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Moving Here Saved My Life: The Experience Of Formerly Chronically Homeless Women And Men In Quincy's Housing First Projects, Tatjana Meschede

Center for Social Policy Publications

For the past ten years, Father Bill’s Place (FBP) in Quincy, Massachusetts, has moved steadily towards providing permanent housing with supportive services rather than emergency shelter as a solution to ending homelessness. According to John Yazwinski, executive director of FBP, the vision for the future is to be able to independently house every homeless person entering FBP within a short period of time instead of “housing” people in the shelter for prolonged periods. As such, sheltering homeless people in mass emergency shelters should be a picture of the past.

Yazwinski’s Housing First Model builds upon an approach of housing “chronically” …