Two decades and countless billions have only accelerated the homelessness crisis

Developers, nonprofits, politicians, and lawyers make off like bandits as Americans die by the thousands

The modern media, both liberal and conservative, have perfected a method of shutting down reasonable debate from those with whom they disagree. On Tuesday The New York Times gave an object lesson in the approach, applying it to homelessness and housing. The article is entitled, “Federal Policy on Homelessness Becomes New Target of the Right.” Unfortunately for the Times, it’s a subject about which the all aspect report knows quite a bit. As it turns out, quite a bit more than the journalist behind the story.

Before unpacking the mendacity of the piece itself, let’s deconstruct the approach, which amounts to misdirection:

Step one: Find the most extreme, insane, even criminal opponents to your chosen cause and use them as strawmen for everyone who disagrees with you. Are you pro-choice? You must be the sort of person who embraces the likes of Kermit Gosnel, a synecdoche on the Right for everyone who supports a modicum of choice. Do you support gun rights? Obviously you think mass school shootings are just the cost of doing business, that a machine gun unloading on children is the sound of freedom.

Step two: Toss in a couple of obscure academic studies that bolster your position but don’t withstand cursory scrutiny, knowing that 99% of your audience will take your word that the study says what you say it says, and will never click the link or look up the reference in any event.

Step three: Acknowledge weaknesses in your preferred policy, but immediately deploy the fallacy of relative privation, aka, “things would even worse without it.”

Step four: End with a flourish that declares your side to be the “bipartisan” one, even if the alleged bipartisanship is a single alderman in Toad Suck, Arkansas.

Of course, it’s all bollocks. It’s the reason polls show Americans view the media with the same degree of favorability as flesh eating bacteria and members of Congress. The harm it is doing to our country and our communities is incalculable. It’s bad enough when it spews from the likes of Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow on cable “news.” It’s worse when a respected newspaper of record like The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal engages in it, because they give mendacity a veneer of respectability.

Worst of all, in the context of the national debate over the homeless crisis, the media’s mendacity rationalizes and justifies an approach that literally is costing lives by the tens of thousands every year. Here’s how.

The subject at hand: “Housing First”

As the nation’s homeless crisis continues spiraling out of control, the policy that has dominated for two decades, known as “Housing First,” has come under scrutiny. And rightly so. The policy is a shibboleth on the Left and to a lesser extent the Right. Its proponents defend it at all costs, even at the cost of reality. Even at the cost of human lives.

According to the Times piece, Housing First is nothing less than a righteous mission that, despite evidence to the contrary, is succeeding. Or, at least, it’s doing better than the alternatives might have done (“even worse without it”). Therefore, anyone who disagrees with it must, ipso facto, be a knuckle dragging ultra-MAGA reprobate, not to be taken seriously. Not just a Republican, not just a conservative, but probably a card-carrying member of the Proud Boys (whoever they are).

Housing First has had more than two decades to prove itself. And it has proven a near total failure. Despite a (very) few exceptions that tend to prove the rule, such as veterans’ housing, the human costs of this failure are in the hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed or lost. It’s not hard to suss out the reasons.

Housing First, as its name suggests, starts from the premise that every homeless person needs and deserves housing. Not a bed, not shelter, but a permanent home. The logic is that a permanent place to live provides the stability upon which treatment, care, counseling, and the other elements of “wraparound services” can be deployed and get the individual’s life back on track. It sounds good, even beneficent, in theory. In practice, in most places, it’s been an abject failure. That’s largely because Housing First quickly morphed into “Permanent Supportive Housing.”

For the vast majority of people who experience it, homelessness is not, or at least ought not be, a permanent situation. Most homeless people remain unhoused for relatively brief periods. Yet Housing First and Permanent Supportive Housing by definition assume that all or nearly all homeless people have fallen so low that the only solution is a new home, paid for by taxpayers, in perpetuity. The policy also focuses resources on a relatively small – albeit fast-growing, ironically thanks to these failed policies – portion of homeless people, the so-called “hardcore homeless” who dominate the national conversation. These are the folks living in the worst ways imaginable, in tent cities, shattered RVs, or sleeping bags on sidewalks. Those who languish in their own filth, a sizable percentage of whom are addicts and the mentally ill, screaming through the nights at demons they alone can see.

Which is where the logic behind Housing First collapses. Many hardcore homeless come to prefer life on the street. It can be a Catch-22: Give them an apartment with no conditions and they will simply continue to spiral, as we have seen over and over in cities like San Francisco and Santa Monica, where Housing First is virtually a religion. In contrast, suggest a place where homeless people are required to quit drinking or doing drugs and most will reject it outright.

The story of L.A.’s Skid Row Housing Trust, the largest private provider of homeless housing in downtown L.A., is illustrative. The Trust declared bankruptcy last year and was placed in receivership. The primary factor behind the failure — one of many, including fiscal mismanagement that bordered on financial illiteracy by the Trust’s leadership — was the cost of maintaining 1,500 units of housing occupied by homeless people who struggle with addiction and mental health issues and have an unfortunate tendency to treat their apartments the way heavy metal bands treated hotel rooms in the 80s. The costs of security and repairs alone drained the Trust’s ledgers. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, at a hearing last month the judge overseeing the case described, “a ‘mess’ for which he could not see an immediate remedy.”

We previously wrote about a homeless man named Brian in Santa Monica. An alcoholic with Tourette Syndrome and schizophrenia, after years on a waiting list, in November 2019 he got a permanent supportive apartment provided by a nonprofit called Step Up On Second. Over multiple interviews Brian confirmed that he was never offered nor was able to access services, even simple group therapy. He didn’t know any of his new neighbors. “We all kind of keep to ourselves,” he told us. He continued drinking every day. In fact, the room the nonprofit provided had a window that looked out directly on a rooftop bar next door. He spent five nights a week laying in bed listening to people drink and party until 2am. Someone with no mental challenges would have found it all but impossible to quit. We visited him on a Wednesday between 11am and noon, during which time he drank an entire six pack.

He lasted less than four months before he assaulted a woman on the street, was arrested, and kicked out. Catching up with him on the street last month he told us, “I’m done with inside places. I’ve got my spot in the alley behind [redacted] Street and I’m comfortable and safe. I’m good, man. Come visit me sometime.”

For what it’s worth the CEO of the nonprofit where Brian received Permanent Supportive Housing that proved neither permanent nor supportive and that barely qualified as housing made $390,000, nearly double what he’d made just five years previously.

Brian’s story illustrates the paradox of Housing First and Permanent Supportive Housing. It funnels billions to developers, nonprofits, and service providers who have little incentive to actually end homelessness. After all, as has been noted often in these virtual pages, no one in their right mind puts themselves out of a job. Ergo, permanent homelessness. Not only is there little incentive for these entities to help people retrieve and even save their lives, the incentives all push them toward sustaining the crisis. They grow their budgets by “serving” more homeless people, creating a doom loop for the pour souls trapped in it. An economist named William Niskanen described the phenomenon as the budget maximizing theory of bureaucracy. It’s the reason the Pentagon pays $500 for a hammer. It’s the reason homeless nonprofits’ budgets — not to mention their executives’ salaries — increase as homelessness increases. We discussed the doom loop in detail in a previous post.

The New York Times acknowledges none of these realities. Instead, it attributes opposition to Housing First not to recognizing failure but to a Right wing, Republican mission to … well, it’s not exactly clear. All that matters is that the people who oppose the policy are conservatives. Which, as far as the Times is concerned, puts the matter to bed. The article says, “Joe Lonsdale, the tech mogul behind the Cicero Institute, has called Housing First part of a ‘Marxist’ attempt to blame homelessness on capitalism, and Mr. Trump, in seeking a return to office, has pledged to place homeless people in ‘tent cities.’” There’s the false equivalency: Donald Trump hates homeless people, ergo anyone who disagrees with the prevailing policy must as well. End of discussion.

It’s quite the misdirection. Pay no attention to predatory nonprofits and their profiteering executives. Focus on a Donald Trump fever dream and a guy who rants about communist conspiracies. It’s deeply misleading.

Then there’s Step Two: The Times refers to a study that found, “[a]fter five years, 88 percent of the clients in a New York City program called Pathways to Housing remained housed, compared to 47 percent in the usual system of care.” The study in question followed a total of 242 homeless people in New York City. Homeless people in places like New York are likely to accept and keep Permanent Supportive Housing because of severe winter weather, making the study inapplicable to places like Los Angeles. Equally importantly, the study focused on what’s known as a linear residential treatment program, in which “clinical status is closely related to housing status. To be admitted to the program, a client must agree to participate in psychiatric and substance abuse treatment.” This is the opposite of Housing First and Permanent Supportive Housing, which come with few if any such requirements. The Times reporter and editors sidestep this crucial fact (again, knowing that almost no one will actually read the study).

And then Step Three: The Times claims, “[P]roponents say Housing First has succeeded where it matters most — getting people off the streets.” Yet three sentences later it admits, “Since 2015, the unsheltered population [in the United States] has grown by about 35 percent, with California the center of the crisis.”

Well, then. Just like the federally-mandated annual homeless “point in time” (PIT) count the numbers are manipulated and manipulative. Independent studies and reporting (including a story broken last year by the all aspect report) consistently demonstrate that the real number of homeless people languishing in the United States are many times higher than the official numbers, meaning the increase is far more than 35%. Likewise, the numbers of “homeless clients” housed and/or served by the hydra-headed nonprofits who comprise the core of the highly profitable Homeless Industrial Complex are inflated wildly.

The failures of Housing First are not a political talking point — they’re a tragic reality

None of this is a Republican or Right wing talking point. It is reality, backed by data, research, and hard experience. Nonprofits and developers are profiteering. They are failing to assist those they claim are their entire reason for existing. They are among the primary reasons people die on the streets by the tens of thousands.

Yet the Times declares that, “Conservative literature on the topic emerged, with critiques from the Manhattan Institute, the Cicero Institute, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and a Heritage Foundation paper by Christopher F. Rufo, the activist who turned ‘critical race theory’ into a war cry on the right.”

By disingenuously framing this evidence-based opposition as a fringe Right wing attack on a righteous mission The New York Times bolsters a policy that at the very least deserves radical reconsideration and reform. In the process the Grey Lady does homeless people, and the country overall, an enormous disservice. Talk about “fake news.”

They ought to be ashamed.