Strings Attached

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 reaches past housing money, too. It directs the Justice Department to help states widen involuntary commitment, the legal power to hold and treat a person against their will, and to undo court rulings and agreements that have limited it. The stated goal is to move more homeless people who have serious mental illness or addiction off the street and into treatment, including institutional treatment, whether or not they agree to it. Court-ordered outpatient treatment, delivered while a person stays in the community, is part of the same push, and federal grant money is steered toward the cities and states that use involuntary commitment and court-ordered treatment. For a place like Buncombe County, that runs into a hard limit. Court-ordered treatment needs beds and programs to send people to, and Western North Carolina, whose state psychiatric hospital sits an hour east in Morganton, is short on both.

The legal groundwork followed. In June 2026 the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion holding that federal disability law carries no integration mandate. Neither the Americans with Disabilities Act nor Section 504, it held, requires a state to serve people in the most integrated setting, and it said so most pointedly for people with severe mental illness. The opinion admits its own reading is out of step with how the federal courts have read the Supreme Court's Olmstead decision for nearly three decades. It does not overturn Olmstead. It tells federal enforcers to stand down, and disability advocates warn it gives states a reason to institutionalize people rather than fund the community care that keeps them housed.

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.

The shift is real, but it is not clean. Even while it rewrote the big grant, the government kept funding the same model by another door. In mid-2026 HUD and the VA put $33 million into 2,532 new HUD-VASH vouchers for homeless veterans, and HUD opened a separate $193 million fund to house homeless youth, both of them housing first in everything but the label. Washington turned hard against the model in its largest grant while still leaning on it where it has worked for years.

Veterans show the whole contradiction in one group. The same government that houses them through HUD-VASH is also moving to commit some of them against their will. Outreach workers describe a VA push toward involuntary guardianship for homeless veterans who turn down help, and they warn it can break the trust that gets a person off the street in the first place.

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. Knowing where an idea came from is not the same as knowing whether it is right, and the rest of this piece takes the argument on its merits.

Start by giving Housing First credit exactly where it has earned it, and only there.

Whether it keeps people housed is one of the most replicated findings in the field. The Canadian At Home / Chez Soi trial, more than 2,000 people across five cities, found 62 percent of Housing First tenants stably housed against 31 percent in usual care. The founding New York study kept about four in five housed. On that question the evidence is about as strong as social policy gets.

That is also where the strength stops. Housing First does not cure addiction or mental illness, and it never claimed to. When the National Academies reviewed the research in 2018, they found the housing holds, but that gains in health, drug use, and work are hard to find beyond the housing itself. It is a platform for treatment, not a treatment by itself.

It has not brought the national numbers down either, and the reason is built into what it does. Housing First decides who gets out of homelessness. It does little about who keeps falling in, and the inflow is set by the cost of housing, not by any program. When rents outrun wages, more people slide into homelessness than any rehousing system can move back out. So the count climbed for years to record highs. A single night in January 2024 counted 771,480 people, up 18 percent in a year. The January 2025 count finally dipped, to 745,652, the first national decline since 2016, but the drop came mostly from families. The part of the problem this fight is about did not ease: unsheltered homelessness is up 36 percent since 2013 and chronic homelessness up 81 percent, both near record. That is the pressure critics press hardest, and it is real.

So the honest version is narrower than either side's slogan. Housing First is the best-proven way to keep a high-need person housed. It was never shown to treat them, and it cannot by itself lower a city's count.

Take the argument for the change at its strongest, because it has one. Unsheltered homelessness is at record highs. Encampments and overdoses sit on the same blocks, day after day. In some high-cost cities the spending rose while the street got worse. Being frustrated with a system that houses people one at a time and leaves the illness and the drugs on the sidewalk is not a fringe position. The executive order says as much, and so do the institutes behind it.

Part of that critique is simply right. A home with no care attached is not the goal, and housing stripped of the services meant to come with it is the exact way Housing First fails when it fails. On that point the critics and the model's own researchers agree.

But the honest answer to housing without treatment is to fund the treatment next to the housing, which Housing First was built to allow. It is not to make the housing conditional on the treatment. Those are different policies, and the difference is the whole argument.

The rising count does not indict the model either, for the reason just given. It is an inflow problem. Cutting the part that holds people back out of homelessness does nothing about how many fall in. Only building housing does that.

And the replacement is not the safer bet it is sold as. No rigorous trial shows that conditioning housing on treatment does better on housing and health together, and the record on forced treatment runs the wrong way. A Swedish national study found overdose deaths spiked in the weeks after people left compulsory care. The new programs are not all alike. Some are real attempts to combine housing and treatment; others, like the federal STREETS grant, bar low-barrier housing outright. The strongest of them end up doing most of what Housing First already asked for, house the person and fund the care. The weakest hold the housing back until the person earns it.

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.

It is worth being precise about what that money buys, because it is not the stripped-down housing critics have in mind. This is where Homeward Bound parts ways with the bare version of Housing First. Its model is permanent supportive housing, an apartment paired with the case management and recovery support meant to keep a person stable. Not a key handed over and forgotten. Its Compass Point Village holds 85 such apartments, and in 2025, 92 percent of its supportive-housing residents stayed housed. That is the home and the help together, the version the evidence rewards, and it is the kind of program the redirect puts most at risk.

The state is leaning the same way. North Carolina's camping ban, which began as House Bill 781 and moved as House Bill 437, would bar cities from allowing public camping outside designated sites with strict conduct rules. It has passed both chambers and sits on the governor's desk.

A second state move shows the distance between the rhetoric and the money. North Carolina signed House Bill 1104 into law on July 6, 2026. It reworks involuntary commitment, routing mental-health evaluations of people who are arrested into jail telehealth instead of hospital emergency rooms, stretching court-ordered outpatient treatment from 90 to 180 days, and opening the state psychiatric-bed registry to law enforcement starting in August. What it does not do is pay for any of it. The law leans on studies and pilots and adds no new money, in a state that put more than $800 million into mental health in the prior budget cycle. It is treatment first written as a plan to study treatment, not to deliver it.

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. In June 2026 a second federal court struck the 2025 restrictions outright, finding HUD had rewritten the rules without following the process the law requires. But a softer replacement still redirects money toward transitional housing, and the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an affordable-housing advocacy group, estimates it could put at least 97,000 people across the country at risk of losing their housing. The softer replacement is in court now too. In June 2026 a coalition of providers and advocates sued to block the new grant competition, arguing it repeats the same flaws a court had already found unlawful in the version it struck down. The direction has not changed. Only the speed is still in question.