Who We Are
Housing for Health is a cohesive team of clinicians, community health workers, program administrators, contract managers, and other professionals who collaborate with multiple County departments, community-based service providers, cities, and other partners to provide housing and critical services to tens of thousands of homeless and formerly homeless people in LA County. Within the County’s homeless services continuum, Housing for Health programs work to meet the needs of people with complex health and behavioral health conditions.
Using evidenced-based practices and pioneering new innovations, Housing for Health’s infrastructure maximizes local, state, and federal funds to deliver an integrated system of care that connects housing, health services, intensive case management, and income supports. Our innovative Flexible Housing Subsidy Pool enables Housing for Health to braid funds from multiple sources to deliver housing assistance where it’s needed the most – quickly and efficiently.
Housing for Health’s “whatever it takes” approach is embodied within our efforts to reduce COVID-19 exposure to people experiencing homelessness in partnership with the Department of Public Health. Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve created specialized mobile teams to offer testing, vaccines, and wellness checks to people living in sheltered and unsheltered locations. We’ve opened quarantine and isolation shelters to reduce the spread of the virus and provide medical oversight to people with COVID who are at high-risk for complications. We also created an infrastructure to deliver meals 7 days a week to people living on the street with limited access to food.
Housing for Health partners with a diverse set of local, state, and federal entities including nonprofit organizations, county and state departments, elected officials, cities across Los Angeles County, philanthropy, health plans and other health partners, and people with lived experience.
Housing for Health was founded in 2012 as a division within the Department of Health Services to provide housing and services to patients who frequented County public hospitals
and were homeless. Access to a housing subsidy and intensive case management services stabilized the health of these individuals, reducing the number of avoidable inpatient, outpatient, and emergency department visits. The County used Housing for Health’s infrastructure to expand housing and services to thousands of more homeless individuals and families when Measure H, the Countywide sales tax to fund homeless services, passed in 2017. In addition, other County departments also began investing in housing and services for their prioritized populations through Housing for Health’s infrastructure.
Throughout this period of rapid growth, Housing for Health has maintained its core ethos and founding principles of improving the health and quality of life of the most vulnerable homeless individuals in L.A. County. The program now provides a full continuum of services to our clients, from street outreach to interim housing to permanent housing, with case management, benefits advocacy, and clinical services layered across all service categories.
