This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 26,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown.

To address homelessness, states and cities have moved ahead with so-called Housing First policies.

Despite their intuitive attractiveness, the record for Housing First is spotty.

In a new Cato briefing paper, Vanessa Brown called her details why she believes that housing

minus a broad legalization of all kinds of housing for everyone is more likely to

fail. A variety of states'

of different locations have tried this new, sort of new

policy housing first.

And housing first is really sort of a it's a philosophy it's a

philosophy that emphasizes the need for permanent housing before tackling

other issues such as mental health problems or substance use disorder or unemployment, you know, all issues that are arguably obstacles to stability.

And proponents of this philosophy argue that once the need for permanent housing, no questions

asked is addressed, then the formerly homeless will be able to tackle underlying problems, find a job, and stabilize their lives.

So this philosophy really wrote in on a wave of optimism, and particularly in Utah Utah

Utah was the first state to adopt it and 10 years into that

into the policy national news outlets were claiming that Utah

this first housing, first state had already nearly

ended homelessness or had reduced chronic homelessness by over 90 percent.

That was in 2015.

At the time that seemed a little bit suspect to me,

but I didn't have the bandwidth to track it down.

...