Moving On Initiative shows promising results in other cities.
Helping formerly homeless people who have stabilized their lives in supportive housing move out into their own apartments is a pretty simple concept on its face. It caught on a decade ago in New York City, has spread to a handful of other cities since, and has shown promising results.
In Hartford, Conn., poverty managers have been able to move 21 percent of their supportive housing residents into new lives each year. In Atlanta, the rate reached 10 percent. New York hit a peak of 25 percent in the late 2000s, and though federal and local funding cuts shrank the program, it’s still achieving a 6 percent rate, which translates to about 2,000 people annually.
“The reasons for Moving On are obvious,” said Robert Friant, a manager at the Corporation for Supportive Housing in New York, which helps oversee the Moving On program there. “I always tell people when you think about the costs of supportive housing today, just think about it for tomorrow because those costs are going to go up.
“Moving On saves money, and it improves lives.”
The Tipping Point Community charity in May promised to spend $100 million to cut San Francisco’s chronic homelessness in half over the next five years, and its first expenditure was $1.2 million to get a Moving On program started. The program is being run in conjunction with the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing and the city Housing Authority by the Brilliant Corners nonprofit. In a limited launch, it’s already placed 13 people into independent housing — and an additional 350 have applied and are being vetted for placement.
The plan is to go into fullscale operation in July, using an additional $4 million in funding from Tipping Point. The first year is expected to result in 200 to 400 people moved up from supportive housing. After that, the goal is to eventually reach an annual turnover of 10 percent.
The cost savings could be big. New supportive housing units cost $400,000 to $450,000 each to build — and that cost drops to zero if a spot is simply vacated so a new formerly homeless resident can move in.
Also, the city spends about $20,000 annually in case manage-
ment and other services for each resident. Moving On’s cost per resident is $10,000 for the first year, should drop to about $5,000 the second year, and is expected to continue to taper off after that, as it has in other cities.
If San Francisco reaches its goal of placing 10 percent of its longterm supportive housing population into the program, that could translate to $13 million a year in savings after the second year. The money would be shifted to new chronically homeless residents moving into the supportive housing spots that get vacated, so the savings mostly translate into a cost of human lives rescued and improved.
The programs in New York and Connecticut found it can take a chronically homeless person three to five years to stabilize enough to move to independent housing. But since San Francisco’s supportive housing programs are more than a decade old, there is a pool of people ready to move on, but they can’t find a place to live without major help.
Human Services Agency Executive Director Trent Rhorer, who oversees the majority of supportive housing in San Francisco, has estimated that 30 percent of those who entered the complexes during the past decade-plus could be ready for a program like Moving On. Service-heavy supportive housing, after all, is ideally meant for those who most need mental, drug and other counseling help — and here, just as in other cities, not everyone pulled inside needs it forever.
“When we look back on the development of supportive housing, we now see that some people just need government housing vouchers, and not so much of the support service,” said Steve Berg, vice president for policy at the National Alliance to End Homelessness in Washington, D.C. “The experience overall is that Moving On works very well, and that it’s growing — as San Francisco now shows.
“We’ve learned that you can’t just give a person a housing voucher and expect them to find a place on their own. They need an advocate. Having an organization that does that, building relationships with landlords and learning how to deal with them, makes all the difference.”
Daniel Lurie, Tipping Point’s founder and chief executive officer, said he views Moving On as one of the most important tools for achieving his goal of rescuing 50 percent of chronically homeless people from their street lives. He wants it to be a national model.
The program may have worked in a few other cities, but if it can work in San Francisco — where the homelessness problem is both stubborn and highly visible — it should be able to work anywhere, the thinking goes.
“I think we’ve learned a lot over the last decade,” Lurie said. “We’ve made some good strides since then. But we can do better, and this is one way we can do that.”