Category: Housing & Basic Needs
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Discharge Is Not the End of Responsibility: Social Work and the Transition Home
A hospital discharge is an administrative event with consequences that extend well beyond the hospital. A person may leave with an appropriate treatment plan and still lack the transportation, housing, food, or practical assistance necessary to carry it out. For social work, the transition home therefore raises a fundamental professional question: has the institution merely…
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Benefits Advocacy Is Social Work: Reclaiming Expertise in Material Conditions
A social worker who helps a household preserve food assistance is practicing at the intersection of individual need and public policy. That work requires assessment, interpretation, communication, and advocacy. Treating it as a peripheral administrative task understates both its intellectual demands and its importance to the profession’s public purpose. The current changes to SNAP make…
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A Record Median Income Does Not Mean the Safety Net Can Be Weakened
The United States reached a record real median household income of $87,460 in 2025, according to data released by the Census Bureau on September 15, 2026. The official poverty rate also fell to 10.2 percent. These are important gains. They do not show that economic insecurity has disappeared or that public benefits have become unnecessary.…
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SNAP Access for Older Adults and People with Disabilities Needs More Than a Website
A benefits portal can make an application easier for one person and harder for another. Someone who cannot reliably use a screen, upload documents or reach an office still needs a workable way to seek food assistance. Social work agencies should treat that access problem as part of their service responsibility. USDA’s guidance on SNAP…
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Advocacy Should Explain Funding Choices Without Ranking Human Worth
When social workers advocate for an organization, they often have to explain why it should receive money that could support another urgent need. That responsibility requires more than a moving account of suffering. It requires an argument about what a particular allocation can accomplish, who will benefit, and what happens to people whose needs remain…
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HUD’s Homelessness Competition Was Vacated. Social Work Must Use the Reset to Demand Evidence
The federal homelessness funding system is in an unusual pause. On August 7, 2026, a federal district court vacated the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s fiscal year 2026 Continuum of Care competition because the agency had not completed the notice and comment process required for major changes. HUD now says the former August 26…
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Healthy Aging Requires Practical Support, and Social Work Should Help Deliver It
Healthy Aging Month is an opportunity to examine what makes everyday independence possible. Advice about exercise, nutrition, and social connection becomes more useful when people have the resources to act on it. Social work should help identify and address the practical conditions that turn a reasonable recommendation into an achievable part of daily life. In…
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Eviction Prevention Is Social Work. Portland’s New Plan Shows Where the Profession Belongs.
A tenant facing eviction may need a lawyer, money to cover overdue rent, help gathering documents, and someone who can coordinate those steps before a deadline expires. Social work belongs in that response. The profession should help build the systems that preserve housing while people still have it. Portland’s recent procurement offers a concrete starting…
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Food, Shelter, and Therapy: Social Work’s Misplaced Priorities
A person worried about the next meal or tonight’s sleeping arrangement may also need mental health treatment. The failure of a service system is not that it offers therapy, but that it can offer therapy more readily than a practical answer to hunger, unsafe housing, or an interrupted income. This final article in The Social…
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Gary Needed Refrigeration, Water, and Cooling. Where Were the Schools of Social Work?
When power fails for days, a family’s needs become immediate and concrete. Food must be kept safe. People need drinking water, a tolerable indoor temperature, transportation, and a way to communicate. Distress is part of that experience, but so are the material conditions producing it. Gary’s prolonged August power outage raises a question for social…