Housing Affordability

The Challenge

The United States is failing transgender people on housing. The U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS)—the largest survey of transgender Americans ever conducted—found that 30% of respondents had experienced homelessness at some point, and 12% had been homeless in the past year specifically because they are transgender. Nearly one in four reported housing discrimination in the previous twelve months. These are not regional anomalies; they describe a national pattern of exclusion.

The emergency shelter system, meant to catch people when everything else fails, compounds the harm. The National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS) documented what happens when trans people seek shelter: 29% were turned away outright, 42% were placed in facilities that did not match their gender identity, 55% were harassed by staff or residents, 25% were physically assaulted, and 22% were sexually assaulted. The USTS confirmed the pattern persists—70% of trans people who stayed in shelters reported mistreatment. For many, the shelter system is not a safety net but another site of violence.

Behind these statistics are people caught between a private market that prices them out and a public system never designed to serve them. That gap exists in every state, in cities and rural communities alike, and it is where policy failure hits hardest.

Why This Matters to Me

I did not come to housing policy through academic study. I grew up in Maine’s foster care system, where housing instability was not an abstraction but a constant. The cycle of displacement—new placements, new schools, never knowing where you would sleep next month—shapes a person in ways that do not fully recede. Later, forced into exile and statelessness, I learned what it means to have no home not just locally but nationally.

That lived experience led me to the research. I served on the research committees for both the NTDS (2008–2009, published 2011) and the USTS (2015, published 2016)—the first two comprehensive national surveys of transgender Americans. Helping design those instruments meant grappling with how to measure housing insecurity, shelter discrimination, and homelessness in a population the federal government had largely ignored. The data confirmed what community members already knew but policymakers refused to see: housing discrimination against trans people is systemic and nationwide.

A Model That Works

Research alone does not keep anyone housed. Through Gender Justice League, I built and run the Community Security Program (CSP)—a mutual aid initiative providing emergency housing, financial assistance, and resource navigation to Two-Spirit, transgender, and gender diverse people in crisis. CSP operates on a simple principle: when someone needs a safe place to sleep tonight, the response must be immediate. The program offers hotel and Airbnb stays of up to three days, giving survivors breathing room while case managers connect them to longer-term solutions.

In 2025, CSP served more than 250 2STGD survivors, prioritizing BIPOC trans community members who face the steepest barriers to housing. Beyond emergency shelter, the program provides direct financial assistance—deposits, back rent, utility bills—and resource navigation to help people access the patchwork of services that exist but are hard to find without guidance.

CSP is a local program, built in one city with limited resources. But its design demonstrates what the country needs: rapid-response housing assistance that is trans-led, culturally competent, and treats dignity as non-negotiable. The model is replicable; what it requires is the political will to fund it at scale.

Where We Go From Here

Mutual aid programs like CSP show what is possible when communities organize to meet their own needs, but they should not have to substitute for functional public systems indefinitely. The goal is to scale the principles that make mutual aid effective—speed, dignity, cultural competency—into federal and state policy.

Concrete national priorities that can move us forward:

• Fund and replicate community-based rapid-response housing models nationally, investing in programs that have proved they can reach populations the existing system fails
• Mandate trans-inclusive shelter policies at the federal level, requiring every publicly funded shelter to house people according to their gender identity and to train staff on serving transgender and gender diverse clients
• Enforce and strengthen fair housing protections for transgender Americans, closing gaps that let landlords, shelters, and housing programs discriminate with impunity
• Adopt housing-first approaches that treat stable housing as the prerequisite for other challenges—employment, healthcare, recovery—rather than requiring people to resolve those issues before accessing shelter
• Expand affirming transitional housing for LGBTQ+ individuals, with on-site case management and connections to employment and healthcare services
• Integrate trans-specific housing data into federal surveys and needs assessments so policy is driven by evidence, not assumptions about a population the government has historically undercounted

Housing is not a standalone issue. It intersects with healthcare access, employment discrimination, gender-based violence, and the broader question of whether public systems treat every person with equal dignity. The USTS data make the scope of the crisis undeniable. Getting housing policy right is a precondition for progress on nearly everything else.