This contribution provides the background to the work carried out in Trieste as part of the UAH! research. In response to the growing and increasingly diverse demand for affordable rental housing, the discussion begins with a critical reconstruction of Italian housing policies. These policies reveal a marked sectoral division between “social” and “very social” measures, treating the provision of housing, assistance, financial aid, and support interventions as parallel rather than integrated domains. Active collaboration with local stakeholders in the city of Trieste has brought to the fore one particularly significant issue: the need to define unconventional forms of affordable, support-based housing capable of integrating and systematising diverse assets, actors, modes, and scales of intervention – from the home, to the neighbourhood, to the broader urban context. The “supportive neighbourhoods” perspective adopted in this contribution to rethink housing policies draws on two key principles: on the one hand, an expansion of the concept of affordability to encompass a complex array of material and immaterial living conditions; on the other hand, the territorialisation of interventions to ensure their relevance and responsiveness to specific contexts – that is, their adaptation to particular parts of the city and to the resources and needs that characterise them. The underlying hypothesis is that, in order to address increasingly complex and pervasive situations of vulnerability, grounding and synergy among multiple and diverse actions are essential. Beyond housing, these actions also involve public space, facilities, and welfare services, conceived as extensions of the domestic sphere and as settings for interaction and mutual support between institutions and individuals, as well as among individuals themselves. Speaking of supportive neighbourhoods, therefore, does not imply a simple discretisation of the housing issue into narrowly defined urban areas, but rather a comprehensive, multi-level reconfiguration of policies and tools, projects and interventions.