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Michele Steeb

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.

Homelessness

Homelessness surges across the country. But Biden is sticking with same failed strategy.

The Biden administration’s assertion that by 2025, the United States will achieve a 25% reduction in homelessness is not only without precedent but also capriciously absurd. “All In” – the Biden administration’s new blueprint to reduce homelessness – is all wrong. Housing First, a policy experiment instituted by the Obama-Biden administration in 2013, grounds the plan. This approach...

January 17, 2023

Homelessness

Dems’ ‘Housing First’ Approach Has Been Disastrous For The Homeless. Here’s How To Fix It

The German proverb — “it is easier to hurt than to heal” — is at the root of today’s homeless tragedy. In 2013, the U.S. instituted a seismic shift in how it approached homelessness. Rather than fund the combination of housing and clinical services to support the homeless in healing from the disease and trauma...

December 20, 2022

Homelessness

Why so-called ‘safe injection’ sites put NYC communities in danger

Just over a year ago, New York City opened the nation’s first “safe injection” sites (SIS) — two taxpayer-funded locations (one in Harlem, the other in Washington Heights) where people can use drugs while overseen by a medic. Supporters claim that allowing drug addicts to shoot up with clean needles in a supervised setting is the most...

December 12, 2022

Homelessness

California’s homelessness crisis hamstrung by expensive lack of accountability

With the number of homeless individuals rising ever higher in California, one might think that policymakers would seek to ensure that taxpayer funds earmarked for affordable housing will be put to good use. However, a recent report highlighted one city’s grossly ineffective and potentially wasteful efforts at housing the homeless — a symptom not just of a...

October 17, 2022

Homelessness

Low Expectations Lead to Low Results

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...

September 26, 2022

Homelessness

More Housing Isn’t The Solution To Homelessness — It’s Treatment

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...

July 19, 2022

Health Care

Drug overdoses show limits of ‘harm reduction’ approach

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...

June 21, 2022

Homelessness

California doubles down on failed homeless policies

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...

May 17, 2022

Homelessness

Why Converting Hotels Into Homeless Housing Doesn’t Usually Work

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...

March 28, 2022

Public Safety

Housing First promised to solve homelessness; it failed

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...

February 21, 2022

Public Safety

Newsom’s plans to eliminate family homelessness, spend Calif. surplus are depressingly clueless

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...

June 15, 2021

Public Safety

‘Safe’ injection sites won’t solve California’s homeless and drug abuse crises

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...

June 4, 2021