Not the Cure
‘Supportive housing’ will never be enough
THE city this week disclosed numbers that should deliver a gut check to anyone who sees homelessness as an affordable-housing problem: As Politico reported, the city’s main supportivehousing program, NYC 15/15, is falling far short of its production targets.
When launched close to a decade ago, this initiative promised 15,000 units. Less than 4,000 have come online.
New York clearly won’t be able to house its way out homelessness — so progressives should reevaluate their opposition to other solutions, such as psychiatric hospitalization and law enforcement.
Supportive housing pairs low rents with behavioral-health services and is developed to serve the hardcore chronically homeless. It was invented in New York in the 1980s. Over the decades, it has enjoyed substantial political support and generous funding.
Federal data shows that New York is America’s supportivehousing capital; it has about 60% more units than its closest competitor, Los Angeles City and County.
Collectively, the Dinkins, Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, working with state government, built 14,115 units. Therefore, at 15,000 projected units, NYC 15/15 — which the de Blasio administration started in 2015 and the Adams administration has continued — is larger than all previous mayors’ efforts combined. (Another state effort, the 20,000-unit Empire State Supportive Housing Initiative, began in 2016.)
It’s hard to overstate progressive enthusiasm for supportive housing: To hear the advocacy community tell it, there is no other legitimate way to help the homeless.
When Mayor Adams announced his involuntary-treatment plan in late 2022, what did critics say? Supportive housing is a better solution.
When last summer Comptroller Brad Lander criticized Adams’ street-homeless cleanup, what did he say should been done instead? Supportive housing.
In the jail “abolition” debate, how, according to progressives,
can the city maintain public safety while slashing the use of incarceration? Expand supportive housing.
New York has already doubled and tripled down on supportive housing. Experience has, nonetheless, demonstrated that no government will ever be able to develop units fast enough to effect a major reduction in homelessness.
In 2019, Los Angeles’ city controller began publishing oversight reports that scathingly criticized Measure HHH, a marquee supportivehousing effort, for soaring costs and slow rate of development.
These reports went viral for confirming many Angelenos’ impression that — despite being told that more money for housing would deal with the proliferation of tents — street conditions had, if anything, gotten worse. The backlash has led to appreciably diminished support among Californians for investment in homeless housing.
Academic research has shown that even when supportive housing is successfully developed, multiple units are required to reduce the local homeless population by one person.
New York is not going to abandon supportive housing anytime soon, nor should it. For many of Gotham’s “rough sleepers,” supportive housing is the only realistic solution.
But there’s good reason to believe that developing supportive housing is only going to get harder in coming years. “Scattered site” units require finding
landlords with vacant units available for rent. They therefore must compete with other city rental-assistance programs.
Custom-built congregate projects require land, a perennially scarce resource in New York.
Meanwhile, reflexive accusations of NIMBYism have distracted supportive-housing proponents from facing up to the program’s limitations.
Housing isn’t health care. For someone with untreated serious mental illness and/or addiction, who’s lived on the streets for years, putting him in his own private apartment won’t magically turn him into an exemplary neighbor.
Competition for funding should also be expected to tighten. New York has some old supportive-housing stock, but their upkeep is costly, and the tension between expansion and maintenance — familiar from debates over infrastructure and mainstream affordable housing — has yet to be honestly reckoned with in the case of supportive housing.
In behavioral-health policy, many programs exist that are worthy but that no one considers a cure-all, such as Assertive Community Treatment and clubhouses.
We’d have more honesty in the homelessness debate were supportive housing’s reputation kept, in a similar way, to more modest proportions. Supportive housing complements the work jails and mental hospitals do.
It will never replace them.