Can housing replace jail? A Manhattan non-profit has tested the answer for almost half a century
NEW YORK — Inside a five-story building tucked into the heart of Chelsea, an art hub in downtown Manhattan, residents greet each other by name. Some gather around a table to play Chinese Checkers. Others hit the nurse’s office for their morning meds.
The people living in this restored 1897 townhouse have schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or another serious illness. Before arriving, they spent years of their lives without homes. Some cycled through homeless shelters or jails.
At St. Francis Friends of the Poor, residents have something many haven’t had in years, or even a lifetime: their own room, medical care and a permanent address. Unlike at a shelter, they don’t leave each morning and find a new bed by nightfall. Unlike at jail, no one is locked inside.
For nearly 50 years, St. Francis has quietly operated one of America’s earliest examples of what is today known as permanent supportive housing. This model helps keep vulnerable populations more stable — out of jail and out of psychiatric institutions — by offering them a private room, paired with on-site psychiatric and medical care.
This approach attempts to correct what is seen as one of the nation’s biggest public policy failures: chronic homelessness and repeated jailing among people with severe mental illnesses. Unhoused people in the United States are 11 times more likely to be arrested than someone with a roof over their heads, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.
The supportive housing model is significantly cheaper and, some say, more effective than incarceration. Locking someone up for a year in a New York City jail costs taxpayers $556,539. Housing someone for a year at St. Francis: $33,000.
Still, the approach used by St. Francis and similar programs faces new uncertainty. Congress is considering cuts to both federal housing programs and Medicaid, both of which help cover the living expenses of people in these programs. President Donald Trump requested a $3.8 billion cut from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s affordable housing, homelessness and community development programs, which the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an advocacy group, describes as vital.
As cities and towns across America struggle with overcrowded jails, chronic homelessness and untreated mental illnesses, places like St. Francis are increasingly viewed as an alternative or antidote to mass incarceration. Budget cuts, advocates say, could prove devastating for communities.
“It would be devastating if all of these changes go through,” John Betts, the deputy executive director of programs at St. Francis, told Straight Arrow, “not just to the supportive housing sector, but in general.”
‘A warm, welcoming home’
After Will Hayes received care at Elmhurst, a public hospital in Queens, New York, he had no place to go after being released.
“I was new to New York City because I’m from Buffalo State,” Hayes told Straight Arrow. “I came down here to my uncle’s and we had a disagreement and stuff. … Long story short, I was in a program inside the hospital.”
His caseworker’s mother happened to be a psychiatrist at St. Francis. The day after he left the hospital, Hayes and his uncle visited a St. Francis residence in Chelsea. Hayes remembered the employees and residents as warm and welcoming. The following day, he was in.
“Turns out… [I] fit the criteria,” Hayes said. “I introduced myself [to residents] and let them know that I’m gonna be moving in tomorrow. One of the guys was Ronnie. He’s passed away, but he grabbed me and gave me a big bear hug.”
Hayes was shown his own private bedroom, with a twin bed, nightstand, desk and chair, closet, a place to hang his coats and hats, and a window.
That was 12 years ago.
“I’ve been here ever since,” Hayes said. “It feels very familiar here, like a warm, welcoming home, exciting, friendly.”
“It’s cool.”
Living at St. Francis
At St. Francis, residents live off about $17 a day from their disability benefits. The employees of St. Francis help create a unique budget for each resident.
“They get a check at the beginning of the month and we deduct rent, any money for bills they may have, like phone bill, cable, et cetera, and then calculate their daily amount out of the remainder,” Camilla Broderick, a program manager at St. Francis, told Straight Arrow.
About 300 people live across the three residences. A fourth residence will open in Harlem, with space for 100 more residents.
The average life span of St. Francis’ tenants is 68 years — significantly longer than the 42 to 52 years most unhoused people live.
Residents stay at St. Francis an average of 18 years. Most leave only when they need a higher level of care. No resident has ever been evicted.
St. Francis provides a tiny fraction of the 62,000 supportive housing units in New York City. It is unusual, though, in giving its residents permanent homes, rather than a temporary place to stay.
‘Big, thorny questions’
St. Francis opened amid a widespread effort to shut down public psychiatric hospitals and deinstitutionalize their patients. The goal was to provide treatment in the communities where people with serious mental illness lived.
But that goal was not met.
“The promise was that there would be community clinics to catch those people and provide support; that never materialized for political reasons,” Betts, the deputy executive director at St. Francis, said. “In order to answer the question of why doesn’t this exist at scale in the United States? You have to get into big, thorny questions… Money hasn’t been invested as much as it should be in this kind of work.”
As a result, he said, “people who previously would’ve potentially been in psychiatric institutions ended up in jail.”
But in 1980, in a bustling corner of Chelsea, three friars from the Church of St. Francis saw these issues firsthand. They asked a simple question: What if people had a permanent home — with support?
They opened the first of three buildings for St. Francis Friends of the Poor.
The requirements for living at St. Francis: One must suffer from severe mental illness and have lived on the streets for many years. Most people who meet that requirement also qualify for government assistance, such as Medicaid or Medicare.
“Academic research proves that expanding Medicaid leads to lower arrest rates across the board, and we know that supportive housing has also shown strong results at keeping people out of jails,” Wanda Bertram, a communications strategist at Prison Policy Initiative, told Straight Arrow.
But without permanent shelter, people with serious mental illnesses wash in and out of jails, often on petty charges like trespassing, vagrancy or urinating in public. U.S. jails have become the largest providers of mental health services in the country; at New York’s Rikers Island, for instance, at least 60% of prisoners require mental health services. Across the country, local jails book about 205,000 unhoused people each year.
“We’ve turned to incarcerating and punishing individuals with mental illnesses, when really they could be thriving in the community,” said Broderick, the St. Francis program manager. “More investment in permanent supportive housing could shift the tides in our overbloated jails.”
Research has found that offering stable housing and mental health assistance reduces homelessness and lock-up time. It also costs significantly less.
Many jails lack proper psychiatric care, despite many incarcerated people suffering from mental illness.
“I was on Rikers Island for eight months,” said Broderick. “I was housed in the psychiatric unit, which is the oldest part of Rikers Island and it is a part that is sort of kept away from everyone else nobody really sees.”
She described maggots in showers, bugs in food and human waste on the beds and walls.
“There’s no actual treatment,” Broderick, who later earned a master’s degree in social work, said. “There’s really no care.”
Living with dignity
At St. Francis, Broderick said, “we try and reach people here, instead of just pushing them out to an island and collecting them.”
Iris Chambliss has lived at St. Francis for 21 years. When her partner passed away, she went through an extremely challenging time.
But her nurse, she said, was supportive, and she was happy to have her community at St. Francis.
“I appreciate them so much,” Chambliss said. “They were so much help with me going through my crisis.”
Residents, she said, live with dignity.
“They provide for us,” Chambliss said. “We give proper memorial services here. We try and avoid Potter’s Field.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
