'Deeply illogical': this man's life work could end homelessness - and Trump is doing all he can to stop it

[babylonsister]

Homelessness
‘Deeply illogical’: this man’s life work could end homelessness – and Trump is doing all he can to stop it
After four decades of research and over a decade of federal support, Housing First’s Sam Tsemberis is ‘back to being an outlaw’ in the US
Timothy Pratt
Thu 12 Feb 2026 08.00 EST

snip//

In the 1990s, Tsemberis began developing a simple idea: people living on the street want, and should have, safe housing with no strings attached. When you add accessible mental health and addiction services and caring, consistent case management, most stay housed. His research would bear out the idea, showing that Housing First results in at least 85% of people staying housed 12 or 24 months later, depending on the study. These are higher rates than any other approach that’s been studied.

The idea was and still is not easy to implement because it depends on all the components being present: the apartments, the services and the committed case workers. It also requires believing that unhoused people “deserve” a place to live – a belief abhorrent to the Trump administration and most Maga conservatives.

On the phone from his apartment in Santa Monica in October, Tsemberis told me he had had an “eye-opening experience” earlier that week. He was preparing the kind of talk he’s given hundreds of times, this time on Zoom, about the relationship between homelessness and health, for several dozen doctors and lawyers hosted by the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership. The center asked Tsemberis to send in his slides before the event. The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) – a federal agency funding the event – wanted to see them, an event organizer told him.

When Tsemberis got them back, there were red lines throughout. Among other things, a federal official had deleted sections referencing the idea that racially discriminatory government policy is one cause of homelessness, as well as the terms “harm reduction” and “trauma-informed”, and mentions of Tsemberis being the founder of Housing First. What’s more, the term “Housing First” was deleted throughout.

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The incident was indicative of the Trump administration’s attempts to do away with Tsemberis’s life work in the US. Instead, the federal government is pushing a longstanding approach sometimes called “Treatment First”, because it is based on the notion that homeless people have to resolve addictions, mental illness and other issues before obtaining housing.

more...

https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2026/feb/12/sam-tsemberis-homelessness

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[rampartd]

2. this guy has been on the street working for decades

he'd best listen to dear leader and the heritage foundation because they know a lot more than he does.

what is wrong with these people? treatment first? does that mean that after a 12 step meeting i get to go home to a tarp under the interstate?

[Moostache]

3. The truth is this (like MANY of our 'problems') will NEVER be acknowledged.

The presence of addicts and homeless has never been about solving the problem or making those lives better... it is 100% to put FEAR into the minds of millions. People who are afraid are easier to force into compliance. People who are afraid will GLADLY give up freedom for PERCEIVED security, even patently FLASE claims of security.

What better way to make people behave than to make them fearful of being homeless themselves? (or make them fear joblessness or loss of healthcare options at the same time?) What better way to have a nearly cost-free advertising for this than to abuse those caught in the situation of being unhoused and then holding up their misery to force multiply the effect on the public? It is the central reason why the problem of the unhoused is not one without known solutions or better ways to alleviate the pain...the problem is the benefits to those who continue to cause it and prevent those solutions - by any and all means necessary.

We live in a society that is infected with the sickness of greed - has been since the Old World came to the New World and has simply never stopped. Hell, there is a strong case that the reason the New World was ever exploited and needed at all was the Old World nearing resource collapse and needing to expand or face extinction or (in their 'royal' eyes - worse yet loss of power). This fish rots from the head down, and when we have billionaires more concerned with asset retention and wealth maintenance (or dick-shaped low earth orbital flights for themselves and their disgusting mutilated trophy wives and friends) than any concerns with profit sharing or minimum acceptable living and working experiences, the situation by definition and design cannot and will not improve.

To be blunt, we can have billionaires or a civil society, we cannot have both permanently.

We also have upwards of 40% of the country seeing the horrors of this current regime and STILL saying they support him and his ilk over anything else...tragic. We need to stop arguing for policies and start focusing on outcomes instead. People do NOT care what you do, if you give them something of perceived value in exchange. Providing REAL value in the place of current lies and platitudes and 'both sides" nonsense works because too little REAL benefits are ever delivered to the public. Too many policies and efforts are killed before any conclusion or benefits can be realized. Too much $$$$ against the sharing of resources.

The real issue is that our collective conscience has been bought and sold to the same degree that our elected representatives have likewise been horse traded and wholly owned. We have not just allowed this abomination to persist, we have directly contributed to it through acceptance, inaction and continued participation in the scam. We do not hold general strikes because there is not general agreement, but the REAL lesson from Minnesota is that ICE and CBP and the Trump regime did not get religion because of two murdered citizens or even the backlash to that. It was when the Twin Cities started getting legitimately closer to a REAL GENERAL STRIKE and shut down of the whole thing that the pressure to stop built up and that today (despite Homan's bullshit and applause lines for the Fox crowd) they announced an end to their surge into the area.

The path forward is no mystery. The ONLY thing the people doing this to the country and the world care about is money and power that they believe is their right to buy with that money. That is IT...at the atomic level, they will paper over, ignore, gas light, intern, and pretend to knot hear ANYTHING else.

No crime (murder, child rape, enslavement, trafficking) is too heinous.
No suffering (of the people, of the poor, of the marginalized) is too much to bear for them.

If we are at all serious about regaining a functional representative republic, we MUST get serious about the only thing that will drive the results we claim to seek. Protests are great to energize and rally, but they suck at moving change faster. They are the transfusion of new blood that can keep a body alive, but not a cauterizing of the gaping wound that has it bleeding out in the first place.

The healing cannot start until the bleeding is STOPPED.
The bleeding cannot stop until the truth is faced.

The truth is that our current capitalist-ish system of graft, theft and influence peddling while ignoring everything else IS the disease. Changing it is a Herculean task at this point in the game. Burning it down and starting over is the most likely outcome, and those with the current appearance of power (which is simply the ability to command other poor people in uniforms to use weapons bought with those same poor people's money and consent on them instead of protecting them) are not going to hand it over easily.

A real GENERAL STRIKE, a blow to the knees of the current lords of creation at the top is the only thing that an prevent bloodshed and wide spread violence to bring about the needed changes. I get it. THAT is scary and discomforting and hard to hear or face. That does not make it any less true or inevitable.

The status quo cannot hold. The cracks are apparent and widening hourly. We can either try to crack this beast from the inside - by starving the economy of ITS blood by not spending our own... or we can wait for the shootings to start in earnest and for protesters to be mowed down by the hundreds or thousands in he name of "security".

Half-measures and platitudes from "leaders" will only get more of the same that we've been getting since about 1974-1975. 50 plus years of this slide has brought us here. The moment of truth. The decision point. Acting NOW, to starve the system of VOLUNTARY feeding (vis a vis non-essential, non-survival spending of ANY kind) or accept the fact that the outcome will STILL be collapse of this current system, but the cost will not be measured in inconvenience and missed lattes or no new shoes or dresses or repairing a TV instead of replacing it; it will be measured by the gallons of blood spilled in the end.

STOP SPENDING NOW.
DEMAND CHANGE OR STOP PARTICIPATING.
IF YOU BUY, YOU ARE BUYING IT ALL - NOT JUST THE 'STUFF' YOU TAKE WITH YOU - THE CONSEQUENCES TOO.

I don't expect any wide or sustained support from the public on this. I fully expect that there will be wars, death, mass killings and misery on a scale unseen since the Black Death in Europe nearly wiped it all out. I do not wish it, but I want to be able to say to my kin and descendants that there were efforts to stop what they will suffer, they just were not powerful enough to stop the waves as they hit our metaphorical shores.