# Strategy Guide — Scenario 110: "Unstable, On Paper"

*Game documentation for a fictional simulation in "The First 90 Days" (Tactic Watch). The family, the case, and every choice below are fictional. This guide is general information about how the scenario is built — it is not legal advice for any real case.*

## (1) The win

**Best ending: "Ending — Stable, On the Record."**

State it honestly: this is a **partial** win, and it is the best this scenario offers. The review records the doubled-up arrangement at Alma's as stable housing with applications pending, and the summary line is corrected on the record — "unstable housing" no longer describes Charise's housing in any copy of the file. Naledi does **not** come home at the end of this ending. Her placement continues and the plan continues. The win is the truthful record, and what it unlocks: every later review, service decision, and filing question now starts from documented stability instead of from an adjective. There is no ending in this scenario where the landlord renews the lease. Anyone selling you one is selling you a different game.

## (2) The route

Verified by walking the scenario graph from the start node (see the verification note at the end). The walk passes, in order, through: The Non-Renewal; The Night Behind the Letter; Four Days of Doors; A Room With a Door; Sign It Like a Lease; Tenant, on Paper; Rent, With a Receipt; A Tenancy, Accumulating; Two Lists, Two Stamps; Pending, With Dates; Unstable, On the Line; Ask for the Housing Entries; What the Entries Omit; Correct It Where It Lives; Filed, Not Just Said; Visits, From Alma's Door; The Framework, Plainly; Date Order, Again; The Review. Key decision points:

1. **Sign It Like a Lease** — *Write and sign the room agreement with Alma, dated, before you move a single box.* Cash −4. Sets **agreementSigned**. The agreement — room, rent, start date (Thursday, October 29, 2026), two signatures — makes the arrangement legible to readers who will never stand in the room.
2. **Rent, With a Receipt** — *Pay by receipt from the first month — dated, signed, room and month named.* Cash −5. Sets **receiptsKept**. A tenancy proving itself one month at a time, in paper created at the time, by the householder.
3. **Two Lists, Two Stamps** — *Apply to both lists and keep the date-stamped copies.* Cash −8. Sets **applicationsDated**. Both applications stamped Friday, November 6, 2026: present housing proved, future housing dated, by two outside offices.
4. **Ask for the Housing Entries** — *Sign the written request for the record — housing entries and draft summary.* Cash −3. Sets **recordsRequested**. This surfaces what the file's entries omit — the agreement, the receipts, the applications, all absent because nothing was ever filed where entries are written from — while the draft summary's adjective is still correctable.
5. **Correct It Where It Lives** — *File the written correction before the review, with the agreement, receipts and applications attached.* Cash −5. Sets **correctionFiled**. Filed weeks ahead, the chronology becomes the draft's new text; the same papers produced at the review would contest, at a discount.
6. **The Review** — *Present the documented housing — agreement, receipts, stamped applications, and the correction filed before today.* This choice is flag-gated: it is only available with **agreementSigned** + **applicationsDated** + **recordsRequested** + **correctionFiled** all set. It leads to **Ending — Stable, On the Record**.

Supporting route choices that cost nothing and keep the route honest: noting the plan's housing line word for word at **Unstable, On the Line** (the correction is later built out of the exact sentence it corrects), and keeping the arrangement exactly as documented — receipts monthly, visits kept from Alma's door — through **Visits, From Alma's Door**, so the corrected file is also a lived-up-to file.

## (3) Why this wins — the law as it is supposed to work

Only principles from the scenario's verified set are stated here:

- **The review decides housing inside the determinations the law assigns it** — the continuing necessity of placement, compliance with the permanency plan, progress toward alleviating the circumstances that caused placement, and whether reasonable efforts were made to finalize the plan (42 Pa.C.S. § 6351(f)(1), (2), (3), (5.1)). Housing sits inside several of those at once, which is why one adjective on a summary line is never a small thing — and why a documented record lets the findings be made truthfully.
- **The case record is available on written request** — 55 Pa. Code § 3130.44(d) ("shall be released upon request"). Step 4 is that right, exercised in writing: it converts the entries' omissions from a suspicion into a quotable text, weeks before the review reads the summary built from them.
- **Counsel files the correction where summaries are written from** (42 Pa.C.S. § 6337). Ms. Solano's correction is a chronology with attachments — landlord's letter, agreement, receipts, stamps — not an argument that a cousin's spare room is a palace.
- **The federal timeline's services exception is record-dependent, and the route treats it that way.** Housing assistance was a service in Naledi's plan; its documented gap is now part of this record. If a filing question ever arises at fifteen of the most recent twenty-two months, the filing duty changes *unless* an exception is documented — including where services the agency was required to provide were not provided (42 U.S.C. § 675(5)(E)). The route asserts no filing date (Naledi's entry date is never stated in the scenario) and predicts no filing outcome; it simply makes sure the gap, if it ever matters, is a document and not a recollection. Any termination filing would still have to be proven on its own grounds.

## (4) The traps

1. **Moving in on a handshake at "Sign It Like a Lease"** because a handshake and a key are enough between cousins. In the house, they are. In the file, an unwritten arrangement has the documentary weight of a rumor — true, warmly believed, unprovable. Cost: no **agreementSigned**, and the best presentation at the review closes.
2. **Paying across the kitchen at "Rent, With a Receipt."** The rent is paid and two people know it. The file knows nothing, because nothing told it in any form it keeps. Cost: no **receiptsKept** — the tenancy's performance, month by month, is exactly what a skeptical reader asks for next.
3. **Settling in before applying at "Two Lists, Two Stamps"** because the lists will still be there next month. They will be — stamped next month, and a review that convenes first reads a file with no applications in it: a present with no dated future, which is the opening the word "unstable" walks through. Cost: no **applicationsDated**, and the best presentation closes.
4. **Producing the folder at the review instead of filing the correction at "Correct It Where It Lives."** The papers are real; the room still reads the printed line first and prices everything produced live as an argument against it. That route reaches **"Ending — The Line Stands."** Accepting the room's suggestion to enter a shelter to be counted as housed reaches **"Ending — Housed, by Definition"**: the line is satisfied in its own vocabulary, at the price of the arrangement that was actually stable.

## (5) What no strategy controls

Whether the landlord renews (he does not, in any route — the letter is the story's given); whether Alma exists, and is steady, and is willing to sign — a piece of luck no packet manufactures; whether a different review weighs a doubled-up room more skeptically even on complete paper; whether the housing lists move in months or in seasons. Naledi's own experience of month nine — a five-year-old visiting a mother whose address changed because a landlord's letter said so — is not controlled by any of this either. What the route controls is narrower: when housing was lost through no act of the mother's, the arrangement that replaced it was documented as it was built — signed, receipted, applied from — and corrected into the file before a summary could finish the story with one word. Outcomes in this system turn on workers, judges, landlords, and luck as much as on any parent's choices. This one turned, in part, on a receipt book and two date stamps.

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*Verification: this route was walked programmatically against `scenario-110.json` — each named choice was followed from the start node in order; every intermediate node and choice exists; every flag-gated choice's requirements were satisfied by flags set earlier on the walk (flags at the ending: agreementSigned, applicationsDated, correctionFiled, receiptsKept, recordsRequested); cash never went negative on the walk. Walked path: start → letter_close → search_days → fern_door → agreement_choice → agreement_signed → move_day → receipts_kept → applications_choice → applications_done → plan_line → records_fork → record_arrives → correction_choice → correction_filed → visits_meanwhile → review_prep → packet_assembly → review → end_win. The walk terminates at the ending node titled "Ending — Stable, On the Record" after visiting 20 nodes, with $130 of the $160 starting cash remaining.*