Homes Guarantee

The so-called ‘miracle cure’ solution gives people homes when they need them without conditions attached, and has brought down homelessness by 70 per cent in Finland and eradicated poverty-based homelessness completely.

Burnham has worked tirelessly to bring homeless numbers down since he was first elected in 2017, and has even been donating 15 per cent of his salary to a homeless charity every month he’s been in the job.

Now, after a successful pilot of a similar housing first scheme in Greater Manchester, which has supported 430 people with complex experiences of homelessness, Burnham is bidding for government funding to extend it beyond the current deadline of March 2025.

“I kept hearing people talking about Finland and housing first, so I just thought, well, I better get over there and have a look. So I went, and it was sort of life-changing, actually”, the Manchester Mayor said when he was first elected.

He has since worked hard to PR the initiatives to the public, saying it financially makes sense.

“It actually saves public money to do this,” he said. “It’s not as if we’re just asking for something, and it’s another pressure. The bigger you do housing first, the more you’ll save.”

The federal government has not made a large scale investment to address affordable housing shortages since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which created public housing for civilians. Now, we need action beyond that scale. The country’s housing crisis is untenable, and it must end. We need a Homes Guarantee that will:

• Build 12 million social housing units and eradicate homelessness;
• Reinvest in existing public housing;
• Protect renters and bank tenants;
• Pay reparations for centuries of racist housing policies; and,
• End land/real estate speculation and de-commodify housing.

Fully realized, this proposal will guarantee homes for all. Rents will be set based on tenants’ needs and real costs to
local government, rather than speculative market prices. Land will be stewarded by and on behalf of everyday people
instead of financialized by developers and landlords. A Homes Guarantee will offer both reparative and proactive
approaches, including restorative justice to communities impacted by decades of discriminatory housing policy, as
well as investments that slash carbon emissions and support resiliency from ongoing climate breakdown.

Offering a plan to eradicate housing insecurity and homelessness in America is a gigantic undertaking. It is also a
moral and political responsibility. This briefing book is our detailed proposal for a Homes Guarantee

A job guarantee would go a long way toward helping people afford housing by locating living wage jobs in communities with cheaper housing. However, for the Job Guarantee to deliver the stability and prosperity we hope to see in a people’s economy, it should be paired with a guarantee of homes to everyone. Without a Homes Guarantee, real estate developers, mortgage brokers, and landlords will do everything in their power to capture the increased Job Guarantee earnings. Speculators who treat housing as an investment vehicle leave properties vacant to manipulate prices, systematically pushing people into homelessness. Lacking an alternative due to chronically underfunded public housing and a federal government legally barred from building new housing, many people have no choice but to rely on the private sector. Because the private sector has near total control over the housing stock, and housing is so fundamental to life, it is easy for speculators to bully people into paying more and more of their income. If we want our people’s economy to include quality, stable, community-controlled housing for all, we need the Homes Guarantee to provide an alternative to the speculative housing system.