Why Housing First is a broken model

Better late than never: local candidates are continuing their journey away from SJ's flawed Housing First strategy to address homelessness, and onto a system that focuses on Treatment First. Author of San Fransicko, and independent gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberger unpacks the reasoning in Reason magazine.

If you give people with untreated mental illness and addiction their own apartments and don't deal with the untreated mental illness or addiction, they end up back on the street, often very quickly. We now know from a big Harvard study that was done over 12 years ago that there were no better outcomes for people that had housing first than non-housing first, even on their own metric of keeping people in housing.

We don't have functioning psychiatric and addiction care services. But a lot of it is also victim ideology, which says that you should give them things, like their own apartment, and offer them help but don't mandate it. Because that would be an extension of the victimization. And there's where everything goes wrong.

There is some amount of coercion that's usually required for people to quit their addiction. People do need to be arrested. In Portugal, they do these interventions with a mix of family members, social workers, government officials, and cops. I think that's where the dogma has interrupted the proper treatment of people with addictions or mental illness: actually requiring some amount of pressure or coercion, if only the enforcement of laws when they break them.

Read the whole thing here:

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Image by Tim Dennell