Report: Program helping homeless

Study upbeat on county’s focus on rapid rehousing

A first-of-its-kind look at how well a new homelessness intervention is working for single adults in Maricopa County found that just over half of participants completed the pilot program and remained in housing months later.

The program emerged from an overflow-shelter crisis in the county and moved 252 people from deficient spaces near downtown Phoenix into apartments in its first years.

At the outset, providers didn’t know much about the people who slept there or whether a housing model used primarily for families would work for them.

For single adults experiencing homelessness, the evaluation released Tuesday by consulting company Focus Strategies details both early successes and struggles of Arizona’s biggest test of rapid rehousing. Single adults are the largest portion of the homeless population nationwide.

Valley of the Sun United Way, an organiza-

tion helping fund the program, commissioned the report.

The idea is to transfer people from a shelter to more permanent housing such as apartments as quickly as possible, provide temporary rent assistance and give them case-management services for needs such as employment.

Maricopa County groups launched a pilot program about two years ago with $2.5 million from public and private groups.

The report comes as agencies continue to fund rapid rehousing and seek other ways to make the service system more efficient. At the same time, a countywide spike in street homelessness has drawn concerns from neighborhoods and non-profits.

There’s little data to compare rapid rehousing in Maricopa County to other places, though report authors see general success. The rate that people return to homelessness is higher than national standards, though most of those standards are not specifically for single adults.

And the evaluation is proof that rapid rehousing — a strategy more frequently used for families — can benefit those single adults, said Katharine Gale, principal associate of Focus Strategies. The group is often seen as being harder to house.

“This is the majority of the homeless population,” Gale said. “We need to find out what models work for them.”

The Maricopa County pilot program targeted housing for people who once slept in a condemned warehouse or parking lot near the hub of providers at the Human Services Campus.

Public and private agencies that fund homelessness services closed the overflow spaces in 2015 amid controversy. People staying there qualified for housing by taking an assessment that showed moderate barriers to ending their homelessness.

After that step, paths varied. The report tracked participants who entered the program between July 1, 2015, and August 31, 2016, and found:

» More than 120 people started the program but never received money from it. Some still ended in permanent housing, but more data are needed on them.

» Nearly three-quarters of people who received funding completed the program in their own apartments. The rest went to shelters or other locations. Data were missing for some.

» The average person housed through the program received $4,900 to $7,200 for start-up costs, rent and case management over several months. That’s significantly less than initial forecasts.

» People who became homeless again after the program did so fairly quickly — normally within about three months.

» Those who had experienced domestic violence and people who ended the program without an income were more likely to become homeless again.

The pilot program didn’t outline specific measures of success beyond housing 250 people, said Amy Schwabenlender, vice president of community impact for Valley of the Sun United Way, which commissioned the evaluation.

Instead, the pilot program intended to test if rapid rehousing worked for the group of people who were sleeping near downtown Phoenix, she said.

The program has already adjusted to address some of the issues raised in the report, including working more closely with employment providers, Schwabenlender said.

New insights — such as the connection between domestic violence and returns to homelessness — help highlight gaps in the system, she said.

Experts could point to few data sources that would compare Maricopa County to rapid-rehousing programs in other local communities.

And at the national level, the only data available on single adults are a federal program to rapidly rehouse homeless veterans, said Dennis Culhane, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has helped evaluate it.

That program showed fewer people became homeless again than in Maricopa County, but Culhane said the rate here “is pretty good.”

Who can participate in the program can have an impact on the outcome, Culhane said, which complicates efforts to make a direct comparison. Overall, he said, the Maricopa County data show that while many people think rapid rehousing doesn’t work for single adults, it can.

“This is helpful in persuading people this is a good intervention,” he said.

In general, people need to keep an eye on how rapid rehousing is working, said Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

It’s a relatively new model, she said. And while there is evidence it works, she said, people need to be connected to the right services.

“We need to keep learning,” Roman said.