A call to fellow organizers: Don’t replicate the exclusions we’re all fighting against.
The progressive left has correctly diagnosed the housing crisis. We understand that Wall Street landlords and private equity firms have transformed homes into profit centers. We recognize that decades of federal disinvestment have engineered record homelessness — 771,480 people in January 2024 alone, up 18% in one year. We’re rightfully outraged that half of renters pay more than they can afford while corporate landlords bank record profits lobbying against rent control and tenant protections.
We’ve also correctly identified a key solution: social housing. Permanently affordable housing under public and community control, protected from speculation, democratically governed. From Seattle to Atlanta, organizers are winning policies rooted in decommodification and community power. This is the fight of our generation, and we’re making real progress.
But we need to ask our fellow organizers a hard question: social housing for whom?
Because here’s what one of the co-authors sees from his vantage point leading VOCAL, an organization building power with people directly impacted by homelessness, substance use, mental health crises, incarceration, and disability — often all of these simultaneously, the folks living on the absolute fringes. He sees social housing policies being developed across the country that, however well-intentioned, are sometimes replicating the same exclusions that have defined affordable housing for decades.
Let us be clear. We’re not just facing a housing crisis. We’re living through interconnected crises of incarceration, substance use, and mental health — and housing is central to all of them. A third of Americans with mental illness can’t access or afford treatment, often leading directly to housing instability. Overdose deaths remain tragically high even as they decline from historic peaks. Over 150 cities have passed laws, following the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision, to ticket or arrest people forced to live on the streets because they cannot afford housing. This feeds people directly from encampments into jails and back to the streets in a brutal, expensive cycle.
VOCAL members know these realities intimately. They’ve cycled through emergency rooms, jails, detox centers, and shelters — systems that spend thousands per person monthly without ever offering actual homes. They’ve been swept from encampments, arrested for sleeping in public, and told they need to “get clean” before they can access housing. They’ve faced discrimination for criminal records, gaps in rental history, or simply being honest about their disabilities and support needs.
And now, as we organize for social housing, we have watched our movement sometimes design programs that could exclude these same people all over again — not with intent, but by omission.
That’s why VOCAL-US and The Action Lab worked on a new report, “The Way Home: Supportive Social Housing,” calling on the social housing movement to intentionally integrate supportive services and accessibility planning from day one — not as afterthoughts, but as core features.
The report highlights what our members already know from lived experience and what rigorous research confirms: supportive housing works. Denver’s five-year randomized study found that providing permanent housing with integrated voluntary services led to 34% fewer police contacts, 40% fewer arrests, 30% fewer jail stays, and over 80% housing retention rates — with roughly half the program costs offset by reduced emergency service spending. Finland’s nationwide Housing First approach, running since 2008, has made it the only European country where homelessness consistently declines.
But more than statistics, the report centers voices and experiences from VOCAL members, who have experienced tremendous strain and the impact of supportive housing. These aren’t edge cases. These are our people. Our neighbors. Our family members. The people left behind — or worse — by decades of disinvestment and failed public policy, only to be used as scapegoats and political pawns for cuts to the safety net and increases to bloated police budgets.
So here’s our challenge to fellow travelers in housing justice work: we cannot build social housing that excludes people with disabilities, people experiencing homelessness, people returning from incarceration, people struggling with mental health and substance use. If our social housing doesn’t serve the most marginalized, we’re not truly building social housing — we’re building slightly cheaper apartments for people already close to market access.
Avoiding this means getting specific and deliberate in our planning. It means requiring housing authorities to conduct disability impact assessments and demographic analyses of who’s actually being served. It means embedding universal design principles — zero-step entrances, wider doorways, flexible spaces — from day one, not as expensive retrofits. It means creating pathways for people with fixed or limited incomes to participate, integrating rental subsidies into our models. It means designing programs to work with existing health and human services systems so individual projects aren’t reinventing wheels.
And critically, it means asking the right questions from the start: are we talking with people who need supportive housing as we develop campaigns? Are our regulations compatible with existing programs or will they create new barriers? How can people with criminal records, eviction histories, or no credit access our housing? And maybe most critically, how can these services benefit all residents of social housing programs so that those struggling in silence can get the care they need before their life is upended.
We want to be clear about what we are not saying. We are not arguing that every single social housing project must serve every possible need or population. That’s neither realistic nor necessary. But as a movement culture and organizational commitment, we must ensure these considerations are embedded across our work. Some projects will focus on seniors, others on families, others on specific community needs. But the overall portfolio must reach people with disabilities, people experiencing homelessness, people coming home from incarceration, or we’ve failed.
The beautiful thing about social housing is that it gives us the opportunity to do this right from the beginning. We’re not working within the constraints of existing broken systems. We’re building new ones. We can design coordinated funding streams where serving people with complex needs is the default, not the exception requiring heroic workarounds. We can create streamlined pathways specifically for non-market housing with integrated services. We can put coordination burdens on public systems instead of vulnerable individuals navigating bureaucracy.
But only if we’re intentional. Only if we center the most marginalized in our planning, not as afterthoughts once buildings are designed and programs launched.
The corporate landlords and private equity firms we’re organizing against have no interest in housing our friends and family who have struggled through trauma and alienation. That’s precisely why we must. The choice before us is whether to build social housing that meets the needs of millions and truly embodies the democratic, inclusive, accessible vision we claim — or to replicate the same exclusions under a progressive banner.
We have the evidence. We have proven models. We have the organizing momentum. What we need now is the political courage and movement discipline to ensure that as we win social housing, we win it for everyone — especially those most excluded from the current system.
The way home exists. Let’s make sure the door is actually open when our most vulnerable neighbors arrive.
