BOISE, Idaho — A new supportive housing investment fund is one of four recommendations in the five-year Supportive Housing Plan released Thursday by the Our Path Home partnership.
The City of Boise is the lead agency in Our Path Home, which takes a "housing first" approach to addressing homelessness. The city in September set a five-year goal of creating 750 new units of supportive housing, which would include case management, counseling, medical care, substance-abuse treatment and other services, depending on the particular program.
New Path Community Housing, with 41 apartment units, and Valor Pointe, with 27 apartment units, are two supportive housing programs currently operating in Boise. Valor Pointe is specifically for veterans who've been experiencing homelessness.
Ada County Commissioners voted recently to pull the county's funding for New Path for the 2022 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1. Instead, the county is directing its funds to a new program that would provide services for people with disabilities, services for mental health and substance-abuse treatment, but not housing.
Without Ada County funding, Our Path Home still moves forward on its "housing first" model with funds from other entities, including public funding from the City of Boise and the federal government.
"The New Path Supportive Housing project in Boise relies upon annual commitments of services funding, historically from Ada County and philanthropic partners. This funding model has proven risky in that it is viewed as discretionary spending and exposes the funding to political whims, funding partner priorities and annual budget cuts," Our Path Home states in the new plan's policy-background section.
The statement of purpose and objectives in the introduction to Our Path Home's five-year plan released Thursday says the primary goals of the plan "are to identify the need for supportive housing units (how many are needed and for which populations), to establish a set of housing unit creation goals over a five-year period and define priorities for implementation.
"Central to the project is the objective to align funding sources in order to create a 'pipeline' of new supportive housing projects, coordinate resources, and share goals."
The statement adds that the plan will shift Our Path Home and its partners from the current "project-by-project approach to transformational change planning for supportive housing."
The needs analysis included in the plan states that Ada County needs 517 new supportive housing units -- through new construction and "scattered leasing" rental assistance strategies -- and estimates a total cost of about $67 million for those units.
The recommendations include the following four points:
- Establishing a Supportive Housing Investment Fund that will be used to address funding gaps for permanent supportive housing.
- Advocacy Path & Timeline for Medicaid Policy Change to support the long-term sustainability of the permanent supportive housing pipeline, which is tied to securing more ongoing services funded by Medicaid.
- Continued partnership with the Boise City-Ada County Housing Authorities on formalizing a rental assistance voucher commitment to help 200-250 households for new permanent supportive housing units.
- Establish a Permanent Supportive Housing subcommittee to own the Permanent Supportive Housing Pipeline implementation. The team will be charged with overseeing the entire pipeline to achieve goals and manage individual projects.
In addition to the City of Boise, partners who worked on the Our Path Home Permanent Supportive Housing Plan include Boise City/Ada County Housing Authorities, CATCH, Idaho Housing and Finance Association, The Pacific Companies, Terry Reilly Health Services, Idaho Department of Health and Welfare and St. Luke's Health System.
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