I'm having some difficulty with the Transitional housing status as it appears in HIFIS, in particular whether it homeless or housed.

First of all, the transitional category is too broad, since it incorporates institutional situations (i.e. hospital, jail) as well as actual transitional housing, and communities might want some of these things to count as homeless and other ones to count as housed.

However, the bigger issue I'm having is now that I've looked at it more, I'm realizing that  whether transitional counts as homeless or counts as housed.  Especially since it's causing headaches for communities.

First, let's ask the question, where does a client's housing status come up? Well, on the client profile, it lists their status as one of 5: housed, homeless, chronically homeless, transitional, or unknown. So in this case, it doesn't matter what setting the community uses.

Where else? On the Coordinated Access module and related functions. But the CA module includes clients who are housed, chronic, and unknown. It specifically excludes those who are housed. So all this module is doing is checking to see, if the setting says that transitional counts as housed, then exclude it. But it seems to me that it would be simpler to just have a filter - there's lots of filters in the CA module already - and have the user generating the CA list to indicate whether they want to include or exclude those with transitional housing status at the time of generation. For that matter, I would suggest making it a multiple select field, and basically just say: show only clients with the following housing statuses. And then the user could use that one single field to indicate whether they want to show only chronic, or chronic + homeless, or chronic + homeless + unknown, or chronic + homeless + transitional, etc.

Finally, and here's the big kicker. Days spent transitionally homeless do not count towards a client's number of days homeless in the past year/3 years, so they don't result in the client becoming chronically homeless. I know that there's debate as to whether it should or shouldn't. But my logic is: if a community says, yes, in my community transitional  then shouldn't the days they spend being transitional actually count as homelessness?

I don't have a specific action that I want taken as a result of this email. I just know that you guys are currently reviewing things like transitional housing, the category for Reaching Home and the RROL report (and hopefully reviewing my other comments about chronic homelessness status and unknown housing status!), and so I thought I'd add this to the pile while you consider.