Making Supportive Housing Work Study - Project Overview

Canada is facing related housing affordability and homelessness crises. Having created the crises through the cessation of new social housing development in the 1980s, more recently through the National Housing Strategy there is a renewed focus on increasing affordable housing stock. While affordability is a key factor, it isn’t the only one. For many exiting homelessness or leaving other public services (hospital, incarceration, child welfare) supports are required to sustain successful tenancies.
Unfortunately, while dedicated streams exist for new affordable housing, to attach supports to this housing is far less straight-forward. Instead, an over-stretched mish-mash of health and social services are leveraged to either provide supports outside the home environment, or more rarely within the housing environment. Because of this, exits into successful housing for Canada’s most vulnerable persons remain a significant challenge.
The idea of the need for supports in-home is not novel. Indeed, this is a core element of successful Housing First and mental health services over the last several years (for Housing First) and decades (for mental health care). However, beyond metrics of how supports improve health and social outcomes, several questions remain:
How are organizations making supportive housing work when dedicated funding streams for this model are absent?
What do in-home supports mean for those exiting homelessness and living in supportive facilities?
How do supportive housing services fit within the broader network of services?
How do supportive housing buildings and their residents integrate (or not) in their local community.
The Partnership
This project represents a partnership between the housing provider, Indwell, and researchers from the Centre for Research in Health Equity and Social Inclusion (CRHESI) at the Faculty of Health Sciences, Western University. Indwell represents a ‘positive deviant’ in the supportive housing space. That is, they are making new supportive housing happen in a funding environment where this is particularly rare. This partnership allows for the research team to look beneath the service to understand both how these services are being delivered as well as their impact at the individual, service sector, and community level.
The Funding
This Project entitled “Making Permanent Supportive Housing Work for Vulnerable Populations” received funding from the National Housing Strategy under the NHS Research Grants stream, however, the views expressed are the personal views of the author and CMHC accept no responsibility for them.
Ce projet “Making Permanent Supportive Housing Work for Vulnerable Populations” a reçu du financement de la Stratégie nationale sur le logement. Cependant, les opinions exprimées sont les opinions personnelles de l’auteur et la SCHL n’accepte aucune responsabilité à l’égard de telles opinions.