Michele Steeb is a senior fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation and oversees the Foundation’s initiative to transform United States’ and Texas’ homelessness policy. She has spent her career in causes for the public good beginning with leadership roles in both federal and state senate campaigns.
Thirteen years in the trenches serving homeless women with children reinforced a grand life lesson for me: “treat a person as he or she is and watch them remain so. Treat a person as he or she can be and watch them become so.” In our government’s sincere attempts to help the homeless, we have...
Two of the latest researchers on the homelessness scene claim that addiction and mental illness are not the cause of homelessness, rather, they claim the people sleeping on the streets and in the parks merely lack affordable housing. Having spent 13 years running on the front lines running one of California’s largest programs for homeless...
The United States has reached a grim milestone. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , nearly 108,000 Americans fatally overdosed on drugs in 2021 — a 15% increase over 2020. This death toll tells only part of the story. For each overdose fatality, a family is left picking up the pieces, experiencing grief, and trying to...
California policymakers wholeheartedly demonstrated they remain wedded to their homelessness narrative—that the sole answer to homelessness is life-long, subsidized housing—despite the fact that this one-size-fits-all policy, called “Housing First,” has epically failed the Golden State and the nation. Pre-COVID-19 data shows California’s experiment with Housing First resulted in a 47.1 percent rise in unsheltered homelessness. But...
Subsidized housing is leftists’ number-one solution to homelessness. But despite historic outlays in California and elsewhere, governments’ attempts to house their way out of the growing crisis have thus far floundered. Hotel conversions have emerged as an alternative way to pursue the leftist homelessness agenda. To avoid the expensive and lengthy process of building new...
United States’ decade-long homeless policy, a policy advocates continue to pursue at the peril of every American, is a colossal failure, according to a recently released white paper by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Human beings are perishing on our streets in skyrocketing numbers. Yet policymakers continue to squander those lives, and taxpayer funds, by doubling...
California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently concluded a five-day road show in which he illustrated, for his pandemic-weary constituents, how he plans to distribute an unprecedented $75 billion state budget surplus, plus an additional $27 billion in federal stimulus funds. Flanked by legislative leaders in Oakland, Newsom presented a $12 billon package he said would house an additional 46,000 homeless individuals in...
In San Francisco in 2020, the number of opioid overdose deaths, 697, was more than twice as high as the city’s COVID-19 deaths, 257. Yet California lawmakers, so quick to lock down the economy, issue stay-at-home orders and mandate masks, are taking a very different approach to the opioid epidemic – giving people with drug addictions a so-called...
Federal prosecutors filed charges against the recently terminated CEO of one of New York’s largest homeless shelter networks. They allege he pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks from contractors hired by the nonprofit organization he led for two decades. These charges were in addition to the sexual abuse and financial impropriety charges that...
Three campfires in one evening sounds like an awful lot of fun, unless you are a firefighter like Austin Fire Department Battalion Chief Thayer Smith. In the wee hours of April 2, his unit battled fires at three homeless encampments. What is happening in Austin is nothing short of a humanitarian crisis. It threatens the...
The city of Austin recently announced a new homelessness “czar,” a position that had been open for more than one year—the first “czar” lasted only a month. As a first course of action, we hope she will advocate for the reversal of a recent decision by ECHO (Ending Community Homelessness Coalition) to skip a full...
President Joe Biden appears to be looking to California for policy inspiration. This bodes ill for Americans. California, a beautiful land graced by mild weather, lost population last year for the first time in its 170-year history as a state. That 80,000 residents are fleeing annually to Texas, where summers are markedly less enjoyable, speaks volumes about California’s craptacular governance....