America’s homeless population is exploding. But there’s a solution.

It seems only fitting that a year like 2024 should end with one last bleak milestone. Late last week, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released the top line numbers from its annual “point-in-time” homeless count, conducted on a single night last January. The headline makes for grim reading: Homelessness appears to have risen by 18% since last year, to the highest level since HUD began collecting this data in 2007. In other words, America’s already historic homelessness crisis has only become worse over the past several years.

Yet, HUD did register one bright spot in the darkness: Homelessness among military veterans has fallen to a record low. The story of how this happened can tell us a lot about what we need to do in order to end the larger crisis.

Though public efforts to combat homelessness receive some federal support, they tend to be coordinated at the local or regional level — if they are coordinated at all. Not so with efforts to house the homeless veteran population, which are overseen by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA follows an approach known as “Housing First,” which is exactly what it sounds like: program beneficiaries receive unconditional offers of permanent housing, along with access to voluntary “wraparound” services such as mental health care and addiction counseling.

Housing First is best understood in contrast with older “treatment first” models that treat permanent housing as a reward for submitting to treatment and exhibiting good behavior. A treatment first program may first transition an unsheltered person who struggles with addiction from the street into a shelter or sobering center, then require that person to demonstrate sobriety and “readiness” to receive permanent housing. A Housing First program will simply move that individual directly into permanent housing, on the assumption that someone who is stably housed has a better shot at defeating — or at least managing —  their other personal demons.

Researchers have studied Housing First programs for decades, and have consistently found that they are effective in getting people stably housed. The success of the VA’s housing first programs reinforces this finding. The first of these initiatives, the HUD-VA Supportive Housing program, started out in 1992 as a small program, but Congress significantly expanded its scope beginning in 2008. By 2016, the VA had cut veteran homelessness by nearly half.

What happened next further confirmed that the Housing First approach was critical to achieving those reductions. Though federal commitment to Housing First had originally been a bipartisan issue — it was under President George W. Bush that housing first became federal policy — the Trump administration rejected the approach. Predictably, progress on ending veteran homelessness slowed under Trump: homelessness among veterans fell 35% between 2012 and 2016, according to HUD point-in-time data, but only dropped by 6% between 2016 and 2020. When President Joe Biden’s administration revived the Housing First approach, the decline resumed its rapid clip even as nonveteran homelessness rose.

The welcome news about veteran homelessness should serve as a reminder that Housing First is the most valuable tool we have for getting individuals back into housing. This is a lesson that many politicians, including many Democrats, seem to have forgotten. California, where I live and do most of my work on housing and homelessness, is a case in point. During the pandemic, buoyed by unexpectedly high income tax revenues and a massive infusion of federal relief aid, the state dramatically expanded its Housing First-aligned efforts to get people housed.

All told, California spent roughly $24 billion over the next few years on efforts to combat homelessness, including the widely acclaimed Homekey program that converted empty hotels and other underutilized real estate into homeless housing. In February 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration estimated that Homekey had created “over 15,300 units of housing to serve over 167,000 Californians.”

Needless to say, these investments did not end homelessness in California. Between 2020 and 2024, the state’s point-in-time counts registered an almost 16% increase in homelessness. This has led a number of observers — mostly, but not exclusively, from the right — to declare Housing First a failed strategy. 

That verdict both elides the VA’s success and misdiagnoses the real problem with housing and homelessness policy in California — and the country as a whole. The challenge is one of scale. Homeless veterans are a relatively small, geographically dispersed population; the overall homeless population is much larger and highly concentrated in a handful of particularly expensive metropolitan areas. If we are going to end America’s modern homelessness crisis, cities and states must learn how to operate much larger Housing First programs at the regional level.

The biggest obstacle to expanding Housing First beyond veterans is a lack of, well, housing. Where homes are scarce, like in California, it is more difficult and more expensive to get people off the streets and into housing. To make matters worse, the same housing shortage fuels the homelessness crisis in the first place: scarcity leads to higher rents, which leads to more low-income people running out of housing options they can afford. In cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, the lack of housing means that residents are becoming homeless faster than local Housing First entities can rehouse them. (In 2022, San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing estimated that four households became homeless for every one that it was able to place back in housing.)

The VA’s experience demonstrates that Housing First works, but California’s failures show that expanding the program on a large scale requires addressing basic market conditions. The United States cannot address its homelessness crisis without simultaneously tackling its housing shortage, particularly in high-cost metropolitan areas.

Without significant land use reforms that remove existing barriers to housing development — barriers such as restrictive zoning, complicated permitting rules and arbitrary requirements that increase construction costs — any large-scale Housing First program will resemble bailing out a sinking ship with a measuring cup. Unless we repair the hole in the hull, we’re only going to keep sinking.