their staff—caseworkers and recovery specialists with Mercy Housing and Shelter. When the state began redirecting funds from transitional housing to other homelessness intervention programs, the state funding— which paid for the staff—stopped. “That’s the whole reason the program closed,” Campbell said. “There was no money left for staffing.” Last May, Catherine’s Place left its location on Church Street and was folded into the existing 90-day program at St. Elizabeth’s House, a shelter at Mercy Housing and Shelter. THE STORY OF CATHERINE’S PLACE
is a common one. States across the country have changed their strategies to respond to a growing body of homelessness research and ever-present budget cuts. National trends show a decrease in funding for transitional housing as funds are redirected toward other homelessness interventions like rapid re-housing. Transitional housing is, by definition, temporary—most programs guarantee up to two years of housing in community settings, facilitating a recovery process that helps residents access the social services they need. The end goal is for residents to eventually find permanent housing and live independently. “The idea is that during those two years, you’d get intensive assistance toward the factors that contributed to becoming homeless,” said Josh Leopold, Senior Research Associate at the Urban Institute, in an interview with The Politic. Rapid re-housing, on the other hand, offers immediate financial assistance to keep individuals from becoming homeless. In cases where
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the individual has already fallen into homelessness, the program works to quickly re-house them in permanent, independent housing within 90 days. “The goal of [rapid re-housing] is to take individuals in a homeless situation that don’t have any of the barriers of those who need permanent support housing and try to get [them] back into the community by providing short-term subsidies, so they can once again get back on their feet, manage their lives, get a job,” Steve DiLella, Director of Individual and Community Support Programs at the Connecticut Department of Housing, told The Politic. Lisa Bates, Executive Director of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness, described the shift towards rapid re-housing. “HUD moved largely away from transitional housing, and the state of Connecticut has followed the same research and followed suit to take that funding and use it for other types of programs,” she said in an interview with The Politic. The research Bates referred to includes the Family Options Study, a national study commissioned in 2015 by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The study assessed four different types of interventions, two of which focused on transitional housing and community-based rapid re-housing. In the short-term outcomes report, the study found that transitional housing was more expensive and did not hold any tangible advantage over other interventions. “That study, among others... showed that unfortunately transitional housing, which I think sounds like a good concept, just doesn’t have the
strong positive outcome that would justify the relatively expensive cost of such programs,” Bates said. Using the Family Options Study and similar findings from smaller studies, the Connecticut Department of Housing has shifted its attention to permanent supportive programs and rapid re-housing programs. While the former targets higher need households suffering from long histories of homelessness, the latter serves those in need of more temporary assistance. “Essentially we have been able to be so successful because instead of managing homelessness, we’re exiting people from homelessness,” Evonne Klein, the Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Housing, told The Politic. For transitional housing advocates, the focus on immediate homelessness can obscure the advantages of transitional housing. Trudi Campbell, the volunteer director of Catherine’s Place, voiced these concerns. “The sense was that we weren’t ending homelessness in Hartford and, by having transitional housing, it was more an idea that homelessness was being extended, not stopped,” she said. THE MOVE AWAY FROM TRANSI-
tional housing came as a surprise to the St. Patrick-St. Anthony side of the program. “Because we weren’t involved in the funding, it wasn’t something we’d known about,” explained Campbell. The program came to a hasty and unexpected end. “We were given two days’ notice that they were moving out, and there would be no more program,” she said. “These are women in transition, trying to make their lives better. They really were given the raw end of the deal. They didn’t have any time to make plans.” Mercy Housing and Shelter, who was St. Patrick-St. Anthony’s