The Approach

The research is clear. Connecting people to housing is fundamental to reentry success and improves community safety and quality of life.

• Housing reduces returns to both prison and jail. 
• Housing reduces costs to corrections and other public systems and can save taxpayer dollars as well. 
• Housing improves outcomes for families and bonds between returning parents and their children while improving prosocial outcomes for kids. 
• Housing increases connections to stabilizing community-based services. 
• Housing reduces rates of crime victimization. 
• Housing enables successful reentry in communities both large and small. 

The vision of Zero Returns to Homelessness is bold, but achievable.

Based on what we have seen works firsthand when jurisdictions work to bridge systems of corrections and care and create housing opportunities for people in reentry, the below strategies take a cross-systems approach to expanding housing opportunities and access for people returning home from prison and jail. These strategies may be implemented in order or according to the areas of greatest need in your community.

1. Bridge silos across systems by collaborating with elected officials, criminal justice system representatives, behavioral health providers, and housing services providers (such as Continuums of Care and housing authorities). This cross-systems collaboration enables communities to develop a shared sense of their unique housing issues and tailor solutions using resources from multiple systems.
2. Conduct universal housing assessments to understand people’s housing and service needs before they leave prison or jail. Pre-release assessments will help to prevent episodes of homelessness upon release and reduce the number of barriers to accessing housing. Gleaning this kind of information can also help communities overcome obstacles such as lack of data, as well as help them better understand the scale and service needs required to achieve the “zero returns to homelessness” vision. The data collected can also help make the case for additional resources and funding.
3. Equitably connect people to evidence-based housing solutions, such as through rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing efforts, by working to address individual barriers to housing and deploying resources to serve the reentry population. Making these connections using a warm handoff approach helps prevent people from falling between the cracks of the criminal justice, housing, behavioral health, and other systems involved in promoting successful reentry.
4. Lower barriers to housing at the housing provider level by working with private and public property owners to build relationships, make housing connections, and evaluate and update policies and practices that create these barriers. These partnerships can help make housing immediately available when someone is reentering the community, avoiding the overuse of emergency shelters or releases into homelessness and opening up pathways to longer-term housing options.
5. Expand the number of housing options available. With an affordable housing crisis plaguing the nation, simply “rearranging the deck chairs” will ultimately leave most communities woefully short on meeting their housing needs. However, cross-systems partners can work together to increase immediate opportunities while planning long term to grow the housing pie for all. This can be accomplished not only through housing development, but also through means such as identifying new sources of rental assistance or leveraging existing low or no-cost resources (such as surplus buildings or land).
6. Leverage and combine a range of funding sources to flexibly support ongoing housing work. Teams working across systems benefit from agile funding that brings together the core pieces of this work, such as rental assistance funding, funding and staff needed for securing units, supportive services, and responsive administrative capacity. A diverse funding pool is also necessary to start addressing the full scope of reentry housing needs.