Editor’s Note: The author spoke with homeless services administrators for his research under condition of anonymity to allow for free expression of opinions about changes to funding.
“People are going to die,” a frantic homeless services administrator warned in early December 2025. Temperatures were plunging. Snow was falling. And just two weeks earlier, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had released a notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) that upended the United States government’s Housing First approach to homelessness.
Threatened with massive cuts to homeless services, the administrator lobbied elected officials for stopgap funding to keep people housed amid freezing temperatures. But the indifference they encountered from lawmakers led them to conclude, “It’s not the people that they think are worthy of living.”
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The Continuum of Care (CoC) Program is a federal program that funds a substantial portion of permanent housing interventions for people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. In 2024, the federal government recognized nearly 400 CoC jurisdictions and awarded over $3.5 billion to support housing and related services.
I’ve spent the past nine years studying how frontline workers in the U.S. implement CoC Program requirements with inadequate resources. Since October 2025, I’ve spoken with 64 administrators from 55 CoCs under the condition of anonymity about the impact of HUD’s new policy direction on their local homelessness systems. Their accounts offer a window into how this policy shift is unfolding on the ground and the dire consequences it may have for homeless systems across the country.
HUD Upends Its Homeless Policy
On July 24, 2025, the White House issued Executive Order 14321, directing federal agencies to treat homelessness as a public safety issue that requires draconian interventions previously discouraged by the federal government: expanded civil commitment, local bans on homeless encampments, the rollback of harm reduction strategies, and new conditions on federal housing assistance. On Nov. 13, 2025, HUD codified the principles of this order in a NOFO that threatened to invalidate two-year funding contracts signed in 2024.
The sudden reversal sent CoCs across the country into chaos. The NOFO required grantees to pivot from Housing First approaches to transitional housing models within weeks during the holiday season, even though Housing First had taken more than a decade of federal guidance, technical assistance, and relationship-building to implement.
A lawsuit was filed soon after.
Plaintiffs argued that the NOFO required federal grant recipients to violate federal statutes and regulations. A preliminary injunction was issued against the NOFO by a Rhode Island federal court on Dec. 19, 2025. HUD then promptly issued a revised NOFO, which the same court temporarily halted on Dec. 23. Local administrators waited in limbo for the Rhode Island court to decide whether the funding competition could proceed. A final decision is still pending.
In the meantime, some CoC grantees laid off staff, delayed recruitment, shed leadership, discontinued CoC participation, and/or closed affordable housing developments for permanent housing tenants.
Another NOFO for Fiscal Year 2026 is slated to be posted by HUD in June. Administrators expect funding requirements to mirror those included in the November NOFO, especially since HUD officials all but promised as much during a recent roundtable.
If HUD continues to violate federal statutes in its next NOFO—as it appears determined to do—litigation might follow, leading to further project delays. This could indefinitely prolong the crisis we’ve lived through over the past five months, weakening system capacity, increasing rates of homelessness, and overwhelming emergency services with unnecessary demand.
Right-Wing Think Tanks Capture HUD
HUD’s sudden about-face did not occur in a vacuum.
The Cicero Institute is an influential right-wing think tank that lobbies governments to overhaul their homeless policies. Founded in 2016 by Silicon Valley billionaire venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, Cicero promotes “entrepreneurial” solutions to social problems. But its policy agenda isn’t a novel one. It is based on failed ideas from the 19th century that objectified and excluded the poor from public life.
On its website, Cicero emphasizes mental illness and substance abuse as primary concerns for addressing homelessness, a stance that implies that homelessness reflects a moral failure of individuals who succumb to vice and pose a public safety threat to law-abiding citizens. Rather than housing, people on the street require compulsory services in specific areas or centralized facilities, where the ostensible root causes of homelessness—mental illness and addiction—can be addressed by so-called experts. While this argument redirects attention away from economic changes like deindustrialization, welfare retrenchment, and inflation that have harmed working-class households, Cicero offers no convincing evidence to support either its explanation of homelessness or its policy recommendations.
Cicero has advanced its arguments through litigation that contributed to City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, a recent Supreme Court decision that expanded the authority of local governments to criminalize homelessness. It circulates model legislation aimed at rolling back Housing First and reintroducing coercive, institutional responses to homelessness. Several conservative states are implementing these proposals. In Utah, for example, state officials are planning to build a centralized facility outside of Salt Lake City where unhoused people from across the state will be compelled to move under threat of arrest, regardless of where they currently live in the state.
While these ideas may have originated at the Cicero Institute, they likely entered HUD through Trump’s appointees from Discovery Institute. Discovery Institute is a right-wing think tank known for promoting “intelligent design” and socially conservative policy. When they aren’t promoting creationism, Discovery Institute writers rail against “progressive” social policies like Housing First, tenant protections, and rent control, while promoting “free enterprise.”
Two political appointees linked to Discovery Institute are the public face of HUD’s NOFO. At a recent roundtable that was hosted by HUD, they promoted the same policies advanced by the Cicero Institute and circulated misinformation about Housing First. As I previously explained in a separate piece, these appointees falsely represented historical trends to blame the recent spike in homelessness on Housing First, while presenting transitional housing as the solution without any evidence.
Adding insult to injury, the same appointees ended their roundtable by blaming advocates of people experiencing homelessness and CoC administrators for the controversy surrounding the NOFO. They suggested that grantees are more concerned with losing their jobs than with helping service users escape homelessness.
“Like a Grim March Toward Death”
While CoC administrators have lots to say about the way HUD has managed the current transition, most aren’t opposed to reform. Although they acknowledged the value of permanent housing, many welcome opportunities to grow their stock of transitional housing, by including more temporary housing options with mandatory supportive services.
“A lot of the people that we work with are people [who] can’t be housed by conventional means. They can’t be housed by calling up a landlord [and] filling out an application, even if they had the money. So transitional housing could be a great component for them, allow[ing] them to stabilize long enough that the same agency could then take rapid rehousing dollars and find them a place,” one provider told me.
Administrators noted other groups that could benefit from transitional housing: homeless youth who lack skills to manage an independent tenancy, those leaving prison who need support while readjusting to society, and former substance users who require aftercare upon exiting inpatient treatment.
What administrators opposed was HUD’s approach to shifting resources from Housing First to transitional housing. Everyone I spoke with was concerned about the NOFO’s imposition of a 30 percent cap on permanent housing. With most service users in permanent housing, the new limit threatened to push 170,000 people who rely on CoC assistance back into homelessness.
“We’re not against transitional housing. We’re not against substance use treatment programs. …We are concerned about taking money from permanent supportive housing and switching it to transitional housing without an opportunity to navigate that change more responsibly,” another provider said.
Administrators said the number of people at risk of becoming homeless because of the 30 percent cap varied from tens to several thousand across CoCs. And each administrator had varying levels of access to stopgap funding. For some administrators, state and/or local governments committed funds to keep permanent housing tenants housed. But many were on their own and worried that service users would return to homelessness in the dead of winter, get locked up by the police, or die.
These dire concerns made success in the NOFO competition essential. However, the NOFO’s ambiguities made it hard for administrators to know if they were meeting HUD’s expectations. The requirement for 40 hours per week of customized services for program participants was a common point of confusion.
“Everybody in my role around the country was like, ‘What on earth does that mean? Does that mean you’re taking 40 hours of classes or are you including things like a front desk worker being onsite or direct care staff being onsite?’ They had never really got to defining what those 40 hours of supportive services meant.”
Everyone I spoke with defined this requirement as “infeasible.” In large rural communities, where transitional housing had to be delivered outside of a congregate facility, case managers would be unable to access service users every day to provide support. Service providers would have to employ and train a huge number of case managers within an unrealistic timeframe while HUD was potentially capping their permanent supportive housing funding at 30 percent. Without a clear definition of what HUD included in that 40-hour requirement, administrators didn’t know how to comply.
There were several other points of confusion. The NOFO’s scoring rubric includes points for having camping bans. While this requirement would be unproblematic in places where such legislation existed, administrators in places where governments have not explicitly banned camping were uncertain how to address that item in the application. Did ordinances that prohibit trespassing or loitering count? If not, how could CoCs pass an ordinance by local government within a month when they have no power to do so? How could Balance of State CoCs, which span multiple rural counties, pass an ordinance across all local governments or lobby a statewide ban within a month?
The NOFO also encouraged CoCs to work with healthcare providers and collaborate with law enforcement to address unsheltered homelessness and public disorder. But the document does not specify how that coordination should happen.
That ambiguity created confusion about how administrators should comply with this requirement. Some administrators understood the emphasis on coordination and treatment as implying increased data sharing across agencies, which raised ethical and legal concerns about client confidentiality.
How can CoCs comply with NOFO requirements that contradict state laws or local ordinances? How can CoCs adopt practices that are not based in evidence while still meeting performance requirements established by federal statute? CoCs could be in legal jeopardy if they violated those statutes.
HUD has been unable or unwilling to provide any guidance on these issues over the past months. One day after the NOFO was released in November 2025, and before administrators had a chance to thoroughly read the entire document, HUD held an “informational” webinar about the NOFO. Most characterized the webinar as a “PR stunt” that failed to answer substantive questions.
“The webinar was actively unhelpful,” one administrator said in January 2026, “in that the people presenting the information did not seem to understand their own policies.”
Several administrators noted that attendees could not see submitted questions and know which ones HUD ignored, which they said was unusual. HUD officials kept promising that NOFO guidance would be released, but it was never published, as administrators tried to meet a two-month deadline during the holidays. Almost every administrator I spoke to submitted multiple queries to HUD’s email system that either went unanswered, received a delayed response, and/or were contradicted by subsequent notifications. The clock was ticking, so administrators looked elsewhere for guidance: neighboring CoCs, state attorneys, national advocacy groups, expensive consultants, and even Facebook.
Nothing about this was normal.
Several administrators had been in homeless services for years or even decades. At the roundtable, the aforementioned political appointees claimed that HUD was providing applicants more time to revamp their systems than the Obama administration did when it realigned NOFO scoring with Housing First principles.
But the administrators I spoke with disagreed. One administrator compared the current funding application process to the one they experienced while shifting to permanent housing during previous administrations:
“When they changed to Housing First from Treatment First in the noughts, that was a 10-year process. That was years and them saying, ‘We’re going to make a change. And we’re going to tell you again: We’re going to make the change. And then we’re going to make the change, but we’re going to make it a bonus point [on the NOFO application].’ You had 5 to 10 years to step from Treatment First to Housing First, and for them to come in and say, ‘You have 60 days,’—it didn’t make sense,” an administrator told me.
Even when the COVID-19 pandemic started, HUD issued clear, consistent guidance on the new rules it was implementing, say some involved with CoC grants when that crisis started. In contrast, administrators say the recent shift to undirected funding mandates is “like a grim march toward death” because they feel helpless to protect service users from being pushed back into homelessness.
Playing It by Ear
CoC administrators are being forced to play it by ear and navigate this uncertain future without guidance from HUD. But HUD hasn’t abandoned everyone. I’ve seen emails in which HUD officials invited faith-based groups to private webinars that provided one-on-one NOFO guidance, but that invitation was not extended to any of the administrators I spoke with. This move is consistent with HUD’s decision to host a roundtable in Washington, D.C., that catered to faith-based groups, while the National Alliance to End Homelessness held a leadership conference in San Diego. HUD’s actions, either intentionally or unintentionally, appear consistent with Discovery Institute’s aim to expand the influence of religion in public services.
Even though the Rhode Island court injunction disrupted the November 2025 NOFO competition and required HUD to revert to FY2024 rules, delays in the release of FY2025 CoC funding have created uncertainty for service providers, some of which used or are using reserve funds to maintain housing placements. In this context, administrators questioned whether HUD would fully comply with congressional demand for funding continuity.
But aside from that added stress, CoCs already experienced consequences as time and resources were redirected from substantive projects to the NOFO competition. Some administrators said they would have developed programs to address the opioid epidemic in their communities, while others would have spent their time updating policies to improve accountability of grant recipients, hosting workshops for staff to enhance service delivery, or strategizing ways to expand funding for permanent supportive housing.
HUD may want to “move fast and break things.” But what gets broken in the process are people’s lives and local systems that deliver vital support to people experiencing homelessness. Vulnerable people suffer material consequences when federal housing policy is recklessly reshaped by ideology. Homeless policy is not a startup experiment. Systems that took decades to build cannot be rebuilt overnight once trust is broken. And while many people may not feel the effects immediately, they will when encampments grow across their communities and local governments can no longer afford to deliver basic services.
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29 thoughts on ““A Grim March Toward Death”: What HUD’s New Homeless Policy Looks Like on the Ground”
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You want to know what’s a grand march to death is these organizations these coordinating care that are making people think that they are actually giving a rat’s ass about the people that are serving they don’t I’m a disabled single mother who is harassed threatened intimidated bullied and still to this day lives in a hud housing that does not think that living in a safe habitable environment for all ages is a federal requirement I have put an environments that were moldy and toxic and killing me and my kids to a place that diminishes my quality of life makes it hard for me to live there’s a water heater with a push button that my kids have full access to the HUD refuses to fix they’ve refused to make it a safe place for all that live here. I don’t get what the issues are with getting the treatment they say they are giving with all the money they received I am pretty positive it’s going all into the pockets of employees ceo and ect. Not the community they are supposed to be assisting.
All I kno is I’m senior citizen and I been homeless since 2011 I have no one helping me it’s scarey out here you just get finally tired of it and give up sooner or later so with that being said I’m tired of looking and tired of getters the runaround so I give up now good luck to all that are on waiting list
I totally feel all of you I been homeless with my now 11yr old daughter for damn near 3yrs in Monterey county they don’t help either list after list been on off checking in now been in and out of hotels some days we don’t know where we gonna be but nobody cares about women and children anymore it’s disabled mental illness substance abuse literally sleeping in a car but I’m not doim any of that cause that will not give cps a chance to take my girl so we make it the best we can resource aint shit in monterey bllshit
That’s the way this countries does the poor homeless an people who have medical problems try an ignore us lie to us about government assistance but it’s fine that Trump has committed war crimes an sueing everyone he can getting richer an richer while we suffer from pain an no food
I eas homeless 5 years waiting to see a judge for a disability hearing which I was awarded. Couldn’t afford rent in my area where I grew up forced to move or be homeless. Lost my romate which I reported to ssa. Applied for section 8 in 2023 still on waiting list.
I have so much respect for this researcher, but when I read this piece, it has serious flaws in the analysis that make it difficult to accept the whole of the argument. The Grants Pass SCOTUS decision preserved the legal status quo. It did not change the law at all except that it overturned a 9th Circuit decision. But there are eight other circuits. It also rejected the application of another SCOTUS decision called Robinson, saying that homelessness is not an imutable status.
Why does this matter? Because unless we understand what the Court is doing, we surrender too much important policy territory to those who wish people harm. Historians of the Court could tell that the 8A argument was never going to win with this Court and we should have known that, but we chose to die on this hill anyway and we’ve lost valuable policy ground as a result.
Another example: the Rhode Island District Court sided with homeless advocates and the attorneys general but the argument wasn’t substantive civil rights law, it was based on the Administrative Procedures Act. It’s boring, dotting “i”s and crossing “t”s law, the stuff that makes most folks eyes glaze over. But it’s also successful, especially when Congress is willing to put into the authorizing legislation the checks and balances necessary to prevent the worst excesses of this administration.
It also has limits. We need to know what they are, and continuums need to plan accordingly. Importantly, they need to rethink traditional governance which is often slow and laborious when confronted with an administration that likes to move fast and break things. CoC governance that relies on six meetings (and thus six months) to build consensus is illequipped to deal with this reality.
What a fine discussion of these issues, including the comments.
Having voted for Trump three times, I am ashamed of what he and his administration have done with respect to this and so many other issues.
See timothy-d.-naegele.pdf
I am cùrrently homeless. I never imagined that would happen to me. I raised 4 children without the help of anyone but God. I’ve noticed the general consensus of people around me, and that they wish we’d all disappear. They seem to want to sweep us all up, and move us to another state. Granted, homelessnes isn’t pretty. But we are all God’s creatures. We are breaking the law due to something we have no control over. I never thought this could happen to me, it could just as well happen to you.
Primary contribution to Homelessness:
Investor Purchases & Vacancies: Billionaire investors and private equity funds buy up properties, sometimes leaving them vacant to profit from appreciation, effectively removing them from the housing market.
Gentrification: As wealthier individuals move in, property values and rents rise, displacing lower-income residents who can no longer afford to stay, as noted in discussions on Quora.
Short-Term Rentals (STRs): Converting long-term rentals into platforms like Airbnb reduces the available affordable housing stock, as discussed by users on Reddit.
Speculative Investment: Treating housing as a luxury asset rather than a necessity for shelter drives up costs, as highlighted by the Institute for Policy Studies.
Corporate Landlords: Large corporations use algorithms to raise rents and can neglect maintenance, increasing costs and housing instability for tenants, notes the Institute for Policy Studies. [1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7]
I have been homeless for 6 years now I am a senior citizen that has tamatic brain injury from domestic abuse. I left my abuser never to look back again. Now I am on the street with my German Shepard service animal with no car. Sleeping on the street. Was denied disability 3 x due to the fact I am not blind. I have no money no car no way to feed my service animal and have to hold on to a 200 lbs animal 24 hours a day while walking I and I am a woman . There is no help for me anywhere in Orange County ca.. The person who beat me beyond recognition for 13 years gets the last laugh …all I can say is don’t leave your abuser ever it’s worse out here. The beatings I could handle I knew they were coming the uncertainty out here is worse.
Invitation to a Conversation
Bangor, Maine is not an outlier—it’s a microcosm.
Watch InhuMAINE (www.InhuMAINE.me�), documentary produced by Common Ground Friends, created through the lens of a clinical mental health counseling graduate student and documentarian. The film reveals the human realities beneath homelessness, mental health, substance use, and stigma—where systems strain and people carry the cost.
This is not a distant story. It’s a reflection.
We are all somebody’s person.
Until people in this country wake up and start asking themselves WHY so many homeless, rather than getting the homeless out of their neighborhoods (these people worry about one thing: property values), things might change.
The Trump regime is requesting 1.5 TRILLION for the MIC. This and tax cuts for the wealthy (as well as Gov contracts and subsidies for Corp) is where taxpayer money is going
Until Americans get TIRED of this flow of money to the rich and MIC, instead of helping Americans, we can count on more homelessness.
They can’t hide every homeless on the streets.
Ok I and most of everybody who reads this must admit something needs done but no one knows what. Well that I believe is because no one also wants to admit what needs done. There are so many things wrong with this whole scenario that’s playing out I don’t know where to begin. From attempting to use federal funding to force camping bans into effect deteriorating the honest voice of the people to the billionaire think-tank members holding positions anywhere near large government non -profit funding is the obvious reason why the new requirements can’t be met for distribution of the funds! So forced camping bans and forced communist concentration camps for the homeless and those who are newly homeless due to unpaid rent or for any reason. The poor is what it amounts too. Forced, forced, forced! I’m a proud and morning citizen of the America that we dreamed of being long ago and for her I’D LOUDLY STATE WITHOUT ANONYMITY WHAT NEEDS DONE! REMEMBER OUR FOREFATHERS AND WHAT THEY DID! DAMN IT WE HAVE ONE THING THEY DIDN’T HAVE! RED-NECKS! AT EVERY GOVERNMENT BUILDING THERE SHOULD BE NOTHING BUT NASCAR RADIOS, BEER CANS AND RED NECKS YELLING, THE WAR’S OVER BOYS” WHEN THE MILITARY COMES ROLLING UP! WAKE UP! If your still aloud to have a gun, make no mistake its because YOU are going to have a choice… Aim it at the ruling party or aim it at your fellow citizens that are poor in the firing lines! And may God help us all, they seem pretty confident that this is a land full of pushies. Now is past time to say, “WE THE PEOPLE HAVE HAD ENOUGH! PLEASE WAKE UP!
I wish people would read the permanent supportive housing bill for their state, in Oregon it’s a grift. The bill states they only need to bribe one tenant, in the entire complex, to bring the landlord their medical records and they get a quarter million per year. For one single tenant. Then they give the tenant a bunch of free donated stuff and bus passes, treats etc and the other tenants fall in line. It is brainwashing and torture.
its not about anything more then people are not going to wait around for red tap im landless because on lemtied income nothing afordabel leagel law biding pot somkwr hear get my weed free. by the way not why im landless red tap lake of help or help that want to controle you i wound want to jump trough the hoops . Its about the ritch not wanti g to look at the poor so make hosuse less red tap and if you say they get money then dont be a lier to do it you sould gave to thats part of my crap covied they said they pay us ao much and they faled to pay power after say ling they would so my credit with landlord turned to shit . There is only going to be more people home less and not becase of drugs and mental issues . Judge mush its like the church saying all is wecome until the gay guys pull up a set . Put up or stick it back were it came from .
Hello my Name is MEL and going to be Homeless too! I reached out to Helping Hands Dec17th 2025. They said I was Approved, and it Also says benefits enclosed, So I went to my Portal and There’s Nothing there! No Benifits in my Portal or Anywhere else. I’ve done all Applications on every Site!
They just don’t Care about US! I feel all of you People because as of June 30th I too Will be Homeless. But I will Pray for us All.
I have been homeless for 5 years im telling you now if you have nothing you get nothing there is no hand out or hand up your fucked in colorado
Keep reading more horrible examples of how people are treated, the lengths to which people have to go to try and get housing, and then the continual flow of articles about fraud and self enrichment happening behind the scenes of homeless housing groups. I am currently homeless through no fault of my own other than taking care of elderly parents and trusting a family member who inherited my house of 20 years who then decided to sell it and needed me out asap. My severely disabled roommate and I (I’m also disabled and currently recovering from cancer) have been given the runaround by several groups in town…told there would be housing soon, then they drop out of sight…don’t get back to us, don’t return calls, each new person we talk with says something different…each group blames the next for delays. Groups sit on applications for months without moving forward. Yet somehow some will show up and get into housing immediately and are written about in the paper locally as if to say “look, we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing after all”. Government funding programs that have so many restrictions and requirements it would be a miracle if you qualify for them. It’s all so discouraging.
Every county was awarded 1 million dollars to eradicate drug addiction, address mental health issues and permanent housing. The problem is HUD gets the money to upkeep the properties. The majority are not spending the money properly and the homes aren’t upkept and the money is spent. Which is fraudulent. Section 8 vouchers are given to people who are not citizens of America but have visas and temporary status, or are Immigrant parents of children born in America. Only citizens should live in public housing. That’s the standing law in most countries. The overall crime in HUD and Section 8 has got to stop. America wouldn’t have this growing homeless situation if these things were addressed and corrected. Stop stealing and get the illegals out of housing. President Trump signed the Executive Orders to combat all these issues. Publications as this are misleading and do not represent the facts.
Homeless 12years ,on the levee in Sacramento.An yes I blame me first & foremost.It all starts with one,thats you,yourself.Take responsible first for you,& the path you chose that lead-To “HOMELESS”-ness… or IS IT “LESSHOMES”, avaliable or qualifiable. I asked for help? Took 6years,But im here w/2 blk trash bags,of my belongings.Shelter #1- ..got to continue,later…
I live in San Diego, and was working for our local government, buying a home, a single mother with 3 kids and a selfish family member threw me out on the street and I lost everything, my kids, my belongings, eventually my job and found myself alone living in a local park for 5 years. People stole from me, abused me, took advantage of me. I couldn’t get my own housing because due to the fact I was buying a house with 2 relatives and learned I wasn’t on the mortgage when I was thrown out of my home, and I had less than average credit, even though I had enough money in my savings to pay 6 months rent in advance, because I had less than average credit and “no rental history” because of living with said relatives for over 10 years, and then when my job of over 13 years found out I was homeless, they fast tracked me out quickly and no one would rent to us. I finally went to a shelter right before the covid and was placed in a purchased hotel that was not renovated or painted. In fact it was supposed to be demolished but instead sold to HUD. We were moved here under permanent supportive housing. It has been 5 years and a couple of months. 99 people have died in our complex due to illness, substance abuse, murder and suicide. We are treated horribly here. Our hippa rights are violated daily. We never received the resources we were promised. All funding assistance was pocketed by employees. Security can be bought off. I have rats in my apartment for the last 2 months due to an overgrown tree blocking my window that also serves as a rat hotel. The guy who does our pest control has already spoken to the management company, who, by the way have no training or experience in mental health or homelessness, and talk down to us, call us names here, its ridiculous how people treat us. When we complain, they evict us. They make up another reason why they are throwing us out. Almost everyone here has rats, mold issues. Our carpet is 40+years old. This hotel was never meant for someone to live in it, yet here we are. I have ptsd, anxiety, chronic migraines due to a head injury, high blood pressure and hipogylecimia which i already had for 9 years prior to my becoming homeless. I have no family except for my children, but they aren’t in a position to help me. I dont have friends that I would want to impose upon to stay with. I receive $800 per month due to early retirement because I’m disabled, and pay $400 a month for rent. I literally am barely making it from month to month. We have had advocates come here to speak to us and attempt to organize us, but they were treated badly by staff here and basically ran off the property. They no longer come. We all have an assigned case manager who is supposedly working with us, but that is a joke. They hang out with the management company and do nothing for us. I worked for many years in public safety and I know the rules. I also know what “permanent SUPPORTIVE housing” means. Where is the support? How is it permanent if we worry about returning to the streets daily? I have written documentation, videos, statements from other residents and proof of what is going on here. One of our buildings burned down last week and 8 residents were displaced, all disabled. It was possibly an arson. Possibly the 4th or 5th fire that has happened in the time we’ve lived here. Legal aid is no help as far as protecting our rights. I have enough evidence to prove how awful we’ve been treated and the circumstances we are forced to live in here. My anxiety is at an all time high. I wish there was an attorney or advocacy group who was bold enough to represent us, but so far we havent had any representation. This goes way beyond slum lords. This is elder abuse. Straight out. With rents in this area in the range of $2500-3500 for a basic 1 bedroom apartment in. A high crime area, property owners should be ashamed of their selves for the amount they are charging average families. Definite changes need to be made to the current system. Our management company, and the advocacy company who provides our casemanagers should be fired and also forced to live on our income and also have to reside in a rat infested unit. Our complex is listed as the most dangerous apartment complex in San Diego. I have spoken to the SDHC and requested to be placed in a different complex and they have stated they have nothing available for me. So my options are to return to homeless and possibly die on the street or stay here and die of something rat related or something worse. I wish someone who was an educated and experienced attorney would have the balls to represent us and let our City know that it is unacceptable to live in an environment such as this. Not everyone in the community is on drugs/alcohol or mentally ill. Some of us are educated, have worked the majority of our lives and found ourselves in a situation where we had no family, no support and didn’t make enough to support our family. With rising costs of everything from groceries, rent, Healthcare, and gas prices, (I paid $6.00 a gallon for 87 gas at am/pm yesterday, which is not a coincidence in this area), but with all that, people surviving on a fixed income or waiting to receive ssi/ssdi will most likely not survive this. I pray for all of us, Sr, disabled, poor, even those who are mentally incapacitated or have substance abuse issues. Changes are needed.
Hud should quit discriminating against the people that live in our communities regardless of their situations. I am on Megan’s Law . I am a tier 1 offender. And hud will not allow me to rent from them. I served my time in prison for setting a child on my lap and was accused of touching that child. I did 7 years in prison and now im out on parole but still cannot find housing through HUD I the city of Pittsburgh Pa. I have been trying since December 17,2025.
I don’t believe in HUD.
I was a working part of society until my husband made me homeless. I did everything right and still the system failed me and husband running around free with a happy life and my money that he wiped out and foreclosed on my home
. WHERE IS THE JUSTICE! I worked all of my life for my home and family. Husband came so close to breaking every single law and still gets to walk. Im working but its nowhere near enough to live on. I started a divorce and he’s all of a sudden no where to be found. I don’t have enough money for another lawyer. And the court system sends a letter ” sorry we can’t take your case at this time “. What are they waiting for, me to get arrested or die?
It is immoral (downright evil) to cast persons without a safe, decent place to sleep, eat and rebuild into the “outer darkness” and death. Compassion is declining across America. Where and how are compassionate care manifested by the political representatives we vote into office? Sure there are some homeless persons who are capable of helping themselves but instead choose dependency instead of applying themselves. However, as Brian Goldstone presents in his reporting and book, There is no Place for Us – Working and Homeless in America – there are millions of hardworking homeless (including children) that cannot work their way out of and rise above homelessness and poverty. For those capable of doing for themselves, yes, there should be accountability. But for the homeless and poverty stricken who do not have the capability of participating in their wellbeing, our compassionate act as Americans is to care for, those who otherwise would suffer and die if they are cast into the outer darkness.
There are more than a few angles to this immoral and scandalous unconcern for the vulnerable among us in the USA.
Too many people do not vote on issues; instead they vote for candidates that share their racial and social prejudices (otherwise Trump would never have been elected).
Some people forget that in peacetime Social Welfare is the overarching issue in domestic politics: If assistance isn’t available to others, it will not be available to you when you need it.
And as the number of unhoused folks relentlessly keeps growing, services are constricting because the big providers are angry about it. Here in my city in Colorado, the only low-barrier shelter for homeless adults just instituted a 10 day stay limit for those without ties to the city. Problem is, that just forces more people onto the streets which is something they also can’t tolerate.
Transitional sanctioned encampments with services near transportation would be one clear alternative that would provide much more stability and specific help for those who would agree to go there. However, it can’t be like a concentration camp, it has to be better than the congregate shelter, or few would want to stay there. But, this city is like most, it will throw more money at the jail and criminal justice system instead of addressing actual needs.
i feel the same way , i was pushed out of the area i was living for mr richie rich to raise the price of the city to impossible levels that american citizens aka the majority of evictions are illegal and done on even middle class… the one mistake away from now homeless majority…… present time issues arent even in the code/housing dept not legal help!!!!!!!!!! or even described… how can you help people if you dont even know the true facts of what caused the eviction. I think half of evictions are forced into settlements that hide the reality. The truth is probably more obvious if the housing dept was doing something that they already due but dont disclose in the way that they should.. The hiding of the problem is to be stopped if you were actually going to solve anything it would start with who is evicting and why it probably is clearly been a oversight thats actually being hidden by the housing dept .. not having clear documents available on your rental property should be available for every rental unit rented so that no illegall evections dont turn into the obvious transfer after tenant was forced out by violations… for the landlord to fix up on the the tenants dime /deposit and now profit off the hell and homelessness to rent for outrageous amount not even questioned by housing dept now … being they know the price and violations on record . In the old days when city workers were tested for there jobs.. and to have degrees….seems like a conflict of intrest if someone workswith homeless / property managment company wants to charge homeless sec 8 excessive rents… basically places that have no kitchen or bathroom and no parking are basically 1000.00 plus for a size of a closet … you might think thats a little much (rent reasonable? no fmr ? please , robbing the persons who deserve housing because you have let a person from china buy the entire city and only rent to rich people or accept vouchers and not even provide value to the selected few who get vouchers , illegal.. as if we dont know what value is on a place that is on skid row that hasnt been updated or kept up to date with thousands of violations … they are behind and not ahead.. just like the issues that are causing the homeless… i was illegally evicted and the deposit was kept even when the person was told to give it back , but thats the missing data that should prevent a person from renting all together … are we scared to keep the deposit then. what if you did that and now you are not allowed to rent agian… for 10years citations … like the parking tickets you give to the poor…. cant it go the same way for the violations that should prevent overcharging hmmm… facts to face …. this is homeless help.. and intentional…. by our own gov…. no conflicts of intrest….. americans evicted by a person who doesnt even live in us….. well that because they now own are city …. even if you pretend thats not what happend if i cant live , most likely no one i know can … and thats mostly … so if i wanted to this in china… i go with my money and try to buy up the city …. and then hold up the rent at the most highest price i can… cant happen…. because china would never let people from another country own anything in there country…… duh…..someone sold my whole city out and evicted anyone that they wanted without even giving free lawyers…. pathetic mr. richie now made everyone homeless and plays dumb…. this is intentional…. but i dont mind letting joey stay with me, but i dont live where i really want to because thats intentional………and this was preventable and still is if you were not letting the facts be hidden on every eviction that they dont document…. or why are no lawyers paid xtra to win or save tenants based on that alone… doing there job … they would be lined up at the court house helping people for finding one mistake in the filing… ohhh missing any info on the prior amounts of the past tenancy should be the first ….. sign we have a SCAMMER…. MANAGEMENT…… leaving info out is there main scam … the facts are already there….? they dont do there job or help tenants ….. but have they recieved funding then harm tenants… yes… conflicts of intrest…