Barack Obama

Last weekend, former President Barack Obama acknowledged a blunt political reality: “The average person doesn’t want to have to navigate around a tent city in the middle of downtown … and we’re not going to be able to generate support [for treatment] if we simply say, ‘It’s not their fault, they should be able to do whatever they want,’ because that’s a losing political strategy.”

What makes the remark notable is not merely its candor. It is the history behind it.

It was the Obama administration that institutionalized the federal government’s one-size-fits-all embrace of Housing First in 2013. They promised the approach would end homelessness within a decade by prioritizing immediate housing placement.

The theory was simple: Housing would stabilize lives.

But the results have been anything but stabilizing.

Michele Steeb joined a weekend edition of Morning Wire, presented by Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley and co-host Georgia Howe, to discuss the recent federal reforms that offer hope for our homelessness crisis. Steeb covers how faith-based programs used to spearhead the fight against homelessness, how the Obama administration changed the federal approach for the worse, and what the Trump administration’s recent reforms mean for the homeless and communities nationwide.

“Today marks the beginning of the end of Housing First as the federal government’s one-size-fits-all—and failed—approach to homelessness.” Yesterday, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” marking a pivotal shift in federal homelessness policy. Following a decade of failure under our nation’s one-size-fits-all approach to homelessness—Housing First—the president’s move is a long-overdue course-correction rooted in hope, healing, and human dignity. To understand its gravity, we must first confront the promise—and profound failure—of the policy he will begin replacing. In 2013, President Barack Obama pledged to end homelessness within 10 years by embracing Housing First, a model that promised stability through life-long, subsidized housing, with no requirement to address underlying challenges like Read More ›