EN · Policy & Advocacy
Change the rules that make homelessness
EN is the action tank: research, frontline evidence, and direct advocacy fused into one engine. The intellectual arsenal is real today. Roughly fifty Congress-ready bill outlines, a cost-of-inaction case built on checked numbers, and the legal argument behind them. The staffed lobbying arm is still ahead, and we say so plainly. What follows is an honest read of where federal housing law just moved, and where it left the work undone.
Why this lever
The supply side is finally moving. The bottom rung is not.
On a single night in 2025, federal counts found roughly 745,652 people without a home. The total fell for the first time since 2016. In the same count, the chronic figure reached a record high, and that is where the human cost and the public cost concentrate. Policy is the only lever that reaches all of it at once.
745,652↓ 3.4%
Counted on a single night in 2025. The first year-over-year decrease since 2016.
2025 HUD AHAR
155,750record high
People experiencing chronic homelessness. The high-utilizer population where the math is airtight.
2025 HUD AHAR
2
Of our six drafted bill packages now carried in substance by the ROAD Act Congress just passed.
Enfiaré bill library
4
That remain, and they are the ones that reach the person already sleeping outside.
Enfiaré bill library
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act
A generational housing bill, read honestly
The ROAD Act, Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream, passed both chambers of Congress by wide bipartisan margins, the Senate 85 to 5 and the House 358 to 32, and became law on July 11, 2026 as Public Law 119-101, taking effect without the President’s signature under the Constitution’s ten-day rule. A deeply divided Congress agreed that housing is a national emergency worth acting on. That consensus is the wind at our back, and we read the bill the same way we ask everyone to read our own work: generous about the real wins, honest about the gaps.
What it does
Build the stock, shield the buyer
It makes housing easier and cheaper to build: streamlined federal review, deregulated factory-built homes, a $200 million annual Innovation Fund that pays localities to reform zoning, and incentives that reward the cities that build. Its marquee provision restricts large institutional investors from buying up more single-family homes, so an ordinary buyer is not outbid by a fund.
What it is not
A spending bill, or a homelessness bill
A late section authorizes no additional funds, so most of this is reform and deregulation rather than new money. And the person already unhoused is barely in the text. The provisions that touch our population are narrow: a shelter-flexibility waiver, an accountability hook for the federal homelessness council, and a real but targeted win for disabled veterans.
Two of six
The house is built. The door is not yet open.
We drafted six bill packages from the library. Set them against what Congress just passed, and the line draws itself. Two are carried in substance. Four remain, and they are the four that reach the person on the street. A filled dot is carried in the bill Congress passed. A hollow ring is still ahead.
Carried in substance
Institutional Investor Reform & Shared Equity
The investor-reform core is carried in the bill: large funds that own at least 350 single-family homes would be restricted from buying more. The deeper shared-equity homeownership models remain open.
Carried in substance
Innovative Construction & Zoning Reform
The Innovation Fund, the build incentives, and manufactured-housing deregulation carry the thesis into the bill. They arrive as incentives rather than mandates, which is a difference worth stating plainly.
Still ahead
High-Utilizer Stabilization & Pathways to Independence
Permanent supportive housing for the chronic high-utilizer population, where the cost-of-inaction math is airtight. The supply bill leaned the other way. This engine is untouched.
Still ahead
Health-Related Social Needs & Medicaid Integration
Let health dollars pay for the housing and navigation that keep people out of emergency rooms. A HUD bill cannot reach this. It lives on Medicaid ground, and nothing in the bill touches it.
Still ahead
Homelessness Prevention, Diversion & Legal Equity
Catch people before the first night outside, where prevention is cheapest. The supply bill added only a modest shelter waiver here, and left the rest undone. Now drafted in full as the DOOR to Housing Act, published below as open policy.
Still ahead
Unhoused Digital Identity & Data Modernization
A portable, verifiable identity and a modern data backbone for the person with no address. This lane is ours alone, and it maps directly onto the instruments the mission is building.
The line we carry into every room
The ROAD Act built the house. It has not opened the door. The supply leg of the race is finally being run by people with the power to move billions, and that was never Enfiaré's leg to run alone. Our leg is the dignity leg: the navigation, the supportive services, the prevention, the portable identity, the shelter that can be deployed. Let the federal government build the stock. We carry the people the stock will not reach on its own.
Open policy · The first of the four, drafted in full
The DOOR to Housing Act
The prevention package is no longer an outline. It is a complete federal discussion draft, seven titles, written to ride the same 85–5 consensus that carried the ROAD Act, and it is published here as open policy under a CC0 public-domain dedication. That means exactly what it sounds like: any legislator, staffer, advocate, or citizen may take it, amend it, strip it for parts, or carry it under any name, in any legislature, without asking us. Attribution is welcome and never required. It is a substantial document, so it opens in its own reading page, with the bill, a model state act, and the full evidence case each downloadable to keep.
The bill · seven titles
Prevent, stabilize, prove
Fast help before housing is lost, eviction off-ramps, no discharge from public systems into homelessness, stabilization housing with no service model mandated, and payment only for independently verified results. No new agency. No mandate on any state or court.
The model state act
Ready for any statehouse
The same architecture adapted for state adoption, with a funding menu for different revenue structures and outcome measures that mirror the federal bill, so a state can plug into pay-for-results partnerships without redesign.
The case & corrections
Every number sourced
Finding-by-finding evidence, twelve objections answered head-on, and a published corrections log of the errors we found in our own earlier materials and fixed. The credibility is the asset, so we show the homework.
A low barrier, and no wrong door
Plain words for how help should reach a person
A person should be able to reach help without first clearing a row of hurdles, and any door they walk through should connect them onward rather than turn them away. Sobriety, work, and stability are things a housed person reaches with support, not gates they clear to earn a bed.
An honest note on the federal weather
The posture in Washington is unsettled. HUD’s FY2026 Continuum of Care notice reframed the long-standing low-barrier approach as a failure and reordered its priorities around treatment, work requirements, transitional housing, and encampment reduction. A federal court set that notice aside on August 7, 2026, and left HUD free to issue the same terms again after running a public comment process. We attribute HUD’s characterization to HUD as its stated position rather than a settled fact, and we keep our own footing whichever way this lands. The cheapest night to prevent is the one that never happens, and a door that connects costs far less than one that sends a person back outside to begin the cycle again.
Where we stand
Housing first, and what changed in 2026
On June 1, 2026, HUD published the notice meant to govern about four billion dollars of the country’s homelessness response, and modified it on July 24. A federal court vacated it on August 7. It is a document with a thesis, and you should hear the thesis from the document itself rather than from us.
Status · updated August 7, 2026
The notice described below no longer has legal force. A federal court set it aside on August 7, 2026, on the narrow ground that HUD skipped a public comment process the law requires. We are leaving the reading in place, because the court left HUD free to issue these same terms again once it runs that process, and because a document you may meet again is worth understanding now. What the ruling did and did not decide is set out directly below this section.
As written, the notice declares the Housing First approach “a profound failure by any measure” and cites rising homelessness counts since 2013 as its evidence. It keeps permanent supportive housing and rapid re-housing eligible, reserves $430 million in permanent housing for families with children, and states outright that it does not require projects to condition assistance on sobriety or treatment. At the same time it sets aside $1.3 billion for new projects with selection priority given to transitional housing and services-only proposals, drops the protected share of renewal funding from 90 percent to 60, and builds its largest block of scoring points around coordination with treatment systems, courts, and law enforcement. On that 60 percent: Congress set it as a floor in the FY2026 appropriation, and HUD went to the floor. Read as a whole: permanent housing stays in the program, and the incentives around it were rebuilt.
The National Alliance to End Homelessness, reading the same document, calls components of it deeply harmful and estimates that at least 97,000 people now in permanent housing will likely lose it. That figure is the Alliance’s estimate and travels here with its name attached, the same way HUD’s characterization travels with HUD’s.
Our own position is narrower than a banner and older than this notice. Housing is the ground floor a life is rebuilt on. That is one of the four values this organization is built from, held before the argument reached its current temperature. Peer mentorship is being built into this work rather than bolted onto it, because someone who has come through a thing is the person best able to walk beside someone still in it. That program is not running yet and we will not pretend otherwise. Our founder is in recovery and training toward addiction counseling certification, which is why the commitment is not abstract here. The housing position and the recovery work are one position, seen from two sides. The current fight treats a dollar spent on housing and a dollar spent on recovery as rivals, and we think that framing is the mistake.
On the evidence: the randomized trials are strong on housing retention and more mixed on substance use and mental health outcomes. Both statements are true at once. Anyone quoting only the first is selling something, and so is anyone quoting only the second.
We will not hand you a villain. People on every side of this are working a genuinely hard problem with incomplete evidence and real constraints. What we will do is read the documents, link them so you can check us, and say so when we are uncertain.
Read it yourself
The primary text is the FY2026 CoC Program NOFO, CPD-2600-DC-0025, published June 1, 2026. Download it from the Grants.gov opportunity listing or from HUD’s Continuum of Care program page. The strongest critical reading is the National Alliance to End Homelessness analysis from June 2026. We read the modified text of July 24, 2026, rather than the June 1 original, and every link here was checked on the day this was posted. Enfiaré is not an applicant in the FY2026 competition, so this is a reading rather than a grievance. Posted July 26, 2026. Updated August 7, 2026, after the court vacated the notice; the links above were rechecked that day.
Filed August 7, 2026 · read in the primary
A court set the 2026 notice aside. Here is what it did and did not decide.
On the afternoon of August 7, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island vacated HUD’s FY2026 Continuum of Care funding notice in its entirety. Coverage of this is going to be loud in both directions. We read the ten-page order itself, and the honest account is narrower than either headline.
What the court held
A procedural gate, skipped
The McKinney-Vento Act names two things as proven strategies for reducing homelessness: permanent supportive housing for chronically homeless individuals and families, and rapid re-housing for families. Anything else the Secretary wants to reward has to clear a public notice-and-comment process first. HUD’s $1.3 billion set-aside for new transitional housing and services-only projects fell outside those two categories, and HUD ran no comment process. The court set the whole notice aside on that ground.
What the court did not decide
Nearly everything else
Having found the procedural defect, the court expressly declined to reach the substantive arguments about housing policy, the constitutional claims, and the challenge to how the money was apportioned. It denied a permanent injunction. It wrote that HUD may issue another notice carrying these same conditions once it completes the step it skipped. No court has ruled on whether the policy itself is sound.
What it costs, said plainly
Nineteen days before the August 26 deadline, the notice governing a four-billion-dollar competition is gone. Continuums of Care around the country spent June and July running local competitions under it, scoring renewals and opening windows for new projects. Congress directed HUD to make awards by December 1. Whatever you conclude about the merits, the near-term effect of this ruling is more waiting inside a program where people are already waiting, and the people waiting are not the ones in the courtroom. The organizations that won today would say the alternative was worse for those same people, and they may well be right. Both things are true at once, and you should hear the second one from us rather than find it later.
Why our position does not move
We never tied our footing to whether that notice survived, so nothing above this line needed rewriting. Look at what the statute the court applied actually protects. It names permanent supportive housing and rapid re-housing by name. The phrase “housing first” appears nowhere in it. The label is contested and the fight over it is real. The statutory floor under those two kinds of housing is the thing that held today. Carrying the substance rather than the banner is why this page reads the same whichever direction the ruling had gone.
Source: National Alliance to End Homelessness et al. v. Department of Housing and Urban Development, C.A. Nos. 26-cv-436-MSM-AEM and 26-cv-439-MSM-AEM (D.R.I.), Memorandum and Order filed August 7, 2026. Read the full order rather than take our summary for it; that copy is posted by counsel for the plaintiffs, and the document is the court’s. The 97,000 figure quoted earlier on this page appears in the order as the plaintiffs’ allegation and not as a finding of the court. Posted August 7, 2026.
The fiscal blade
It costs more to leave a person outside
We scope this argument tightly, to the chronic high-utilizer population, because that is where the math plainly holds. For the people who cycle hardest through emergency rooms, jails, and shelters, stable housing with support often costs the public the same or less than the endless churn of managing the crisis. We argue the next increment, not a slogan: the supply bill left the bottom rung untouched, and the bottom rung is where the public dollars already pour out.
One worked example
Transition support for a young person aging out of foster care runs roughly $5,000 to $10,000, and can avert $50,000 to $100,000 in later public costs across hospitals, jails, and shelters. Institutional discharge is a recognized prevention point, which is exactly why one of our near-term offers stops public systems from releasing people directly onto the street.
We state numbers we can stand behind, and we attribute contested claims to their source. The credibility is the asset.
Beside the flagship
The DOOR Act carries the prevention and pay-for-results work inside it, as Titles III and V. What follows are the proposals that stand on their own, drafted in full and published here rather than promised. Each one is written to ride something Congress has already done.
Capital · tax
Opportunity Zone Dignity Housing
Opportunity Zones became permanent law in July 2025, and the capital they draw has overwhelmingly built market-rate housing. This creates a bonus tier for deeply affordable and supportive housing, modeled on the richer step-up Congress already carved out for rural funds. The precedent for a favored use is already in the statute.
Infrastructure · navigation
Care Navigation Infrastructure Act
The hardest part of getting help is often finding it. The system holds permanent-housing units for roughly one in ten of the people who need them, which makes navigation the difference between a scarce bed used well and one left unmatched. This funds resource directories, navigation tools, and assisted navigation as public infrastructure, under open standards, with a human making every call that carries risk.
Capital · philanthropy
Philanthropic Capital Activation Act
More than $140 billion sits in donor-advised funds with no requirement ever to reach a working charity. The bipartisan attempt to force faster payout stalled. This tries the carrot instead of the stick, pulling idle charitable capital toward housing by making the trip worth taking.
Supply · land
Public Land for Dignity Act
Federal law already offers surplus federal property to nonprofits and local governments at no cost, for housing and services, with a right of first refusal. It is badly underused, approval rates are low, the process is slow, and it does not contemplate modular or relocatable housing. Use the land the government already owns and pays to keep empty.
Resilience · disaster
Climate Displacement Rehousing Act
Disasters displace people and a share of them never get rehoused. The 2025 count carried the fingerprints directly, with sheltered homelessness in North Carolina up by about 3,610 after Hurricane Helene. Recovery leans on prolonged shelter and motel stays; the path to durable rehousing is weak. Build it before the next one lands.
Inside the DOOR Act
Pay-for-Results and No Exit
These began as standalone offers and are now Titles V and III of the flagship bill, where they do more work together than apart. Pay-for-Results funds outcomes rather than line items. No Exit stops the public systems that manufacture homelessness at a discharge desk. Both are in the full legislative text above.
An honest count
Published in full: one federal bill in complete legislative text, a model state act, and the case-and-evidence memo behind them. Drafted and summarized above: five further proposals. More sit in draft and will appear here as they are finished rather than counted before they are. These are advocacy proposals. Where an offer touches Enfiaré’s own technology or any tax-advantaged vehicle, the structural and tax questions are flagged for counsel, and nothing here is legal or financial advice.
A conflict we name rather than bury
The Care Navigation Infrastructure Act describes the public-good version of what Enfiaré is building. We would benefit if it passed. So the bill funds the capability under open standards, open to any qualified provider, and Enfiaré would compete for that work like anyone else. Whether it can supply such infrastructure to the field at all, and on what terms, is a structural question our counsel has to map before it becomes an offer we push.
Use the lever
The door opens faster with more hands on it
If policy is where you can move something, the cost case and the bill packages are open for you to carry into a room that matters. Standing with the work starts with the Stewardship Pledge.