Supportive Housing for Youth Formerly in Foster Care

The heightened risk of homelessness among youth with foster care experience is well established. Likewise, permanent supportive housing (PSH) has become one favored approach to serving the most vulnerable among people experiencing homelessness. While many housing programs serve youth with foster care histories, it is unknown how many take a PSH approach and whether those that do effectively address the particular needs of young people who, by virtue of their experience in foster care, may require different supports in their transition to adulthood than their counterparts who did not spend time in care. Our research aims to discover and summarize PSH programs for youth formerly in foster care, filling an intermediate knowledge gap in the causal pathway from serving this population to program efficacy.

We conducted a national search for housing programs for youth who had spent time in foster care. Of the 75 programs we found, 23 agreed to a telephone interview. We selected for site visits eight of these programs that would represent diversity across the following criteria: local housing affordability, clustered or single-site housing verses scattered site, best model program, connection to the child welfare system, coordinated entry verses open referrals, and geographic location. The visits included focus groups with youth participants and interviews with key staff. Transcripts were coded in NVivo and analyzed for themes.

The major research questions include: (1) What characterizes PSH programs for youth with foster care histories? What are the approaches to staffing, eligibility, recruitment and referrals, supportive services, and housing models? (2) For whom is permanent supportive housing appropriate? (3) Do youth perceptions of the program’s goals match those of program staff? (4) Does a PSH model create unique challenges for youth or for program operations?

Among the 23 programs interviewed, three main typologies emerged: (1) PSH programs that intentionally target youth who had been in foster care; (2) PSH programs that may serve youth who were in care, but cannot target them specifically because of coordinated entry requirements (i.e., local systems that systematically screen, prioritize, and match homeless individuals with programs according to need; and (3) programs that target youth who were in care, but have service requirements and duration limitations, and are therefore not PSH.

Two themes emerged among programs in the second typology that have policy and program implementation implications. First, some programs have had to restructure their programming in recent years to accommodate a broader and sometimes higher-need population of young people under coordinated entry systems. Because these systems reorganize service slots rather than generate more slots, these efforts to prioritize the neediest can displace youth who might benefit from the prior model. Second, true PSH models have no exit criteria, which creates the practical problem of program flow. A program cannot continue to serve an incoming population if the present population rarely or never exits. However, youth who age out of foster care de facto do not achieve legal permanency and may uniquely benefit from the permanent stability a PSH program promises.