Since returning to office, the Trump administration has moved to upend America’s long-standing approach to tackling homelessness. The “housing-first” model — which has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades — prioritizes getting people into stable accommodations before addressing other issues like mental health or substance abuse.
This evidence-backed approach first gained prominence during George W. Bush’s presidency, with Salt Lake City becoming an early success story in 2005. It was supported by the Trump administration during the president’s first term, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson publicly praised the model several times.
But as homelessness has worsened due to the nation’s housing affordability crisis, conservative think tanks and GOP lawmakers have increasingly pointed to housing-first, and the network of nonprofits and service providers that support it, as the culprit. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page policy blueprint, explicitly calls to “end housing-first policies.”
Trump’s appointment of Scott Turner — a pastor and former Texas state lawmaker — to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) signals a deeper shift. Federal policy is poised to turn away from the individuals and institutions that have backed housing-first and toward a new approach that embraces mandatory treatment and even faith-based models.
During his time as a legislator, Turner voted against multiple bills to expand affordable housing and protect low-income tenants, while blaming government welfare for harming American families. In his confirmation hearing, Turner emphasized an interest in leaning more heavily on local organizations, including religious groups, to solve the homelessness crisis.
Now as secretary, he’s created a “DOGE”-style task force aimed at slashing agency spending, including money directed to housing-first organizations. Recent leaks suggest HUD is planning massive staffing cuts, particularly to the Office of Community Planning and Development — the division responsible for homelessness programs, affordable housing, and disaster relief. The New York Times reported in February that this office could see an 84 percent reduction, from 936 employees to just 150.
When Vox asked HUD to explain its homelessness strategy and position on housing-first, spokesperson Kasey Lovett repeatedly declined to address homelessness, only confirming that the agency’s disaster relief efforts “will not be impacted.”
A rapid policy reversal
The administration didn’t wait long to act. By January 27, the Office of Management and Budget had imposed an across-the-board grant freeze affecting $3.6 billion in previously approved homelessness funding. Though a federal judge ordered this freeze lifted, many homeless service providers still haven’t received the money. Earlier this week more than 50 Democrats sent a letter urging HUD to release these congressionally appropriated funds.
The consequences are already visible. In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, a region outside Philadelphia, officials recently held a press conference to highlight the $5 million in homeless funds they’ve been promised but haven’t received. “Losing this funding could mean that we see a doubling in the number of people that are sleeping on the streets and in our un-housed population,” one commissioner warned. “This is extremely serious. It affects children — 120 children and 400 people as a whole.”
The freeze, even if it ultimately ends, reflects years of growing skepticism among conservatives about the federal government’s approach to tackling homelessness and selecting grantees. By 2019, Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers was questioning the effectiveness of housing-first, and Trump’s appointment of longtime housing-first critic Robert Marbut to lead the US Interagency Council on Homelessness underscored the shift.
Under Marbut’s leadership, the Council published a report encouraging leaders to consider requiring sobriety and other treatments in exchange for housing assistance — a report that 12 national homelessness organizations condemned as “ineffective and dishonest.” Leaders for the most part did not take up the recommendations.
The Biden administration then pivoted back to unequivocal support for housing-first, even expanding it by authorizing federal Medicaid dollars for rental assistance — effectively embracing the idea that housing is a form of health care.
Yet, during this time, the attacks on housing-first started to pick up momentum in several GOP-led states, which began diverting resources away from the model with backing from conservative groups like the Cicero Institute, an Austin-based think tank founded in 2016, the Manhattan Institute, and the Heritage Foundation. Missouri, Florida, Georgia, and Utah now redirect tens of millions from permanent housing solutions toward transitional and short-term options, in explicit rebuke of the housing-first approach.
What’s the best way to help?
At the heart of the debate is a fundamental disagreement about what constitutes success in addressing homelessness. For housing-first advocates, stable housing is both the primary goal and the foundation for addressing other issues. Critics, however, argue that simply being housed without improvements in health or substance use doesn’t represent real progress.
This philosophical divide shapes how both sides interpret research on housing-first’s effectiveness. Critics like Judge Glock, an alumnus of the Cicero Institute who now directs research at the Manhattan Institute, point to studies from the National Academies of Science and The Lancet that found limited evidence of improved health outcomes among housing-first participants.
Proponents like Margot Kushel from the University of California San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative see the debate differently. “Housing-first is not and has never been ‘housing only,’” she told Vox. “Rather, it describes a strategy that best pairs housing with services in the most efficient way possible.” She argues that the voluntary nature of housing-first makes it successful by helping preserve client dignity and autonomy while increasing the odds that people actually embrace and stick with treatment.
Veterans’ homelessness provides perhaps the clearest example of the model’s potential. In 2008, a housing-first program began combining HUD-provided housing vouchers for veterans with case management and clinical services provided by the VA. As a result, while overall homelessness has increased nationwide in the last decade, veteran homelessness has decreased by more than half.
But most housing-first programs are not as well supported (financially or politically) as the efforts to end veteran homelessness. “The problem with the housing-first policy is that Congress has not funded it to scale,” Dennis Culhane from the University of Pennsylvania told Vox. “Only about 15 percent of people who experience homelessness get into a housing-first program in a given year.” And although regular check-ins by case managers remain a core component of housing-first programs, many programs do not live up to these standards. As critics note, this leaves some vulnerable individuals effectively abandoned, albeit indoors, with limited improvement in other outcomes.
Despite these shortcomings, most experts see the shift away from housing-first as deeply concerning. Culhane found, for an upcoming paper, that the model was associated with a 15 percent decline in homelessness nationwide from 2010 to 2018. HUD’s housing-first investments have added more than 100,000 units of permanent supportive housing, and another 144,000 subsidized beds of other types.
Culhane added that past experience has shown that models like transitional housing or “treatment first,” which were the predominant approach from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s, are expensive and unsuccessful. “Funding was entirely tied up in the high costs of administering the beds and services, and there was no funding dedicated to the endgame of getting people into housing,” he said.
Glock, the critic, conceded that the evidence for his preferred alternatives that carry more strings attached isn’t great either. “We have to wrestle with the fact that the turnover rates in those [transitional] units are wild and substantial, that people who go into a very structured environment that often requires sobriety or regular mental health checkups are often going to leave those units quickly because they don’t want the structure,” he said.
Still, Glock believes having zero mandates on people is a mistake. “That doesn’t have to be complete sobriety,“ he added. “But right now you aren’t even forced to, like, get a checkup.” He expects the Trump administration to abandon what he calls its “one-size-fits-all” approach. “The problem is that the federal government made housing-first the uniform and universal standard for homeless housing, and that was inappropriate,” he added.
Trump’s tight-lipped pivot on housing-first comes at a time when over 650,000 people in America experience homelessness on any given night, and roughly 40 percent of those individuals are sleeping outside on the streets, in cars, parks, train stations, and other places not designed primarily for people. In Congress, it’s unclear whether lawmakers even plan to adequately fund the federal housing voucher program — one of the key policy tools used to prevent ending up unsheltered in the US. Even if it is funded, though, gutting the federal agency that administers the vouchers could lead to further problems in fighting homelessness.