Supportive Housing Demonstration Program

By 1992, the concept of supportive housing had been tested on a relatively large scale in New York City, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The need for supportive housing was present in Connecticut: homeless shelters were at capacity, hospitals around the state were treating numerous episodes of illness and injury among indigent, often homeless, users of alcohol and drugs, and the State had been progressively discharging long-term patients from its three large psychiatric hospitals for several years.

But the concept had not been tested to the same extent in mid-size cities like New Haven and Hartford, or in towns the size of New Britain and Middletown. Although there was a “model” for supportive housing, it required adaptation to Connecticut’s governmental structures and interests and to local conditions and needs.

So in 1993 the Melville Charitable Trust offered funding for the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH) to initiate a supportive housing demonstration in Connecticut. The Corporation for Supportive Housing joined forces with the State of Connecticut, several housing developers, and several human services providers to create the Connecticut Supportive Housing Demonstration Program. This initiative produced 281 units of service-enriched permanent housing for homeless and at-risk populations.

This demonstration program, researched by the University of Pennsylvania Health System in 2002, substantiated the success of supportive housing: 

• Tenants decreased their utilization of restrictive and expensive health services.
• Tenants increased their usage of less expensive ongoing and preventative health care. For example, Medicaid-funded inpatient health and behavioral health care provided to tenants dropped by 71 percent from two years prior to three years after they entered the housing.
• Tenants reported high levels of satisfaction with all aspects of the housing and services.
• Tenant income increased, on average from $500 to $639 per month.
• Two-thirds of tenants reported being employed or in education and training programs.
• Neighborhood property values increased by more than 30 percent for eight of the nine projects in the study.
• The majority of neighbors and nearby business owners report that their neighborhoods look better or much better than before the projects were built.
• Development of the projects yielded $72 million in direct and indirect economic and fiscal benefits to Connecticut communities.

Supportive Housing Pilots Initiative

Building on the success of the Demonstration Program, in 2000 the State of Connecticut launched an ambitious new initiative designed to produce new supportive housing units, extend the reach of supportive housing to new communities, and increase the number of nonprofits providing supportive housing at the local level.  The overall purpose of the Supportive Housing Pilots Initiative was to build a solid statewide foundation for taking supportive housing to scale in Connecticut. 

Its goal was to produce at least 650 new units of supportive housing statewide, most of which would serve formerly homeless men, women and families coping with mental illness and/or chemical dependency.  As in the Demonstration Program, this program involved the cooperative efforts of six State agencies, CSH, philanthropy and the nonprofit community.  

The first 350 of the 650 supportive apartments were created in the form of scattered site apartments using existing rental properties. The Pilots Initiative also financed 15 new site-based projects to create new supportive housing: as of 2007, 261 units are in various stages of production from planning to completion.

The State of Connecticut Supportive Housing Pilot’s Initiative was awarded Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government Ash Institute 2006 Innovations in American Government award, recognizing the initiative for its innovation in building a network of state, federal, and non-profit resources to achieve its goal of creating new supportive housing units and providing support services to residents.