How has the Pathways to Housing program helped many homeless?”
Tsemberis quit his New York City job in 1992 and founded Pathways to Housing, a program that places the chronically homeless in apartments first, then enrolls them in programs to treat their drug addiction or mental illness. Almost immediately, the program worked. People who had not a had a place to live for years were dealing with their problems and staying in their apartments. Studies consistently showed a retention rate of more than 80 percent – compared with 20 percent success rates for more traditional programs Tsemberis and other social workers in New York had tried. Success helps growth Pathways to Housing was so successful Tsemberis launched a similar program in Washington and agencies in other cities – including San Francisco, Phoenix, Chattanooga, Tenn., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. – have replicated Tsemberis’ model with comparable results. “I realized we had a successful program from year one,” Tsemberis said. “This was people demonstrating that just because they were mentally
Sam Tsemberis spent years in squalid alleys and dank corners of subway stations searching for mentally ill homeless people who could be a danger to themselves or others and required hospitalization. As an employee of the New York City mental-health department, Mr. Tsemberis’s job was to figure out what to do with the people he found. To help come up with an answer, he asked each one: What is the first thing you want? The almost universal reply: a place to live. Mr. Tsemberis took this information to heart, and in 1992 opened Pathways to Housing, a New York nonprofit group that has helped pioneer an approach known as “housing first.” Pathways takes homeless people who are mentally ill, many of them drug addicts, off the streets and puts them directly into their own private apartments. It also offers participants access to social services and health care. But unlike many housing programs — where sobriety, psychiatric counseling, and drug and alcohol treatment are mandatory — Pathways t
