>Housing's just a symptom, a lot of the homeless have underlying addiction and mental issues that need to be addressed otherwise even if you give them an apartment they'll just wreck it.

The problem is that a lot of these articles that talk about things such as homeless people tearing copper out of walls and selling them to get drugs, for example, are purely anecdotal. Do these things happen? Yes. Does everyone involved in housing first become a functioning, working member of society? No.

What focusing on these instances totally misses is the bigger picture... how much money is saved in housing first interventions? How much is homelessness, and pathologies related to homelessness, reduced overall? For these questions, we need hard quantitative data, not qualitative case instances.

So far, the data that I have looked at has implied housing first (a) saves taxpayer money, (b) reduces significantly, with housed individuals less likely to return to the streets, and (c) reduces health pathologies, including addiction, that are related to homelessness. This is the discussion we should be having.... in other words, what does the data say?