Homelessness Safety Net in Tatters

Louise Gooden

“Housing is the key to reducing intergenerational poverty and increasing economic mobility…increasing access to affordable housing is the most cost-effective strategy for reducing childhood poverty and increasing economic mobility in the United States.” —National Low-Income Housing Coalition

THE UNITED STATES is deep in the midst of a worsening affordable housing crisis, reverberating throughout thousands of communities and millions of lives, and the Trump administration has struck what might be a fatal blow.

Stable, affordable, long-term housing is a key social determinant of health, fundamental to well-being, and to one’s ability to thrive and participate fully in social, economic, and political life. Much of it is about to disappear.

On November 14, 2025 the Trump administration released an executive order that upends the services landscape for people experiencing homelessness, reversing more than a decade of (slow) progress toward what we know works.

This set of policies would shift funding from the long-term “Housing First” model and revert to a short-term model of “Transitional Housing” — inserting a one-size-fits-all victim-blaming mentality, framed as promoting self-sufficiency — that denies the complex reality of homelessness and time-tested solutions.

[UPDATE: Shortly before we went to press, a one-paragraph statement from the Department of Housing and Urban Development “abruptly withdrew its high-profile plan to overhaul the way in which $3.9 billion in federal aid to combat homelessness would be spent, saying it would reissue the proposal after making ‘appropriate revisions.’” It added that the withdrawal was meant to address technical issues, rather than changing policy direction.

[The pause was issued hours before the first hearing on two lawsuits that were filed against the new plan, with the judge stating that the withdrawal “…feels like intentional chaos.” In the December 9th New York Times the reporter, Jason DeParte, explained, “The announcement added new uncertainty and delays to the government’s main program for homelessness relief.”]

Housing First

The movement known as “Housing First” began in the 1990s, and has since become a well-studied, evidence-based gold standard for supporting unhoused people.This model, providing subsidized apartments without preconditions or end dates, regards one’s lack of housing the most significant obstacle to stability. Housing First prioritizes housing and offers, but does not require, mental health, substance abuse, employment support, and other services. It enjoyed bipartisan support and has guided federal grantmaking for more than 25 years.

The National Low-Income Housing Coalition notes that by prioritizing stable housing and giving clients the power to decide the services they need, “the Housing First approach is more effective…. than the high-barrier Treatment First or abstinence-based programs.”

In fact, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) states, on its website (dated 2023 but still posted as of this writing) that “overwhelming evidence from several rigorous studies indicates that Housing First programs increase housing stability and decrease rates of homelessness.”

“The best available evidence indicates that Housing First programs successfully house families and individuals with intersecting vulnerabilities, such as veterans, individuals experiencing substance use or mental health issues, survivors of domestic violence, and with chronic medical conditions such as HIV/AIDS.”

Despite the solid evidence behind the “Housing First” model, HUD now plans to redirect most of the $3.5 billion in homelessness funds to programs that impose work rules, sobriety mandates, and involuntary mental health and substance abuse treatment. (“Trump Administration Expected to Drastically Cut Housing Grants,” Jason DeParte, NYT, November 13, 2025).

This policy change would place up to 170,000 formerly homeless people at risk of returning to the streets. It cuts aid for permanent housing by two-thirds, beginning in January, and imposes a two-year cap on housing, expecting most to be self-sufficient beyond that time — regardless of age, health, poverty, or the gap between community wages and housing costs.

Many residents of permanent supportive housing are senior citizens; all live with a disability.

“Treatment First”

The treatment-first approach driving this plan focuses on what it calls the “root causes” of homeless, (such as mental illness and drug abuse), abandons those who cannot or do not comply with such requirements, and fails to address actual, more pervasive causes of homelessness, such as exploding housing costs and stagnant wages.

A 2023 Trump campaign video called unsheltered homeless people “dangerously deranged,” accused them of destroying urban life, and promised to move them from city centers into treatment camps.

His July 2025 executive order reinforces the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the summer of 2024 that municipalities may criminalize sleeping in public places. Such criminalization exacerbates homelessness and does nothing to shore up resources or to address the causes.

The administration alleges that current housing projects and providers can simply shift from housing long-term residents, and people-empowering policies, to the Transitional and Treatment First models. These are unrealistic and disingenuous plans.

Vivian Wan, chief executive of Abode Services in Fremont, CA, “…called the cuts in long-term rental subsidies ‘catastrophic’ for tenants and landlords alike, and said local governments and charities could not make up the aid.” (NYT, November 13, 2025).

The “Notice (to service providers) to Apply” for the new funding was to be released much later than usual, and given when current funding expires, leaves funding gaps.

Continuum of Care

The homeless services community has worked together with HUD to create an imperfect but sustainable system of allocating funds to communities and service providers.

These Continuum of Care collaborations (COCs), operate on mandated inclusive and democratic principles and include a wide array of voices: those in need of services, providers, unaffiliated community members, elected officials, city staff, and others.

The 400 COCs hold responsibility for allocating that community’s share of federal housing dollars. This is based on structured assessments of community needs and rigorous evaluations of service providers’ meeting required outcomes.

Ninety percent of each year’s funding has been reallocated through COC collaborative processes. Trump’s executive order would impose a maximum of 30% for renewed funding, shifting the majority of these funds to a nationally competitive pool. (Troy Closson, NYT, October 3 and 20, 2025)

This not only threatens high-performing and long-standing services which have been foundational to homeless services networks, but enables the administration to move funds across states, based on its preferences rather than performance of the providers or where the need is greater. It dramatically shifts the balance of control from local communities to the Trump administration.

Many post-COVID gains, and lessons learned about how best to help unhoused people acquire stable and safe housing, are being eroded. Concrete barriers the Trump administration has imposed include:

• New work requirements for Medicaid. These clash with requirements for Permanent Supportive Housing, making most PSH recipients ineligible for Medicaid.

• Application processes are becoming more complex, beginning with replacing one application form with a set of six.

• The value of tax credits — which are sold to corporations to raise funds for affordable housing — have been cut 13%. With constructions costs at an all-time high, tax credits now cover only 70% of project costs, down from 90%. This requires nonprofit and for-profit affordable housing developers to raise funds from other sources, or decline to invest in affordable housing.

• The U.S. FY 2026 budget includes drastic reductions to other specific programs that support services, emergency shelter, and affordable housing including the Community Development Block Grant and the Home Investment Partnership Program.

Utah Model for Compulsory Warehousing

A chilling example of this realignment of power and practices can be seen in Utah, once a leader in Housing First. In October, Ellen Barry and Jason DeParle reported that “State officials promise large-scale involuntary addiction and mental health treatment at Salt Lake City’s edge. Critics see ‘a prison, or a warehouse.’”

Barry and DeParle report that the state plans to place as many as 1,300 people experiencing homelessness “…in what supporters call a services campus and critics deem a detention camp.” State planners “vow stern measures to move homeless people to the remote site and force many of them to undergo treatment.”

Utah’s chair of the state Homeless Services Board, Randy Shumway, said “An accountability center is involuntary, OK — you’re not coming in and out…..Utah will end a harmful ‘culture of permissiveness.’” Given recent Medicaid cuts, promises of treatment may not materialize. (“In Utah, Trump’s vision for homelessness begins to take shape,” NYT, October 29, 2025)

Barry and DeParle further report that, while Utah appears to be the clearest example of Trump’s vision, other communities have used threats of arrest to move people experiencing homelessness to designated areas.

With the Supreme Court ruling to back them up, state police in New Orleans moved 120 people to a distant warehouse in advance of Superbowl 2025. San Diego enforces a camping ban and moves people to 800 beds in two tent sites described in a lawsuit as operating with inhumane conditions. Las Vegas is building a $200 million homeless campus, planning 900 beds, to coincide with the ban.

The New York Times article concludes that “Utah’s plan is novel in that it combines elements of a homeless shelter and a psychiatric hospital sharply expanding involuntary treatment. Critics say it accelerates a disturbing shift toward coercion.”

Mr. Shumway — criticized for alleged conflicts of interest, given his firm’s promotion of software used in data collection and case management for people experiencing homelessness — asserts that “Success in not permanent housing — success is human dignity.”

Pre-existing Serious Problems

Key contributing factors include a lack of low-cost housing, the limited and shrinking scale of housing assistance programs and below-cost-of-living wages. Add to this a lack of employment opportunities, skyrocketing health insurance rates and lack of access to health care — all are multiple factors that interconnect and intensify poverty. (National Coalition for the Homeless/NCAH).

Nationally, record-breaking numbers of families cannot afford a decent place to call home. Affordable (i.e. federally subsidized) long-term rental housing works! However, there is a shortage of more than seven million affordable homes for the 10.8 million U.S. extremely low-income families.

In fact, extremely low-income renters face a shortage in every state or major metropolitan area. Seventy percent of all extremely low-income families pay more than half their income on rent. Only one in four extremely low-income families who need assistance receive it. (National Low-Income Housing Coalition/NLHC)

Nationally, rental housing costs greatly exceed wages earned by low-income renters. For example, a full-time wage of $25.82/hour is the minimum needed to afford the average modest two-bedroom rental (more than triple the national minimum wage of $7.25, which is the effective minimum wage in 21 states). (NLHC)

Wages of workers in many industries fall far short of affording average rental costs, let alone other living costs: nursing assistants ($14.57), maintenance and repair workers ($20.76), home health aides ($14.15), retail workers ($14.03), and many others.

Housing absorbs a high proportion of income for low-income earners. That means that people in poverty are typically just an illness, an accident, or one paycheck away from homelessness.

The national poverty rate was 10.6% in 2024, which amounts to 35.9 million people living in poverty. (U. S. Census Bureau). While the poverty rate has been slowly declining since 2014, several factors account for persistent poverty. And in the current environment, the rate of poverty is projected to increase.

A rational approach would be to link solutions to these causal factors; however, federal policy is steering responses to homelessness in the opposite direction.

Housing Insecurity Impacts Education

Most policy initiatives and funding, at local and national levels, focus on adults — especially military veterans — experiencing homelessness. These populations are indeed important and deserving of support.

However, “the next generation of homeless adults is literally being created if we don’t center schools in the (homelessness) conversation.” (Barbara Duffield, Schoolhouse Connection)

Children in housing insecure families face dismal educational outcomes. Housing insecurity and homelessness disrupts education, with children changing schools many times within a school year.

While students experiencing homelessness have a federal right to remain in the school they had been attending, logistical barriers are sometimes prohibitive. Yet “…every time homeless students move schools midyear, …they can be set back by up to six months academically.” (Troy Closson, NYT, October 3 and 20, 2025)

Transportation to school becomes difficult or impossible when the family’s home base is a series of shelters, some of which provide only night-time care. Half of homeless students and two-thirds of those living in short-term shelters are chronically absent; nearly half of all teens living in shelters are unable to graduate from high school on time.

The loss of relationships with peers and adults is debilitating. A record 154,000 — 17% — of public school students in New York City were homeless in 2024-25, with the city’s housing crisis a major contributing factor. In some neighborhoods, more than one in five students was homeless. In approximately 30 New York schools, more than half were homeless.

An estimated 4.2 million youth and young adults experience homelessness each year, unaccompanied by a parent or guardian (Schoolhouse Connection), or about 15% of the total population of unhoused people. (kidsdata.org) Over the last decade the number of children living in temporary housing has nearly doubled.

Unaccompanied youth, ages 13 to 24, are considered among the most vulnerable of unhoused people, and the greatest in need of long-term stability and intensive, supportive resources.

Youth experience homelessness for many of the same reasons adults do, but in addition there are a number of youth-specific factors such as family conflict and instability, family rejection of LGBTQ identities, physical and sexual abuse, and violence in the home.

Federal programs supporting K-12 students experiencing homelessness fail to support or protect students beyond grade 12. They face daunting barriers to college enrollment and attendance, such as weak academic foundations, limited family support, lack of awareness of available financial resources, and burdensome financial aid program rules.

There are many first-hand stories of college students scrambling to survive breaks in the academic schedule when dorms close, and utilities and services shut down. Students are known to hide out in corners of dorms, without heat or any utilities, surviving on nonperishable snack food they manage to stash away prior to the break.

The Hope Center’s 2023-2024 Student Basic Needs Survey Report from 91 institutions across 16 states found that 59% of students experience at least one form of basic needs insecurity, 48% of students experience housing insecurity, and 14% of undergraduates experience homelessness.

Criminalizing Housing Insecurity

Housing insecurity also deepens existing racial inequities, given the disproportionate impact of homelessness on Black people and other communities of color. They not only experience homelessness at higher rates but are also more likely to be targeted by law enforcement. (National Alliance to End Homelessness, NAEH)

As is the case with long-term affordable housing units, the numbers of shelter beds fall far short of the need throughout the country. A shortage of 200,000 year-round shelter beds leave most unsheltered people living on the streets.

Further exacerbating the problem, and giving the lie to the narrative that people choose homelessness, are barriers to access such as rules that forbid boys older than 12 from being in a shelter unit with younger children, exclusion of those with certain gender identities, prohibition on pets, requirements for abstinence and sobriety, inadequate safety protocols, and lack of access to physical and mental health care.

Multiple studies have consistently found that around 90% of people experiencing homelessness would live in stable housing if available.

Uncertainties of Funding for Providers

Perhaps the biggest problem faced by affordable housing developers throughout 2025 has been uncertainty of federal funding.

For example, the Michigan State Housing Development Authority (MSHDA) conducted a race equity study and incorporated contract language to ensure equity in how building operators select tenants. These policies and language have been scrubbed in order to avoid DOGE scrutiny. This delayed the annual release of policy documents that trigger funding applications for affordable housing projects.

A new pilot program providing enhanced federal support for services to people for one specific type of supported affordable housing was announced near the end of 2024. It was frozen in early 2025, then re-released, and then replaced in September, with a startling set of new benchmark requirements.

Applicants were required to answer “yes” to a set of “merit review” questions in order to be competitive. Assertions for which a “yes” is expected include: “The applicant does not and will not promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate racial preferences or other forms of illegal discrimination.”

While prior rounds of funding have required applicants to promote equity, under these new rules a strong record of compliance can now be held against an applicant.

Under the heading “Affirming Fairness and Reality”: “The applicant does not and will not deny the sex binary in humans or promote the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic,” and “The city, county, or state in which the project is located cooperates with Federal immigration enforcement.”

Under the heading “Protecting Public Safety”: The city, county, or state in which the project is located….prohibits public camping or loitering and enforces such prohibition.”

Many community-based organizations and coalitions, unwilling and/or unable to agree to these benchmark requirements, chose to pass on this very significant funding.

Any organization within a community that does not cooperate with immigration enforcement, or that allows homeless encampments, is significantly disadvantaged, allowing the Trump administration to redirect funds away from communities with greater needs and strong track records toward those whose practices align with their priorities.

Fair Housing Enforcement Coming Undone

According to a New York Times report in September 2025, systemic efforts are underway by the Trump administration to block enforcement of Fair Housing Laws Whistle­blowers from within HUD’s Office of Fair Housing have filed formal complaints, pointing to civil rights protections being “dismissed as ideologically driven and DEI in disguise.”

Reported tactics include the use of gag orders and intimidation to block progress with discrimination cases, reducing the Fair Housing Office workforce by 65% and reducing the staff of lawyers from 22 to six (the average DOGE cuts to federal departments was 10%); halting or dropping hundreds of cases, blocking lawyers from communicating with clients without approval from a Trump appointee, and barring them “…from citing some past housing civil rights cases when researching legal precedent for possible new prosecutions.”

The average annual collection in legal settlements from discrimination cases by the Fair Housing Office ranged from $4 million to $8 million; during the first seven months of 2025, less than $200,000 was approved. HUD’s Fair Housing Office issued only four charges of discrimination during this period, down from an annual average of 35. (“Trump Appointees Roll Back Enforcement of Fair Housing Laws,” Debra Kamin, NYT, September 22, 2025)

Being denied the basic tools necessary to do their jobs, many Fair Housing lawyers and other staff members have resigned or filed written complaints with Senator Elizabeth Warren, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee with HUD oversight.

Warren ultimately asked HUD’s acting inspector general to open an investigation, citing that allegations “suggest that HUD is no longer enforcing Fair Housing and Civil Rights Laws — with dire consequences.” (NYT, September 22, 2025)

The three-legged stool that sustained unhoused people — listening to their vulnerable voices, community-directed funding and a collaborative commitment to best practices — however inadequate, is being dismantled.

Two decades of community collaboration, rigorous evaluation, experimentation, investment in and study of various models have revealed a broad understanding of factors that contribute to homelessness. The current administration is racing to replace them with patterns of funding that will exacerbate homelessness and suffering.

These policies deny reality, engage in cruel spin, and create fertile grounds for corruption, dehumanization, profit, and isolation —even erasure — of people experiencing homelessness. These inhumane conditions must be reversed.

Call to Action

Instead of offering long-term stable supported housing, non-compulsory treatment and support services, the new U.S. national housing policy is defined by cruelty and looming corruption. We must reject this plan and fight for what we know will work: increasing wages, expanding affordable housing as well as stable, supported housing.

Housing has long been a commodity in the United States, and, although there are nonprofit players, the lions’ share of affordable housing development (approximately 70%) is done by for-profit big business, with policy being shaped through a constant tug of war between housing rights advocates and developer lobbyists.

While advocates have managed to create successful, evidence-based models, these unfortunately serve only a fraction of those who need support. Until housing is recognized as a basic right, even those models will fall far short of a real solution.

The long-standing failure of our society has created multiple layers of dehumanization and obstacles, with consumer-centered goals of stability being obscured by for-profit entities and politicians racing to out-do one another with self-serving narratives about who is “deserving” and who is not, and strategies to manipulate eligibility and access in ways that enrich developers, and pay lip service to solving homelessness.

These dynamics are intensified by the Trump administration’s drive to slash affordable housing support and to institute failed and punitive models. This will only serve to sharpen inequality, heighten stigma and amplify false “blame-the-victim” narratives against people experiencing homelessness.

Above all, people experiencing homelessness are worthy human beings who, like anyone, need safety, support, services, and stable homes in stable communities. We need to see the attack on housing rights not just as an immediate crisis to overcome, but a wake-up call to overhaul a flawed economic system and commit to a comprehensive solution.

January-February 2026, ATC 240