“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…” opens the poem Mending Wall by Robert Frost. The poem describes an annual ritual between two neighbors, brought together to patch the wall between their two fields. As they go about the work, one neighbor asks about the purpose of the wall. The other simply replies, “Good fences make good neighbors.” But…do walls, in fact, ensure good relations?  Previously, the Building Bridges blog has addressed the lack of systemic alignment in the community through the image of failure hoarded in silos.  Given the need for distancing driven by COVID-19, this post will employ the idea of a wall. Since mid-March, the Building Bridges blog has been focused on housing challenges and solutions through the lens of COVID-19. Reviewing these posts, three primary themes have emerged: Housing is healthcare; what was previously thought impossible is now considered smart and strategic; and with new private and public dollars, communities can both mitigate a new wave of COVID-related housing instability and homelessness and address the factors that drove pre-pandemic housing and homelessness issues. In particular, the post from May 13, “What Does It Mean to Go “Home” in A COVID-19 World?” underscores the fact that, while housing has always been essential to individual health, the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the vital role housing plays in ensuring public health. The blog series first spotlighted the short-term interventions implemented as a crisis response to the COVID-19 pandemic that can (and should) be transformed into permanent solutions addressing the pre-existing conditions of housing instability and homelessness. Topics covered by the series include: eviction prevention; funding distribution and flexibility; shelter capacity; information sharing; evaluation and performance; conversion of hotel leases to permanent housing; and telecommunication. The blog series concluded by describing ways in which communities can use both a public health and an economic response framework to maximize COVID-19 funding.  By “stretching the dollars,” communities can prevent or reduce a new wave of housing instability and homelessness specifically related to the novel coronavirus.  Last week’s blog post covered this final impact area of the framework: strengthening systems as critical for an effective public health and economic recovery response. Strengthening systems requires cross-sector collaboration. Systems-level change can only happen through coordination across the entire service continuum, from funders to providers. Functioning as an integrated system, communities have the power to finally erect solutions to the complex, intractable issues of housing instability and homelessness. What role, then, do walls play in this work? This blog post will delve further into this question; the current state of housing instability and homelessness; and what it all means for Charlotte-Mecklenburg.