Welcome to Dave’s House

Thanks to Dave’s House, affordable, permanent housing is now available to Floridians recovering from serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Each residence is a place for independence and achievement, a place of acceptance and caring, a place for living at one’s personal best, and . . . a permanent place to call home.

Dave’s House is the name for homes funded by The Brain Foundation of Florida, Inc. (TBF), a not-for-profit organization that purchases houses, apartments and land for development. TBF works with qualified mental healthcare providers, government entities, developers and corporate and community partners throughout Florida to establish supportive housing.

Supportive housing helps save and improve lives, prevent and end homelessness, and halt an expensive and hopeless pattern of dependency on crisis care in hospitals, shelters, and correction facilities. It is the most effective and cost-efficient way to reduce homelessness among the mentally ill.

By gifting houses to qualified behavioral healthcare providers, TBF ensures that tenants’ rent is affordable. By providing supportive housing to complement clinical services, behavioral healthcare providers help to complete a vital continuum of care that can achieve better outcomes for their clients. By committing to renovating and maintaining houses as well or better than the surrounding neighborhood, TBF and its healthcare partners enhance communities.

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Dave’s House is named in memory of the founders’ brother, Dave Jeffreys. At 21 years old, Dave was a smart young man who “should have had the world on a string,” according to his sister, Lin Wilensky. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia in his junior year in college. “I followed my older brother to college and one day when we were in the dining hall, Dave wanted to know why everyone was staring and laughing at him,“ she recalls. “No one was staring or laughing at us or even looking our way.” This hallucination was the beginning of a severe disability he battled for the next 40 years, robbing him of the promising life he was destined for and changing his family’s life forever. Dave’s life was characterized by a series of downward spirals until he found supportive housing.

Dave’s Houses are modeled after the pre-eminent, award-winning housing program in Virginia where Dave lived successfully without any crisis care for 15 years after 25 years of pre-housing instability. See Dave’s House is Changing Lives for Dave’s inspiring story. TBF’s goal is to make supportive housing available to others like Dave so they too can live their best lives possible.