Housing is justice

The Housing Solutions Lab is partnering with the Center for Justice Innovation (CJI) to help localities develop effective strategies to address their linked housing and criminal justice challenges. With generous support from Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, we studied how local housing and criminal justice agencies can better collaborate and are now building on that work to directly engage and support local leaders.

Overview

Close collaboration between housing and criminal justice agencies can help policymakers meet shared goals to prevent incarceration and homelessness, reduce government spending, and foster safer communities. In September 2023, CJI partnered with the Lab on a six-month research project to study why such partnerships are not more common, and what enables successful partnerships to get off the ground. Through interviews, a survey, a literature review, and a program scan, the project generated learnings which we presented in a formal report and showcased on the Lab’s website.

Then, in April 2025, CJI and the Lab launched the Housing Justice Cohort to advance housing solutions for justice-involved people. Over the course of 16 months, CJI and the Lab provided peer learning facilitation and one-on-one technical assistance to eight localities as they developed specific strategies and implementation plans at the intersection of housing and criminal justice. CJI and the Lab are now working together to distill and disseminate learnings from the cohort.

Project purpose and methods

In 2023, the United States had one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. Evidence shows that incarceration is a major contributor to homelessness. Meanwhile, homelessness also drastically increases the risk of being arrested. Both incarceration and homelessness are damaging to individuals and extremely expensive for society. Systemic barriers to affordable housing opportunities and unjust treatment within the criminal justice system mean that the people overwhelmingly harmed by this cycle of housing insecurity and criminal justice involvement are low-income people of color. 

Faced with these challenges, cities are realizing that they cannot reduce incarceration without tackling housing needs, and conversely, they cannot address housing needs without changes to the criminal justice system. Through our partnership, CJI and the Lab aim to help housing and criminal justice agencies overcome barriers to collaboration and develop effective strategies to disrupt the homelessness-carceral cycle.

Our joint report drew on a literature review and web-based scan of programs at the intersection of housing and criminal justice as well as two primary data collection efforts. First, we fielded an online survey of government officials, including judges, probation officers, public defenders, prosecutors, law enforcement personnel, and administrators of a wide range of government programs related to reentry, housing, social services, and homelessness prevention. This aimed to help us better understand how housing and criminal justice agencies might be interacting now and what kinds of collaborations they viewed as helpful. Second, we conducted 32 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with practitioners across the country to identify cross-sector partnerships and their successes and challenges.

The Housing Justice Cohort work built on our research findings to convene a nationally representative learning cohort of jurisdictions to explore problems and solutions for housing justice-involved people. Each jurisdiction identified a promising strategy and worked to develop it through peer learning and individualized technical assistance, leaving the cohort with a clearly articulated policy solution and a detailed work plan to implement it.