All posts tagged "Homelessness"

During Donald Trump's second presidency, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) plans to redirect $3.9 billion away from Housing First — a program that got underway under President Bill Clinton during the 1990s.

Trump officials are attacking Housing First as ineffective and claiming that it isn't doing enough to reduce homelessness, especially in major U.S. cities. But according to policy experts interviewed by the New York Times, the program is working much better than Trump allies appointed to HUD say it is.

Times reporter Jason DeParle, in an article published on Christmas Day 2025, explains, "The administration called the policy a permissive approach that had let homelessness rise, while supporters said Housing First was backed by proven science. Housing First provides chronically homeless people long-term subsidized housing and offers, but does not require treatment for mental illness or addiction. It contrasts with programs that condition help on sobriety or work, which Trump officials want to encourage — though there is less direct research to suggest their efficacy."...

WASHINGTON — Just outside the newly unrolled yellow police tape that encloses Lafayette Square, the green seven-acre public park just north of the White House, a graying African American man bent down to leave a hot Potbelly sandwich and tall store-bought water for a younger white man who lay there, sleeping in the sun.

“Sir, I don’t mean to disturb you,” Michael — a 61-year-old Houston native — said as the man was roused.

“I brought you a sandwich and a drink.”...

This article first appeared on Houston Landing and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Channelview High School senior Danielle Stephen trudged out of the assistant principal’s office, defeated and desperate. In the fall of 2021, an administrator at the east Harris County campus had just suspended Stephen, sending her home for breaking a rule requiring students to carry backpacks made of see-through material.

But Stephen, who had lived on the streets for much of the past three years, didn’t have a home to go to. The 100-liter camouflage hiking backpack that got her kicked off campus held all her possessions. And she would now miss lunch at school, the place she relied on for hot meals. ...

This article originally appeared in ProPublica.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

This story was originally published by CalMatters, nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

For many people, living on the streets of California is a death sentence.

That’s according to a recent study that took the first deep look into mortality rates in homeless communities throughout the country. It found the death rate more than tripled between 2011 and 2020. The findings make it clear that at the same time the number of homeless Californians is soaring, it’s also becoming more dangerous to be homeless. And it means the stakes are sky-high when it comes to state and local efforts to combat the crisis: People’s lives are on the line. ...

Los Angeles (AFP) - When Carlos Schmidt beds down on the hard streets of Los Angeles, he has nothing but a backpack and an old blanket, like thousands of other homeless people in one of the richest cities in the world's richest country. "At nighttime, I just find somewhere quiet like a park or a bus bench, where there's not a lot of chaos," the 37-year-old told AFP. "And I'll try to rest up right there for as long as I can." Schmidt is one of some 75,500 people living on the streets of Los Angeles and its sprawling suburbs, according to a January survey. The figure is up 70 percent since 2015,......