The Challenges of Bridging Audacious Vision to Operational Reality
The vision for PERIS Hill was ambitious: a beautiful, integrated housing community where young people aging out of foster care could build stability, autonomy, and belonging. At the center of that vision were dignity, choice, and a belief in young people's capacity to grow when given time, trust, and support.
As we moved from concept to daily operation, our vision encountered the realities of implementation. What had felt coherent and aligned on paper now had to function within a complex web of funding requirements, neighborhood dynamics, service delivery systems, property management norms, and human relationships.
Funders Expectations and the Pressure to Linearize
One challenge that emerges in any housing development is related to funding sources and compliance requirements that may or may not align with mission.
An early decision for PERIS was whether or not to pursue funding sources that would require use of Coordinated Entry for tenant referrals. Coordinated Entry is designed to serve people already experiencing homelessness—and it is essential to a robust homelessness response system. But its outcome frameworks and eligibility logic are built around crisis response.
PERIS Hill was designed to meet a different moment in the continuum, intervening before crisis rather than after it. We wanted to welcome direct referrals from Hennepin County’s Extended Foster Care system and other service providers. That distinction, while clear in principle, created real friction when funders and systems accustomed to crisis-response frameworks encountered a model operating upstream of them.
The tension was visible even in the capital stack: PERIS Hill pursued its tax credit allocation through the City of Minneapolis rather than Minnesota’s Housing Finance Agency, in part because the City was able to honor the program's preventive referral process.
The work of healing, trust-building, and skill development is cyclical rather than linear—and a model designed around that reality needs funders and accountability structures that can hold it.
Neighborhood Dynamics and the Limits of Integration
The vision for PERIS Hill emphasized community integration and belonging. In practice, neighborhood concerns shaped how that integration unfolded. While some neighbors were supportive of PERIS Hill from the beginning, some raised objections during the planning and development process—concerns that at times felt more like resistance to the presence of a building serving low income residents and young people who had experienced foster care, than good-faith engagement.
Among the consequences: height restrictions imposed through the process limited the number of floors and units the building could include, and other modifications altered outdoor space and the building's overall footprint. Some of these adjustments reinforced feelings of othering among residents, while others heightened tensions around autonomy, oversight, and control.
The experience underscored an important lesson: integration is not achieved through proximity alone. It requires shared understanding, intentional relationship-building, and ongoing attention to power dynamics—both inside and outside the building. Over time, we have continued to forge relationships with the neighbors, often successfully, through attending neighborhood association meetings and sharing our vision and updates, hosting an open house, and throwing block parties every summer.
Service Philosophy Meets Practice
Another critical challenge surfaced in the delivery of supportive services. The initial service provider brought genuine care and experience to the work, but operated from a framework that emphasized structure, risk management, and protective policies. In a building designed to feel like home rather than a program, that approach created unanticipated tension.
The tension surfaced most clearly in feedback from young people themselves. Youth described feeling watched rather than supported and pointed specifically to policies like guest restrictions as the source. What was designed as protection was experienced, by some, as a continuation of the surveillance and control they were hoping to leave behind.
That feedback led to adjustments in our service model and eventually helped inform a transition to a service provider whose approach was more closely aligned with the model's relational and dignity-centered commitments. The lesson was not that structure is wrong, but that structure experienced as distrust undermines the very stability it is meant to support.
Systematic Fragmentation in Daily Life
The idea of wraparound support within one housing community sounded straightforward in theory. In practice, it collided with the realities of siloed systems. Health care, mental health services, education, employment programs, and income supports each operated with their own eligibility rules, timelines, and philosophies. No single organization—or staff member—could fully hold or coordinate it all.
PERIS Hill was forced to make ongoing decisions about what could realistically be provided in-house and what had to be navigated externally. In this way, the building became not just a place to live, but a site where systemic gaps were made visible in real time.
Partnership Transitions and Organizational Alignment
As with most supportive housing projects, the relationship between the service provider and the property management function at PERIS Hill has never been incidental. From the outset, the building's physical operations and the delivery of supportive services were held by separate entities—partners that each held distinct roles, distinct accountability structures, and distinct theories of how best to support young people, which at times led to conflict.
Since we opened in 2021, we have transitioned both of those key partnerships, finding partner organizations that can effectively do the work while holding the values at the heart of PERIS’s work. The decisions to transition were a recognition that alignment between service philosophy and model values is not a nice-to-have; it is a structural requirement.
PERIS Foundation operates functionally as the owner/operator of the building but is also, in this case, the steward of the PERIS Hill model. In that position as both steward and mediator, PERIS Foundation leadership navigates a recurring challenge: holding the building's financial and operational health while also holding the integrity of a service philosophy that is not yet fully articulated or realized. Knowing that relationships are at the heart of the work, PERIS leadership is onsite regularly, meeting with staff, reinforcing relationships, and collaborating to execute the model with integrity–not perfection but integrity.
That challenge is not a sign of dysfunction. It is, in many ways, the defining condition of a model that sits at the intersection of housing, services, and youth development—and that refuses to subordinate any one of those to the others.
Summary
The challenges that emerged as we took PERIS Hill from vision to reality reflect not flaws in intention, but the inherent complexity of a multi-agency, mixed-income, youth-centered supportive housing model. Those challenges, and the subsequent lessons learned, will continue to guide refinement of the PERIS approach and offer valuable insight for communities seeking to replicate or adapt the model.
Ultimately, PERIS Hill’s early implementation period reinforces a simple but essential truth: innovative work is relational work, and its success depends as much on the alignment and human capacity of partners as on the strength of the model itself.
Written by Carla Godwin - Director | PERIS Foundation
& Nora F. Murphy - PhD