Index of articles from Housing Works

Over 30,000 New Yorkers with AIDS and HIV currently live in shelters, on the streets or in severely inadequate housing. Common sense and public health principles dictate that people with AIDS and HIV are entitled to decent, affordable housing and to the services they need to remain stable, healthy and independent. Yet society's response to this crisis has been late and inadequate.

What Is Housing Works?

Housing Works is a minority-controlled, community-based, not-for-profit corporation providing housing, health care, advocacy, job training, and vital supportive services to homeless New Yorkers living with HIV and AIDS. When Housing Works was founded nearly a decade ago, there were fewer than 350 units of supportive housing for the estimated 30,000 homeless people with AIDS and HIV who were living in New York City. AIDS was fast becoming a primary cause of homelessness in the United States. Thousands lived on the streets or in dangerous, squalid, and disease-ridden shelters, with no access to health care or social services. A woeful lack of effective HIV prevention/education programs -- as well as an increasingly high incidence of intravenous drug use and survival sex, both as a cause of and a response to homelessness -- led to tragically predictable and dramatic increases in HIV-infection among the city's homeless. Housing Works was founded in June 1990 as an outgrowth of the Housing Committee of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), to address the burgeoning crises of homelessness and AIDS, and to restore the fundamental human rights of homeless people with AIDS and HIV through innovative advocacy and direct service programs.

Today, Housing Works ...

... is the nation's largest minority-controlled AIDS service organization. Our mission is to reach the most vulnerable and under served among those affected by the AIDS epidemic in New York City -- primarily homeless persons of color whose positive HIV diagnoses are complicated by a history of chronic mental illness and/or chemical dependence -- and provide them with a comprehensive range of services designed to help them gain stability, independence, and dignity, and improve their overall health. At the heart of our mission is our commitment to advocating for the systemic changes necessary in public attitudes, policies and laws to ensure that AIDS and public health policies at all levels of government are both sound in concept and equitable in administration.

Over the past decade, we have:

• housed over 2,500 individuals and provided one-time or ongoing services for an additional 5,000;

• attracted nationwide recognition for developing innovative, client-centered models of housing and services for hard-to-reach populations;

• been consistently regarded as the leading advocate in New York State for the rights of our constituency;

• created New York State's first and most successful job training and placement program for homeless people with AIDS/HIV; and

• become pioneers in the nonprofit trend toward social entrepreneurship.

Housing Works is dedicated to developing and refining a self-sustaining model of housing, serving, and advocating for homeless people with AIDS and HIV -- and remains firmly devoted to ending the twin crises of homelessness and AIDS.

How to Reach Housing Works

Housing Works, Inc.
320 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10014
Phone: (212) 645-8111 Fax: (212) 645-8750
TTY users call (212) 925-9560
E-mail: smith-caronia@housingworks.org