If having a safe and secure home is the basis for your life, how do unhoused men, women and their families find that starting point to get back toward productive living? Particularly individuals with behavioral health disabilities?
The Behavioral Health Network of Greater St. Louis and Places for People grappled with that dilemma, and secured resources to provide supportive housing in locations throughout St. Louis where there had been none.
Places for People provides caring, evidence-based behavioral health and medical care, programs and services to support and empower persons to recover from mental illness, substance use disorders and associated chronic conditions.
“When they come in for services, which is behavioral as well as physical health services, they’re homeless, and we consider a place to live the foundation for recovery, for health, for getting healthier,” Joe Yancey, executive director of Places for People, said. “Affordable housing is one of the greatest needs that we have, and not just for people with behavioral health, really – for people who are poor.”
The Behavioral Health Network is a collaborative group of community mental health and substance use providers, working with hospital and governmental leaders and community members, that identifies gaps in behavioral health care, then work together to identify solutions. The network focuses on the uninsured, underinsured populations in St. Louis city and Franklin, Jefferson, St. Charles, St. Louis and Warren counties. It also hosts a housing collaborative, made up of some of the same leadership, to foster a common agenda for housing support.
“We utilize Gateway Housing First as a supportive housing entity, who, not only understands the development side of things, but also the need for supportive housing,” said Wendy Orson, executive director of the Behavioral Health Network.
Gateway Housing First – a property landlord, facilitator, owner and developer – was established in 2013 to offer stable housing for the disabled and most vulnerable individuals and families who live with a wide range of complex disorders and life situations and who need support to maintain housing.
“We have found that our tenants have needs that often can’t be met immediately by other service partners,” said Cynthia Duffe, executive director of Gateway Housing First. “Like, they need to be enrolled with a community mental health provider or a substance abuse provider or other social service providers to really support them effectively. So, we really have to seek funding from grant sources to support a small clinical staff that can provide bridge services until they can be enrolled in full services through another community partner and to also negotiate issues that may arise with tenants when they are struggling.”
Places for People turned over properties it owned to Gateway Housing First to operate. Places for People provides the after-hours onsite behavioral health personnel, and the Behavioral Health Network finds resources to connect individuals to supportive housing.
“We facilitate multiple community projects where we’re taking folks from the ED [emergency department], many of whom are homeless, and connecting them back to community care,” Orson said. “So we are a resource that works in conjunction with Gateway Housing to refer people, to bring providers together and to help continue to coordinate care regionally.”
Between the three organizations, doors are opening for persons living with anxiety, depression or other issues, helping them reestablish themselves as tenants who take care of themselves and their families. Places for People’s onsite staff at the supportive housing locations work primarily between 5 p.m. and 7 a.m. Their work augments treatment from other people that takes place during the day and outside of the housing communities.
Yancey said having that type of enhanced supportive environment, particularly for persons who have not had their own place for some time, works very well to support the entire treatment process.
“It helps people feel safe in some cases, particularly people who may have had tremendous trauma experiences in their life,” Yancey said. “It helps them feel safer. There are people there that can help calm things down if thoughts or anxiety or whatever is running a little rampant for whatever reason.”
The 32-unit Nathaniel Rivers Place community, located in the 22nd Ward and named after a former state senator and representative for the area, is the first new construction project for this supportive housing collaboration.
“For Nat Rivers Place, we built from the ground-up and we relied mostly on financing from Missouri Housing Development Commission – specifically, state and federal low-income housing tax credits to build that project,” Duffe said. “It’s amazing and beautiful because we were also able to get other gap-funding sources to take it a step further and make sure there is plenty of space in the building for onsite support services, for 24-hour clinical staff and it just to be a high-quality construction product.”
Duffe said Gateway Housing First acquired its other housing communities either from other organizations that wanted to get out of housing, or bought apartment complexes for less than market value and transformed them into permanent support housing. It operates Gateway Accessible Housing apartments in South St. Louis County near Jefferson Barracks, Giles Apartments in South City, a North Spring House for men, and an historic mixed-use house for women in the Hyde Park neighborhood.
Yancey said Places for People’s role at most of these properties is to provide a community support team attached to that property. “We need so much more, and it’s not just a behavioral health thing,” Yancey said. “We have so many people – families, children – that don’t have a place, and the Section 8 waiting list is six or seven years long and has been forever.”
Orson said the Behavioral Health Network is looking at housing collaborations in other states, and it plans to bring some of those ideas to this area with additional partners to fund housing support.
“We all have a responsibility as healthcare providers to invest in social determinants of health, one of which is housing, because we know that, oftentimes, these social indicators impact the overall health and wellbeing of individuals,” Orson said.
“If hospitals, if communities, if all of the folks who are involved at the intersects with these individuals can help fund housing supports, then we could see reduced costs in acute care and emergency room visits, because large portions of the top ED users are often homeless.”
For more information, call 314-309-3174 or visit gatewayhousingfirst.org or placesforpeople.org.
