Patrick Marquis

We started to see that you don't need to do treatment first.

You actually need to do housing first.

Exactly.

And it's just the most frustrating thing in the world.

I mean, we're really starting to see it come back with a vengeance now.

You know, Donald Trump...

and the sort of MAGA movement have really been pushing this idea of treatment first again and waging some just incredible attacks on the housing first approach.

Once again, it's this idea of trying to sort of demonize and pathologize homeless people, to try and claim that the problem is a problem of personal dysfunction or...

You know, homeless people are either lazy or they're dysfunctional or they're pathological, that the problem is you've got to fix those people first and that's how you solve the problem of homelessness instead of looking at it as a systemic problem.

And what we really learned through the Housing First approach, you know, is that...

You know, if your goal, your end goal is to help somebody who's, say, living with mental illness to kind of get stability, to get treatment for their mental illness, or somebody who's recovering from addiction to be able to, you know, recover from drugs or alcohol, then you need that person to be in a home.

It's so much easier to engage in that kind of treatment, to take medication, to...

to get into recovery programs.

It's so much easier to do that when you have a home.

To instead say, well, we want that person to do that while they're sleeping rough on the streets or while they're sleeping in a shelter, you know, crowded with hundreds of other people is just counterproductive.

It just doesn't make sense.

Yes, it's just stunning.

I mean, they make up 90% of the homeless population.

Black New Yorkers make up nearly 60% of the homeless population.

Latinos make up around 30%.