Mr. Quintana, 41, has worked as an organizer for community-based housing and tenant groups, and managed the Borough President's field office in upper Manhattan.

We made a series of recommendations, including moving adult home residents to community-based housing.

About 300 others will be released from all four hospitals and placed in community-based housing, including group homes, residential health care centers and supervised apartments.

The Stabilization Trust is sponsored by six non-profit organizations with national reputations for innovation in community-based housing and economic development.

For more than a decade, the city and state have fought over who should pay to develop the supported, community-based housing for patients who are not eligible to live in the state's shrunken hospital system.

Assemblyman Steven Sanders, a Manhattan Democrat who is the chairman of the Mental Health Committee and a strong supporter of community-based housing, called the Government's investigation "a fishing expedition."

The greatest shortcoming of deinstitutionalization was not seeing the need for and developing community-based therapeutic housing.

Creating therapeutic community-based housing is expensive; the alternative is unacceptable.

Those who moved into community-based housing were more likely to get jobs, ride public transportation, go to restaurants and otherwise integrate into society.

But in recent years, the policy is widely believed to have been a significant factor in the growth of homelessness, as financing and community-based housing failed to keep pace.