Could you make ends meet with just $121 per month to pay for transportation, your cell phone, clothing, hygiene products, and the rest of your essential living costs? What limits and barriers would it put on your ability to stay healthy, work, save for the future, and live your life?
These are questions that many prospective Haven Housing residents have to wrestle with.
OK, let’s back up and do some learning together while shedding light on one of the challenges the women we serve face in securing stable housing.
In Minnesota, we have a program called Housing Support, which pays for room and board for adults with disabilities and seniors living on low incomes. About 27% of the more than 20,000 Minnesotans that utilize Housing Support each month also receive supplemental services to help them live healthy, safe lives.
The program effectively helps Minnesotans living on low incomes maintain stable housing after experiencing homelessness or chemical or mental health crises. We appreciate how the program allows people to choose to live in a community setting like Haven Housing @ Next Step Housing or Board and Lodge setting like Haven Housing @ Ascension Place, where they have a private room, three meals a day, supportive services, and peer support.
The problem? The Housing Support program does not make housing affordable, and not everyone who is eligible for the program is treated the same. Perversely, disabled people and people living on the lowest incomes may have to pay up to 90% of their benefits toward their room and board in the Housing Support program.
Are you concerned? Let’s dig in.
More than half of the Minnesotans who utilize Housing Support are disabled, live on very low incomes, and receive a form of government assistance called Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Our current state laws require that Housing Support participants who receive SSI contribute 90% of their benefit to cover the costs of the Housing Support program, leaving them just $121 each month to cover EVERY OTHER EXPENSE in their lives.
Housing is considered affordable when the person living there doesn’t pay more than 30% of their income towards housing costs. Many other public assistance programs, like Housing Choice Vouchers (previously known as Section 8), use this 30% measure to determine how much a person must contribute. Why doesn’t Housing Support?
When women who receive SSI explore living at Haven Housing @ Ascension Place and find out they will need to surrender 90% of their income, many choose not to move in. They may choose homelessness or live in a more vulnerable situation rather than surrender the lion's share of their income.
For those who do move in, living on just $121 a month is extremely difficult. How is a person supposed to save for future goals—for a deposit and first month’s rent on their own apartment, for example—if they are paying for transportation, phone, clothing, hygiene products, emergency expenses, and saving on $121 each month?
Haven Housing @ Ascension Place is designed to be an interim step between chemical or mental health treatment, shelter, prison, or housing instability and a person living in their own apartment. Are we setting people up for success by asking them to choose between paying 90% of their SSI benefit toward housing and their other needs? If the person prioritizes their other needs for just one month, they could lose their housing and be discharged from Haven Housing, resulting in an episode of homelessness.
The supportive environment Haven Housing provides women, non-binary people, and their families is top quality. I know that, and as one of our supporters, I know you do too. But we are still working within unjust systems. This version of the Housing Support program is better than no Housing Support program, but Minnesota can do better. We can rewrite the law so that the program better helps Minnesotans achieve housing stability, rather than keeping them locked in extreme poverty and reliant on a program that is nearly impossible to graduate from.
Thankfully, there are efforts afoot to chart a better path. We are excited to join our partners at the Minnesota Coalition of the Homeless and Catholic Charities this year to push for an update to the state law that would change Housing Support contribution calculations to allow people receiving an SSI benefit to retain more of their personal income.
I want to close with the words of one of our Haven Housing residents:
"Receiving SSI and living in a Housing Support program makes me feel stuck. I am unable to save any money because the state requires me to pay $730 towards my stay and I can only keep $121 for other expenses. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, I am so thankful for all that you do, but these policies are forcing me to stay living in poverty. It's hard to have hope when I am unable to work due to my disability, and my income is treated differently than if I was receiving money through employment."
If we could make this change, we could create more hope. We could help more individuals exit homelessness by removing barriers to enroll in Housing Support, a program that we know works! Haven Housing is committed to creating future where we make this change and we hope you will join us.
Legislative Update March 2023
Tell your legislators to support House File 732 or Senate File 992 to modify the income definitions in the Housing Support Program and change this harmful policy.
A previous version of this blog used noted that Housing Support participants receiving SSI could only keep $111 of their income. This was the 2022 amount. The blog has been updated to reflect the increase to $121 in 2023.