The Rise and Fall of ‘Clean and Sober’ in Supportive Housing

New York City’s homeless population is no monolith, and the 2005 NY/NYIII supportive-housing funding agreement explicitly recognized that. Kingsbridge Terrace, a supportive housing facility run by Jericho Project in the Bronx, was in part funded for “Population F”—substance users who recently finished treatment.

Including substance users in supportive housing was controversial to earlier planners. While those agreements ended up including many homeless individuals who had struggled with addiction, they were accepted into the program because of serious mental illnesses, not because of their drug or alcohol problems. As Ted Houghton put it in his history of the field, “in our society’s constantly shifting definitions of deserving and undeserving poor, substance abusers rarely escape the latter category.”