Almost everyone instinctively understands why housing affordability is important. We all need a place to call home, where we can pay the bills without excessive stress or uncertainty. A place to sleep and eat and bathe and store our things, where we feel safe and, hopefully, get to enjoy some respite among the ordinary and inevitable stressors of life. A quality home that you can afford is a home that you can rely on to meet these basic needs.
What is less familiar to many is the concept of supportive housing. You might link that phrase with people with disabilities, or perhaps those experiencing street homelessness, with visible signs of mental illness or addiction. You might assume people in these situations need various kinds of assistance, but your sense of how this relates to housing - getting it, maintaining it - might be vague. What services are offered within supportive housing? How are they embedded into people’s experience of living in their homes and communities? How does this work, exactly?
There is more to supportive housing than you might think, and it’s a far more important piece of solving the housing crisis than you may imagine.
So, here’s an explainer about what supportive housing is and why the Hamilton is Home coalition believes investing in it is essential to getting and keeping people housed, permanently.
Supportive housing: What it is and why it matters
What is supportive housing? The phrase may conjure images of paperwork and programs and social workers. The truth is that, defined more broadly, we all need supportive housing. We all need to live in homes where we can function well, and this may require a range of different “supports,” ranging from specific physical infrastructure needs to emotional support to social networks that help us solve practical problems, like a job loss or a car in the shop, or help taking out the trash or preparing meals when we’re ill or injured.
“People don’t take care of themselves as well as they should,” said Jess Brand, Regional Director at Indwell, a Christian charity providing permanent supportive housing in Hamilton and throughout Ontario and a founding member of the Hamilton is Home coalition.
“We all do that,” Brand explained, “but most of us have people around us” who help to get us back on track when we start to lose our way. “But if you’ve had circumstances that cut you off from other folks” - like addiction and mental health issues, among others - the consequences can be significant and long-lasting. Brand offered an example of an Indwell resident who mentioned to a staff member pain in his shoulder.
“The staff member said, ‘I think you should get somebody to look at your shoulder,’” Brand said. “He said no. After two days, she offered to go with him to the hospital.” The suggestion worked. “He had surgery that day,” Brand said. “A simple, timely intervention from someone who’s built trust keeps someone healthy. He still works to this day. He would have lost that if he didn’t get the medical care that he needed when he needed it.”
Zoom out from that one example and the big-picture impact of supportive housing becomes clear.
“The reason supportive housing is so important is that the people who are pushed out of the housing market are the people who have a disability or have trauma or some other reason that they’re disconnected from their support networks. We have to be able to develop supportive housing to give a pathway out of that,” Brand said.
Supportive housing offers services that many of us get through our communities of families, friends and neighbours. When those natural social networks break down or aren’t present, for whatever reason, people become vulnerable in ways that can lead to long-term financial, health and housing instability.
“People who require supportive housing almost by definition have fewer resources than those who don’t,” said Alan Whittle, of Good Shepherd, a Catholic charity that’s a major health and human services provider in Hamilton, with over 1,000 supportive housing units, including emergency, transitional and permanent supportive homes. Whittle now serves as a development consultant for the organization after retiring from his role as its Director of Community Relations and Development in 2022.
Whittle echoed Brand’s assertion that supportive housing often fills gaps left by frayed social ties, and made clear the individually tailored nature of the support available in Good Shepherd homes. He said the organization asks of its clients, “What does that person need at that particular time and what is it that we can do to facilitate that going forward?”
“When I think about the single moms that we support, it's partly about life skills, ensuring their children are well cared for,” Whittle said. “Does a person need help around mobility, someone who’s aging? Do they need someone to check in on them to be sure they're taking their medications? Do they need assisted living, help with food, toiletry? In our hospice housing, they are looking for pain relief, but also spiritual assistance. People may want to be able to connect with people that they haven’t had a relationship with in decades, so we can facilitate that.”
Good Shepherd often serves people who have alienated family during periods of addiction, mental illness and homelessness. “Supports help them stay housed,” Whittle said. “We don’t want anybody back out on the streets, so what do we need to house this person?”
Individually tailored solutions
Individually tailoring support often entails detail-oriented problem-solving.
Sometimes “it’s something as simple as talking to people who wear shoes and bother people below them,” Whittle said. Having a supportive service provider who can coordinate with the landlord helps reduce conflict and keep people housed.
This is especially important in more challenging cases. Whittle recalled a Good Shepherd tenant who was schizophrenic and liked to play the drums. “So we said, you can play the drums, but only between these hours,” he said. It worked. Another tenant Whittle recalled was so upset by hearing sounds around her in her apartment that she would scream for hours. The organization installed additional flooring and better insulated the walls, eliminating the triggers that caused her distress.
“She lived in that situation for 25 years or more because it was just about finding that kind of response that meant that the stimulus wasn’t there,” Whittle said. “I’m sure this woman lived a very fulfilling life in the context of what she was capable of, and got along with her neighbors. Usually there is a solution for these things.”
A cost-effective approach
It may seem like a significant investment by an organization to provide this type of solution and it is - but for these highly challenging scenarios, tailored support is a cost-effective service for the whole community. Good Shepherd’s efforts prevented years of likely displacement and conflict with landlords and neighbours, and severe mental distress that may have led to heavy use of healthcare services.
“The health and wellness of all is actually more cost effective,” said Jess Brand, of Indwell. “It’s very expensive for people to experience homelessness or ill health. “Someone’s going to go to a hospital instead of a pharmacy. Someone’s going to need an ambulance rather than going to a doctor, and that’s our tax dollars. So how do you want your money spent?”
Brand added that supportive housing also helps to maintain physical housing quality for all who live in a building. “There’s all kinds of reasons that it’s hard to maintain a home,” she said. “Supportive housing enables a place to stay good. It ensures that the windows get fixed and the hallway gets cleaned and the smoke detector works.”
Strengthening communities
Preserving housing quality through support services helps encourage longer tenancies for everyone in a development.
“This is about housing stability,” Brand said. “When people have a place to live for a long time it’s better for them, and it’s better for the community.”
Ultimately, helping tenants in supportive housing find a place within their community is the goal. Supportive housing very often includes elements of social connection centred around a residential development, like activity groups in common spaces, that help build relationships among residents. This allows their support systems to organically expand beyond professional staff assistance. This deepens and widens the support available as well as adds meaning and purpose to people’s lives.
At Sacajawea Non-Profit Homes, a supportive housing provider serving Indigenous people, activities like traditional crafts help create social bonds among staff and tenants. This promotes a sense of belonging that helps keep tenants in their homes and allows them to feel comfortable asking for help from support staff when needed.
“We can house people,” said Miranda Rapazzo, Sacajawea Non-Profit Housing’s Executive Director. “But it’s the maintaining the housing, making sure the individual or family are thriving in that housing” that’s the bigger challenge, she said. Social activities “build that community, so that everybody knows, ‘Okay, we’re going to go to the program today. We’re going to go and see Sally, and Jenny might be there and so will Bob, and then we can have our coffee.’ It’s forming that community and that trust.”
Connection is “identity-forming,” said Brand, of Indwell. “It’s having something meaningful to do and be a part of: a dog to buy a jacket for, a plant to water, or a neighbour to do a favour for. We need to get the community to do what the community does, rather than having all paid professionals meet a person’s needs. There is value in community living as opposed to institutional living.”
Brand cited studies on loneliness, revealing that it’s more deadly than smoking. “Supportive housing is an antidote to that, or tries to be,” she said. This speaks to supportive housing’s intertwining of the two meanings of value: social connection is cost-effective, but also deeply important to health and wellbeing for everyone.
“Dignity, love and hope are our values” at Indwell, Brand said. “That's the dignity part of our values, all people having worth. That’s a protective factor, when you believe you have worth, that’s going to help you stay housed but also help you live longer, find meaning.”
“These are things that we all want, Brand added. “We are not doing something exceptional. We are helping people have common experiences. Everybody is worthy of having a good place to live.”
Strength in diversity
The value of coming together in community extends to the supportive housing providers that make up the Hamilton is Home coalition.
Indwell offers permanent supportive housing. Good Shepherd provides emergency and transitional housing in addition to permanent homes. Sacajawea Non-Profit Homes offers moderate support services, with cultural programming that advances its mission to provide not only shelter but spaces where Indigenous people can thrive, feel connected to their culture and support one another as a community.
Whittle, of Good Shepherd, explained that his organization tends to house more single tenants, whereas “there are organizations who have lots of townhouses for example, because part of their historic population that they serve is families. So they do that and we don’t necessarily need to do that.”
Being able to draw on each organization’s areas of expertise and coordinate among each other helps the Hamilton is Home coalition better, and more efficiently, meet the full range of supportive housing needs in Hamilton.
“The key,” Whittle said, “is that we can all work together because we cover that spectrum collectively.”