Katie Lodge faced a harrowing choice this spring. The mother of three and Marine Corps veteran started taking classes at Tacoma Community College in hopes of becoming a nurse. Lodge was going through a divorce, though, and she had to find a new place to live just months later. In her mind, she had just two options: remain in school and risk homelessness, or quit school so she could find a job.
But a flyer she saw on campus for the College Housing Assistance Program opened up another possibility. In early April, Lodge visited an adviser with the program, a partnership between the college and Tacoma Housing Authority to help students experiencing or on the verge of homelessness. By the end of the month, Lodge was living in a duplex not far from the college. She’s taking a full course load and has a work-study job, which pays enough for her to cover her half of the rent.
Without the assistance, it’s unlikely she would’ve continued school. Lodge called living in poverty a vicious cycle. “If you don’t have stable or safe housing, then higher education is next to impossible.” she said. “Temporarily helping out with housing, even for just two or three years, can break that cycle.”
The cycle Lodge refers to is one reason that housing authorities like Tacoma’s are branching out. Typically thought of as a place for people to go for help with finding and affording a place to live, housing authorities, especially in cities in the West where homelessness grows to epidemic proportions, are starting to partner with education and health care organizations. These partnerships represent boosts in efficiency, and some believe could help stem the issues of homelessness and generational poverty altogether.
“We know that children in school that suffer from housing instability do not perform as well. We know that folks with housing instability, homeless populations, make enormous demands on the health care system,” said Sunia Zaterman, executive director of the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities. “The effectiveness of housing authorities could be significantly enhanced by partnering with other entities that, for the most part, were already serving this population.”
Tacoma Housing Authority began prioritizing housing for college students in 2014. That year, the organization offered assistance to 45 community-college students at high risk of homelessness, and then tracked the progress of them and 150 others who weren’t receiving assistance. Executive Director Michael Mirra said the plan was to do a three-year study, but the need became clear after just two: 60 percent of students receiving the program’s help stayed in school, while just 16 percent of the control group did.
Now, the College Housing Assistance Program serves 250 students at Tacoma Community College and the University of Washington Tacoma. The housing authority partnered with the developer of a new Tacoma high-rise to offer housing for low-income students, and it bought land near the community college where it plans to build 500 units of mixed-income housing.
The intertwined nature of education and housing is not an issue unique to Tacoma. A survey by Temple University of 86,000 college students found that 56 percent had unstable housing in the previous year, and 17 percent had experienced homelessness. The national statistics and the experiences of local clients has Mirra convinced education is one realm housing authorities should continue to focus on. And it’s not just college students — THA offers scholarships and college savings accounts for the children of its residents.
“We’re more than a landlord, more than a real estate developer. We’re a social justice agency with a technical mission,” Mirra said. “If you understand your job that way, it brings you pretty directly to education.”
While education is often framed as something that can lift a person out of poverty, a health crisis is the inverse: it can crash a person into housing instability. The majority of housing authorities have health initiatives and partner with community health organizations, but Denver Housing Authority took these concerns a step further when it began designing its mixed-income Mariposa community in 2009.
The end result takes health in all forms seriously. Mariposa has a pedestrian-friendly design, making it easier to walk to the nearby park. An on-site navigator helps connect residents with health care services. Local community and botanical gardens bring in free produce, and a nutrition program teaches folks how to incorporate those fruits and vegetables into their cooking.
“The focus really shifted not from healthy housing, but to healthy neighborhoods and healthy people,” said Ismael Guerrero, DHA’s executive director.
According to statistics from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funds public housing authorities, people receiving housing assistance experience a host of conditions — hypertension, heart disease, asthma, diabetes, complete tooth loss — at much higher rates than the general population. And somebody who lives in public housing often lives in an area where nutritional food is sparse.
That’s certainly the case in Denver. In the Sun Valley neighborhood, where DHA is beginning a five-year redevelopment of its properties, the closest full-service grocery store is more than a mile away. For a resident with no car and young children, a trip to the grocery might be infeasible much of the time. So DHA is remedying this in the simplest — if not the cheapest — way possible: by building Sun Valley’s own market, set to open in 2020. Coupled with the large onsite garden, Guerrero envisions the market as a space where residents can sell some of the food they grow themselves.
“It’s important to have proximity to healthy food,” Guerrero said. “And it’s not just somebody growing potted tomatoes. It’s actually a much larger selection of vegetables, and the market will give us a venue for people to have some economic opportunities.”
Creating access to economic opportunities, whether through health, education, or housing stability is paramount, because the ultimate goal of housing authorities is to help residents get to a position in which they don’t need subsidized housing.
Lodge, the Tacoma student, sees the education she’s able to focus on now that she has stable housing as a stepping stone in that direction. “Students can be successful as long as they have a safe and stable place to sleep at night,” she said. “If they’ve got a place to live and food to eat, everything else is easy to take care of.”
