Twelve years after the Obama administration significantly expanded the Housing First model, some policy analysts argue the strategy has failed to reduce homelessness and has coincided with sharp increases in unsheltered populations, particularly in California. Texas Public Policy Foundation fellow Michele Steeb, citing federal data and a Cicero Institute report, contends the approach over‑prioritized unconditional housing subsidies at the expense of treatment for underlying issues such as mental illness and addiction.
The Housing First model was incorporated into federal homelessness policy under President George W. Bush in 2008 and later became the centerpiece of federal strategy during the Obama administration. In 2013, the Obama White House and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) moved to make Housing First the dominant, "one‑size‑fits‑all" approach to addressing homelessness, according to Texas Public Policy Foundation senior fellow Michele Steeb, who was interviewed by the Daily Wire’s Morning Wire podcast.
Under the broader pre‑Housing‑First framework, federal funding streams supported shelters, transitional housing, and services such as mental health and substance‑use treatment alongside housing. Steeb told Morning Wire that, beginning about 12 years ago, HUD increasingly conditioned key grant programs on providing permanent housing with minimal preconditions, limiting support for stand‑alone treatment or employment programs.
“The Bush administration first introduced the Housing First model to federal policy in 2008. The Obama administration massively expanded the policy in 2013, turning it into the federal government’s one‑size‑fits‑all approach to homelessness,” Steeb said, according to the Daily Wire. She argued that under this framework, HUD grant recipients generally could not require tenants to stay sober or maintain employment as a condition of receiving housing, a core tenet of Housing First as implemented by the federal government.
Steeb, author of Answers Behind the Red Door: Battling the Homeless Epidemic, maintains that Housing First was originally designed for a relatively small subset of people experiencing chronic homelessness but was scaled up nationally without sufficient evidence to justify its exclusive use. She further claimed in the Morning Wire interview that former President Barack Obama “literally promised it would end homelessness in 10 years,” and that roughly a decade after the expansion the United States had reached its highest recorded level of homelessness, describing an "almost 35%" increase. That specific percentage, however, reflects Steeb’s characterization; publicly available HUD data show that national homelessness trends have fluctuated over the past decade and do not align cleanly with a single 35% nationwide increase over a 10‑ to 12‑year window.
A 2022 report by the Cicero Institute, a public policy organization that has been critical of Housing First, found that homelessness increased by nearly 25% in jurisdictions that they identified as relying almost exclusively on Housing First strategies. The report argued that systems emphasizing permanent supportive housing without stronger requirements or parallel investments in treatment and accountability have seen worse outcomes than more mixed approaches. Other researchers and advocates, however, have defended Housing First, pointing to studies that show improved housing stability for chronically homeless individuals and arguing that rising housing costs and local market conditions play a major role in homelessness trends.
Steeb and the Daily Wire article contend that the effects of the Housing First‑centered strategy are especially visible in California. In the interview, Steeb said California was “the only state in the nation that followed the feds and said, all of our money on top of all of your money … is now going to go to Housing First,” and asserted that the state experienced a roughly 40% increase in homelessness after aligning its funding approach around 2017. Public data from HUD and independent analysts confirm that California has seen substantial increases in homelessness in recent years, though specific percentage changes vary by time period and methodology.
California now has by far the largest homeless population of any state and the highest share of unsheltered homeless people. Recent federal and state reports indicate that the state is home to nearly a quarter of all people experiencing homelessness in the United States and roughly 40–45% of the country’s unsheltered homeless population, depending on the year and dataset. Major urban centers such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, which have adopted Housing First‑oriented strategies alongside other local programs, have struggled with visible encampments and public disorder linked to homelessness, even as some local counts show slower growth or modest declines in unsheltered numbers in the most recent years.
Steeb praised changes under the Trump administration, telling the Daily Wire that federal officials had begun to "reprioritize mental health treatment" and "drug and alcohol counseling" in conjunction with housing, and to encourage clearing encampments she described as dangerous. She warned that large, unmanaged encampments are associated with overdoses, human trafficking, and broader public‑safety and public‑health impacts on surrounding neighborhoods.
Debate over Housing First remains sharp. Critics like Steeb and organizations such as the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Cicero Institute argue that an exclusive focus on unconditional housing has coincided with rising homelessness and insufficient attention to addiction and severe mental illness. Supporters of Housing First counter that the model is evidence‑based for certain populations and that surging housing costs, not the design of federal homelessness policy, are the primary drivers of recent increases. As new federal and state data continue to emerge, the effectiveness of Housing First as a singular or primary strategy remains at the center of the national policy discussion on homelessness.
