By Stephen Witt, Los Angeles County Politics (LACP)
A homeless outreach program built and funded in Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger‘s Fifth District was singled out as a successful new model to treat homelessness in a “Treatment First” Best Practices Toolkit that Trump administration officials released yesterday.
Barger (R-Palmdale, Lancaster, Santa Clarita, San Marino, Pasadena, La Cañada Flintridge, and portions of the San Gabriel Valley) has funded the LA County Sheriff’s Department’s Homeless Outreach Services Team (HOST) dedicated specifically to the Fifth District since 2022, separate from the teams serving the rest of the county.
An entire chapter of the 37-page best practices toolkit looks at the HOST program. The chapter, entitled “A Community Response Model for Homeless Encampments,” lays out a five-step framework for identifying, engaging and resolving encampments.
“That is why I chose to directly fund HOST teams dedicated solely to the Fifth District, separate from the teams that serve the County at large,” said Barger. “The results speak for themselves: in regions like the Antelope Valley, we have seen unsheltered homelessness decline, encampments cleared safely and compassionately, and individuals reunited with family members and loved ones.
“I appreciate the federal toolkit’s recognition of HOST and the multidisciplinary approach it represents. It reinforces an important lesson: meaningful progress depends on strong partnerships across public safety, healthcare, housing, and human services,” Barger added.
The 2026 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count, released July 24, found unsheltered homelessness in the Antelope Valley fell 37% even as the countywide count rose for the first time in two years.
HOST pairs sworn LASD deputies, trained in crisis intervention and stabilization, directly with outreach workers in the field — a hybrid law-enforcement model that differs from the county’s more common civilian-only outreach teams. The program uses a decision-making framework called ROAR — Respond, Observe, Assess, React — that officials say is meant to keep interactions compassion-first rather than enforcement-first.
The toolkit itself is built around a broader argument that breaks sharply from the dominant federal homelessness policy of the past two decades. It explicitly rejects “Housing First,” the approach — prioritized under both Republican and Democratic administrations since the early 2000s — of moving people into permanent housing without preconditions like sobriety or treatment participation, then layering in services afterward.
“It is critical we focus on real solutions that lift Americans out of homelessness,” said U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner in the toolkit. “We must abandon the failed ‘Housing First’ policies that have misused taxpayer-funded resources without any expectation of results and too often leave individuals trapped in addiction, untreated mental illness, and indefinite dependence on government systems. HUD will promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency.”
The toolkit argues that “Treatment First” — engagement in evidence-based addiction and mental health treatment from the outset, paired with law enforcement, healthcare and housing providers working as one team — works better than the “Housing First” model.
“We’ll engage people continuously, from first contact on the street through recovery, through employment and through self-sufficiency,” said U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Law enforcement, courts, housing providers and healthcare systems will work as one team, so people will no longer fall through the cracks.”
The toolkit’s release comes as the Trump administration is separately locked in a legal fight over homelessness funding closer to home: the administration has withheld federal dollars from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority over allegations of mismanagement, according to NewsNation.
