July 2024 | Message from Our Executive Director
| What Does It Mean to Be a Housing First Focused System and Why You Need to Know HUD staff that oversee the Continuum of Care funding process have indicated that they plan to take a much closer look at Housing First program fidelity and systemwide performance measures such as the percentage of households exiting to permanent housing 1. This is part of the move from an annual CoC funding application to a two-year process, shared by HUD staff at the recent National Alliance to End Homelessness conference in Washington, DC. You may be asking – how is Housing First supposed to work if landlords don’t want to rent to people with past evictions nor someone who is unemployed and without income nor someone with a criminal history? We have heard this directly from landlords from a variety of sources including our own survey of over 660 landlords 2. Finding a decent place to live (rental housing) got even harder after the COVID-19 pandemic and is way harder if you have little to no income. Here at the Housing Alliance, the difficulty in engaging private market landlords was a bit of a broken record in the conversations that we were having with those delivering homeless assistance and other types of housing assistance locally. So… Thanks to Truist, we had some funds to make grants to and study the work of three communities and what they accomplished was very impressive! These results and learnings will help your organization and your Continuum of Care perform better on the CoC’s systemwide performance measures including helping more households exit to permanent housing. We found that even in the new post-COVID rental market, families experiencing homelessness moved into their own homes faster after programs started offering landlord incentives. A lot changed as a result of the pandemic. What hasn’t changed is that landlords, tenants, and nonprofit assistance organizations all want the same thing: stable and lasting tenancy for renters. In our recent Landlord Engagement Virtual Summit: Leveraging Funding Sources for Housing Solutions, Gale Schwartz talked about the benefit of Housing First from her perspective. “These programs are facilitating the human benefit of getting people to a place where they can have respite, they can start to heal, they can start to recover, they can start to think about and plan for the future.” This special edition electronic communication focuses on housing location and landlord engagement. We have created a new toolkit to help homelessness crisis response systems build upon their existing efforts to quickly place unhoused households into permanent housing. It includes information on promising practices including tools and templates, how to align these practices to achieve better outcomes, how to leverage multiple funding sources for these activities, and various models of customer service and financial incentives for landlords In partnership, Phyllis Chamberlain Gale Schwartz Executive Director Director of Programs and Outreach |
| 1 Footnote: “Housing First.” National Alliance to End Homelessness. 2022 20 March. Https://endhomelessness.org/resource/housing-first/ 2 Footnote: “Landlord Attitudes on Homelessness Assistance Programs.” Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania.2024 February. Https://housingalliancepa.org/wp- |