Conference Panels 2026

Housing navigation thrives when executive vision, frontline execution, and landlord partnerships operate in perfect harmony. Moving away from passive panels and corporate buzzwords, this highly interactive session confronts the real-world friction between rigid compliance mandates and chaotic daily realities. Through live “Fishbowl” role-plays, perspective-shifting experiments, and real-time crowdsourcing, executives, navigators, and housing providers will learn how to leverage actionable empathy to break down administrative silos, prevent staff burnout, and build lasting, high-value landlord collaborations.

This panel will demonstrate Monarch’s in-development clearinghouse of affordable housing financing programs in New Jersey. As a component of LISC’s ABC effort, this clearinghouse serves as phase one in an ongoing effort to highlight gaps, identify overlaps, and host conversations with funders to make funding programs and finance underwriting more comprehensive and accessible to emerging developers. Attendees will have a chance to explore the website, provide direct feedback, and shape the ongoing development of the site.

Though coordinated entry is utilized as an entry point for housing solutions, there is a window of opportunity for the program to operate in a more robust capacity. This panel will highlight systems where coordinated entry has been able to expand the housing availability for those on the prioritization list by fostering relationships and filling gaps for affordable housing developers.

The affordable housing development process is a complicated one in which developers must navigate and coordinate funding, timelines, reviews and approvals between multiple programs, agencies and institutions.  Often developers face duplicative and inefficient review processes that slowdown and set back development timelines ultimately impacting the project completion and cost.  This panel will explore direct ways in which the review process impacts projects and creative solutions to streamline and expedite the process while preserving oversight and quality.

This panel marries two important issues (historical housing inequalities and modern health inequalities caused by housing) in an effort to guide modern developers to avoid the pitfalls of the past – all with a throughline of applicability to housing projects being built now.

Taking pointers from successful and ongoing community projects, this conversation will elucidate how a community- or faith-based organization comes to the decision to develop affordable housing. Partners involved in these developments will share their successes and challenges in creating much-needed housing and explore how policy changes can lead the way to the development of quality housing and community spaces. Panelists will showcase real life examples of adaptive reuse projects being completed without compromising ongoing organizational presence or spiritual mission.

The affordable housing crisis and climate crisis have merged.  Wildfires incinerate neighborhoods, hurricanes demolish entire costal regions, floods ravage homes leaving them uninhabitable for months, tornadoes obliterate communities – stress testing planners, developers, and policy makers in ways we are only beginning to reckon with.  This panel examines what extreme weather is doing to housing affordability.

As Insurers are abandoning climate-exposed markets and extreme weather events are wiping out affordable housing stock faster than it can be rebuilt, displacement permanently prices out residents least able to absorb them.

This panel explores how extreme weather is reshaping housing costs, insurance markets and development economics.  What is realistic intervention?

Cross Borders: Innovation Lessons from the World in Affordable Housing Models.
From Vienna’s century-old social housing tradition, where more than half the city’s population lives in publicly subsidized housing, to Singapore’s Housing Development Board, which has made homeownership a near-universal reality through land stewardship, mixed-income community land trust in the UK, emerging cooperative housing in Uruguay and Finland’s elimination of chronic homelessness the international landscape offers a rich array of approaches.
This discussion probes the structural conditions that allow these models to succeed: the role of land policy, financing mechanisms, political will, community will and design innovation.
Attendees will leave with a comparative framework for evaluating housing interventions in their own context and inspiration for adaptation closer to home.

Municipalities can play a critical role in ending unsheltered homelessness in their communities. This panel will explore effective strategies for advocacy at the local level that encourage human-centered solutions and municipalities that have developed local responses to address community needs.

As Monarch’s Housing is a Human Right campaign continues to grow and evolve, this panel brings together legal and legislative experts to discuss the underpinnings of the human right to housing. This conversation will explore housing rights theories, policies, models, and legal frameworks, both international and domestic, ultimately grounding the discussion by applying these to New Jersey’s landscape.

This panel will discuss how non-traditional partners are critical in serving those experiencing homelessness and ending homelessness in communities through their work in filling funding or service gaps.

This panel will explore how People with Lived Experience (PWLE) can be powerful partners in improving housing and homelessness programs and driving meaningful system change. Through real-world examples, panelists will highlight how tenant advocacy boards and advisory groups have helped create better outcomes for communities.

Agencies often spend the first initial weeks, or months, of engagement with unsheltered persons focused on meeting their immediate needs: food, shelter, resource connection; this panel will describe what it looks like to primarily be focused on PH from initial engagement

Ending Homelessness in New Jersey is a collective responsibility that requires active participation from a variety of stakeholders to create lasting system change.  Over the last 2 years New Jersey stakeholders have engaged in a process to develop and implement a Statewide Strategic Plan to End Family and Youth Homelessness.  This effort has been a collaboration between state agencies, homeless system partners and foundations.  In this session we will dig into the plan as well as hear from philanthropy about the various roles they can plan in supporting communities in creating system change.

Affordable housing begins with land. Who owns it, who controls it, and who benefits from it are questions that shape whether communities can create and preserve affordable housing for the long term.

This panel will explore how different models of land ownership, including community land trusts, neighborhood land trusts, shared equity approaches, and strategic use of publicly owned land – can expand access to affordable housing while ensuring lasting community benefit. Panelists will discuss the opportunities and challenges of acquiring land, financing and sustaining community ownership models, and preserving affordability overtime.

As governments increasingly examine publicly owned land as a resource for housing development, this conversation will highlight innovative partnerships, financing strategies, and policy solutions that help communities move from land access to long-term stewardship. Attendees will gain insight into how different models of ownership and control of land can create more equitable development and strengthen neighborhoods for community residents.