Note: This newsletter was sent to readers on April 15, 2025.
Dear Headway reader,
When a New York organization called Pathways to Housing pioneered the concept of permanent supportive housing in the 1990s, it was hailed as a major advance.
“I’ve sensed a new energy in city halls and state houses around the issue of ending homelessness,” said Robert V. Hess, New York’s new homeless services commissioner in 2006.
It was the start of a new approach to resolving homelessness that caught the imagination of the George W. Bush administration, and that has significantly shaped federal policy on the issue in the two decades since. Today, supportive housing remains a foundational intervention in the U.S. response to homelessness. But while the evidence for its effectiveness is as robust as it was then, there’s both more awareness and more criticism of its limitations.
Since Headway began covering homelessness, we’ve wanted to take a deep look at how supportive housing works, and what it can and cannot do. So over nearly two years, the Times staff reporter Andy Newman and the photographer Thea Traff have visited residents and staff members at a supportive housing complex in the Bronx called the Lenniger. With permission from the Lenniger’s owner, they’ve crafted a rare, vivid and nuanced portrait of life there.
How supportive housing works
Reading through the archive of Times coverage of supportive housing over the years, what’s most striking to me is how consistently it has worked since Pathways to Housing started in 1992.
“In a radical departure from traditional homeless policy, Pathways does not require any of its clients to seek treatment before moving into permanent housing,” David Scharfenberg wrote in a 2006 article about the program. “In fact, it does not require treatment at any point. The hope is that a home will provide the stability a client needs to make use of the job-placement, substance-abuse and mental-health services that Pathways provides.”
At the Lenniger, we found that permanent supportive housing continues to fulfill that hoped-for stability. It stands in contrast to models that require residents to maintain treatment or employment, observe strict rules, or meet other conditions. People who haven’t been able to sustain other housing have stayed housed there.
“Over the past four years,” Andy reports, 97 percent of residents, “have either remained at the Lenniger or moved to other housing, according to the nonprofit that owns and provides social services at the complex.”
What it doesn’t do
The central criticism of the supportive housing model, though, is that it hasn’t proved effective at other measures beyond keeping people housed, such as getting them into jobs or reducing addictions. In an interview with James Barron, Andy elaborated on what he found at the Lenniger:
There is a lot of drug use and a fair amount of disorder. The Lenniger generated more than 200 calls to 9-1-1 last year.
Some tenants told us that being around so much drug use made it harder for them to work on getting sober. Some told us that they felt like they were “stuck” there.
Permanent supportive housing and the other “Housing First” policies it complements have been subject to a growing political tug of war, as Jason DeParle reported in 2023. The Trump administration has largely been critical of the approach, and as Jason reported this week, has recently begun turning that criticism into action.
— Matt Thompson
Revisiting
One of the catalysts for Headway to pursue a story on permanent supportive housing was covering Community First! Village outside Austin, Texas.
In many ways, Community First and the Lenniger serve a similar need — keeping people housed when they’ve been living for years without housing and are battling mental illness and addiction. Despite using significantly different approaches in different places, they’ve confronted similar challenges. (And by sheer coincidence, we glimpsed each community through the eyes of a newcomer named Justin.)
Spending time in places like these has allowed us to get a finer grasp of the achievements and limitations of these programs than higher-level policy debates often permit. So we plan to keep exploring notable approaches to the problem of chronic homelessness.
We hope you find our chronicle of life at the Lenniger illuminating. We welcome your thoughts on where we should look next.
Links we liked
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50 States, 50 Fixes: Our colleagues at The New York Times Climate Desk have begun a series featuring 50 programs — one in each U.S. state — that strive to be part of the answer to climate change and environmental destruction.
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A brain map in the making: Carl Zimmer reports on a scientific milestone — the mapping of a cubic millimeter of a mouse’s brain.
Can you help Headway tell more stories?
You, dear reader, can help us in two very different — but equally important — ways to tell more progress-driven stories of change and possibility.
Are you a storyteller? A writer or journalist? A photographer, illustrator or videographer? If you have an idea you think would be a good fit for Headway, we’d love to hear it. Learn how to pitch us by following this link and filling out our pitch form.
Not a storyteller exactly, but want to tell us about a project changing your community? We want to hear from you, too. If you’ve read this far, you know Headway is a team at The New York Times that reports on progress and possibility. Tell us about the efforts shaping your community — what’s working, what’s not, and what you think we should look into. You can share those ideas here.
We look forward to hearing form you!
The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.
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