Problems at Madison’s first two Housing First developments prompted the cancelation of a third one proposed for Park Street. But officials say they haven’t given up.
For months, the empty lot at 1202 S. Park St. was set to be developed into a 58-unit permanent supportive housing facility intended to help people transition from homelessness. But with local stakeholders raising concerns about nearly every aspect of the project and a deadline to start construction approaching, the developer — Chicago-based Heartland Housing — announced in early May that the proposed Housing First project was officially dead in the water.
City officials are framing the decision not as a major setback in the city’s plan to alleviate the housing shortage, but as an opportunity to evaluate what has and hasn’t worked at the company’s two existing properties in Madison — Rethke Terrace on the east side and Tree Lane Apartments on the west side. Both properties have been plagued by drug dealing, loud parties and violent incidents, drawing hundreds of police calls for service and widespread skepticism about a third project operating under the same model.
Jim O’Keefe, the city’s director of Community Development, says the move was “an acknowledgement that we have more work to do.”
“We need to better understand what has worked at Rethke and Tree Lane, as well as other permanent supportive housing properties in Madison, and why we’ve had some difficulties,” he says.
The project’s demise leaves the city in the lurch on its strategy to house Madison’s highest need citizens. What will become of the lot at 1202 S. Park St.? Will the city partner with Heartland again at a new site, or put out a bid for new proposals? Has public perception of Housing First been damaged beyond repair? It’s all up in the air.
“I’m not sure what we’ll do moving forward,” says Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway. “I’m fully committed to a Housing First model, but I want to make sure we learn everything we can from the Tree Lane experience before we jump into another big Housing First project.”
Rhodes-Conway characterizes the struggles at Rethke and Tree Lane as the result of Heartland’s lack of familiarity with local service providers. She says Heartland was selected because of its track record of success in Illinois it but has struggled to adapt to Wisconsin’s Medicaid program and learn lessons from smaller, scattered-site Housing First projects that have been effective in Madison for decades.
“We were working with a new nonprofit partner who wasn’t as familiar with Madison as they might have been,” she says. “When you look at successful examples of Housing First, these agencies are rooted in Madison and have been working here for a long time. … With a provider that was relatively new to town, we needed to make sure that they were connecting to the community of providers already working with this population in Madison. Before we even chose them, we should have made sure they understood the full legal and financial context of working in Wisconsin.”
Rhodes-Conway believes Heartland and former Mayor Paul Soglin’s administration were overly ambitious in tackling projects in which 100 percent of tenants were formerly homeless. Though that approach allows for the efficient delivery of services, she says, “There’s definitely a downside to co-locating so many high-needs families in one place.”
Housing First is a strategy that attempts to lower or remove barriers (such as sobriety and credit history requirements) and place homeless people directly into a living situation with “wraparound” support services. It works best when 20 to 50 percent of tenants in a given building are transitioning from homelessness, according to Housing First: Ending Homelessness, Transforming Systems, and Changing Lives, a 2015 book published by Oxford University Press.
“The projects that tend to have the most success are mixed-income projects,” says Ald. Tag Evers, whose district includes the Bay Creek neighborhood that would have been most directly affected by the project at 1202 S. Park St. “At Rethke and Tree Lane, the thought was that we could economize the services by having all these people under one roof. But, in some sense, we were doing it on the cheap, without providing sufficient staff. … There were flaws, in my mind, in terms of the design and execution of both projects. That said, it’s noteworthy that individuals who previously did not have a home now have a roof over their heads.”
Though it’s unlikely that 1202 S. Park St. will become the site of another large-scale supportive housing project — the city is reportedly entertaining other ideas — that doesn’t mean Madison has built its last Housing First development. O’Keefe says the city is entering an information-gathering phase that will set the course for its next project.
“I suspect that [the city’s] analysis will touch on everything from site selection and project scale to tenant mix and funding strategies for support services,” he says. “Then we’ll make appropriate adjustments and resume our efforts to expand this critical component of affordable housing.”
Meanwhile, the city will continue monitoring staffing levels and quality of services delivered at both Rethke and Tree Lane on a weekly basis. Rhodes-Conway says police calls for service have been trending down at both properties for months, while the rate of tenants connecting to services is going up. And that, she says, bodes well for Madison’s prospects of getting the Housing First model right.
“I hope Heartland has learned a lot from this experience,” she says. “It’s unfortunate that they learned these lessons at the expense of a lot of disruption in our community, but I do think they’ve learned. Before we even talk about moving forward, we need to be clear that their current properties are stabilized and in really good shape.”
