Family-Centered Supportive Housing

Family-centered supportive housing is one solution to family homelessness. Like all supportive housing, family-centered supportive housing is, first and foremost, housing. It provides affordable rental housing to end the family’s untenable living situation: emergency shelters, streets, doubling up with friends.

Along with the housing, supportive housing offers services to help families address the economic, health, and life circumstances that have led to their homelessness. Typically, these services include case management plus a combination of on-site and off-site services to address issues such as mental illness, chemical dependency, domestic violence, and chronic health problems.

What is special about family-centered supportive housing is the presence of children. Family-centered supportive housing considers a “resident” to be a person living in supportive housing, regardless of age. Children are seen as people in their own right with their own strengths and needs, not just as adjuncts to the parent. Therefore, services to address the negative effects of poverty and homelessness on children are as vital as the services to support the parents’ health and economic well-being.

Family-centered supportive housing seeks six outcomes for residents:

1. Adults and children will demonstrate educational advancement.

2. Participants will view themselves as part of a community.

3. Participants will increase their economic stability.

4. Participants will achieve residential stability.

5. Participants will improve their health.

6. Families will be strengthened.

Housing and Service Arrangements

Beyond these basic principles—housing, recognition of children as full residents, and expected outcomes—we embrace an expansive definition of supportive housing that allows providers and residents to design programs that work best for them:

* Housing arrangements: The housing may be owned by the service provider, owned by a non-profit or for-profit real estate development partner, or leased from private landlords. It may be located on one site or scattered throughout the community.

* Time-limited or permanent housing: Some supportive housing programs may offer time-limited housing, but these limits are determined by the supportive housing providers and tenants rather than externally imposed by funders. Others may offer permanent housing that is available as long as the family chooses it.

* Voluntary or mandatory participation in services: Providers may or may not require participation in services as a condition of residency, depending on the philosophy and goals of the housing program. Even where some participation is mandatory, however, family-centered supportive housing providers rely more on service staffs’ relationships with residents to encourage participation than threats to coerce it. In practice, we have found that most services in most family supportive housing programs are voluntary.

Family-Centered Housing as Sober Housing

Family-centered supportive housing puts forth an expectation that residents will not use drugs or alcohol. While on-site chemical use may be acceptable in housing communities that serve adults only, it places children at higher risk. Use of illegal drugs places children an environment of unlawful activity. While it is certainly possible for adults to use alcohol in ways that do not threaten children’s safety, supportive housing providers have no way to guarantee against unsafe use that endangers children in the home and neighbors.

Sober housing is not an idea imposed from above by service providers. Rather, it comes from our conversations with supportive housing residents who are seeking an environment that diminishes the challenges of maintaining their own sobriety and protects their children’s safety.

Sober housing does not mean that housing programs must evict families upon use of drugs or alcohol. Rather, it means that expectations of sobriety must be clear; that residents must have access to any chemical dependency-related services needed to maintain sobriety; that providers may have to provide services that address chemical use among children as well as adults; and that, as in any supportive housing, providers should define some end point at which chemical use that endangers others in the household or housing community will be grounds for expulsion.

Making Supportive Housing Child-Friendly

Family-centered supportive housing considers support for loving, healthy relationships between parents and children as important as any other supportive housing outcome, such as housing, recovery, or employment. At the same time, it provides a supportive community for children that goes beyond individual families. We suggest these aspects as central to making a supportive housing program child-friendly:

1. The housing is safe, free from neighborhood violence, physical hazards, and environmental hazards.

2. The program connects children to the most commonly needed medical treatments for homeless children: asthma prevention and treatment, dental care, immunizations, and hearing and vision tests, as well as prenatal care for pregnant women.

3. The program works as partner with neighborhood schools and early childhood programs, with teachers and service staff working together to help formerly homeless children become kindergarten-ready, literate, and grade-level achievers.

4. The program is a bridge to the community resources that children living anywhere and of any economic status use, such as libraries, parks, and recreation programs.

5. Service staff work with parents to ensure that an adult knows where each child is at all times.

6. Service programs address the mental and chemical health needs of children as well as adults.

By helping children build strong minds and bodies, academic success, and the love and affection of parents and community, family-centered supportive housing is no less than an opportunity to give a true childhood back to children who have experienced the trauma of homelessness.