Categories: New York State
01.11.2024
Governor Hochul’s continued recognition of the urgent need to address New York’s housing shortage and intensifying behavioral health crisis with increased resources and attention is yet another sign that she is serious about solving the challenges that matter most to New Yorkers. However, if she is going to meaningfully solve either, it’s essential that she prioritize a sector not explicitly mentioned in her State of the State Address: supportive housing.
Supportive housing is one of the best tools available to assist vulnerable New Yorkers and end homelessness, but the sector – and those who staff it – are facing serious challenges that jeopardize its ability to operate at full efficiency and effectiveness. It is crucial that Gov. Hochul’s forthcoming executive budget – and any comprehensive housing and/or mental health plan she crafts with legislative leaders – include additional resources to expand and preserve supportive housing.
Supportive housing nonprofits and their allies statewide have called on the governor to rescue 9,000 units at risk of coming offline entirely, part of the New York State Supportive Housing Program (NYSSHP), by making a simple and logical funding formula conversion in the 2024-25 state budget. We look forward to working with her – and state lawmakers – to make this much-needed change in the final spending plan and ensure that supportive housing providers have the resources they need to pay hardworking staff competitive wages and ensure tenants stay safely and successfully housed.
Behavioral Health
- Supportive housing is a proven intervention to provide stability for people who have been cycling through hospitals, the criminal legal system, and homelessness. We are encouraged by many proposed measures to interrupt that destructive cycle, including expanding mental health courts, funding court-based mental health navigators, and expanding available housing options.
- We are heartened to see that OMH and DOH will codify recent guidance to hospitals to provide better mental health risk assessments and screenings and ensure connections with community-based services are taking place. The Network’s members have been asking for these changes for years, and we hope they allow better collaboration with hospital providers in service of our community’s well-being and safety.
- The Network has been advocating for expanding crisis de-escalation training in supportive housing to support community safety for our residents and staff. We are very pleased to see the State of the State Book mention de-escalation support as a key component of specialized housing for people with serious mental illness and criminal history, and we hope that we can expand those efforts to all supportive housing environments.
- The opioid crisis is hitting our supportive housing community hard. The continued deployment of opioid settlement fund initiatives is imperative, especially the harm reduction efforts and expansion of integrated mental health and substance use services, such as Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics (CCBHCs).
Workforce
- This year, the Network presented the Governor’s office with a comprehensive, multi-year proposal to support our human services workforce. While wages are a necessary component to bolstering our workforce, and we hope to see a 3.2% COLA in this year’s budget, we are encouraged by other proposals in the State of the State that could provide a stronger foundation for our workforce.
- One component of the Network’s workforce plan is to make mental health and emotional support more accessible to our staff. Increasing requirements for commercial insurance reimbursement rates for mental health services and requiring out-of-network coverage at no additional cost if necessary, as proposed in the State of the State, is a good start.
- Another component of the Network’s plan is recruitment. We hope to work with Lieutenant Governor Delgado’s new service and civic engagement initiatives to provide structured opportunities to enter the supportive housing workforce via the inaugural class of the Empire State Service Corps Program in partnership with SUNY and an enhanced CUNY Service Corps.
- The State of the State proposes the establishment of an Office of Workforce Data and Research. We hope this Office will highlight the flagrant wage disparity for the nonprofit human services workforce compared to the State employee and private workforce and help support more rational wage policies.
Housing
- We are thrilled to see the continued commitment to creating 3,500 units of mental health housing announced last year as part of the State’s $1 billion mental health initiative after years of disinvestment.
- Developing new affordable and supportive housing is critical to addressing our homelessness crisis. The State of State contains a number of new and existing proposals to expand production, including the deployment of State-owned sites for developing up to 15,000 units. Publicly owned sites, such as those developed by the Vital Brooklyn Initiative, have been instrumental in the creation of thousands of units of supportive housing.
- The crushing cost of property and liability insurance is hampering the creation and stewardship of affordable and supportive housing statewide, which is disproportionately feeling the brunt of a hardening insurance market. We know addressing the issue will require a multi-pronged approach, but we are encouraged by the Governor’s proposal to prohibit insurance companies from refusing to cover affordable housing.