The city’s latest budget includes funds to grow the number of apartments in the Justice-Involved Supportive Housing program (JISH) from 120 to 500. That expansion was among the commitments the city made in its 2019 agreement to close Rikers Island.
A May 2023 rally calling for the city to move forward with plans to close Rikers, citing the costs of incarceration compared to supportive housing. (Neha Gautam/Urban Justice Center)
In 2019, when Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Council passed a plan to eventually close the notorious jail complex at Rikers Island, the “Points of Agreement” struck as part of the deal included a pledge to expand the city’s Justice Involved Supportive Housing (JISH) program, from 120 units to 500.
The city launched JISH in 2015 to provide affordable housing and support services to New Yorkers with behavioral health needs who tend to shuffle back and forth between shelters, hospitals, and jail or prison—what advocates and experts describe as a “vicious cycle” that feeds both the city’s homeless and shelter populations.
But that expansion has yet to take off, despite the city releasing a $93.7 million Request for Proposals (RFP) six years ago. Providers declined to bid on that RFP, telling City Limits the funding rates were too low to adequately provide the housing and services the program requires.
The city’s latest budget deal, however, includes an additional, baselined $4.8 million that officials and advocates say will finally allow JISH to grow to the promised 500 units. This builds on earlier discretionary funding the City Council allocated last year so the program’s existing three providers can enhance their services.
“This, to us, is a smart investment,” said Stanley Richards, president and CEO at the Fortune Society, which currently operates JISH housing for 60 people in scattered-site apartments in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Manhattan.
“It is an investment we need to make when we talk about reducing our footprint on mass incarceration,” he added. “Providing some of our most vulnerable people access to supportive housing and to stop the cycle of hospitalization, homelessness and incarceration.”
The number of people in the city’s shelters and behind bars at Rikers Island has swelled in recent years, and access to supportive housing plays a role in both, experts and advocates say.
JISH is modeled after an earlier Bloomberg-era program called FUSE. Participants housed through that initiative spent 256 fewer days in shelter and an average of 95 fewer days in jail than members of a comparison group, one study found.
In addition to affordable housing, Fortune Society’s JISH clients get access to medical and behavioral health care, medication management, job training, art programs and other resources.
“Those are key components to increasing public safety,” Richards said. “Public safety is not just about policing, police enforcement, incarceration. That’s a piece of it; that’s not the total picture. The other side of public safety is when you provide people with opportunity to rebuild their lives, when you connect them.”
Richards said the higher reimbursement rate provided by the extra City Council funds has allowed Fortune to restructure its existing JISH portfolio so that each participant has their own unit, rather than doubled up with a roommate in a two-bedroom, as they had previously.
“The [prior] amount of funding wasn’t sufficient to pay fair market rent and to provide the level of services we need to ensure people are engaged and connected,” he said.
Kandra Clark, director of policy at Urban Pathways, another organization that runs 30 JISH units, said they’re looking forward to applying to operate more with the city at the new, higher funding rates.
“We would like studios, but all within the same building, then that way it’ll be much easier to do case management,” she said. That work can include providing people with everything from doctor’s appointments to basic life skills training.
“Some of our folks have been in [prison] for decades. They don’t know how to use computers. They don’t know how to use the MTA,” Clark said. “It just looks a little different, even from our regular supportive housing sites, because of those barriers that they’ve had for so long.”
Unlike JISH, other types of supportive housing are often inaccessible to people coming out of jail or prison. For many supportive apartments, applicants must prove they’re “chronically” homeless, meaning they’ve been unhoused for long stretches of time, typically a year. A stint in jail for more than 90 days would disqualify someone from most units, restarting that clock.
The City Council is expected to pass a bill Thursday that would amend that requirement when it comes to city-funded supportive housing programs, allowing time spent behind bars to count as time spend unhoused.
“We must update our housing policies to be sensitive to the unique vulnerability faced by people cycling in and out of the jail system,” the bill’s sponsor, Councilmember Carlina Rivera, told City Limits last year.
Reducing the population at Rikers is key to the city’s ability to close the troubled island jail complex, as required by a law passed under the de Blasio administration, which will replace it with four new, smaller jail facilities across four of the five boroughs.
The number of people being held at Rikers surpassed 7,000 this spring, several thousand more than what the future borough-based jails will be able to accommodate. While the law requires the city to close Rikers by 2027, it’s currently unlikely to meet that deadline.
At a press conference earlier this month, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and other lawmakers urged the Adams administration to implement the new JISH funding as quickly as possible, along with other recent mental health reforms they say will help reduce the number of people in jail.
“These investments, which we have consistently championed and were a part of the independent Rikers commission’s updated blueprint to close Rikers, are critical to our goal of keeping our city safe, reducing the inflated jail population and ultimately closing Rikers for good,” Speaker Adams said at the time.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which oversees JISH, said the 2019 RFP remains open on a rolling basis and that the administration is discussing the best approach to using the extra funds from the most recent budget.
While finally expanding the program to the planned 500 units would be a win, advocates say the need is even greater than that, and would like to see the program grow further.
In 2022, an analysis by the Corporation for Supportive Housing estimated that some 2,500 people held at Rikers Island in a given year fit the criteria of need for supportive housing, generally meaning they’re homeless and have a behavioral health diagnosis.
“We’re very confident that the 2,500 number is a conservative estimate,” said Cassondra Warney, CSH’s senior program manager.
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