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Governor Shapiro's New Housing Action Plan: What It Means for Medicaid Enrollees

In February 2026, Governor Josh Shapiro released Pennsylvania’s first-ever Housing Action Plan, which includes plans to build more homes, fix up older homes, and help more Pennsylvanians find safe, affordable places to live.

Why This Matters

The idea behind the Housing Action Plan is straightforward: housing is health care. When someone has a chronic illness and no place to live, their health gets worse and their care costs more. For people on Medicaid—including older adults, people with disabilities, and families with low incomes—housing problems can make everything harder. Someone who receives home and community-based services (HCBS) through a waiver like Community HealthChoices needs a home to receive those services in. Without stable housing, people may end up in emergency rooms or nursing homes—settings that are more expensive and less suited to their needs.

 

What the Plan Does

Pennsylvania needs about 450,000 new homes by 2035. Without changes, the state will come up about 185,000 homes short. More than a million Pennsylvania households already spend more than 30% of their income on housing, and more than half the state’s homes are over 50 years old and in need of repairs.

The Housing Action Plan aims to tackle these problems in the following ways:

  • Build and fix more homes through new construction, home repairs, and job training in the building trades.
  • Help more people access housing —especially first-time homebuyers, renters, older adults, people with disabilities, and communities that have been left out in the past.
  • Prevent evictions and homelessness by protecting renters, helping with foreclosures, and supporting survivors of domestic violence.
  • Cut red tape so that it costs less and takes less time to build homes.
  • Make government work better together by improving coordination across state agencies and creating a “one-stop shop” so people can more easily find help.
     

The plan also calls for connecting unhoused Medicaid recipients to stable housing and support services through a new program called Investments in Health. The Governor’s budget proposes $1 million in state funds for this pilot program, which would help Medicaid recipients with serious health conditions who are unhoused or living with housing insecurity. Since Medicaid is a joint state-federal program, this $1 million in state funding would be matched with federal dollars, bringing the total to $2.5 million in the first year.

What Happens Next

Many of the ideas in the Housing Action Plan will need funding from Pennsylvania’s General Assembly. PHLP will keep watching Housing Action Plan developments closely and will share updates as we learn them.