Promoting resident well-being in permanent supportive housing: insights from community-driven indicators

Introduction Processes for integrating the perspectives of people with lived experiences of homelessness into the evaluation of permanent supportive housing (PSH) remain underdeveloped. This study pilots the Firsthand Framework for Policy Innovation (FFPI), a participatory measurement approach that generates resident-defined indicators of well-being directly from residents’ own language.Methods Partnering with five Bay Area PSH properties, we conducted ten focus groups (n = 98) where residents discussed how they know when things are – or are not – going well in their buildings. This process yielded 646 resident-generated “Firsthand Indicators,” which were thematically coded into five domains. In a second stage, residents at three properties (n = 66) voted on the indicators they believed best captured community well-being.Results FFPI proved to be an effective and accessible method for eliciting resident priorities, surfacing themes that both converge with and extend existing qualitative research on PSH residents’ experiences. FFPI's outputs translated directly into a measurement tool now being piloted by PSH operators.Conclusion This pilot demonstrates that FFPI offers PSH operators a systematic, resident-centered approach to evaluation – one that moves from qualitative narrative to actionable, deployable measures – helping providers allocate scarce resources strategically toward the factors residents themselves identify as most critical to their well-being.