Varig bolig framfor hospits

This is a study of how actors in Norwegian municipalities cooperate to establish more permanent housing for persons living in various forms of temporary housing shelters. In particular, it focuses on the cooperation between the staff at shelters and local government representatives, to establish housing that is both suits individual needs and satisfies quality criteria. The central actors’ views on the possibilities and barriers related to this work have been important to trace. It was important that the municipalities selected for the study had experienced a certain amount of homelessness problems among their inhabitants. It was also an important criterion that they should represent different ways of organizing the social housing services. The three largest cities and three medium sized municipalities with a geographical location close to the cities were selected. Three of the municipalities have established a housing company, based on certain business-like principles. All six municipalities have renewed their housing policies and services for the last years, largely through financial support from the central government. The degree of political and administrative anchoring of the services varies between these municipalities, but such anchoring seems to be an important factor to a successful establishment of housing for the disadvantaged. Municipal actors saw possibilities for long-term thinking, better opportunities for coordination and better anchoring of policies and services as important requirements for securing more permanent housing solutions for homeless people. The seven temporary housing shelters being studied represents a variety of organization, size, and central service principals, and their perspectives on the work towards establishing more permanent housing varies as well. In the report, we have classified the housing shelters into four categories: The good shelter, the planning place, the training institution and the house with supporting services. For all of them, the main target groups are people with drug problems and/or mental problems. They have different strategies when it comes to the establishing of mote permanent housing. Some of them work in lines of what have been labelled a Staircase-model, others base their work on what resembles a so-called Chain-model. «The good shelter» experiences a dilemma between the offering of good services and care to people in a difficult life-situation, and the striving towards securing more permanent housing. In the «Training institution» this kind of dilemmas are being solved through a strong weight on long-term working, tolerance and several chances on the road to coping with ones problems. The challenge they face is to secure the process of moving out into permanent housing through a more smooth coordination with the social services. «The planning place» has both as its principle and mandate to offer a temporary place to live. The main principle of work is to map out the situation of the clients, and to secure them a suitable place to live in cooperation with the local social service offices. As in the «Houses with support», this place have developed competence and principles of their work that is very much in accordance with the ideas now dominating Norwegian social housing services. All the studied housing shelters have important relations to both municipal services, in particular the social services. Some of them also cooperate closely with the state health services and other public services. The social services can be an important driving force in the housing work, but according to the shelter staff these services can also in some cases represent a barrier. The housing of problematic groups of clients in temporary shelters can therefore become permanent. An important finding of this study is that the cooperation between social services and temporary housing shelters is of importance to integrate the new strategies from the social housing work into the temporary housing services. At the same time, it is important to strengthen the focus on housing in the social services, and thus secure an understanding of temporary housing shelters as just that, and not places to put away problematic clients for an undefined period. It is also worth listening to the views of the staff at temporary housing shelters, pointing to the lack of adequate housing possibilities in the municipalities. And the most difficult persons to establish good housing for, is the people with the largest and most complex needs