When it comes to addressing homelessness, Fort Worth’s Tara Perez knows it takes more than just housing to get people off the streets.
The city is piloting a new program, High Impact Pilot, to bring direct, intense psychiatric services to people experiencing homelessness in seven designated areas and successfully place them into housing.
Perez, who oversees the city’s Directions Home program, described this new pilot as a boost to the various homeless services already available in Fort Worth to people in need.
This pilot has two parts: Stabilize people with severe mental illness and help them to get into housing and stay housed through Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) teams; provide more rapid housing assistance.
“The ACT model is very different. The ratio is 1 to 10 and they directly provide the services. So you don’t get referred to a psychiatric visit. The psychiatrist comes to you. The case manager doesn’t say, ‘I’ll try to get you into JPS.’ The registered nurse comes to you,” Perez said.
Areas of focus
The High Impact Pilot program will serve the following seven areas:
- Camp Bowie West/Las Vegas Trail
- Seminary/La Gran Plaza/Hemphill
- Downtown
- Near Southside
- Historic Southside
- Near Eastside
- Beach Street intersections from East Lancaster Avenue to North Tarrant Parkway
Having both the mental health and housing aspects in this program will help reach and meet the needs of a more specific population, said Deirdre Browne, senior director of substance abuse, outreach, veterans and housing case management at MHMR.
“What makes it nice about this is that it’s a very fluid program. If someone comes in — gets housed, they need more services — we can have the ACT team stabilize them, but then they don’t have to stay on the ACT team. They’re stabilized. They’re doing better,” Browne said. “This model really allows for people to move through stages and phases without not moving for two years and staying in the same service.”
The pilot is currently set up for an 18-month trial period with a price tag of around $2 million. The program will serve only 80 patients at a time, the majority of whom suffer from severe mental illness.
Susan Garnett, CEO of MHMR, Tarrant County’s mental health team, said the group and the city have been working with Fort Worth’s HOPE team and neighborhood police officers to identify individuals who could best be served by this program.
“The city of Fort Worth has identified over the last few years that there are a number of people who experience homelessness and who, despite trying to connect them to some traditional services, still seem to fall in the gaps,” Garnett said. “So the city decided that they wanted to step in and say, ‘Let’s target some folks and let’s be willing to make an investment in time and energy and money in trying to reach people who have some really significant needs.’”
While the price tag might seem high, Perez said it is still cheaper than any kind of inpatient treatment.
“There’s that continuous relationship. They have somebody on call 24/7, which is another big (thing). It’s a really intense approach for those (who) are severely mentally ill. So ACT teams meet daily and go over all the clients and who’s seeing who,” Perez said. “That’s why it’s expensive. It works because it’s very, very intense but it’s only for those who have severe mental illness.”
Similar programs have been implemented successfully in cities like Philadelphia’s Pathways to Housing program. Using ACT teams, Philadelphia reduced its inpatient psychiatric treatment numbers by bringing resources to the people who need them on the street.
Perez described Philadelphia’s program as “a hospital without walls” and one of the models for Fort Worth’s proposed pilot.
One of the main differences between this pilot and other homeless services already in place across Fort Worth, such as the police department’s HOPE team and organizations like DRC Solutions, is the implementation of a master lease program. For the first time, MHMR will be on a few apartment leases as tenants, giving them the ability to house people faster and therefore enable those clients to recover faster.
Tarrant County Homeless Coalition also will provide a landlord engagement specialist to work on successfully getting voucher holders into housing.
“We can actually say, ‘Would you like to go see a place where you can stay today?’ which is a very different concept, a very immediate concept,” Browne said.
The average wait time for housing in Fort Worth is between three to four months. A 60-day turnaround is considered fast, Browne said.
“You lose a lot of folks in that time,” Browne said.
Performance on how well the program does will be measured based on how many people enter housing and stay housed.
City staff hope that within the first six months, at least 70% of those offered housing find a place to live, and that one year after finding housing, 70% of those people still have a place to live.
“You always want to measure people’s willingness to stay in treatment, people’s ability to stay in their housing,” Garnett said.
Council will vote to approve this pilot on March 19. If it passes, then the city will enter into an agreement with MHMR, who will then hire the ACT teams. A start date is currently set for May 1.
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Sandra Sadek is a Report for America corps member, covering growth for the Fort Worth Report. You can contact her at sandra.sadek@fortworthreport.org or on X @ssadek19.
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