Strings Attached
For twenty years the federal deal was a home first, no conditions. Washington just moved to attach them. The new approach has thinner evidence than the one it is replacing, and about $1.4 million of Asheville's housing money runs straight through the change.
For most of the last twenty years, federal homelessness money followed a simple rule. You give a person a stable home first, with no demand that they be sober or in treatment, and you build the rest of the help on top of that floor. The approach has a name, Housing First, and a long evidence record behind it.
In the summer of 2025 the federal government decided to stop. An executive order told its housing and health agencies to end support for Housing First and to start tying housing to treatment. The money that pays for permanent housing in Asheville and everywhere else is now being pulled toward a different model, one with far less proof that it works. The change is being fought in court as you read this.
The federal government changed its mind
The instrument is Executive Order 14321, "Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets," signed on July 24, 2025. It directs the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Health and Human Services to end support for Housing First, and where a person has a serious mental illness or addiction, to require them to be in treatment as a condition of getting help.
The order is not just language. HUD rewrote the rules of its Continuum of Care competition, the roughly four billion dollars a year that is the single largest federal source of money for local homelessness programs, to steer it away from permanent housing. An early version of the new rules would have capped permanent supportive housing at 30 percent of that spending, down from about 87 percent today.
On the health side, a new program at the federal substance-abuse agency, SAMHSA, called STREETS puts fresh money into street outreach and treatment, and it explicitly bars Housing First. Cities, counties, and tribes can apply for it. The nonprofits that actually house people cannot, except as junior partners under a government applicant.
What the first plan would have cut
Share of Continuum of Care dollars going to permanent supportive housing: today versus the withdrawn first version of the rules. National figures; bars drawn to scale.
It did not start in the White House
The claim that Housing First failed did not begin with the administration. It was built over years by a small set of think tanks, and it reached the executive order along a path you can follow.
The Cicero Institute, founded by the tech investor Joe Lonsdale, wrote much of the model legislation and argued in print that Housing First should be rejected outright. The Manhattan Institute supplied the longer intellectual case and, in early 2025, a specific plan to convert the federal homelessness grant into a state block grant that drops the Housing First requirement. NPR has traced that plan straight into HUD's overhaul.
What turned an argument into enforceable policy was a court. In June 2024, in Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court ruled six to three that a city may punish people for sleeping outside even when there is no shelter bed for them to use. In the year that followed, more than 320 bills to criminalize homelessness were introduced across the country, and roughly 220 became law. That ruling is what made the order's enforcement push legal.
The think tanks
Cicero (Lonsdale) and the Manhattan Institute wrote the case that Housing First failed and drafted the model bills.
The court
Grants Pass v. Johnson, 2024, made it legal to enforce camping bans even where no shelter is available.
The order
Executive Order 14321, July 2025, told HUD and HHS to defund Housing First and tie help to treatment.
The money
HUD's grant rewrite and SAMHSA's STREETS program move the dollars to match the order.
The money is moving toward the weaker hand
Here is the part that should give anyone pause. The model being defunded is the better-proven one.
Whether Housing First keeps people housed is one of the most replicated findings in the field. A national Canadian trial of more than 2,000 people found 62 percent of Housing First tenants stably housed against 31 percent in usual care, and the founding New York study kept about four in five housed. What Housing First does not do is cure addiction or mental illness, and it never claimed to. It is housing, not treatment.
The model replacing it has the opposite problem. No rigorous trial has shown that requiring treatment before or during housing produces better results on housing and health together. And the record on forced treatment is not encouraging. Studies tie involuntary commitment for addiction to higher overdose deaths after release, not lower; a Swedish national study found overdose deaths spiked in the first weeks after people were discharged from compulsory care.
So the federal government is moving money from the model with strong evidence to the one with thin evidence. That is a choice about values. It is not where the research points.
Housing First was never sold as a cure. The fix the evidence actually supports is treatment paired with housing, plus enough housing to slow the inflow, not a home a person keeps only as long as they comply.
About $1.4 million runs through this
In Buncombe County, the program most exposed is Homeward Bound's permanent supportive housing, which draws the largest single share of local Continuum of Care money, about $1.4 million. That is the line most directly in the path of a rule that pulls dollars out of permanent housing. Asheville Watchdog reports the federal changes could move more than a million dollars locally away from Housing First toward shorter-term, treatment-conditioned housing.
The state is leaning the same way. North Carolina's House Bill 781 would bar cities from allowing public camping and let them designate a sanctioned site only if that site bans alcohol and drug use. It has passed the state House and is waiting in the Senate.
The federal picture is not settled. After lawsuits, HUD withdrew the harshest version of its rules in December 2025, and in March 2026 a court ruled against it. But a softer replacement still redirects money toward transitional housing, and the National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates it puts at least 97,000 people across the country at risk of losing their housing. The direction has not changed. Only the speed is still in question.
Housing First is not a miracle, and it never was. It reliably keeps people housed. It does not cure what made them sick, and it cannot lower a city's total count on its own. The answer the evidence supports is to fund the treatment Housing First was always missing and to build enough housing to slow the inflow. What Washington is doing instead is defunding the part that works to pay for the part that is unproven, and attaching strings to a person's home in the bargain. Asheville did not choose this, but about $1.4 million of its housing money is riding on how it ends.