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housing first
Trump’s New Substance Use Policy Would Have Made My Own Recovery Impossible
My daughter exists because someone gave me a hotel room, a hospital bed, and a second chance. If EO 14321 had been in place, I would have been treated like a criminal, not a patient.
Aug 30, 2025
Last month, US President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14321—“Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.” By criminalizing homelessness, addiction, and mental health crises, the order strips federal support from lifesaving public health solutions like Housing First and harm reduction—the very policies that saved my life and my daughter’s, and made my nearly three years of recovery possible.
I spent over a decade unhoused in San Francisco. I was already used to instability—much of my childhood was spent living in cars, motels, and campgrounds, until I landed in foster care. They kept placing me in institutions, each more restrictive than the last. I ran away often. The threat of forced placements where abuse was common taught me early to value my freedom. But freedom, without any foundation, can come at the cost of survival. I used substances to manage trauma I had no tools to process. It wasn’t glamorous. I did what I had to do to survive.
By age 29, I was pregnant and living in a makeshift shelter beside the freeway with my partner. A massive storm hit and everything we had was washed away. We were soaked, freezing, and standing in knee-deep water when the city’s Homeless Outreach Team arrived. No judgment. Just one question: “Are you safe where you are right now?” They got us into a hotel that night. That simple act saved my life—and gave me a chance.
With shelter, I was able to schedule a prenatal appointment. When I missed it due to withdrawal symptoms, a public health nurse came to me and helped get me into a hospital bed to safely taper off opioids. I spent the rest of my pregnancy hospitalized due to complications. My daughter was born prematurely and spent two months in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. It was a long road, but we made it. That wouldn’t have been possible under Trump’s executive order.
If Trump chooses cages, we can choose clinics. If he chooses punishment, we can choose prevention. If he chooses fear, we must choose humanity.
EO 14321 eliminates federal support for Housing First policies—programs that provide housing without requiring sobriety. It prioritizes forced institutionalization over voluntary care. It defunds services like naloxone distribution, clean syringes, and mobile health teams that meet people where they are. It punishes cities like San Francisco for offering compassionate, evidence-based care.
After giving birth, I entered treatment, using methadone to taper slowly. I’ve been sober nearly three years. That wouldn’t have happened if I’d been forced to quit cold turkey. The first time I was pregnant, I did exactly that—thinking it was best for the baby. I got violently ill and miscarried. I didn’t know opioid withdrawal could be fatal during pregnancy.
That’s why harm reduction matters. When you’ve used for years, quitting all at once can kill you. I needed time, support, and nonjudgmental care. If someone had tried to force me into abstinence, I would’ve run. The only reason I could stay was because I was met with dignity, not demands.
Harm reduction tools—like clean syringes and naloxone—kept me and my partner alive long enough to heal. Narcan brought us back more than once. These aren’t fringe ideas. They’re public health basics. Without them, I wouldn’t be a mother today.
My daughter is 2 now—chubby, curious, thriving. I still receive medication-assisted treatment, not because I’m still using, but because my tolerance was high after years on the street. My partner is now in the sheet metal union. We have housing. We have hope. But under EO 14321, the very services that helped build this life would have been gone. The care I needed would’ve been criminalized.
Trump’s order doesn’t just shift funding—it reshapes the system around coercion. It calls for expanded civil commitment laws that make forced treatment easier. But science and lived experience say the same thing: Coercion kills, voluntary care heals. I was institutionalized for nearly a year at 16—not because I was violent, but because I was suffering. It didn’t help. It hurt. It made me distrustful and traumatized. If you strip away someone’s autonomy, you strip away their will to recover.
This order tries to legislate suffering. It replaces housing and support with jail cells, locked wards, and abstinence-only programs that don’t work for most people. It replaces hope with fear. But addiction doesn’t respond to punishment. Recovery grows in trust, safety, and connection.
So what does compassion look like in practice? Start with Housing First—always. Fund syringe access and safe-use spaces. Offer medication-assisted treatment without strings attached. Train outreach workers in trauma-informed care. Build trust. Respect autonomy. Celebrate survival instead of punishing it.
San Francisco has already shown it’s possible. Our city is on track to become the first major US city with no new HIV infections—precisely because we invested in harm reduction and met people where they were, without shame. As the federal government rolls back those strategies, we face a choice. Do we follow them down a path of fear and criminalization, or do we lead with evidence, compassion, and courage?
My daughter exists because someone gave me a hotel room, a hospital bed, and a second chance. If EO 14321 had been in place, I would have been treated like a criminal, not a patient. I might not be here. She definitely wouldn’t be. Until a person dies, there is hope. That hope is sacred. It’s not flashy. It takes time. But it works. If Trump chooses cages, we can choose clinics. If he chooses punishment, we can choose prevention. If he chooses fear, we must choose humanity. Let’s not squander the hope we still have.
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Trump's DC Occupation Costs 4 Times More Than It Would Take to House City's Entire Homeless Population
"This militarized spending comes at the expense of federal programs—like public housing—that actually do prevent crime and improve health and education outcomes," said researcher Hanna Homestead.
Aug 22, 2025
Last week, when Trump federalized Washington, DC's police force and deployed the National Guard to occupy its streets, one of his main orders was to "end vagrancy" by destroying homeless encampments and arresting and forcibly relocating the people taking shelter there.
But according to an investigation published on Wednesday by Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project, in collaboration with The Intercept, deploying the National Guard and "getting rid of the slums" is costing far more than it would cost to simply provide housing to every homeless person in the city.
Governors from six US states have sent troops to Washington to help Trump's effort, swelling the ranks to nearly 2,100 who will soon be on patrol.
According to previous reporting, National Guard deployments cost the US government $530 per guard member each day. Using that figure, Homestead estimated that it would cost just over $1.1 million.
She added that "the number of troops will likely continue to grow. And with no deadline for the DC deployment, those costs could add up for months or even years."
According to the most recent data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), there are about 5,600 people experiencing either sheltered and unsheltered homelessness in DC on a given night. Operating an affordable housing unit for each one of them, the data shows, costs about $45.44 per person, per day, on average in DC.
Providing affordable housing to every homeless person in DC would cost an estimated $255,166, which is 4.3 times less than the cost of Trump's military deployment.
"Taxpayers like you and me bear the cost of this cruel power grab," Homestead said. "This militarized spending comes at the expense of federal programs—like public housing—that actually do prevent crime and improve health and education outcomes."
Last week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that over 70 encampments had been cleared since Trump's order to federalize the police. She also said that over 600 people had been arrested, though it was not specified how many of them were homeless.
Trump has sought to conflate homelessness with criminality, suggesting that the nation's capital had been "overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people."
While his solution has been a show of military force against people with nowhere to go, a large body of research suggests that the approach of providing "Housing First"—meaning a stable place to stay with no preconditions for sobriety or treatment—reduces crime.
A 2021 study from UCLA found that providing homeless people with targeted housing assistance reduced the probability of committing a crime by 80%.
"Arresting or ticketing people for sleeping outside makes homelessness worse, wastes taxpayer money, and simply does not work," said Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center. "The solution to homelessness is housing and supports, not handcuffs and jails."
But in addition to a crackdown on the homeless, the Trump administration is also pushing to eliminate funds for public housing. The White House's proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 slashes funding for HUD's Continuum of Care program, which provided cities with funding for initiatives to house the homeless.
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the proposal would effectively end funding of permanent supportive housing for 170,000 residents and potentially increase the number of homeless people in the US by 36%.
"Arresting people for no reason other than the fact that they have no home is inhumane and unjust," said Amber W. Harding, executive director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. "It is particularly cruel to do so knowing that federal and local housing programs have been slashed and that DC does not have enough shelter beds."
"Fines, arrests, and encampment evictions make homelessness worse, further traumatize our homeless neighbors while disconnecting them from community and support," said Dana White, Director of Advocacy at Miriam's Kitchen, a DC-based homeless services organization. "If policing resolved homelessness, we wouldn't have homelessness here in DC or anywhere else in this country."
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As Trump Wages War on the Homeless, His Budget Will Kill a Policy That Helped Them Find Housing
The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that the proposal could increase the number of homeless people in the US by 36%.
Aug 18, 2025
As US President Donald Trump moves forward with a nationwide purge of homeless people from America's streets, his administration is moving to kill a program that has helped many of those in need find permanent housing.
The White House's fiscal year 2026 budget proposes ending a program under the Department of Housing and Urban Development known as Continuum of Care, which has helped cities across the country address or, in some cases, nearly eliminate their homelessness problem.
To receive federal funds, cities are required to adopt community-wide plans to end homelessness with the goal of moving people from the streets into shelters and then into stable housing.
The National Alliance to End Homelessness describes Continuum of Care as "the federal government's key vehicle for distributing homelessness funds."
As the Washington Post reports, Dallas has become a model for the program's effectiveness:
Instead of shuffling people to other neighborhoods, [the city] offered wraparound social services—and a permanent place to live.
The approach worked. Even as homelessness nationwide has surged to record levels, Dallas has emerged as a national model. The city declared an end to downtown homelessness in May after more than 270 people moved off the streets.
Other places, it says, have used Continuum of Care to substantially reduce homelessness, including San Bernardino, California, and Montgomery County, Maryland.
But the White House budget, unveiled in May, would eliminate Continuum of Care, instead shifting its resources to the Emergency Solutions Grant (ESG) program, which prioritizes shelters and transitional housing, as well as mental health and substance abuse counselling, rather than "Housing First" solutions.
The National Alliance to End Homelessness says the administration's plan to consolidate the program "would place thousands of projects and the hundreds of thousands of people they serve at risk."
The Alliance estimated that the proposal would effectively end funding of permanent supportive housing for 170,000 residents and potentially increase the number of homeless people in the US by 36%.
In addition to eliminating Continuum of Care, the White House budget cuts $532 million in funding to the federal government's Homeless Assistance Grants account. That money, the Alliance says, could fund over 60,000 Rapid Re-Housing Units—enough to serve 8% of the US homeless population.
"Between 2023 and 2024, homelessness increased by 18%, yet this proposal would strip funding for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)'s homelessness programs by 12%," said Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. "That is a recipe for disaster. We know that these programs have been chronically underfunded for decades."
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has declared an all-out war on the nation's homeless population. In July, he signed an executive order requiring states and cities to remove homeless people from public places, expanding cases where they must be involuntarily committed to psychiatric hospitals, and requiring sobriety preconditions for them to receive housing assistance.
During his federal takeover of Washington, DC, Trump ordered homeless people in encampments to move "FAR from the Capital." Press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said those who refuse to accept services at a shelter will face jail time.
The advocacy group Housing Not Handcuffs reported Friday that "police evicted and destroyed the property of homeless people throughout DC, throwing away people's personal belongings, including tents and other property."
"Homelessness is a market failure, a housing problem," said Rob Robinson, a formerly homeless community organizer in New York City, in USA Today. "Rent prices have exceeded income gains by 325% nationally since 1985. Rates of homelessness are tied to rental affordability."
"The White House's recent moves toward the criminalization of homelessness and forced institutionalization," he said, "ignore decades of research and real-world outcomes."
"If Donald Trump really wanted to help people and solve homelessness, he would use his power to lower rents and help people make ends meet," said Jesse Rabinowitz from the National Homelessness Law Center. "Estimates show that taxpayers are spending over $400,000 a day for Trump to use the DC National Guard for photo ops. Why can they find money for that but not for housing and help?"
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