By Stephen Witt
Part of the trouble with covering government and local politics in places where one party—Democratic or Republican—dominates is that both elected officials and the agencies they oversee often lack accountability and resist considering ideas from across the aisle.
Case in point: the Trump administration’s recently released 37-page “Treatment First” Best Practices Toolkit, aimed at confronting the homelessness crisis.
The toolkit argues that a “Treatment First” model would be more effective than the current “Housing First” model. Its central claim: providing housing with no strings attached to someone struggling with drug addiction, mental illness, or trauma only temporarily relieves a symptom, and often leads that person either to abuse the system or to end up back on the street in a revolving door.
That’s a fair argument — especially considering that after billions of tax dollars spent trying to control homelessness, Los Angeles County saw only a 1.2% increase and the city of Los Angeles a 3.4% increase in homelessness this year, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s 2026 point-in-time count.
In raw numbers, that’s more than 73,000 unhoused people countywide and 45,194 in the city of Los Angeles alone — many of them struggling with drug addiction, mental illness and past trauma.
Both Trump and his Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who spearheaded the toolkit, have well-documented personal experience with these issues. Trump has spoken for years about his older brother’s death from alcoholism-related causes and how it shaped his own life. Kennedy is a recovering heroin addict.
While California elected officials recently celebrated a federal court blocking the Trump administration’s attempt to suspend $241 million in federal funding to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, they also need to take a hard look at their own long-failed efforts to curb homelessness.
After touring the Stairway Recovery Center in Woodland Hills this week, LACP asked LA County’s newly created Department of Homeless Services and Housing and its director, Sarah Mahin, whether they had read the toolkit and had any comment on implementing all or part of it.
LACP has received no response to date, despite follow-up emails.
There’s an old axiom: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
The “Housing First” method has clearly shown serious flaws. It’s time local government — and the agencies it oversees — pulled its collective head out of the sand and tried a new course of action.
