<<previous  |  index |  next>>

XII. Conclusion

Housing is a linchpin that everything else hangs on in your life—who you associate with, where your kids go to school, whether you can keep a job.  If you don’t have housing, that all falls apart.³²⁶
—Katherine Stark, executive director, Austin Tenant’s Council

Policies that arbitrarily exclude people from public housing do not advance public safety—they undermine it.  Denying housing to those with the fewest options threatens the health and safety of people with criminal records and, indeed, the safety of entire communities. 

Exclusionary policies may seem an appropriate way to distribute scarce public housing resources, and because criminal offenders are not a powerful political constituency locally or nationally, these policies are not subject to political challenge.  But the right to housing should not be conditioned on public appeal or political power.

With increasing numbers of people—now in the hundreds of thousands each year—returning to their communities after periods of incarceration, federal, state, and local governments are finally beginning to support reentry programs.  But even the most well-designed reentry programs will fail unless political leaders and the public acknowledge the collateral consequences that follow a criminal record and dismantle the barriers to reentry that have been erected by law and policy.  Chief among these, as documented in this report, are the barriers to housing.

The United States must address the drastic shortage of affordable housing, particularly in public housing.  Ultimately, adequate solutions must be devised to ensure that those rightfully excluded have safe and affordable alternatives.  As a first step, it is critical that the United States eliminate the profound unfairness in the allocation of existing units, exemplified by unreasonable criminal record exclusions.