Housing First policies are being replaced with punitive reforms that could push 170,000 people back into homelessness.
By Garrett L. Grainger ,
January 19, 2026
A general view of the Robert C. Weaver Building, serving as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, on December 12, 2025, in Washington, D.C.Heather Diehl / Getty Images
Last fall, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) nearly triggered a homelessness disaster of its own making. A rush of policy changes that were rolled out with almost no warning and even less guidance threatened to push up to 170,000 formerly unhoused Americans out of stable housing.
The strangest part? Much of this upheaval traces back to a little-known think tank that was born in Silicon Valley.
The Cicero Institute, created by tech investor Joe Lonsdale, has spent the past few years promoting aggressive policies targeting encampments for the unhoused and pushing cities to move away from Housing First, the U.S.’s primary model for responding to chronic homelessness. Over the summer, HUD quietly adopted several of Cicero’s key recommendations. And the result was widespread panic among the local agencies responsible for keeping people housed.
Meet the Tech-Bro Think Tank Redesigning Homelessness Policy
Joe Lonsdale, best known as a founding partner of Palantir and a member of the original “PayPal Mafia,” created the Cicero Institute in 2016 to inject what he calls “entrepreneurial thinking” into government. The group operates on a roughly $10 million annual budget that is financed by undisclosed donors, and its board is dominated by Lonsdale’s family members, other entrepreneurs, and political staffers. Its messaging leans heavily on the idea that homelessness persists not because of poverty or a shortage of affordable housing, but because service providers are enabling poor behavior.
On his social media accounts, Lonsdale warns of a “homeless industrial complex” supposedly enriching itself through failed policies. That claim is not grounded in evidence, nor does it match the reality I’ve seen after eight years interviewing and observing frontline service workers in the homeless sector. If anything, the people running U.S. homeless shelters and supportive housing programs are overworked, underpaid, and overwhelmed by needs that far exceed their funding.
Yet Cicero’s arguments have found a national platform through the work of Devon Kurtz, the organization’s “public safety policy director.” Kurtz has a background in classics and criminology, but there is no evidence of any experience working in U.S. homelessness systems, according to his LinkedIn profile. Despite this, he has become a frequent commentator, urging lawmakers to ban encampments, expand involuntary psychiatric commitment, move unhoused people into transitional housing programs with strict behavioral requirements, and dismantle key federal institutions that design homelessness policy.
Last fall, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) nearly triggered a homelessness disaster of its own making. A rush of policy changes that were rolled out with almost no warning and even less guidance threatened to push up to 170,000 formerly unhoused Americans out of stable housing.
The strangest part? Much of this upheaval traces back to a little-known think tank that was born in Silicon Valley.
The Cicero Institute, created by tech investor Joe Lonsdale, has spent the past few years promoting aggressive policies targeting encampments for the unhoused and pushing cities to move away from Housing First, the U.S.’s primary model for responding to chronic homelessness. Over the summer, HUD quietly adopted several of Cicero’s key recommendations. And the result was widespread panic among the local agencies responsible for keeping people housed.
Meet the Tech-Bro Think Tank Redesigning Homelessness Policy
Joe Lonsdale, best known as a founding partner of Palantir and a member of the original “PayPal Mafia,” created the Cicero Institute in 2016 to inject what he calls “entrepreneurial thinking” into government. The group operates on a roughly $10 million annual budget that is financed by undisclosed donors, and its board is dominated by Lonsdale’s family members, other entrepreneurs, and political staffers. Its messaging leans heavily on the idea that homelessness persists not because of poverty or a shortage of affordable housing, but because service providers are enabling poor behavior.
On his social media accounts, Lonsdale warns of a “homeless industrial complex” supposedly enriching itself through failed policies. That claim is not grounded in evidence, nor does it match the reality I’ve seen after eight years interviewing and observing frontline service workers in the homeless sector. If anything, the people running U.S. homeless shelters and supportive housing programs are overworked, underpaid, and overwhelmed by needs that far exceed their funding.
Yet Cicero’s arguments have found a national platform through the work of Devon Kurtz, the organization’s “public safety policy director.” Kurtz has a background in classics and criminology, but there is no evidence of any experience working in U.S. homelessness systems, according to his LinkedIn profile. Despite this, he has become a frequent commentator, urging lawmakers to ban encampments, expand involuntary psychiatric commitment, move unhoused people into transitional housing programs with strict behavioral requirements, and dismantle key federal institutions that design homelessness policy.
The proposals are sweeping. The evidence behind them is thin.
The Campaign Against Housing First
Cicero’s preferred target is Housing First, a model adopted by the George W. Bush administration and expanded under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, during the latter’s first term. Housing First prioritizes moving chronically unhoused people into permanent housing without requiring sobriety or treatment upfront. The model rests on numerous randomized controlled trials, which find that people stay housed at far higher rates and reduce consumption of some costly emergency services when basic stability comes first. By contrast, evidence for mental health, income, and employment impacts shows no advantage for the conditional services that Cicero advocates.
Kurtz argues that Housing First has “failed,” pointing to rising numbers of unsheltered people over the past decade. But this argument misuses the data in several ways.
For one, “permanent supportive housing” is the closest thing to Housing First that the federal government provides homeless service recipients. That program wasn’t designed to end all homelessness. It was specifically created for “chronically” homeless households who have been unhoused for at least 12 months and who have a documented disability. Rising unsheltered homelessness, by contrast, has been driven largely by soaring rent costs, the expiration of pandemic-era protections, and insufficient supply of emergency shelter, not Housing First.
There’s also the question of outcomes. HUD tracks Housing First retention each year, and the results are consistent: Since 2015, roughly 90 to 95 percent of people in these programs remain housed. If chronic homelessness is rising, the problem is not that Housing First “doesn’t work.” The problem instead is that there aren’t enough preventative services to keep people housed during crises or sufficient rental subsidies for people who have been unhoused for less than 12 months.
Still, Cicero frequently cites outlier studies to suggest Housing First is dangerous, ineffective, or too expensive. These studies are often based on narrow samples, misapplied to the wrong populations, or interpreted in ways the original authors explicitly warn against. The broader research consensus is clear: Housing First works extremely well for the population it serves. What it cannot do is counteract years of rising rents, stagnating wages, catastrophic shortages of affordable housing, and the collapse of political will to end homelessness.
HUD Adopts Cicero’s Playbook
The Cicero Institute’s advocacy department, “Cicero Action,” has employed “high-powered” lobbyists to push its agenda in states around the country. Cicero Action, for example, hired Alfred Parks, a former state representative, and a corporate lobbyist, Jason Weaks, in New Mexico to advance model bills that criminalize homelessness and redirect funding from permanent to transitional housing programs.
After passing its model legislation in red states like Florida, Missouri, and Utah, it appears the Cicero Institute has expanded its influence to the federal government. In July 2025, President Trump issued an executive order directing HUD to shift federal homelessness funding away from permanent housing and toward transitional housing and encampment enforcement. And HUD has quickly moved to comply.
Federal contracts that were supposed to run through 2026 were abruptly cut short. A new funding notice, released in mid-November, gave local agencies just months to redesign their entire homelessness systems, which took over 10 years to build.
The notice leaned heavily on the same weak evidence that Cicero uses. HUD cited a non-representative survey from 15 states to justify claims that most unsheltered people have severe mental illness or addiction, despite the study’s own authors warning against using their data to generalize about causes. HUD suggested Housing First had failed, even though the agency’s own metrics belied that claim.
Local administrators were stunned. I conducted 12 interviews with local administrators across the country over the past three months. My contacts would only speak to me under the condition of anonymity due to fear of political retaliation from HUD. The administrators I spoke to described HUD’s abrupt change as chaotic, reckless, illegal, dangerous, and impossible to carry out.
“You’re talking about historical supporting of permanent supportive housing,” one administrator said, “and essentially giving us eight months to wind those down. That’s not enough time.”
In addition to this unrealistic deadline, most administrators would have to make those reforms with less funding and, as a result, fewer staff to deliver the intensive case management that HUD is now demanding. “There are some many consequences to this on down the road that they’re not looking that far ahead,” another administrator said. “They are not looking at, ‘If we cut this, how do other services pick that up,’ because we don’t have those services and they aren’t giving us the money to create those services.”
The recently announced $2 billion cuts to community-based mental health and substance abuse treatment will exacerbate this crisis by shrinking, if not eliminating, the case management agencies that deliver the kind of support HUD expects homeless service users to receive.
A lawsuit was quickly filed to thwart disaster. Ninety minutes before its court hearing, HUD abruptly withdrew the funding notice until problems could be worked out.
The Damage Isn’t Over
Even though HUD pulled back its proposal, the uncertainty it created has already strained homelessness systems that were stretched thin long before this episode. With another winter underway and the threat of policy whiplash still looming, governors cannot afford to wait and see what happens next.
Roughly a third of contracts were ending between January and June 2026. A large number of people would therefore lose their rental assistance in the dead of winter if HUD followed through with this disastrous policy. This will cause unsheltered homelessness to spike at a time when emergency shelters already cannot meet demand.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, states used eviction moratoriums, utility shutoff protections, and emergency rental assistance to keep millions of people housed. They may need to use these tools again if HUD continues to pursue abrupt policy shifts without adequate planning.
Thousands of people are depending on them to act before the next crisis hits.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Garrett L. Grainger is Research Fellow in Social Inclusion at Wrexham University in Wales. His work on homeless policy and governance has also appeared in outlets like The Hill, NPR, and The Progressive.
No comments:
Post a Comment