Forming an Effective Supportive Housing Consortium
Why do we need a consortium?
A gathering of major stakeholders is essential for organizing effective supportive housing projects, designing an appropriate mix of services, assembling reliable funding for both the housing development and the services, and building local coalitions of support for supportive housing.
Supportive housing is almost never the work of a single organization. Its funding comes from multiple sources, both public and private, with different missions and regulatory requirements. Developing and managing housing requires technical and professional skills quite different from the operation of a quality service program. Federal, state, and local government programs for housing development are almost always separate from those that support mental health, addiction recovery, and other human services. Housing and service providers operate in distinct policy environments — which all too often are so isolated from one another that each field has little or no idea how the other operates.
In fact, the “professional cultures” of housing and services are profoundly different. Even their fundamental economics are different. Housing developers, for example, are accustomed to a “bottom line” measured at least partly in dollars and cents. Most of the value of a service agency’s work isn’t measured financially, but in less quantifiable terms. Housing organizations are accustomed to multi-year commitments that run 10, 15, even 30 years into the future.
Services agencies almost always live on year-to-year commitments that could change or disappear at any time.
In that light, consider how differently a housing developer and a service provider might react if service funding in a supportive housing project were suddenly withdrawn: The service providers would be concerned about the residents’ future, and would no doubt scramble to help them find alternative sources of support. But if that effort falls short, the service agency would probably bear few long-term consequences (other than concern and stress). The housing owner, by contrast, would have to choose between continuing to deal with the tenant population and its now-unmet needs, come what may, or evicting people who begin to experience problems — and then finding other tenants willing to replace them. The building is that organization’s long-term responsibility; any failure to maintain it in good order could mean chaos, lawsuits, fiscal crisis, or all three.
In the best of times, when practitioners in these two fields work together the result can be a dialogue of distinctive and complementary perspectives, where each side sheds light on problems encountered by the other side. But in less ideal (and probably more common) circumstances, the two sides speak different languages. They approach problems with dissimilar assumptions and methods of analysis. And they sometimes come away from the discussion either confused by the other side or, in the worst case, distrustful.
Supportive housing is doomed to serious trouble if it suffers from that kind of culture clash. Effective supportive housing requires a close partnership, common goals, and real understanding between housing providers and service agencies. Plenty of unhappy experience illustrates what happens when a program’s housing developer or manager is out of sync with the designated service providers, or vice-versa: The result is not only inadequate housing or services for the tenants, it can lead to a failed project and a financial crisis for the participating agencies.
What is the purpose of this handbook?
This is the first of three related guides for those interested in forming Supportive Housing Consortia and developing projects. In this guidebook, we discuss the formation and management of the Supportive Housing Consortium: who should participate, what the agenda should include, and, in general, how to seize opportunities and avoid problems that emerged in the initial few years of the demonstration program.
The two companion guide-books discuss, respectively, the planning and provision of services in supportive housing, and the development and financing of the housing itself.
