Shelterforce Releases Article on Increasing Need for Affordable Housing with Support Services
Jun 22, 2026
By Haadia Hyder, NLIHC Strategic Partnerships & Campaigns Intern and Julie Walker, NLIHC Project Manager, Opportunity Starts at Home
Shelterforce, an independent newsroom that serves affordable housing and community development practitioners, published an article, “Unsupported Housing, When Stability Isn’t enough” outlining the increasing need for comprehensive support from affordable housing providers. The article identifies challenges that traditional affordable housing providers face in providing wraparound services to their residents and asks readers to consider true support as going beyond just providing affordable housing and toward a system dedicated to ending chronic homelessness and ensuring housing stability through a full scope of safety-net systems.
The author, Shelby King, highlights that affordable housing providers must increasingly go beyond supplying housing due to critical support systems, like nutrition assistance, medical care, substance use recovery services, and mental health care, struggling to keep up with high demand amidst funding instability. The author differentiates this trend from supportive housing, which targets people struggling to remain stably housed and is designed to provide affordable housing paired with ongoing case management and voluntary medical and mental health services. Individuals experiencing housing insecurity often experience other barriers to aid, have trouble navigating complex care systems, and need support to access mental and physical health care. With underfunded supportive housing programs and social safety-net systems, traditional affordable housing providers increasingly find themselves operating beyond their traditional capacity and providing more comprehensive support.
The article concludes by emphasizing that as wraparound services become increasingly vital to successful housing operations, practitioners must consider how to redesign affordable housing program funding in a way that comprehensively meets the needs of residents through connected supportive systems.
Read the article here.
To learn more about the connections between Recovery, Mental Health, and Housing, read the OSAH fact sheet here.