Many old school homeless advocates resisted Mangano’s approach. They were impelled by two main objections:
1. They believed that homelessness was just the most extreme form of a problem faced by low-income people generally — a lack of affordable housing for low-income people. Focusing resources on the nation’s hardest cases would (these advocates feared) distract the federal government from the bigger project of subsidizing better housing for millions of people who did not literally live in the streets.
2. By 2002, the nation had been worrying about homelessness for several decades. Countless programs from state and local agencies responded to some separate part of the problem; tens of thousands of people earned their livings in those state and local agencies, disposing of massive budgets. “Housing first” threatened to disrupt this vast industry. “Housing first” was comparatively cheap, for one thing: a homeless shelter might look squalid, but it cost a great deal to operate — more, oftentimes, than a proper apartment with kitchen and bath. The transition to “housing first” threatened jobs and budgets across the country.
There was only one counterargument to these objections: “Housing first” worked. It worked from the start, and it worked fast.