The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it will deprioritize the Housing First model in its upcoming June funding cycle, opting instead to favor transitional housing and addiction treatment programs.
The critique of the status quo is gaining momentum in mainstream policy discourse. On The Ezra Klein Show, Ezra Klein questioned the efficacy of the framework, noting that "California spent something like twenty-four billion dollars on homelessness from 2018 to 2023, mostly within that framework, and the unsheltered population has continued to grow. What went wrong?"
While critics sharpen their knives, proponents at the Housing First Partners Conference in San Francisco argued that the model is being scapegoated for broader systemic failures. The divide is clear: federal leadership under E. Scott Turner is signaling a hard pivot toward treatment-based requirements, setting the stage for a contentious budget battle in the coming fiscal year.
