AILSA CHANG, HOST:
President Trump signed an executive order last Thursday that aims to overhaul how this country deals with homelessness. It marks a fundamental shift on the approach to homelessness away from Housing First programs and towards involuntary mental health and addiction treatment. Ann Oliva is CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness and joins us now to talk about the consequences of this executive order. Welcome.
ANN OLIVA: Thank you so much for having me.
CHANG: So to be specific here, what kind of program or policy changes do you think we might see at local levels because of this executive order?
OLIVA: Well, the executive order attacks evidence-based approaches and specifically the approach that's called Housing First that has been in use by homeless services providers and the federal government for many years. And really what that does is ensure that folks have access to housing as the first step towards ending instability and homelessness for people. And once they have access to housing, then services like health care, mental health care, addiction treatment, job training or other supports are provided so that they can maintain that housing in the long run.
The second, very alarming item is basically a call for forced institutionalization under a guise of sort of promoting public safety. And the third is that it eliminates fundamental privacy protections for people who are experiencing homelessness, in that it would require recipients of federal funding to collect personal health-related information and share that with law enforcement.
CHANG: I want to return to the first point that you made, that this executive order attacks evidence-based approaches. What does the evidence say about what approaches work when it comes to homeless populations?
OLIVA: The evidence is really clear on what works to end homelessness. The common denominator among everyone experiencing homelessness is that they can't afford a safe place to live.
CHANG: Right.
OLIVA: Evidence tells us that when we couple safe and affordable housing with the services that people want and need to maintain stability, that folks can keep that housing over the long term. It's one of the most studied interventions, this idea of coupling housing and services.
CHANG: Well, let me ask you if the federal government expands efforts to force hundreds of thousands of people off the streets into some kind of civil confinement, I mean, where would the government even send these people? Are there even enough shelters or care facilities for so many individuals?
OLIVA: I think we really have to ask ourselves, what is this executive order trying to do? And as it looks to expand civil commitment - and we know we don't have enough shelter beds in almost any community across the country - what does that mean? And I think we're talking about camps. And we've already seen that happen on the immigration front.
CHANG: Can we talk about what's happening across the country, though? - because more than a hundred cities have passed or have strengthened bans on outdoor encampments. This is - and I'm talking about across both conservative and Democratic-led parts of the country, including Democratic-led cities like San Francisco. What...
OLIVA: Right.
CHANG: ...Do you think has led to this broader shift, even across partisan lines?
OLIVA: The issue of homelessness is becoming more and more visible to housed people, and it is becoming a political issue in ways that maybe it hadn't been 10 or 15 years ago. And elected leaders across the country are making decisions that are largely political rather than strategic. And what I mean by that is that from the national level all the way down to the local level, we are not seeing the kinds of investments that we need in affordable housing, in treatment and health care. As a matter of fact, we're seeing - at least at the federal level - a retreat from being able to provide the health care that people want and need in this country.
CHANG: You have talked a lot about how much you believe in the Housing First approach to homelessness. And in - yeah, for two decades, there has been a bipartisan Housing First approach. But homelessness has continued to rise, I mean, to record numbers across much of this country. So I guess I ask you, why not try the Trump administration's approach to see what happens?
OLIVA: First, this approach is cruel and dehumanizing to the human beings who are experiencing incredibly traumatic situations in their lives. The second thing that I would say to that question is that the evidence is so strong as to what works to end homelessness. And if we were serious about ending homelessness rather than just removing people from public view, we would invest in approaches that have an evidence-based (ph), and we would make those investments at the scale we need to address the issue nationwide and see if that works. And if we could do that, I think that we would see incredible progress, like the progress that we've made on ending veteran homelessness. We've cut veteran homelessness by more than 50% since 2010. That's evidence.
CHANG: Ann Oliva of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, thank you very much.
OLIVA: Thank you so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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