{"id":5447,"date":"2026-08-30T17:09:19","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T17:09:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=5447"},"modified":"2026-08-30T17:09:19","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T17:09:19","slug":"how-not-to-solve-the-homelessness-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=5447","title":{"rendered":"How not to solve the homelessness problem"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The homelessness fight is being staged as compassion versus cruelty.\u00a0\u00a0That is the wrong frame.\u00a0\u00a0It is the\u00a0Solvency Trap\u00a0again: 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.<\/p>

Read more Just what is seriously wrong with Zohran Mamdani?<\/a><\/p>\n

On August 17, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and HUD secretary Scott Turner sent partners a\u00a0joint letter\u00a0advancing \u201cTreatment First.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Housing would be paired with treatment for addiction and serious mental illness rather than treated as the cure by itself.\u00a0\u00a0Kennedy put it this way: \u201cWe cannot solve homelessness by funding systems that perpetuate it.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Turner said Housing First has left people \u201ctrapped in cycles of homelessness,\u201d and that the federal job is not to warehouse them.<\/p>\n

Housing First became federal orthodoxy by promising an end to street homelessness.\u00a0\u00a0Place people in permanent housing with no preconditions \u2014 no sobriety, no treatment, no work requirement \u2014 and stability would follow.\u00a0\u00a0What followed was a larger funded inventory and a larger problem.\u00a0\u00a0HUD now says housing units for homeless individuals nearly tripled in recent years while national progress failed to match the spending.\u00a0\u00a0That is what happens when a program is scored by occupancy rather than by exits.<\/p>\n

Los Angeles is the exhibit, and the numbers need to be kept distinct.\u00a0\u00a0HUD says LAHSA, the region\u2019s lead homelessness agency, took in nearly $1 billion in federal money over five years, more than any other jurisdiction.\u00a0\u00a0Since HUD mandated Housing First in 2013, federal funding to Los Angeles rose 178 percent, homelessness doubled, and free housing units rose 212 percent.\u00a0\u00a0In August, Turner put the same point in shorter form: Over the last decade,\u00a0HUD funding to Los Angeles nearly tripled while homelessness doubled.\u00a0\u00a0The 2026 point-in-time count put about\u00a045,000 people in the city and just over 73,000 in the county.\u00a0\u00a0More money, more units, more people on the street.<\/p>\n

The harder numbers concern what happens after placement.\u00a0\u00a0HUD\u00a0says\u00a0people 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.\u00a0\u00a0Officials\u00a0also cite estimates\u00a0that about three in four homeless Americans struggle with addiction and close to eight in ten with mental illness.\u00a0\u00a0A key does not treat those conditions. It can hide them.<\/p>

Read more Twenty-five years after 9\/11, unchecked mass migration makes terror threats greater than ever<\/a><\/p>\n

The reply from the existing bureaucracy and support apparatus\u00a0has been the Solvency Trap\u2019s usual currency.\u00a0\u00a0A court blocked an earlier HUD shift after warnings that as many as\u00a0170,000 people could be displaced.\u00a0\u00a0States have sued over Continuum of Care rules that would cap permanent-housing grants and require services instead of housing alone.\u00a0\u00a0The method is\u00a0familiar from SNAP integrity fights\u00a0and 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.<\/p>\n

A provider network paid to keep people \u201choused\u201d inside the program has little reason to define success as leaving it.\u00a0\u00a0Recovery programs that require sobriety look, under that scoring system, like obstacles.\u00a0\u00a0The toolkit HHS, HUD, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy released this month\u00a0names a different finish line: abstinence, mental health stability, work, and housing that is not a federal caseload.<\/p>\n

If fewer people are on the program next year, that may be failure, or evidence the program was holding people it could not help.\u00a0\u00a0If death remains a leading way out of \u201csupportive\u201d housing, repeating the same placements is not mercy.\u00a0\u00a0The Solvency Trap prefers the repetition, because shrinking the crisis shrinks the rationale for the apparatus.\u00a0\u00a0Treatment First does not.\u00a0\u00a0That is why it is being litigated as cruelty.<\/p>\n

Compassion is not the number of keys issued.\u00a0\u00a0It is the number of people who no longer need one from the government.<\/p>

Read more Sorry, Talarico, but you are no LBJ<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

Image via Pixabay.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The homelessness fight is being staged as compassion versus cruelty.\u00a0\u00a0That is the wrong frame.\u00a0\u00a0It is the\u00a0Solvency Trap\u00a0again: 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. Read more Just what is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5445,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,563],"tags":[2162],"class_list":["post-5447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-homelessness","tag-related-topics-homelessness"],"yoast_head":"\nHow not to solve the homelessness problem - Interstate Logistics Hub<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=5447\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How not to solve the homelessness problem - Interstate Logistics Hub\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The homelessness fight is being staged as compassion versus cruelty.\u00a0\u00a0That is the wrong frame.\u00a0\u00a0It is the\u00a0Solvency Trap\u00a0again: 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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