Housing First

Michele Steeb appeared on The Steve Gruber Show on May 5 to discuss our current homelessness crisis. She explained why Housing First has failed to address the crisis, why the crisis is especially bad in California, the bill that could have begun to turn things around, but that Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed, and more.

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 Read More ›

For more than a century, America’s response to homelessness was rooted in faith. Churches, rescue missions, Catholic Charities, and the Salvation Army fed the hungry, sheltered the vulnerable, and most importantly, walked alongside them toward restoration. They innately understood a fundamental truth: Homelessness is a human transformation challenge requiring recovery, accountability, and the restoration of purpose. Over the past decade, however, policymakers were increasingly steered toward a different conclusion. A one-size-fits-all approach was supposed to end homelessness and simplify it — housing as the solution, housing placement as the sole metric, and a uniform approach applied everywhere. For policymakers drawn to ease, the appeal was obvious. But in embracing simplicity, the system ignored human complexity. Faith-based organizations began to be Read More ›

Skid Row in Los Angeles stands as a stark example of what happens when ideology overrides reality. Spanning roughly fifty blocks, it is one of the most concentrated homeless zones in the United States, filled with people trapped in addiction and untreated, severe mental illness, often marked by psychosis — a loss of contact with reality. For years, Los Angeles has wrapped its homelessness policies in the language of empathy and housing justice. But Skid Row reveals a harsher truth. What exists there is not simply poverty. It is a concentration of addiction, untreated mental illness, disorder, and human collapse in one of America’s most visible zones of urban breakdown. Los Angeles has embraced Housing First, a model that places Read More ›

Starbucks: From Foe to Friend Last year Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson blasted Starbucks while standing in solidarity with workers on strike. This week, she announced the local coffee giant would help fund the first phase of the city’s homelessness response. So is the mayor now pandering to Starbucks or is Starbucks pandering to the mayor? Either way, we all know how the last public-private partnership to end homelessness turned out for local donors and the government. Past Failed Attempts Remember We Are In? The King County Regional Homelessness Authority under former CEO Marc Dones got corporations like the Gates Foundation to pony up millions of dollars to solve homelessness. Amazon, Microsoft, Ballmer Group, and the Raikes Foundation were also involved. Read More ›

Gavin Newsom stood before the cameras in early March and once again blamed local governments for the state’s spiraling homelessness crisis. “No more excuses,” he thundered, threatening to strip funding from counties he claims are underperforming while promising to redirect “every damn penny” to those “getting things done.” Newsom is once again attempting to shift blame for California’s homelessness crisis — the very crisis he has repeatedly pledged to solve, including his 2021 vow to end family homelessness within five years. Since 2017, homelessness in California has surged by more than 40 percent — from roughly 134,000 people to nearly 187,000 in 2024 — despite an estimated $30 billion in spending he authorized. His latest tirade against counties ignores the Read More ›

“Egg God’s” Apartment Breaking. We gained exclusive access to ‘Egg God’s’ apartment in Los Angeles with @choeshow and we interviewed him. He has a video that went insane, viral for destroying his subsidized apartment and then mocking his eviction notice. System Struggles to Respond The reality: Under Los Angeles’ strict tenant protection laws, what he’s implying is largely true. Evicting him won’t be easy, no matter how extreme the behavior. This is the flaw in the Housing First model. People are often placed into housing with no expectations on the front end and very few real consequences on the back end. When things go wrong, the system struggles to respond. Housing First Fails the Vulnerable Jonathan and I actually thought Read More ›

Update 3/5: The State Senate passed HB 2266, with amendments. The bill will now go back to the House to be reconsidered. A vote is expected the week of 3/9. Please call your local Representative today! Update 3/9: The House passed HB 2266. The bill will go to the Governor’s desk for signature. More than 20,000 people are living on the streets in Washington state, most of them suffering from an untreated mental illness and/or drug addiction. HB 2266 is currently moving through the Washington State legislature to make it easier to develop subsidized housing and emergency shelters in the style of the failed Housing First policy. This bill would override local ordinances and zoning laws, put residents in real Read More ›

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.

Making the Problem Worse The homeless drug crisis is out of control in Seattle. And it’s now evident Mayor Katie Wilson is going to make the problem worse. During her first State of the City address, she talked about building more housing and shelter. But no solutions to deal with mental illness or drug addiction ravaging the city. Sweep, Sweep, Sweep Aside from changing some policy language, she is pretty much doing the same thing as the last mayor of Seattle. Sweep, sweep, sweep. And the game of Whack-A-Mole continues. Same Old Same Old Wilson’s spokesperson recently told the Seattle Times that, “the mayor isn’t pursuing a significant shift in encampment clearing strategies from the previous administration.” Ignoring the Service Read More ›