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Shelter House and CSH present needs assessment estimating about 300-unit supportive-housing gap in Johnson County
Summary
Shelter House and the Corporation for Supportive Housing told Johnson County leaders on Oct. 20 that preliminary modeling shows a need for roughly 300 units of permanent supportive housing—about 261 for individuals and 36 for families—and warned of near-term funding cliffs that could endanger support for existing households.
Shelter House Executive Director Chrissy Cangonelli and consultants from the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH) presented a preliminary needs assessment on Oct. 20 to the joint Johnson County entities, concluding that Johnson County appears to need roughly 300 additional units of permanent supportive housing (PSH) to meet current demand.
CSH senior staff described the methodology: combining Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) data with interviews of local stakeholders across behavioral health, physical health, law enforcement and other sectors to estimate the number of households whose needs align with PSH’s evidence-based model. Gabe Schuster, CSH senior program manager, said the modeling accounts for current inventory, annual turnover and potential system-efficiency improvements.
"We pulled data from the homeless management information system ... to assess ultimately ... what is the total need for supportive housing?" Schuster said. He summarized the preliminary result: "just about 300 units of supportive housing," including approximately 261 units for individuals and about 36 for families with children.
Shelter House officials described local outcomes and current capacity: roughly 60 single-site PSH units and about 130 units supported by mainstream and emergency housing vouchers scattered through the community; Shelter House said only one of 93 tenants in single-site properties has exited to homelessness since Jan. 2019. Presenters cited strong post-housing outcomes in their samples—including reductions in arrests and emergency-department use—and national research aligning PSH with declines in incarceration and emergency services use.
Presenters warned of funding risks. Chrissy Cangonelli said about 105 households are supported currently by time-limited funds that will expire by Dec. 2027 and that changes in Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) priorities and practice "stand to put at risk" permanent supportive housing for roughly 84 households. They also noted the local housing market's limits on expanding scattered-site PSH and that development timelines for new units can be lengthy; Shelter House cited an aggressive one-year development of 36 units completed in 2022 as atypical.
CSH said the needs-assessment process will continue through stakeholder feedback and additional data collection—presenters specifically noted the value of school-district (McKinney-Vento) data to capture doubled-up families not counted under HUD's homelessness definition—and that recommendations and an implementation plan will be developed and presented in spring to summer 2026.
No formal action or funding commitments were recorded at this meeting. The joint entities were invited to engage in stakeholder sessions as the assessment progresses.
Notes: Numerical findings were presented as preliminary estimates by CSH and Shelter House. The transcript includes specific sample statistics cited by presenters (for example, 98.8% remaining housed at one year in a small sample and a 68% decrease in arrests for a sample of Park Place tenants); those sample statistics were presented by Shelter House and characterized as local experience and partial analyses rather than comprehensive county-wide longitudinal studies.
