Written By: Jayme Marshall, Chief, Homeless Programs Branch, Center for Mental Health Services, SAMHSA

A life in recovery requires health, home, purpose, and community.  This blog entry focuses on the home dimension of recovery.

Providing services to people who have become homeless is expensive and exhausting work. For those who have this experience, either as a brief episode or a long-term nightmare, it is dangerous, unstable, and traumatizing. What would it take for us to prevent people from experiencing homelessness? What could we do better in our communities and as a country?

With the help of Federal partners, including the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH), SAMHSA recently gathered together experts from all over the country to look at the research on preventing homelessness and share their experiences of what works. A fact sheet summarizing what they had to say is posted on the USICH website.

Panelists said that the key message that emerges from research on homelessness is one that seems obvious: ensuring access to stable housing is the best prevention strategy. For example, short-term, limited rental subsidies targeted to those clearly at risk of losing their housing may  help individuals or families weather a particularly difficult period of insecure income. Research also makes clear that different populations need different interventions. For most families, subsidies alone are sufficient to prevent homelessness. For other groups, supportive services are a key component in housing stabilization. The panel articulated ten principles that can guide efforts to prevent homelessness, but the one they placed first was this: Housing stability is the primary goal of homelessness prevention. All housing work should be done with housing stability as the primary outcome.

The Expert Panel highlighted some terrific programs that are demonstrating real-world solutions to preventing homelessness. Check out HomeBase, a city-wide program that helps people on the verge of homelessness in New York City by providing case management services to help them with tenant/landlord mediation, household budgeting, emergency rental assistance, job training and placement, and benefits advocacy. On the opposite side of the map, “Everyone Home” is using several funding sources, including major funding from the from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Rehousing initiative, to pull together an entire California county – inclusive of private and public resources –  and offer people at risk for losing their housing a single place to call to be screened for supportive services.

What strategies are effective? Panelists stressed these: supportive service interventions, to address risk factors before people become homeless; discharge planning from institutions, including prisons and hospitals, so people have stable housing to return to; Housing First programs that make housing stability their first goal; rental and housing subsidies; and Permanent Supportive Housing. To learn more about Permanent Supportive Housing, check out SAMHSA’s free toolkit.

For additional information, visit SAMHSA’s Housing and Homelessness Resource Network at: http://homeless.samhsa.gov/