Housing and Health Partners Can Work Together to Close the Housing Affordability Gap

Access to safe, affordable housing supports people’s physical and mental health, research shows. The health care system has an important role in connecting patients to housing, but housing programs themselves need substantial additional resources to make a meaningful dent in the number of households that struggle to afford housing. Over 17 million households eligible for federal rental assistance do not receive it due to limited funding.^[1] This contributes to over 47 percent of renter households spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs, and almost 25 percent spending more than 50 percent of their income on housing.^[2],^[3]

"The health care system has an important role in connecting patients to housing, but housing programs themselves need substantial additional resources to make a meaningful dent in the number of households that struggle to afford housing. "

When households struggle to pay the rent, they not only face financial and housing instability, but they are also at heightened risk for a host of negative health outcomes. When people experience homelessness, they struggle to eat nutritious food, get regular preventative care, and manage chronic health conditions. More generally, high housing costs worsen the adversity that low-income families experience, forcing them to face a persistent threat of eviction and make difficult choices between paying the rent and paying for medicine, food, heating, transportation, and other essentials. Housing costs may also compel families to live in housing or neighborhoods that are rife with health and safety risks. These consequences can contribute to “toxic stress” and other mental health conditions that alone can be devastating but can also exacerbate physical health conditions for adults and children.^[4]

Health stakeholders can make modest but important programmatic contributions to directly expanding access to affordable housing. On the direct access front, state Medicaid programs and managed care organizations can pay for housing-related support services such as housing location services, eviction prevention (such as negotiating with landlords and assistance with personal budgeting), and tenant rights and responsibilities training — efforts that can help prevent a loss of housing or assist families in finding more suitable housing quickly. Hospitals can use their various assets, including land, investment portfolios, community benefit resources, and data capacity to make strategic financial investments in housing.^[5] Managed care and hospital systems are also finding ways to make strategic financial investments to develop affordable housing — investments that can yield a small return for the health entity investor and add needed housing stock. Finally, community-based services providers (such as behavioral health clinics and social services agencies) and local public health departments can partner with housing providers to improve the condition of public and affordable housing properties, deliver individualized home-based support services, and target community health programs to low-income residents.

While these and other initiatives can reduce health care costs for targeted individuals and improve people’s health, resolving unmet housing needs requires larger scale policy efforts, including far broader availability of basic rental assistance for struggling households and increasing the supply of affordable housing, especially for those experiencing or at risk of homelessness. Because health care stakeholders see face-to-face the difference affordable, quality, stable housing can make in health outcomes and have data that underscore the broader implications of a lack of affordable housing, they have an essential role to play in the housing policy debate.

Housing and Health Status Are Linked, Evidence Shows

Growing evidence shows that housing stability and location can significantly affect health care costs, access, and outcomes.^[6] Supportive housing — affordable housing combined with intensive coordinated services — can lower participants’ health care costs. Research has shown that for those participants who incurred high health care costs before being housed in a supportive housing program, these health care cost reductions can pay for (sometimes more than pay for) the cost of the supportive housing. Interventions to help families improve the condition of their housing or move to healthier neighborhoods also show promise to improve people’s health status. Understanding and properly applying the evidence of how and when housing access saves money, when housing interventions improve health outcomes, or when both are accomplished is important to ensuring that housing investments are well-targeted to achieve the desired outcome.

Lack of Housing Can Lead to Higher Health Costs

Health care spending is often higher for people experiencing homelessness, who often use expensive emergency room care as their primary source of health care.^[7] Homelessness can cause serious infections, increase the likelihood of contracting the flu or colds due to exposure, or spur a health crisis due to untreated chronic conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, or heart disease. The insecurity and chaos of living without a home can also exacerbate mental health and substance use conditions because people aren’t safe or able to adhere to treatment plans. These disruptions to care for physical and behavioral health conditions can increase anxiety, depression, and paranoia, which can lead to avoidable incarceration, institutionalization, and inpatient hospitalizations.

The inability to afford housing can also lead to longer-than-necessary stays in institutional care if people have lost their housing due to inability to work while in a nursing home, mental health facility, or other institution like jail. These health care costs are unnecessary and preventable. People can be at risk of homelessness when length-of-stay limitations force people out of institutions without a stable housing alternative, which can also lead to increased health care costs due to avoidable emergency crisis care.^[8] Community-based services, such as in-home care, outpatient mental health care, or medication-assisted substance use treatment, are often available, but they aren’t enough to keep people out of institutional care if they can’t afford a place to live.

Housing Conditions and Neighborhood Factors Can Lead to
Avoidable Health Costs and Bad Outcomes

Poor-quality housing or housing located in neighborhoods in which policymakers and businesses have underinvested can lead to health conditions that worsen not only individual health outcomes but also the public’s health in preventable ways that sometimes are inexpensive in the short term but costly to both people and the health system over time.

Contaminants such as lead paint and mold, unkempt or unsanitary living conditions, and deteriorating buildings can lead to chronic health conditions such as childhood or adult asthma, brain injuries or developmental disabilities, preventable infections, or trips and falls that can result in injuries or premature deaths. In 2014, 20 to 30 percent of asthma cases were linked to home environmental conditions, 21,000 lung cancer deaths were the result of radon in homes, over 24 million homes had lead-based paint hazards, and home injuries led to over 6 million seniors being hospitalized or in nursing homes due to preventable falls, the American Public Health Association and the National Center for Healthy Housing estimated.^[9] Neighborhood conditions can also lead to poor health of residents. People need to be able to find grocery stores with fresh, inexpensive produce, clean water, walkable amenities for exercise, and conditions that lower stress such as access to jobs and low crime.^[10]

Poor housing conditions, chaotic and violent neighborhoods, and worry about housing stability can also cause toxic stress or exacerbate mental health and substance use conditions. This stress can negatively affect both children’s and adults’ well-being. Parental depression and other stress-related problems are associated with poor social development and poor physical, psychological, behavioral, and mental health for children, particularly young children, studies find.^[11]

Housing Interventions Boost Health

Supportive Housing Evidence

Supportive housing has been shown to reduce health care costs for high-need, high-cost users of the health care system who are experiencing chronic homelessness or are living in institutional care. Most people who experience homelessness simply need financial assistance to help them afford rent, but for those who need the extra help, supportive housing can end their homelessness and stabilize their health and health care costs.

Supportive housing couples affordable housing — usually a voucher that covers the gap between the rent and what tenants can afford to pay — with health care services and case management for people with complex needs. People live independently and are assigned a case manager who helps residents coordinate their medical appointments, access social services such as employment assistance or parenting classes and behavioral health services, and work through crises to avoid eviction. Supportive housing providers focus on keeping the person housed, engaged with the services they choose, and out of expensive health and social systems of care.

When targeted to high-cost users of the health care system who have histories of homelessness, supportive housing reduces health system costs by keeping people out of hospitals, emergency rooms, and nursing homes, studies show. In Chicago, for example, supportive housing reduced costs for high-need, high-cost users of hospitals who also were homeless by over $6,000 per person per year.^[12]

Housing Location Evidence

Providing housing vouchers can also improve health outcomes by reducing residents’ exposure to detrimental environmental conditions. Housing vouchers can help people live in communities of their choice including high-opportunity neighborhoods, which can have strong positive effects on adults’ and children’s mental and physical health.

HUD’s Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program has demonstrated these effects.^[13] MTO was a ten-year (1993-2003) research project in which low-income families received rental assistance vouchers, along with intensive housing search and counseling services, to help them move from high-poverty to low-poverty neighborhoods. Several MTO studies comparing families that received MTO vouchers to similarly situated families that didn’t receive an MTO voucher found that using rental assistance to move to high-opportunity neighborhoods improved families’ immediate outcomes, including health-related conditions.

Adults in families that used an MTO voucher to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods reported 33 percent fewer instances of major depression than those without MTO vouchers. Adults who moved with MTO vouchers also had much lower rates of extreme obesity and diabetes. Children’s outcomes also improved, broadly. Children in families that used MTO vouchers were 32 percent more likely to attend college and earned 31 percent more as young adults than similar children who didn’t have access to MTO vouchers. And girls were 30 percent less likely to become single parents.

Housing Programs Are Underfunded

Unlike major health programs like Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace subsidies, affordable housing programs aren’t entitlement programs that serve everyone who meets the eligibility requirements and applies for assistance. Instead, Congress sets funding allotments for housing programs annually at levels that limit the number of families that can receive assistance.^[14] Once funding runs out, everyone else must wait. That results in 75 percent of households eligible for federal rental assistance not receiving it.^[15] (See Figure 1.) Families may wait for years to receive housing assistance, and overwhelming demand has prompted most housing agencies to stop taking applications entirely.^[16]

The unmet housing need is large among vulnerable groups like low-income families with children, seniors, and people with disabilities. Some states and localities use their own resources to make additional rental assistance available, usually for targeted populations such as people experiencing homelessness, people with chronic health conditions, or people with disabilities, but these programs are small and don’t cover the gap left by inadequate federal resources.^[17] In addition, they leave behind people who are on the margins of eligibility, such as those who are healthier, younger, or have experienced shorter periods of homelessness. In 2017, almost 11 million low-income renter households paid over half their income for housing.^[18] Such renters face a far greater risk than other households of eviction, homelessness, and other hardship.

Medicaid, by contrast, is available to everyone who meets its eligibility requirements.^[19] Medicaid expansion, in the states that have implemented it, extends coverage to people based on income and provides coverage to everyone who meets the income and other eligibility criteria in the program. Funding responds to demand and no person eligible for Medicaid can be turned away.

The differences in the programs’ funding structure and adequacy can lead to frustration by health providers who serve vulnerable populations whose housing concerns are causing or exacerbating health conditions. These providers are accustomed to being able to draw on public programs like Medicaid for all eligible patients, but the severe funding limitations in housing programs mean that although health providers may identify housing as a key need to treating a patient’s health, they likely cannot secure appropriate housing assistance and supports for them.

Health System’s Housing Initiatives

The scarcity of affordable housing coupled with the urgency to reduce health costs has put pressure on the health system to fill in gaps. Managed care organizations, hospitals, and state Medicaid programs have started to invest in targeted, small-scale affordable housing initiatives.^[20] Typically, these health care entities partner with established local affordable housing developers or housing authorities that administer rental assistance. These initiatives, while providing important lessons, have limited reach and fall far short of meeting the demand for affordable housing, even for the identified target populations.

Managed Care Investment

Managed care organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to control health care costs — their primary goal — without making non-health care investments. They are increasingly investing in programs aimed at addressing non-health factors, otherwise known as social determinants of health, that have been proven to have an impact on health outcomes, including housing.^[21]

Some managed care organizations have invested in affordable housing development. Kaiser Permanente and Enterprise Community Partners, an organization that brings together affordable housing development investors, have partnered in Oakland, California, on a $50 million fund that will help create and preserve affordable housing to help people with chronic illnesses. They also have created a $250 million housing equity fund directed at preserving and improving affordable housing that supports healthy communities. These investments enable Kaiser Permanente to advance its goal to increase access to housing because they recognize that more housing improves its members’ health, along with that of the broader community; reduces health expenditures; and allows Kaiser Permanente to potentially realize a return through tax savings (although these savings will likely be smaller than it may have otherwise earned through private investments).^[22]

Rental assistance is needed to ensure that housing is accessible for those with extremely low incomes, and it helps in areas where there’s enough housing but it’s not affordable for people with low incomes. (See box, “New Buildings Alone Won’t Solve the Affordable Housing Crisis.”) Some Medicaid managed care organizations have recognized this need and are testing ways to provide rental assistance. For example, Health Plan of San Mateo in California pairs health care services with ongoing housing assistance for over 120 people to avoid nursing home care costs. As of 2017, the plan’s costs for these members had fallen by 50 percent.^[23]

Hospital and Health Systems

To maintain their tax-exempt status, non-profit hospitals must contribute resources that improve the communities they serve.^[24] These hospitals conduct community needs assessments every three years to determine how to direct these resources. Projects must fit into one of four categories: improving access to care, enhancing health of the community, advancing medical or health knowledge, or reducing the burden of government or other community health programs.

A growing number of hospitals are making financial investments in housing capital costs with the intended purpose of addressing the housing needs of people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness and either currently or potentially high-cost users of health care, with the expectation that increasing available affordable housing will help stabilize the person and reduce the need for high-cost hospital or health system use. These investments also often generate direct, usually small, financial returns in either the short or long term for the hospital system.^[25] Sometimes, hospital systems will use community benefit resources in the same neighborhood as their housing investment properties so that both the housing and services needs are met for the target population. Examples of hospital and health systems working to address housing include: Denver Health in Denver, Colorado; AdventHealth in Orlando, Florida; Bon Secours hospital in Baltimore, Maryland; Dignity Health System in several locations; Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio; and five hospital partners in Portland, Oregon.^[26]

Medicaid

There is significant eligibility overlap between people who are eligible for federal rental assistance and those who qualify for Medicaid. However, the Medicaid statute prohibits federal Medicaid funding of “room and board,” which has been interpreted to mean rent and building costs. Medicaid can reimburse costs for health care services that enable people to live independently at home and maintain their housing. Seniors and people with disabilities may need health providers to visit them in their home to help them with personal care services. And people with long histories of homelessness or institutional care may need housing-related support services such as negotiating with landlords to avoid eviction, housing search, and tenants’ rights and responsibilities training, for certain populations based on medical needs.^[27]

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that oversees Medicaid, has approved demonstration projects in several states to deliver housing-related services such as in-home personal care services, behavioral health care services, and intensive case management, and housing-specific supports like help searching for housing and working with landlords, if Medicaid beneficiaries need these services to maintain their health and keep them out of expensive institutional care (see Appendix for more details). These are often pilot programs with narrowly defined target populations, but they are helping to test Medicaid’s role in stabilizing people in housing. Illinois, for example, includes housing status as a criterion for eligibility in its planned pilot project, relying on HUD regulations that define homelessness.^[28] This recognizes that homelessness exacerbates poor health and indicates that people with chronic or disabling health conditions who are experiencing homelessness should receive non-traditional Medicaid services, such as housing search and stabilization services, to improve their health.

Medicaid programs have also connected people to housing through CMS’ Money Follows the Person (MFP) demonstration program, which helps people transition from nursing home or mental health facility care to living independently in the community.^[29] Because this program is a temporary demonstration, and therefore not part of the regular Medicaid program, states can use MFP funding for non-Medicaid services, such as direct housing costs.

Several states have used MFP to pay for short-term rental assistance, utility fees, and housing modifications to help people leave institutional care and receive in-home services.^[30] This is less costly than a nursing home stay and achieves better client satisfaction because people prefer living at home.^[31] Original funding for this program expired in September 2016, but Congress added about $140 million in additional funds in fiscal year 2019 to help states continue their MFP programs through the program’s September 2020 expiration date. Congress and the President must act to extend or reauthorize the program beyond 2020.

Federal Housing and Health Grant Programs

Federal grant programs, such as the Community Mental Health Block Grant, the Community Services Block Grant, the Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS program (HOPWA), and the Community Development Block Grant, can fill in the gaps between what Medicaid can pay for and what people with complex health conditions need to remain housed and avoid expensive health services. Government entities should incentivize partnerships across health and housing government agencies and community-based programs by strategically using these grants to fund investments in agency- and program-level data collaboration and sharing, promote integrated case management practices that ease the burden on families and streamline administrative requirements, and standardize service definitions and eligibility requirements across agencies and programs to increase efficiency and ease administrative burden.

At the federal level, for example, HUD and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) can identify ways for their grantees that serve similar (if not the same) populations to collaborate so that programs from both agencies, along with Medicaid, maximize their impact and people’s housing and health needs are met in a coordinated way. For instance, grantees in HHS’ Ryan White Program, which provides medical care and services to low-income people with HIV/AIDS, often overlap with HUD’s HOPWA grantees; HUD and HHS can coordinate grant programs by encouraging the HUD and HHS grantees to work together when their grant objectives are aligned. HUD and HHS can also identify opportunities to make joint grant awards to ease administrative burden and ensure that providers or localities can come closer to meeting clients’ comprehensive needs. HUD and HHS each have grant programs focused on several other populations, such as people experiencing homelessness, seniors, and people with disabilities.

The Health System Alone Can’t Solve the Affordable Housing Crisis

Health initiatives such as those described above can improve service delivery for some people with unstable housing or, through MFP, deliver temporary housing assistance, but the health care system isn’t well positioned to fill the large gap between those who receive federal housing assistance and those who are eligible. The health system isn’t equipped to manage housing stock, inspect units for safety, or pay people’s rent, and it shouldn’t recreate an existing affordable housing infrastructure.

Publicly funded health programs need more money to continue to improve access to health services. Expanding Medicaid’s scope to include housing, beyond immediate assistance to transition from institutional care or homelessness, would undermine the program’s primary purpose of helping people afford health care services. Many state Medicaid programs are stretched, with health services such as dental care, vision care, and behavioral health care too often inadequately available to Medicaid beneficiaries.^[32] Medicaid investment in health-related activities shouldn’t be jeopardized by over-expanding into other areas.

Housing stability could be jeopardized if housing supports are linked to Medicaid eligibility. People often have better health outcomes once they are stably housed, but they may still need rental assistance after their health improves. They may also earn enough to make them ineligible for Medicaid but housing affordability may remain challenging. If states or managed care providers used Medicaid to pay for their housing, beneficiaries would likely lose their rental assistance if they were no longer eligible for Medicaid. While eligibility for housing assistance targeting people with extremely low incomes generally overlaps with eligibility for Medicaid, federal housing assistance can go to people with incomes of up to approximately 80 percent of the area median income — a much higher income level than the eligibility cutoff for Medicaid, even in expansion states.^[33] But there aren’t enough federal housing resources to guarantee that someone losing Medicaid could immediately transition to other rental assistance programs. That means that despite earning higher income — and possibly receiving health insurance through their employer or in the marketplace — many such renters would still pay severely unaffordable rents and struggle to keep their housing.

Steps to Create More Affordable Housing, Broaden Access to Health Care

Partnerships across health and housing sectors are key to helping people with low incomes obtain and maintain housing that they can afford. Policymakers will have to make significantly larger investments in housing assistance to move successful interventions from small pilot projects to programs large enough to serve all who need integrated housing and health care services. The health care system has the data and experience needed to illustrate the impact that better access to affordable housing can have. The housing system has the expertise and many of the processes, such as inspecting units and paying people’s rent on time, needed to serve more people but it lacks the resources to do so. The housing and health sectors together can maximize their collective resources and expertise to call for increased federal affordable housing funding; increased Medicaid coverage for housing-related services; and effective coordination of Medicaid and other federal health funding with housing resources to comprehensively meet people’s physical, behavioral, and social support needs.

Strategies for Increasing the Availability of Affordable Housing

The following concrete policies can reduce the number of households that struggle to afford housing and improve the fact that 75 percent of households eligible for rental assistance don’t receive it due to funding scarcity:

Expand the Housing Choice Voucher program. A substantial increase in housing vouchers is needed to make housing affordable for people with low incomes. Federal vouchers, which currently serve 2.2 million households across the country, are the primary form of federal rental assistance that can be quickly expanded to serve more households.^[34] Housing Choice Vouchers can be tenant-based or project-based,^[35] allowing people flexibility to live in the type of housing of their choice. Even project-based vouchers allow tenants flexibility because they can move out of the building with an available tenant-based voucher after one year. This ensures that tenants do not risk losing housing assistance if they wish to live somewhere else.

In recent years, federal policymakers have mostly provided enough funding so that no household loses assistance due to federal funding cuts, but there haven’t been major funding increases to extend assistance to more families. However, federal policymakers have targeted some assistance under the voucher program toward addressing the housing needs of specific groups of people. For example, the Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing program, created in 2008, has provided 98,000 targeted Housing Choice Vouchers and services for veterans experiencing homelessness, most of whom have had physical, substance use, or mental health conditions and been homeless repeatedly or for a long period of time.^[36] And in 2017 and 2018, Congress allocated $385 million for new housing vouchers targeted to adults with disabilities who are under 62 years old, which is expected to provide housing assistance to nearly 50,000 people.^[37] These increases haven’t been sufficient to make significant progress in closing the gap between those who need assistance and those who receive it.

Establish a renters’ tax credit program. A well-designed renters’ credit would reduce rents to levels that extremely low-income families can afford, in both developments that have received tax credit subsidies and those that have not.^[38] (The Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) provides tax credits for investments in certain housing developments that must meet certain affordability standards. But rents in these developments, while lower than market rate, are still unaffordable for very low-income families without further subsidies.) Under a proposal that the Center has advanced, property owners would receive a tax credit that would subsidize their operating costs and allow them to collect less rent from residents. The proposal would authorize states to allocate a capped amount of credits to landlords, property owners, or property management entities, subject to federal income eligibility rules and state policy preferences. Each state’s share of the credits would be set based on its population with a minimum allocation for small states. A credit with an annual cost of $6 billion once fully phased in could help about 720,000 households afford decent stable housing, we estimate.

Strengthen LIHTC and the National Housing Trust Fund (NHTF) to build more affordable housing in high-opportunity areas. Development subsidies can support the creation of more affordable housing in certain high-cost, low-vacancy areas and some rural areas where rental assistance alone may be difficult to use. They are also helpful tools to renovate and re-configure housing to help special populations, such as seniors and people with disabilities, live independently in the community and out of institutional care. The federal LIHTC is the largest source of development funds. Federal and state LIHTC policy should incentivize developers to build in high-opportunity areas, target resources to poor communities as part of a broader effort to revitalize them, help and require developers to make units affordable for people with extremely low incomes, and market the availability of new units in high-opportunity areas to low-income tenants who are underrepresented in the communities with LIHTC properties.^[39]

The NHTF, while relatively new, is another important source of federal development funding. It helps states build, preserve, rehabilitate, and operate housing that is affordable to people at the lowest incomes. Policymakers should significantly expand its funding and use it to complement other federal rental assistance programs.^[40]

To ensure that housing is built in diverse communities and does not result in segregation, local officials should be prohibited from blocking LIHTC and NHTF affordable housing developments, fair housing cases should be pursued when appropriate, and resources should be dedicated toward improving the collection and reporting of resident demographic information.

Expand smaller federal programs that provide rental assistance to special populations. A number of smaller programs provide rental assistance to certain groups such as people experiencing homelessness, seniors, non-elderly people with disabilities, and people living with HIV/AIDS.^[41] These programs can make it easier to target and couple housing assistance with support services for people who are particularly ill or needy.

Maintain and boost state and local rental assistance programs. An increasing number of states and localities are funding their own rental assistance programs. These programs are typically targeted to people identified as having low or extremely low incomes and who have other barriers to housing, including people with serious health conditions who are experiencing homelessness, people preparing to leave jail or prison, or people trying to move back into the community after a stay in a nursing home or psychiatric facility.

State or locally funded rental assistance won’t fill the gap in the availability of affordable housing without significantly more federal rental assistance. It is, however, a useful tool for starting new or building on existing innovative strategies that seek to integrate housing and services for vulnerable populations, such as supportive housing programs. For example, Connecticut’s state housing agency administers a rental assistance program that serves over 5,500 people, many of whom have a mental health condition or history of homelessness. Iowa’s state housing agency has a small rental assistance program that services about 360 people who receive services through the state Medicaid Home- and Community-Based Services program.^[42]

Continue housing investment resources from managed care organizations, hospitals, and health systems. As explained above, several health entities invest in housing developments and subsidy programs.^[43] These projects are generally small but help local efforts move forward in an environment of stagnant federal resources. They also allow communities to test new housing and services practices for certain target populations. These entities should continue their initiatives while looking for ways to align with other local resources, to maximize the impact of health system resources and serve as many people as possible.^[44]

Strategies for Increasing Access to Services for Vulnerable Populations

As described above, Medicaid can be an important source of support for households struggling to pay rent and make ends meet. Health insurance coverage helps people, including those experiencing or at risk of homelessness, afford care that can help them through a health crisis or access ongoing supports if they have chronic physical or behavioral health care conditions. States can use Medicaid to further promote housing stability by:

Expanding Medicaid. The Affordable Care Act gave states the opportunity to expand Medicaid to cover nearly everyone whose income is at or below 138 percent of the poverty line, which includes most people who qualify for federal rental assistance. But 14 states have not expanded Medicaid, and in those states, only people with certain disabilities, seniors, or low-income families with children are eligible.^[45] Barriers to proving disability status preclude many from Medicaid eligibility, especially homeless people with mental illness or substance use disorders. Expanding Medicaid in the states that have not done so would be an important step toward providing housing support services for more of those who need it. Eviction rates have fallen in states that expanded Medicaid, a recent study in the American Journal of Public Health showed.^[46]

Providing a broader range of Medicaid-funded services and supports, including services to help find and maintain housing. While not well understood, some affordable housing property owners and public housing agencies deliver health services to their residents. Medicaid could cover many of these services if the provider meets Medicaid standards for billing, or housing services agencies could seek certification, if appropriate.

As explained above, state Medicaid agencies can request permission from CMS to provide services such as in-home personal care services, behavioral health care services, intensive case management, and housing-specific supports like help searching for housing and working with landlords, if these services are necessary for someone to maintain their health and keep them out of expensive institutional care.^[47] But relatively few states have used the Medicaid authorities available to them to provide these services, and when they do, states often have different rules for the same services depending on a beneficiary’s eligibility category. This inconsistency can make it hard for providers who must track delivery and payment differently for their clients due to the lack of coordination within the state’s Medicaid program. More states should take advantage of their flexibility to provide these services and streamline these services across their Medicaid programs.

Helping more providers, especially providers of substance use treatment and recovery and housing supports, secure Medicaid reimbursement. Many social services providers that provide housing-related services don’t bill Medicaid for services that are eligible for Medicaid reimbursement. The same is true for substance use treatment and services providers that lacked expertise in, and an infrastructure for, billing Medicaid before their services became eligible for reimbursement under the Affordable Care Act.^[48] States and managed care organizations should provide training and outreach to encourage these providers to bill Medicaid where appropriate.

Appendix A: Summary of Sample State Medicaid Programs That Provide Housing Related Services