The laughter is contagious. Gae Felice, 53, pets her puppy Sheena Champain and speaks about her past with a calm voice. Until recently, she lived on the streets of South Los Angeles for 10 years, sometimes sleeping in cars or motels.
Two months ago, she moved into Rampart Village, a shelter in Los Angeles provided by People Assisting the Homeless (PATH), one of the longest-running homeless service organizations in Southern California.
“It has been really nice here. The organization itself has a lot of great amenities. The layout is good, the showers and the bathrooms are always clean. Food is delicious and most of the staff are good,” Felice said.
It’s a Friday morning in early October in PATH Metro Villas, one of the organization’s urban campuses. Built in 2019, it offers permanent and interim housing and supportive services for low-income households and individuals. Nearly 200 permanent housing units and 100 interim housing beds, also known as shelters, make up the sprawling complex.
The sun is shining, the grass is cut, everything is clean and there’s a big garden outside.
PATH is one of many organizations using the Housing First approach to address homelessness. Housing First’s guiding principle is that housing is a human right: Everyone deserves housing before requiring employment or addressing physical or mental health needs, such as sobriety, good behavior or regular meetings with a supervisor. The stability of a home allows people to have a foundation to work on these long-term goals.
“Homelessness is not an individual failure but a policy failure,” said Tyler Renner, PATH’s senior director of communications.
Housing First policy has won bipartisan support for over 20 years. The first presidential administration to endorse it was Republican George W. Bush.
Project 2025 suggests a U-turn. The over 900-page-long plan for the first 180 days of a Republican administration published by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation calls Housing First “a far-left idea premised on the belief that homelessness is primarily circumstantial rather than behavioral.”
It calls to “end Housing First policies so that the department prioritizes mental health and substance abuse issues before jumping to permanent interventions in homelessness.”
In other words, Project 2025 would only provide housing to people who maintain their sobriety and address their mental health issues.
Such a decree would make the work of organizations like PATH much more difficult. The federal government has given significant funding to organizations using the Housing First approach.
“Currently the funding based on the Housing First approach is very important for us,” Renner said. “If that is canceled, it would jeopardize our work. Maybe some of the money would be replaced by state or independent funding but PATH probably would need to scale down operations.”
Inside PATH Metro Villas, Felice goes through her life story, which hasn’t been an easy one. It includes drug problems, crimes, sexual abuse, prison time and the death of her child. Her attempts to find an apartment have been unsuccessful.
“I’ve been struggling with housing agencies because they all have these long lists and sometimes they don’t contact you again. I was trying to get a motel voucher, I just always miss it somehow,” Felice said.
People staying on interim housing beds of PATH usually live there for a couple of months to one year. While there, clients work to secure employment and work with a case manager with the eventual goal of finding housing.
Normally, when a person is connected to housing with the help of the organization, they can apply for a housing choice voucher that covers most of the rent expenses. The duration of financial support depends on the individual situation; some receive it indefinitely.
If the government scrapped the Housing First policy, it would harm the lives of unhoused people in California and all over the United States, said Daniel Flaming, the president of the nonprofit research organization Economic Roundtable.
“If the Housing First policy gets abolished, we’ll see more street homelessness,” Flaming said. “The average time of living on the streets in Los Angeles is five years…Most of the people living without housing for a long time have multiple different problems in their life, and if we require them to solve the other problems without providing them with housing, they’ll end up staying on the streets. I don’t think that’s what people actually want.”
The homelessness issue has intensified in the United States in recent years. Experts blame the rise of housing prices, inflation, the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and inconsistent policies for creating the crisis facing over 650,000 people who experienced homelessness in the United States in 2023. Nearly one-fourth of them – 180,000 people – live in California.
This year brought both good and bad news in California. The bad: The number of unhoused people increased last year. At the same time, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered a complete removal of California homeless encampments. The order has been widely criticized.
The good: The rate at which the homelessness crisis is growing has slowed in California. In Los Angeles City and Los Angeles County the amount of homeless people dropped for the first time in years — 2% in the city and under 0.5% in the county.
Many experts say one of the main reasons for this development is the Housing First policy.
“When done properly, Housing First works,” said Benjamin Henwood, the director of USC’s Homeless Policy Research Institute. “It’s been clearly proven to be one of the best tools for addressing homelessness. The previous solutions just made the problem worse.”
The section about housing and homelessness of Project 2025 was written by Benjamin S. Carson Sr., who served as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during Donald Trump’s presidency. He praised Housing First policy publicly in 2017 but changed his mind later when California’s homelessness crisis worsened and Trump began highlighting the issue to criticize the state’s “liberal establishment.”
Trump tried distancing himself from Project 2025 and its extremist right-wing proposals by stating that “he hasn’t even read it,” but close connections to its authors indicate there’s a chance that many of the proposals of Project 2025 will end up becoming U.S. policy if Trump is elected.
The right has targeted this bipartisan approach to ending homelessness in recent years. Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance has been one of the loudest critics of Housing First. Even though the approach made a difference in majority Republican states such as Texas and Utah, conservative authors have written multiple blog posts and articles claiming that Housing First doesn’t work and instead can be deadly.
It’s easy to understand why many may question the effectiveness of the Housing First policy. If it works, why is California experiencing a record-breaking homelessness crisis?
“Even though the amount of unhoused people is still getting bigger, that doesn’t mean the Housing First approach doesn’t work,” Henwood said. “At the same time it can be true that we have an effective solution and that the problem is getting worse because more and more people are becoming unhoused.”
Many said the main reasons for more people experiencing homelessness are unaffordable housing and income problems.
“Los Angeles and California in general have a long history of not building enough houses. L.A. was built around suburbs: The density of the city is nowhere near where it should be. Because we’re not using our land effectively, the housing prices have soared,” Renner said.
According to many experts, the simplest solution would be to build as many new houses as possible to increase the supply and to decrease the housing prices. However, that won’t happen overnight, as supportive housing is expensive to build.
The L.A. Times reported that the under-the-radar proposal to provide enough housing to end homelessness in Los Angeles by the end of 2032 would cost $20.4 billion. One huge reason for the soaring costs of building is the widely criticized California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which is often abused to postpone construction, driving up costs.
Flaming says there should be other actions taken rather than solely focusing on building new houses.
“My opinion is that we can’t house our way out homelessness,” he said. “We need to reduce the flow of new people ending up on the streets. We need to get people employed in the early stages when they’re at the risk of ending up on the streets.”
However, Henwood said that prevention work is complicated, as identifying people who are at risk of ending up homeless is hard. He believes that even if the government ended its support for the Housing First policy, most homeless service organizations would not stop using the approach.
But it’s hard to use any approach to provide housing without funding.
This year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced it will make the largest-ever single-year investment in communities’ homelessness response, providing more than $3.5 billion in competitive funding to homeless services organizations across the country. It’s unclear what would happen to the governmental financial support if Housing First is abolished.
In addition to federal government funding, the organizations also receive money from states, counties, cities and independent operators. States distribute the money to counties, which in turn give the money to organizations. It’s hard to say how much federal money each organization receives. Renner said 89% of their budget comes from federal sources, which includes funding from the state, county and city programs.
If the government does away with the Housing First program, organizations like PATH will have a much harder time helping people like Felice. For now, Felice doesn’t need to worry about that. A week after the first interview, she answered her phone in Metro Villas in the middle of dinner.
“I found an apartment. It’s in Boyle Heights, I’m moving there tomorrow,” she said.
Felice couldn’t sound happier. The apartment is provided by PATH in a brand-new building.
“It came furnished, and the building has a computer room, community room and so on. It’s beautiful. I got my keys today.”
Felice praised PATH for everything they’ve done for her.
“PATH was great for me. Every step they were efficient and got me housed fast. It took only 70 days.”
Earlier in Metro Villas, she spoke about her future plans.
“My passion is interior design. I want to be a designer but I also want to work for PETA to help animals and to be a drug counselor,” she said.
Achieving those dreams gets easier when you have a place to live.