mental illness

A City in Urgency Seattle is moving rapidly to expand shelter for homeless drug addicts before the FIFA World Cup comes to the city. Faster than the public has been given time to fully understand. Mayor Katie Wilson set a goal of adding hundreds of new units in a matter of months. The strategy relies heavily on taxpayer dollars to expand tiny house villages. No one questions the urgency. But speed should not replace accountability and transparency. Lack of Transparency Right now, Seattle is making high-impact decisions about land, funding, and service delivery through a relatively tight network of policymakers, advisors, and providers. And the public has not been given a clear, transparent picture of how those decisions are being made. Read More ›

More than 48 million Americans are battling substance use disorder. Many are deteriorating in plain sight — on sidewalks, in encampments, and in emergency rooms. Others decline behind closed doors. Overdoses are shattering families, especially within the homeless population where the death rate among people living on the streets has surged by 77 percent. Yet in a media landscape quick to amplify controversy but slow to recognize consequential reform, President Donald Trump’s executive order to overhaul America’s addiction response passed with remarkably little national attention. It shouldn’t have. At its core, the order affirms a truth long understood by those who have worked on the front lines: no man or woman living with addiction ever dreamed of this life. When Read More ›

California Governor Gavin Newsom regularly repeats his mantra: “Shelter solves sleep; housing solves homelessness.” Hmm. From 2022 to 2025, I wrote weekly columns about homelessness and gained insight by living for three weeks in shelters. Based on that I can say: In general, it is not true that housing solves homelessness.

Maybe it solves homelessness for people who are not addicts, alcoholics, mentally ill, or victims of abusive childhoods, but most homeless people are in one or more of those four categories. Maybe housing solves homelessness if the rest of us don’t like to see homeless people: Get them out of sight and they can be out of mind.

Invisibility benefits those who have homes. Unseen homeless folks don’t ask us for money, so we are free from giving what often goes to buy drugs or alcohol, or from not giving and feeling heartless. But for those who are out of their minds for various reasons, housing does not solve homelessness.

Augustine 1,600 years ago famously said regarding God, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” The earthbound equivalent is “Our bodies are restless until they reside in a home.” For many, though, walls and a roof alone do not make a home.

Instead, hiding away addicts or alcoholics inside an apartment leaves many apart from everything except a needle or a bottle. Hiding away the severely mentally ill leaves them apart from everything except walking nightmares. People who are desperately ill need to be together with someone who can offer compassionate help.

That’s one reason a chart used at the Orange County Rescue Mission (OCRM) in Tustin, California, impressed me. It’s one of the places I lived at for a few days in 2023 and in January 2026 to gain some street-level understanding of these issues. Instead of using one marker to assess progress in coming out of homelessness—a signed apartment lease, say—OCRM evaluates a more holistic list of ten, including: “spiritual … sobriety/substance abuse (if applicable) … mental health … shelter/housing … social/family relationships … income and employment … physical health, food, and nutrition.” (This quotation and those that follow are from the OCRM “Outcome Assessments,” and I’ve seen that actions back up those words.)

After decades of working inside homelessness services, I’ve learned that the greatest lie we tell ourselves is that we don’t know what works. We do. The problem isn’t a lack of data, innovation, or funding. The problem is that real solutions require decisions we are unwilling to make and truths we are afraid to say out loud.

It is easier to expand systems than to fix them. Easier to signal compassion than to practice it in ways that are uncomfortable. Easier to manage homelessness than to end it.

Most people assume homelessness persists because it is too complex to solve. In reality, it persists because solving it would disrupt an entire industry built around its permanence. Over time, the system stopped being accountable to outcomes and became accountable to itself. Programs are judged by how many people they touch, not how many people leave the streets. Success is defined by engagement, not transformation. In this environment, homelessness is no longer a crisis to be resolved, but a condition to be administered.

One of the hardest truths is that housing alone does not stabilize people who are deeply addicted, severely mentally ill, or both. I have watched housing placements fail because we insisted on treating housing as the solution rather than the setting in which recovery might occur. For people actively using fentanyl, methamphetamine, or alcohol at life-threatening levels, housing without treatment can become a slower form of self-destruction. When it collapses, we try again and call it trauma-informed care, quietly accepting failure as inevitable.

Real solutions begin with recovery, not as a moral requirement, but as a practical one. A person cannot stabilize while in the grip of serious addiction. No amount of case management, harm-reduction supplies, or wellness check-ins can substitute for sobriety when the brain itself is hijacked. Cities like Portland and Seattle know this, yet continue to build models that treat recovery as optional. We call this compassion, but too often it looks like abandonment.

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 ›

In a recent ruling that defies both logic and compassion, a federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s effort to reform the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Continuum of Care program — the federal government’s primary funding mechanism for homelessness assistance.

The lawsuit — filed by a coalition of 20 mostly Democratic-led states, local governments, and nonprofit organizations and spearheaded by groups such as Democracy Forward — warns of “funding gaps,” winter instability, and the potential displacement of people currently housed. These alarms are sounded even though HUD includes a nearly 12% increase over last year’s funding allocation.

At the core of the complaint is a revealing claim: that reform would “upend longstanding projects that have been thoughtfully developed to comport with evidence-based, best-practices services delivery.”

But HUD’s own data make clear that the evidence on which they have long relied is catastrophically wrong.

Canceled Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson abruptly canceled the first major encampment sweep of the year. It was scheduled for Wednesday morning in Ballard. Neighbors are furious and some in the outreach community are questioning this decision. But Wilson’s risky call could be a long-term blessing in disguise. Other Sweeps Continue Wilson’s spokesperson sent me a statement saying this is a one-off and that the mayor “believes a better resolution is possible at that location.” We are still waiting on those details. Meanwhile other encampment sweeps are still happening across the city. Blessing in Disguise? As for how this could be a blessing in disguise, Mayor Wilson could set a new precedent by personally going to this encampment and meeting the Read More ›

Across America’s streets, the homeless epidemic is claiming lives, fracturing families, and eroding public safety. Often deeply intertwined with mental illness and addiction, it has become a humanitarian crisis that traps vulnerable individuals in cycles of dependence and despair while destabilizing the communities around them. This crisis has been worsened by policies that elevate the notion of “freedom” over timely, life-saving intervention. Recent events make the consequences of that choice unmistakably clear. Continuing on the current path is neither humane nor responsible. Consider what unfolded in New York City over the holidays. A woman with a documented history of serious mental illness and homelessness was released from psychiatric care, only to purchase a knife hours later, then repeatedly stab a Read More ›

Tackling the Root Causes HUD Secretary Scott Turner takes direct aim at America’s “homeless industrial complex” and says the the days of “warehousing people” are over. The Trump administration is reallocating federal dollars to tackle the root causes of homelessness like drug addiction and mental illness. This plan could cripple so called Housing First programs that do not require people to find jobs or enter drug treatment. Many of these understaffed facilities under Housing First also trigger the most 911 calls in cities, allow drug use behind closed doors, and attract an inordinate amount of crime to neighborhoods. California and WA are ranked in the top three for overall homelessness in the nation. But elected officials in these states are Read More ›