Building a Stronger Future for Supportive Housing

Last month, the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) and the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH) released Building a Stronger Future for Supportive Housing: Lessons Learned from Nationwide Community Conversations, a new report examining what communities across the country are learning about the strengths, challenges, and future of supportive housing.

This blog provides an overview of the report, key findings, and what they might mean for Charlotte-Mecklenburg.

OVERVIEW

Building a Stronger Future for Supportive Housing: Lessons Learned from Nationwide Community Conversations analyzes data from conversations with more than 100 people across the country, including supportive housing tenants, service providers, government officials, funders, property managers, and developers. These conversations focused on what is working in supportive housing, what is becoming harder, and what communities need to strengthen this critical intervention for the future.

The report reinforces what research and local experience have shown for years: supportive housing works. It improves housing stability, reduces reliance on crisis systems, improves health and mental health outcomes, and helps people with long histories of homelessness remain housed. It also makes clear that supportive housing is under strain. Across the country, communities are facing rising rents, limited housing supply, behavioral health service gaps, staffing shortages, funding limitations, and increasing difficulty sustaining the level of services that make supportive housing effective.

KEY FINDINGS

One of the strongest themes from the report is that supportive housing is much more than providing an individual with a subsidized housing unit. Tenants and providers described supportive housing as a source of stability, connection, belonging, and access to services. Study participants shared examples of tenants connecting to health care, transportation, food, case management, psychiatric care, employment support, and other services that helped them stabilize and pursue personal goals. Some tenants credited supportive housing with helping them prevent family separation, access education, and maintain long-term housing.

The report also highlights the importance of physical space and location. Supportive housing works best when people can live in places that feel safe, accessible, and connected to the broader community. Outdoor space, community rooms, accessible design, transportation access, and proximity to schools, jobs, and services all matter. Housing is not only about the unit itself. It is also about whether people can live with dignity, independence, and connection.

Another key finding is that supportive housing depends on partnership. Property managers, service providers, funders, health care providers, government agencies, community-based organizations, and people with lived experience all play different roles. When those partners work well together, supportive housing is more effective and tenants are better supported. When those partnerships are under-resourced or disconnected, the model becomes harder to sustain.

NEED EXCEEDS CAPACITY

The report identified one defining challenge: there is not enough supportive housing for everyone who needs it. Nationwide, only about 13% of single adults experiencing chronic homelessness are able to access supportive housing in a given year. The unmet need is smaller for families and veterans experiencing chronic homelessness, but still exceeds 50% for both populations.

This finding matters for Mecklenburg County because our local homelessness response system continues to experience pressure at every point in the continuum. As of March 31, 2026, the One Number showed 2,482 people in 2,070 households experiencing homelessness in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, including 744 people experiencing chronic homelessness and 157 veterans.

For people with the highest service needs, permanent supportive housing is often the intervention most aligned with long-term stability. But when supportive housing supply is limited, people wait longer, remain in shelter or unsheltered settings longer, and may cycle through emergency rooms, jails, behavioral health crisis systems, and other costly interventions that were never designed to function as housing.

The report also points to a related challenge: even when supportive housing is available, people often have little choice in where they live. Tenants described being offered one option, sometimes without seeing the unit first, and feeling they had no ability to choose a neighborhood, housing type, or environment that matched their needs. That lack of choice can affect housing stability, especially when someone is placed far from trusted supports, medical care, transportation, or community connections.

SERVICES ARE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HOUSING AND STABILITY

The report highlights something essential to supportive housing and that is that supportive services are not optional extras. They are the reason supportive housing works.

Participants described the growing difficulty of meeting acute behavioral health needs in supportive housing. Providers reported that some tenants had needs that exceeded current staffing, funding, and service capacity. Tenants also described the impact of insufficient services, including limited access to mental health care, life skills support, crisis response, and other help needed to adjust from homelessness to housing.

This is especially important for Mecklenburg County. Housing alone is essential, but housing without adequate supports can leave people and providers set up to struggle. When services are too thin, tenants may not receive the level of support needed to sustain housing. Staff may carry unsustainable caseloads. Property managers may be asked to respond to situations they are not trained to manage. In the worst cases, people lose housing and return to homelessness with additional barriers, including eviction histories.

The report also emphasizes that staffing is a major challenge. Low pay, high turnover, burnout, and competition with other sectors make it difficult to recruit and retain the workforce needed to provide high-quality supportive housing. Participants described how turnover affects trust. For people who have experienced trauma, homelessness, and repeated system failures, rebuilding trust with a new case manager again and again is not a small disruption. It can become another barrier to stability.

FUNDING STRUCTURES ARE NOT BUILT FOR THE MODEL WE NEED

Supportive housing is often financed through a complicated mix of funding sources that were not designed to work together. Capital, operating, rental assistance, and services funding often come from different programs, each with its own rules, timelines, reporting requirements, and limitations. The report notes that no single federal funding source exists for supportive housing, which means communities must braid together Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, HOME, CDBG, CoC rental assistance, tenant rent contributions, Medicaid, state, local, and private funding to make projects work. This creates administrative burden and uncertainty. It also makes it harder to scale supportive housing quickly, especially when service funding is the piece most likely to be underfunded or time-limited.

The report’s policy recommendations point to the need to increase and sustain funding for services, preserve and expand rental assistance, protect Medicaid access, grow flexible state and local service funding, address source-of-income discrimination, revisit local zoning barriers, and remove housing access barriers tied to criminal background, credit history, and income source.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR MECKLENBURG COUNTY

For Mecklenburg County, this report reinforces several important local priorities:

• Supportive housing must remain a core part of the homelessness response system, especially for people experiencing chronic homelessness and those with the highest service needs. The goal is not only to move people indoors. The goal is to help people remain housed, connected, and supported over time.
• Supportive housing cannot be scaled through housing production alone. New units are necessary, but services funding, behavioral health partnerships, workforce investment, landlord engagement, and property management support must grow alongside them.
• Coordinated entry and housing navigation must continue to focus not only on prioritization, but also on transparency, choice, and fit. The report makes clear that people want to understand where they are in the process, what options may be available, and how decisions are made. Locally, this aligns with ongoing work to make coordinated entry more transparent, equitable, and responsive.
• Mecklenburg County must continue strengthening partnerships across housing, health care, behavioral health, justice, workforce, and community-based systems. Supportive housing sits at the intersection of all of these sectors. No single agency can carry the model alone.
• The report underscores the need to communicate more clearly with the public about why supportive housing matters. Supportive housing is often misunderstood. It is not simply a program cost. It is a proven strategy that helps people stabilize while reducing reliance on more expensive crisis systems. Communities need stronger public understanding, political will, and sustained investment to preserve and expand it.