Thanks for the report. I intended to go and write a post, but was unable to make it.

"A: Funding does NOT necessarily restrict us. A good case manager would not let them move in if they will be disruptive.
They aren't all addicts! (but more of the chronically homeless are...)"

That is a very squishy response.

These are rental units. The market is a niche market. Requiring sobriety, abstinence, and drug testing would cut down greatly on the number of people interested in participating.

If the funding does not prevent the Ten Year Plan from requiring sobriety, abstinence, and drug testing as a lease restriction then after five years and a lot of protest why haven't they done it?

I don't believe them.

Metulj, refor4 & Rachel,

Have any of you ever wondered why it is that the Housing First concept got so much support from so many governments so fast?

Maybe it’s because -

In the Study: Housing First for Homeless Persons with Active Addiction: Are We Overreaching?
It states:

“This new ferment has been spurred by important research (detailed below),
by advocates within and outside the government, and by the operational threat that
communities without plans to end chronic homelessness risk loss of federal funding.”

(link...)

Or

Without Housing: “Decades of Federal Housing Cutbacks, Massive Homelessness, and Policy Failures” byWRAP-Western Regional Advocacy Project

The hype surrounding Housing First, however, has not led to the funding of affordable housing production at the levels necessary to resolve homelessness and to generally help
alleviate poverty in the United States because it has been applied only to a small stream of homeless assistance funding. Rather, the emergence of the Housing First model has occurred simultaneous with a continued assault on public housing, housing subsidies, Section 8, basic social safety net services, health care, childcare, education, and with a refusal to increase the federal minimum wage.47 While Housing First has given lip service to the importance of housing, it has not been supported with a commitment to provide the resources necessary to ensure adequate, affordable, and universal housing for all. Instead of leading to a push for universal and affordable housing, Housing First has been directly tied only to the newest homeless target sub-population: the chronically homeless. Chronically homeless people are defined as single homeless individuals with severe challenges of mental illness or substance abuse who have been serially homeless or who have been homeless for over a year.48 The Bush administration, through the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH) and HUD, has advocated for a mandate that, in order to receive priority for federal funding, localities must produce tenyear plans focusing their community’s efforts toward addressing chronic homelessness.49

Housing First is the favored model for addressing chronic omelessness. This has forced communities to often implement Housing First policies by leasing hotel units from forprofit landlords, and then claiming that these previously existing units are newly created housing for homeless people.

Combining Housing First with a nearly exclusive focus on chronically homeless individuals links the recognition of the importance of affordable housing in addressing homelessness with the portrayal that homelessness is primarily about dysfunctional, “chronically” homeless individuals. In this portrayal, affordable housing becomes primarily a means to warehouse deviant homeless individuals.50 This again reinforces
negative stereotypes about homeless people and the premise that individual deficiencies are the primary cause of homelessness. Rather than contributing to a full redress of the
massive need for affordable housing throughout the United States, Housing First has become but another strategy for dealing with degenerate homeless outcasts.

(link...)

And for the NHI Article: When Supportive Housing Isn’t, By Martha Bridegam

It’s a scene reminiscent of a madhouse in another century: a tenant suffering pain from untreated physical illness, malnourished, mentally frozen by anxiety, sits in a room heaped with third-hand possessions and garbage. A property manager stands in the doorway, grimacing at the smell, demanding a cleanup, and threatening penalties. The tenant feels like a prisoner. The manager acts like a warden.
This scene plays out regularly in supportive-housing projects for recently homeless people in present-day San Francisco. The tenants are not prisoners, but instead are threatened with eviction, which almost guarantees a return to homelessness. They are not physically threatened, but instead suffer from neglect, which managers often attribute to the tenants’ failure to use available services.
Supportive housing for homeless people is meant to prevent just these kinds of crises. Properly run supportive housing provides individualized services to help disabled people live independently. Possible services include case management, medical and psychiatric care, housekeeping, home health assistance, medication and appointment reminders, addiction treatment, meal programs, and life coaching. The idea is to stabilize tenants, both for their own sake and to save public dollars by avoiding the more expensive institutions such as jails, hospitals, and homeless shelters.
Many supportive-housing programs I know well don’t make these services accessible enough to people with serious mental disabilities. In the 15-odd years I’ve been an advocate for very poor people in San Francisco, I have been through several eviction-threat scenes with clients, and have heard of many, many more from colleagues and clients, and clients’ friends and neighbors. It seems accepted as normal that some mentally disabled supportive-housing tenants are neglected and allowed to fail.
I have handled some of my clients’ case management and home care myself to prevent their eviction because their assigned “case managers” didn’t. I have cleaned and decluttered rooms, negotiated with property managers, advocated with public and nonprofit service providers, coaxed tenants to accept state-paid home-care workers, made reminder calls before medical appointments, and more. This tells me that supportive services do help. It also tells me supportive housing typically fails any tenant needing careful follow-up.
Most supportive-housing programs in San Francisco provide services primarily by employing case managers to connect tenants with outside nonprofit and government service providers, though sometimes there is a visiting nurse or other medical professional on site. Medical staff, when available, can be godsends, and case managers are often good-hearted. However, case managers face frequent crises—fights, suicide threats, health inspectors, cops, paramedics, and coroners. And there’s always paperwork. They have very little time to engage with each tenant.

(link...)

So would the three of you please sing to all of us again about the reasons why Housing First, Permanent Supportive Housing has been rolled out across the Nation, and is so beneficial for the Chronically Homeless.

The Ten Year Plan IS

A Building Plan for the Wealthy Real-estate Elite of Knoxville

A way to get the Homeless away from the 100 Block of Gay street at the expense of Neighborhoods, all over the City.

The result of Bush area De-Funding of HUD Housing Programs.

A “Feel Good” Plan for the ‘Vote your Conscience, Not the will of the People” politicians on City Council

The Ten Year Plan is NOT

A Plan that will actually help in the recovery of the Drug Addicted Alcoholics.

A plan that will actually save any money, considering all the cost associated with its implementation. As in $142,000 per unit cost for Minvilla.

A plan that will remove homeless from the streets of Knoxville. Example: 12,000 PSH apartments in Seattle, in the last 12 years, and today, over 9,000 Homeless still on the streets of Seattle.

A plan that reduces the Chronically Homeless population in Knoxville. Started at 400, then 600, then 800, then 1000, and now over 1255 Chronically Homeless, according to the new HMIS system of the TYP.

Get over it, this plan is dead. Stick a Fork in it and Let the People Vote.
Look for Petitions soon at locations all around Knoxville.

Greg Johnson on the Ten-Year Plan:

As the Knoxville/Knox County Ten-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness meets resistance at every turn in every neighborhood, perhaps the time has come to step back, take a breath and look at the big picture of the homeless situation once again...

For our overwhelmingly Christian community to get the really big picture on homelessness, though, Christ was crystal clear. He said, "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in." He didn't say how or where. He just said his true followers truly provided for "the least of these."

I'm the author of the *When Supportive Housing Isn't* article cited above -- the full article is at (link...) and my current weblog is at (link...).

Actually I'm in favor of the "Housing First" concept in the sense that, if people are going to make bad life choices, they may as well make such choices indoors as outdoors. For example, no sense in an active IV drug addict also being unable to heal abscesses or cellulitis due to outdoor living in San Francisco's default climate of 58-degree fog.

The problem is that city officials and nonprofits have strong incentives and powerful political support when they are clearing the shopping districts by moving visibly poor people indoors, but they have much weaker incentives to provide genuinely supportive services for the new tenants once they are indoors. As I suggested farther down in that 2007 article, "Housing First" for really fragile formerly homeless tenants is a great idea as long as it involves appropriate skilled case management, with medical and psychiatric followup as necessary, that is genuinely focused on improving the tenants' well-being rather than just getting them out of public view.

That of course takes skilled social service, medical and mental health professionals who have enough time and money to do their jobs properly. Sometimes good followup does happen. Sometimes not.

I shudder every time I see arguments for "supportive housing" that emphasize the savings realized by sticking homeless people in buildings compared with the costs of paying paramedics and police to rescue and punish them alternately. Because the rescue-and-punishment dynamic continues in a bad building -- except arguably with less actual rescue involved.

What's essential is to manage "Housing First" with the clear understanding that this work is all to be done for the sake of the tenants, and if the Chamber of Commerce is happier as well about fewer people expiring visibly on the pavement, that's incidental.

We can dream...