Fix Homelessness How to rebuild human lives

Housing First Failures

Housed Doesn’t Mean Whole: Julianna’s Story

Michele Steeb
October 8, 2026
1
Homelessness
Housing may put a roof over someone’s head, but it does not single-handedly restore them from drug addiction, mental illness, and other tragic situations that led to homelessness in the first place. This is why measuring success by housing placements is misguided. Senior Fellow Michele Steeb shares Julianna’s inspiring story. …

Power, Politics, and Seattle’s Homelessness Machine

Jonathan Choe
October 7, 2026
1
Housing
In an eerie, “zombie-like” incident last September, a homeless woman in Seattle attacked another woman, biting a chunk out of her forehead. The homeless woman lives in Seattle’s Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC) apartments, a homeless service provider that follows the Housing First model, providing housing without any requirements for treatment or sobriety. In this investigation, Senior Fellow and journalist Jonathan Choe examines the crime, chaos, and disorder that proliferates in and around DESC’s multiple locations, their powerful connections to Washington politics, and the protection they receive from those connections. …

HUD’s Homelessness Reforms Put Human Lives Ahead of Housing Bureaucracy

Michele Steeb
September 29, 2026
5
Homelessness
On Sept. 16, the First Circuit Court of Appeals cleared the way for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to move forward with desperately needed reforms to the nation’s homelessness system. After months of litigation by the Homeless Industrial Complex to repeatedly block these reforms, the decision allows HUD to redefine success and fund the programs that generate the greatest success in moving the homeless toward recovery, restoration and self-sufficiency. And not a moment too soon. For more than a decade, federal homelessness policy has centered heavily on permanent housing placement, while the measures used to define and count homelessness have often obscured important differences between who is counted as homeless and who is being served through …

Jonathan Choe Testifies Before Congressional Subcommittee on Housing First Fraud and Failure

Center on Wealth & Poverty
September 17, 2026
3
Homelessness
Independent journalist and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Jonathan Choe appeared on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, September 15, to testify before the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the invitation of Chairman Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.). The hearing was titled, “Fixing Fraud and Failure in Federally Funded Homelessness Services.” Several clips and excerpts of Choe’s videos covering the homelessness and drug addiction crisis were also presented to the subcommittee. HUGE DAY: Tuesday afternoon, Republican Representative Tim Burchett invited me to be a witness and speak before a congressional subcommittee on fraud, waste, and abuse in America's federally funded homelessness services. Time was limited so I was unable to finish my… …

Pallet Shelter CEO Says “Wait and See” to Questions About Low Barrier Concerns

Jonathan Choe
September 3, 2026
1
Homelessness
What Happens Next? Pallet Shelter CEO Amy King says she is now exiting the homeless housing space. So what happens if these unique tiny houses start breaking down like an old dish washer? Will there be replacement parts? Who’s doing the repairs? Still tons of unanswered questions after King’s abrupt announcement that she’s shutting down Pallet. I spoke to King during the company’s grand opening in Seattle’s Inter Bay neighborhood in June. Aside from being a builder, she also led a successful workforce development program called Weld. So I asked King point blank why she would risk her reputation by aligning herself with some of the most notorious homeless housing providers in the region. She told me this time it would be …

Seattle Low Barrier Homeless Services Provider Closes Up Shop

Jonathan Choe
September 2, 2026
1
Homelessness
Defunded Holy crap! Seattle’s homeless industrial complex is taking a massive hit. Pallet Shelter is going out of business. CEO Amy King announced that she is ejecting from this space saying “funding and political environments have shifted, and our customers have pivoted in how they approach this work.” In other words, low barrier “Housing First” projects that allow drug use are being defunded by the Trump administration. The homeless housing grift is starting to implode. This comes just a few months after socialist Mayor Katie Wilson went all in on these tiny house projects. NEW: Sunday afternoon, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson joined a press conference to announce the grand opening of the Bayside Enhanced Shelter community in Interbay. …

Las Vegas Mole People: Jonathan Choe and Kevin Dahlgren Talk with Podcaster Sean Kelly

Editor, Jonathan Choe and Kevin Dahlgren
August 24, 2026
1
Homelessness
Underneath Las Vegas lies a network of tunnels intended to channel floodwaters. But they are also filled with hundreds of homeless people who have made the tunnels their home. Earlier this year, independent journalists Jonathan Choe and Kevin Dahlgren explored these tunnels. Now, they sit down with podcaster Sean Kelly on the Digital Social Hour Podcast to discuss what they found. Choe and Dahlgren also discuss broader topics around homelessness, such as why Housing First has failed to solve the homelessness crisis, how fentanyl has changed the crisis, the multi-billion-dollar industry homelessness services have become, and more. Watch “The Tragic Tale of the Las Vegas Mole People” …

JD Vance Is Right: American Homelessness Is “Third World”

Caitlin Cory
July 30, 2026
4
Homelessness
This month on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Vice President JD Vance discussed Israel, Jeffrey Epstein, and aliens, topics that have lit up public conversation. Largely overlooked, however, were his thought-provoking remarks about America’s homelessness crisis, which highlight the harmful results of present policies in some of our largest cities and the need to enact new policies that prioritize restoring lives. Vance recalled attending an office Christmas party near Skid Row, the notorious 50-block area in downtown Los Angeles overcome by homelessness, illicit drug use, and crime. He described armed security and “gigantic walls” protecting the party. He told Joe Rogan that it reminded him of visiting the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. “Crazy …

Drug Addiction and Destruction on DESC’s Doorstep

Jonathan Choe
July 28, 2026
1
Crime, Law, and Order
A Destructive Ecosystem The Downtown Emergency Service Center cancer is spreading across Seattle. This latest incident at DESC’s Hobson Place perfectly encompasses what’s wrong with Housing First policies and permanent supportive housing. There is an elderly woman who has to share a floor with fentanyl dealers and drug addicts. Why is this vulnerable woman living in a place like this? Was this the only option for her in the final years of her life? What responsibility does taxpayer funded DESC have in keeping senior citizens safe in their facilities? I could go on and on. Then right in front of Hobson Place, people are smoking fentanyl and partying on the sidewalk. Down the block, there is another massive tent encampment where DESC residents buy and sell …

Andrea Suarez Advocates for Treatment First in KOMO News Town Hall on Homelessness

Center on Wealth & Poverty
July 21, 2026
1
Homelessness
KOMO News hosted a Town Hall on Western Washington’s homelessness crisis on July 13. The Town Hall panel included Daniel Malone, Executive Director of the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC); Andrea Suarez, Founder and Executive Director of We Heart Seattle; Jon Scholes, President and CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association; and Dominique Alex, CEO of Mary’s Place. Among the topics discussed were the root causes of chronic homelessness, whether current policies hurt or help the problem, Housing First and harm reduction, untreated mental illness and substance use disorder, and family homelessness. While Malone of DESC repeatedly emphasized the importance of housing and the role of affordability in homelessness, Suarez strongly advocated for a “treatment …

America’s Homelessness System Must Pursue Self-Sufficiency, Not Simply Housing

Michele Steeb
July 6, 2026
5
Homelessness
For more than a decade, America’s homelessness system has largely measured success by a single metric: whether someone is housed. In the process, what should have been a milestone on the journey to self-sufficiency became the destination itself. Housing is important, but making it the finish line set the bar devastatingly low for both the system and the people it serves. We now routinely confuse housing placement with transformation and occupancy with human flourishing. As a result, too many people remain trapped in addiction, untreated mental illness, dependency, and isolation, yet are counted as successes because the system measures where they sleep rather than whether they are healing, rebuilding, and moving toward self-sufficiency. This was never what most Americans …

Housing First Failed America’s Homeless

Marsha Michaelis
June 25, 2026
4
Homelessness
When a policy intended to help vulnerable people actually harms them, the ethical response is immediate: Stop, reassess and tell the truth. That was why, in January 1996, a team of doctors at the Seattle-based Fred Hutch Cancer Center dramatically halted the active phase of a study assessing the benefits of beta-carotene and vitamin A supplements for people at high risk of developing lung cancer. Leading up to the study, Hutch News reported, “public enthusiasm for the purported health benefits of beta-carotene was so high, ‘people thought it would be unethical to assign participants to the placebo group.’” It turns out the placebo takers were the lucky ones. Among the 18,314 participants, those receiving supplements “had a 28 percent greater incidence of …

When Ideology Overrules Common Sense

Kevin Dahlgren
June 18, 2026
10
Homelessness
For years, the political left has controlled the conversation around homelessness, addiction, and mental illness in most major West Coast cities. They control the nonprofits. They control the bureaucracies. They control the county commissions, the grant systems, the academic language, and most of the policy decisions. And yet the crisis keeps getting worse. That should tell us something. At some point, we have to stop judging these policies by their intentions and start judging them by their results. Because no matter how compassionate the language sounds, the outcome is obvious to anyone willing to walk the streets: more tents, more overdoses, more untreated mental illness, more open-air drug use, more crime, more suffering, and more people slowly dying in public. The problem is …

HUD Re-Issues New Homeless Grant Criteria, Freeing Cities to Ditch Housing First, Pursue Real Solutions

Center on Wealth & Poverty
June 16, 2026
2
Homelessness
SEATTLE, WA — The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently released its 2026 grant criteria for $4 billion in homelessness funding, with a major shift toward treatment, recovery, and renewed self-sufficiency for all who are able. “Federal reforms have finally created space for local leaders to put treatment and recovery back at the center of homelessness policy,” says Discovery Institute President Steve Buri. “Real compassion means helping people reclaim stability and dignity, not leaving them trapped in addiction and illness without a path to restoration.” Discovery Institute has updated its essential policy brief, calling on local governments, Continuums of Care (CoCs), and service agencies to leverage these new federal reforms and …

Protestors Gather at Cicero Institute to Protest HUD’s Shift in Homeless Policy

Jonathan Choe
June 5, 2026
1
Homelessness
Homeless INC Protests Changes Friday afternoon, far-left activists targeted Cicero Institute’s Homelessness Policy Summit in Washington, D.C. Most of these professional protesters are aligned with Homeless INC and are deathly afraid of losing their gravy train. That’s because the Trump administration defunded Housing First, one of the greatest public policy failures in American history. It’s made the street crisis worse and cost taxpayers billions of dollars. But now the vast majority of that money will be flowing into treatment and recovery focused providers. Discovery Institute and Cicero Institute played a massive role in helping craft the direction of this new approach that will save lives. We Heart Seattle’s Andrea Suarez, Tom Wolf, and …

Housing First Is a Disaster. I Saw Sacramento’s Homeless Chaos Firsthand

Michele Steeb
June 2, 2026
5
Homelessness
America’s homelessness crisis is routinely framed as a housing crisis. It is not. It is a crisis born from the collapse of accountability at every level of the system. Nowhere are the consequences of that collapse more visible than in California — and especially in its capital city, Sacramento. In 2016, California became the only state in the nation to formally adopt the federal government’s Housing First mandate as its sole taxpayer-funded approach to homelessness, directing billions in state and federal dollars toward subsidized-for-life apartments with no accountability for sobriety, treatment, or work — ever. Sacramento County followed in 2017, embracing the housing-only model, despite repeated warnings from frontline providers that housing alone would …

Seattle Mayor Accused of Pushing Homeless Drug Addicts Out of Downtown Ahead of FIFA World Cup

Center on Wealth & Poverty
May 8, 2026
1
Homelessness
Jonathan Choe and Brandi Kruse give an inside look into the open-air drug use, mental illness, and sale of drugs/stolen goods plaguing downtown Seattle streets and parks — problems city leaders now appear eager to move out of sight before hundreds of thousands of visitors arrive. An estimated ~750,000 people are expected to visit Seattle during the FIFA World Cup beginning in June 2026. In preparation, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is accused of pushing homeless encampments and activity out of the downtown core and into surrounding areas. Former Mayor Bruce Harrell faced criticism for similar tactics, including downtown sweeps and distributing visitor maps highlighting “safe” routes for tourists to avoid areas overwhelmed by homelessness, drug use, and …

Madison Valley Homeless Shelter Brings Crime and Disorder to Neighborhood

Marsha Michaelis
April 29, 2026
8
Housing
Wendy Yim is an aspiring writer, and by all measures a good one. Her first novel attracted the attention of literary agents and she was working on a second when she was forced to pivot to much less rewarding work: defending her neighborhood against the dangers posed by a low-barrier homeless shelter. Wendy’s family lives in Seattle’s picturesque, middle-class Madison Valley neighborhood, situated just east of Capitol Hill — a place filled with eclectic and colorful homes, winding streets lined with trees, and yards landscaped with flowers. Through the middle runs East Madison Street, host to about twenty small businesses, including a flower shop, bakery, music school, several ethnic restaurants, a small supermarket, and a massage clinic. Children make up 20% of the …