Showing Posts by Date: 10/2018
10.16.2018
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In 2016, Governor Cuomo announced a commitment to fund 20,000 units of supportive housing over the next 15 years. To achieve this commitment, NYS began rolling out a brand new services and operating program called the Empire State Supportive Housing Initiative (ESSHI). The goal: to create 1,200 units a year across the state. ESSHI is intended to leverage various state and local capital resources.
What Makes ESSHI Innovative?
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1. Largest commitment to supportive housing in history – ESSHI is the largest commitment to supportive housing in history; it is over twice the size of NY/NY III.
2. First long-term commitment to developing supportive housing outside New York City – Funding at up to $25,000 a unit with an annual escalator built in, ESSHI provides the first substantial and long-term services and operating funding source to communities outside NYC. Historically, supportive housing providers outside NYC have relied on a mix of outside sources such as Shelter + Care, the NYS Supportive Housing Program (NYSSHP) and Section 8 to help fund rent and services. ESSHI for the first time fully funds the supportive housing model in both urban and rural areas across the state.
3. First time the state Legislature adopted a five-year appropriation in an annual budget – While the state has made past long term commitments to supportive housing via the NY/NY Agreements, this is the first time it committed to five years’ worth of funding in one annual budget cycle. ESSHI was funded through the state’s five year housing and homelessness plan, with over $1 billion for the first 6,000 units of supportive housing under the 15-year commitment. While the state legislature will have to adopt this plan every year, it is unprecedented that they would put five years’ worth of funding in a one year budget. This is important because without a long-term agreement like past NY/NY agreements, investors and nonprofits need a long term commitment from their government partners to ensure confidence. This five year plan helped address that issue.
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4. Interagency collaboration – An ESSHI Interagency Workgroup is the established policy body overseeing program implementation. The Workgroup includes representatives from eight State agencies including: Department of Health (DOH) which includes the AIDS Institute; Homes and Community Renewal (HCR); Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services (OASAS); Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS); Office of Mental Health (OMH); Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence (OPDV); Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA); and Office for People with Developmental Disabilities (OPWDD). Decision-making is structured so that the human services agencies work in sync with the capital funders to ensure the integrity of the model.
5. Expanded Populations Served – ESSHI allows providers to serve one or more of eleven different populations. In addition to chronically homeless individuals and families, as well as people with mental health, substance abuse or HIV/AIDS, and at-risk youth, ESSHI also provides funding to serve people re-entering the community from incarceration or juvenile justice placement, victims/survivors of domestic violence, frail elderly and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
The first ESSHI Units opened in November of 2016. Finger Lakes Area Counseling & Recovery Agency opened eight units of permanent supportive housing in rural upstate New York targeted to people with substance use disorders.
10.15.2018
The Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH) was founded in 1991 by Julie Sandorf and is now led by Deborah De Santis. Watch the video above to learn more!
|10.12.2018
The Network and its members have been at the table for many of the important advances in New York supportive housing. Watch the video above to see many of the pivotal wins advanced by the supportive housing community in New York.
|10.11.2018
And so it was with Frequent Users Systems Engagement (FUSE). A conversation in an elevator between then Commissioners of the NYC Departments of Corrections (DOC), Martin Horn, and Homeless Services (DHS), Linda Gibbs, where they jokingly blamed each other for their respective challenges before pausing to reflect, “maybe we could work to solve our problems together?” That gave birth to the NYC Discharge Planning Collaboration, the forerunner of FUSE.
FUSE was a simple idea: that supportive housing with specialized services could prevent homelessness and reduce recidivism for people leaving incarceration. Over three years, a pilot program which helped 100 people was designed and implemented by an extraordinary public-private partnership among CSH, DOC, DHS, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, NYC Housing Authority, and eight non-profit service and supportive housing providers: The Bridge, Brooklyn Community Housing and Services, Bowery Residence Committee, Breaking Ground, Community Access, Jericho Project, Palladia (now Services for the UnderServed), and Women’s Prison Association.
FUSE was the first model nationally using administrative data to screen people with criminal justice records into housing as opposed to screening them out. After countless hours of in-reach to jails and shelters, case conferencing, devising work-arounds to administrative hurdles, and no small amount of tears and laughter, FUSE proved it could make a difference. Not only were people identified through FUSE able to maintain their housing (at the same rates as other supportive housing initiatives), the program reduced homelessness and recidivism at levels indicating the program paid for itself.
FUSE was expanded a few years later and evaluated by Columbia University. More recently it was the basis for the de Blasio Administration’s Justice Involved Supportive Housing initiatives. And CSH has worked to replicate and advance it nationally. FUSE has been implimented in over thirty jurisdictions, showing the potential of collaboration and dismantling the notion that some people are unhousable.
As I look back on the last thirteen years since FUSE started, I can think of no professional experience comparing to it, the partners at the table, the tenants who made the program their own, and the impact it’s had across the country. Being first of it’s kind made FUSE exceptionally challenging to launch. When the project was at it’s most critical moments and felt like it was going off the rails, there was one distinct voice in the room that would keep everyone from giving up.
Kathleen Coughlin was a Deputy Commissioner at DOC who managed the project along with CSH and DHS. In a solid Staten Island accent and clear delivery, she would simply say that working in government meant everyone was constantly telling you things were impossible and couldn’t be done; and that our job was to reply, it doesn’t matter, we’re doing it anyway. Sadly, Kathy died this past August.
The picture above is from a recognition dinner in 2008 celebrating the completion of the first FUSE initiative. Kathy is at the front table, surrounded by friends, colleagues, and people who were able to rebuild their lives through FUSE.
I’ll share a hope and I know those who worked on the first FUSE initiative would agree: that Kathy truly understood the imapct of her work, and how it would forever help change the national conversation on justice and housing.
Her dedication and vision lifted up every one of us, the FUSE initiative, and now thousands of formerly incarcerated people who have found a way home.
10.10.2018
In 2015, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio committed to creating 15,000 units of supportive housing in New York City over 15 years, the first time a City administration has funded its own supportive housing initiative.
1. Informed by a six-month Task Force process involving more than two dozen nonprofit and government stakeholders who had been charged with recommending improvements in every aspect of creating and providing services in supportive housing.
2. First long-term commitment to separate services and rental assistance funding streams so that rental assistance can rise without diminishing resources for services.
3. First commitment to create a rental assistance program that mimics Section 8, without being subjected to restrictive federal funding requirements.
4. The first long term commitment to provide supportive housing to at-risk families headed by a young adult 18-25.
5. The first long-term commitment to offer sufficient funding to provide services for all the members of an at-risk family.
|10.09.2018
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.
|10.05.2018
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.
| Funding, New York State10.04.2018
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.”
| Funding, New York State10.03.2018
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.
|10.02.2018
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.