Homelessness to permanent supportive housing: promoting housing as healthcare in rural communities

Programs and federal resources aimed towards homelessness have historically been geared towards providing emergency assistance instead of long-term housing. The advent of permanent supportive housing (PSH) initiatives over the last two decades supports the Housing First theory, which recognizes housing as a form of harm-reduction and healthcare to those who are chronically homeless. Permanent supportive housing provides stable housing to those with co-occurring disorders, and also offers services to address client medical conditions. Although permanent supportive housing efforts have gained recognition for successfully re-stabilizing many chronically homeless individuals who reside in sprawling urban cities, this model has only recently been applied to serve rural homeless communities. As a result, current research has been overwhelmingly focused on urban models of permanent supportive housing, while largely ignoring the examples of this model as applied in rural dwellings. With an increase in rural-based PSH efforts, this project aims to address this gap in literature by comparing the impacts of both housing models. As there are no existing studies that examine the impacts of both PSH models, the purpose of this project is to evaluate the effect of permanent supportive housing to rural homeless communities compared to that of urban communities. This exploratory research analyzes pre-existing survey data collected by a rural PSH non-profit agency as well as archival sources to measure the impact of urban models.