How Funders Need to Change to Spark a Revolution in Accessible, Affordable, Inclusive Housing
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The Kelsey team tours the San Jose Ayer Station development site.
The social sector has an opportunity to play a crucial role in addressing the growing affordable housing crisis across the U.S. — particularly as a catalyst for ensuring that solutions prioritize equity for people with disabilities, the largest minority group in the country and the only one any of us could join at any time.
Sixty-one million Americans (more than 1 in 4) live with a disability, and they face significant housing insecurity. People with disabilities are priced out of housing at a much higher rate than nondisabled people, with 38 million experiencing barriers to obtaining stable housing, according to recent research from the Urban Institute and The Kelsey. That affordability challenge — combined with a dearth of housing that is accessible to people with a spectrum of sensory, support and mobility, and cognitive access needs — means many people with disabilities can’t find options outside their family homes or end up unhoused or in institutions.
Nonprofits and funders, working alongside disabled advocates and the public system, are ideally positioned to create, prove and advocate for models that ensure disabled people can live full lives on their own terms in communities that are truly inclusive. To do that, however, the social sector needs to break free from three limiting habits: the tendency to work around public systems rather than with them; a deep-rooted, if unconscious, bias toward paternalism, ableism and segregation; and underfunding of disabled-led advocacy groups.
Bolster public systems by de-risking new models
The social sector is never going to independently address the needs of disabled people at scale — government will always have a critical role in achieving that goal — but it is ideally suited to seed and demonstrate new models that improve quality, equity and access. Funders and nonprofits can help de-risk new models for government adoption by designing services and infrastructure with the vision that, ultimately, government will be the funder or partner that ensures the best ideas get rolled out broadly.
Funding initiatives that align with or bolster public systems is a social justice imperative. Disabled people are disproportionately low-income — in 2021, the median income for households with at least one disabled member was less than 60% of the median for households without a disabled member — and many rely on public systems to meet their basic needs. Even those with higher incomes or assistance from relatively well-off families often need public services to address complex needs.
There’s been an unfortunate tendency, however, to fund and build organizations that circumvent or compete with public systems. Many private disability housing organizations have reacted to a slow-moving public sector by creating housing options completely outside the public realm. That’s an understandable reaction when government systems don’t perform as we’d like them to, but it reinforces inequities and lets government off the hook for failing to meet community needs.
Like creating private schools to address problems with public schools, building accessible housing with no connection to public support is a solution that serves only small, privileged groups of people. Most disabled people will never have access to these private spaces, and they pull people with more resources away from the public system, which can lead to fewer resources for the majority who continue to rely on that system. Systems don’t change without pressure, and change happens faster when people with financial and social capital are motivated to apply that pressure.
Driven by my late cousin and The Kelsey cofounder Kelsey O’Connor, who struggled for years to find appropriate housing in her community, I traveled around the country researching disability housing models, seeing them in action, talking to disabled advocates about their housing needs, and asking them what kinds of housing options they’d create with no restrictions. That work, plus ongoing engagement with disabled people who’ve emphasized the significant role that Medicaid, subsidized housing and other public systems play in their lives, informs The Kelsey’s determination to build a widely adoptable model in partnership with public systems.
Our goal in co-developing accessible, affordable, inclusive multifamily housing for people with and without disabilities is to meet needs where we operate and provide a template for disability-forward housing that works everywhere. This requires not only raising philanthropic dollars to fill in gaps in development capital, but also demonstrating the essential role of the public sector and advocating for policy initiatives that subsidize accessible housing and add disability-forward incentives and requirements to projects financed with tax credits.
Replace the rescuer lens with a social justice lens
An ethos of paternalistic othering was embedded in disability-focused philanthropy at the beginning, with the establishment of schools for invalid children and care homes that segregated people with disabilities from the rest of the community. Unfortunately, that attitude continues to suffuse the field.
We still see disability organizations — mostly those led by nondisabled people — raise funds in ways that exploit disabled people as objects of inspiration and rely on “helper” or “rescuer” narratives. This kind of framing reinforces the exact systems the social sector should exist to dismantle. It also celebrates nondisabled leaders as heroes, creates mistrust of nondisabled leaders among people with disabilities, and maintains a disempowering distance between funders and programs and their intended beneficiaries.
The paternalistic ethos also obscures the equity and inclusion failure at the heart of disabled adults’ housing insecurity. People with disabilities do not have the same access as nondisabled people to high-quality housing that supports both independence and community connection, with proximity to jobs, social networks, arts, services and transit. That exclusion is a social justice problem that needs to be addressed as part of every effort to create more affordable housing generally — it’s not a “special needs” issue.
As Avichai Scher of the Ford Foundation put it, “For too long, philanthropy has treated disability as a niche area for specialized foundations, an approach that is rooted in the ableist notion that disability is a separate issue that isn’t integral to work that addresses injustice and inequality.”
Embrace and support disabled-led advocacy initiatives
Perhaps because of this history, the public sector has actually outpaced the philanthropic sector when it comes to working with disabled advocates and acting on their perspectives. Over the last 10 years, government policies and programs have evolved toward community-based, self-determined, disabled-led, integrated experiences. While many public policies now mandate community integration, inclusion and choice, nonprofit programs have not made commensurate progress.
Funders can help shift that mindset — and enhance their own effectiveness at improving disabled people’s lives — by investing in disabled-led organizations. These organizations often operate on a shoestring, with a fraction of the money flowing into nondisabled-led organizations. Only five of the 15 largest and most prominent disability organizations in the country are led by openly disabled people. Based on 2020 tax returns, the disabled-led organizations average $3.3 million in annual contributed revenue versus $20.3 million for nondisabled-led organizations. If you take out the top-earning organization in each category, it’s $2.5 million compared with $10.1 million.
As a nondisabled leader of an organization focused on disability, I recognize the role of allied leadership, but the work and insights of disabled leaders are grossly undervalued. Changing this power imbalance is imperative. It is likely the only way to eliminate a pattern of addressing disabled people’s needs in ways that cause harm by reinforcing ableism and paternalism.
Many funders and nonprofits are already thinking critically about how both individuals and the field can engage with disability issues in productive, progressive ways and avoid reinforcing the ineffective systems they’re working to change. Affordable, accessible, inclusive housing — perhaps the most urgent need for people with disabilities — is a high-impact way to put those new understandings and approaches to work in the world. The first step is to chart a new, collaborative course with disabled leaders and the public sector.
Micaela Connery is CEO and co-founder at The Kelsey, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that co-develops affordable, accessible and inclusive housing for people with and without disabilities. Its first multifamily is under construction in San Jose with a second expected to break ground in San Francisco in May.
