The Fall of Housing FirstRepublicans have realized that Housing First is not about housing.
John Hirschauer
Jun 22, 2023
For nearly two decades, everyone in Washington believed in Housing First.
Housing First holds that homelessness is a housing problem that can be solved—note the word “solved”—by giving the housing to the homeless, no strings attached. Proponents of Housing First believe that tying housing to users’ sobriety or their participation in drug-abuse or mental-health treatment is wrong on both practical and moral grounds. Not only do behavioral requirements make the homeless less likely to use state services, it infringes on what advocates claim is homeless people's inalienable right to housing.
The policy had enjoyed broad support on both sides of the aisle. George Bush's homelessness czar, Philip Mangano, backed Housing First with almost biblical fervor. Barack Obama made adherence to the policy a condition of receiving federal grant money, and promised its adoption would end homelessness nationally within ten years.
It is now a decade after Obama's prediction, and cities across the country are grappling with an increasingly visible and violent homelessness problem. The number of unsheltered homeless people increased more than 20 percent between 2014 and 2020, even as Housing First proponents touted the program's success.
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Before Housing First came in vogue in the early 2000s, services were provided to the homeless on what is sometimes called the “staircase” model. Providers would see a homeless person on the street, and offer him an emergency shelter bed. If he behaved, he would be given the chance to move into a transitional housing unit, where he'd have to find a job and, if he was an addict, participate in substance-abuse treatment. At the end of this process, the hope was that the man could pay his own rent—or, in Marbut’s words, “exit the condition of homelessness and not to be in a subsidized living condition.”
Housing First advocates claim, not entirely unreasonably, that the “staircase” sequence expected too much from a population of people who are, oftentimes, ill-equipped to hold down a job, or ill-disposed to participate in treatment. They argue that providing people with housing, no questions asked, helps to get people off the streets, and lowers the costs associated with those who fail out of the “staircase” program, such as incarceration or psychiatric hospitalization.
But housing is expensive, and the notion that we can afford to provide housing to every single homeless person is belied by experience. As the Times reported, in Los Angeles, which embraces Housing First as a matter of policy, building a new supportive living unit for just one homeless person costs nearly $600,000. We also know that providing mentally ill people who refuse treatment with unsupervised, unconditioned housing often leads to disaster.
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Republicans have realized that Housing First is not exclusively, or even primarily, about housing. As Eide put it, “The real distinction is whether residential stability should be the goal of the program, as it is with Housing First providers, or secondary to primary goals such as economic independence.”
Richard Cho, former deputy director of USICH, said “Housing First is not a ‘program,’” but “a whole-system orientation and response.” It is a paradigmatic approach to the provision of social services that “is, and always has been, about changing mainstream systems.” Housing First is as much, if not more, about dismantling what proponents see as the bourgeois assumptions of our social safety net than the merits of a housing-oriented homelessness policy. Elected Republicans, at long last, are starting to recognize as much.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-fall-of-housing-first/
