For courts, hospitals and programs: what you get when you refer to Smart Step

You place people in housing — from a court, a hospital, a recovery program, a jail release, or a caseload. You have been let down by a housing provider before: the bed that was not there, the person discharged at 9pm with nowhere to go, the operator who would not return a call, or the one who told you things about your client they had no right to tell you.

This is what referring to Smart Step actually gets you, and where we are deliberately less convenient than an operator with fewer scruples.

Open beds are published, by house, and kept current. You are not phoning around to discover availability, and you are not told a bed exists so that a call gets booked.

If you refer regularly, you can have an account: live status on every person you have sent us, document upload, and outcomes for your own referrals. Not aggregate marketing numbers — yours.

We will not tell you how your client is doing without a signed, dated release from them. Not as a general policy that bends for a familiar caller — as a rule the software enforces. Every read of a resident's compliance record is written to an audit log with the name of who read it and when.

This is occasionally frustrating, and it is the single most important thing on this page. A provider who will discuss your client with you without a release is a provider who will discuss your client with someone else. The discipline that inconveniences you is the same discipline that makes the placement worth trusting — and it is why residents tell us things they would not tell an operator with a looser reputation.

If your client is prescribed medication as part of their recovery, they are eligible here. They will not be asked to taper, to stop, or to keep it quiet as a condition of a bed.

This is worth checking with every operator you use, because it is not universal and the answer is often softer than the practice. Federal law is not ambiguous on it — someone taking medication under a prescriber's supervision is not an illegal drug user, and excluding them on that basis is disability discrimination. The Department of Justice has settled cases on exactly this pattern.

• Not a medical or counselling provider. We provide housing, structure, peer accountability, and connection to services other people deliver. If your client needs medical care, we are the place they live while receiving it, not the place they receive it.
• Not a locked setting, and not a substitute for supervision. Residents come and go for work, school and appointments.
• Not free. There is a weekly program fee, and applicants are told every figure in writing before they commit to anything.
• Not able to hold a bed indefinitely. Tell us the realistic date and we will tell you honestly whether we can hold it.

• Consent is enforced by software and audited, not promised in a policy document nobody reads.
• Published house standards, resident rights and grievance process — your client can read the rules before agreeing to them, and so can you.
• A named person answers, rather than a general inbox.
• Response to a return to use is a written, graduated process rather than an immediate discharge to the street, which is both safer for your client and less likely to land back on your caseload next month.
• Unconfirmed facts on this site are shown as gaps rather than filled with plausible numbers. Anyone can write a success rate on a website.

Or ask about an account if you place people regularly.