Hi, it’s Josh Sanburn, producer with More To The Story.
About a decade ago, I first wrote about Sam Tsemberis, a clinical psychologist who remade the way we approach homelessness in America. Back in the 1990s, Sam was tasked with getting people who lived on the streets in New York City into hospitals for treatment. At the time, the way most cities dealt with unhoused people—a population on the rise because of the Reagan administration’s cuts to public housing and rent subsidies—was to deal with mental health and substance abuse issues first and provide housing later. But on his way to and from work each day, Sam noticed that the same people he got into treatment often ended up back on the streets. Nothing changed.
Sam soon came up with a new concept: Housing First. Get people into housing and then deal with underlying issues later through support services. The approach routinely proved to be twice as successful as a treatment-first strategy and became the basis for the federal approach to homelessness under the George W. Bush administration. Over the last 15 years, it helped cut veterans’ homelessness in half. So when I was writing about Sam a decade ago, Housing First was a success story.
But today, the Trump administration is rewriting that story and shifting the federal government away from Sam’s model and back toward a treatment-first approach, despite the many studies showing Housing First’s effectiveness. It’s merely the latest science-based policy being discarded by the current administration.
On this week’s More To The Story, host Al Letson sits down with Sam to take a look at how his approach is being abandoned 30 years after stumbling upon a new way forward and how that could have serious consequences for the hundreds of thousands of people who live on the streets every night. I hope you'll give it a listen.
—Josh Sanburn
