The state of housing justice and public health is nothing short of a political polycrisis. A term defined as a “cluster of distinct crises that interact in ways that they and/or their effects tend to reinforce each other.” Michael D. Durham of Funders Together for Housing Justice used this term to describe the intersection of homelessness, overdose, and unmet mental health needs, because lawmakers are each crisis to exacerbate the other. This was made even more clear by the administration’s decision to deploy the national guard to displace unhoused communities and divert funding towards carceral punishment instead of proven, housing first strategies.
Movement leaders on May 2025 webinar hosted by Funders Together for Housing Justice and Democratizing Development Program offered a warning call for funders to resource integrated powerbuilding, narrative, legal, and policy strategies. Speakers from National Homelessness Law Center, VOCAL-US, and Drug Policy Alliance offered a sobering assessment: infotainment media outlets and lawmakers are leading a coordinated campaign to fuel public perceptions of chaotic, unchecked urban communities to profit off of the erosion of democratic institutions and discard proven community-based solutions that address public health and housing precarity.
Between 2020 and 2024, funding for homelessness and housing development rose to about $19.2 billion, and funding specifically for anti-homelessness programming reached $9.4billion. Movement groups have questioned how accessible and effective resources are in addressing the root causes of homelessness and housing precarity. Program strategies of funders often focus on single-issue strategies such as policy to protect, produce, or preserve housing; but rarely do strategies address the implications and concrete human impact of housing precarity. The decades-long, and geographically pervasive lack of deeply affordable housing, has created the conditions for the overdose and public health polycrisis we’re seeing across the country. Funders looking to support solutions need to commit multi-year resources that fully fund groups to tackle both housing precarity and public health. Otherwise, they’ll mutually exacerbate one another and galvanize punishment and incarceration instead of care.
Attacks on Housing, and on the Unhoused
During May’s webinar, Kassandra Frederique of Drug Policy Alliance shared that homelessness creates conditions for addiction and overdose. She went on to say that society finds it easier to blame individuals for their conditions, rather than contend with the fact that housing is inaccessible and unaffordable and intentionally kept that way. She explained that overdoses go up when unhoused people are treated violently by law enforcement by having their belongings moved or destroyed. Further, a 2019 study titled “The effect of evictions on accidental drug and alcohol mortality” affirms that people are more likely to experience substance-abuse related deaths if they experience an eviction.
Despite these facts, incarceration is becoming the norm. Over 250 new laws have been introduced by state and local lawmakers across the country since the Supreme Court’s horrific Grants Pass decision in 2024- which allowed municipalities to use the legal system to punish unhoused people. Since then, legislatures are diverting money towards policing and criminalizing homelessness, restricting individuals ability to work and move. Legislatures are punishing homeless support providers as well, levying fines and fees to “disincentivize” public camping. Antonia Fasanelli of National Homelessness Law Center shared that Democratic and Republican administrations are consistently choosing to disappear people rather than serve them. Incarceration is likely to increase as the administration has threatened to send the national guard and criminalize unhoused communities in other cities as well.
We are also seeing increased public narratives of drug use, fear, and stigma, to implement draconian, dangerous policies. For instance, states and municipalities are expanding involuntary mental health commitments under the idea of “forced benevolence.” But as Kassandra aptly observed, coercion is not benevolence. It's abundantly clear that an attack on housing is an attack on people’s dignity.
Implications for community organizations
Organizing wins, as we see when coalitions beat bills and provide supportive services with dignity. Yet perhaps more importantly, it provides impacted people the opportunity to organize for justice for themselves and their communities. Over the last year, impact litigation, narrative strategy, and policy advocacy have centered the demands of impacted people to achieve tangible solutions.
But, housing justice organizations are also losing funding. As Shameka Parrish-Wright of VOCAL-KY shared, grant-funded positions that lose funding means people at these organizations lose their jobs. For organizations that center impacted people, in service and on staff, this means that the impacts of defunding are even more hurtful. Aileen Joy of Tenants Together stated that for some, these losses have come with a number of problematic rationales, including: “backtracking from proven intersectional approaches to public health, ostensibly to pursue public health without housing; moving out of the ‘complicated housing world’; and (most recently) pre-complying with federal directives around DEI. All of these reasons spell the same thing: increasing conservatism at the expense of one of the most vulnerable places to our most vulnerable communities, our homes.”
In this time of crisis, funders must act. “It would be devastating if we didn’t take this opportunity to build the systems that work for all our people. We cannot put forth single issue solutions. This is how philanthropy has funded. WE need to build holistic ecosystems of support and action,” shared Kassandra.
For funders seeking to support this work, the speakers recommended the following:
- Emergency funding, and low-barrier, less restrictive funding.
- Commitment from new funders who think about funding the ecosystem of organizations while considering the safety, security of unhoused people that are under attack.
- Don't wait for a perfect proposal.
- Understand that we need multiple tactics and strategies, and organizers are already moving with this understanding. Siloes are holding organizations back from putting forward collective action and solutions.
- Everything connects to housing. For example, you can’t say you don’t do criminal justice work if you do housing justice, because unhoused people are a criminalized population.
Aileen went on to share:
“We need to take this moment to make the organizing and direct service organizations deeply resourced so that all of us can stand strong to support communities who are looking for alternatives to the public services they normally could have relied on in what promises to be a deep increase in our rates of eviction, harassment in the home (particularly of immigrant and transgender tenants). This is the time in history where we need to be building and strengthening independent community and civil society institutions.”
This piece is a summary of the DDP webinar Cultivating Philanthropic Champions to Drive Real Solutions in Today’s Threatening Climate, co-hosted by Funders Together to End Homelessness and the Fund for Housing and Opportunity.
