In 1980, I founded a nonprofit agency called Para Los Niños (For the Children), located in L.A.’s Skid Row, serving very low-income families living in transient and residential hotels of the area. During these early years, we also saw an influx of families from the Midwest, migrating to Southern California as plants closed and jobs disappeared. Once in Los Angeles, many relocated families found that jobs were hard to find, and rental housing in residential neighborhoods was beyond their reach. Not only did the numbers of families moving into transient hotels of the area increase, but we were soon seeing families seeking emergency food and shelter from the Skid Row missions that traditionally had been serving transient older men, primarily disabled and unemployed. I began to dread Monday mornings, because homeless families would be lined up at our front door, many of them having slept in their cars over the weekend or arriving in Los Angeles on the Greyhound Bus the day before, dragging their bags and their children behind them.
I found myself in a pivotal position, as major changes began to occur – but changes that had certainly been anticipated by people who were knowledgeable about the issues. By 1983, not only had the lines at the soup kitchens became longer, winding around the block, but… and, it seems as if this happened overnight, we began to see something we had never seen before – people actually sleeping on the streets of Skid Row. And this scenario was soon being replicated in cities and town, and in both rural and urban communities, throughout the United States.
During that “first decade of homelessness,” as we now call it, many of us thought that we were dealing with a “temporary problem,” and that providing emergency shelter for homeless people would solve it. In short time, however, we learned that we were wrong. And so by the second decade of homelessness in America, the 1990’s, emergency shelters and transitional housing had become part of a “continuum of care”…. in which homeless people would move through a system that would supposedly lead eventually to permanent housing at the end – with the desired outcome being, of course, an end to homelessness.
I would like to comment here that during the early years of homelessness in America, it slowly became apparent to many of us in the field that we were both witnessing and participating in the development of a new subclass, a subclass we called “the homeless.”
During the 1990’s, we found ourselves developing targeted homeless programs parallel to mainstream systems – and, in a sense, “institutionalizing” homelessness – and, unintentionally perhaps, accepting its existence as inevitable. And as our systems became more sophisticated and entrenched in national bureaucracy, so to speak, with dedicated funding streams and special services for individuals and families identified as “homeless,” mainstream systems in communities throughout the United States began to “dump” people into this new system.
At its best, it has worked for some people some of the time. In general, however, the system of services that was developed to serve the homeless has been fragmented and focused on the provision of emergency shelter and, for homeless families, long stays in transitional housing, with little assistance for many in actually helping them to move back into permanent housing in communities at rents they can afford.
Today we know that emergency shelters and transitional housing, while important components in a strategy that must be as multi-faceted as the various target populations we try to serve, are simply stepping stones, so to speak. Because if at the end of our interventions and support, the homeless are still homeless – or at risk of another episode of homelessness – then what really have we accomplished?
Homelessness ends when a family or individual is stabilized in permanent, affordable, rental housing, whatever that permanent housing type may be.
But let me go back in time once again. During the 1980′s, we were learning fast, we learned as we went along – and we learned from our mistakes. We learned the most, however, from the very people we were trying to help. In Los Angeles, even as the shelter system began expanding throughout L.A.County, what we quickly found was that homeless families often cycled from one program to another for months and sometimes years at a time, or, at the end of their shelter stay, often moved into an apartment that they could not afford and rapidly became homeless again.
And while emergency shelters and transitional housing programs were providing vital services for families in crisis, support services generally ended when families moved into permanent housing. Although some programs began to provide follow-up services, this was often not enough to help homeless families to rebuild their lives. The reality is that once a family or individual becomes homeless, it is extremely difficult, and for many actually impossible, to get back into permanent, rental housing on their own. There are tremendous barriers to overcome. In addition to the high cost of rental housing in most communities, there are also other barriers, even when there are rent subsidies available, which may include poor credit, eviction histories, unemployment, the lack of move-in funds, and discrimination based on income source, ethnicity, family make-up, and gender.
After developing two of the first family shelters in Los Angeles, one in 1986 and the other in 1988, it became obvious to me that, while homeless families and individuals certainly needed shelter, what they actually really needed was help in finding and moving into safe, decent and affordable housing in the community at-large.
And once in permanent housing, many would benefit from targeted assistance for a period of time as they regained stable living patterns – or perhaps developed them for the first time.
Beyond Shelter was founded in 1988, and introduced what was then a major innovation in the field: housing first. “Housing First,” or rapid rehousing as it is sometimes now also called, offered a viable alternative to traditional models of emergency shelter and transitional housing for families with children. This approach is designed to move people who are homeless into permanent rental housing as quickly as possible (which realistically could take some time), with the services traditionally provided in transitional housing instead provided after the move into permanent housing. The basic goal is to break the cycle of homelessness and prevent a recurrence.
Beyond Shelter’s Housing First Program in Los Angeles was set up to serve the emergency shelter and transitional housing continuum of a large, metropolitan county. For more than 20 years, up to 60 agencies annually from throughout L.A.County – including family emergency shelters, transitional housing programs, residential drug treatment programs, domestic violence shelters, and halfway houses – referred homeless families to Beyond Shelter for the “next step,” while providing initial emergency or crisis intervention services.
Through the Housing First Program at Beyond Shelter, homeless families (many of whom are high risk and vulnerable) are (1) assisted in moving into permanent, rental housing in residential neighborhoods located throughout LA County (most often, until recently, with a Section 8 voucher), and (2) then provided case management support through regular home visits and phone and office contact for six months to one year after the move to help families begin the process of rebuilding their lives and to connect them to community-based resources and services to address their longer-term needs.
In this Los Angeles model, families remain physically at the referring agencies while simultaneously being enrolled in Beyond Shelter’s Housing First Program. During this period of dual enrollment, families are being assisted by Beyond Shelter staff in developing and implementing housing plans to enable them to move to permanent and affordable rental housing . This support includes assistance in accessing the finanancial resources and negotiating leases with landlords wary of renting to homeless families who often have both poor credit and eviction histories. Once in housing at rents they can afford, families are assisted in developing and implementing individualized Family Action Plans to help meet both their immediate and longer-term needs.
From the program’s inception in 1988 through 2010, approximately 5,000 homeless families were enrolled, with an estimated 85% success rate of families who, once in housing, remained housed over time. The housing first approach to ending homelessness has since helped to transform both public policy and practice on a national scale.
And let me clarify here: “housing first” is an approach – not a specific program. It can be, and has been, implemented in many different ways for different target populations – often with collaborative partners or by a single agency alone. For families, “housing first” may take some time – as there are children, schools, and other special needs of families with children to plan for. For individuals and the elderly or disabled, it may take very little time at all. (See Pathways to Housing in New York for an example.) All programs, however, provide connections to services and resources in the community at-large to address special needs after homeless families and individuals are assisted in accessing permanent rental housing.
The Housing First approach is based on the “human right to housing.” It is premised on the belief that our work in ending homelessness should focus on helping people back into permanent housing – and to do so as quickly as possible. In a housing first approach, people who are homeless do not first have to prove that they are “housing ready.” Should their immediate and current crises be addressed prior to moving them into permanent housing? Absolutely – particularly for families, primarily to ensure the welfare and safety of their children, but also to ensure the welfare and safety of their parents, and particularly in families in which substance abuse and/or domestic violence have played a role. However, beyond the specialized crisis intervention that might be needed, Housing First practitioners believe that families with special needs and/or multiple problems are often more responsive to interventions and support from a permanent housing base.
In fact, the Housing First methodology can offer an individualized and structured plan of action for often alienated and troubled families, as they develop stable living patterns and connections to the community. Perhaps more importantly, it has proven to successfully stabilize such families fairly rapidly. To me, from over 20 years of direct experience, perhaps the greatest benefit of this approach is the fact that it enables vulnerable and at risk families to move out of the homeless services system into permanent housing – yet continue to receive case management support for a transitional period of time.
Although job loss, domestic violence, substance abuse or other crisis may precipitate a homeless episode, the primary cause is the lack of affordable housing. Without access to affordable housing or rent subsidies, welfare-dependent families are high risk for homelessness. The problem has been exacerbated over the past decade by Welfare Reform and decreasing access to Section 8 rent subsidies. As a result, families who lose their housing are remaining homeless for extended periods of time or are experiencing multiple episodes of homelessness.
Even a short episode of homelessness is a devastating experience for, disrupting virtually every aspect of family life – damaging the physical and emotional health of family members, interfering with children’s education and development, and, in some cases, resulting in the separation of family members when children are placed in foster care or parceled out to relatives. . Studies show that the trauma of homelessness affects children long after housing has been acquired.
And now let’s talk about research. The consistent findings about the modest t
o minimal differences between homeless children and poor, housed children is one of the greatest contributions, in my mind, of studies on homeless families conducted to date. This evidence makes clear that homeless children, like their parents themselves, should not be treated as categorically different from poor children who are not homeless. Rather than segregating homeless children and their families in a separate services system, we need to move homeless families back into permanent housing as quickly as possible, and then address their needs by providing them the same type of services that benefit poor, continuously housed children.
Over the last decade, research has emerged demonstrating that what most homeless families need is permanent housing in the community at-large that they can afford, similar to poor families generally, rather than specialized housing and services models (Shinn, 1998; Bassuk & Geller, 2006; Khadduri, 2008). This same body of research also indicates that housing vouchers are both necessary and sufficient to end the homelessness of all but a relatively small number of families. Once reintegrated into the community, formerly homeless families benefit from the same array of mainstream programs that support the service needs of other poor families.
I have been introducing people to the Housing First approach on a national scale for two decades now, and I can tell you that even in the early years, before the National Alliance to End Homelessness embraced the Housing First approach in the year 2000 and took on much of the fight, and even after, the vast majority of people who heard me speak out often told me later (sometimes many years later) that I had simply articulated what their experience with homeless families was telling them to do: housing first.
But there is still some confusion – including who should be able to be “rapidly re-housed.” I think that is my biggest concern – that an overemphasis on “targeting” will preclude the participation of harder-to-serve families from rapid re-housing programs. But some people over the years have felt that harder-to-serve families should remain in the “homeless services system” until they are “housing ready.” And that leads to one of my favorite articles about Housing First, which was published in a 2004 issue of STREETS, the newsletter of the Philadelphia Committee to End Homelessness. The article was entitled, “What is Housing First? (And Why Do Some People Say Such Nasty Things About It?).” What I liked the most about the article was its title. Indeed, why were some people saying such nasty things about Housing First for so many years? By the way, the author of the article was a Professor of Social Work and Social Research at Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia.
And here are some comments from the keynote speaker at a major, national faith-based conference about 10 years ago: “The Housing First model underestimates the nature and magnitude of the problems these families face and the resultant need for services. . . .Housing First proponents seemed to have underestimated the challenges of delivering services to multi-problem, service-resistant families living in scattered-site housing. In our experience, it is much more difficult to deliver case management once our families move into their own housing than it is when they are living with us.”
In response, not for a minute do I believe that Housing First providers ever underestimate the nature and magnitude of the problems people they serve face – nor do they underestimate the resultant need for services. I would also have to agree that it could be much more difficult to deliver case management once people move into their own housing. But then, I also feel strongly that delivering case management once families and individuals move into their own housing might just be the right thing to do.
I’d like to conclude by saying that rather than continuing to think of families with children who are homeless as isolated and different from their poor, housed counterparts, we should be examining how to deliver comprehensive interventions in communities that support poor, housed and homeless families in the same way and through the same mainstream service systems. There is no reason for families to become or remain homeless in order to benefit from interventions and support to address their special needs. The strategies that work, from cross-systems partnerships to blended funding streams to housing subsidies to effective coordination of services, are out there, but must be properly supported and brought to scale.
Unfortunately, over the past few years the various definitions for “housing first” have become confusing, sometimes linked to permanent supportive housing and often differentiated from a new term: rapid rehousing. This confusion has resulted in sometimes arbitrary and fundamentally inappropriate and/or potentially damaging “time limits” for relocation to permanent housing. It has also led to assumptions that “housing first” leads solely to permanent supportive housing. Because the “housing first” or rapid rehousing approach to ending homelessness is based firmly on the human right to housing, it must also include “housing choice.” Think about it.
In the coming year, it is the intention of Partnering for Change to focus on helping to clarify and simplify “housing first” methodologies for practitioners, localities, government agencies, and funders.
Tanya Tull, President/CEO – Partnering for Change & Founder – Beyond Shelter
(Various versions of this speech have been presented at national, state-wide and local conferences throughout the United States over the past 20 years.)
Maria Foscarinis is the Founder and Executive Director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty (www.nlchp.org), a national advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. Please read her blog from the Huffington Post last week: Telling the Truth about Homelessness. Maria helps to explain why HUD’s homeless numbers are often wrong…and shares insights into the plight of the “hidden homeless,” primarily families with children. (See my blog from May 3, 2012 below….) Please feel free to comment or ask questions and please share the link. Thank you – Tanya Tull, President/CEO, Partnering for Change
In an earlier blog, I wrote about the overwhelming challenges we all face in doing this work – many of which are due to systemic forces that are beyond our immediate control. The numbers involved are so vast and the issues so multi-faceted, that It is easy sometimes to forget that our failures to respond adequately affect real people. I wrote that Partnering for Changewill periodically highlight email communication received from desperate families whom our systems have failed. These emails from the field, so to speak, are the These emails from the field, so to speak, are the ”windows” into the real lives of real people that are often the impetus that keeps me going. Please see below. You are welcome to share similar stories on this site…..