Obama Admits Housing First Was a Losing Strategy

Last weekend, former President Barack Obama acknowledged a blunt political reality: “The average person doesn’t want to have to navigate around a tent city in the middle of downtown … and we’re not going to be able to generate support [for treatment] if we simply say, ‘It’s not their fault, they should be able to do whatever they want,’ because that’s a losing political strategy.”

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It was the Obama administration that institutionalized the federal government’s one-size-fits-all embrace of Housing First in 2013. They promised the approach would end homelessness within a decade by prioritizing immediate housing placement.

The theory was simple: Housing would stabilize lives.

But the results have been anything but stabilizing.

Despite a roughly 300% surge in federal spending over the past decade, overall homelessness has risen nearly 35% since the former president promised to end it. Unsheltered homelessness — the tent encampments and sidewalk suffering Americans see with their own eyes — has nearly doubled in eight years.

The shift redirected an estimated 80–90% of federal homeless-assistance — the nation’s largest stream of homelessness dollars — into “permanent” housing subsidies, often lifelong, with no expectation of sobriety or engagement in treatment at any stage.

Residential recovery programs, psychiatric stabilization beds, and structured transitional housing models — approaches that pair shelter with clinical care, accountability, and a pathway to restoration — were relegated to the margins of the nation’s homelessness toolbox.

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