--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story from Up First, where we go beyond the news to bring you one big story.
--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Not long ago, reporter Will James walked into an apartment building in Seattle and met a tenant named Kenny Taylor. Good morning.
--:-- Will James: Oh, thanks so much.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Oh, this is home. Yeah, this is great. This building, the Union Hotel, is the first in Seattle to operate under a philosophy called Housing First.
--:-- Will James: And Kenny was one of the original tenants who moved in 30 years ago. He came here straight off the streets.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I was homeless for about five years before I moved in here. I slept in doorways. I slept on the street. I slept in tents. I saw admissions and stuff like that. It's not fun. Being homeless is not fun at all.
--:-- Will James: When Kenny moved into his apartment in the 1990s, Housing First was an experiment. And nobody knew how it was going to turn out.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But now, 30 years later, Housing First is the central strategy the federal government uses to combat homelessness. So is it working? And is it working like it's supposed to?
--:-- Will James: When Housing First was introduced, the idea was to take some of the most vulnerable people living on the streets and move them immediately into their own permanent subsidized apartments.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: A lot of these people had serious mental illnesses and addictions. The plan was to get them a home first and then worry about treating those problems later.
--:-- Will James: Housing first started as a fringe idea, but eventually evidence started piling up that this worked to resolve many of the most stubborn cases of chronic homelessness.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: When people got housing under this approach, they usually stayed housed for years, like Kenny. This is my home. I'm going to keep my home as long as I pay my rent.
--:-- Will James: I just feel happy here. I wasn't traded for nothing in the world.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But with homelessness now at record levels, conservative think tanks and activists have set their sights on the philosophy of Housing First.
--:-- Will James: They're pushing for more programs that require treatment and sobriety before housing. And Project 2025 calls for ending support of it all together.
--:-- [Break music plays]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: After a break, reporter Will James joins me to talk about the future of Housing First and whether it's time for a course correction and how the U.S. handles one of its most persistent problems.
--:-- [Break music fades out]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This message comes from BetterHelp. It's only human to ask others for advice, like turning to your barista, hairdresser, or a taxi driver for life advice.
--:-- Will James: But when you're looking for help about relationships, anxiety, depression, or other clinical issues, they may not have all the right answers.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Instead, get guidance from a licensed therapist online with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash NPR for 10% off your first month.
--:-- [Break music plays]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This message comes from the NPR Wine Club, a place to explore the exciting world of wine, including wines inspired by popular NPR shows, like all things considered Cabernet.
--:-- Will James: Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, all purchases help support NPR programming and fund quality reporting developed to connect people to their communities and the world they live in.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: More at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase.
--:-- [Break music fades out]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This message comes from Sony Pictures Classics. In Eleanor the Great, June Squibb brings to vivid life the spirited 94-year-old Eleanor Morgenstein, who after a devastating loss tells a tale that spirals beyond her control.
--:-- Will James: From director Scarlett Johansson comes a comically poignant exploration of how the stories we hear become the stories we tell. Deadline puts it, there won't be a dry eye in the house. Eleanor the Great, now playing only in theaters.
--:-- [Break music plays]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We're back with the Sunday story. I'm here with Will James, a reporter and producer for KUOW in Seattle, he recently published an audio documentary about the Housing First approach to homelessness, its history and its future.
--:-- Will James: Hey, thanks for having me, Aisha.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So, Will, Housing First has been around for 30 years, and it's been the U.S. government's central strategy for fighting homelessness for at least a decade now, depending on when you start counting.
--:-- Will James: Help us to understand the backlash to this philosophy. Like, where is it coming from?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah. So there's a piece of this that is political. Housing First was pretty bipartisan under George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
--:-- Will James: But over the past few years, activists and think tanks on the political right have been pretty successful at branding this philosophy as left-coded or liberal coded.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But there's another element to this backlash that's actually much more interesting to me.
--:-- Will James: As a reporter covering homelessness here in Seattle, I started hearing doubts about Housing First from people I didn't expect to hear them from, folks who work directly with the homeless population at nonprofits that practice Housing First, sometimes even from people who lived on the streets themselves and moved inside under Housing First.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And this really threw me because as a reporter, I'd been hearing for years that Housing First is the most studied, the most proven, the most cost-effective strategy for getting people off the streets.
--:-- Will James: And at the same time, some of the evidence that these critics were pointing to rang true to me. Like they were pointing to problems that I have witnessed myself in my reporting.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And this is what really made me want to dive into Housing First with this documentary.
--:-- Will James: It was my own genuine confusion about how to reconcile these things.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: That is very interesting because you are talking to people who are dealing with this firsthand and they are fueling some of these doubts about Housing First.
--:-- Will James: Like what are they seeing that's causing their concerns?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So the first observation that critics of Housing First tend to make is since 2013, the U.S. government has really pushed local governments and nonprofits to adopt Housing First practices.
--:-- Will James: And for years, a majority of federal grants for homelessness have gone to Housing First projects, adding up to billions of dollars.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But the U.S. homeless population hit a new record in 2024.
--:-- Will James: And so this has caused some people to wonder whether Housing First, or maybe the way we're practicing Housing First, is not meeting this moment.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The second observation that critics make is that Housing First in practice can look very imperfect, to put it mildly.
--:-- Will James: Yes, it offers people an apartment, a bed, a door that locks behind them.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But the environment in these buildings can be challenging because the chaos of the streets tends to follow people indoors.
--:-- Will James: And you talked to some tenants who had experiences like this for your audio documentary.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah, so we're going to hear from a woman named Maureen Hawley who lives in a building in downtown Seattle.
--:-- Will James: It's this 14-story building that's a century old. And some of the tenants there are just low-income, but others come straight off the streets under a Housing First program.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: There is staff on site to help them with addiction and mental health if the tenants want that.
--:-- Will James: But like with every Housing First project, treatment is not a requirement of living here.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Maureen's lived here for more than two decades after spending some time homeless herself.
--:-- Will James: Two years ago, Maureen had an encounter with a neighbor that she says almost killed her.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Here's Maureen from the documentary.
--:-- Maureen Hawley: I was using crack cocaine at the time. And I was given a glass pipe to smoke, but it had fentanyl in it, and I didn't know it.
--:-- Will James: I was in a coma for about four days, and they said it was a miracle that I managed to live because I had enough fentanyl in my system to kill me.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The rise of fentanyl has sent a surge of overdose deaths through housing programs across Seattle.
--:-- Will James: These deaths nearly quadrupled between 2020 and 2023.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Michelle Huckabee-Varick is one of Maureen's neighbors.
--:-- Michelle Huckabee-Varick: I mean, there was people dying around you, so you hoard things, you make walls, you know.
--:-- Will James: So, like, somebody came through your door, they couldn't get to you, you know.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'd never in my life lived like that. I felt like no one was safe, not even me.
--:-- Will James: I just kind of basically left. And I, like, camped out across the street.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I was really scared.
--:-- Will James: So conditions were so bad in the building that Michelle actually felt safer staying in a tent out on the street?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah, that's right.
--:-- Will James: And she was there until some outreach workers helped clean out her apartment and then move her back in.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This story is just one of a few anecdotes I've heard over the years that have trickled out of buildings like this.
--:-- Will James: These stores have fueled questions about whether Housing First, as we currently practice it, is working like it's supposed to.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: A common perception I've heard from tenants and even occasionally from staffers who work in these buildings is that Housing First is taking people off the streets and sort of hiding their problems behind four walls and not doing enough to address those problems like substance use or mental illness.
--:-- Will James: And vocal critics of Housing First, like the vice president, J.D. Vance, have picked up on these anecdotes, right, in their efforts to dismantle these programs.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But what do they want instead?
--:-- Will James: Generally speaking, they want to change course and return to a philosophy called treatment first.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This is the idea that people should follow a series of steps like treatment, sobriety, and employment that eventually end with permanent housing as the last step.
--:-- Will James: And this idea of treatment first goes way back. Before Housing First took off, treatment first was the go-to approach for many, many years.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Okay, so Housing First was an alternative to Treatment First.
--:-- Will James: Yeah. So what were the problems with this reward and punishment-based system that, you know, Housing First emerged to address?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah, that is a really important question, and I really wanted to understand this.
--:-- Will James: So I dug back into the history of Housing First.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Back in the 90s, people working in the homelessness field realized that Treatment First wasn't working for a subsection of the homeless population.
--:-- Will James: They called this group the hardest-to-serve population.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: These were people who were the most disabled by mental illness and addiction and could not abide by the rules of Treatment First.
--:-- Will James: So they always ended up back on the streets.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: That's when some innovators decided to take a big risk and try just housing them and then bringing the treatment to them in their new apartments.
--:-- Will James: And this was the birth of Housing First.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And here's where Seattle enters the story in a big way.
--:-- Will James: In 2005, a Seattle nonprofit called the Downtown Emergency Service Center, DESC, planned to open a building with 75 apartments for people who had been homeless for years and addicted to alcohol.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: At that point, Housing First had mostly been focused on people whose main health problem was mental illness and who often had addiction on the side.
--:-- Will James: But DESC's project was going to test Housing First for people whose main health problem was alcoholism.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This blew up into a national news story, and it remains probably the most famous and controversial example of Housing First in U.S. history.
--:-- Will James: So you're talking about the 1811 Eastlake Project.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yes. You've got a section about this in your audio documentary, and it starts with this excerpt from a local Seattle call-in show back then, The Conversation.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The Downtown Emergency Service Center is opening the facility at 1811 Eastlake Avenue for homeless men and women who've been identified as some of the most down-and-out chronic alcoholics.
--:-- Will James: Residents will be allowed to drink in their rooms.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Anyone who moved into 1811 Eastlake was not required to participate in any kind of treatment for alcoholism.
--:-- Will James: It was there if they wanted it, but they could also just keep drinking.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It sounds to me like you're taking alcoholics and saying, please drink as much as you like.
--:-- Will James: Why don't we have call-in shows anymore?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This is good radio.
--:-- Will James: I mean, basically what they're talking about doing is having a public tax dollar funded flop house.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I mean, what are they going to do? Just let them live there and continue to drink themselves to death?
--:-- Will James: What's the purpose? What's going to be the outcome of this?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The person these callers were angry at was Bill Hobson.
--:-- Will James: He ran DESC at the time, and he was one of the country's most enthusiastic adopters of Housing First.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Bill was a bit of an iconoclast.
--:-- Will James: Daniel Malone runs DESC Today, and he worked under Bill back then.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: He was pretty plain spoken a lot of the times about calling out things that he thought were wrongheaded.
--:-- Will James: It was up to Bill, the head of DESC, to explain to the irate public radio listeners of Seattle how all of this would work.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: First of all, we're not saying please drink as much as you like.
--:-- Will James: One of the goals of the project is to get residents in the building to reduce use.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We believe that once you eliminate the chaos of homelessness from somebody's life, that they can more effectively and meaningfully go through the stages of change that they need to go through in order to become a bit more clinically stable and much more socially stable.
--:-- Will James: Now, as you're probably well aware, the most vehement criticism of this often comes from people who are recovering alcoholics or have recovering alcoholics in their family, they are kind of appalled that you would operate a facility and allow folks to keep drinking, and they would say their recovery would have never happened if they didn't stop, and they see this facility as not doing that.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: How do you respond to people like that?
--:-- Will James: I'm sure you get that all the time.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We do.
--:-- Will James: Bill said, sure.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: For lots of people with alcoholism, abstinence did work.
--:-- Will James: But what he wanted listeners to understand was that this was not the population he was talking about.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: He was talking about the hardest to surf.
--:-- Will James: The 1811 Eastlake Project was for people who back then were called chronic public inebriates.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: There were more than a thousand of them in Seattle, according to a state estimate.
--:-- Will James: Their health problems were comparable to people in developing countries, and their average age of death was 42 to 52 years old.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: In the Seattle area, their emergency room visits alone cost $100,000 per person per year.
--:-- Will James: And on average, they had already tried to stop drinking 16 times and it didn't work.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: You're kind of acknowledging that it's highly likely these people will never stop drinking.
--:-- Will James: That's correct.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I mean, we're talking about men and women that have been living on the streets of downtown Seattle for 15, 20 years and have gone into conventional treatment multiple times and have not succeeded with it.
--:-- Will James: So what I'm picking up on here is that there are very different ideas about what success looks like under Housing First.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The callers were basically saying they want people to get sober.
--:-- Will James: And Bill, who runs the nonprofit, is saying we have to accept that, you know, some percentage of people are never going to get sober.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: That's right.
--:-- Will James: And that's why this recording from 20 years ago was so eye-opening to me.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The proponents of Housing First were always clear-eyed about what their tenants were dealing with.
--:-- Will James: They just have a very different idea of what recovery means for the people they're trying to help.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: In many cases, recovery for them doesn't mean sobriety. It means a life that is a little more stable, a little more comfortable, a little more dignified.
--:-- Will James: And this is incredibly painful and frustrating for a lot of critics to hear because it goes against a lot of values that we're steeped in as Americans.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It's saying that there is a limit to how far grit and self-improvement will get you.
--:-- Will James: And there are a lot of people who just don't want to believe that.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah, I can see how it's hard to accept that some people won't be able to get helped in the way that we think about it.
--:-- Will James: Like, can everybody with the right, you know, approach get sober?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: What happened with 1811 Eastlake?
--:-- Will James: DESC did open the building in 2005 and they moved in 75 of the most disabled people living on the streets of Seattle with alcoholism.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And then an academic study came out a few years later.
--:-- Will James: This study showed that the first wave of people who moved into the building stayed housed there.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And that housing them ended up being cheaper than just letting them cycle through emergency rooms and sobering centers and jails.
--:-- Will James: And it showed that the people who moved in ended up drinking a little less on average once they were inside.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Now, these results were pretty modest.
--:-- Will James: They went from drinking something like 16 drinks a day to 11 on average.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But this fear that people had that this environment was gonna enable people and their alcoholism was gonna get worse, it just wasn't true.
--:-- Will James: In fact, the opposite was true.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: These results got a lot of attention and helped build hype for Housing First across America.
--:-- Will James: And results like this have been replicated again and again for decades now.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It's worth saying, too, that 1811 Eastlake is still going on here in Seattle.
--:-- Will James: It still has 75 units.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And 20 years later, it's still doing essentially the same thing.
--:-- [Break music plays]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So, Will has raised a lot of really difficult questions about Housing First as a policy.
--:-- Will James: After the break, he tries to make sense of all of this nuanced information, the good stuff, the bad stuff, and how it can all fit together.
--:-- [Break music fades out]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This message comes from Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills.
--:-- Will James: Try it at Progressive.com.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.
--:-- [Break music plays]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Support for NPR and the following message come from Pete and Jerry's Eggs. Their new organic pasture-raised eggs come from hens that roam lush pastures and enjoy a USDA-certified organic diet.
--:-- Will James: The result? Delicious, ethical, healthy eggs, as nature intended.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Learn more at PeteAndJerrys.com.
--:-- [Break music fades out]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This message comes from NPR sponsor AARP. Where do you see your career in 12 years? What are you doing now to help you get there?
--:-- Will James: The sooner you start enhancing your skills, the sooner you'll be ready.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: That's why AARP has management, finance, and small business reskilling courses, all to help your income live as long as you do.
--:-- Will James: Because the steps you choose to take today will help you love what you do in the future.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Learn more at aarp.org slash skills.
--:-- [Break music plays]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We're back with the Sunday Story, talking with reporter Will James about the complicated reality of housing first.
--:-- Will James: I want to take us back to the question that kicked off my reporting.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Um, the, the results from 1811 Eastlake are part of this stack of evidence that Housing First works.
--:-- Will James: And yet, the shortfalls that I point to in my reporting are real.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So in, in practice, people continue to relapse and overdose and have crises, even once they're inside under Housing First.
--:-- Will James: I'm wondering how have you come to understand the role of Housing First in addressing homelessness?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: When Housing First was first invented, it was really for a subpopulation of the homeless population.
--:-- Will James: It was for the most disabled people living on the streets with serious mental illness, with serious substance use disorders.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And those things sort of happen over time, right?
--:-- Will James: When someone becomes homeless and then they stay on the streets for months or years, those disabilities tend to compound over time.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So housing first is like throwing them a lifesaver and giving them something to grab onto, some foundation upon which to do the really intense lifelong work of rebuilding.
--:-- Will James: But a little over a decade ago, this definition of housing first started to expand and the federal government started to really incentivize housing first practices for all sorts of organizations that were trying to address homelessness.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And so we saw more and more people, you know, fall under the housing first umbrella.
--:-- Will James: And this is where some of the questions start to emerge.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Like are people getting swept up in housing first when some of them might actually do better in a more structured setting like sober housing or an addiction treatment center?
--:-- Will James: And when I look at all of this, it's clear that Housing First was only ever meant to be one piece of the solution to homelessness.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: When we look at why Housing First on its own is not going to solve homelessness, one of the reasons is that new people are constantly falling into homelessness.
--:-- Will James: A metaphor that I've heard that's been really helpful is that Housing First is one way of bailing out the bathtub.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Meanwhile, the faucet is still on and new people are constantly falling into homelessness.
--:-- Will James: So that's why Housing First on its own is not sufficient.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So it sounds like people may need to modify their expectations of what Housing First can do.
--:-- Will James: But do you think there are ways to continue improving it, like as a part of a comprehensive plan to reduce homelessness?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So there's been this debate for decades now about the best way to implement Housing First.
--:-- Will James: Sam Sambaras, who's like the father of the Housing First approach, wanted his clients to be scattered in apartments all across a city, in buildings where they're surrounded by neighbors from like mainstream society.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But other communities found that it was sometimes cheaper and often just easier to put all of their tenants together in one big building.
--:-- Will James: And, of course, concentrating people with a lot of really serious problems in one building like this, that does contribute to some of the issues we see here in Seattle and that we document in the piece.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: When I talked to Sam, he mentioned something else that's important for implementing this approach.
--:-- Will James: Remember, the program for me was not about somebody moves into an apartment and lives happily ever after, although a great many do.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This is a journey for people. It's very hard to recover. It's very hard to acknowledge you have problems.
--:-- Will James: But we're going to stay with you, you know, through the journey.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: To be clear, there are plenty of providers who do follow through.
--:-- Will James: Sam cited the Downtown Emergency Service Center here in Seattle as an example of that.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: They have doctors, nurses, addiction specialists on staff.
--:-- Will James: That's what Housing First can aspire to.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But Sam worries that these practices aren't widespread enough.
--:-- Will James: So I want to go back to Kenny.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: You point to his life as an example of what success looks like under Housing First.
--:-- Will James: But you also point out in your audio documentary that it's a complicated success.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Across 30 years at the Union Hotel in Seattle, Kenny Taylor has seen all that's good and bad about Housing First.
--:-- Will James: The bad includes a neighbor who bangs on the wall at 3 in the morning and has knocked holes in it.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
--:-- Will James: I'm on the wall and I call the police on them. I can't do nothing for me.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Kenny says his girlfriend died in her apartment here a few years ago after using heroin, falling, and hitting her head.
--:-- Will James: He wishes there wasn't so much drug use in the building.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And he keeps his distance from a lot of his neighbors because he feels like they just want money out of him.
--:-- Will James: But for 30 years, Kenny has chosen to keep living here anyway.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This is where Kenny says he got sober.
--:-- Will James: He says he quit drugs about 10 years ago and alcohol two years ago.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And it wasn't any sort of pressure that got him there.
--:-- Will James: Kenny says recovery just moves at its own pace.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: In his case, it took decades.
--:-- Will James: I was determined that the drugs or alcohol wasn't going to destroy me.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I come this far, might as well go all the way.
--:-- Will James: That's how I felt about it.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Sometimes he helps out with communal meals here in the dining room.
--:-- Will James: Do you cook?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah, a little bit.
--:-- Will James: Southern style.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I cook a lot of grits.
--:-- Will James: I love grits.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Kenny's life, in all its messiness, all its ups and downs, is what success looks like under Housing First.
--:-- Will James: You might notice it's not all that different from the stories critics point to as evidence of failure.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Kenny's lived some of those same headaches and tragedies here.
--:-- Will James: So is Housing First working for Kenny?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: He'd say yes.
--:-- Will James: Having a place has allowed him to adopt his cat, Treasure, which he says has given his life purpose.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Kenny spends most of his days lately writing a book about Treasure.
--:-- Will James: I got 19 chapters written already. I'm about ready to get it published.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Everybody's got a purpose in their life. And my purpose was to write this book.
--:-- Will James: What story does the book tell?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: That anybody can put down paper that they love something and stick to it.
--:-- Will James: And so far, I've stuck to it.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Well, I mean, that's incredibly moving.
--:-- [Break music plays]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Getting back to the politics of all of this, President Trump, he's surrounded by critics of Housing First.
--:-- Will James: So what is the possible impact of shifting away from Housing First on a national level?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yeah. The approach in Project 2025 would be to end support for Housing First altogether and reimpose requirements like entering treatment for addiction and mental illness.
--:-- Will James: And it's worth noting, these are programs that have historically been underfunded and in short supply.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And as we saw in the past, like the 1990s and before that, that approach risks condemning a lot of people to the streets.
--:-- Will James: And if that were to happen, it would happen at a time of record homelessness in America.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: That's Will James, reporter and producer at Seattle Member Station KUOW.
--:-- Will James: You can find his full documentary on Housing First at the link in our show notes.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Thank you for being here, Will.
--:-- Will James: Thanks for having me, Aisha.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Justine Yan and Kim Naderfane-Petersa.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It was edited by Jenny Schmidt.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Kwasi Lee mastered the episode.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Special thanks to Liz Jones, who edited the KUOW audio documentary on Housing First.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo and our senior supervising producer, Liana Simstrom.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Irene Noguchi is our executive producer.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.
--:-- [Theme music plays]
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This message comes from Capital One Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts.
--:-- Will James: What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank for details.
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--:-- Will James: Nature is common ground for everyone, and uniting to protect nature can help solve today's challenges and create a thriving tomorrow for future generations.
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