The homelessness fight is being staged as compassion versus cruelty. That is the wrong frame. It is the Solvency Trap again: a system that treats recovery as a threat, scores itself by beds and budgets, and treats any reform that might shrink the caseload as an attack on the people it claims to serve.
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On August 17, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and HUD secretary Scott Turner sent partners a joint letter advancing “Treatment First.” Housing would be paired with treatment for addiction and serious mental illness rather than treated as the cure by itself. Kennedy put it this way: “We cannot solve homelessness by funding systems that perpetuate it.” Turner said Housing First has left people “trapped in cycles of homelessness,” and that the federal job is not to warehouse them.
Housing First became federal orthodoxy by promising an end to street homelessness. Place people in permanent housing with no preconditions — no sobriety, no treatment, no work requirement — and stability would follow. What followed was a larger funded inventory and a larger problem. HUD now says housing units for homeless individuals nearly tripled in recent years while national progress failed to match the spending. That is what happens when a program is scored by occupancy rather than by exits.
Los Angeles is the exhibit, and the numbers need to be kept distinct. HUD says LAHSA, the region’s lead homelessness agency, took in nearly $1 billion in federal money over five years, more than any other jurisdiction. Since HUD mandated Housing First in 2013, federal funding to Los Angeles rose 178 percent, homelessness doubled, and free housing units rose 212 percent. In August, Turner put the same point in shorter form: Over the last decade, HUD funding to Los Angeles nearly tripled while homelessness doubled. The 2026 point-in-time count put about 45,000 people in the city and just over 73,000 in the county. More money, more units, more people on the street.
The harder numbers concern what happens after placement. HUD says people in taxpayer-funded permanent supportive housing are twice as likely to die as they are to move into unsubsidized housing, and that nearly 20 percent of program exits are deaths. Officials also cite estimates that about three in four homeless Americans struggle with addiction and close to eight in ten with mental illness. A key does not treat those conditions. It can hide them.
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The reply from the existing bureaucracy and support apparatus has been the Solvency Trap’s usual currency. A court blocked an earlier HUD shift after warnings that as many as 170,000 people could be displaced. States have sued over Continuum of Care rules that would cap permanent-housing grants and require services instead of housing alone. The method is familiar from SNAP integrity fights and from restrictions on pediatric medicalization: Count the people who might lose a slot this month, treat the count as proof the reform is immoral, and do not ask whether the slot was solving anything.
A provider network paid to keep people “housed” inside the program has little reason to define success as leaving it. Recovery programs that require sobriety look, under that scoring system, like obstacles. The toolkit HHS, HUD, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy released this month names a different finish line: abstinence, mental health stability, work, and housing that is not a federal caseload.
If fewer people are on the program next year, that may be failure, or evidence the program was holding people it could not help. If death remains a leading way out of “supportive” housing, repeating the same placements is not mercy. The Solvency Trap prefers the repetition, because shrinking the crisis shrinks the rationale for the apparatus. Treatment First does not. That is why it is being litigated as cruelty.
Compassion is not the number of keys issued. It is the number of people who no longer need one from the government.
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Image via Pixabay.