Thirty years ago, housing activists began an unusual experiment to help people struggling with homelessness and chronic addiction. They decided to get people into housing first and then try to help their clients with their addictions. This idea, called "Housing First," is now the central strategy guiding homeless services in America. But the concept is facing new scrutiny and growing criticism from conservative lawmakers. Today on The Sunday Story, we look at the controversy around Housing First and consider if the strategy is working as it was designed.You can listen to Will James's full documentary on KUOW's Soundside podcast.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the Housing First strategy and how did it begin?
I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story from Up First, where we go beyond the news to bring you one big story. Not long ago, reporter Will James walked into an apartment building in Seattle and met a tenant named Kenny Taylor.
Good morning. Oh, thanks so much. Yeah, this is great.
This building, the Union Hotel, is the first in Seattle to operate under a philosophy called Housing First. And Kenny was one of the original tenants who moved in 30 years ago. He came here straight off the streets.
Chapter 2: Who is Kenny Taylor and how did Housing First impact him?
I was homeless for about five years before I moved in here. I slept in doorways, I slept on the street, I slept in tents, I slept at the missions and stuff like that. I slept fun. Being homeless is not fun at all.
When Kenny moved into his apartment in the 1990s, Housing First was an experiment and nobody knew how it was going to turn out. But now, 30 years later, Housing First is the central strategy the federal government uses to combat homelessness. So is it working? And is it working like it's supposed to?
When housing first was introduced, the idea was to take some of the most vulnerable people living on the streets and move them immediately into their own permanent subsidized apartments. A lot of these people had serious mental illnesses and addictions. The plan was to get them a home first and then worry about treating those problems later.
Housing first started as a fringe idea, but eventually evidence started piling up that this worked to resolve many of the most stubborn cases of chronic homelessness. When people got housing under this approach, they usually stayed housed for years, like Kenny.
This is my home. I'm going to keep my home as long as I pay my rent. I just feel happy here. I wouldn't trade it for nothing in the world.
But with homelessness now at record levels, conservative think tanks and activists have set their sights on the philosophy of housing first. They're pushing for more programs that require treatment and sobriety before housing. And Project 2025 calls for ending support of it all together.
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Chapter 3: Why is Housing First facing criticism and scrutiny?
After a break, reporter Will James joins me to talk about the future of Housing First and whether it's time for a course correction and how the U.S. handles one of its most persistent problems. We're back with the Sunday story. I'm here with Will James, a reporter and producer for KUOW in Seattle.
He recently published an audio documentary about the housing first approach to homelessness, its history and its future. Will, welcome to the podcast.
Hey, thanks for having me, Aisha.
So, Will, Housing First has been around for 30 years, and it's been the U.S. government's central strategy for fighting homelessness for at least a decade now, depending on when you start counting. Help us to understand the backlash to this philosophy. Like, where is it coming from?
Yeah. So there's a piece of this that is political. Housing First was pretty bipartisan under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. But over the past few years, activists and think tanks on the political right have been pretty successful at branding this philosophy as left coded or liberal coded. But there's another element to this backlash that's actually much more interesting to me.
As a reporter covering homelessness here in Seattle, I started hearing doubts about Housing First from people I didn't expect to hear them from, folks who work directly with the homeless population at nonprofits that practice Housing First. sometimes even from people who lived on the streets themselves and moved inside under Housing First.
And this really threw me because as a reporter, I'd been hearing for years that Housing First is the most studied, the most proven, the most cost-effective strategy for getting people off the streets. And at the same time, some of the evidence that these critics were pointing to rang true to me. Like they were pointing to problems that I have witnessed myself in my reporting.
And this is what really made me want to dive into Housing First with this documentary. It was my own genuine confusion about how to reconcile these things.
That is very interesting because you are talking to people who are dealing with this firsthand and they are fueling some of these doubts about housing first. Like what what are they seeing that's causing their concerns?
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Chapter 4: What are the reported challenges of Housing First?
So the first observation that critics of Housing First tend to make is since 2013, the U.S. government has really pushed local governments and nonprofits to adopt Housing First practices. And for years, a majority of federal grants for homelessness have gone to Housing First projects, adding up to billions of dollars. But the U.S. homeless population hit a new record in 2024.
And so this has caused some people to wonder whether Housing First, or maybe the way we're practicing Housing First, is not meeting this moment. The second observation that critics make is that Housing First in practice can look very imperfect, to put it mildly. Yes, it offers people an apartment, a bed, a door that locks behind them.
But the environment in these buildings can be challenging because the chaos of the streets tends to follow people indoors.
And you talked to some tenants who had experiences like this for your audio documentary.
Yeah. So we're going to hear from a woman named Maureen Hawley who lives in a building in downtown Seattle. It's this 14-story building that's a century old. And some of the tenants there are just low income, but others come straight off the streets under a Housing First program. There is staff on site to help them with addiction and mental health if the tenants want that.
But like with every Housing First project, treatment is not a requirement of living here. Maureen's lived here for more than two decades after spending some time homeless herself. Two years ago, Maureen had an encounter with a neighbor that she says almost killed her. Here's Maureen from the documentary.
I was using crack cocaine at the time, and I was given a glass pipe to smoke, but it had fentanyl in it, and I didn't know it. I was in a coma for about four days, and they said it was a miracle that I managed to live because I had enough fentanyl in my system to kill me.
The rise of fentanyl has sent a surge of overdose deaths through housing programs across Seattle. These deaths nearly quadrupled between 2020 and 2023. Michelle Huckabee Virick is one of Maureen's neighbors. Michelle has struggled with fentanyl addiction herself and says after a wave of overdose deaths in their building, she started to hoard stuff in her apartment.
I mean, there was people dying around you, so you hoard things, you make walls, you know. So, like, somebody came through your door, they couldn't get to you, you know. I never in my life lived like that. I felt like no one was safe, not even me. I just kind of basically left, and I, like, camped out across the street. I was really scared.
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Chapter 5: How did the 1811 Eastlake Project influence the Housing First debate?
Before housing first took off, treatment first was the go-to approach for many, many years.
OK, so so housing first was an alternative to treatment first. Yeah. So what were the problems with this reward and punishment based system that, you know, housing first emerged to address?
Chapter 6: What are the arguments for and against the Treatment First approach?
Yeah, that is a really important question. And I really wanted to understand this. So I dug back into the history of housing first. Back in the 90s, people working in the homelessness field realized that Treatment First wasn't working for a subsection of the homeless population. They called this group the hardest to serve population.
These were people who were the most disabled by mental illness and addiction and could not abide by the rules of Treatment First. So they always ended up back on the streets. That's when some innovators decided to take a big risk and try just housing them and then bringing the treatment to them in their new apartments. And this was the birth of Housing First.
And here's where Seattle enters the story in a big way. In 2005, a Seattle nonprofit called the Downtown Emergency Service Center, DESC, planned to open a building with 75 apartments for people who had been homeless for years and addicted to alcohol. At that point, Housing First had mostly been focused on people whose main health problem was mental illness and who often had addiction on the side.
But DESC's project was gonna test Housing First for people whose main health problem was alcoholism. This blew up into a national news story, and it remains probably the most famous and controversial example of Housing First in US history.
So you're talking about the 1811 Eastlake Project. Yes. You've got a section about this in your audio documentary, and it starts with this excerpt from a local Seattle call-in show back then, The Conversation.
The Downtown Emergency Service Center is opening the facility at 1811 East Lake Avenue for homeless men and women who have been identified as some of the most down-and-out chronic alcoholics. Residents will be allowed to drink in their rooms.
Anyone who moved into 1811 East Lake was not required to participate in any kind of treatment for alcoholism. It was there if they wanted it, but they could also just keep drinking.
It sounds to me like you're taking alcoholics and saying, please drink as much as you like.
Why don't we have call-in shows anymore? This is good radio.
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