Housing Justice Framework:

Having a safe, affordable, and quality place to call home is fundamental to individual, family, and community life. Across the US, however, people and communities experience high rates of housing insecurity, a reality fueled by historical and ongoing discriminatory practices and racist housing policies.

These challenges are particularly stark for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people, who experience higher levels of housing instability and lower levels of wealth (Yixia Cai, Fremstad, and Kalkat 2021; Massey and Rugh 2018).

To remedy these and other inequities, a growing number of advocates, organizers, policymakers, and researchers are calling for a structural overhaul of the country’s housing system. They aim to dismantle the factors that contribute to housing instability so that everyone—regardless of their race, income, gender identity, disability, and/or sexuality—can live in a safe, affordable home.

The concept of “housing justice” as a framework for advancing this structural approach to housing insecurity has become more prevalent in recent years due to several factors, each of which we examine in more detail below: (1) the pervasiveness of housing insecurity, (2) racial injustice and oppression, (3) the shift from a “reform” mindset toward one of lasting structural change, and (4) fragmented housing policy and approaches.

Housing has long been tied to the so-called American Dream, but in recent years, housing challenges have risen to become a top concern of community residents across the country. A national poll from August 2021 revealed that 2 out of 3 residents are “extremely/very concerned” about homelessness and the high cost of housing, while 1 out of 4 residents are “somewhat concerned.” A key factor contributing to these concerns is that new housing supply has not kept up with demand, leading to a nationwide gap of nearly 4 million homes—up from 2.5 million in 2018, according to Freddie Mac.

For renters, finding an affordable place to live is particularly challenging. About 46 percent of renters spend more than a third of their income on housing and 22 percent of renters spend more than half of their income on housing. The National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates that there is a shortage of 7 million rental units for extremely low-income renters (NLIHC 2022). After declining from 2010 to 2016, the number of people experiencing homelessness across the US on a single night rose from 2016 to 2020, driven by increases in unsheltered homelessness.

There is a long history of housing discrimination in the US, going back to land theft from Indigenous and Black people to what Ta-Nehisi Coates has called the “Quiet Plunder,” when federal policies crafted during the New Deal created backed credit for white homeowners but “Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport.”

This discrimination has occurred through systemic racist policies such as redlining, restrictive covenants, and public housing policies that created residential segregation (Rothstein 2018), as well as organically in the housing market, through such practices as landlord and real estate agent discrimination (Tighe, Hatch, and Mead 2017; Langowski et al. 2020), predatory lending (Immergluck 2015), and discriminatory appraisal practices (Korver-Glenn 2018).

All of these forms of discrimination affect Black, Indigenous, and Latinx residents particularly hard. Racism in other systems and markets also contributes to racial inequities in housing (Korver Glenn 2018). For example, racism in the criminal legal system and in mass incarceration policies creates a cycle of housing insecurity and the jail system. Discrimination in the educational system and in employment practices leads to disparate outcomes for educational attainment and income, which contributes to higher housing instability for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx residents (Winkler 1993). These historical disparities have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and will continue to grow unless there is concerted action to eliminate them.