My experience has been that as you dig deeper into the success of housing first programs, you start to find a lot of caveats. For example, for a while Utah was

My experience has been that as you dig deeper into the success of housing first programs, you start to find a lot of caveats. For example, for a while Utah was being praised for “solving” homelessness by applying the housing first method, but their program failed after a few years. It’s still probably the best idea we have going, but it’s not without significant downsides. Where I live, many small time landlords who have agreed to participate in programs like this with the city have had to evict the tenants placed with them because they made the entire property unlivable for other people through actions like smoking meth in their apartments, letting their dealers move in with them, or in one case, piling all their belongings into the bathtub and lighting them on fire in a state of meth induced psychosis. In Portland, there is a large housing complex called Bud Clark Commons that provides low barrier housing to the homeless. Since it was constructed, the area around it has become far more dangerous than it was before. There are hundreds of tents surrounding it, meth dealers operating openly from RVs, and trash strewn all around the area. But what’s really interesting about Bud Clark Commons is that the staff actually struggles to keep people there. People cycle in and out, often leaving to return to the streets voluntarily. It’s really depressing to consider, but it seems clear that some of the people living on our streets have been fundamentally changed in such a way that will make it extremely difficult for them to find their way back into society again. Especially for addicts, the call of euphoric oblivion right outside the door seems very hard to resist in the long term.