SACRAMENTO — A front-page Washington Post investigation provides, as reporter Kyle Swenson promotes it in an X post, “an inside look at a well-funded effort on the political right to target, vilify, and defund a key piece of the social safety net, the ‘housing first’ approach to homelessness.” The article zeroes in on Missouri legislation that bans funding that approach, which it describes as a widely supported measure “that prioritizes a stable home before other services.”

On today’s @washingtonpost A1, you’ll find my latest story: an inside look at a well-funded effort on the political right to target, vilify, and defund a key piece of the social safety net, the “housing first” approach to homelessness 1/x pic.twitter.com/oGMPU6PxrQ

— Kyle Swenson (@kyletalking) January 2, 2024

Obviously, that goal sounds laudable. Getting a person into a stable home certainly sounds reasonable, but the concept is far more ideologically rooted than this benign description would suggest. If I were Swenson’s editor, I would have recommended a deep dive into how it’s played out in jurisdictions — the state of California and city of San Francisco spring to mind — that have embraced it the most. Those jurisdictions have made the least progress in dealing with the crisis. There’s a connection. (READ MORE from Steven Greenhut: Latest Evidence of a Death Spiral in Newsom’s California)

Originally, the Housing First concept was designed to find immediate housing for people — specifically, mothers with kids — who faced some temporary event that put them on the streets. Thanks to ideologues, it has morphed into official California housing policy, as explained on a state website: “[A]nyone experiencing homelessness should be connected to a permanent home as quickly as possible, and programs should remove barriers to accessing the housing, like requirements for sobriety or absence of criminal history.”

In other words, the state’s policy is to provide a permanent home for any homeless person and not require anything in return (mental health treatment, drug-addiction counseling, etc.). As the former head of a nonprofit homeless center once told me, that often means people dying alone of drug overdoses in their apartment. It also has led to wild occurrences at state homeless residences — fights and drug dealing and various crimes.

As top California homeless officials wrote in a 2019 CalMatters column:

Under housing first, men, women and their children are treated identically. They are provided housing as the solution to their homelessness. A house does address the symptoms of homelessness, but it does not address what led them there, including the childhood trauma that many struggling with homelessness have faced.

Exactly.

In other words, Housing First treats homelessness purely as a housing issue, even though surveys show the vast majority of homeless people have drug, alcoholism, and mental health issues. The other painfully obvious problem is that states and localities simply cannot afford to build all the permanent housing they would need to house every unhoused person. It ultimately means the right to a free apartment, which would lure many people who aren’t currently living on the streets.

California in particular can’t do anything at a reasonable cost. Here’s just one example, from the Los Angeles Times in 2022: “More than half a dozen affordable housing projects in California are costing more than $1 million per apartment to build, a record-breaking sum that makes it harder to house the growing numbers of low-income Californians who need help paying rent.” With all the state’s land-use regulations, union work requirements, and bureaucratic waste, it’s not only overly costly but also absurdly time-consuming to build these projects.

The numbers offer the proof. A recent Mercury News article summarized it as follows: “Despite billions spent, new data shows almost a third of the nation’s homeless now live in California. The state’s homeless population increased by 6%. Why is the crisis still getting worse?” Perhaps the answer is obvious — because California has embraced a Housing First policy that is destined to fail.

The state continues to ramp up homeless spending, which is a problem, as the state faces an unprecedented $68 billion budget deficit. Cities such as San Francisco spend huge portions of their budget on the issue, yet the numbers and the dismal street scenes have gotten worse. I don’t doubt that governments must spend money on the issue given that it’s a legitimate public-policy concern, but spending more on failed policies doesn’t work. Note that homelessness has soared most since the state’s official adoption of Housing First in 2016.

According to the book No Way Home, a study in Ottawa, Ontario, found:

To the shock of the researchers, after 24 months, the non-intervention control group reported better results regarding substance abuse, mental health, quality of life, family relations and mortality than the Housing First group. In other words, doing nothing resulted in superior human outcomes than providing Housing First with wraparound services.

Homelessness is indeed partly a housing problem, one that is magnified by California’s absurdly high housing and rent prices. In communities with more reasonable prices, it’s easier to find housing for those living on the margins. The state’s high prices are in turn driven by our regulatory barriers. The state is reducing some regulations, at least in a targeted way (for high-density and affordable-housing projects in urban areas). But that situation is unlikely to get fixed anytime soon, so policy makers need to deal with short-term reality.

One reasonable approach: build temporary housing and large shelters that provide a panoply of services. Public money could be far more effectively spent. I’ve written about San Antonio, Texas’ success at reducing its downtown homeless population in such a way. But that conflicts with the Housing First model. The more spent on the latter, the less money that’s available to spend on projects that provide homeless people with the help they need.

And while the conservative laws the Post details might in some cases make things worse, it’s absurd to focus attention on these tangential issues. Homelessness is growing most in progressive states and cities that have embraced the policies those conservative states are trying to undo. But, of course, we know that in the mainstream media, progressives rarely get blamed for their failures. There has to be a right-wing root to the problem.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.