Americans are rightly frustrated by the record-setting homelessness crisis. It's a moral outrage, but also a highly visible symptom of a deeper disease—a drastic shortage of affordable homes afflicting people in all parts of the country, in turn forcing hundreds of thousands into shelters, motels, and the streets.
Countless studies show that homelessness and a lack of affordable housing are inextricably linked. Controlling for variables like mental health, substance use, and even climate, scholars Gregg Colburn and Clayton Aldern write in their aptly titled book, Homelessness is a Housing Problem, that it's the inability for individuals to find affordable homes that is the greatest predictor of homelessness rates.
Building and preserving more affordable homes and getting people into them should thus be our highest priority. But today there is an eagerness—fueled by frustration but also deliberate misdirection—to retreat from known solutions and double down on phony fixes. If the Supreme Court upholds one such phony fix in Oregon, the homelessness crisis will likely only deepen.
Any day now, the Supreme Court will hand down a ruling in City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson. The justices are considering whether someone who has no access to temporary shelter or a home can be fined or put in jail for sleeping outside in a public space. It's a form of punishment that is cruel and unusual, levying fines merely for sleeping in public when there is no other place to go.
It also doesn't work.
In 2021, Los Angeles passed a city ordinance that outlawed encampments in certain parts of the city. Two years later, a Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority report concluded that it was "generally ineffective" in permanently housing individuals. The report found that nearly all encampments re-emerged after the clearing, and 81 percent of encampments had people return to them after being evicted.
What's more, criminal convictions resulting from fines and arrests stymie efforts to secure employment, housing, or government benefits. Time spent in jail or navigating the criminal justice system is time that individuals experiencing homelessness could otherwise be earning income and pushes individuals deeper into poverty. If anything, criminalization only serves to send more people spiraling into homelessness.
Instead, we know the real fix—getting people into homes with supportive services.
While people enduring homelessness often face serious challenges—joblessness, health problems, domestic abuse, racial discrimination—placing them rapidly into a permanent home with supportive services is the most effective way of keeping them permanently off the streets. A 2021 study showed that prioritizing housing with services decreased homelessness by 88 percent. It's also a good investment. An independent CDC panel found that for every dollar invested in such housing, taxpayers realize $1.44 in savings.
Despite aggressive narratives to the contrary, we know that this approach works. During our tenures at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), we saw what is possible when federal, state, and local leaders align; total homelessness declined every single year from 2010 and 2016, and veteran homelessness was ultimately cut in half.
That progress continues today. Local leaders in Houston have reduced homelessness 62 percent since 2012. In Newark, homelessness is down 57 percent. In Chattanooga, it's down 40 percent. In Minneapolis, homelessness among the people with the most severe needs is down 36 percent in the past two years. This year, Dallas announced that it effectively ended veteran homelessness.
Instead of the misguided approach of arrests and writing tickets, these leaders did the smart, strategic work of enlisting local support from the private and public sectors. They harnessed federal dollars, subsidies, matching grants, and philanthropic dollars to rapidly rehouse people into supportive homes. And critically, they didn't succumb to quick, phony fixes.
So why do these phony fixes continue to gain ground?
Since 2021, a small, cynical group of supposed advocates have been dangling in front of municipal and state leaders a raft of phony fixes like camping bans, coerced treatment, institutionalization, and criminalization—explicitly at the expense of the permanent housing investments that every community needs. Template legislation advancing these phony fixes has made its way into at least 14 state legislatures, and we're likely to see more of these bills pop up if the Supreme Court rules to allow unchecked criminalization of homelessness nationwide.
These cynics have peddled distorting narratives about crime, rampant substance use, and mental illness—caricatures that paper over very serious problems that require serious solutions, not shortcuts.
In fact, we've been down this road before. The explosion of homelessness in the 1980s drove similar fear mongering and sparked a similar wave of phony fixes to try and criminalize our way out of a housing problem.
Then, like now, rents climbed faster than wages. Affordable housing vanished, with HUD's budget cut from $29 billion in 1976 to $17 billion in 1990. That along with cuts in Social Security and other sources of income were among the main culprits of the spike in homelessness in the '80s. It was only when we reached a bipartisan consensus around prioritizing housing as the foundation for ending homelessness that we began to see it decline.
Let's not be distracted again. Phony fixes will get us nowhere. And if this Supreme Court greenlights them, we must all be ready to fight to ensure more communities aren't distracted from proven solutions.
Ann Oliva is CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness and led homelessness prevention, supportive housing, and rapid re-housing programs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for 10 years.
Shaun Donovan is CEO and president of Enterprise Community Partners and served as HUD secretary and budget director during the Obama administration.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
