Taylar Nuevelle does not remember her time spent in reentry housing fondly. In fact, Nuevelle told Shelterforce, she didn’t see much distinction between her experience of 4 ½ years of incarceration and the first home she was afforded outside of that experience—if “home” is what she would even call it.
“It literally was run like a jail,” she says, with curfews, regular alcohol and drug testing, and mandatory Narcotics Anonymous meetings in a church (regardless of the residents’ faiths), where residents were verbally abused and pitted against one another.
“I kept saying, ‘This is not how you run a reentry place.’”
But the comparison to a carceral setting is common feedback among people leaving incarceration who participate in reentry housing programming, often likening it to another form of institutionalization and captivity.
“It’s really acting as an extension of the carceral system,” says Nuevelle.
Approximately 600,000 people are released from state and federal prisons every year, according to federal government data, but while the U.S. spends more than $80 billion a year on incarceration, it only spends about $100 million on reentry programming to support their reintegration into the community.
Access to safe, affordable, and dignified housing is one of the principal challenges that returning citizens face upon release, and the lack of it pushes many into homelessness. The housing options that are available to them through reentry programming, advocates say, often reflect carceral spaces.
But some housing providers and advocates for formerly incarcerated persons—who have experience with incarceration themselves—are not only offering new models of housing that redesign community members’ experience of homecoming, but also, they hope, reforming society’s relationship with them beyond stigma.
A Redesigned Building
Stanley Richards, president and CEO of The Fortune Society, a decades-old nonprofit serving formerly incarcerated individuals in New York City, is quick to point out what visitors won’t see at any of the organization’s suite of emergency, transitional, and permanent supportive and affordable housing buildings.
“You walk into our housing, you won’t see metal detectors, you won’t see guards—that is a replication of the carceral system,” says Richards, who was himself formerly incarcerated. “What you see is an open, inviting place.”
In fact, the word Richards most often uses to describe the housing is “beautiful,” especially when he talks about the 114-unit West Harlem residence aptly dubbed Castle Gardens, and the new 82-unit East Harlem development Castle III. Both are permanent supportive and affordable housing buildings.
You walk into our housing, you won’t see metal detectors, you won’t see guards—that is a replication of the carceral system. What you see is an open, inviting place.
Stanley Richards, president and CEO of The Fortune Society
Castle Gardens, which opened in 2010, has 63 supportive housing units for houseless, justice-involved individuals, and 50 units for low-income community members. By 2011, the development won the New York State Affordable Housing Awards for Excellence, Downstate Project of the Year.
“We bring visitors in, [and] they are shocked at how beautiful the building is,” he says, an effect that was intentional in the design. “The whole design [goal] was, how do we design something that is beautiful, that when people walk in, they have a sense of ‘This is mine’?”
It’s a principle that Nuevelle shares.
“People don’t just need a place to lay their head,” she says. “That’s a lie, if anybody tells you that.”
Nuevelle is the founder and executive director of Who Speaks For Me?, a national nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., that works toward a trauma-informed justice system. Its pilot program, Housing For All, connects women and LGBTQ+ returning citizens to free or low-cost apartment housing in the D.C. area, but not just any place will do. Nuevelle tells her staff not to bother showing her housing that they themselves wouldn’t want to call home.
“They need a nice place to live that’s furnished with nice things,” she says.
When Nuevelle returned from incarceration, she settled into a dilapidated building in an unsafe neighborhood. It was the only place she could find on her own. “I just wanted to have a place,” she says.
That’s why units in high-crime, impoverished neighborhoods are stricken from the pilot program’s search area. “If you’re in a neighborhood where there are drive-bys all the time, [and] you just came home from prison, that can be really problematic,” Nuevelle says. “It is important to put people in places where they can feel comfortable and as safe as possible.”
Nuevelle also remembers traveling for 45 minutes by bus just to do laundry or shop for groceries, so the Housing for All program staff tries to find units close to major public transit lines, grocery stores, within a 15- to 20-minute walk to a library, and, if the unit is in an apartment building, one with laundry facilities.
The Housing For All program is not yet two years old and has already housed 8 formerly incarcerated people who lived in homes for 1 to 12 months, Nuevelle says. Six of those participants are over 40, having spent decades incarcerated and/or as much time struggling to find stable housing before the organization stepped in with rental assistance and advocacy—in a housing landscape that stigmatizes them.
The program’s search criteria, Nuevelle notes, are no different than they would be for anyone searching for a rental unit. And, importantly, she lets program participants know that they do not need to jump through any additional hoops to get it. “You’re home now, and our goal is to help you come back to society and be the best version of yourself, and give you a place to live where you can have pride.”
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Much like the units that Who Speaks For Me? finds for program participants, the permanent housing buildings in The Fortune Society’s portfolio are also not segregated from the larger community, like they are in many other reentry housing programs. Both Castle Gardens and Castle III have residents with and without histories of incarceration, but they may share the experience of being homeless or unstably housed prior to living there. The developments also have on-site services to support all residents, both those who do and do not have experience with the criminal legal system, on their respective journeys of restabilizing their lives through housing security.
“Our housing model is premised on the notion that people with convictions are no different than people who need housing in the community, so we don’t segregate people with convictions on a particular floor, or in a particular unit,” says Richards.
Both community reintegration and safety, he believes, can be nurtured through that shared sense of ownership.
“It’s their place,” said Richards. “They are community members.”
A Trauma-Informed Approach
That destigmatizing incarceration is not embedded in many of the available reentry housing models, both Nuevelle and Richards believe, is an egregious shortcoming given the community that they are intended to serve. But Nuevelle’s main criticism of most reentry housing models is, first and foremost, that they are not expressly trauma informed.
For example, forcing programming onto residents—like drug testing or rehabilitation treatment for addiction, even when residents don’t have issues with substance abuse—is “a way of controlling and reminding you that society sees you [as] less than,” says Nuevelle. “The endgame is to make you feel shame. It’s a way of saying, ‘I know you’re no good.’”
The housing-first model, if people really follow it, is housing, period. No strings attached.
Taylar Nuevelle, founder and executive director of Who Speaks For Me?
When reentry housing models have conditions like sobriety—which, advocates say, is the conventional model—“it’s playing into the stigma,” she says, which does little in the way of helping individuals reenter society and actually paves a pathway back to institutionalization. “If you do test positive, and you’re on probation, they’re going to report you and have you put back in jail or prison. This isn’t a way of helping you.”
The organization’s Housing For All program expressly follows a housing-first model, which treats housing as the first step toward stability, rather than a conditional goal. “The housing-first model, if people really follow it, is housing, period. No strings attached,” Nuevelle says.
A trauma-informed approach to reentry housing services, according to Nuevelle, begins with removing the expectation that participants must earn their housing security.
“If government entities are going to give money for reentry housing, they need to be clear that this is a true housing-first model, meaning you get housing just because,” she says. “We’re going to provide wraparound services, if you want to use them; if you don’t, this is how much time we have in our program, and you can make use of it or not. That’s exactly what we do.”
Ending Stigma in Housing Policy
Housing programs like those offered by The Fortune Society and Who Speaks For Me? were created to fill a gap in housing policy, where historically, landlords have been entitled to reflexively deny housing to applicants with conviction records.
In New York, the Fortune Society fought for years for the Fair Chance for Housing Act, which prohibits private landlords from discriminating against prospective tenants solely based on their contact with the criminal legal system. The legislation, which passed in December 2023 and was signed into law in January (the act will go into effect Jan. 1, 2025), mandates landlords to consider conviction records only after considering all other qualifying criteria, but allows a lookback window of three years for misdemeanors and five years for felonies.
Advocates who fought alongside The Fortune Society for this legislation were disappointed that the version of the act that ultimately passed still afforded loopholes for property owners to discriminate, especially against those recently released from incarceration. But they were grateful that upfront discrimination would no longer be free practice. In New York City, 53 percent of landlords won’t allow applicants with a conviction record to even view a property.
“We’ve seen some progress in New York City, [but] we still have a long way to go,” says Richards.
D.C., where Who Speaks For Me? is based, has similar protections in place. Under The Fair Criminal Record Screening for Housing Act of 2016, landlords are not allowed to check a prospective tenant’s criminal background until after a conditional offer has been extended, and there are only two criteria that they can consider:
- Pending charges in the court system at the time of the criminal background check;
- Criminal convictions that have occurred within the last seven years, and only if they are one or more of the 48 criminal offenses listed in the law.
But Nuevelle says that hasn’t stopped many D.C. landlords from devising creative workarounds.
“They’re very clever,” she says. “They’ll give you a form to say, ‘We’re offering you this apartment, or this unit, and we’re going to do a background check because we’ve said that you can have the apartment.’ That really is a workaround before they actually make an offer. It’s fake.”
Other property owners will ask for credit history or proof-of-income forms, knowing that returning community members will have neither, Nuevelle says. “That’s a dead giveaway.”
As long as stigma against formerly incarcerated individuals remains a practice, if not a policy, in housing, housing providers with sensitivity toward the needs of this community must fill the gap—and with threadbare resources.
Richards pointed to New York City’s Department of Corrections budget, which sits at over $2.6 billion.
“We make massive investments in building prisons and cages and places to punish people,” says Richards. “We do a nickel-and-dime investment when it comes to investing in people to make sure that they have the resources they need to change their lives.”
Beyond Housing
Advocates and housing providers agree that resources must extend beyond physical housing.
In addition to placing returning citizens in housing, Who Speaks For Me’s intermediary role between tenants and property owners often positions them as facilitators with a larger society that still harbors deep discrimination toward people who’ve had contact with the criminal legal system.
“If you’re going to be providing housing for people who’ve been impacted by the criminal legal system, you don’t just give them housing, you [have to] advocate for them as well,” says Nuevelle.
“Anytime you hold someone accountable for harm they’ve caused on a community, and they go to prison, we have an obligation to ensure that we provide the kind of resources and supports they need so that they can break that cycle,” said Richards.
That is a collective, communal responsibility, says Nuevelle.
“Being a good neighbor goes both ways,” says Nuevelle. “You want people who’ve been incarcerated to be a good neighbor, but you [also] want people who are in the community—and that means housing providers as well—to be a good neighbor.”
Part of being a good neighbor, both agree, is sharing in the responsibility of deprogramming from the stigma of incarceration.
What Housing Providers Can do Differently
For housing providers who want to extend reentry services to returning citizens who’ve been involved in the criminal legal system, both Richards and Nuevelle advise not building a reentry house.
“I don’t like the idea of building a reentry house, or having a building that’s only for returning citizens, because that’s a stigma,” says Nuevelle. “People [will say], ‘Oh, that’s where the people who went to prison live.’ But if that’s what we have to deal with now, then make the best version of that, [where] you have trained staff, [and] you don’t have policies and procedures that harm people.”
A built-in harm reduction ethos is perhaps the only distinction that separates housing needs for returning citizens and those for the rest of society in need of affordable housing. “You don’t have to have a degree to work in [this] space, but you do have to have compassion and training and be trauma informed.”
I don’t like the idea of building a reentry house, or having a building that’s only for returning citizens, because that’s a stigma. People [will say], ‘Oh, that’s where the people who went to prison live.’
Taylar Nuevelle
As for designing a space to adequately accommodate returning citizens, says Richards, the guiding design principle is to design it to our own standards.
“It’s not that we’re trying to build something that is different than another project,” he says. “We build it to our own standards. Is this a place I would want to raise my kids to play soccer? And if the answer is yes, that’s the design that we want, because we want people to know that when they enter that place, that’s their place, and they are valued.”
But it’s also critical to understand that newly returning citizens are on inherently less stable footing to be self-sufficient in new housing. “If people aren’t succeeding just because you give them housing, don’t think it’s because they don’t want to succeed,” says Nuevelle. “You have to look at all those things that go into how you maintain your house. Do you have cleaning supplies? How do you keep yourself clean? How do you make yourself feel good?”
For both Nuevelle and Richards, it goes back to being trauma informed and understanding how the collateral consequences of incarceration hinder people’s successful reintegration into society.
“How do we walk in this society and know we have privilege, but also remember that others don’t? And then, how do we fight for that?” says Nuevelle. “For me, housing is at the base of it all.”
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