We provide emergency shelter when the temperature drops. We serve meals. We distribute clothing, blankets, hygiene supplies, and other necessities. Outreach teams meet people where they are. Hospitals treat them when they become sick. Police officers, paramedics, social workers, churches, charities, and volunteers respond when someone is in crisis.
All of this matters. A person who has nowhere safe to sleep tonight needs somewhere safe to sleep tonight. Someone who is hungry needs food. Compassion requires us to respond to those immediate needs.
But we need to be clear about what we have accomplished when we do these things.
We have helped someone endure homelessness. We have not ended their homelessness.
That distinction matters because the United States continues to devote enormous resources to homelessness while hundreds of thousands of Americans remain without permanent housing. HUD’s 2025 Point-in-Time count found 745,652 people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2025.1
At Provident Hearts Foundation, we believe it is time to change the question.
Instead of asking only, “How do we care for more people experiencing homelessness?”
We also need to ask:
“How do we help more people stop being homeless?”
The answer begins with something remarkably straightforward.
A home.
Shelter Is Necessary. It Is Not the Destination.
Emergency shelters serve an essential purpose. This is not an argument for eliminating them, nor is it criticism of the people who operate them.
It is an argument for recognizing their proper role.
Shelter is temporary accommodation. It protects someone from the immediate dangers of homelessness. It can also create an important point of contact through which people can be connected with healthcare, benefits, employment assistance, treatment, and ultimately housing.
But a shelter bed is not a home.
The difference is not semantic. It is the outcome we are trying to produce.
And the national numbers tell us that we need to think seriously about that outcome.
HUD’s 2025 count found 745,652 people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January, including 266,320 people who were unsheltered.1 Point-in-Time counts have important limitations—they measure homelessness on a particular night and can underestimate the actual population experiencing homelessness. The Government Accountability Office has specifically identified limitations in PIT methodology and data quality.2
But even with those limitations, the national picture demands our attention.
After decades of effort, homelessness remains an enormous problem.
We should therefore be willing to ask an uncomfortable question:
Are we measuring success by how much homelessness assistance we provide—or by how many people are no longer homeless?
Those are not the same measurement.
Housing First Changes the Order
Housing First begins with a simple proposition: permanent housing should not be the prize someone receives after successfully overcoming all the problems associated with homelessness.
It should be the foundation from which those problems can be addressed.
Housing First provides rapid access to permanent housing without requiring psychiatric treatment, sobriety, or other demonstrations of “housing readiness” as preconditions for housing. Support and treatment are then offered according to the person’s needs.3
Housing First reverses an older way of thinking.
Under a Treatment First or housing-readiness model, someone may be expected to demonstrate sobriety, participate successfully in treatment, stabilize a mental illness, or otherwise prove that they are ready for independent housing before receiving it.
Housing First asks a different question:
What if we house the person first?
Then, from the stability of a permanent home, we help that individual address the barriers that threaten their ability to remain housed and build a better life.
That does not mean simply handing someone the keys to a house and walking away.
Housing First does not mean housing only.
Some people may need little beyond an affordable home and an opportunity. Someone who lost housing following a financial crisis, job loss, divorce, or other temporary disruption may need assistance finding better employment, completing education or training, establishing a budget, or rebuilding savings.
Someone else may need considerably more.
A person living with serious mental illness may need continuing behavioral-health services. Someone struggling with addiction may need treatment or recovery services. Another person may need intensive case management, healthcare, disability benefits, transportation, employment assistance, or help relearning the ordinary responsibilities of maintaining a home.
Housing does not cure schizophrenia.
It does not cure addiction.
It does not create a job.
It does not erase trauma.
And the research does not tell us that it does.
What housing provides is something more fundamental:
Stability.
It is difficult to build a stable life when you do not know where you are going to sleep tomorrow.
The Evidence for Housing First Is Strong
Housing First should not be accepted simply because it sounds compassionate. It should be evaluated on whether it actually works.
The evidence on its primary objective—housing people and keeping them housed—is compelling.
A systematic review conducted for the Community Preventive Services Task Force examined 26 Housing First studies in the United States and Canada. Compared with Treatment First programs, Housing First programs decreased homelessness by 88% and improved housing stability by 41% among people experiencing homelessness with disabling conditions.4
A separate systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials similarly found that Housing First participants spent more days housed and were more likely to be housed at 18 to 24 months. That review found fewer emergency-department visits and hospitalizations among Housing First participants, while effects on many other health outcomes and substance use were less clear.5
That distinction matters.
Housing is foundational, but housing alone is not necessarily sufficient for every person.
We should not expect someone’s addiction, psychiatric illness, poverty, lack of education, or years of trauma to disappear when a lease is signed.
We should expect that person to be in a substantially better position to work on those problems when they wake up tomorrow in the same safe place where they went to sleep tonight.
That is why a successful Housing First system must be capable of matching people with the level of support they actually need.
The objective is not to make someone well enough to deserve housing.
The objective is to use housing as the stable foundation from which greater success becomes possible.
We Have Already Done This in America
One of the most compelling arguments for Housing First is not found in Finland.
It is found here in the United States.
Look at what has happened with veterans.
Beginning with demonstration sites in 2010 and 2011, the Department of Veterans Affairs implemented a Housing First model within HUD-VASH. In 2012, the model was transitioned into VA homeless-program operations for nationwide incorporation into HUD-VASH. VA reports that its initial Housing First initiative reduced average time to housing placement from 235 days to 35 days, lowered emergency-room use, and increased housing retention compared with veterans enrolled in Treatment First.6
Housing First subsequently became the principal model for VA’s permanent supportive housing program, HUD-VASH.3 Federal veteran-homelessness strategies explicitly called for government to “Lead With an Evidence-Based Housing First Approach,” while also increasing affordable-housing access, delivering supportive services, and preventing homelessness.7
The result deserves our attention.
The January 2025 Point-in-Time count found 32,495 veterans experiencing homelessness—the lowest number since HUD began reporting veteran homelessness—and a 56.1% decline since 2010.8
HUD reports that more than 250,000 veterans have obtained safe, stable, affordable housing through HUD-VASH since 2008, and more than 118,000 HUD-VASH vouchers are active nationwide. HUD itself states that HUD-VASH has played a significant role in the decline in veteran homelessness.9
We need to be precise about what those numbers prove.
It would be too simplistic to say that Housing First alone caused a 56.1% reduction in veteran homelessness.
It did not operate alone.
HUD-VASH provides rental assistance. VA provides case management and clinical services. Supportive Services for Veteran Families provides prevention and rapid-rehousing assistance. Federal agencies, local governments, public housing authorities, nonprofits, landlords, healthcare providers, and others have worked toward a measurable objective.
But that is exactly why the veteran experience is so important.
The United States deliberately built a veteran-homelessness strategy around permanent housing, Housing First principles, rental assistance, prevention, and individualized support—and veteran homelessness moved dramatically downward.
In fiscal year 2025 alone, VA reported permanently housing 51,936 veterans, with 96.2% remaining housed at the end of the fiscal year.10
Housing First is not an untested theory we are being asked to import from another country.
We have already used it here.
So we should ask:
What can we learn from what worked for veterans when we address homelessness more broadly?
Finland Gives Us Another Lesson
Finland provides a different large-scale example.
Beginning in 2008, Finland made Housing First a guiding principle of its national program to reduce long-term homelessness. Its strategy deliberately moved away from dormitory-style solutions and toward ordinary rental housing and supported housing, with more intensive support available for people who needed it.11
Finland’s experience also demonstrates something larger than an individual Housing First program: Housing First requires an adequate supply of housing.
The Finnish model has used existing rental housing, newly constructed units, renovated properties, social housing, and supported housing. An OECD account of the Finnish approach emphasized that permanent housing replaced temporary accommodation as the objective and that affordable social housing was crucial to both ending and preventing homelessness.12
Finland’s experience should not be attributed to Housing First in isolation. Housing supply, affordable housing, social services, public investment, and sustained cooperation among government and nonprofit organizations all matter.
And recent increases in Finnish homelessness are a reminder that progress can be reversed when the broader system changes.13
But that qualification leads directly to one of the most important lessons in this discussion.
You cannot implement Housing First at scale without housing.
And that may be where the next great challenge begins.
The Cost of Homelessness Is Not Zero
Whenever permanent housing is proposed, someone eventually asks the reasonable question:
How much will this cost?
We should ask it.
But we need to calculate the comparison correctly.
The alternative to paying for housing is not necessarily paying nothing.
A person experiencing prolonged homelessness may use emergency shelters, emergency departments, inpatient hospital care, ambulances, police services, jails, crisis programs, outreach services, and numerous other publicly or charitably funded resources.
Those services cost money.
A systematic economic review of Housing First programs found a median annual program cost of $16,479 per person across U.S. studies and median annual economic benefits of $18,247 per person. The review calculated a benefit-to-cost ratio of 1.80:1 for the U.S. studies it examined.14
But economic findings vary across studies and populations. Another review found consistent reductions in shelter and emergency-department costs while effects on hospitalization and criminal-justice costs were more mixed. Experimental studies did not consistently show Housing First completely paying for itself.15
So we should not turn this evidence into a slogan claiming that every Housing First program always saves taxpayers more than it costs.
That is not what the evidence establishes.
The more defensible—and more important—point is this:
When calculating the cost of permanent housing, we should compare it with the total cost of allowing someone to remain homeless, not with zero.
Even when reductions in crisis-service use do not completely pay for housing, those offsets change the economics.
And unlike an emergency-room visit, a jail stay, or another night in a shelter, permanent housing can accomplish the objective we are actually pursuing:
The person is no longer homeless.
But There Is a Problem: Housing Has Become Too Expensive
Housing First cannot scale if there are not enough homes people can afford.
That is not merely common sense. Housing-market research connects affordability with the prevalence of homelessness.
A U.S. Government Accountability Office analysis found that a $100 increase in median rent was associated with approximately a 9% increase in the estimated homelessness rate in the communities examined. GAO reported that the relationship remained positive and statistically significant after sensitivity analyses and controls for other relevant factors.2
GAO correctly cautions us against interpreting an association as proof of a simple one-variable cause-and-effect relationship.
Homelessness is complicated.
But the relationship between housing costs and homelessness is difficult to ignore.
HUD’s Market Predictors of Homelessness study similarly found that housing factors—including rental costs, crowding, and evictions—were the factors most consistently associated with higher community-level homelessness, even after controlling for economic, demographic, safety-net, and climate factors.16
Mental illness matters.
Addiction matters.
Disability matters.
Trauma matters.
Job loss matters.
Family breakdown matters.
But so does something much simpler:
Can people afford a place to live?
We cannot have a serious national conversation about homelessness while treating the cost and availability of housing as a separate issue.
We Need More Money for Housing. We Also Need Housing to Cost Less.
This is where I believe the conversation needs to expand.
When housing becomes more expensive, the obvious response is to seek additional funding.
Sometimes that is exactly what is necessary.
But if every home costs more to acquire, every apartment costs more to build, and every monthly rent requires a larger subsidy, then each dollar devoted to housing reaches fewer people.
Eventually we need to ask another question:
Why does it cost so much to create a home?
And then:
What can we do about it?
This is a challenge for government, but it is also a challenge for builders, architects, engineers, manufacturers, universities, trade schools, developers, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, charities, and community organizations.
How inexpensively can we create a safe, durable, dignified permanent home?
Not cheap housing in the pejorative sense.
Not inferior housing.
Not housing we would be embarrassed to live next to.
Quality housing that simply costs less to create.
And I think we need to broaden our definition of innovation.
Innovation Does Not Have to Be Futuristic
When people hear “housing innovation,” they may imagine a giant robotic printer extruding the walls of a house.
That may ultimately be part of the answer.
But innovation can be much less dramatic.
It can mean designing a conventional wood-framed house around standard material dimensions so fewer pieces have to be cut and discarded.
It can mean simplifying a roof.
Standardizing plans.
Concentrating plumbing.
Purchasing materials in volume.
Building multiple units together so fixed costs are spread across them.
Using modular construction where factory production genuinely reduces total delivered cost.
Converting an appropriate existing building instead of starting from an empty lot.
Or looking at a condemned house and asking whether destroying it really makes sense.
That last example is not hypothetical.
Before We Demolish a House, Ask Whether We Can Save It
In Peterborough, Ontario, the nonprofit Peterborough Community Housing Development Corporation—also known as Home Grown Homes—developed and operated affordable housing. Municipal records later documented Home Grown Homes properties containing multiple affordable rental units being transferred to the Peterborough Housing Corporation.17
The organization’s earlier history, documented in Canadian parliamentary proceedings and contemporary reporting, included rehabilitating housing that otherwise faced demolition.
There is a lesson in that story that every community with blighted housing should consider.
Some condemned structures absolutely should be demolished. A building can be unsafe, structurally unsalvageable, or so deteriorated that rehabilitation would be economically irrational.
But that should be a conclusion—not an assumption.
Before a government spends public money destroying a house, why not ask:
Could those resources help turn it back into a home?
Imagine the possibilities when the economics work.
Instead of spending money to remove a blighted structure and being left with an empty parcel, a community might combine public resources, donated labor, charitable funding, skilled trades, and nonprofit ownership to produce an affordable home.
The blight disappears either way.
But in one scenario, so does the house.
In the other, someone gets to live in it.
That is innovation.
New Construction Needs the Same Kind of Thinking
There are promising examples of development teams questioning the conventional cost structure.
The Tahanan permanent supportive-housing development in San Francisco is especially interesting.
An Urban Institute evaluation found development costs of approximately $377,000 per unit—41% below the median per-unit cost of comparison developments in San Francisco—and found that Tahanan was completed substantially faster than comparable permanent supportive-housing developments.18
The achievement did not come from one magic technology.
The project combined flexible financing, design decisions, coordination, approvals, modular construction, and development execution.18
That may be the more important lesson.
We should stop looking for the invention that will make housing inexpensive.
We should examine every part of the process that makes housing expensive.
Land.
Design.
Financing.
Permitting.
Site preparation.
Materials.
Labor.
Waste.
Construction time.
Infrastructure.
Scale.
Maintenance.
Energy use.
Every one of them deserves scrutiny.
Three-dimensional concrete printing is worth exploring. So is modular construction. So are smaller private units, adaptive reuse, rehabilitation, shared community spaces, and construction methods we have not yet imagined.
But we should not be impressed by novelty for novelty’s sake.
A 3D-printed house that costs more than conventional construction has not solved our affordability problem.
A conventional house redesigned so that it can be delivered at substantially lower total cost might be far more innovative.
The measure of innovation should be the total delivered cost of a safe, durable, dignified home.
And the Savings Need to Reach the Resident
There is another part of this conversation that may be uncomfortable.
Innovation normally has an economic incentive.
A business discovers how to make something for $80 that used to cost $100. That efficiency can produce additional profit. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Profit encourages investment, experimentation, risk-taking, and innovation.
But homelessness gives us another reason to innovate.
What if some of those savings become lower housing costs?
What if an architect, builder, manufacturer, university, philanthropist, or entrepreneur decides that success will not be measured solely by the margin created, but also by how far the cost of a quality home can be driven downward?
There is room for profit.
There is also room for purpose.
Government and philanthropy can help align those incentives. Public land, infrastructure assistance, streamlined approvals, prototype funding, development grants, guaranteed purchases, tax incentives, and partnerships can make affordability innovation economically attractive.
The challenge is not to ask businesses to stop being businesses.
It is to ask people with extraordinary expertise:
Can you help us solve this?
Can you design a house differently?
Can you build it differently?
Can you finance it differently?
Can you manufacture part of it differently?
Can you save an existing building?
Can you eliminate waste?
Can you reduce the cost of maintaining it?
Can you find an approach none of us has considered?
And when you succeed, can we make sure that success ultimately means lower housing costs for the person who lives there?
We Should Fund Outcomes, Not Just Activity
Government officials, grantmakers, foundations, and nonprofit leaders should be asking equally difficult questions.
How many people entered permanent housing?
How many remained housed one year later?
How many returned to homelessness?
How long did people remain homeless before receiving housing?
How much did each successful permanent placement cost?
How much did the community spend on emergency services before and after placement?
How much does it cost to create each new permanent housing unit?
How many abandoned properties were returned to productive use?
How much subsidy does each unit require to remain affordable?
These questions do not diminish the value of meals served, shelter nights provided, outreach contacts made, or other acts of service.
They put those activities in context.
A program can be extremely busy.
A community can spend a tremendous amount of money.
Thousands of people can work extraordinarily hard.
And homelessness can still increase.
Activity and outcome are not the same thing.
Ultimately, one measure must stand above the others:
Are fewer people homeless?
This Is a Call to Rebalance Our Efforts
None of this means that we stop feeding people.
We do not close the doors of emergency shelters tomorrow morning.
We do not stop street outreach.
We do not tell someone sleeping outside in January that permanent housing is our priority, so they will have to wait in the cold while we build it.
Compassion requires us to meet immediate needs.
But strategy requires us to look beyond them.
Emergency shelter should be a bridge. It should not become the destination.
As communities consider future homelessness investments, I believe a greater share of our energy, creativity, capital, and public funding needs to move toward permanent housing creation, Housing First placement, rental assistance, housing preservation, rehabilitation, prevention, supportive services, and innovations that materially reduce housing cost.
The question should no longer be only:
How many more people can we shelter?
It should also be:
How many more people can we permanently house?
Where Provident Hearts Foundation Stands
Provident Hearts Foundation does not yet operate a housing program.
I think it is important to say that plainly.
We are not presenting ourselves as experts who have solved homelessness. We have not built a portfolio of housing, and we cannot point to hundreds of people we have already housed.
But we are passionately committed to getting there.
My own experience has largely been in operations: looking at a problem, determining the outcome that needs to be achieved, identifying the barriers preventing that outcome, and then developing and implementing a practical solution.
When I apply that way of thinking to homelessness, I keep returning to one unavoidable conclusion.
If the desired outcome is for someone to stop being homeless, that person ultimately needs a home.
Everything else should help us reach that outcome or help the person sustain it.
That is why Provident Hearts Foundation is committed to developing a housing program centered on permanent housing and the Housing First principle.
We intend to learn from organizations and governments that have already succeeded.
We intend to partner rather than unnecessarily duplicate services that already exist.
We intend to recognize that different people need different levels of support.
We intend to explore rehabilitation, innovative construction, lower-cost development, and other ways to expand the supply of quality affordable housing.
And we intend to keep asking whether there is a better way.
But Provident Hearts Foundation cannot—and should not—do this alone.
A Challenge
To city and county officials: look carefully at where homelessness dollars are going and what outcomes they produce. Make permanent housing a larger part of the answer.
To state and federal leaders: create funding structures that reward communities for expanding permanent affordable housing and reducing the cost of producing it.
To foundations and grantmakers: fund not only the management of homelessness, but the creation of housing and serious experiments designed to make housing less expensive.
To nonprofits and charities: continue meeting immediate human needs, but ask whether some of our resources and partnerships can also help people make the transition out of homelessness.
To builders, architects, engineers, manufacturers, universities, trade schools, developers, and entrepreneurs:
We need your ideas.
Find ways to build quality housing for less.
Find ways to rehabilitate what we already have.
Find waste nobody else has questioned.
Test new materials.
Test old materials in better ways.
Test modular construction.
Test 3D printing where scale makes it economical.
Rethink floor plans.
Rethink development.
Rethink financing.
Rethink the assumption that housing simply has to cost what it costs today.
And when you find a way to save money, help us find a way for those savings to reach the people who need a home.
There are hundreds of thousands of reasons to try.
We Need to Change the Question
For decades, compassionate people have asked:
How can we help the homeless?
We should keep asking that question.
But we need to add another:
How can we help people stop being homeless?
That changes how we think about shelter.
It changes how we think about treatment.
It changes how we think about public funding.
It changes how we think about affordable housing.
And it changes how we define success.
The challenge before us is not simply to build a better system for caring for people while they are homeless.
It is to build communities in which fewer people remain homeless at all.
That is the work Provident Hearts Foundation intends to pursue.
Our goal is to help people make the transition from homeless to formerly homeless—and to give them the strongest possible foundation for staying there.
Joshua Galloway Founder, Provident Hearts Foundation
References
- U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report to Congress: Part 1—Point-in-Time Estimates of Homelessness. Published May 29, 2026. Accessed August 23, 2026. View online.
- U.S. Government Accountability Office. Homelessness: Better HUD Oversight of Data Collection Could Improve Estimates of Homeless Population. GAO-20-433. Published July 14, 2020. Accessed August 23, 2026. View online.
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center on Homelessness Among Veterans. Permanent Supportive Housing Resource Guide. Chapter 5: Housing First. Accessed August 23, 2026. View online.
- Peng Y, Hahn RA, Finnie RKC, et al. Permanent supportive housing with Housing First to reduce homelessness and promote health among homeless populations with disability: a Community Guide systematic review. Am J Prev Med. 2020;59(5):e188-e201. doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2020.05.032. View online.
- Baxter AJ, Tweed EJ, Katikireddi SV, Thomson H. Effects of Housing First approaches on health and well-being of adults who are homeless or at risk of homelessness: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. J Epidemiol Community Health. 2019;73(5):379-387. doi:10.1136/jech-2018-210981. View online.
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center on Homelessness Among Veterans. Housing interventions & practices: Housing First. Accessed August 23, 2026. View online.
- United States Interagency Council on Homelessness. The Biden-Harris Administration’s strategies to end Veteran homelessness. Published November 12, 2021. Accessed August 23, 2026. View online.
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Point-in-Time (PIT) Count. Updated July 7, 2026. Accessed August 23, 2026. View online.
- U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD and VA announce funding to support over 2,500 homeless Veterans. Published June 26, 2026. Accessed August 23, 2026. View online.
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. VA demonstrates continued progress in addressing Veteran homelessness. Published May 5, 2026. Accessed August 23, 2026. View online.
- Housing First Finland. The Finnish National Programme to Reduce Long-Term Homelessness I (PAAVO I), 2008-2011. Accessed August 23, 2026. View online.
- Kaakinen J. Housing First: how Finland is ending homelessness. OECD Observer. 2019. Accessed August 23, 2026. View online.
- Henley J. Finland tried to end homelessness. What can we learn from its runaway success—and recent failures? The Guardian. Published August 23, 2026. Accessed August 23, 2026. View online.
- Jacob V, Chattopadhyay SK, Attipoe-Dorcoo S, et al. Permanent supportive housing with Housing First: findings from a Community Guide systematic economic review. Am J Prev Med. 2022;62(3):e188-e201. doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2021.08.009. View online.
- Ly A, Latimer E. Housing First impact on costs and associated cost offsets: a review of the literature. Can J Psychiatry. 2015;60(11):475-487. View online.
- Nisar H, Vachon M, Horseman C, Murdoch J. Market Predictors of Homelessness: How Housing and Community Factors Shape Homelessness Rates Within Continuums of Care. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research; 2019. Accessed August 23, 2026. View online.
- City of Peterborough. Committee of the Whole minutes: PHC acquisition of four Home Grown Homes properties. July 25, 2016. Accessed August 23, 2026. View online.
- Rinzler D, et al. Evaluation of the Homes for the Homeless Fund. Urban Institute; 2022. Accessed August 23, 2026. View online.