Trump’s ‘Tectonic Shift’ on Homelessness Is Sending Shockwaves Across California

Wearing a fistful of army rings, Bill Wade pulled his green beret from a shelf crammed with military memorabilia. As he held it in his hands, he read the U.S. Army Special Forces motto on the patch: De Oppresso Liber, in his words, “Hero of the Oppressed.”

Wade’s time in Vietnam is a source of pride, but more than half a century later, the 74-year-old still carries its scars.

As a teenager, the army provided him with an escape from an abusive foster father. Later, it gave him structure and purpose. But his 12 years of service also left him with PTSD, a shattered jaw that still aches and a jar of his own teeth, which fell out over the years.

For over a decade, Wade lived in his truck, doing stints as a bouncer and renting rooms when he could. “It was a weird life,” he said, “a terrible life back then.”

Then, six years ago, he landed a small studio apartment in Fremont that he shares with his cat, Libby.

Having a place to live hasn’t relieved his pain, physical or emotional, but it’s put him in a better place to tend those wounds. “Now I have a place to come home to,” he said.

Wade’s path from years of instability to this small sanctuary reflects the philosophy guiding California’s homelessness policy, which prioritizes getting people into permanent housing with as few barriers as possible. Or, as Alex Visotzky of the National Alliance to End Homelessness puts it, “The very simple idea that the immediate solution to someone being homeless is a home.”

This approach, known as Housing First, has shaped the federal response to homelessness for two decades, and California doubled down in 2016 by requiring state-funded programs to follow its principles.

Now the Trump administration is trying to scrap it. In late July, the president issued an executive order directing federal agencies to stop funding Housing First programs, calling them a failure and turning a California mandate into a liability.

The order is the culmination of a backlash that’s been brewing for years — both in California and across the country — as the number of people on the streets keeps ticking up even as the spending on homelessness grows.

The debate over Housing First hinges on a clash over both causes and solutions. Is homelessness the result of rampant drug use and untreated mental illness, or of deeper structural forces like sky-high rents, poverty and racism? Should housing be used as a reward for sobriety and treatment, or provided first, as the foundation for recovery? And, perhaps more fundamentally, should housing be a human right?

“The pendulum is swinging back,” said Paul Webster, a California-based fellow with the Cicero Institute, the Texas-based think tank leading the ideological charge against Housing First. “We have to balance the provision of housing with some kind of way to help people get better.”

What the federal pullback will mean in California isn’t clear. Local officials are awaiting guidance on whether and how they’ll be able to tap federal dollars. Jonathan Russell, who runs homelessness services for Alameda County, where Wade lives, called it a “tectonic shift” that has left local agencies caught between contradictory policies. “There’s a lot of unknowns,” he said.

Last year, the county’s main federal homelessness-related grant totaled $56 million, and nearly 80% of that went to permanent housing. If that funding doesn’t come through this year and he can’t find a way to make it up, Russell said, as many as 1,400 people in Alameda County alone could lose their rental assistance.

Million-dollar Murray

Wade spent years in and out of homelessness before a fellow vet suggested he turn to the VA for help. He started seeing a psychiatrist and secured a housing voucher through a federal program that specializes in helping homeless veterans. But he still hadn’t found an apartment that would accept it.

That changed after a lucky encounter with a DMV worker. He was applying for a new driver’s license with a veteran designation when the woman behind the counter asked for his address. “I don’t live nowhere,” he recalls telling her.

Her son happened to be a veteran who’d been in the same position, and she connected Wade with staff at an apartment building in Fremont for people exiting homelessness. Within weeks, Wade said he was able to move into his own studio there.

“It was fantastic,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

When proponents of Housing First point to the approach’s success, they often highlight the very program that helped Wade get into housing. Launched in 2008 under the George W. Bush Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing, or HUD-VASH, offers participants housing vouchers with few strings attached.

Participants put about a third of their income toward rent, and the rest is covered by the voucher. Case managers help connect the veterans with optional services like health care, mental health treatment and substance use counseling.

The program is credited with helping contribute to a 55% drop in homelessness among veterans nationwide since 2010, even as overall homelessness climbed over 20% during that time.

It was the story of another veteran that first brought Housing First into the mainstream. Murray Barr was an ex-marine who drank himself to death on the streets of Reno, Nevada. In a 2006 New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell used Barr’s repeated ER visits and rehab stays to illustrate the high cost of homelessness and to make the case for a more economical approach: permanent supportive housing.

Around the country, journalists, politicians and nonprofits seized on the “Million-Dollar Murray” narrative, galvanizing support for the Housing First strategy with its cost-saving logic.

Gladwell first heard Barr’s story not from a liberal academic or housing advocate, but from Philip Mangano, who Bush appointed to lead the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness in 2002.

His idea was radical: Take the most difficult cases, the nation’s Murray Barrs, and hand them the keys to an apartment.

Before Mangano ushered in the era of Housing First, the typical approach to getting people off the streets was intuitive, not guided by research, according to University of Southern California professor Benjamin Henwood, who studies homelessness policy. In hindsight, it can be seen as a “treatment first” or “housing readiness” strategy that operated like a reward system, providing housing to those who could meet a series of requirements as they graduated from shelter to temporary to more permanent placements.

“Folks had to prove all along the way … that they were ready for housing,” said Vivian Wan, the CEO of Abode Services, which operates the building where Wade lives. “If they did well and followed all the rules and were good tenants in transitional housing, then they got the golden ticket to permanent supportive housing.”

Success required staying sober, getting mental healthcare, drug treatment, making curfew or meeting with a case manager. As a result, chronically unhoused people with substance use or mental health issues often flunked out of programs.

Around the country, people started experimenting with a different approach that prioritized housing. New York City-based psychologist Sam Tsemberis was the first to rigorously study the model and coin the term: Housing First.

In the early ’90s, Tsemberis launched a program that targeted people who’d failed out of previous programs and placed them in apartments with no requirement to get clean or enter treatment and no time limit.

“These were typically very significantly impaired people,” Wan said. “Folks who were really very vulnerable had acute mental health needs across the board.”

After five years, 88% of the participants were still housed, compared to 47% of residents in the city’s residential treatment system.

Other research showed promising results, too. “The people who you gave housing to actually stayed in that housing, and they stopped going to the emergency room, and they stopped getting arrested, whereas the other folks continue to cycle through all these other institutions,” Henwood said. “That’s what got the attention of the Bush Administration.”

The intent, Mangano told Gladwell, was to invest in solutions “that actually end homelessness.”

Evolution and backlash

Over time, as Housing First became the country’s homelessness policy north star, the term evolved into a catch-all, blurring what it actually entails.

“It sort of lost a bit of its meaning along the way,” Henwood said. “And I think part of that made it an easy target for where we are today.”

Across the country, there are now some 400,000 units of permanent supportive housing nationwide, up 32% in the last decade. In California, the number rose 73% to around 79,000. While some programs hew to Tsemberis’ model, with its clear set of standards, many more employ the approach loosely. Today, it’s shorthand for simply providing housing with few preconditions.

And as permanent supportive housing has become the primary tool for ending homelessness, critics see its limitations.

While Wade imagines he’ll live in his studio apartment for the rest of his life, the evidence shows permanent supportive housing doesn’t work for everybody. About one in five people will struggle to keep their apartments, Henwood said, noting it’s difficult to predict who that will be. People with serious mental health or drug issues might stay housed, while others who appear stable get evicted.

Stephen Eide, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, argues that while certain Housing First programs might be successful, the results don’t often hold up at scale. “At the city level, the evidence was never very compelling,” he said. “That’s a big problem because when the public was told, ‘We know how to end homelessness,’ they were really thinking about at the city level.”

In his view, Housing First has promised too much and delivered too little, making it ripe for attacks. “This is a problem that the advocates created because they were so grandiose in their claims about what Housing First was going to do,” he said.

By the late 2010s, right-leaning think tanks like his were waging an ideological war on Housing First. They’ve argued the model is ineffective and doesn’t address what they believe are often the root causes of homelessness — drug addiction and mental illness.

Those arguments have now found purchase at the highest levels of government. The Cicero Institute pushed many of the ideas in President Trump’s recent executive order, including banning public camping, predicating housing on treatment and forcibly institutionalizing people.

“The spigot’s been supporting this housing-centric approach,” Cicero’s Webster said of the billions in federal money invested. “And what are the results that we’ve seen? We’ve seen homelessness go up.”

Defenders of Housing First liken that logic to handing out too few life jackets and then, when those without jackets drown, blaming the devices. The problem isn’t too much spending in their view, but too little.

In the Bay Area alone, the nonprofit All Home estimates it would cost $9.5 billion over five years on top of current spending to cut homelessness by just three-quarters. And despite the expansion of permanent supportive housing, they point to a system dogged by scarcity. In California, where more than 187,000 people experience homelessness on any given night, people can wait years for a spot to open. In the meantime, their condition deteriorates.

“We know the longer folks are outside and the longer folks don’t have stable housing, the more their needs can get more complex, more difficult to overcome,” Russell said. And research shows that Housing First programs aren’t good at addressing those complex needs.

For those whose needs are less complex, Housing First may indeed get them off the street, but the “Million-Dollar Murray” cost-savings argument breaks down. Research finds that it only holds up for the small subset of unhoused people who cycle between emergency rooms and jails. But for many others who don’t fit that criterion, it may not.

“That doesn’t hold true once you’re working with families who live in their cars and don’t go to ERs and don’t use all these other emergency services,” Henwood said. “If you give them an apartment and a social worker or a mental health worker, that just costs money.”

The answer, Russell and Henwood say, is not to throw out Housing First, but to expand the types of offerings that are available to better meet people’s needs. “The real need is actually to diversify the housing types across the continuum,” Russell said.

On that point, Eide and Webster agree. They argue that some people might need more mental health support than housing providers can offer. Others might need sober living facilities so they don’t relapse. And still others might not need much more than a temporary roof over their heads.

Rethinking housing first in California

Beneath all these arguments is a more fundamental disagreement about the nature of housing in this country. For Visotzky of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, solving homelessness means asking big questions that get at the true cause: “Are we doing enough to house poor people in this country? Is our housing market working for the poorest people?” And blaming Housing First is a distraction from the answer — in his view, a resounding no.

It’s an idea echoed on the homepage for Tsemberis’s preeminent Housing First training program, which declares, “Housing is a Human Right.” To critics like Webster, such statements are evidence that the model isn’t just a failed policy but a Trojan Horse for socialism.

“The ultimate choice is, do we want to have a conversation about restructuring our entire housing system, such that housing is no longer considered a commodity but a public good?” Webster said. “I’m not interested in that conversation; I don’t think this executive order is interested in the conversation.”

Pete Kasperowicz, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, said he has no reason to believe the recent executive order will impact the HUD-VASH program that Wade is in. “Past administrations may have labeled HUD-VASH as a ‘Housing First’ program,” he said in a statement, “but we don’t view it that way.”

Asked whether HUD-VASH has begun or would begin requiring treatment as a condition of enrollment in the program, which Trump’s executive order explicitly demands, Kasperowicz declined to respond.

In California, efforts to enshrine housing as a human right into the state constitution and build social housing haven’t gotten much traction. But policymakers are reconsidering their approach to homelessness, including Housing First.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and many local leaders have already leaned into enforcement, backing encampment clearings and expanded conservatorships.

Eide, of the Manhattan Institute, sees the state’s shift as part of a larger national turn away from Housing First. “A lot of people, whether they want to say they’re aligned with the president or not, are moving in the same general direction as a lot of the ideas in this executive order,” he said, referring to Trump’s call for tougher enforcement and more treatment mandates.

Assemblymember Matt Haney of San Francisco is among the Democrats pressing for changes. “Where California’s approach to Housing First has fallen short is that it’s been in some ways inflexible in recognizing that some people do need options,” he said.

He introduced a bill that would allow state funding to be used for drug-free recovery housing. He said California’s 2016 Housing First law was written to prevent providers from imposing conditions like drug tests just to get a bed for the night. But in practice, he argued, it has blocked funding for residents who actually want drug-free environments.

“Unfortunately, right now, we force everyone into environments where drug use is explicitly allowed,” Haney said.

Whatever its pitfalls, Wade is proof of what Housing First can do: keep someone with deep wounds housed and connected to care. Advocates warn discarding the model could unravel that fragile progress for thousands like him.

When he was living in his truck, Wade was fighting a deep depression. He was divorced, and his only child had died in her 20s of a brain tumor. “Throughout those years, I was contemplating suicide and got pretty close,” he said.

Today, Wade volunteers as a security guard for a nearby church, and he’s made a couple of friends in the building. Still, he struggles. “Sometimes I get down and out,” he said.

Housing has not swept away his depression, but he’s less alone. His VA case worker regularly calls to check up on him and make sure he’s seeing his doctor and taking medication. He’s enrolled in an anger management class and goes on group outings to the movies or to eat.

On his favorite field trip, they visited stables, and Wade met a horse named Country Candy. He beamed as he recounted brushing her chest. “We had a ball,” he said.