“Housing first,” a policy approach focused on providing no-strings-attached housing for the homeless, has been implemented across the United States, including in the City of Dallas, despite its alleged harmful effects on both homeless individuals and communities as a whole.
Homelessness policy expert and author Michele Steeb suggests housing first policies trap the homeless in a cycle of dependence, and data from sources including the Texas Public Policy Foundation indicate such policies may have caused the death rate among the homeless to “skyrocket.”
In an interview with The Dallas Express, Steeb discussed the pitfalls of taking housing first as a “one-size-fits-all” approach to addressing homelessness.
Steeb formerly served as CEO of Saint John’s Program for Real Change in Sacramento, California, which supports homeless women and children. She was recently appointed as a visiting fellow for the International Women’s Forum.
She described Housing First as “a Section 8 voucher [with] no requirements.”
“There’s no requirement to be sober. There’s no requirement to engage in any sort of services,” she explained. “There’s no requirement to be employed.”
Steeb told The Dallas Express that while most clients do pay rent, they do so using welfare or general assistance checks they receive from the government and are thus “never required to work.”
Housing first was developed in the 1990s and was geared specifically toward the chronically homeless.
“They said, ‘We’re going to give you housing without any requirements,’ because if you attach requirements to housing … [such as] engaging in work training [and] refraining from criminal activity … then the homeless are likely to refuse the housing,” Steeb recounted.
The Obama administration formally instituted housing first as the federal government’s blanket approach to homelessness in 2013. This was despite the fact that the chronically homeless, for whom housing first was originally intended, only comprised 10-20% of the homeless population.
President Obama pledged at the time that homelessness would be eradicated within 10 years. Over those ten years, homelessness and vagrancy have grown worse across the U.S.
“They rolled it out as a one-size-fits-all without any evidence it would work, and it hasn’t,” Steeb told The Dallas Express.
“The vast majority of the homeless can become self-sustaining with the right tools, the right support, [and] the right incentives,” she continued. “But instead … we’re straitjacketing them into dependence [and] the misery that they experience in homelessness … largely mental illness and addiction and, in some cases, physical disability.”
She said the requirements to address issues like mental illness and addiction were “completely disconnected from housing” as part of the Obama administration’s widespread adoption of housing first.
The federal government sends billions of taxpayer dollars every year to homeless response services across the country, including local governments and nonprofits.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, a network of homeless service organizations throughout Dallas and Collin counties called the All Neighbors Coalition was granted $22 million in additional funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in April.
Furthermore, Dallas County and Collin County were given a $22.8 million taxpayer-funded grant from HUD in February. The City of Dallas received $32.9 million from HUD during fiscal year 2022-23.
“[HUD is] such a large funder that they dominate policy at the local level,” Steeb told The Dallas Express. “Even though [the City of Dallas and Dallas County] haven’t formally adopted Housing First, it’s the approach that’s often used because that’s where the money is coming from — the federal government.”
Since the nationwide implementation of housing first policies, the death rate among the homeless population has increased by 77%, according to a 2020 analysis, despite a 200% increase in government spending and a 47% increase in permanent supportive housing units since 2015.
“The death rate among the homeless has skyrocketed under Housing First because … we’re not addressing the illnesses that often accompany homelessness,” said Steeb.
Still, other data suggest that Housing Forward can be an effective solution to homelessness.
A study published in 2021 analyzing housing first’s effects on the Boston homeless population concluded that Housing First has “potential for ending chronic homelessness given some studies showed high housing retention after 1–2 years.”
According to the analysis, 82% of those housed through Boston’s Community Support for People Experiencing Chronic Homelessness program, which “adheres to Housing First principles,” retained that housing for more than a year.
Steeb told The Dallas Express that if success is defined simply as getting homeless people into housing, then housing first can be considered successful in some cases. However, she argued that being housed “is not the sole definition of success.”
She asserted that the overall health and personal growth of the formerly homeless should also be taken into consideration.
“All of us in society have requirements in order to be productive citizens, and we should not absolve the homeless completely of those requirements,” she said, asserting that the “health and prosperity” of people are just as important.
Steeb acknowledged that “not … everyone can be self-sustaining” but asserted that even those who struggle with mental illness and addiction “can heal to some degree, and they can participate [in society] to some degree.”
“We should be measuring that, and that should be the goal,” she said.
As an example of a homeless response organization that others can look to emulate, Steeb pointed to Haven for Hope in San Antonio and compared it to Saint John’s Program for Real Change, where she served as CEO from 2007 to 2019.
“It’s a very comprehensive program,” she told The Dallas Express. “There [are] requirements. You’re not going to like all of them, but that’s life, and we want to prepare you to be successful in life.”
Haven for Hope, in partnership with the City of San Antonio, offers supportive services in conjunction with housing on a single campus. This “one-stop-shop” strategy has polled favorably among Dallas voters but has yet to be pursued by the City of Dallas.
Meanwhile, Dallas residents say that homelessness and vagrancy remain a “major” problem throughout the City.