Person-Centered Property Management in Affordable Housing

Affordable housing and homelessness

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)

As of October 2023, Los Angeles had 374 permanent supportive housing sites with 14,272 units (LA County Homeless Initiative). The people in these homes are formerly homeless and may be living with a multitude of traumas, physical and mental health conditions, substance use disorders, and disabilities from their time surviving unhoused. While service providers help tenants address challenges that threaten their ability to remain housed, property management staff rarely have the knowledge to work constructively with this population. For-profit property management firms often implement a rigid approach regardless of the different needs of people in supportive housing. Their policies are structured on penalizing versus improving behaviors and focus on the bottom line, which leads to evictions. They lack training and collaborative values to effectively serve formerly unhoused tenants, resulting in strategies counterproductive to Los Angeles’ fight to reduce our city’s homelessness.

PATH Enterprises is launching a person-centered property management initiative that integrates homeless services methods to better support the formerly homeless tenants of permanent supportive housing communities. Our social enterprise will depart from the standard model and refocus on our tenants’ individual needs with staff who have experience in human behavior and homelessness. An LA2050 award will fund a Los Angeles regional manager who will hire and oversee a team of individual property managers who live on-site at our communities. Our staff will perform all supportive housing property management responsibilities such as assessing subsidy eligibility, managing leases, and providing maintenance support. Our model will seek staff who have lived experiences with homelessness, substance use, mental illness, and other commonalities that will strengthen our methods and provide employment opportunities to formerly homeless people. Property management and services staff will work in close collaboration to ensure our approach is trauma-informed and respects the agency and dignity of our tenants. This includes using our 4-Step Retention Plan, a strategy we developed specifically for supportive housing. The Plan outlines procedures to respond quickly to behaviors that threaten a tenant’s housing stability, identify appropriate resources and supports (e.g., healthcare, benefits assistance, legal resources, etc.), and prevent tenants from falling back into homelessness.

By the end of 2025, PATH Enterprises will ramp up our initiative and be managing at least 15 sites in Los Angeles. All are owned and operated by PATH Ventures, the affordable housing development arm of the PATH family of agencies, which also includes PATH, the homeless services provider at the sites. Ten buildings are recent acquisitions from the dissolution of Skid Row Housing Trust, whose tenants lived in high-risk, inhumane conditions. The PATH family is rehabilitating the buildings and providing services for the highly traumatized tenants. By 2028, PATH Enterprises will be serving all 31 of PATH Ventures' current properties with property management that prioritizes the people over profits. In the long-term, our vision is to change the model of supportive housing property management from one that is bottom line-driven to one that is stability-driven and uses compassion and collaboration with tenants and service providers to keep people in their homes and off the street.

The goal of our initiative is to close the gap of person-centered support within supportive housing development and operations. With the addition of property management to the PATH family’s portfolio of services, tenants of PATH Ventures supportive housing will have streamlined and coordinated services from organizations with a shared focus – to provide a safe and supportive place for people to recover and call home. Our initiative will be successful if our tenants can remain in permanent homes, address their health concerns, and live a fulfilling life. We will evaluate our success through tracking the rate at which tenants retain their housing and their satisfaction in their experience with the PATH family of agencies and in the housing community. Tenant satisfaction is gathered informally by staff through their daily interactions and formally through annual client surveys. Data will be analyzed regularly by program leadership to identify and address areas for improvement.