| The Special Needs Housing Trust Fund: Implementation in Mercer County
What is the Special Needs Trust Fund?
The Governor’s Mental Health Task Force called on the state to dramatically shift its vision to a “Housing First” philosophy for people with mental illness. It recommended a major initiative to expand supported, independent housing for people with mental illness in New Jersey.
Their recommendations called for creation of 10,000 new affordable, permanent housing opportunities for people with mental illness and other disabilities. Coupled with the housing would be community-based services that are flexible, comprehensive and accessible and which meet the consumers and their families in their environment. The models would be a combination of permanent supportive housing (the major model), specialized residences(These could include targeted medically enhanced services, residences for people with mental illness and developmental disability or mental illness and substance abuse, aging-out youth, parolees or veterans) and other independent living arrangements.
The Task Force recommended that “the primary focus of this initiative should be for new housing opportunities for people with mental illness and that the large majority of funds be earmarked strictly for the mental health population. The balance of these funds should strongly be considered for people dually diagnosed with developmental disabilities and mental illness.” “Large majority was not defined and neither was the balance of supportive housing, specialized residences and “other independent living arrangements”.
Recommendations for the Special Needs Housing Trust Fund were approved in the 2006 NJ State Budget, as recommended by Acting Governor Codey. The plan authorized establishment of a $200,000,000 Housing Trust fund to be administered by the NJ Housing and Mortgage Finance Authority, a division of the Department of Community Affairs. This is not enough money to create 10,000 new housing units. The fund is intended to be used to leverage other financial resources from a variety of sources, including The US Department of Housing and Urban Development, foundations, local municipal developer trust funds, private financing, etc. The trust funds can be in the form of grants or low- interest loans made to non-profits.
The priority housing model for the initiative is Supportive Housing. Supportive housing for people with disabilities has two major components. The first is safe and secure rental housing that is affordable, independent, (tenants in their own apartments, typically leased in their own names) and permanent, (occupancy provided as long as the tenant pays his/her rent). The second component is support services provided by staff trained in working with people with disabilities who may also be homeless. The support services should be flexible and responsive to the needs of the individual, available as and when needed by the tenant and accessible where the tenant lives.
The Mental Health Task Force recommended, and the Governor’s budget included, funds for these supportive housing services. For the first year, the budget authorized $5,000,000 for these housing support services. This was expected to provide support services for the first 500 persons served through supportive housing. These funds are administered by the Division of Mental Health Services.
How big a change is this?
Huge. For many years, housing options for people with mental illness were limited mainly to residential treatment programs, families, boarding homes and residential health care facilities. Right now New Jersey has 1,019 “beds” in adult psychiatric group homes, and 165 in youth homes; 778 in staff supervised apartments and 111 in “family care” with someone else’s family.
For the last six years, the state has shifted its emphasis to creating supportive independent housing. 1800 of these living situations have been developed as new support services have been established with increased access to housing vouchers. Now 45% of the state subsidized housing for people with mental illness is in independent supportive housing.
- The new initiative will increase available housing by 250%- from 4,000 units to 14,000.
- For the first time, the state will be in the business of developing affordable housing for people with mental illness. Before the state provided housing vouchers and support services or relied upon treatment programs to obtain sites for group homes or apartments, either through lease or purchase with state grant funds .
Where will all this housing come from andh ow will housing and mental health be coordinated?
A major focus of the NJH&MFA is now identifying housing developers, both nonprofit and for-profit, to develop viable plans for new housing and to work with them to find the leveraging to make the Trust Fund dollars go as far as they can. The state HMFA and Division of Mental Health Services (DMHS) are working hard to coordinate planning, requests for proposals and review of applications. Both of their point staff on the project (Pam McGrory from NJHMFA and Patti Holland from DMHS) are veteran mental health people who worked together at the Collaborative Support Program of NJ- the state’s main consumer-based agency and a major provider of supportive housing services. Housing proposals are required to link housing development and support services plans.
What questions and concerns does NAMI Mercer have about the impact of this initiative on Mercer County?
The Mental Health Task Force recommended that the 10,000 housing opportunities be roughly distributed proportionally to each county’s population. That would mean 400 new housing opportunities for Mercer County over ten years. This will dramatically change housing opportunities in Mercer County. In December, the NAMI Mercer Advocacy Committee Chairperson, Tom Naughton, sent letters to the heads of the NJ Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency and Division of Mental Health Services, asking how services to people with mental illness could be kept the primary focus, and how community input could be supported. They responded that they had been developing a working relationship with each other, they needed to expedite funds, priority is given to programs serving mental health clients, and DMHS will be approving service plans for the projects and involving County Mental Health Boards.
On January 6, he also sent a letter to the Chair of the Mercer County Mental Health Board asking the Board to convene a forum for community discussion of the initiative, with these goals:
- To promote community understanding of the opportunities,
- To be sure that Mercer County is poised to take advantage of the opportunities,
- To encourage applications,
- To hold discussions with interested parties on priorities and needs and
- To make sure that essential needs and populations are included
On January 18, the Professional Advisory Committee of the Mental Health Board held a special meeting to consider the same questions and recommended that its Housing Sub-committee continue to encourage applications and review coordination efforts.
What concerns does NAMI Mercer have about the implementation here?
- Use for people with mental illness. The Mental Health Task Force has recommended that “the large majority of funds be earmarked strictly for the mental health population and the balance of funds should strongly be considered for people dually diagnosed” with mental illness and other developmental, medical or physical disabilities or other special conditions as the homeless, veterans or people discharged from correctional facilities.
However, this is a political issue also, and other disability groups will also be competing for a share of these funds. We want to be sure that, in Mercer County, the primary focus of this initiative should be for new housing opportunities for people with mental illness.
- Getting Mercer County’s fair share. AlthoughDMHS and NJHMFA are concerned with equity, they are more concerned with timely, if not rapid, development of viable projects that can get housing up and operating.There are no guarantees or set asides for individual counties, and Mercer County increases its chance of fully using this opportunity if we are moving aggressively to develop projects.
- Ensuring local capacity . We want to be sure that Mercer County mental health agencies, public and private developers have a commitment to getting to scale with these housing initiatives and have the resources and connections necessary to create successful projects. We are fortunate to have several excellent agencies involved with housing for people with mental illness, including Catholic Charities, Greater Trenton Behavioral Health Care, SERV Behavioral Health Systems and the Association for the Advancement of Mental Health. However, housing is a complex system. Their resources are finite and may not be sufficient. Housing is so expensive in the county and state that maximizing resources is essential.
- Creating a planning process and coordinating projects and efforts. We want tomake sure that Mercer Countyinterests are served and we take full advantage of this opportunity. We want to make sure that no important group is left out. We want to see a reasonable balance of we need to share information and resources. The Mental health agencies have conflicting interests to collaborate with each other and to compete. At the present time, local agencies are in a more competitive mode and are keeping their options close to their vests.
- Balancing access: Leaving no group out while considering the benefits of concentrated services . The guidelines for project models and populations served are broad. Specific populations could be targeted or not, and in varying proportions. Possible targeted populations could include:
- Clients of individual agencies (current plans by two local agencies limit access to their own clients) or of specific programs (e.g. PACT, Homeless Case Management, partial care)
- People with mental illness who are chronically homeless
- People with co-occurring substance abuse problems (This could also be an excluded population)
- Women with mental illness, with or without children
- People with mental illness living with aging parents
- People discharged from state psychiatric hospitals
- Youth with mental illness aging out of the Children’s Behavioral Health System
- People with early episode psychoses or, in contrast, with very chronic illness
NAMI Mercer’s concern is that important groups are not left out of the picture, and that targeting is done thoughtfully with open input. In particular, we want to see help offered to families where aging parents are caring for adult children with mental illness.
- Spectrum of models and balance of locations. We want to see housing in both the city and suburbs. We want to see a range of housing options that include shared housing, independent housing, and single room occupancy, scattered and concentrated sites. Housing development and developers will be the limiting factor in this process. None of our local agencies appears to be interested in doing housing development. We are concerned that, if housing developers are driving the process, consumer and community needs could become secondary.
- Need for coordination and joint planning. This is too important a process to take place without educated and informed input from people in Mercer County who will be affected by decisions made. Without some coordination, priorities will be determined by the aggregate, separate decisions of individual agencies and/or developers. There needs to be a public dialogue about housing options and projects in the county. It should inform, not tie the hands of, the organizations that must take risks and develop projects.
According the NJHMFA website (www.state.nj.us/dca/hmfa/home), HMFA is dedicated to increasing the availability of and accessibility to safe, decent and affordable housing to families in New Jersey. In some cases this may mean working with traditional affordable housing developments, serving New Jersey's most needy families. In other instances it is working with first time homebuyers, senior citizens in senior and assisted living facilities, and/or the disabled in our special needs communities. In every situation HMFA is committed to make quality housing available at costs affordable to New Jersey residents. |
