Lying About Housing First

The most effective strategy we have for transitioning families and individuals out of homelessness is called the “Housing First” approach: extending an unconditional offer of permanent housing, augmented with voluntary wraparound treatments such as addiction counseling and psychiatric care. Since this approach first gained popularity in the 2000s, a substantial body of literature has piled up demonstrating its effectiveness. (For a thorough overview, I recommend Shinn and Khadduri’s In the Midst of Plenty.)

Thanks in part to this research, Housing First enjoyed broad bipartisan support for a time. But as homelessness in California and other high-cost, deep blue areas became a matter of national political salience, that changed. Far-right media outlets and think tanks started railing against Housing First as yet another example of decadent wokeness, a soft-hearted attempt to aid degenerate Others by showering them with tax dollars.

While the Housing First detractors on the far right haven’t produced research of any particular distinction, they have generated quite a bit of content. There was, of course, the book San Fransicko (which I replied to here). There were segments on Tucker and videos from PragerU. Some Manhattan Institute reports. Several Wall Street Journal op-eds. And so on.

The latest entry in the genre, published last Friday, is a Wall Street Journal piece co-authored by Joe Lonsdale and—I’m not making this up—a guy named Judge Glock. Lonsdale is a venture capitalist, Palantir co-founder, and chairman of a right-wing think tank called the Cicero Institute. Mr. Glock is the institute’s senior director of policy and research. Their op-ed is called “‘Housing First’ Foments Homelessness in California.” To give you a flavor of their general stance on unhoused people, the subhead accuses California policymakers of “allowing them to ruin cities.”

There’s a standard template for pieces like this, and Lonsdale/Glock don’t risk any originality. As the template demands, they dismiss Housing First proponents as zealots committed to a utopian ideological project; mischaracterize a couple examples of the relevant research and ignore the rest; and mislead their readers about the character of California’s homelessness strategy.

Here’s the paragraph where they purportedly demonstrate that Housing First doesn’t work (emphasis mine):

Based on how the above is worded, you might think that the bolded sentence is an empirical finding; it is not. Lonsdale and Glock simply made it up. The relevant paper—which is about a specific intervention called permanent supportive housing (PSH), not “permanent subsidized homes” writ large—notes the “relatively modest … effects of PSH on homeless counts,” but does not reach any conclusions about why the effect is modest.

Poor targeting of PSH is floated as one possible explanation, but the author concedes that more research is needed. Lonsdale and Glock would have you believe this is a solid conclusion when it is clearly speculation. Oddly, they give more weight to this speculation than to the central finding of the report: a small but observable decline in overall rates of homelessness associated with PSH development.

They commit a similar act of violence against the only other paper they cite. Lonsdale and Glock note that University of Pennsylvania researchers “found that an anticamping enforcement on Los Angeles’s Skid Row after 2006 reduced violence and death among the homeless.” The conclusion they draw from this is that encampment bans are “solutions” to homelessness. But the very study they cite makes clear that this is not the case: “We emphasize again, however, that police interventions of the sort undertaken by the Main Street Project and the SCI do not solve the problem of homelessness.” [Emphasis mine.]

This is obviously correct. The goal of the intervention studied in this paper was to disperse unhoused people living on Skid Row, not to move them out of homelessness. Shoving unhoused people from one corner of the city to another does nothing to address their homelessness; in fact, as other research has indicated, it can make the actual solutions harder to implement.

In addition to misrepresenting the research they cite in the hopes that no one will bother to read it themselves, Lonsdale and Glock lie to their audience about the nature of California’s homelessness strategy. A central premise of their op-ed is that both the state and California cities have allowed encampments to proliferate unmolested.

As even a casual observer of recent history knows, this is completely untrue. San Francisco spent more than $20 million in a single year on “quality of life” enforcement actions against unhoused people. CalTrans, the state’s transportation department, recently cleared more than 1,200 encampments in the space of about a year. Los Angeles and Sacramento have both passed sweeping encampment bans in the past few months.

One would think Lonsdale and Glock would applaud this investment in sweeps. The fact that they can’t even acknowledge them is telling. If they did acknowledge them, they would also have to acknowledge that police crackdowns have done nothing to reduce rates of homelessness.

So why expose themselves to potential embarrassment by writing nonsense like this in the first place? It’s an interesting question. There is clearly a market on the MAGA right for dishonest attacks on Housing First; how these attacks fit into their broader ideological project is probably worth exploring in depth at some later date. In other words, this stuff is worth taking seriously—just not as an actual argument.