Are We Asking the Right Questions?
Yesterday, HUD released its FY2026 Continuum of Care funding notice, reigniting familiar debates about Housing First, treatment, recovery, accountability, and public safety. As I worked through the NOFO and the online discourse that followed, another question kept coming to mind: What actually determines whether communities can reduce homelessness at scale?
We know homelessness can be reduced because communities do it every day. People move from homelessness into housing. Families remain stably housed because prevention efforts intervene before a crisis occurs. Individuals reconnect with healthcare, employment, and community after months or years of instability. These outcomes happen every day, including here in Fargo-Moorhead.
What often determines whether those successes can be replicated is capacity.
Housing programs cannot place people into units that do not exist. Service providers cannot support unlimited numbers of households with finite staff and resources. Communities cannot create affordable housing overnight. Demand routinely exceeds the housing, services, and support systems available.
Despite that reality, much of the conversation surrounding homelessness continues to revolve around accountability. We spend a great deal of time asking what people experiencing homelessness should be doing differently and whether service providers are doing enough.
What receives far less attention is community accountability.
Every community makes decisions about housing, land use, funding priorities, service capacity, workforce investment, transportation, healthcare access, and dozens of other factors that shape whether homelessness rises or falls. When homelessness increases, we rarely examine those choices with the same intensity that we examine the decisions of individuals or providers. Yet those decisions often determine the conditions under which homeless service providers, housing programs, and individuals are expected to succeed.
Over the past year, that question has increasingly shaped our work at the FM Coalition to End Homelessness. Through initiatives like United to End Homelessness and the Cass Clay Interagency Council on Homelessness, we have worked to bring together local governments, housing providers, healthcare systems, businesses, faith communities, philanthropy, and service organizations around a simple premise: ending homelessness requires a community response.
In Fargo-Moorhead, the challenge is rarely identifying what needs to happen next. More often, it is finding enough housing opportunities, service capacity, and community alignment to make those solutions available at the scale the problem requires.
The discussion surrounding this NOFO will continue, and it should. Federal policy influences how communities respond to homelessness; it can shape priorities, incentives, and constraints, but it cannot substitute for local leadership, partnership, and investment.
Ultimately, communities still have to decide what they are willing to build, fund, prioritize, and sustain. Communities struggle when accountability is expected from everyone except the community itself.
Our willingness to confront that reality will tell us more about our future than any federal funding notice ever could.