Biden Homeless Plan Recycles Failed Housing-First, Equity-Focused Playbook, Advocates Say

When his administration released a plan last week to reduce homelessness 25 percent by 2025, President Joe Biden called it the most ambitious effort yet to get struggling Americans off the streets and to “allow them to thrive.” The plan focuses on providing housing to those who need it most and combatting inequities in housing and health care.

But homeless advocates who spoke to National Review said the new Biden framework is not only exceptionally vague, but also appears to be a retread of previous strategies that have failed to slow the nation’s growing homelessness crisis. They say the Biden plan doesn’t focus enough on rehabilitation efforts for people deep in the throes of crippling drug addiction and mental illness, and it doubles down on housing-first strategies that often fail to address the root causes of homelessness and end up encouraging more of it.

Michele Steeb, who heads the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s initiative to transform policy around homelessness, said the plan seems to be “a lot of the same. It hasn’t been working.”

“It’s changing some words and adding some pages to the same playbook,” said Steeb, who for 13 years ran a program for homeless women and children in Northern California. “I don’t even think they’re going to achieve a decline. Not even close to 25 percent.”

Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in issues around poverty and inequality, called the new Biden plan a “mixed bag.” Ultimately, he said, homelessness is better addressed by state and local governments. “The federal government,” he said, “is great at sort of spending money and brute force. That is kind of the two things it’s got going for it. Homelessness doesn’t respond to either of those particularly well.”

Biden announced the new plan on December 19, in the wake of Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass declaring a state of emergency over the city’s homelessness problem, New York City mayor Eric Adams announcing a new policy to forcibly treat people on the streets who are mentally ill, and a lawsuit against the city of Portland, Ore., for allowing homeless camps on the sidewalks.

Biden said the plan — All In: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness — “offers a roadmap for not only getting people into housing but also ensuring that they have access to the support, services, and income that allow them to thrive.” The plan is built around a housing-first strategy, a strategy that involves offering housing with no preconditions, because, “when we provide access to housing to people experiencing homelessness, they are able to take steps to improve their health and well-being, further their education, seek steady employment, and bring greater stability to their lives and to the community that surrounds them,” Biden said in an introduction of the plan.

The plan also has a heavy focus on equity, a term that is used 68 times in its 104 pages. It says that unsheltered homelessness has been on the rise not only because of growing income inequality; soaring housing costs; and housing supply shortfalls; but also because of inequitable access to health care; climate change; and “discrimination and exclusion of people of color, LGBTQI+ people, people with disabilities and older adults.”

The plan is built around three “foundational pillars” — equity, data, and collaboration — as well as three “solution pillars” — housing and supports, homelessness response, and prevention. However, much of the plan doesn’t really read like a plan at all, but more like a plan to develop plans. It has few details about specific programs to address homelessness, costs to implement those programs, or metrics to measure success or failure. Rather, there is a lot of talk in the plan of identifying promising opportunities, gathering input from experts, examining federal policies and practices, catalyzing existing infrastructure, and developing new tools.

“It’s vague about how to build low-cost housing. It’s vague about everything. There’s a lot of platitudes here,” Tanner said, adding that while it’s good to examine policies and develop metrics, those things by themselves, “don’t add up to a plan.”

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The plan does include a focus on the prevention of homelessness, with an “all-hands-on-deck effort across government to broadly reduce the risk of housing instability for households most likely to experience homelessness.” Tanner said that is a worthwhile effort.

“The idea that you need to stop feeding into the pipeline of homelessness to solve the problem is important,” he said. “Right now, you get people off the street, and more people take their place.”

Steeb said the plan is deficient in offering a “reasonable, effective approach to the rehabilitation of human beings.” Homelessness, she said, is typically driven by generational poverty, drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, domestic violence, and a lack of strong support networks. The Biden framework doesn’t do enough to address those issues, she said.

In the years before the Covid-19 pandemic, the federal government poured money into permanent housing subsidies as part of a housing-first strategy, but homelessness increased, particularly the unsheltered homeless population — the people camping in parks and subways.

There is a lot that should be done to make affordable housing more affordable and attractive to build, Steeb said, “but it’s not the solution, in and of itself, to homelessness.”

“If homelessness were solved by increasing affordable housing units, you would not have seen the increases you saw in the pre-pandemic era,” she said.

John DiLorenzo, a Portland, Ore., lawyer who is suing the city for allowing homeless camps to block sidewalks needed by people with disabilities, said there are generally three types of homeless residents in Portland: people struggling financially who typically end up staying with others or living in vehicles; people with severe mental-health challenges and drug addictions who need constant supervision and can’t live in an apartment alone; and people who refuse for other reasons to live in a communal environment.

DiLorenzo is an opponent of housing-first strategies, in part because it takes too long for new housing units to be built. “Forget the wisdom about putting people who have hopeless drug addictions and mental illness into brand new units absent adequate constant supervision, it will still take five years to build the housing units they would need to address the problem of chronic homelessness that we find on the streets,” he said. “Most of the people who are chronically homeless will never be able to avail themselves of those housing-first policies, because most of them will be long gone before then. They’re not going to survive.”

DiLorenzo is instead an advocate of making shelters the centerpiece of the strategy to address chronic homelessness. “For homeless people who are chronically homeless, there is no way to address their plight than shelter first,” he said. “They’re not in tents on the sidewalks because they couldn’t pay the last $50 worth of rent. They’re there because they can’t pay any rent.”

DiLorenzo is also skeptical of growing what he calls the “homeless industrial complex.” Too much of the money that is supposed to be targeted at combatting homelessness in Portland is used for administrative costs and ever-larger nonprofit payrolls. “Professionalizing homelessness services will look very much like the old Great Society programs,” he said. “Those who receive the most benefit will ultimately be the staff who work for the programs.”

Eric Fruits, vice president of research for the Cascade Policy Institute in Portland, said in an email that there is no substantial published research to demonstrate that housing-first strategies lead to improved health outcomes, reduced healthcare costs, or a reduction in overall homelessness. “It is clear,” Fruits said, “that none of the jurisdictions that have used a Housing First approach have ended or even significantly reduced their homeless population.”

Tanner said that when it comes to building new affordable housing, local zoning policies and state environmental rules are often among the biggest impediments.

“There’s not a lot that the federal government can do, or at least not a lot of things that the Biden administration is going to be willing to do,” he said. “It’s not going to tie housing funds to zoning reform. It’s not going to end some of the tariffs that are making building materials more expensive. It’s not going to deal with labor shortages in the construction industry.”

Tanner added there should be a greater effort to identify, “regulations and rules at the federal, state, and local level that are standing in the way of construction of affordable housing.”

Steeb noted that while the federal government often can’t force state and local policy changes, it is the largest funder of programs targeted at reducing homelessness, and “because of that, they drive policy.” Advocates for the homeless who don’t agree with the dominant housing-first narrative are often ostracized, she said.

Steeb also said the Biden administration’s strong emphasis on equity could be a concern if it leads to some populations of homeless being favored over others based on race and sexual orientation. “We need to get services to everyone who is struggling with these issues,” she said.

Tanner said it would be counterproductive if the administration’s emphasis on equity led to money being doled out to a specific list of identity-focused interest groups. Everyone who is struggling with homelessness needs attention, he said, and because of that the administration’s emphasis on equity is “a good symbol in some ways of the kind of pointlessness of this whole plan.”

Homelessness in the U.S. has been an ongoing problem for decades, bridging presidential administrations, and there are no easy answers, Tanner said.

“I think too many people on either side of the debate tend to want to find that easy answer, whether it’s, we’re just going to have the police clear them out, or we’re just going to throw money at housing,” he said. “These type of answers aren’t going to solve the problem.”