"Housing First" Homelessness Solution Under Attack
A July 24, 2025, Presidential Executive Order takes aim at groups that prioritize housing first to solve homelessness.
Quietly, with little fanfare, President Donald Trump signed an order seeming to criminalize homelessness and target organizations dedicated to a “housing first” approach to finding homes for the unhoused. The title of the order sounds as if the focus will be on cleaning the streets of gangs and thieves. But the “Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets” order states its purpose is to end vagrancy and shift homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings.1
Just two weeks later, using the excuse of being tough on crime, Trump federalized the capital’s police force. While media covered National Guard troops entering D.C., authorities appeared to give Trump’s earlier order targeting the homeless a test run, dismantling campsites, trashing campers’ belongings, discarding them in garbage trucks and scattering residents.2
Trump ominously declared the homeless would be removed “far away.” It remains to be seen to what locale. But if his executive order of July 25 offers a clue, they are headed toward institutionalization.3
What does the institutionalizing of the homeless look like? in the early 20th Century, unhoused people were placed in asylums and poor farms.4
Will the homeless end up in places like Alligator Alcatraz, or any other of the many detention centers that are being thrown up around the country, holding people without due process of the law. No one has proposed this so far, but where will they put the 771,480 people experiencing homelessness in 2024, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness? What about mental hospitals? Do the states have enough beds in mental health facilities to accommodate an onslaught of unhoused people caught up in Trump’s dragnet? DC is just the first. Trump’s order applies not just to DC, but to any and every city in the United States where there are unhoused people.
NPR reported that during a press conference last week at the White House, Trump lumped unhoused Americans together with criminals, people experiencing drug addiction and mental illness and said they all must leave the streets or vacate D.C. immediately.
"We're going to be removing homeless encampments from all over our parks, our beautiful, beautiful parks, which a lot of people can't walk on, they're very dirty," Trump said. "There are many places they can go, we're going to help them as much as you can help. But they're not going to be allowed to turn our capital into a wasteland," he added.
The article quoted Dana White from Miriam's Kitchen, a group that works to end homelessness in Washington, who said of the actions against the homeless in DC: "We're simply moving the problem around, we're not really providing a solution to folks homelessness. Ultimately these people … have no permanent, stable place to go."5
Groups like Miriam’s Kitchen may lose funding in the future after Trump’s executive order. Miriam’s Kitchen advocates a “housing first” model that is called out in the President’s order to end.
Section five of the order states the secretaries of Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development are charged with taking actions to “increase accountability in their provision of, and grants awarded for, homelessness assistance and transitional living programs. These actions shall include, to the extent permitted by law, ending support for “housing first” policies that deprioritize accountability. …”
In his book, Grace Can Lead Us Home, author and advocate for the homeless Kevin Nye, debunks the “accountability” approach that the President’s order supports. In “accountability” programs, unhoused persons are expected to complete programs designed to hold them accountable to meet certain moral and spiritual standards. Nye builds a strong case for “housing first” policies that are under attack, showing how they produce better, more lasting outcomes for unhoused people.6
Nye says “accountability” proponents use a self-fulfilling prophecy when celebrating its successes: “If only everyone had the discipline and fortitude to finish the program, it would work for everyone.” Forced treatment, however, almost never sticks.
Nye says, “(H)ousing itself is the most meaningful intervention for virtually all other ailments for people experiencing homelessness. Unsurprisingly, for someone with a chronic health condition or disability, housing provides stability that soothes many symptoms of the physical ailment.”
Pioneered by Dr. Sam Tsemberis, founder of Pathways to Housing, “housing first” abandons the “accountability” model and moves people directly from the streets into permanent housing. Finland has nearly eradicated homelessness with this model, Nye says, and the city of Houston cut its unhoused population in half in under ten years.7
“Housing first” is built on the following principles:
Consumer choice: The individual experiencing homelessness has options as to the type and location of the housing. Additionally, services like mental health support, addiction treatment, and medical services are constantly offered but always voluntary.
Community-based: Housing and services are rooted in the local community, not sent “somewhere else.”
Mobile support services: Services are nimble and can be brought to the participants when possible, rather than requiring them to seek them out.
Permanent housing: participants have their name on a lease, and are able to keep their housing for as long as they want it - housing is “a human right, not a privilege to be earned.”
Harm reduction: Rather than mandating transformation for problematic behaviors or realities, the focus is on minimizing and mitigating the harm that results from these behaviors.
Kevin Nye, Grace Can Lead Us Home, pp. 58-59
The White House, Presidential Actions, Executive Orders, ENDING CRIME AND DISORDER ON AMERICA’S STREETS, July 24, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/ending-crime-and-disorder-on-americas-streets/
Shauneen Miranda, “Trump Issued an Order Targeting Homeless People in DC, He’s Giving It a Test Run,” Missouri Independent, August 21, 2025, https://missouriindependent.com/2025/08/21/repub/trump-issued-an-order-targeting-homeless-people-in-d-c-hes-giving-it-a-test-run/?emci=50acbde2-ce7e-f011-b484-6045bdeb7413&emdi=e52e0127-477f-f011-b484-6045bdeb7413&ceid=126192
ENDING CRIME AND DISORDER ON AMERICA’S STREETS, Section One. Purpose and Policy. “… Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order. …”
For more on poor farms, see my Substack: Back to the Poor Farm We Go?
Brian Mann, “Trump's purge of Washington's homeless encampments escalates,” NPR, August 14, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/08/14/nx-s1-5502247/trump-purge-homeless-washington?fbclid=IwY2xjawMVrw5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHtMwevHtOZUS6jmmTarjUN0dnS74KtQXUOhzv81KCH6VcD_RM2UHXdxejzvm_aem_LQ4Pew6Wb0NtMncztlWK-A
Kevin Nye, Grace Can Lead Us Home: A Christian Call to End Homelessness (Herold Press, Harrisonburg, Virginia, 2022), pp. 56-63.
Nye, Grace Can Lead Us Home, p. 59