Abstract: Housing Outcomes Among Housing Unstable Families Served By a Novel School District-Housing Agency Partnership (Society for Social Work and Research 29th Annual Conference)

Schedule:

Sunday, January 19, 2025

Willow B, Level 2 (Sheraton Grand Seattle)

* noted as presenting author

Thomas Byrne, PhD, Associate Professor, Boston University, Boston, MA

Jessica McCabe Johnson, PhD, Family Housing Hardship Program Director, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA

Indrani Saran, PhD, Assistant Professor of Practice, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA

Background and Purpose

Amidst recent sizeable nationwide increases in housing instability and homelessness among families with children, there is growing interest in partnerships between school systems and housing agencies that provide targeted housing assistance to housing unstable families with school-aged children. Yet, research on the outcomes of families receiving services through such partnerships remains scarce. To address this gap, the present study leverages administrative data from a school system-housing agency partnership in Boston, MA to 1) describe the housing outcomes among families receiving services via several interrelated programs operated by this partnership; and 2) identify the relationship between housing outcomes and both family characteristics and service-related factors.

Methods

The cohort for the present study is comprised of 926 homeless and housing unstable households with children enrolled in Boston Public Schools (BPS) who received housing-related services at some point between April 2020 and March 2023 through a partnership between the BPS system and FamilyAid (FA), a local housing services provider. We used FA administrative data to capture the extent to which families were residing in permanent housing at their time of exit from the program, which served as the study’s main outcome. We used multivariate logistic regression to assess the relationship between an array of family characteristics (e.g. age, race, household composition) and service-related factors (e.g. length of program participation, receipt of financial assistance for move-in costs, total amount of financial assistance received), all of which were available in FA administrative data.

Results

Roughly 72% of families in the study cohort were residing in permanent housing at their time of exit from the program. Factors associated with greater odds of exiting to permanent housing included older age of the head of household and longer length of service receipt from the program, while families with any member having a disabling condition had lower odds of exiting to permanent housing. Apart from program participation, none of the service-related factors were significantly associated with the probability of exiting to permanent housing.

Conclusions and Implications

The majority—nearly three quarters—of families receiving services via the BPS-FA programmatic partnership were residing in permanent housing at their time of exit from the program. However, very few of the family characteristics or service-related factors we considered were associated with the probability of exiting to permanent housing. Taken together, these findings point to the potential value of school system-housing agency partnerships as a means to help housing unstable families access permanent housing, while also underscoring the need for additional research to better understand the family and program-level factors that might be modified to promote positive housing outcomes for families.