"the Walk's Alright:" Wayfinding, Bias, and Disengagement in Permanent Supportive Housing Tenants' Neighborhood Perceptions

Background: Neighborhoods matter for residents’ well-being, mental and physical health, and status attainment. Permanent supportive housing (PSH) is an intervention to interrupt chronic homelessness that has stabilized housing for participants and reduced communities' rates of chronic homelessness. However, the neighborhood where communities locate PSH can impact tenants’ outcomes. For example, previous research found tenant perceptions of neighborhood safety impact housing tenure and mental and physical health. However, neighborhoods operate through a number of pathways, including physical mobility, social connectedness, and participation. Therefore, this research examined formerly homeless tenants’ perceptions of the neighborhood where their project-based PSH was located and whether those perceptions changed over time.

Methods: Data come from a mixed-methods study of a 24-unit, single-site Housing First-inspired PSH in one mid-sized Midwestern city. The project-based PSH was in a neighborhood that has more poor and fewer white residents and lower violent and property crime than the city. Data come from semi-structured interviews of 29 formerly homeless PSH tenants conducted at intake (i.e., lease initiation), and 6-, 12-, 24-, and 36-month increments after intake (18 tenants completed a 36-month interview due to move-out, death, shorter tenure, and refusals). Respondents were predominantly white, male, and older adults. During the interview, we asked tenants about a typical day, opinions of the program, and perceptions of their neighborhood. We coded verbatim transcripts in Dedoose following a general inductive approach. We conducted second-order analysis in Excel, reviewing codes by wave and individual. We used peer debriefing at both coding stages.

Results: Three themes of PSH tenants’ perceptions of their neighborhood emerged from the analysis: neighborhood wayfinding; racist and classist perceptions of neighborhood quality; disengagement from the neighborhood. All themes were persistent over time. For most residents, the specific location of PSH was optimal because it was within walking distance to convenience stores, a large grocery store, and other stores, restaurants, and social services. Most also noted proximity to a bus stop as a positive feature of their location. Temporal variation in perceptions came from changes in respondents’ mobility and a new convenience store. The second theme that emerged from one-third of respondents was a temporally consistent assessment that it was a “bad” neighborhood, which some tenants linked to safety. However, the evidence they provided for this was consistently racial innuendo or explicitly that it was a poor, Black neighborhood. Finally, many tenants were not engaged in the neighborhood, such as stating “it’s fair” or returning to describing their building. These respondents did not share detailed perspectives of the neighborhood after probing questions nor after longer housing tenure.

Conclusions: Our three themes highlight differences between tenants of the same PSH site. Implications from the first theme are that PSH neighborhoods should consider both walkability and access to commercial and social services. PSH neighborhoods may be interpreted through a racist and classist lens, which may amplify fear for safety in the neighborhood, suggesting that working on biases may improve tenants’ well-being. Finally, PSH housing programs could support tenants’ engagement in and integration into their community.