An Assessment of the Housing Needs of Persons with HIV/AIDS: New York City Eligible Metropolitan Statistica Area, Final Report

This report is the final deliverable of a study of the housing needs of persons with HIV/AIDS in the New York City Eligible Metropolitan Statistical Area that was commissioned in 2001 by the New York City Mayor’s Office of AIDS Policy Coordination under the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA) program. The Hudson Planning Group (HPG) and a team of professionals including the University of Pennsylvania Center for Mental Health Policy and Services Research, the Center for Urban Community Services, and Public Sector Research was selected to perform the assessment under the direction of the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health (PCMH), as the City’s Master Contractor, and with the help of an Advisory Group composed of consumers, service providers, government representatives and experts in health and housing policy. The release of the report has been delayed close to a year beyond its due date. The assessment was scheduled to take two years and to be completed in the fall of 2003, in accordance with the terms of an agreement between HPG and the PCMH. HPG submitted a complete draft of the report to the York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Bureau of HIV/AIDS in February 2004. Review and comment by City agencies and HPG’s revisions to the draft took an extended time and the final report is being released in November 2004. Accordingly, data in the report are current as of December 2003, with the exception of a few cases where it is noted that more recent data were provided at the request of a City agency reviewing the report

Report on Effects of Frequent Users Service Enhancement (FUSE) on Homelessness

The Corporation for Supportive Housing’s FUSE program provides housing and services to homeless people with a history of frequently using NYC shelters and of frequently being jailed. In so doing, it seeks to improve the physical and mental health of these people, as well as other aspects of their lives, and to reduce the their use of shelters, jails, and crisis care operations (e.g., ambulance rides, emergency room visits, and the like). This evaluation uses a prospective, quasi-experimental design as well as propensity score matching to measure the effects of the program over two years. It interviews and collects data at six month intervals on 72 program participants and a similarly sized comparison group. It finds strong effects on permanent housing and shelter use, milder but positive effects on incarceration and jails, and varyingly sized but generally positive effects on individual’s health as well as on crisis care operations. In addition, it finds, among other cost effects, that an almost $16,000 reduction per person in avoidable public costs offsets over 60% of the total public cost for the FUSE program