Imagine you have a home that you love. You raised your children there. But now they are off to college, and you’re facing a divorce. In a few weeks you will have to leave your house. Recently you were also diagnosed with cancer and need treatment.
Scroll forward a few weeks. You rented a small apartment for $1,500, but you just got let go from your job because you were unconcentrated and missed days of work because of all the medical appointments. No one is willing to hire you because they can see that you are sick. It’s all too much and you are struggling not only with your physical but also with your mental health.
Eventually, after eight months of fighting, you can no longer pay your rent. Your family is tapped out. They are struggling themselves and do not have the space or money to help you. You are facing homelessness.
Even though you are eligible for rental assistance, there are just no housing vouchers available to you. You learn that only three out of four households in the United States qualify for rental assistance because Congress has not fully funded the need.
Being poor in America is expensive. And it is about to get worse as the Trump Administration promotes policies that, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, will:
- “Cut rental assistance, which helps people afford housing;
- Cut Medicaid, a key source of funding for services that can help people find and keep homes;
- Pressure communities to abandon evidence-based approaches to homelessness in favor of outdated, less-effective models; and
- Pressure states and cities to fine, arrest, jail, or institutionalize people who sleep outside because they have nowhere else safe to go, worsening inequities and access to housing and health care.”
Unfortunately, the scenario I describe above is not at all unrealistic. Too many people have already fallen through the gaps of the safety nets in this country, and more are likely to follow. Wages are not keeping up with rent, and people often are forced to choose between paying for medication, food or housing costs.
The people whom we see on the streets have often experienced similar scenarios. I recently came across a social media post from Knoxville that lists the main reasons for homelessness. This data comes directly from their Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) and shows that the lack of affordable housing was the main cause of homelessness. Most larger cities, including Nashville, are likely to paint a very similar picture.
When politicians try to blame individual behaviors rather than systemic failures for homelessness, we end up with remedies that offer quick fixes and do not address the actual causes. Evidence has shown that assisting people obtain and retain permanent housing and providing the wraparound support services they need to do so is the most effective way to reduce homelessness. This is the approach the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has used to reduce homelessness for Veterans by 55 percent since 2010.
Congress, however, has been unwilling to invest similar resources to benefit everyone else. Therefore, even the evidence-based solutions have had limited success due to a lack of funding that would have allowed local Continuums of Care* to scale up.
Now, the federal government is using national data to justify cutting permanent housing dollars. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been tracking homelessness through a Point-in-Time (PIT) count since 2007 (see Box 1). The PIT count only focuses on visible homelessness — the people who stay in temporary beds such as emergency shelters or transitional housing programs and those sleeping on the streets, in encampments, and in cars.
According to the PIT count, homelessness declined steadily until 2016 when it increased to never-before-seen numbers. However, there seems to be a glimpse of hope when HUD released the latest PIT numbers (with a six-month delay). Homelessness nationwide decreased by 3.3 percent.
Nonetheless, HUD in their press release presented the data in such a way to draw negative conclusions and justify a move away from a housing-focused strategy to one that invests heavily in temporary programs focused on recovery.
Investments in recovery and mental health are definitely needed, but moving away from permanent housing investments will not reduce actual homelessness long-term. And with “actual homelessness” I refer to situations where survivors of domestic violence, people going through a divorce and struggling with health issues, folks who simply lose their income, and others that experience a hard time can no longer keep their homes.
Multiple studies and reports over the years have shown that homelessness is directly linked to housing affordability. If the cost-of-living increases and rents go up, homelessness goes up. Furthermore, the prevalence of homelessness among the minority population is disproportionate to the general U.S. population. In other words, homelessness is a symptom of inequity. It is directly linked to the availability of housing.
But the Trump Administration has no appetite to invest in accessible, low-income housing or housing subsidies — other than tax breaks for the rich, which in essence are their own form of a subsidy. Rent assistance is exactly what would help reduce homelessness.
As expected, in the most recent Continuum of Care (CoC) Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for fiscal year 2026, HUD doubled down and reduced the funding for permanent housing programs, shifting the focus to temporary programs with mandated 20-hours-per-week services. However, whether those programs will be funded at the needed levels of intensity is questionable. And once the programs end after one or two years, without the needed accessible permanent housing, a large number of program participants will likely end up where they started out.
Finland, the European country held up as a beacon of hope for many cities and countries when it comes to reducing homelessness, is a great case study that shows how these types of abrupt policy changes matter. After 12 years of steady decline in homelessness (by some accounts the reduction was more than 60 percent), Finland has seen an increase over the past two years. Critics such as Mark Horvath of Invisible People blame the change in the political climate that shifted away from funding supportive housing. The Finnish Red Cross cites a combination of the increase in the cost of living, significant cuts to social benefits, and reductions in housing subsidies as the main culprits for the recent increase.
To sum it up, when governments undermine the social safety net and when the market does not pay living wages, people increasingly struggle to maintain their housing.
Local CoC’s need to focus on building effective homelessness systems that create stronger connections with healthcare systems to provide the needed ongoing support for some of our most vulnerable neighbors. A strong homelessness system, which I prefer to call a Housing Crisis Resolution System, offers different paths out of homelessness — all of which are focused on permanent housing and build up on a strong prevention effort.
Communities, and I am mostly referring to service providers, need to stop the fight between what comes first: shelter, recovery housing, transitional housing or Housing First program models. In essence, in an efficient Housing Crisis Resolution System, all types of programs are included and needed to give people an option to work through their crisis and obtain sustainable housing with the right types of support that addresses their individual needs as quickly as possible.
In Nashville, we have seen significant increases in resources to build permanent housing units, to offer temporary beds, to expand support services, and — most of all — to focus increasingly on Rapid Rehousing programs, which offers time-limited assistance (generally anywhere from three months up to a year, depending on the specific program). All these efforts sound great on the surface, but street and shelter homelessness has increased by about 14 percent since 2022 when the influx in funding started. We are missing something, and I have claimed repeatedly that in my opinion, our system is broken due to Metro’s overexaggerated focus on making street homelessness invisible by trying to implement quick fixes rather than investing in evidence-based, long-term solutions.
The city claims to be data-driven. But data reports published by the Office of Homeless Services are contradictory, confusing, or plain false. To be able to counteract the damage that we can expect from HUD’s policy changes, Metro must provide the transparent, trusted leadership in homelessness that is at the core of any efficient, highly functional system.
A Continuum of Care (CoC) is a regional or local planning body that coordinates housing and services funding for individuals, families, and unaccompanied youth experiencing homelessness. A CoC creates a collaborative community effort that provides a strategic systems approach that focuses on connecting people to housing and services to end their homelessness.
Judith Tackett is a longtime homelessness expert and advocate for housing-focused, person-centered solutions. Opinions in this column are her own.