Network Newsfeed

High Design in Supportive Housing

Oct.09.2018

Good design is an integral part of supportive housing projects. Watch Cindy Harden, Architect at EQ Architecture & Design, talk about the importance of good design in the lives of people who live in supportive housing.

Homeless Housing and Assistance Program

Oct.05.2018

Enacted into law by the New York State legislature in 1983, the Homeless Housing and Assistance Program (HHAP) was the first program in the country to target substantial financial resources for the development of homeless housing. Administered by the New York State Office of Temporary & Disability Assistance (OTDA), HHAP provides capital grants and loans for the acquisition, construction or rehabilitation of housing for persons who are homeless and are unable to secure adequate housing without special assistance.

The NYC Acquisition Fund

Oct.04.2018

As anyone who develops supportive housing these days knows, acquiring a site is half the battle. It’s difficult to imagine now, twelve years into the NYC Acquisition Fund, how the supportive housing community would have fared without it.

The NYC Acquisition Fund (the Fund) was spearheaded by Shaun Donovan, then HPD Commissioner, in 2006, along with LISC, Enterprise, Forsyth Street, and the Rockefeller Foundation. It addressed a growing need to provide early stage capital to developers to acquire sites for affordable and supportive housing. In the eighties and nineties, when supportive housing was born in New York, dilapidated SROs abounded and tax-foreclosed properties could be transferred to nonprofits for a dollar, but by 2006 these options had dried up and nonprofits were competing in the marketplace for privately owned sites.

One of the best features of the Fund is that it provides loans at 130% of the property’s value, allowing nonprofits to have additional capital for predevelopment expenses. Many banks stay away from these loans because of their risky nature, but defaults are almost unheard of with the Fund because of close collaboration with government partners, who are engaged in all aspects of the deal at each stage.

“The Fund’s structure was novel,” says Brian Segel, senior vice president at Forsyth Street. Assembling capital from public and private philanthropic sources allowed for flexibility and a variety of risk appetites.

Since its inception, the Fund has enabled the creation of 24 supportive housing residences, serving 1,701 special needs tenants and providing an additional 952 affordable apartments for the community.

Judi Kende, vice president and New York market leader, Enterprise Community Partners notes that in addition to providing much-need affordable homes, the Fund “enables mission-driven, nonprofit and minority and women-owned enterprises to compete with market-rate developers. It is a testament to what can be accomplished when private and public partners come together to improve the lives of New Yorkers”

According to Sam Marks, executive director of LISC NYC, the Fund is “designed to share risk across the public, private, and philanthropic sectors, has proven incredibly flexible, and continues even today to innovate in response to the city’s evolving challenges and strategic priorities.”

Howie the Harp - A national model for peer advocacy

Oct.03.2018

Howie the Harp Advocacy Center is a peer advocacy program that trains individuals with a lived experience in the mental health system to help those undergoing recovery. This model and program has been instrumental in helping supportive housing residents make their journey to health and recovery.

Trauma-Informed Care – Identifying and Supporting Trauma Response for Tenants

Oct.02.2018

Trauma-Informed Care emphasizes the importance of providing physical, psychological and emotional safety for both consumers and providers, helping rebuild a sense of control and empowerment in survivors’ lives. Over the course of the past 30 years, this mental health modality has developed as a framework that involves understanding, recognizing, and responding to the effects of all types of trauma, seeking not to pathologize behavior, but rather look at the root causes informing behavior. Trauma-informed care also recognizes that every survivor of trauma learns their own survival mechanisms, depending on resilience and risk factors in their lives. This approach is now an evidenced-based practice that has gained more momentum and buy-in over the course of the past 5 years. Trauma-informed care shifts the question from, “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” It values a person’s full story and paves the way for healing.

How does this framework fit into the supportive housing model?

CUCS’s Peggy Shorr’s 30 years in the field have magnified the importance of providing trauma survivors a sense of physical and psychological safety—values that guide the supportive housing movement. As Director of Evidence-Based Practices, Shorr knows that providers need to understand when to explore a tenant’s story and when not to delve into their trauma; recognize that certain spaces and behaviors may be unintentionally re-traumatizing for tenants; as well as know how to hold information a tenant shares without judgement, while validating their experiences. In supportive housing, providers learn to define various forms of trauma, understand trauma’s bio-psycho-social impacts on both the individual and the community, and practice empathy-building by learning to identify different behaviors of trauma response. Supportive housing provides three areas in healing from trauma: creating a sense of safety, allowing for mourning and processing, and taking steps towards re-integration into community, knowing that “being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health.”

How are service providers implementing trauma-informed care?

Supportive housing was founded on the tenets of harm reduction, centering services around the needs identified by tenants and “meeting them where they are at”. This approach recognizes common coping strategies, including drug and alcohol dependence as a learned coping mechanism, understanding that treating survival skills requires treatment of complex trauma. Commonly used trauma-informed practices include motivational interviewing and strength-based case management; clinical interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), and narrative therapy; as well as implementation of grounding activities to counter post-traumatic stress symptoms such as meditation.