By Tom Horvath, PhD
Housing First project launches in Alaska, but the debate about housing first continues.
Anchorage, Alaska, has launched an innovative treatment program that includes housing in tiny homes for unhoused individuals with addictive problems. Press coverage dated April 2, 2026, describes the 32-home community, Willow Commons, which is placed in a parking lot behind municipal buildings. Funding comes in part from opioid settlement money, awarded to the municipality of Anchorage, and then granted to Anchorage Recovery Center, which already operates similar projects.
“Housing First” has been proposed for the unhoused with addictive problems since the 1990s. Rather than requiring someone to be abstinent before granting them housing, it was suggested that housing first would enable success with addictive problems. The idea has been important enough that Portland State University has included it in their Homelessness Research Resources Repository, which is “intended to serve as an online repository of academic research, policy briefs, and other information on best practices and policies in addressing homelessness.”
There are many challenges to housing first, and they mirror challenges to other treatment approaches. Does providing housing without an abstinence or addiction treatment requirement simply enable further use? What is the impact on neighborhoods (including possible drug dealing and violence)? How motivated is the individual to change when this negative consequence (being unhoused) is taken care of for them? How likely is the provision of the other “wrap-around” services that are probably needed? How much does it cost relative to other approaches?
It seems likely that these objections identify results that would occur some of the time. Housing first could enable further use, have some negative impact on neighborhoods, reduce motivation to change, distract from the provision of the other services that would also be needed, and finally, be more expensive than other approaches.
Many of the arguments against housing first are summarized by a white paper from the Cicero Institute, a non-profit, non-partisan, right-leaning (founded by a billionaire), public policy institute which focuses on state level legislation and market-based solutions. The Institute itself may be as controversial as housing first.
As with many attempts to address our major societal problems with legislation, the details become critically important. I suspect that individual cases will illustrate both the strengths of housing first and its weaknesses. Perhaps over time we will determine how to identify in advance when it is likely to be effective or not. At the very least it would appear that those answers will require further research.
https://omeka.pdx.edu/exhibits/show/housingfirstoverview/housingfirstoverview2
https://ciceroinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Rejecting-Housing-First-10-18-2024.pdf
Liked this article on the Housing First debate? You might also be interested in: Addiction Treatment is Sick, Not the People Treated, by Thaddeus Camlin, Psy.D.
