Homelessness and vagrancy have drastically increased over recent years, reaching critical levels in many major cities, including Dallas and Fort Worth.
According to a new report from The Center on Wealth & Poverty at the Discovery Institute, the total number of homeless and vagrant people across the nation “is approaching 1.2 million, not the half a million number that is frequently cited by media sources.”
Government efforts to address the homelessness and vagrancy crisis are “doomed to failure” because they “begin with an inadequate diagnosis of the causes,” according to the report.
The report explains that although lack of housing is a “major factor” in homelessness and vagrancy, these issues are not primarily housing problems that can be solved through a “Housing First” approach.
“Housing first” approaches ignore untreated mental illnesses and enable addicts to continue their drug abuse through “harm reduction” projects. The federal government formally adopted “Housing First” in 2013.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) describes “Housing First” as an approach to connect the homeless to “permanent housing without preconditions and barriers to entry, such as sobriety, treatment, or service participation requirements.”
The Discovery Institute report explained, “Even though federal funding of the homelessness assistance system has significantly expanded after the policy shift to the Housing First approach, unsheltered homelessness rose dramatically between 2014 to 2020.”
“The total number of unsheltered individuals experiencing homelessness increased 20.5% over the five pre-COVID years after HUD’s adoption of Housing First,” it read.
The report also noted that the Biden administration did not report the national homeless count for 2021. The institute said the omission “was likely made to hide the dramatic increases in unsheltered homelessness since the onset of the Housing First approach.”
“Prior to the implementation of Housing First, the total number of unsheltered individuals had dropped 31.4% between 2007-2014, when intensive wraparound services for participants were required for most homeless assistance program participants,” it continued. “The downward trend ended with HUD’s adoption of the Housing First approach.”
The report described Housing First as a program with no rules, no treatment programs, and no participation requirements.
“Disconnecting housing subsidies from any participation requirement for rehabilitation and treatment is the most radically negative single change to federal homelessness assistance policy in decades,” the report declared.
The “Housing First” approach was built on the false premise that “homelessness is primarily a housing issue rather than a mental illness issue with co-presenting substance use disorders.”
“A reverse course is needed,” the report said. “Rather than seeking to increase the number of taxpayer-subsidized housing vouchers, our goal should be to help as many people as possible into recovery and stability, and then toward self-sufficiency with supported long-term sobriety.”
The two most important tools to end homelessness, according to the report, are the promotion and funding of “trauma-informed” treatments directly tied to housing provisions and the development of “truly affordable housing construction through the elimination of local building fees and excessive regulatory requirements.”
The Center on Wealth & Poverty encouraged Congress to take the following steps, among others, in addressing the country’s homeless crisis:
- Pass legislation directing HUD to eliminate Housing First as the primary approach to addressing homelessness.
- Prioritize economic “self-sufficiency” as the primary measure of the effectiveness of all federal homelessness assistance programs.
- Prioritize trauma-informed wraparound services.
- Require program participation in all federally-funded homelessness assistance programs.
- Incentivize local governments to eliminate local building fees for affordable housing construction.
Dr. Robert Marbut, a Discovery Institute senior fellow and former director of the Federal Interagency Task Force on Homelessness, said, “The housing first policy often results in a housing only policy in many cases.”
“A more diverse policy should include treatment for mental illness and drug addiction,” he continued. “Congress should be measuring how many lives are improved and how many people exit homelessness, rather than promoting ‘harm reduction‘ initiatives.”
“In essence, we have created an enormous federal homeless assistance program that is functionally equivalent to HUD Section 8 housing, but with no rules,” said Marbut. “The success of federal programs should not be measured by amounts of inputs — such as numbers of housing vouchers delivered — but by the number of persons recovered from homelessness.”
