Opinion

Housing First is a disaster. I saw Sacramento's homeless chaos firsthand

Homelessness rose 40% in California after the state adopted a housing-only model with no sobriety or treatment requirements

By Michele Steeb Fox News

Published June 1, 2026 9:00am EDT

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America’s homelessness crisis is routinely framed as a housing crisis.

It is not.

It is a crisis born from the collapse of accountability at every level of the system. Nowhere are the consequences of that collapse more visible than in California — and especially in its capital city, Sacramento.

In 2016, California became the only state in the nation to formally adopt the federal government’s Housing First mandate as its sole taxpayer-funded approach to homelessness, directing billions in state and federal dollars toward subsidized-for-life apartments with no accountability for sobriety, treatment, or work — ever.

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Sacramento County followed in 2017, embracing the housing-only model, despite repeated warnings from frontline providers that housing alone would never adequately address the addiction, mental illness, trauma or behavioral health challenges that so often accompany homelessness.

Those warnings proved tragically accurate.

The problem was never simply homelessness and the solution was never simply apartments.

Under this mandate, homelessness rose nearly 35% nationally. In California, it surged 40%. In Sacramento County, the homeless population more than doubled.

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But even more alarming than the numbers was what society increasingly learned to tolerate: human deterioration,........

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