The Housing Authority of the City of Asheville North Carolina (HACA) has housed more than 100 chronically homeless individuals with a 90% success rate through a local preference for its public housing program and case management partnerships. This program has been a major contributor to the community’s 75% reduction in the number of people experiencing chronic homelessness.
HACA did not require Moving To Work (MTW) status with HUD to implement this program. Other than meetings and coordination time, HACA says this program has required no additional financial resources from its budget and that the program has enhanced its resources by having case managers assigned and on-call to help resolve problems.
HACA offers these words of wisdom to other PHAs striving to serve vulnerable households, “We believe that having case management provided by an outside agency (or agencies), whose mission is to assist homeless people obtain and retain permanent housing is the best model. It prevents confusion between our role as manager of the housing units and the support role provided by the agency. It also provides an independent sounding board for decisions that need to be made by both agencies.” HACA is currently seeking to expand its preferences and partnerships with service providers to help Asheville reach its goal of ending chronic homelessness.
Learn more about HACA’s program, view documents they used to implement the program, and learn from other PHAs in CSH’s PHA Toolkit.
