Sometimes, stable housing alone isn’t enough to increase assets and move families up and out of poverty. It may take an extra hand to help a family attain quality education or career advancement, to help their children succeed in school or to create a brighter future for those feeling left behind or overwhelmed by the complex array of social services. Extra encouragement may be required to foster strong, connected communities of support and hope where people can grow to their potential. In these cases, making a small investment in people’s lives, combined with decent, affordable housing, can lead to astounding results.
The aim of resident services programs is to make modest investments that will pay back in meaningful returns over a lifetime. Resident services are support systems designed to conquer risk factors and foster positive outcomes in the lives of low-income families. But they offer an additional benefit as well. Resident services improve the performance of the property. They reduce turnover, evictions and vandalism, and they improve resident satisfaction, property maintenance and occupancy rates. Through referral to quality services or services provided directly on-site by a staff member, resident services to families in affordable housing have become more prevalent in the last few years in communities across the country. Often, such services include educational and workforce training and job placement, after-school youth and teen programs, financial literacy and homebuyer classes, as well as programs designed to address the specific goals of the unique communities they serve.
Heretofore, resident services in family affordable housing have operated, with a few exceptions, on an ad hoc basis, with little uniformity and few best practices to follow. Enterprise’s purpose for creating this tutorial is to share lessons learned by the pioneers in the field from around the country. Toward that end, Enterprise, with support from Freddie Mac Corporation and Foundation, partnered with several local, nonprofit housing organizations to demonstrate best practices and distill and build upon their on-the-ground wisdom. To that end, we have created and compiled a series of informative guides and model documents covering the full array of relevant topics both in operations—designing and budgeting for a program, evaluating existing services, developing and managing partnerships with service providers, working with property managers, fundraising—and in key program areas—employment, adult education, child care and after-school programs, community safety and financial literacy.
Resident services programs are gaining popularity as a means to provide a true avenue out of poverty and a path for low-income families to overcome the barriers that prevent them from improving their life prospects. We believe that providing services in conjunction with housing can only improve beneficial outcomes for children and adults. And our work has provided positive anecdotal evidence of this. We are working with national partners, including NeighborWorks America and the American Association of Service Coordinators, to aggregate data that we expect will prove the benefits of resident services more definitively. Meanwhile, much has been proven about the value of similar services and outcomes, both short-term and life-long, that has been demonstrated through study after study:
Low-income children who participated in a school district pre-school program were 33 percent less likely to be arrested as juveniles, 40 percent less likely to be held back a grade in school, 41 percent less likely to need special education and 29 percent more likely to graduate from high school, according to Long-Term Effects of an Early Childhood Intervention on Educational Achievement and Juvenile Arrest: A Fifteen Year Follow-Up of Low-Income Children in Public Schools.
According to the Brookings Institution, after-school mentoring and tutoring programs for teens have been effective at improving a young person’s performance in school as well as behavior out of school.
Over their lifetimes, high school graduates earn roughly $300,000 more than those who fail to receive their diploma, according to the Employment Policy Foundation.
Brown University and the National Bureau of Economic Research report that after a few years, individuals who attained a GED earned between 10 and 20 percent more than those who opted against gaining their high school equivalency.
The Federal Reserve reports that homeowners of modest incomes have a net worth of almost $60,000 compared to less than $10,000 for renter households with similar incomes.
To be sure, this list of positive impacts of various service programs is not exhaustive, but it does indicate the strong influence such programs—when properly designed and managed toward positive outcomes—can have on the lives of low-income families and individuals. What follows in this tutorial is advice on the best ways to design and implement services to create positive outcomes for community residents and property performance.
