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.
A new bill in Colorado, HB 1202, would allow communities to set up “safe injection sites” in hopes of curbing the state’s overdose crisis. Its sponsors argue that people can’t kick their habit if they are dead. Colorado, for once, isn’t charting the course to the drugging of people — it’s simply following the misguided lead of...
Newsom’s homelessness strategy leaves California in a shambles, but there may be hope SAN FRANCISCO — As the cold fury of the January storms ripped through San Francisco’s Tenderloin district — the epicenter of the state’s drug and homelessness crisis — much of the trash and drug paraphernalia debris had washed away. But within minutes of...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...