Our Tattered U.S. Safety Net, Part Three: Unemployment Insurance and Housing

This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right on February 13, 2026.

For our series on how existing U.S. programs come up well short of meeting needs, Part One last week covered food and family support, and Part Two reviewed our subsistence income programs and healthcare.

As a reminder, Jacobin published my article two weeks ago that covered much of this same ground in one piece. You can read it on their site here.

For our third and final installment, we review unemployment insurance and housing. Then we close with a reminder that even our flawed safety net programs have a deeply positive impact. If those programs are fully funded and accessible to all who need them, we can end U.S. poverty.

Unemployment Insurance.

Low-wage employers’ impact tearing holes in the U.S. social safety net may be most profoundly felt in the nation’s unemployment insurance program. Relentless lobbying by business elites has ensured that, when a U.S. worker loses their job, they are unlikely to receive any benefits at all. Less than 3 in every 10 unemployed U.S. workers receive unemployment insurance benefits.

The other 70% are blocked by multiple restrictions: mandated delays before receiving benefits, disqualification of gig workers, seasonal workers, and many part-time workers, required minimum pre-employment earnings, paperwork barriers, employer opposition to benefits applications, and time limits on benefits. All combine to bar deserving workers from assistance.

Image by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free

If they are fortunate enough to qualify, unemployed U.S. workers’ benefits average less than half their wages before losing their jobs, far less than in comparable nations. States set their own benefit levels, so in many states unemployment insurance payments are even lower.

Housing.

As flawed as the U.S. food, healthcare, and income support programs are, the U.S.’s pathetic housing efforts are worse. At least all who can prove eligibility for SNAP, TANF, SSI, Medicaid, and Unemployment Insurance receive it. Those are entitlement programs. Not so for U.S. housing supports.

Like child care subsidies, the underfunding of housing programs create a mad scramble for scarce resources. It is a competition that has far more losers than winners: more than three of every four households that are eligible for housing vouchers or subsidized units do not receive them. Massive waitlists are maintained, filled with the names of families and individuals seeking housing support. The waitlists are usually closed, with literal stampedes having occurred on the rare occasions they are opened.

Yet a household’s name being pulled from the waitlist does not guarantee safe shelter, either. The largest U.S. rental assistance program is the Housing Choice Voucher program, which puts the burden on recipients to find private-market landlords to accept their voucher. With no federal requirement for landlords to accept voucher tenants (some localities and states prohibit discrimination against voucher holders), would-be tenants’ searches are often futile. Over 40% of voucher holders can’t find a willing landlord, and those who succeed spend on average 78 days searching.

Those who can access increasingly scarce public housing units don’t have to search for a landlord. But decades of lawmakers starving public housing agencies of funding means public housing residents tenants often find their buildings and units to be in disrepair and unsafe.

Yet . . . The Safety Net Can Work.

A tragic irony of the U.S.’s frayed social safety net should also motivate efforts to improve it: the programs, deficient as they are, still achieve remarkable results. Two-decade analysis of the TANF, SNAP, and Medicaid programs has shown that participation in the programs significantly reduced economic hardship and food insufficiency. Receipt of unemployment benefits has been shown to cut household poverty rates in half.

Medicaid has been proven to support the financial stability of families, along with better physical and mental health for all in the household’s adults and higher educational attainment of covered children. Similarly, affordable housing increases the income of the household, longevity of the adults, and school success of the children.

The flaws in these programs mean too many U.S. households are wrongfully denied these benefits. But just a few years ago our government responded to the Covid pandemic by expanding nearly all of our assistance programs and reducing barriers to access. The result: poverty rates dropped dramatically, and overall well-being increased.

That success shows what is possible if we commit to repairing the many holes in our safety net.