On homelessness, HUD is right to move away from failed 'housing first' policies

In a memorable scene from "Casablanca," actor Claude Rains plays a corrupt police chief ordered by the Germans to shut down a popular nightclub after patrons indulge in a disfavored patriotic song.

“But I have no excuse to close it!” protests Rains.

“Find one,” is the curt reply.

Rains orders everyone to leave immediately. When the nightclub’s owner Rick (played by the unforgettable Humphrey Bogart) demands to know “on what grounds,” Rains exclaims: “I’m shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in here!” He then cordially thanks the staff member who hands him his night’s winnings.

In a similar show of manufactured outrage, executives at the National Alliance to End Homelessness filed a lawsuit September 11 in Rhode Island seeking to prevent the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development from implementing new criteria for its homelessness assistance grants.

“Both the process and substance of this new award process are shockingly unlawful,” claims the lawsuit. “The administration is leveraging federal funding to advance the president’s ideological vision.”

U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy recently granted a temporary restraining order against HUD’s use of the new criteria while the lawsuit goes forward. But it is, of course, anything but shocking for a president to direct his administration to prioritize the principles and policies he deems most effective to carry out the nation’s laws.

Officials at the National Alliance to End Homelessness know this. They loudly applauded just over ten years ago when HUD made sweeping changes to its grant-making criteria and rules in order to leverage federal funding to advance President Obama’s ideological vision of “Housing First.”

As described on the organization's website, “Housing First is an approach ... to quickly and successfully connect individuals and families experiencing homelessness to permanent housing without preconditions and barriers to entry, such as sobriety, treatment or service participation requirements.”

Then, as now, charitable programs that did not comply with the new criteria faced the loss of public dollars.

One Sacramento-based program that served more than 800 homeless women and children each year was given less than six weeks’ notice that the county would cancel its $730,000 contract. The program’s leaders were faced with a decision: give up the funding, or stop requiring participants to maintain sobriety and move toward self-sufficiency. They knew from 30-plus years of serving the local population that their families needed a safe, sober, and structured environment to heal and prosper. They knew if they gave up the mission in order to keep the dollars, everyone would lose.

That program lost the public funding and kept its soul, but many other programs did not.

The disastrous results of Housing First policies are recorded in the statistics, which show dramatic increases in the number of homeless people on the streets of America. But they also show up in individual lives.

The courageous journalism of people like Jonathan Choe and Ginny Burton in Washington state reveals that, far from the promise of permanent supportive housing in a safe and empowering environment, many Housing First facilities are little more than modern flophouses — filled with disease, despair, open illicit drug use, violent crime, and lonely death.

"Housing First" has created not havens but houses of horror.

Why has the policy been such a catastrophic failure? The answer to that is found in honest answers to other questions. For example, is the lack of permanent affordable housing the true root cause of most homelessness? What parts are played by severe mental illness and substance abuse? Did the broad deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals have any unintended harmful consequences? Are there other contributing causes, such as broken families, domestic violence, and badly failing schools?

How do lenient sentences for violent criminals and lack of enforcement for basic public health, safety, and border laws contribute? How important is it to have clear and measurable outcomes governing public dollars spent to address homelessness, and what should those be? Does genuine compassion help people avoid discomfort, or wade into it with them? And isn't it time we embrace uncomfortable topics like the role of individual responsibility and the hard consequences that can motivate personal change?

These are important and relevant conversations. Our answers to them must correspond to reality if we hope to build effective policies that will solve the crisis of homelessness.

President Trump’s administration is offering answers to those questions and crafting policy to match. That’s literally the job description.

Unfortunately, rather than engage the conversation on its merits, the National Alliance to End Homelessness is resorting to lawfare and hyperbole.

Marsha Michaelis is a research fellow with Discovery Institute’s Fix Homelessness initiative.