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, in their homelessness programs, for Housing First policies that, in the order's words, "deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency," to the extent the law allows. It also tells HUD to take steps so that the groups it funds raise their requirements that people with a serious mental illness or addiction use treatment as a condition of being in their programs.

The order reaches past housing money, too. It directs the Justice Department to help state and local governments expand involuntary commitment, the legal power to hold and treat a person against their will, and to seek, in appropriate cases, to overturn court rulings and end consent decrees that have limited it. It aims at people with mental illness who are a danger to themselves or others, or who live on the street and cannot care for themselves, and it says long-term institutional care will restore public order. Court-ordered outpatient treatment, delivered while a person stays in the community, is part of the same push. The order also tells four departments (Justice, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation) to see whether, as far as the law allows, their discretionary grants can favor grantees in states and cities that meet any of five tests, among them using commitment or court-ordered treatment and enforcing bans on public camping and open drug use. 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, which awards roughly four billion dollars a year and 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 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 June 2026 HUD and the VA put $33 million into 2,532 new HUD-VASH vouchers for homeless veterans, a program the VA itself has moved to a Housing First approach. 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 has also weighed folding them into its push for involuntary treatment. NPR reported in June 2026 on leaked slides for a VA plan called Safe Harbor that would do that, which the VA says was only a proposal, and on a VA agreement with the Justice Department on court-appointed guardians, which the VA says is unrelated. Outreach workers told NPR that forcing veterans into treatment could help or could be traumatic, and that their work runs on building relationships.

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 enforcing general laws against camping on public property, even against people who have no shelter bed to use, is not the cruel and unusual punishment the Constitution forbids. In the year that followed, more than 320 bills to criminalize homelessness were introduced across the country, and 230 of them passed. That ruling took away an Eighth Amendment objection to the camping bans the order wants enforced. It said nothing about involuntary commitment. 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, which followed 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 record is not seriously in dispute; we weigh the full evidence, cost and failure modes included, in What Housing First Can and Cannot Do.

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 little evidence yet that it improves health or cuts health care costs. 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, people fall into homelessness faster than any program can house its way out. So the count climbed for years to record highs. A single-night count in January 2024 found 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 barely moved. Unsheltered homelessness fell 3 percent in the year but is still up 36 percent since 2013, and chronic homelessness rose to a new record, up 81 percent since 2013. That is the pressure critics press hardest, and it is real. Washington now sets those numbers beside its own growth figures: taxpayer-funded assistance beds up 151 percent, grant spending up 111 percent over the same years. That juxtaposition is the strongest card the critics hold. It is also what an inflow problem looks like: the system added beds, and rents pushed people in faster than all those beds together could take them.

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.

Start with the strongest case for the change, because there is one. Unsheltered homelessness is near its record high. 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 real 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 same reason. It is an inflow problem. Cutting the part that keeps people 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 reported in November 2025 that the first version of the changes, the one HUD later withdrew, 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. In November 2025 that federal money housed 102 households, at its 11-unit Key Commons building and in private rentals across the county. In 2025, 92 percent of its supportive-housing residents stayed housed. That is what the evidence backs: the apartment and the support together. It is also the kind of program the federal redirect puts most at risk. The retention number is the program's scorecard, not the county's: in the same window, Buncombe's homeless count kept climbing, from 755 in January 2025 to 824 in February 2026. The floor held while the inflow rose, this article's whole argument in miniature.

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 and counties from letting people regularly camp or sleep on public property. It makes an exception for land the local government owns, designates for up to a year, and the state certifies. Local governments other than those on the Local Government Commission's Unit Assistance List must give such a site security, restrooms, running water and access to behavioral health care, and must ban illegal drugs and alcohol there. It passed both chambers, but Governor Stein vetoed it on July 8, 2026, and Republican leaders have pledged to try an override, so it is not settled.

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. Starting December 1, 2026, an outpatient commitment order, whether entered at the first hearing, on transfer out of a hospital, or reissued after a compliance hearing, can run up to 180 days instead of 90. Orders renewed at a rehearing could already run that long. From the same date, a court that finds a defendant unable to stand trial, but reasonably likely to become able in the foreseeable future, must order the defendant into a program to restore that ability. The court may waive that if no program is reasonably available, if it expects the defendant to become able without one, or for other good cause. Most of the rest is homework: eleven sections order studies, plans, proposals or a working group, among them a proposal for a jail telehealth pilot and a study of how practical it would be to give law enforcement access to the state's behavioral-health bed-availability system, both due by March 1, 2027. What it does not do is pay for any of it. The law 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, ordered by the courts but with no new money 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 the same court set aside both 2025 versions of the rules as unlawful under the federal law that governs how agencies act, though it declined to issue a permanent injunction. But a softer replacement still redirects money toward transitional housing, and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the field's main research and 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, advocates and local governments asked to add the new grant competition to its case. The judge said no and invited a new case, and on July 2, 2026 the coalition sued, arguing the new notice repeats the same flaws the court had already found unlawful in the version it struck down. On July 7, 2026 a second front opened. State attorneys general, joined by the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania, sued to block the replacement notice too. They argue its roughly $1.3 billion set-aside for transitional housing and service-only projects is an unlawful cap, one that would starve the permanent supportive housing the evidence rewards. On August 7, 2026 both suits succeeded. The court set the 2026 notice aside in its entirety, holding that HUD could not create the set-aside without first taking public comment. The competition stopped where it stood. HUD appealed and asked the trial court to pause its own ruling in the meantime. That court said no. The appeals court said yes. On September 16, 2026 the First Circuit paused the ruling while it heard the appeal, saying HUD was likely to win the question the trial judge turned on: whether the set-aside is the kind of incentive the law makes HUD put out for public comment first. HUD reopened the competition on September 18, 2026. On September 21 the challengers asked the appeals court to vacate the August ruling and send the case back to the trial court, and on September 24 it did. That left HUD's notice standing, and its application window closed on September 30, 2026. The two cases are back before the trial judge, with new briefing due through October 14, 2026. Nothing about the merits is settled yet. The August ruling turned on whether HUD had to take public comment first. The court did not reach the challengers' other claims, including whether HUD had the authority to set the money aside at all, and those questions are still open. The direction has not changed. Only the speed is still in question.