Fifteen years ago, the federal government assured us that Housing First would end homelessness within a decade. Billions were invested, states restructured their systems, and communities like ours were told that permanent supportive housing — with no expectations for treatment or accountability — would be the silver bullet.
Yet here we are in 2025, and homelessness is worse than it has ever been.
According to the Discovery Institute’s recent report, How Local Jurisdictions Can Leverage Federal Homelessness Reforms, national homelessness has grown dramatically since Housing First became federal policy in 2013. Street-level unsheltered homelessness has risen nearly 60%, and total homelessness is up 34%. Even more sobering, the crisis has become increasingly interconnected with untreated mental illness, trauma, and the devastating rise of fentanyl and methamphetamine.
We don’t agree with everything in the Discovery Institute report — nor should any community outsource its moral imagination to a single policy paper. But we do agree on this: radical reform is needed at the federal, state, and local levels. Because doing more of the same will only get us more of what we already have.
Housing First Promised Transformation. It Delivered Stagnation.
The Discovery Institute report argues that Housing First failed because it treated homelessness as a housing shortage rather than a human crisis rooted in relational breakdown, addiction, and mental illness. Whether you fully agree or not, the numbers cannot be ignored, and neither can the streets of our cities.
Oregon has remained one of the most committed Housing First states in the nation — doubling down on a model that, by its own ten-year benchmark, should have ended homelessness by now. Instead, our crisis has deepened.
The report outlines new federal reforms that allow communities to pivot back toward treatment, accountability, emergency shelter, and recovery-centered programs. But will Oregon adopt these reforms? Or will we continue pouring money into approaches that have not delivered the promised outcomes?
That remains an open question.
Why We Don’t Fully Align with Either Side
At Medford Gospel Mission, we don’t fall neatly into the political boxes that dominate the homelessness debate.
- We don’t believe Housing First has the capacity to fix what’s broken.
- But we also don’t believe punishment, displacement, or “sweeps-only” approaches can heal anyone.
- And despite what some advocates claim, we can’t spend our way out of this crisis any more than we can legislate people into sobriety, stability, or restored relationships.
Both the left and the right tend to reduce homelessness to a single-variable explanation — lack of housing or lack of accountability. But homelessness is not a one-dimensional problem. It is a relational, spiritual, and human problem at its core.
The Discovery Institute rightly highlights the need for treatment, recovery, and accountability. We support those principles. But policy alone cannot fix relational poverty. Only God can truly transform the heart.
And that is where we place our hope.
Real Change Only Happens Through Relational Restoration
We work every day with people who are experiencing homelessness, addiction, trauma, and profound relational loss. And one thing has become unmistakably clear:
Lasting change does not begin with a lease. It begins with relationship.
People are not transformed by programs. They are transformed by God’s grace, often delivered through consistent, loving, accountable community. This is the kind of relational restoration that our guests experience at the Mission — the kind that cannot be mandated by Washington, D.C. or funded through a special session in Salem.
Housing is important. Treatment is important. Policy is important.
But none of it works without healing the relational, emotional, and spiritual wounds that sit at the center of homelessness.
And we have yet to see a government program that can do that work.
What Should Come Next?
If Oregon continues to invest exclusively in Housing First, the crisis will deepen. But if our communities begin embracing the reforms outlined in the report — transitional recovery housing, integrated outreach teams, accountability-based treatment, and performance-driven funding — we may finally start to see movement in the right direction.
Still, the work of restoration will not be accomplished by policy shifts alone.
We believe in a different kind of transformation:
- One built on real relationships.
- One grounded in truth and grace.
- One that refuses to give up on people even when systems fail them.
- One that trusts God to do the deep work that no policy can ever reach.
And that is the hope we cling to, even in the middle of a crisis that continues to grow.