If you’ve been anywhere near the Medicaid or Medicare world lately, you’ve probably had the same conversation I have every week. It goes something like this:
And yet, many health plans are still trying to solve the housing problem by building from scratch. Standing up internal teams. Creating their own housing stock. Partnering with one or two local landlords and hoping it scales.
I get the instinct. I’ve been in the operational trenches long enough to understand why plans want to control more of the solution. But when it comes to housing, control often looks a lot like chaos.
You already know how fragmented housing is. It’s local, heavily regulated, and incredibly difficult to scale.
What makes it especially hard is the mismatch between what housing needs and what plans are built to do. Managing thousands of landlord relationships, negotiating leases, coordinating move-ins, and tracking tenancy data across states and markets? That’s a full-blown infrastructure lift.
Most plans weren’t designed to do that work. And they shouldn’t have to.
Too often, well-meaning teams fall into the trap of building a solution that doesn’t scale. Constructing a building might feel like progress, but it houses a tiny slice of your members. Standing up an internal navigation team might work for a few high-touch cases, but it stretches resources thin across too many priorities.
The outcome? Lots of activity. Not a lot of movement.
I’ve seen it firsthand. Unless you’re resourced like a national housing agency, trying to own every piece of the puzzle is a losing strategy.
When we talk to MCOs, three operational pain points come up again and again:
1. Sourcing units that will actually take your members
Especially when those members have credit challenges, eviction histories, or justice involvement. These aren’t easy placements, and landlords aren’t always eager to help.
2. Layering in the right support
Housing without supportive services is just delayed failure. Case managers are stretched thin, and housing-specific support is rarely baked into their workflow.
3. Getting clean data
You need to know who’s housed, where, for how long, and whether it’s moving the needle. That gets messy fast when housing efforts are split across internal teams, local vendors, and siloed CBOs.
None of this is new to you. But it’s worth naming clearly, because it’s the friction that derails even the best-intentioned housing efforts.
For us, it means offering housing as a fully contracted solution. That means:
All handled by one accountable partner. One team to call. One set of deliverables. One price.
Plans shouldn’t have to chase down five vendors and pull together spreadsheets to figure out if housing is working. With a fully contracted model, you know what you’re getting, what it costs, and what success looks like.
And because it’s performance-based, you know we’re motivated to deliver outcomes. Not just services.
Sure. So is heart surgery. That doesn’t mean you don’t cover it.
Plans deal with complexity every day. What matters is whether there’s a way to take that complexity off your plate and still deliver value. That’s what we’ve built at Upside. We’ve gone deep on landlord relationships, service coordination, and tenancy support so plans don’t have to.
You don’t need to become experts in leases and move-ins. You need to help members get housed and stay housed, with clear results and fewer headaches.
That’s what we’re here for.
Upside Corporate Headquarters
200 E Las Olas Blvd 14th Floor
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301
