Last weekend, former President Barack Obama acknowledged a blunt political reality: “The average person doesn’t want to have to navigate around a tent city in the middle of downtown … and we’re not going to be able to generate support [for treatment] if we simply say, ‘It’s not their fault, they should be able to do whatever they want,’ because that’s a losing political strategy.”
What makes the remark notable is not merely its candor. It is the history behind it.
It was the Obama administration that institutionalized the federal government’s one-size-fits-all embrace of Housing First in 2013. They promised the approach would end homelessness within a decade by prioritizing immediate housing placement.
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The theory was simple: Housing would stabilize lives.
But the results have been anything but stabilizing.
Despite a roughly 300% surge in federal spending over the past decade, overall homelessness has risen nearly 35% since the former president promised to end it. Unsheltered homelessness — the tent encampments and sidewalk suffering Americans see with their own eyes — has nearly doubled in eight years.
The shift redirected an estimated 80–90% of federal homeless-assistance — the nation’s largest stream of homelessness dollars — into “permanent” housing subsidies, often lifelong, with no expectation of sobriety or engagement in treatment at any stage.
Residential recovery programs, psychiatric stabilization beds, and structured transitional housing models — approaches that pair shelter with clinical care, accountability, and a pathway to restoration — were relegated to the margins of the nation’s homelessness toolbox.
More significantly, the policy approach codified the notion that individuals suffering from severe mental illness or addiction could refuse treatment without consequence, even while markedly deteriorating.
Housing First quickly devolved into housing only.
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Obama’s recent comments implicitly concede what voters have already recognized: permissiveness has failed in policy and in results.
Today’s homelessness crisis is the predictable outcome of a federal experiment that elevated progressive ideology above medical and behavioral realities. It was neither organic, nor inevitable.
An estimated 70–80% of those living unsheltered struggle with serious mental illness, substance use disorder, or both. These are brain diseases that impair judgment, sever relationships, and erode self-preservation.
Yet, the Housing First approach considered mental illness and addiction not as medical crises, but as lifestyle preferences. In the process, compassion was reduced to “non-intervention.”
The deeper message in Obama’s remarks is this: The more policymakers ask Americans to accept disorder as the “new normal”, the more they erode public trust and public compassion for the very people who need help most.
Thankfully, a course correction is already underway.
Within six months of taking office, President Donald Trump issued one of two executive orders to move federal policy away from the passive management of decline and toward the active restoration of lives, health, and public order.
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This order, combined with a recent executive order on America’s addiction crisis, is aimed at reversing both crises by focusing on recovery and rehabilitation while expanding mental health and addiction treatment capacity.
The shift recognizes a foundational truth: Stability follows health, not the other way around. Housing is part of recovery, but it is no substitute for it.
As treatment, restoration, and renewed purpose become the foundation of the new system, stability will follow: first in individual lives, then in the communities they call home.
Congress should build on these orders by acknowledging that the codified approach failed to deliver on its central promise. It should realign federal priorities toward expanding psychiatric and addiction treatment capacity at scale, strengthening the recovery and mental-health workforce, and incentivizing states and municipalities to adopt models that couple accountability with care — including structured, treatment-centered housing designed to stabilize individuals in recovery.
Engaging law enforcement and consistently upholding public safety laws is an equally indispensable pillar, as the President outlined in his initial order.
Yet, the Obama approach pitted compassion against the rule of law, creating a false binary that stalled reform and prolonged visible suffering. The evidence has since shattered that illusion. Congress must ensure that public policy aligns enforcement with intervention, restoring both civic order and mercy.
Where the Obama administration codified decline, President Trump is codifying restoration.
A serious-minded nation does not wait for catastrophe before intervening, nor does it confuse unmanaged mental illness and addiction with freedom.
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It insists on expectations — of treatment, of safety, and of shared civic responsibility — that affirm a profound truth: every life is worth saving, and every community is worth protecting.
This is a national imperative that commands full bipartisan support.
Michele Steeb is a Senior Fellow with the Discovery Institute’s Fix Homelessness Initiative. She is the founder of Free Up Foundation and author of “Answers Behind the RED DOOR: Battling the Homeless Epidemic,” based on her 13 years as CEO of Northern California’s largest program for homeless women and children. Follow her on Twitter: @SteebMichele.