By Amy Collado, Terri Davis-Merchant, Joyce Kwon, Steph Rudolph, Charlie Rudoy
Despite its standing as the wealthiest city in the world (1) and a global economic center – New York City suffers from stark housing inequality and an acute affordable housing crisis.
Our sprawling patchwork of public assistance programs fails to house unstable and homeless New Yorkers. As of late 2025, 350,000 New Yorkers had no stable place to call home. Over 100,000 of those individuals resided in temporary shelter, including more than 34,000 children.(2) As of January 2026, over 175,000 households face eviction in New York City. (3)
Despite such staggering statistics, New York has strong renter protections achieved largely by our robust tenants’ rights movement – a movement credited with winning significant victories in the last decade. These landmark wins include the citywide right to counsel in evictions and the 2019 State rent reforms(4) that significantly curtailed landlords’ abilities to deregulate the affordable housing stock.
Still, New Yorkers face displacement, uninhabitable living conditions, and chronic homelessness due to an increasingly financialized system that prioritizes corporate interests over working and low-income New Yorkers. Even middle-income working households are often just one missed paycheck away from homelessness.
New York must reframe its approach to housing policy by adopting an international human rights lens. Article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights states that those who lack affordable, stable housing face a deprivation of their human right to adequate housing.(5) This human rights framework asserts that governments must protect renters against eviction, promote affordable and habitable dwellings, and provide supportive services as elements of a fundamental human right to housing.
Case Studies
Like New York City, Helsinki and Tokyo have vibrant economies and serve as the cultural hearts of their countries. Unlike New York City, Helsinki and Tokyo have adopted policies that allow residents to access and maintain affordable housing over time.
In Helsinki, Finland’s embrace of “Housing First” policies has led to a historic reduction in homelessness and shows us what it looks like when a government allocates resources that prioritize homeless prevention over emergency response. By overhauling their public benefits system to bring people off the streets and into homes, Tokyo has also experienced a dramatic decline in its unhoused population since the turn of the century. Unlike the U.S., Finland and Japan articulate either an explicit or implicit right to housing in their constitutions. In the following supportive policies, we gain insight into what embracing housing for all could look like in New York City.
Housing First in Helsinki
In 2000, the Finnish government amended their constitution to state: “the public authorities shall promote the right of everyone to housing and the opportunity to arrange their own housing.”(6) In 2008, to make the right to housing a reality, the country established a “Housing First” model called “The Finnish National Program” to reduce long-term homelessness.
While the U.S. federal government under Trump has cut key “Housing First” programs,(7) the Finnish government – in partnership with local NGOs – has moved in the opposite direction. It has allocated resources to scale housing interventions that have reduced homelessness by a third in less than two decades.(8) This political shift was grounded in the core belief that housing is a human right, and that homelessness results from system failure rather than individual fault.(9) Acknowledging the failure of their prior “Staircase Model,” that compelled households to meet certain criteria to “earn” housing, Finland shifted to treating housing as a necessary source of stability and prerequisite to addressing other health and social issues.
Finland’s “Housing First” approach combines government financial assistance, integrated and targeted support services, and increased housing supply. Success of the plan relies on each component working in concert with the others.
The city of Helsinki has been exemplary in executing this Housing First model. A founding member of the Y Foundation, a major NGO established to reduce homelessness and provide affordable housing, Helsinki partnered with the NGO to methodically increase its supply of permanent housing. The city, which owns 70% of its land, quickly took advantage of government-subsidized interest rates and loans provided by The Housing Finance and Development Centre (ARA)(10) to create new housing units utilizing a two-pronged strategy: first by converting shelters into community housing, often studios accompanied by on-site services for the formerly homeless in need of more support, and secondly, by building scattered housing for those capable of living more independently.(11)(12)
Both congregate and scattered housing models feature long-term leases and high-quality building standards, making the affordable housing largely indistinguishable from market-rate housing. Because of Helsinki’s high percentage of publicly owned land, the city was able to provide affordable leases to developers at below market rate, allowing groups like the Y Foundation to scale this production quickly. According to Juha Kahlia, Head of International Affairs of the Y Foundation, since 2008, Helsinki has been able to virtually eliminate shelters, reducing the number of shelter beds from 600 to 52 beds by 2016. (13)
Housing advisors and social workers play a key role in supporting this kind of development. In adopting the Housing First approach, Finland shifted resources from emergency response to prevention and housing support services. This effort includes new legislation that guarantees the right of all people to access housing advisors and social workers.
Housing advisors work to prevent homelessness by providing Fins with financial guidance (ex: setting up payment plans to pay rent) and serve as “bridge builders” between the tenant and landlord. Often located within community housing, social workers provide support by focusing on the root causes of instability, such as mental illness and trauma.(14) Social workers also work to house unstable and homeless Fins by determining whether community or scattered housing is appropriate for their specific situation and by helping clients obtain additional support – from financial skills training to mental health services – to address the diverse challenges that often cause housing instability. For those living in scattered site apartments, additional case managers check in with residents regularly to support them in maintaining their tenancy.
In addition to supporting tenants with housing advisors and social workers, Finland requires landlords to play a role in ensuring housing stability. One concrete example of this is that landlords are required to alert social services if they plan to evict a family with children so that social services can intervene and pay their rent or arrange another apartment for them.
Per Kahlia, Helsinki has a network of landlords and NGOs whose end goal is to end homelessness by 2030. The Finnish approach is illustrated by a culture of collaboration that endeavors to provide a social safety net that truly regards homelessness as a last resort. Rather than defaulting to an eviction machine as a pathway to emergency support, as is the practice in New York City, Finland focuses primarily on prevention. As a result, the country has reduced homelessness by more than 80% since 1985. These successful policies have moved the country from an emergency response paradigm to one that emphasizes prevention. (15)
Finland’s Housing First approach of proactively stabilizing tenants and preventing homelessness saves 15,000 Euros per person annually. By shifting resources from emergency services to prevention, Finland saves money and maintains much needed stability.
Despite the federal government taking a sharp turn away from a Housing First Model, New York City played a key role in the creation of the model, and it remains woven into our city’s identity. In 1979, tenants living in a hotel on East 24th Street prevented the hotel’s sale to a developer. Leveraging the power of collective action, they worked with Franciscan friars to convert their hotel into SRO housing that offered medical care and support services, creating the City’s first supportive housing.(16)
Today, without robust federal and state support, deeply affordable and supportive housing remains severely underfunded. As a result, New Yorkers must meet narrow eligibility criteria, leaving out the most under-resourced. Too many New Yorkers cycle between emergency response systems – shelters, hospitals, and carceral settings. These systems do not offer stability and cost taxpayers significantly more than housing. Finland exemplifies the power of stakeholder alignment around a Housing First model and demonstrates what it looks like when a country commits to providing a stable home for every household at risk.
“No Wrong Door” to Benefits in Tokyo
Japan’s constitution promises a “right to maintain the minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living.”(17) Housing is a central component of this right. When applying for benefits, homeless and housing unstable residents of Tokyo experience a different reality from New Yorkers in similar situations. Japan’s Seikatsu-Hogo, (or Livelihood Protection) public assistance program knits together systems that remain a disparate patchwork of agencies in New York City.
According to research by Japanese and American experts, the program has succeeded due to three factors largely absent from US safety net programs: generality, comprehensiveness, and expeditiousness.(18) Seikatsu-Hogo determines eligibility based only on income and assets; it bundles housing assistance with a variety of other supports a person might need; and it typically makes a decision on applications within two weeks, compared to averages of many months, if not years, for U.S. programs.
The program has been transformative. In 2025, Tokyo’s 23 wards (home to nearly 10 million people) counted just over 565 individuals living on the street.(19) In the same period, Los Angeles County, with a similar population, recorded around 72,308 unsheltered homeless. (20)
Implementing Seikatsu-Hogo
A dramatic surge in street homelessness spurred policy changes that led to a historic reduction in homelessness. Due to a recession in Japan in the 1990s that was later exacerbated by the Great Recession of the early 2000s, Japan hit a high of nearly 25,300 homeless people living on the street nationally by the turn of the 21st century, with close to 6,000 of this group in Tokyo’s twenty-three wards. (21)
According to Dr. Hiroshi Goto, a renowned researcher and professor at Tokyo’s Rikkyo University – during this crisis, Japan had implemented Seikatsu-Hogo but not at the scale necessary to support the crisis. Advocates for the homeless and government partners pushed reforms that lowered the barriers to access and put an end to local welfare offices’ practice of turning away eligible applicants. (22)
In 2008, homeless Tokyoites and advocates staged a protest by camping out in a park in front of the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare. As part of the protest, they created a Hakenmura, or a Temporary Workers’ Village, that raised awareness among the Japanese public about homelessness and unemployment. (23)
This organizing resulted in government action. Along with social workers conducting street outreach, the Tokyo government signed master leases on buildings for the homeless and implemented new job training programs. Researchers attribute these policies that both expanded and deepened Seikatsu-Hogo as key to housing thousands of the most vulnerable. (24)
Within two weeks of applying for benefits, Tokyoites access a monthly payment for life’s necessities: education assistance, employment assistance, support for funeral expenses, and enrollment in Japan’s universal health care system. The government provides a monthly housing assistance payment, capped at different amounts based on region.(25) These benefits complement the already robust Japanese social safety net, which includes a universal “child allowance” provided to all households with children. This allowance and additional benefits available for low-income, single parent households ensures that Japan has virtually zero homeless children – a stark contrast to the U.S. and New York City.
Despite seeming out of reach for the U.S., New York City played a role in inspiringSeikatsu-Hogo. According to homelessness researcher and University of Pennsylvania professor Dennis Culhane, Japanese policymakers traveled to New York at the turn of the twenty-first century to study how the city approached housing support for people living with HIV/AIDS. The HIV/AIDS Services Administration (“HASA”) of the City’s Human Resources Administration provides direct rental assistance for HASA clients to use on the private market. The subsidy includes wrap-around services and access to supportive housing for those with higher needs.(26) While not available to all New Yorkers, the HASA program has proven highly effective at moving people from homelessness to stable housing and keeping them housed.
Japan’s model is not perfect. The low number of homeless people in Tokyo only considers those living on streets, in parks, or in other public spaces during a point-in-time count. This leaves out those who are less visibly housed in the city, including thousands of “net cafe refugees” – Tokyoites who sleep in 24-hour internet cafes.(27) Additionally, Japan’s homeless population presents less frequently with serious mental illness in part due to the prevalence of involuntary institutionalization.(28) This is troubling, given that supportive housing programs have shown that people with mental health diagnosis can thrive in permanent housing integrated in a community.
Despite its drawbacks, Seikatsu Hogo shows what is possible when any household in need can access housing assistance quickly.
Big Swings for New York City
To embrace housing for all, New York State must codify a “right to housing.” Article XVII of the NYS Constitution states: “aid, care and support of the needy… shall be provided by the state.” Courts interpret this clause to create “Right to Shelter.” The only city in the country to recognize a right to shelter, New York City must go further. Much like Finland, New York State must make the right to housing legally explicit and integral to its cultural identity.
To enforce the right, New York City must expand eligibility for housing and benefits programs, make applications easy, and create a preventative housing safety net rather than an emergency response machine that fails to serve the most vulnerable. Like in Finland, New York City must impose an affirmative obligation on landlords to participate in the application and maintenance of housing benefits. Agencies must minimize evictions by creating accessible pathways for tenants and owners to efficiently resolve benefits issues. Like in Tokyo, the application and administration of benefits must prove radically inclusive and culturally competent. The mantra “No Wrong Door” must become a reality; regardless of how or where a person in need seeks help, the city must expeditiously provide assistance. To realize the right to housing, New York City must do the following:
- Establish a preventative housing safety net for the most vulnerable by broadening eligibility criteria, eliminating narrow or exclusionary categories, and streamlining the application process to reduce administrative barriers and shorten wait times.
- Impose an affirmative obligation on landlords to participate in the application and maintenance of housing benefits. Agencies must minimize evictions by creating accessible pathways for tenants and owners to efficiently resolve benefits issues.
- Ensure the administration of benefits is radically inclusive and culturally competent. Regardless of how or where a person in need seeks help, the City must expeditiously provide assistance.
Fellows
Amy Collado
Terri Davis-Merchant
Joyce Kwon
Stephanie Rudolph
Charlie Rudoy
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