Housing instability, homelessness, and stable housing represent interconnected stages along a single housing continuum. Each stage reflects whether households are able to obtain and maintain safe, affordable, and sustainable housing over time. Understanding how households move along this continuum helps clarify both the causes of housing instability and homelessness and the solutions required to improve housing stability.

This blog is the fifth and final post in a five-part series examining findings from the 2025 State of Housing Instability and Homelessness (SOHIH) Report. This post brings together key findings from across the housing continuum and examines what these findings reveal about housing stability and housing access in Charlotte-Mecklenburg.

Families involved in the child welfare system are often navigating multiple, intersecting challenges at once, including housing instability, poverty, health needs, and trauma. When housing is unstable, these challenges compound, increasing the likelihood of child welfare involvement and, in the most severe cases, family separation.

The Keeping Families Together model was developed in collaboration with the Corporation for Supportive Housing through its Frequent User System Model (FUSE) to intervene at this intersection by pairing permanent supportive housing with wraparound services for families involved with child welfare who are also experiencing homelessness. A new evaluation of Mecklenburg County’s Keeping Families Together program offers important insight into how this approach is working locally and what it tells us about the role of housing in stabilizing families and reducing system involvement.

This blog summarizes findings from the Mecklenburg County Keeping Families Together program evaluation, highlighting housing outcomes and changes in child welfare involvement for families served between 2020 and 2023.

Housing instability, homelessness, and stable housing are often discussed as separate issues. In reality, they are interconnected stages along a single housing continuum that reflects whether households are able to obtain and maintain safe, affordable, and sustainable housing over time.
The newly released Charlotte-Mecklenburg State of Housing Instability and Homelessness (SOHIH) Report examines this continuum by analyzing conditions at three critical points: housing instability, homelessness, and stable housing. Together, these stages illustrate both how households lose housing and what is required to restore and sustain housing stability.

This blog is the first in a five-part series that takes a deeper look at findings from the 2025 SOHIH Report. Each post in this series examines a different stage of the housing continuum and explores what the data reveal about housing stability, homelessness, and access to stable housing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Together, this series provides a deeper understanding of how housing challenges develop and what is required to improve housing stability across our community.

The 2025 State of Housing Instability and Homelessness (SoHIH) report, released today, provides a comprehensive view of housing conditions across the full housing continuum from instability to homelessness to stable housing. Produced annually by Mecklenburg County Community Support Services, the report integrates local, regional, and national data sources to assess housing instability, homelessness, and access to stable housing, offering critical insight into both system performance and structural challenges.

The 2025 report highlights the growing pressures facing households across Mecklenburg County and underscores the structural factors driving housing instability. Taken together, the findings show that housing instability remains widespread, homelessness persists, and deeply affordable housing remains critically insufficient to meet community need. These trends reinforce the importance of coordinated strategies that address both immediate housing crises and the upstream conditions that place households at risk.

This blog post outlines the key findings from the 2025 SoHIH report and examines what these findings could mean for Mecklenburg County.