Planning the Housing Opportunity and Services Together Demonstration Challenges and Lessons Learned

aunched in December 2010 with the support of the Open Society Foundations’ (OSF) Special Fund for Poverty Alleviation, the multisite HOST demonstration tests innovative, twogeneration service models to improve the life chances of vulnerable low-income families living in public and mixed-income housing communities. At its core, the demonstration aims to address parents’ key barriers to selfsufficiency—such as poor physical and mental health, addictions, low levels of literacy, lack of a high school diploma, and historically weak connection to the labor force—while simultaneously integrating services and supports for children and youth. HOST builds on lessons learned from the successful wraparound service model that the Urban Institute and the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) piloted from 2007–2010 with residents of Dearborn Homes and the Madden/Wells development. While this model showed promising gains for even the highest-risk adults, the benefits did not extend to their children. Parents reported that their teens were struggling in school, engaging in risky behavior, being arrested, and pregnant and parenting at rates far above average (Popkin and Getsinger 2010). Developing effective place-based models that reach youth is critical not only for improving the lives of individual children and youth, but also for ensuring the health and viability of public and mixed-income communities. If youth engagement strategies are successful, they can reduce critical neighborhood The multisite Housing Opportunity and Services Together (HOST) demonstration is an ambitious effort to test strategies that use housing as a platform for services to improve the life chances of vulnerable children, youth, and adults. This brief provides an overview of the project’s early challenges and successes to offer practitioners insights on the planning and design of “dual-generation” interventions and to inform policy supporting comprehensive place-based initiatives. BrIef #