Health and Housing: Introduction to Cross-Sector Collaboration (via NASHP)

This article was authored by Marcella Maguire, Allie Atkeson, and Sandra Wilkniss. Dr. Maguire is Director, Health Systems Integration at CSH. Below is an excerpt and link to the article.

For the past decade or more, state leaders have worked across health and housing sectors to strengthen comprehensive services for individuals experiencing homelessness and housing instability. However, challenges remain for successful, person-centered coordination, cross-agency work and implementation. A significant restricting factor that limits coordination is the fragmentation of the health and housing sectors, with persons or households with multiple needs having to navigate multiple systems to address these needs.

The COVID-19 pandemic and related economic and social crises have further exacerbated long-standing needs for coordinated health and housing services. Structural and institutional racism has created segregated communities and limited access to resources, furthering the need to center equity in states’ health and housing work. Click here to access the entire article.

Using Home and Community Based Services for Supportive Housing

This paper published with the generous support from The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation shares critical information about the Home and Community Based Services (HCBS) program and how it can boost ‘services’ in supportive housing. HCBS services help individuals live comfortably in their own homes, despite challenges commonly faced by
people with disabilities and all of us as we age. HCBS will be an essential supplementary resource to help supportive housing tenants thrive in their community at all ages.

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Renting 101, A Guide to Successful Apartment Living

While this guide was developed for a San Diego based audience, the guidance can be tailored to any community.

Through a collaboration between CSH and the Southern California Rental Housing Association (SoCalRHA), a helpful new resource is now available to guide new or returning renters through the often confusing and sometimes overwhelming process of leasing a home and remaining safely and stably housed for many years.  

The combination of quality housing and support services (supportive housing) provides the stability and support many people need to thrive. Available in both English and Spanish, Renting 101, A Guide to Successful Apartment Living provides tips, suggestions and recommendations intended to help anyone transition from a variety of circumstances to living in affordable/supportive housing.

The impetus for this guide was born out of a partnership between CSH and the County of San Diego Behavioral Health Services' advisory Housing Council. As part of its annual work plan, the Housing Council prioritized enhancing informational and educational housing resource materials to help lower income and/or disabled residents and persons rehousing after experiencing homelessness with finding, leasing and then successfully retaining safe, healthy rental housing.


Here is a sampling of quick tips you will find in this Renting 101 guide:

  • Living in close proximity to others in an apartment setting often requires drawing on social skills, tolerance, and discipline to create a positive experience.
  • Respect the rights of others.
  • Keep your apartment clean.
  • Establish communication and a good working relationship with the landlord or property manager.
  • If you have questions about your lease, talk with your property manager.
  • Be a good neighbor.

A special thanks to SoCalRHA for their work on this guide, and their partnership in this educational effort.

About SoCalHRA & CSH

SoCalRHA is the leading trade association serving the rental housing industry in Southern California. The Association provides education and advocacy to individuals and companies who own, manage or provide services to the rental housing industry, and has been doing so for nearly 100 years. CSH has been working for nearly 30 years to advance solutions that use housing as a platform for services to improve the lives of the most vulnerable people, maximize public resources and build healthy communities. The two organizations are a natural to partner in developing a guide that helps build a healthy tenant-landlord relationship and teach others how to be successful renters.

Renting 101

A Renters Guide for Successful Apartment Living

This guide is for anyone who will be renting an apartment for the first time. The information here is intended to make the transition to this new lifestyle easier. In this guide book you will find helpful tips on apartment living like housekeeping issues, keys to a successful relationship with your landlord and other resources.

Esta guía también está disponible en español aquí.

Alquilar 101

Una Guía para la Vida en tu Apartamento

Esta guía es para cualquiera que este planeando alquilar un apartamento por primera vez. La información presentada busca simplificar la transición a este nuevo estilo de vida. En esta guía encontraras consejosútiles sobre la vida en un apartamento, como la limpieza, la clave para tener una buena relación con tu propietario y otros recursos.

This guide is also available in English, here.

Support Plan for Clients in Quarantine Hotels

Communities across the country are increasingly placing vulnerable people and those experiencing homelessness into motels/hotels to protect them from exposure to COVID-19 and to reduce community spread. Many are using FEMA funds to support these quarantine hotel sites. These funds can be used in the following instances:

  • Those who test positive for COVID-19 and need to be isolated but do not require hospitalization, including those discharged from hospitals
  • Those who have been exposed to COVID-19 and are identified by a health care professional as needing quarantine but do not need hospitalization
  • Those needing individual sheltering as a precautionary measure because they belong to a high-risk group, such as people over age 65 or with certain underlying health conditions

While obtaining a space to safely isolate is critical to ensure the health of communities, ensuring that individuals with significant social, medical, and psychiatric needs are having their needs met within these quarantine sites is also critical.

This document can aid in developing a support plan for those in quarantine sites by covering the following :

Triage | Intervention | Management | Discharge.

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The Road Ahead

From Perpetual Crisis to Thriving Inclusive Communities

Never in recent history has it been clearer our individual health and ability to thrive is inextricably linked to the overall health of our communities. For far too long people of color, persons experiencing homelessness, people living with disabilities, those with histories of involvement with the justice system and many others have been systematically ignored and marginalized. It is both heartbreaking and unsurprising that these same people are being disparately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

CSH board member, Roland Lamb, recently reminded me that we learned that lack of housing is a social determinant of illness, long before we learned that it was a social determinant of health. Today we are witnessing this in real time as COVID-19 spreads rapidly through institutions like nursing homes, shelters, veterans’ homes, mental health facilities, and group homes.

We already know people cycling through shelters, jails, emergency rooms, and other crisis settings incur enormous costs and poor outcomes. We also know that connecting such individuals with housing and supports can improve outcomes and ensure limited dollars are used effectively. Creating housing aligned with services at scale is critical to securing our public health infrastructure.

The looming question is; how do we get there? Today’s crisis presents an historic opportunity to transform all of our communities to places where everyone, particularly those with the greatest needs, have a real home and the support they need to thrive. Our goal must be to not only utilize the unprecedented funding coming as part of the COVID-19 response to implement short term solutions, but also to use it as a catalyst for long term solutions toward building inclusive communities that provide the housing, healthcare, food, employment, education, child care, outdoor space, and connection that we all need to be healthy and make meaningful progress in our lives.

A siloed approach to service delivery can no longer be the norm. Requiring individuals to run the gauntlet from shelter to emergency room to child welfare agency to food pantry to unemployment not only produces poor outcomes but wastes time and money. We must transform these systems to become more equitable, person centered, and collaborative.

While getting to the scale we need will call for a significant investment in resources, we also know that it will result in better outcomes, prevent future public health crises and generate new job opportunities in construction, human services, property management and beyond.

For the 1.1 million people currently inappropriately housed in institutions - we can do better.  We can treat the lack of housing as a public health issue.  And we can seize this opportunity to transform institutional care in our country.

Deb De Santis
President & CEO


This is the first in a series of blogs from our President & CEO on how we move to long term solutions when the crisis abates.

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Advancing Equity through Data

A New Tool from CSH

Today’s emergency punctuates the deep racial and ethnic disparities in our communities and across the country. Efforts to build multi-sector partnerships to create and sustain change grounded in equity have long been hampered by system-level data silos. The lack of multi-sector efforts to collect and analyze data has prevented holistic approaches to meaningfully address the root causes of racialized inequities.

To address this critical gap, CSH developed a Racial Disparities and Disproportionality Index (“RDDI”) that looks at 16 unique systems and measures whether a racial and/or ethnic group’s representation in a particular public system is proportionate to, over, or below their representation in the overall population (proportionality) and also allows for the examination of systematic differences between groups and geographies (disparities).

Data is the guide, not the destination and this tool is in service of achieving more equitable outcomes for those most impacted and disproportionately represented across crisis systems. 

This this is also a call to action: at a systems level we must move beyond silos and aggregated data to inclusive and disaggregated data in order to address inequities with purpose. As individuals we must ensure racial and ethnic data is collected, reported, and used to inform our programs and the outcomes we pursue. 

Data matters, but only in service of designing a more just and equitable world.

-Deb De Santis
 President & CEO

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New Webinar Series: The Supportive Housing Field Responds to COVID-19

Thursday April 2
1:00-1:30 PM ET

The supportive housing community, from providers to developers to policymakers, is stepping up to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Join CSH on Thursday, April 2 for the kickoff of a webinar series designed for anyone providing and housing and services in this crisis where we will:

  • highlight what we have learned in the past week;
  • provide examples of best practices from communities across the country; and
  • discuss what information and resources the field needs.

The webinars will be 30 minutes. Initially scheduled as weekly for the next 10 weeks, the frequency may change to meet the needs of the industry. The content and focus of the webinar will evolve with the pandemic and the response to it.

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