“Shelter first, treatment first, housing earned”
The housing first approach has been the longstanding progressive approach to solve homelessness and while it is well intentioned it is painfully nearsighted. Most people are unable to keep their house when their underlying addiction or illness goes unaddressed, and it is financially impossible to build housing for every single homeless person. Currently, there are upwards of 11,000 homeless people in Portland, and it costs $490,000 to construct a single affordable housing unit according to Portland Housing Bureau, meaning it would cost over $5 billion to house every homeless person just in Portland! Furthermore, as previously mentioned, when you give a person facing addiction or mental illness a no-strings-attached apartment for free, that property will descend into chaos as demonstrated with the Buri Building in the Hazelwood neighborhood. This $28 million low-income apartment complex has been plagued with reports of people smoking fentanyl in the hallway, vandalizing plumbing, public defecation, and terrorizing neighbors all within three years of opening.
The housing first model actually enables addiction as seen in the example of San Francisco. San Francisco has more permanent supportive housing per capita than any other city, they've doubled the amount spent on homelessness, but homelessness grew 13% even as it declined nationwide.
When someone experiences homelessness for days, weeks, months or years their brains stay in a chemical stress response the whole time. They can’t show up to appointments, keep a job, let alone maintain a house or appreciate the unwritten rules of being a good neighbor. You need shelter to overcome addiction or mental illness, but offering housing with no strings attached isn’t compassionate, it’s naive. The compassionate approach is not to pour billions of dollars into a failing model, but rather offer shelter to get houseless people out of the open air drug scene, provide wraparound services to address their addiction and/or mental illness, and connect them to a job, or job training program so they can regain a sense of normality and self-esteem, work towards independence, and eventually become another welcomed member to the community.