No human should have to live on the streets. Yet, as low-income households in the United States face growing disparity between income and rents, homelessness is growing too. High rents are the greatest determiner of homeless rates. The antidote is not that complicated: Invest in housing that is affordable to the bottom third of the income ladder.
Instead, the last half century trend has been for our leaders to vacillate between immoral inaction and blaming poor people for their poverty.
Today we are on the political far right side of that pendulum, and about to fall off into a hellscape down below. From national decisions in Washington, to local decisions in San Francisco, the broad defunding of already inadequate homeless housing is underway.
Despite this political landscape, we have made some progress. A focus on housing homeless vets led to reducing veteran homelessness by half nationally. While tens of thousands of extremely low-income San Franciscans are housed by public housing, permanent supportive housing and housing subsidies, it is nowhere near meeting the need and all of it is at risk.
In San Francisco, 14,000 unhoused households are waiting and registered under the Coordinated Entry System for housing, and many more lose their housing every day with rising rents. That’s a bad situation with a whole lot of human suffering, compromised health and deteriorating mental health.
It’s about to get so much worse.
Recently, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development released the 2025 Continuum of Care Program Notice of Funding Opportunity that stipulates that no more than 30 percent of Continuum of Care funds can be allocated for supportive housing. While a judge issued an injunction, it didn’t outright require the release of the previously granted funds.
That means San Francisco could lose an estimated $35 million in housing operating funds in a system that is already radically underfunded, a loss that will plunge hundreds of San Franciscans back into homelessness.
But it doesn’t stop there. Emergency choice vouchers, which were issued under the Biden Administration, are about to be eradicated. This program, which serves 70,000 formerly homeless households with rental subsidies, is being completely eliminated.
Approximately 1,000 additional households will return to homelessness in San Francisco at the end of 2026 with the loss of rental assistance.
The Trump Administration talks a lot about the failed ‘Housing First’ ideology, using tired tropes that it “encourages dependence on endless government handouts while neglecting to address the root causes of homelessness, including illicit drugs and mental illness.”
The fundamental idea is that affordability is not the issue—the individual just needs to stop using drugs and acting crazy and they will be able to pay for housing on their own.
The discourse peddled by the Trump administration is mirrored by the actions of local elected officials in San Francisco, with Mayor Daniel Lurie cutting housing funds to pay for shelter—which costs just as much as housing—and recent legislation being introduced by Supervisor Matt Dorsey to ban all new supportive housing that isn’t recovery housing.
The Dorsey legislation not only unnecessarily pits “recovery housing” against “housing first,” but also jeopardizes several supportive housing projects in the pipeline and will limit our ability to backfill the loss in federal funding. His legislation already has four co-sponsors.
Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed similar state legislation pushed by our local leaders, limiting non recovery focused supportive housing, correctly saying nothing prevents municipalities from creating recovery based Housing First models. The California Interagency Council on Homelessness then came out with guidelines that lay out how to do recovery housing while ensuring local municipalities follow successful Housing First principles.
The only thing preventing the addition of supportive housing focused on recovery—or even enriching current supportive housing programs to have a real recovery focus—is funding.
Housing First is a proven effective model with a 97 to 98 percent success rate in San Francisco. Housing First was created after years of failed policy in which unhoused people had to show they were “housing ready” before they could get housing, leaving many out on the streets.
That approach didn’t work. It’s almost impossible for unhoused people to address jobs, recovery and other means of stabilization without housing. Point in Time data in SF indicates that experiencing homelessness drives up rates of behavioral health issues—not that behavioral health is driving homelessness.
A movement at the federal and state level to remove barriers, and prioritize housing retention through onsite support services and tenant rights, was widely accepted pre-Trump.
However, many supportive housing programs are underfunded and historically there has never been anywhere near enough supportive housing funding to end mass chronic homelessness.
Due to the lack of housing, most unhoused people are on the streets for a decade before getting housed, leading to complicated trauma and medical needs requiring a level of care housing providers are not currently funded adequately to address.
Rising housing, costs coupled with wholesale defunding of public housing, has led to the humanitarian crisis we see today. That does not indicate a failure of the model, but a need to expand and enrich it, which would prevent many of the issues long term homeless people face.
Almost all those impacted by deep poverty can never be stably housed without rental assistance due to the structural disparities in our housing market. Some may need higher levels of care in the short term, while others in the long term, but they all need housing.
Yet in San Francisco, affordable housing providers such as Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation are being forced to sell off buildings due to lack of funding, while conditions and support services deteriorate in others because of underfunding.
Instead of calling for addressing the actual root causes—such as preventing homelessness in the first place—there are attempts at the federal and local level to operationalize “the Utah Model.” This is a massive untested program, called an “accountability center,” which plans to open its doors in 2027 in the deadlands outside of Salt Lake City.
The program fronts as an addiction and mental health services center, but in reality functions like a jail. Those who don’t earn enough to pay their rent are sent there against their will.
Sadly, Utah had a laudable housing program that all but eliminated veteran and family homelessness, but the funds for that are at risk with the political shift towards fixing so-called pathologies that are driven by deep inequity.
Locally, policy makers like Dorsey are calling for bringing back the tried and failed drug war by increasing penalties for public drug use, while Lurie has massively increased arrests of unhoused people and wants to open back up locked drunk tanks also masked as service centers.
After all the money is spent, the homeless person would still be homeless, stuck in a revolving door leading nowhere.
These changes paint a truly sad and devastating state of affairs, in which thousands will lose their housing and thousands of others will be pushed into homelessness.
San Francisco leaders must stand up to Trump. The people of a progressive San Francisco should demand our leaders demonstrate real leadership and work collaboratively to develop consensus-based solutions not political wedges and performative distractions.
Our leaders should stop copying the Trump Administration style of pitting communities against each other, and figure out how to save working models we have and invest in more. Unhoused people do not need to be further marginalized and scapegoated by controversial measures demonizing their existence.
Yes, we need more treatment of every kind, from trauma therapy to medically assisted treatment. Yes, we also need more housing of every kind—from sober living, to board and care, to permanent supportive housing, to just plain old extremely low-income housing. Yes, we need rental assistance that keeps San Franciscans housed.
Just because we don’t have enough of the interventions that are working doesn’t mean we should bring back demonstrated ineffectual strategies or hamper evidence-based solutions.
San Francisco knows how to be better. Let’s work together to make that happen in 2026.
Jennifer Friedenbach is director of the Coalition on Homelessness
