SANTA CLARA COUNTY, Calif. (KRON) -- A recent study has found the vast majority of even the most impaired homeless individuals can be successfully housed given access to permanent housing with voluntary supportive services.
UC San Francisco's Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative conducted a study on Santa Clara County’s Project Welcome Home -- a permanent supportive housing program in partnership with Adobe Services -- and found 86% of participants who were randomized to a permanent supportive housing model were successfully housed for several years.
“We were able to do a randomized trial which means that we enrolled people into a study as they were enrolling in the program and the study determined whether or not they got the program which was the intervention or if they got usual care which was just to be able to obtain housing by other means from Santa Clara County,” said Dr. Maria Raven, chief of the Department of Emergency Medicine at UCSF.
“The difference between the program and usual care is that the program provided these individuals basically very rapid access to permanent supportive housing which is housing with sort of embedded social services which this group of folks really really needed because they were very very sick it turns out” Dr. Raven added.
“Much sicker than we expected.”
Project Welcome Home offers support teams led by a certified behavioral health professional and one staff member for every 15 clients -- the study focused on the most frequent users of acute medical, psychiatric and other emergency services.
Participants averaged five hospitalizations, 20 visits to the emergency department, five to psychiatric emergency services and three to jail in the two years prior to being enrolled in the program -- according to the study these participants only represent about five to 10% of chronically homeless individuals.
“This is the group of people that many individuals would consider very hard to house or almost unhouseable because they just have so many chronic, behavioral health, and medical issues that can make working with them and getting them housed a challenge," said Dr. Raven.
“But what we found is when they were paired with services which was the housing and case management organization, they were able to get housed and stay housed."
In 2015 -- Santa Clara County launched Project Welcome Home which offers subsidized housing and community-based clinical services to assist chronically homeless individuals who are frequent users of the county’s emergency rooms, acute mental health facilities and jail.
At the time, reports indicated more than $3 billion of public services were used by 104,206 county residents who experienced homelessness at any point from 2007 and 2012.
The study identified a group of 2,800 persistently homeless individuals in the county with an average cost of $83,000 per year in public services.
Supervisor Dave Cortese-- who served as the Board of Supervisors president at the time -- tells KRON4 News a lot was gained from the project but acknowledged there is still much work left to be done to address the on-going homeless crisis.
According to the latest Point-in-Time Count -- Santa Clara County now sits at nearly 10,000 homeless individuals.
“It’s actually a lot cheaper to house the homeless and provide them what we call wrap-around services whether it’s mental health, drug and alcohol … it’s a lot cheaper to do that than to leave them on the street but a lot of people don’t believe that,” said Cortese.
“We need to do a lot more and that’s evident … and I’ll be the first one to say it,” Cortese added.
“We realized it around 2015, we passed a bond in 2016 to create enough permanent housing for 4,200 homeless but we just have a lot more to do and we have a lot of more to do in terms of creating temporary shelters and short term shelters.”
Despite the project's success -- researchers also found extremely high death rates -- including those who were successfully housed.
In the end -- 70 of the 423 participants died over the 2.5 years under study with similar numbers in the supportive housing and control groups.
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