Is this environment conducive to child flourishing?
This question should be at the heart of affordable rental housing policy, yet the current housing landscape rarely reflects it. Veronica Miranda, a psychotherapist who has been living in state-funded public housing in Massachusetts with her daughter for approximately seven years, captures why: “Children learn from their environment whether they are valued, safe, and cared for by the systems and people around them.” A child spends most of her time at home, and that home should offer more than a safe shelter—it should give her a place she is proud to call home. As Miranda’s words illustrate, the environments surrounding a child shape her understanding of her own worth. Achieving that requires government to set and enforce meaningful standards, private developers and inspection firms to build and maintain units responsibly, and civil society institutions to bring the local knowledge and care that policy alone cannot provide. Together, these efforts must ensure that housing goes beyond basic safety and health standards, with an intentional commitment to beauty within the physical condition of units and developments, from the materials used to the local amenities offered.
Affordable rental housing should reflect the dignity of each person; however, the current housing landscape reveals not only a lack of affordable units but a significant gap in quality. In 2023, the Office of the Inspector General audited the Boston Housing Authority twice, once covering public housing units and once covering Housing Choice Voucher units. Both audits found that units were not rigorously inspected and maintained, leaving families in substandard housing. Affordable housing should never merely meet the bare minimum. It should instead foster the kind of environment that promotes a child’s health, development, and sense of worth.
Child well-being ties intrinsically to housing quality. Lead paint, mold, and pests can impair a child’s physical and cognitive development. The surrounding neighborhood, too, shapes a child’s psychosocial development depending on her exposure to drug and alcohol use, toxic stress, and violence. Children learn and grow both within and outside the home, and the presence of environmental and health hazards can undermine that well-being. Addressing these hazards requires sustained funding.
Fostering environments where children can thrive has remained a persistent challenge, largely due to the chronic shortage of capital and operating funds needed to keep public housing units modernized and well-maintained. Without the necessary funds, the units families live in fall short of conditions children need to thrive. Currently, over 2.2 million families live in public housing, including approximately 800,000 children. Don’t they deserve a well-maintained and safe environment to call home? Programs like the Massachusetts Affordable Homes Act, which includes a “Restoring Dignity to Public Housing” initiative aimed at maintaining public housing to a standard that reflects the dignity of its residents through capital improvements, marks meaningful progress, but funding deficits remain the central barrier. Congress and state legislatures must prioritize closing this historical funding backlog.
Safeguarding children should not stop at prioritizing public housing funding, since millions of families rely on other affordable housing programs, from Housing Choice Vouchers to Section 8 Project-Based Rental Assistance to developments created and renovated by civil society institutions. Across all these programs, the conditions of the units themselves matter just as much as access to them. That is where inspections and maintenance become critical. At the federal level, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) passed new National Standards for the Physical Inspection of Real Estate (NSPIRE) in 2023 for HUD-assisted housing, marking a meaningful step toward creating safe and healthy housing for children. However, NSPIRE moves away from prioritizing the function and physical appearance of developments, which previous standards emphasized more heavily. HUD’s inspection standards should hold both safety and beauty simultaneously, promoting environments that demonstrate the value of the families living within them.
Miranda’s experience in state-funded public housing illustrates what is at stake when these standards fall short. Her daughter’s exposure to mold captures the consequences of poorly maintained units:
My daughter is allergic to mold, and when we first moved into our apartment a couple of years ago, she told me that she “liked the smell here,” but she was coughing every night and at that point, I didn’t know why. That experience stayed with me because it highlighted how kids often adapt to unhealthy conditions without fully understanding that something is wrong. No child should have to normalize mold, poor air quality, chronic pests, or unhealthy living conditions in their home. Conditions like that impact sleep, physical health, concentration, school attendance, and emotional well-being.
In situations like Miranda’s, the local housing authority carries the weight of providing quality housing, particularly when maintenance and inspections are handled in-house. These agencies must ensure that their teams rigorously follow quality standards so that children’s immediate environments support their development. Once the minimum health standards are met, they can explore the role of beauty within their housing.
Lisl Hacker, the Chief Programs Officer of the North Shore Community Development Coalition (CDC), offers a compelling example of what intentional housing looks like in practice. The CDC pursues two mechanisms for providing well-maintained, beautiful units: partnering with an outside property management company to identify and address hazards, and painting murals on their buildings. On the murals, Hacker puts it plainly: they represent “direct beautification of the city and taking away that stigma that affordable housing is run down and not nice to look at.” Together, these approaches illustrate that quality affordable housing requires more than meeting minimum standards. The North Shore CDC offers one local example of what it can look like to provide homes that children not only feel safe in but proud of.
The current landscape of affordable housing makes clear that providing safe, dignified homes for children remains an unfinished task. The United States currently lacks 7.2 million rental homes for extremely low-income renters—and even the units that exist frequently fall short of what children need to thrive. That gap in both quantity and quality calls for a serious and sustained response. It should not be hard to see the significance of housing that is located in opportunity-filled neighborhoods, rigorously maintained, and a place a child can take pride in calling home. Getting there will require government, housing authorities, and civil society institutions alike to fulfill their distinct responsibilities. But if we value the next generation, we must commit to creating homes—not just units—where a child’s imagination can take flight.
The interviews cited in this piece were conducted as part of the Hatfield Prize research report, “Refocusing the Priorities of Affordable Rental Housing: Investing in Quality and Child Well-Being” published by the Center for Public Justice. The full report, which includes additional research, data, and policy recommendations, is available here.
Emma Scott is a 2026 Hatfield Prize recipient. She grew up in Central New Hampshire and loved to spend time at the beaches with her family and friends. She just received her Bachelors of Arts degree in Social Welfare from Gordon College. She plans to continue working to cultivate spaces for children to thrive by using her countless years of experience in doing just that through tutoring, leading summer camps, and interning at a Head Start agency. She is excited to work with others who are focused on serving children and families in a way that reflects their dignity and worth.
Ivy George, Ph.D. is a 2026 Hatfield Prize recipient and teaches sociology at Gordon College in Massachusetts. She was trained at the University of Madras, Bryn Mawr, Brandeis, and Harvard in economics, social work, social policy, and religion. She has written two books on child labour (From Child Labour to Child Work, 1990) and cross-cultural comparisons of romance and marriage (An Uncommon Correspondence – East West Conversations on Friendship, Intimacy and Love, 1998, co-authored with Margaret Masson). She has published articles and contributed book chapters and lectured on a wide variety of crucially important topics including masculinity, feminism, the impact of globalization on social inequalities, and international adoptions.
Graphic by Center for Public Justice
