Pathway 04 · Learn

A society where everyone has a home

If housing markets cause homelessness and housing-first interventions end it, then ending homelessness at scale is a policy question — what we build, who we protect, and how we pay for it. The map from here to a society where everyone has a home is real. It runs through housing supply, tenant protections, funding mechanisms, and the political will to use them.

A policy choice, not a fact of life

Americans tend to treat homelessness as a permanent feature of urban life, like weather. It isn't. Finland has reduced long-term homelessness to near zero. Vienna houses most of its residents in well-built, well-maintained social housing. Tokyo, by building enormous quantities of housing every year, has kept rents flat for two decades and homelessness extremely low despite being one of the densest cities on earth. Singapore, Japan, and Austria all have policy regimes that would be considered radical by US standards and produce housing outcomes that are not radical at all.

Within the US, individual communities have ended homelessness for specific subpopulations — Bergen County NJ for chronic and veteran homelessness; the VA, working with HUD, has reduced veteran homelessness nationally by more than half since 2010. These results were produced by deciding to do it, building the system to do it, and funding the system long enough to do it. Nothing about ending homelessness at scale is mysterious. It is a political and budgetary problem dressed up as a technical one.

Housing supply: build more, in more places

If the housing market causes homelessness, the most fundamental long-term intervention is producing more housing — particularly at the low end of the rental market that is currently unbuildable in most US cities because of zoning, land cost, and construction cost.

Three approaches with the strongest evidence:

• Zoning reform. Many US cities have made it illegal to build anything but a single-family home on most of their residential land. Easing these restrictions — legalizing duplexes, triplexes, accessory dwelling units, and modest apartment buildings in single-family zones — adds units in the locations that need them most. Minneapolis, Oregon, and California have done this at various scales; early results show meaningful rent moderation in the affected areas.
• Direct public housing investment. The US largely stopped building public housing in the 1990s and shifted to voucher-based subsidies. Most peer countries did not stop. Direct production of subsidized rental housing — by public, nonprofit, or "social housing" entities — adds units at price points the private market doesn't serve.
• Social housing models. Vienna houses roughly 60% of its residents in subsidized rental housing that is well-designed, mixed-income, and permanently affordable. Singapore houses about 80% in HDB flats. These aren't "projects" in the US sense — they are the standard form of housing in those places, and they keep the bottom of the market accessible.

Tenant protections that keep people housed

The cheapest housing is the apartment someone already lives in. Tenant protections reduce homelessness by reducing the number of people displaced into it.

Right to counsel in eviction court

New York City became the first US jurisdiction to guarantee legal representation in eviction proceedings, starting in 2017. Tenants with lawyers win or settle dramatically more often than tenants without. Citywide eviction filings and eviction warrants both dropped substantially after the program rolled out. Several states and cities have followed; the early evidence is consistent.

Just-cause eviction

Just-cause eviction laws require landlords to have a specific reason — nonpayment, lease violation, owner move-in — before evicting. They prevent retaliatory and arbitrary evictions, particularly for tenants who report code violations or organize. New Jersey, California, Oregon, and Washington have variations.

Rent stabilization

Limits on year-over-year rent increases for existing tenants. The empirical literature is mixed on the long-run housing supply effects of rent control, but the short-run effects on tenant stability — particularly preventing displacement of low-income elderly tenants — are well-documented. Most economists view modest, well-designed rent stabilization (capping annual increases, allowing vacancy decontrol) as a tool that reduces displacement at some cost to new construction; aggressive rent control with strict caps has clearer downsides.

Emergency rental assistance

Short-term cash assistance for households at risk of eviction. The COVID-era ERAP program distributed roughly $46 billion in rental assistance and is widely credited with preventing a feared wave of evictions and homelessness during the pandemic. Permanent, funded emergency rental assistance at smaller scale exists in some cities and is one of the highest-leverage prevention tools available.

Funding mechanisms and the federal voucher gap

The largest US housing assistance program is the Housing Choice Voucher program (formerly "Section 8"). Vouchers cover the difference between 30% of a household's income and the market rent of a modest apartment. They work — voucher holders have substantially better housing outcomes than comparable households without — but the program is funded at a level that reaches roughly one in four eligible households.

This is the single biggest leverage point in US housing policy. Universal vouchers — funded for every eligible household, in the way SNAP food assistance is — would substantially reduce homelessness, housing instability, and severe rent burden. The Congressional Budget Office and academic researchers have estimated the cost; it is large but well within the range of programs the federal government routinely funds. The barrier is political, not technical or fiscal.

Local funding mechanisms have also emerged. Los Angeles County's Measure H, Seattle's JumpStart payroll tax, and various state-level funds have created sustained homelessness funding streams independent of federal appropriations. They are imperfect but they show that the funding gap is closable at multiple levels of government.

Right to housing as a legal principle

Several countries enshrine a right to housing in their constitutions or statutes — Finland, South Africa, France, Scotland. These rights have varying enforcement strength, but in the strongest cases (Scotland's homelessness duty, which requires local authorities to provide housing to people who are unintentionally homeless) they have produced real reductions in street homelessness.

In the US, the right to housing is not constitutionally established at the federal level. Some state constitutions and statutes contain related provisions. The 2024 Supreme Court decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson went the opposite direction, holding that cities may enforce anti-camping laws regardless of shelter availability — a setback for the legal-rights framing. The argument for a federal right to housing continues, but the near-term political environment is unfavorable.

The role of business, healthcare, faith communities

Housing supply and tenant protections are the structural levers. Inside them, several sectors have outsized influence on whether the system holds together at the community level:

• Healthcare systems are increasingly investing in housing directly. Hospitals that pay $30,000/night for psychiatric or ICU admissions have a clear financial interest in housing their highest-utilizing patients; Kaiser Permanente, Boston Medical Center, and several health systems have launched housing investment programs with documented reductions in their own costs.
• Employers in tight labor markets benefit when their workers can afford to live near their jobs. Some have funded workforce housing or supported zoning reform; many more could.
• Faith communities have historically built and operated significant amounts of affordable housing on church land. Recent zoning reforms in California and Washington explicitly permit this on faith-owned land that was previously restricted.
• Philanthropies have the flexibility to fund the parts of the system that government grants don't reach — prevention, advocacy, research, innovation. The most effective ones fund evidence-based interventions and avoid being captured by ideology.
• The press shapes the political environment. Coverage that consistently frames homelessness as personal disorder produces different politics than coverage that consistently frames it as a housing market failure.

The political economy of housing scarcity

Why has the US not solved this? The deeper answer involves a series of compounding political-economy facts:

First, housing has been the primary vehicle of middle-class wealth-building in the US since the GI Bill. For tens of millions of homeowners, the value of their largest asset depends on housing being scarce in their neighborhood. This creates an active constituency for policies — restrictive zoning, opposition to dense development, opposition to affordable housing siting — that maintain scarcity. The constituency is well-organized at the local level (where most zoning happens), older, wealthier, and more likely to vote.

Second, the people most harmed by housing scarcity — renters, the housing-insecure, the homeless — are younger, poorer, and less politically organized. They have fewer resources to bring to local zoning fights and a much shorter time horizon: by the time the dense development they advocated for is built, they may have already been displaced.

Third, the federal shift from building public housing to issuing vouchers (mostly in the 1980s–90s) tied housing assistance to the existing private market. When that market doesn't produce units at the price points vouchers can pay, the vouchers become useless. The shift also broke the political constituency for direct housing production.

Fourth, the structure of US federalism diffuses responsibility. Federal funds for housing assistance flow to states and local CoCs; the rules for what gets built where are local; the consequences of failure show up on streets that are politically inconvenient for everyone involved. No level of government has clear ownership of "homelessness," which means each can plausibly blame the others.

None of these facts is fixed. The political economy of housing can shift — and is shifting, slowly, as a younger generation of voters whose lives have been shaped by housing scarcity comes into political influence. Several states have passed zoning reform in the last five years that would have been politically impossible a decade ago.

What you can do

The honest answer is that what you can do depends on what kind of leverage you have. A few specific paths by role:

As a voter

Local elections — mayor, city council, county commission, planning commission — decide whether housing gets built, where, how dense, and on what terms. They are also the elections with the lowest turnout. Voting consistently in local primaries for candidates who support housing supply and tenant protections is one of the highest-leverage things a person can do.

As a community member

Show up to zoning hearings and write to your council members when an affordable housing project, ADU reform, or zoning change is on the agenda. Opposition to housing in local hearings is well-organized and well-attended. Support is usually neither. Tipping that balance is one of the cheapest political acts available.

As a donor

Local CoCs, Housing First nonprofits, eviction defense funds, and tenant rights organizations all do effective work and are persistently under-funded relative to need. National organizations focused on policy (National Alliance to End Homelessness, National Low Income Housing Coalition, National Housing Law Project) advance the structural reforms.

As an employer or institutional leader

The faith community / hospital / employer levers above are real. If you sit in one of those institutions, the question is whether your organization is using its land, its capital, or its political voice on this.

As a person who is housed

Talk about it accurately. Most of what circulates publicly about homelessness is wrong — the personal-failure framing, the magnet theory, the "they choose this" story, the assumption that nothing works. The political environment shifts when enough people are willing to push back on those casually, in conversation, with the actual evidence. That is also something you can do.