“In the beginning, it was annoying,” McCrea said, about Bellinger’s visits. “It took time for me to realize he was actually helping me.”

Living in a community, rather than living independently on the streets, can be life-changing. BCHS focuses on building a community in their buildings, and making sure residents feel comfortable there, with both neighbors and staff. Residents slowly begin to get to know social workers and their neighbors. They join in-house groups like a horticultural society or a coffee club or a group for FUSE members. They attend holiday dinners or monthly floor meetings, all of which are optional. If someone disappears for a few days, their neighbors can tell the social workers they are concerned, and the social workers can check in.

Buildings are structured to promote shared spaces where people can spend time and talk to friends and neighbors, encouraging people to leave their rooms and socialize, Nemetsky said. McCrea shares a kitchen and bathroom with other tenants, and Bellinger has meetings with them to talk about the challenges that arise.

Critics of so-called Housing First programs like this one, which give people homes without requiring them to first get sober or deal with their mental illnesses, say that people will become homeless again because housing alone doesn’t solve all the problems people face. But supportive-housing organizations like BCHS address this criticism by strongly focusing on building the community and networks so that people feel safe and secure, and are motivated to address the underlying issues that made them homeless.

“In additional to concrete services, we’re really trying to create a sense of community for all of the formerly homeless residents,” Nemetsky said. “We really use this as a programmatic model and a clinical approach."

For most people coming into supportive housing from the streets, the first six months can be challenging. Sometimes, they’ll continue to sleep on the streets and use their bed infrequently, Nemetsky said. They may test boundaries, since when they were homeless they had to develop survival skills to push people away. But the social workers have patience, and usually, residents settle down and become like almost any other tenant.

“If you think about any of us living in the community, when we had a bad day, we have somebody we can talk to, it doesn’t have to be a worker, it can be a neighbor or friend,” Nemetsky said. “That’s part of what we’re doing, and what supportive housing is doing, is creating those interpersonal relationships so those crises don’t build up. When someone’s having a bad day, they can talk to their neighbor, their friend.”

I also visited the Prince George, a historical hotel on East 27th street in Manhattan that has been turned into a mixed supportive-housing and low-income-housing building. I spoke to Calvin Bennett, who has been in a wheelchair since a kidney transplant last year, in the ornate lobby, which has intricately decorated columns and wood paneling on the walls. Bennett says he had been caught up in getting and using drugs when he lived on the streets, and had ignored the outreach workers who came around trying to get him and others into shelters. Then one day, an outreach worker with Breaking Ground told Bennett that in the time since they’d last seen each other, the worker had helped another man find permanent housing. That struck Bennett as significant. So he started the long process of going through the paperwork to apply for an apartment in the Prince George. He moved in about seven years ago.