A ROOF SHOULD NOT BE THE AMERICAN DREAM'S FINAL BOSS.

JUSTICE · SOCIAL JUSTICE

Published by Langhorne P. Breedlove

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2026 · 12:31 AM ET

Tags: Social Justice · Public Housing · Homelessness · Affordability · Accessible Homes

Dear fellow American proletariat: You can work forty hours, save what the landlord hasn't already taken, and still discover that the privilege of sleeping indoors requires an application fee, three pay stubs, a criminal background check, and income equal to three times the rent. The apartment, meanwhile, has a mysterious smell and a window that opens exclusively in theory.

We do not propose a country where everyone must live in government housing. We propose a country where safe, dignified public housing is a real option, where private homes and rentals can coexist with it, and where losing a job, aging, disability, family violence, or a bad month does not automatically become a sentence to the sidewalk.

THE MANDATE

American Proletariat proposes building, repairing, and maintaining a substantially larger supply of safe, accessible, publicly owned or publicly controlled housing. The program would combine direct public housing development, rehabilitation of neglected units, acquisition and conversion of suitable properties, and coordinated rental assistance. The governing standard is a decent home with enforceable habitability, accessible design, resident rights, transparent management, and a clear path to community services.

We would prioritize people facing homelessness, severe rent burdens, unsafe conditions, disability-related barriers, displacement, and other documented housing needs. Eligibility, rent contributions, income transitions, accessibility priorities, appeals, tenant protections, and the division of responsibility among federal, state, Tribal, and local governments must be defined in legislation—not invented by a manager standing between a family and a front door.

Public housing is not supposed to be a warehouse for poverty. Buildings should contain functioning plumbing, safe electrical systems, ventilation, reliable heating and cooling, pest control, accessible entrances, sensible layouts, privacy, security, maintenance, and reasonably located schools, healthcare and transit. People deserve homes, not an architectural apology.

ROOTS · WE HAVE BUILT PUBLIC HOUSING BEFORE

The United States Housing Act of 1937 established the modern federal public housing program. Public housing authorities, generally formed under state law, developed and operated housing intended to provide decent, safe, and sanitary homes for lower-income families. HUD was subsequently established as a Cabinet-level department in 1965 (Source 01).

The Fair Housing Act of 1968, as amended, prohibits discrimination in most housing transactions on grounds including race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability. A public housing initiative must uphold those protections and applicable disability-access requirements—not revive exclusionary practices under a more cheerful brochure (Source 02).

Public investment also has a history of choices that deserve scrutiny: where developments were built, whether neighborhoods were isolated, whether maintenance funding kept pace with need, and how residents were treated. We should study those failures rather than pretend that a public landlord becomes infallible simply because its letterhead contains an eagle.

THE SHORTAGE IS NOT IMAGINARY

The National Low Income Housing Coalition's March 2026 Gap report estimated a shortage of 7.2 million rental homes that were both affordable and available to extremely low-income renter households. It counted only 35 affordable-and-available homes for every 100 households in that income category, and reported that 74% of these households spent more than half their income on housing (Source 03).

HUD reported 745,652 people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2025, including 266,320 people living unsheltered. That point-in-time measurement was about 3% lower than the January 2024 count, but it remained a snapshot—not the total number of people who experienced homelessness at any time during the year (Source 04).

The measurements answer different questions. The housing shortage describes rental availability and affordability for a particular income group. The homelessness count describes a population observed on one night under federal counting rules. Neither can be casually added to the other to manufacture a headline-sized statistic.

HOMES FIRST. SERVICES WHEN NEEDED.

HUD's Family Options Study followed 2,282 families recruited from emergency shelters across twelve U.S. communities, with random assignment to offers of different housing and service interventions. Families offered a long-term rental subsidy experienced significantly less subsequent homelessness and housing instability and improvements in several well-being measures, compared with usual care. Long-term subsidies cost more over the study period than usual care, but they produced substantial additional benefits (Source 05).

That study provides stronger causal evidence than a collection of heartwarming anecdotes. It also has limits: it examined families entering shelters during an earlier period, not every person experiencing homelessness today, and it did not test the exact public-building program AP is proposing. Its findings support making stable housing central to the response without claiming a newly constructed apartment and a rental voucher are economically identical.

Some people also need accessible healthcare, behavioral health treatment, disability support, childcare, income assistance, or help navigating the legal system. Those services should be coordinated and made available without turning access to ordinary shelter into a reward for passing an arbitrary test of moral worth. Safety policies, resident choice, tenancy rights, and individualized support matter.

BUILD IT WELL. MAINTAIN IT FOREVER.

The federal government already has physical-condition standards for assisted housing. HUD's National Standards for the Physical Inspection of Real Estate, or NSPIRE, emphasize conditions that affect resident health, safety, and basic function, including building systems and individual dwelling units (Source 06). AP would build on enforceable inspection, timely repairs, transparent records, independent complaint channels, and public accountability.

This cannot be merely a construction ribbon-cutting program. Every newly built unit creates a lifetime obligation: property management, routine maintenance, major capital replacements, insurance, utilities, accessibility improvements, climate resilience, and repair when something breaks. An apartment that opens in January but cannot be maintained in July is a fiscal liability disguised as a photograph.

HUD's fiscal year 2025 budget justification estimated that more than half of the nation's approximately 900,000 public housing units were constructed before 1970. It also estimated a deferred capital-needs backlog approaching $60 billion, noting the estimate relied on extrapolation and that a precise current total required better property-level information (Source 07). That is not a reason to abandon public housing; it is a warning against funding construction without funding stewardship.

WHERE THE HOMES GO MATTERS

New housing should be planned with local housing demand, jobs, schools, transit, water, utilities, climate exposure, accessibility, and community participation in view. Governments must examine zoning, land costs, development approvals, construction capacity, and neighborhood infrastructure. Locating inexpensive apartments hours away from employment is not housing policy. It is an elaborate method of purchasing gasoline.

Public agencies should evaluate infill development, acquisition of underused buildings where conversion is structurally appropriate, rehabilitation of existing housing, mixed-income developments, and new sites in areas where the evidence supports them. Each choice has different costs and consequences. Residents should have meaningful representation in management and planning, not just the opportunity to admire an architect's rendering.

Tribal Nations, territories, rural communities, high-cost metropolitan areas, and places with severe climate or utility constraints will need distinct approaches and proper jurisdictional respect. A national minimum quality standard can coexist with regional designs and locally accountable administration.

THE LEGAL PATH

Congress can authorize and appropriate funding for new or expanded housing programs and establish federal conditions for participating jurisdictions. HUD and public housing authorities can administer aspects of the work, with Tribal housing institutions, state housing agencies, local governments, nonprofit providers, and appropriately regulated private partners assuming roles suited to their lawful authority.

Legislation should specify eligibility, anti-discrimination rules, tenant selection, accessible units, income verification, rent contributions, appeals, eviction protections, resident councils, procurement, construction standards, audits, and enforceable maintenance obligations. Residents should have a meaningful method to challenge unsafe conditions and management misconduct. Public housing ought to be accountable precisely because the people living there may have limited alternatives.

We should also examine how federal funds can support more housing without unnecessarily making zoning and land-use conflicts worse. Some local governments will favor new construction; others may question tax effects, density, infrastructure demands or the character of a particular site. Those objections require evidence and clear decisions—not the claim that every opponent of a building has identical motives.

THE TEN-YEAR LEDGER

A ten-year estimate must report site acquisition, design and permitting, infrastructure, construction, financing, accessibility, operating subsidies, reserves for repair, renovation of older properties, staffing, inspections, tenant services, and administrative enforcement. It must specify the number, size, location, type, accessibility standard, expected occupancy, and completion schedule of units. National totals cannot be responsibly calculated until those choices are made.

Count costs and benefits separately. Government spending on construction and rent support is not automatically offset by lower homelessness, healthcare, shelter, or incarceration expenditures. Avoid double-counting the same households across programs or treating a reduction in private rent payments as though it were an identical federal cash saving.

When comparing a home with a prison bed, use the same jurisdiction, fiscal year, population, included operating services, capital costs, time horizon, and method. Housing and incarceration serve different legal purposes; a comparison cannot establish that every incarcerated person could be housed outside prison. What it can do is expose the fiscal consequences of using expensive crisis systems when preventive housing and support are appropriate.

The model should publish low, central, and high construction-cost scenarios, maintenance risks, financing sensitivity, vacancy assumptions, local market effects, and both ten-year and longer-lived capital obligations. We are asking government to create homes. We are not giving it permission to hide the mortgage in a footnote.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

Poorly chosen sites can segregate households or isolate them from work and services. Bad management can reproduce unsafe buildings and resident mistreatment. Construction subsidies can be captured by inflated bids. Local housing markets may react through rents, construction costs, or private development decisions. Concentrating resources on new public buildings alone might delay faster relief through existing rental assistance.

A legitimate counterargument is that vouchers, private construction, and zoning reform can sometimes deliver housing faster or more flexibly than government development. Another is that permanent public inventory creates ongoing financial obligations. Those are reasons to compare approaches rigorously, preserve private and nonprofit options, and hold public agencies accountable—not reasons to dismiss the underlying housing shortage.

A serious program must also safeguard neighbors and residents against dangerous conditions, harassment, violence, and unmanaged properties while protecting due process. The goal is an effective housing system, not a talking point that ignores everyone affected by its operation.

MEASURING SUCCESS

Publish quarterly and annual results: new and rehabilitated units, net additions after demolitions, verified accessibility, waiting times, inspection results, repair completion, housing stability, resident satisfaction, eviction rates, geographic access to jobs and services, costs per unit over time, and the share of households with severe rent burdens.

Track homelessness and displacement using definitions appropriate to each dataset. Report outcomes by region, housing type, and relevant populations without exposing private resident information. Independent auditors and resident representatives must be able to challenge both the statistics and the conditions behind them.

The objective is simple enough to understand and difficult enough to deserve a national plan: a safe home should be an available foundation for living, learning, working, recovering, and growing old. A decent apartment is not a prize for having already solved every other problem in your life.

A government that can regulate the width of a staircase can learn to make sure a family has one.

SOURCES & FURTHER READING

01 · U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — History of HUD and the Public Housing Program. https://www.hud.gov/aboutus/history

02 · U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — Housing Discrimination Under the Fair Housing Act. https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/fair_housing_equal_opp/fair_housing_act_overview

03 · National Low Income Housing Coalition — The Gap 2026: A Shortage of Affordable Homes (March 5, 2026). https://nlihc.org/news/nlihc-releases-gap-2026-shortage-affordable-homes

04 · U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report Release (May 29, 2026). https://www.hud.gov/news/hud-no-26-037

05 · U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — Family Options Study: Three-Year Impacts (October 25, 2016). https://archives.hud.gov/news/2016/pr16-160.cfm

06 · U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — National Standards for the Physical Inspection of Real Estate (NSPIRE). https://www.hud.gov/reac/nspire-terms

07 · U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — FY 2025 Public Housing Fund Congressional Justification. https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/CFO/documents/2025_CJ_Program_-_Public_Housing_Fund.pdf

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