Pine Hill, NM
Housing | 2025
Identifying the scale of unmet housing needs to inform advocacy for more equitable housing investments and improve living conditions.
A history of systemic racism, disinvestment, and restrictive federal policies has left tribal communities with widespread unmet housing needs. As a Band of the Navajo Nation, the Ramah Navajo community faces additional challenges, including limited authority to independently manage housing development, access federal housing resources, and address its community’s housing needs in a self-determined way. Moreover, the federal trust land system and complex land tenure arrangements create significant barriers to private investment and mortgage financing in the Ramah Navajo community. Because trust and allotment lands cannot be easily collateralized or transferred, conventional lenders are often unwilling to finance home construction, purchase, or repairs. These structural barriers have led to persistent housing shortages, overcrowding, and substandard living conditions while preventing families from building generational wealth through homeownership, a key pathway to economic security in the broader US economy.
In response, the Ramah Navajo School Board is conducting a comprehensive housing data collection project to assess housing quality, document structural deficiencies and environmental hazards, and gather resident perspectives on affordability, overcrowding, and housing access. The assessment will also examine how federal policies and trust land constraints contribute to local housing challenges, generating data crucial to improving housing conditions, guiding equitable investment, and promoting health equity.
The project aims to produce robust, actionable data to inform policy development, advocate for equitable housing funding, and identify solutions to legal and financial barriers that impede housing progress in the Ramah Navajo community and across Indian Country. Following community engagement sessions to present findings and collect feedback, the Ramah Navajo Chapter and Ramah Navajo School Board will collaborate to draft housing policy proposals, pursue funding opportunities, and prioritize resources for home rehabilitation and new construction. In parallel, findings will support Pine Hill Health Clinic in addressing health disparities linked to poor housing conditions, guiding integrated health and housing interventions. Critically, the data will bolster Ramah Navajo’s efforts to establish a Housing Development Agency, empowering the community to directly manage tribal, federal, state, and private housing resources and pursue sustainable, self-determined solutions.