Our current profit-driven housing ecosystem has produced scarce options for people seeking affordable and sustainable places to live in communities that meet their needs. What options do we have for creating permanent solutions? PowerSwitch Action, Local Progress and PolicyLink are excited to co-author this report that unpacks local governments’ efforts to build out social housing solutions that benefit the public. 

This report offers principles for how we achieve a different world, and a snapshot of how emerging local policies are working toward those principles. It presents a history of how the real estate industry has worked for a century to distort our housing choices in favor of their profit interests, and dissects how real proposals to build and manage housing in the public interest can guide us out of a housing crisis.

The report includes an overview of ten cities and states’ proposals and programs to create social housing – from Seattle and Atlanta to Chicago and Washington, D.C. — and compares them using principles that organizers and advocates have prioritized to measure the strength of social housing policy design.

Our homes are emotional sanctuaries. They define our identities and sense of belonging and provide a foundation for security and community. For too long, housing justice narratives have underrepresented this storytelling aspect, leaving critical stories untold and engagement opportunities unexplored. Without new storytelling techniques, the narratives that shape public understanding and support for housing justice will continue to overlook the experiences of Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, further entrenching disparities in access to secure, affordable housing.

Through media platforms like YouTube, housing justice advocates have a wealth of opportunities to expand their storytelling practices. As an influential platform driven by personalities and emotional content, YouTube offers opportunities to broaden community engagement by meeting audiences where they are and using relatable storytelling techniques to drive participation in the movement.

PolicyLink, in collaboration with Harmony Labs and Erin Potts, cultural researcher, conducted an analysis to understand how different audiences consume housing-related content on YouTube and identify opportunities to better engage them on housing justice issues. The following five takeaways reflect our high-level guidance on uprooting harmful narratives using messaging, language, storytelling, and data. 

1. Center Stories of Personal Experiences With Housing Insecurity
2. Let the Emotion Flow,  Let Intellectualizing Go
3. Leverage Community-Oriented Holidays for Mobilization
4. Weave Housing Justice Themes into Genres Like Gaming, Crime, and Horror
5. Share Examples of Collective Action to Nurture Hope in a Brighter Future

Download the research brief

• Homes as Sanctuaries: Audience and Storytelling Insights from YouTube

Download the mini-playbook

• How to Win on Housing

Just cause tenant protections — also referred to as “good cause” or “for cause” — are designed to prevent arbitrary, retaliatory, or discriminatory evictions by establishing that landlords can only evict renters for specific reasons. While many cities have just cause ordinances, there has been a surge of state-level legislation in recent years. California and Oregon legislatures passed statewide just cause in 2019, Washington passed it in 2021, and both Colorado and New York passed it in the 2024 legislative session. These states join New Jersey and New Hampshire, who passed just cause legislation in 1974 and 2015, respectively. 

This tool is designed to help advocates compare and contrast each state’s just cause legislation. It has also been translated into Spanish and French.