For decades, communities across America have fought to address the problem of homelessness. Yet the crisis keeps growing, in large part because rents have soared while affordable housing has become even more scarce.

A common tool for addressing the housing crisis is rental assistance vouchers, issued monthly by local, state and federal government housing agencies. Last year, the federal government spent $38 billion on rental assistance to tenants.

Unfortunately, too many families who qualify for vouchers still spend far too long searching for an apartment, finding a willing landlord, navigating inspections and paperwork and overcoming obstacles that get in the way of putting a voucher to use. The result is one of the great inefficiencies in our response to homelessness: We have rental assistance available and people who desperately need homes, yet we still fail to connect the two.

The problem is national. A 2019 study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found that roughly 4 in 10 families issued a Housing Choice Voucher — known as Section 8 — could not use it to lease a home. In some places, the numbers are even starker. For example, in 2026, the New York State Comptroller found that nearly 4 in 5 households issued vouchers under a New York City-funded rental assistance program were unable to lease an apartment within one year.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As housing advocates with the nonprofit groups Anthos Home and Brilliant Corners, we are working on a solution — a public-private partnership launched more than a decade ago — that addresses this critical gap.

In 2014, the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services’ Housing for Health division partnered with Brilliant Corners, a supportive housing nonprofit, to launch the Flexible Housing Subsidy Pool. It was built on a simple premise — that matching people with housing is specialized work, not a side task.

Rather than asking overstretched case managers to recruit landlords, locate units and solve last-minute move-in obstacles, the Flex Pool built dedicated infrastructure for each function: housing acquisition specialists who focus solely on finding units and matching tenants with landlords; flexible rent subsidies that move at the speed of the private market; and dedicated housing coordinators to provide ongoing tenancy support, ensuring long-term stability.

The effort works: Since its founding, the Los Angeles County Flex Pool has housed more than 16,000 people — nearly 200 a month. Approximately 92% of clients remain housed one year after move-in. The model has expanded to San Francisco and San Diego, bringing housing to more than 2,250 people since 2020, with Sacramento County launching in 2026. Brilliant Corners has proven that even in the nation’s most expensive, lowest-vacancy markets, units are available and — with the right strategies — can be secured.

Anthos Home, based in New York City, adapted the same principles — housing navigation, landlord engagement, flexible funding and ongoing support — and has seen similar results in efficiently connecting voucher holders to housing. Similar models have taken root in Chicago.

The lesson here isn’t that every community should replicate this model. Rather, communities should invest as intentionally in the infrastructure that ensures access to housing as they do in building housing itself. Someone must do the unglamorous work of turning vouchers into signed leases and stable tenancies.

A housing voucher that never becomes a lease helps no one. An affordable home that remains out of reach cannot end homelessness. Our investments into housing must deliver what they promise: homes.

The responsibility for making this happen belongs to all of us. The government should recognize housing navigation, landlord engagement and ongoing tenancy support as essential to effective homelessness systems. Philanthropy, which often moves faster than government, can identify operational gaps, test new approaches and spread successful models.

We’ve long measured progress by the homes we finance and the vouchers we issue. Those investments remain indispensable. But if we want them to translate into results, we must give equal attention to the infrastructure that turns housing policy into housing reality.

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Laura Lazarus is CEO of Anthos Home; William F. Pickel is CEO of Brilliant Corners. This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

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