Trump Targets Housing First Strategy

The Trump administration has turned its sites on something called the Interagency Council on Homelessness, a small group that works on a policy called Housing First. The move is reported in the New York Times as Trump’s Targeting of Homeless Agency Signals Sharp Shift in Policy. That’s true, but the change doesn’t really come with an alternative. And there is the program and policy, but then there is also the ideological hue of the phrase, “housing first.” That more broad and political statement is one side of a debate nationally that misses the point; the problem that we call homelessness won’t be solved by law enforcement or boot strap grabbing nor will it end when everyone gets an apartment key.

The policy called housing first emerged over the last two decades as a mandate to provide immediate shelter and housing for people living unconventionally without requirements. The policy was never exactly harm reduction, which is a more radical approach which includes interventions like providing clean needles for drug injection or “wet housing,” facilities in which people leaving the streets can drink alcohol. The idea of housing first is a practical one: addiction and mental health issues are key, but they can’t be addressed if a person is living on the streets.

People who support the agencies work argue that groups like youth and veterans have responded especially well, while those that are critical point to the programs lack of broad success. Just look out the window of any downtown building in any large city, they might say, and you’ll see the problem has only gotten worse. While supporters tend to be liberals and critics conservatives, the sorting isn’t exactly symmetrical. The Times article points out the policy once had bipartisan support and many homeless advocates are equally frustrated as conservative critics at the lack of success. And apartment key doesn’t solve the chronic problems most people face and they end up back on the streets.

We’ve seen the new Trump administration at work. It’s only a matter of time before housing first as a policy will be a thing of the past. But one thing is certain, what we call homelessness is complex; it isn’t simply a housing problem. I wrote a while back about the solid argument that the problem visible on city streets and even rural communities is highly correlated with cheap and engineered street drugs. In a post called Cheap Drugs, I took a closer look at Sam Quinones’s book The Least of Us, a chr