Pathways to 38: RHLS & CSH work together to bring more supportive housing to PA.

Why is supportive housing so important? Having a home is the first step toward health and stability, but sometimes people require more than just four walls. Lives get disrupted, perhaps by eviction, the carceral system, sudden disability, or mental health setbacks. Uplifting people when they are at their most vulnerable is vital to health and healing. Supportive housing gives that help. 

What is supportive housing?

Supportive housing is a type of affordable housing that includes supportive services that people need to live and thrive in their community. Supportive housing is generally for people experiencing homelessness or housing instability, or those who have been living in an institutional setting, such as a nursing home. People who face complex barriers to housing due to a lack of employment or a substance use disorder benefit greatly from supportive housing.

Services in supportive housing must be flexible and responsive and are usually linked to intensive case management. Tenants are supported as they receive services such as healthcare, mental health care, substance use counseling, job training, and employment support, and child welfare. Supportive housing serves some of the most vulnerable households in the Commonwealth. Supportive housing allows people to live with stability, autonomy, and dignity. Building more of it requires significant legal expertise and advocacy.

RHLS is proud to partner with the Corporation for Supportive Housing as it continues its important advocacy efforts to spur the creation of more affordable and supportive housing. In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, CSH estimates that we need 38,000 supportive and affordable homes.

In 2023, RHLS worked with CSH, conducting listening sessions and engaging partners to develop a supportive housing policy platform, you can read about that on our website. Since that time, CSH has continued its research on the logistics of supportive housing and how to bring it to the community. A key component of building more is identifying new sources of funding. RHLS and CSH are working together as part of an affordable housing coalition. Executive Director Dina Schlossberg is involved in the larger coalition meeting, while Supervising Attorney Jack Stucker focuses on the affordable housing working group.

CSH has created a needs assessment data model that accounts for the percentage of individuals from each system that could benefit from supportive housing, integrating them into their communities, as an alternative to individuals living in expensive institutional settings that separate them from their communities. The report shows it is less expensive to support people in their own homes than to institutionalize them and is associated with better health outcomes.

As part of this advocacy work for more supportive housing, CSH has released a research document, Pathways to 38. RHLS Staff Attorney, Kathryn Oates, contributed to this collaborative effort. Her work involved gathering data to analyze average capital and operational costs for supportive housing developers across the state. This analysis required an understanding of construction, development, and operational budgets, in addition to knowledge of the available major funding sources.  

We invite you to read the Pathways to 38 report on the CSH website.