Houston, Texas, and Salt Lake City, Utah, made eye-popping headlines for their self-claimed success in addressing homelessness using the Housing First approach. Both jurisdictions had all but declared victory over homelessness.
Salt Lake City’s 2015 claim was unraveled in 2018 as Utah’s state auditor found the claim was based on bad data.
It was the Houston Chronicle that revealed the unraveling of the city’s model as they described a scene with Houston’s new, pragmatic mayor as he spoke with homeless men and women hunkering down for the night in the city’s theater district. “Sure looks like we’ve fixed it, didn’t we?” he asked sarcastically.
While a blow to the Houston and Salt Lake City communities that were continually reassured they were successfully tackling homelessness, it is an even greater blow to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) that had only two models to which to point — Salt Lake City and Houston.
Housing First models are now permanently out of stock.
First adopted at the federal level as the nation’s one-size-fits-all approach to homelessness in 2013, the stated promise was that the policy shift would end homelessness in a decade.
The implication of the shift and the decision by Houston and Salt Lake City to do the same was that housing vouchers became the primary tool in their homelessness toolkit. Funding and requirements for mental health therapy, substance use disorder counseling, and employment training were deliberately minimized and, in many cases, eliminated.
Yet 10 years later, the number of homeless Americans is
