Open Doors Opens a New Door

By Joshua-Michael Corrente

“Open Doors” will soon break ground as Rhode Island’s first Permanent Supportive Housing program specifically targeting RI’s formerly incarcerated community members.  The housing program will be located on Plainfield Street in the Silver Lake section of Providence in what  a month ago was an abandoned ice cream factory.

‘Open Doors’ Providence (formerly called the “Family Life Center”) provides social services to members of Rhode Island’s incarcerated community. The six year old non-profit organization works, day to day, to help remove the enormous integration barriers ex-offenders face when discharged from the Rhode Island Department of Corrections (DOC).

Permanent Supportive Housing programs for prisoner re-entry are cost effective because they directly address the problems created while homeless ex-offenders cycle through the transitional housing (shelter) system. That the housing opportunity is “permanent” provides a long term stabilization to the tenant-constituent housing dilemmas.

For the Open Doors program, support services such as interactive case management, education that addresses the barriers to housing, employment and financial literacy will be located directly on site of the housing complex. The Open Doors housing project is Rhode Island’s introduction to Permanent Supportive Housing as a long term solution to the issues of prisoner recidivism. It took the Open Doors five years of intensive research, lobbying and complex fundraising to successfully bring this program to reality.

By design, the Permanent Supportive Housing model is conceptually closer to the innovative Housing First model (also known as the “rapid re-housing” model) of addressing homelessness, which predicts an individual’s primary need is stable housing and that other critical issues of impact (such as employment) should be addressed once housing is established.

Construction of the Open Doors Permanent Supportive Housing project is expected to take about one year. The completed facility will include space for all the Open Doors programs such as the drop-in center, service-function rooms, computer labs and offices.

Rhode Island’s Adult Correctional Institution (ACI) is the state’s largest housing complex.   About 1500 are released from the ACI annually and of those released, approximately 1000 people or about 40% will seek residence in the city of Providence. Rhode Island is home to over 30,000 people on probation and parole. Says Rodriguez “If you have 30,000 people, completely disenfranchised, can’t find jobs, many have families, if they cannot support their children, their children end up living in state custody at additional costs….I don’t think it creates a safer community, it creates a much more dangerous community…”

Approximately one third of Rhode Island’s released prisoners return to a correctional institution within a year and over half return within in three years.  Former inmates face extraordinary barriers in the critical area of housing. When the formerly incarcerated are released from prison, they most often do not have the resources to access permanent housing and must depend on emergency or temporary housing or ‘reside themselves’ in non-sheltered, street locations.

The Open Doors new housing complex will have 19 individual units for adult men including seven one bedroom and twelve efficiency apartments. Support opportunities for tenants will include coordinated case management that will target the significant employment obstacles experienced by ex-offenders, as well as substance abuse referrals and social service application assistance.  Tenants will pay rent on a monthly basis. Tenants will also be required to be part of a tenant’s association group which will allow them to participate in the management functions of the housing complex and develop a sense of ownership of the property and the program.

Open Doors is optimistic their new Permanent Supportive Housing Project will successfully produce happy endings for people and families who seek a new start to  grow into stable community members.

Editor’s Note:  This article is the first of a four part series on the Permanent Supportive Housing model of eliminating homelessness that Street Sights will publish during 2010.