The model
A bedroom with a door that locks, a key of your own, and up to eighteen months, in a neighborhood.
The model
We do not build a building. We lease houses that already exist, in neighborhoods where people already live, and we pay above market to be the most attractive tenant on the street. It is the fastest route to a bed and the least institutional place to put a person who has been institutionalized enough.
Every bedroom in the women's house is single occupancy. Every resident holds their own key. For a survivor, a room no one else can enter is what makes sleep possible.
An eleven month average stay against an eighteen month ceiling, in three phases. Stabilize, months one to three, is safety, documents, benefits, and health. Build, months four to twelve, is income, credit, savings, and rental readiness. Launch, months thirteen to eighteen, is the housing search and the move. A resident who meets the milestones sooner moves sooner. Nobody is discharged to the street. That obligation is written into the operating manual.
Active substance use, untreated psychiatric conditions, evictions, no rental history, any discharge characterization including Other Than Honorable. The population most programs screen out is the one this exists for.
Awake overnight staffing in every women's house from the day it opens, so a women's house is never the one that waits. Men's houses run an on call standard in year one and convert as revenue allows. We state which is which rather than implying they are the same.
Among 448,290 service members who deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and separated between 2001 and 2011, those discharged for misconduct were 5.6 percent of separations but 25.6 percent of the veterans homeless at first VA contact, nearly five times the risk (Gundlapalli et al., JAMA, 2015). Yet veterans with Other Than Honorable discharges were only 4 percent of those served by VA's own Grant and Per Diem transitional housing nationally in 2018–2020 (Military Medicine, 2024). The veterans at highest risk are the least reached. That gap is the niche.
