Ahead of her book release, Foscarinis reflects on her role in shaping federal homelessness policy and the urgent need to reframe how America thinks about housing
Many folks in the homelessness service arena know Maria Foscarinis’ work. In 1989, she founded the National Homelessness Law Center with the goal of using legal power to end and prevent homelessness. But before that, her first major campaign was to elicit a response from the federal government on the explosion of homelessness in the early ‘80s.
“That led to the enactment of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act in 1987,” Foscarinis details to The Contributor. “It was a huge win at the time — Reagan was President and denying homelessness even existed. But it was only part one of the three-part proposal we were pushing — it was the emergency part, providing mainly shelter instead of housing, which was in the parts left out.”
Ahead of her time leading the National Homelessness Law Center, Foscarinis’ work on that first campaign that led to the McKinney-Vento Homelessness Assistance Act took her from New York City, where she’s originally from, to Washington D.C.
“[In DC], we fought to enforce the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, including the right of homeless children to go to school and the rights of service providers to use vacant federal properties to help folks,” she says. “We also focused on addressing root causes, and we won legislation including the protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act and the housing provisions of the Violence Against Women Act.”
On June 3, Foscarinis will release her book AND HOUSING FOR ALL: The Fight to End Homelessness in America, a longform exploration of narratives around the housing crisis she’s seen over the past 35 years in America and an examination of the policies that discourage change. Her experiences in advocacy and policy work are woven in as a piece of the overall narrative.
Foscarinis answered a few questions for The Contributor ahead of her book’s release.
Can you give a bit of a sense of the highlights of your work of the past 35 years [in addition to the above work]?
In the mid 1990s, I was part of a small group of advocates who traveled to an international conference and heard about the human right to housing. I remember thinking this was an amazing concept — if we had a right to housing that would go a long day to ending homelessness. We started working on developing the idea and advocating for it here in a practical way.
In 2003 we started holding regular convenings to bring advocates together from around the country to strategize. We also turned to the international community, highlighting homelessness in the US at the United Nations, putting more pressure on our government. We began making progress, especially at the local level.
But at the same time we were fighting the criminalization of homelessness — a trend that really started growing in the 1990s. In 1991, we began publishing regular national reports to call attention to the trend, argue against it and for constructive alternatives, and to support local groups fighting criminalization. We also went to court to challenge laws criminalizing homelessness.
In 2016 we launched the Housing Not Handcuffs campaign with advocates across the country. We wanted to make clear we weren’t just fighting against criminalization but also for housing, and we wanted to coordinate our efforts more closely.
We were making headway on both fronts — fighting criminalization and getting support for the human right to housing. Then came the Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass, followed by the election of Donald Trump for the second time.
I stepped down from leading the Law Center in 2021, but the organization is going strong with the leadership of my successor, Antonia Fasanelli.
What were your goals going into writing this book? Who were the folks you were most hoping to reach?
Homelessness is something Americans see in their daily lives, and I think many people instinctively understand that it’s part of the bigger affordable housing problem that’s gripping much of the country. But there’s a real lack of understanding about how we reached this point, and a lot of misconceptions about homelessness itself. I’ve been an advocate working to address homelessness nationally virtually since the beginning of the modern crisis, and I’ve seen up close the deliberate policy choices that have led to it — and their impact on human beings. I wanted to tell the story of those choices and their impact in a way accessible to the general reader.
Over the years, I’ve met and worked with thousands of unhoused people, and I wanted to find a way to honor their lives and experiences. The book includes a few of their stories and voices into the narrative. My hope is that the book will not only inform but also enrage readers — and spur them to demand change.
Can you talk about how the conversation and work around homelessness has shifted toward Housing First in that time and how this book addresses that? In our community in Nashville, we see a lot of folks, organizations using the term in their work, but maybe not fully believing in or adhering to the strategy. What does it take to make that kind of shift happen?
Housing First is a critical programmatic strategy backed by mountains of evidence that it works. Over time, federal policy shifted to embrace and prioritize it as an approach. A key problem, however, is that for Housing First to work you need housing. The federal shift towards Housing First has not been accompanied by an increase in funding for housing — that is the fundamental problem. Housing First is now being criticized by Trump and his supporters for not ending homelessness — but that is totally misplaced. Housing First can and does end homelessness when it is backed by funding for housing. But it’s never been funded at scale.
My book discusses this at length and contrasts Finland, a country that invests substantial resources into housing as well as other social services that people need. This is why they have made so much progress in ending homelessness. They also have a right to housing in their constitution and a public narrative that supports housing for all.
For folks who work in this field for a long period of time, the narratives are not just narratives when they get put to paper. Can you speak to writing a book that I know must’ve called up some really difficult moments and memories for you? Sometimes previous failures, and even successes, can be difficult to put out there.
Even after so many years I still find it enraging that people can be so desperately poor in a country with so much wealth. Homelessness does not have to exist in a rich country like the U.S. It’s hard to have worked so long for solutions — and to know they are possible, given the political will to put them in place — and yet they have not been because that will is lacking. So many people are suffering so much and so needlessly. I try to remind myself that our work has helped many people and that without it things would be even worse. That’s something, but cold comfort to people who are suffering, and I felt a lot of outrage as I was writing the book. I hope readers will also be outraged and moved to take action to demand change — that is how we can create the political will that is essential for action.
I also write about advocacy that is going on at this very moment in communities around the country — advocacy for social housing especially, which is a key way to implement the human right to housing. That advocacy is scoring victories and that gives me hope. It also shows that change really is possible if enough people mobilize to demand it.
I hope my book will contribute in some way to spurring that change.
I want to ask about the challenge of “pitching” housing for all in our current social and political climate. Obviously, it would be ideal if folks could come to understand the basic humanity around roofs over heads, but there’s an unfortunately large group of people who don’t seem quite moved yet. It seems basic to ask, but what do you find most moves people who are normally rigid in their thoughts around homelessness and/or poverty?
This is something I address in the book, and I think there are several answers.
First, more and more people now have some kind of direct connection to homelessness. They may know someone who has experienced it, or, more likely they’ve felt the effects of high housing costs themselves and can see or can be helped to see the connection to homelessness.
Some people have religious or spiritual beliefs that promote caring for one’s neighbors and fellow human beings, or philosophical beliefs about how we are all interdependent.
Some people understand — or can be helped to understand — that without meeting their basic survival needs — like stable housing — people can’t truly or fully participate in society. Homelessness undermines the foundations of democracy. President Franklin Roosevelt spoke to this around the time of the New Deal.
Finally, there’s also a financial argument: According to many studies, ending homelessness with housing saves money. Even if you don’t care about anything else, you might still care about saving money.
This interview has been edited for brevity.