In an op-ed for MSNBC, Ned Resnikoff, the policy director for California YIMBY, noted the bleak news from last week on the homeless front: “Homelessness appears to have risen by 18% since last year, to the highest level since HUD began collecting this data in 2007.”
In other words, he writes, “America’s already historic homelessness crisis has only become worse over the past several years.”
The one bright spot offers a path to the future. It turns out, homelessness among military veterans “has fallen to a record low.”
Resnikoff writes, “The story of how this happened can tell us a lot about what we need to do in order to end the larger crisis.”
As most observers understand, while efforts to combat homelessness receive some federal support, for the most part they are coordinated at the local or regional level—if at all.
However, the efforts to house homeless vets are overseen, unsurprisingly, by the US Department of Veterans Affairs.
What approach does the VA take?
It takes an approach know as “Housing First,” —the very program that most homeless advocates espouse for solving the overall homeless crisis— wherein “program beneficiaries receive unconditional offers of permanent housing, along with access to voluntary ‘wraparound’ services such as mental health care and addiction counseling.”
Housing First has been panned by some as ineffective. Some have suggested what could be termed a “treatment first” model, then “treat permanent housing as a reward for submitting to treatment and exhibiting good behavior.”
Under a treatment-first program, a person is first transitioned into a shelter or a treatment center, which then requires that person “to demonstrate sobriety and ‘readiness’ to receive permanent housing.”
In contrast, a “Housing First program will simply move that individual directly into permanent housing, on the assumption that someone who is stably housed has a better shot at defeating—or at least managing—their other personal demons.”
Resnikoff notes, “Researchers have studied Housing First programs for decades, and have consistently found that they are effective in getting people stably housed.”
But people have been reluctant to embrace it, believing that people housed who suffer from addiction and mental illness will continue to shirk treatment.
Resnikoff, however, argues, “The success of the VA’s housing first programs reinforces this finding” in the effectiveness of housing first.
He writes, “The first of these initiatives, the HUD-VA Supportive Housing program, started out in 1992 as a small program, but Congress significantly expanded its scope beginning in 2008. By 2016, the VA had cut veteran homelessness by nearly half.”
Resnikoff also notes that, in California, the experience during the pandemic bears this out as well.
He writes, “During the pandemic, buoyed by unexpectedly high income tax revenues and a massive infusion of federal relief aid, the state dramatically expanded its Housing First-aligned efforts to get people housed.”
But there is an obstacle: housing. This is what I would argue is the problem with a lot of the treatment-based solutions—not only do we not have sufficient resources to properly do treatment, but lack housing to put people into. So how are we going to make headway on the homelessness crisis?
Resnikoff lays out the problem that happened in California— “California spent roughly $24 billion over the next few years on efforts to combat homelessness, including the widely acclaimed Homekey program that converted empty hotels and other underutilized real estate into homeless housing.”
In February 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration estimated that Homekey had created “over 15,300 units of housing to serve over 167,000 Californians.”
However, Resnikoff notes, “these investments did not end homelessness in California. Between 2020 and 2024, the state’s point-in-time counts registered an almost 16% increase in homelessness. This has led a number of observers—mostly, but not exclusively, from the right—to declare Housing First a failed strategy. “
Resnikoff offers another interpretation of this.
He argues that the verdict that Housing First failed “elides the VA’s success and misdiagnoses the real problem with housing and homelessness policy in California — and the country as a whole.”
One problem is one of scale.
“Homeless veterans are a relatively small, geographically dispersed population,” he writes, while noting “the overall homeless population is much larger and highly concentrated in a handful of particularly expensive metropolitan areas.”
Thus, “If we are going to end America’s modern homelessness crisis, cities and states must learn how to operate much larger Housing First programs at the regional level.”
Once again, the biggest obstacle to expanding Housing First is “housing.”
He notes, “Where homes are scarce, like in California, it is more difficult and more expensive to get people off the streets and into housing.”
As Resnikoff notes, “The VA’s experience demonstrates that Housing First works, but California’s failures show that expanding the program on a large scale requires addressing basic market conditions. The United States cannot address its homelessness crisis without simultaneously tackling its housing shortage, particularly in high-cost metropolitan areas.”
And this is the problem that the state of California is going to face attempting to clear encampments and force people into treatment; unless we properly fund treatment and have a ready supply of housing, we are simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Or as Resnikoff puts it: “Without significant land use reforms that remove existing barriers to housing development — barriers such as restrictive zoning, complicated permitting rules and arbitrary requirements that increase construction costs — any large-scale Housing First program will resemble bailing out a sinking ship with a measuring cup. Unless we repair the hole in the hull, we’re only going to keep sinking.”
People are rightly concerned with the nuisance and blight of people living on the streets in encampments, but unless we fix our housing crisis, we are throwing money down a rabbit hole.
