This article is part of the Under the Lens series
Street Blocks to Alphabet Blocks: The Housing-Education Connection
Housing advocates in Washington, D.C. understood long ago the correlation between schools and housing, which is why, in 2013, they fought against the closure of 15 public schools with predominantly Black and brown low-income students. Empower D.C., an advocacy group working to advance racial, economic, and environmental justice for D.C.’s lowest-income communities, sued the District and its officials on the grounds that the closures were discriminatory.
“We believe that public resources, which include buildings like public schools, are important for strong communities,” said Daniel del Pielago, who had been at the time an education organizer for Empower D.C.
But a federal judge disagreed that the closures were inherently discriminatory, stating instead that “it is residential segregation, along with changing population patterns, that is largely to blame for the disparities in the closures.”
The failure to recognize how city planning influenced those population changes was frustrating for del Pielago, to say the least, as the connection between dwindling affordable housing options and underenrollment in already under-resourced schools seemed blatantly apparent to the group. “You literally lose the feeder for the schools, so the schools become underenrolled, which then begins to make a case for foreclosure.” he says. “For us, it’s been very clear that all of it is tied to gentrification where people of color—especially low-income Black residents—lose important resources that they have in their neighborhoods and are forced out.”
Today, D.C. is considered one of the fastest gentrifying cities in the country, and del Pielago says as much can be observed in the areas of the city where the school closures were concentrated. “What we’re seeing is development happening in and around those areas.”
As for whether that decision went to better serve the school system—which, the District of Columbia Public Schools argued at the time, would benefit from the consolidated resources—“We’ve not seen an improvement in outcomes,” says del Pielago. More than 10 years later, “Black students are [still] underperforming because they’re still under-resourced.”
The federal judge who ruled in favor of the school closures told parents and advocates that their fight was a matter of policy, underscoring what has historically been a pain point for both education and housing advocates: cross-sector collaboration in policy has very few precedents, given their particular challenges and siloed work to address them.
But amid the throes of an acute housing affordability crisis and concurrent public education crisis—both of which have been exacerbated by the global COVID-19 pandemic—the conditions are primed for these sectors to reach beyond their siloes and work together, as many advocates have already realized that they can’t reach their shared goals alone.
A Battle for Resources
Cross-sector organizing has been a perennial challenge, not only between education and housing but with other social sectors as well. And the reasons, advocates say, are manifold.
Michael Moriarty—who serves as the executive director of the OneHolyoke community development corporation in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and has served on the state board of education for the past nine years—says he’s been trying to bridge the conversational gap between these two sectors for just as long.
“There’s tons of places where they can and should intersect, but if I talk to housing people about education, or education people about housing, it doesn’t compute,” says Moriarty. “People can get the broad ideas in a big way, but our jargon is very different. Our time frames and our funding sources are siloed from one another. That’s been a real challenge.”
What is perhaps an even greater challenge is the lack of resources and capacity that both sectors face. “We’re all really busy, so you’re going to get a lot of ‘Not my monkey, not my circus,’” he says. “There is active resistance on both ends.”
Del Pielago agrees, adding that “the issue that you are working on and care about is always pitted against other issues,” as advocates grapple to access the same limited funding—which, some would argue, is not a coincidence.
“We have to recognize that these systems were set up not to work together,” says Alexa Rosenberg, senior director of programs at Enterprise Community Partners, a national housing nonprofit. “If you look at the way that housing systems have been built, and how residential segregation has allowed for disinvestment in communities, disinvestment in public infrastructure—including in public schools—we didn’t set up systems to work together in service, particularly, of populations of color [or] low-income populations,” she says. “That was intentional.”
Consequently, she says, there is rarely existing infrastructure on the community level for the two sectors to communicate and collaborate, much less on the policy level. “Where that doesn’t exist already, it’s very hard to build a shared understanding, or build shared strategy, and that takes time.”
It’s more work than resource-strapped groups can take on without greater incentive, she says. “There almost needs to be a non–sector-specific frame to drive the need for them to come together.”
Then, the pandemic brought the world to a standstill, forcing federal and state governments to finally confront housing conditions as they enacted public safety mandates that required remote work for their labor force, remote learning for their children, and sheltering in place for everyone, regardless of their housing stability.
A Long-Awaited Catalyst
In Northfield, Minnesota, it was not just the pandemic but also the murder of George Floyd that brought local partners in government, community development, and education together—with the help of national partner StriveTogether, a “cradle to career” network of local communities working toward racial equity and economic mobility—to create the Northfield Racial and Ethnic Equity Collaborative, a coalition focused on improving outcomes, particularly in education, for low-income BIPOC youth.
One of the highest-priority issues the coalition identified was housing. Partnering with Enterprise Community Partners, the coalition analyzed housing data to explore opportunities for the local housing and education sectors to collaborate, resulting in a housing solutions working group. “We dove into the data and quickly realized all these really significant housing-related issues affecting student attendance and student achievement,” says Sandy Malecha, executive director of Healthy Community Initiative (HCI), a community organization convener in Rice County (where Northfield is based) that co-founded the coalition with Northfield Public Schools and the city of Northfield.
The group found that a considerable percentage of the student body—mostly low-income students of color in families with mixed immigration status—lived in a large mobile home community where the units were in severe disrepair to the point of being unsafe, so the coalition, with local government, launched the Mobile Home Rehabilitation Initiative to rehabilitate and repair these homes.
It was a project that, had it not been for pandemic relief funds, likely would not have found funding otherwise.
“It wasn’t until we had ARPA funds and COVID relief funds [that] the city and the county felt they actually had financial resources to dedicate to housing solutions,” says Malecha. And getting buy-in to allocate those funds to such a project was seamless, in part, because the coalition was exploring the issue intersectionally—and had the infrastructure already in place to do it.
Outlasting a ‘Return to Normal’
The pandemic presented a rare opportunity for the public, as well as decision makers, to see this intersection clearly.
“[I saw] a lot of people really start focusing on keeping people housed in respect to education.” says Taneeka Richardson, housing policy analyst for the Maryland Center on Economic Policy. “We saw things flourishing because of that.”
But as the public health emergency receded (or appeared to), so did the connection between the two from public consciousness, and the drive to “return to normal” was pushing the two sectors back into their silos. “[Now that] everybody’s outside and vaccinated, [it’s like], ‘The pandemic is over. We don’t need funding.’ Yes, we do. The issue is still there. [There’s] still a housing crisis,” says Richardson. “How quickly we forget!”
As federal eviction prevention funds began to disappear, housing advocates in Maryland, as elsewhere in the country, felt that they would lose their hard-fought gains during the pandemic if they did not adopt a different approach to engaging policymakers on the issue.
For every dollar the state invested in preventing evictions, it could save nearly $2.50 in what evictions cost.”
In 2023, the Maryland Center on Economic Policy, along with members of the Maryland Eviction Prevention Funds Alliance (MEPFA), commissioned a study conducted by Stout Risius & Ross to analyze the cost savings of short-term eviction prevention funds to families and found that, for every dollar the state invested in preventing evictions, it could save nearly $2.50 in what evictions cost, laddering up to approximately $92 million in cost savings or fiscal benefits with an investment of $40 million in eviction prevention funds.
“It was born out of our failure, frankly,” says Matthew Hill, an attorney at the Public Justice Center, which is part of the MEPFA coalition. “We had all this emergency rental assistance. We brought evictions to record lows in Maryland through that. So, we know how to stop people from becoming homeless. We know how to keep people housed and employed. But the pushback we got was, ‘The pandemic’s over. What do you need emergency rental assistance for when there’s no further emergency?’ So, that forced us to take a step back.”
The coalition, partnering with advocates in education, then pushed for legislation to attach eviction prevention funding for families enrolled in community schools as part of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, a state education reform plan that will invest $30 billion in public education over the next decade. That legislation, which will implement many of the findings of the study, pased in the 2024 General Assembly, albeit with less funding than the coalition had advocated for.
“It definitely seemed to resonate more with policy makers when we could talk about housing stability in the context of education, especially in Maryland, where the state has made it a real priority to level up Maryland schools,” says Hill. “Some policy makers don’t necessarily think that the affordable housing crisis is something that they know how to address with state policymaking tools—and the capacity as well—but they do understand education, and they can see the intersection.”
“For us at the union level, housing policy is something that our folks have wanted us to get more engaged with,” says Samantha Zwerling, managing director of political and legislative affairs at the Maryland State Education Association, which worked on the drafting of the Blueprint and joined MEPFA in championing the legislation. “Keeping a student in their same school, with their same community and their same educators, is really important, and this bill was seeking to try to help those students who are most at risk from having housing instability.”
Zwerling says that while the association is still learning how and where to collaborate with housing advocates in this relatively new policy space, collaboration is growing as a priority, which is both a good thing as well as an inescapable one as the housing and public education crises continue to collide. “Many of our jurisdictions are growing very quickly, and we see that growth when our schools are at 110-percent capacity,” she says. “That has a huge impact on our students, [and] on the educators that work there, so we are trying to work with housing advocates to figure out what is the right policy approach where we can stop the overcrowding of our schools and build schools at the rate of growth while still building affordable housing. How can we either make sure that school construction is keeping up with that [or] that we’re building in areas that are underdeveloped or are, maybe less populated school feeders?”
Affordable housing is a direct goal—and need—for educators too, says Zwerling, as it is for “education support professionals” who are not educators but are employed across the school’s vast ecosystem of care. “That is coming up actually a lot more recently,” she says.
Growing in this cross-sector policy field, and building the channels to collaborate, is becoming more intuitive for advocates as they start to rack up wins together. “We are all in our silos a lot of times, and we have extremely limited capacity to begin with. And there aren’t many foundations that will fund advocacy, so you tend to focus on the issue that’s right in front of your face,” says Hill. “But, if you can reach beyond your silo, you can find a lot of leverage that can resonate with some policy makers. That sort of intersectionality is something that I think is growing in all advocacy, so I’m hoping that we can keep that momentum going.”
“Working across sectors, working cooperatively with others, and being able to see that it’s all the same fight is going to be really important,” says del Pielago in D.C. “The skeleton is there for us to begin to build or strengthen and continue this work, so that’s the way we need to move in.
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