WEEK 7: Disability Discrimination & the Systematic Exclusion of People Who Are Different

I had planned to land the plane on this series about the complexity of homelessness—why the tidy stories we tell ourselves are incomplete and, often, harmful. But last week, I only brushed up against a reality that deserves far more attention: the intersection of disability discrimination and homelessness, and the quiet ways people are excluded from support long before they ever fall into crisis.

I want to name something upfront. By most measures, I was born holding a winning lottery ticket. I'm a white, able-bodied male. I grew up playing sports, had access to good schools, earned a postgraduate degree, and found work that allowed me to be upwardly mobile, starting as an outreach leader and now serving as a CEO. None of that makes me exceptional. It reflects the advantages I've had.

For a long time, disability exclusion felt distant. Like many societal problems, it was easy to assume that because I wasn't close to it, or couldn't see it, it wasn't as real or as widespread as advocates claimed.

That changed when my wife and I had to advocate for our daughter, who has some special needs. As we pushed for her education and safety, we ran headfirst into legal hurdles and bureaucratic systems that seemed designed to slow us down and wear us out. Even with every resource at our disposal—time, relationships, and experience navigating systems—we still had to force our way through.

We were fortunate. My wife is able to be available for our kids around the clock. My work has trained me to identify which levers to pull when bureaucracy stands in the way. So we fought. And eventually, we broke through.

But I remember thinking about the parents who can't fight the way we could. Parents working two jobs, solo-parenting, navigating language barriers, or lacking access to legal or professional support. It was hard for us, and expensive. But that's the point. Accessing basic support for children with disabilities should not require privilege, persistence, or a war of attrition.

Millions of people are navigating life with physical, intellectual, developmental, or psychiatric disabilities in a world that was never built with them in mind. A world designed by and for the able-bodied majority, where accommodation is conditional, benefits are fragile, and support often comes only after a crisis.

A few weeks ago, I sat on a panel with a disability rights advocate who shared a story that has stayed with me. She explained that organ donations are still often allocated preferentially to people without disabilities. If her son, who has Down syndrome, were in a car accident and needed a heart, and another child needed the same heart, the able-bodied child would likely move ahead of her son, even if her son were higher on the list, simply because he is deemed more "deserving".

This isn't about one hospital or one policy. It's about a value system that quietly ranks lives.

When society is built this way, homelessness is not a surprise, it's an outcome.

People with disabilities are more likely to experience poverty, housing instability, and gaps in healthcare. When something goes wrong—a medical emergency, a lost caregiver, a denied benefit—there is often no margin for error. One disruption can mean losing everything.

We often talk about homelessness as a personal failure. But what if many people are not failing at all? What if they are being failed by systems that were never designed to hold them?

If we are serious about addressing homelessness, we must reckon with disability discrimination. We must design systems that assume vulnerability, offer stability before crisis, dignity before compliance, and care without conditions.

The measure of a society is how it shows up for those most likely to be excluded. 

Thanks for reading,

Josiah Haken

City Relief, CEO