Our Recommendation
We strongly recommend The Other Side Village as a bold, evidence-based response to chronic homelessness that combines permanent housing, a structured therapeutic community, and clear, measurable life changes for residents. Their early results—100% sobriety, 100% employment or vocational engagement, 100% housing stability at one year, 75% health stabilization—put them among the most promising community‑based models in this space.
The Other Side Village meets the requirements for 4 of our 4 key criteria:
✔ Understand the Social Issue
✔ Ultimate Outcome Goals (Life Changes)
✔ Evidence of Success
✔ Counterfactual Impact
The Social Problem
The Other Side Village is tackling chronic homelessness driven by addiction, trauma, mental illness, and long‑term disconnection from work and community. Traditional responses in Salt Lake City and elsewhere often cycle people through shelters, jail, and emergency rooms without delivering stability, recovery, or belonging. The result is premature death, high public costs, neighborhood disorder, and deep suffering for people who have been on the streets the longest.
The Solution
The Other Side Village operates a peer‑led, democratic, therapeutic community that integrates housing, recovery, work, and self-governance in the following ways:
- Provides high‑quality, permanent tiny‑home housing in a purpose‑built neighborhood, coupled with a preparatory stabilization program to prepare residents for independent living.
- Embeds residents in a peer‑run culture of accountability, service, and sobriety, where people support and challenge each other to change deeply ingrained behaviors.
- Offers preliminary Village Prep School, life‑skills, and intensive support for mental health, trauma, and substance use.
- Connects residents to employment and vocational training inside and outside the Village so that work, income, and contribution become central to daily life.
The core bet is that stable housing plus a disciplined, supportive community will produce durable recovery and self‑sufficiency for people who have not succeeded in less intensive models.
Key Outputs
- 538% income growth. Residents’ annual incomes increase more than five‑fold after one year in the program.
- All residents enter a structured stabilization and Village Prep track focused on accountability, sobriety, and life skills. 80% of those residents continue progressing through the program.
- 60 completed housing units in Phase 1.
- Residents participate in daily work, service, and community responsibilities that keep the neighborhood clean, safe, and self‑governing.
Key Outcomes
- 100% housing stability at one year.
- The Village connects residents to jobs and training placements so that 100% of residents are employed or in vocational programs during participation.
- 100% sobriety and recovery. All residents are maintaining sobriety while in the Village model, a critical precursor to health and housing stability.
- 75% health stabilization. On average, residents show a 75% improvement in physical and mental‑health indicators after one year.
- 4.9/5 participant satisfaction. Residents report very high levels of happiness, safety, and well‑being in surveys.
A Sample of Their Impact
- Every formerly chronically homeless resident is maintaining permanent housing after a year in the model, an outcome that far exceeds typical Housing First retention rates in high‑needs populations nation-wide. Utah figures report a 93% housing stability, however.
- In programs that add high‑quality supported employment, employment rates can reach roughly 50–70% of participants working at least part‑time, though those samples are often mixed homeless populations and not exclusively chronically homeless permanent supportive housing tenants.
- Multiple reports on Utah’s permanent supportive housing systems explicitly note that many residents in housing continue to use substances, and that most programs do not require sobriety as a condition of housing. Supportive housing in the US does tend to improve substance‑use outcomes and control compared with usual care or treatment‑first models, but full abstinence for everyone is not the norm.
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