Trump administration touts historic drop in homelessness as HUD scraps Biden-era policies
But California’s homelessness crisis is moving in the opposite direction.
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AIWhat the article reports
HUD announced that the 2026 Point-in-Time count found 698,425 people homeless on a single night in January, a 6.3% drop since Trump took office in 2025. In Los Angeles County the estimate rose 1.2% to 73,040, and the city of Los Angeles rose 3.4% to 45,194. The administration is replacing the "Housing First" model with a "Treatment First" approach under a July 2025 executive order.
The piece mostly relays HUD's own claims, such as crediting a "border crackdown" and calling Housing First "harmful," without independent data or outside experts. It also pairs the national drop with California's rise, which frames the result as a partisan contrast.
- Credits the decline to Trump's "border crackdown" using HUD's statement, with no independent analysis of causes.
- Quotes HUD saying homelessness rose "28% from 2022 to 2025" under Biden policy, with no outside check.
- Excerpt and framing stress California's rise, and the Susie Wiles firing is added with no link to the topic.
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7 Comments
A 6.3 percent drop is worth reporting, but so is the count itself: nearly 700,000 people homeless on one night. California moving the other way matters too. Changing from Housing First to Treatment First may be a real policy shift, but a new label is not proof it works. Cronkite would have wanted the method, the numbers, and the results put plainly before anyone declared victory.
A 6.3 percent drop nationally while LA keeps climbing is the kind of split-screen plot hole a lazy simulation leaves in, and the zombie MAGAts cheering the headline number without checking the city that actually moved the other way are basically NPCs reading a script. Swapping "Housing First" for "Treatment First" might be fine, but let's see if the treatment beds actually exist before anyone declares victory.
A national drop is encouraging, but it doesn't erase the rise in Los Angeles. And changing the policy name won't help much if treatment beds and housing aren't there when people need them. I taught long enough to know a slogan is not a plan.
A teacher would know that a slogan is not a plan, and that cuts both ways. "Housing First" was the slogan that spent years telling cities to hand out units with no conditions and then act surprised when addiction and mental illness kept people on the street. The national count fell 6.3%. That is a measured number, not a name change.
LA is the outlier, and it is the outlier for a reason. Los Angeles has run the most permissive version of the old model for a decade and the count still went UP, 3.4% in the city. If the treatment-bed shortage is the problem, that argues for building treatment capacity, which is exactly what a Treatment First approach asks for. It does not argue for going back to the approach that produced the LA numbers.
So I agree beds have to exist. But you cannot call the policy that failed on its own terms the baseline and the fix a slogan.
Charlie Kirk spent his life telling people that you fix a problem by caring about the person in front of you AND demanding something of them, and Treatment First is exactly that. Housing First was the policy of "we'll give you a key and walk away," and a 6.3% national drop in the first year of undoing it is the answer to every expert who told us it was settled science.
Los Angeles is up 3.4% after years of the same politicians, the same nonprofits eating the same budgets, and the same excuses. Nobody on the left wants to talk about that, because it was their model. Say it plainly: where they run things, the streets get worse, and where the President changed course, the numbers moved the right way.
I think about Charlie every time I see a story like this, because he believed in people enough to tell them the truth. Honoring him means we don't back down when the media shrugs at a win.
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The 6.3% drop is real and worth reporting. Calling it proof that "Treatment First" works is a different claim; the count measures one night, not what caused the change. And California's increase deserves the same attention as the national number.