Mirror, mirror
Hello and Happy Holidays! In the spirit of the holiday season, I would like to address a challenging yet necessary topic. Many of our neighbors and family members are struggling to find adequate housing. However you define it—unsheltered, doubled-up, couch surfing, or trapped in a motel week-to-week—homelessness is a mirror we don’t like to look into for long.
And yet, in Illinois, the mirror is becoming harder to ignore, as the numbers and the strain on shelters, hospitals, schools, and policing are becoming increasingly evident everywhere. Moreover, when people ask, “Why is this happening?” they usually mean, “Where did the help go?”
To be clear, I have a brother who has suffered from addiction and homelessness for the better part of 35 years. My family and I have done our best to support him and help him find permanent shelter, but there are limited funds on our side and through public support.
God bless us, everyone!
Every time I hear the line from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, when Scrooge asks the men seeking charity, "Are there no prisons? ... And the Union workhouses?” I get upset. You see, the "Union workhouses" Scrooge mentions were institutions created by the New Poor Law. These facilities were designed to be intentionally harsh and dehumanizing to discourage people from seeking aid.
People of the 1800s felt that too much charity to the unworthy would only create more people seeking to take advantage of the system. Yes, fear-based and shortsighted all those years ago.
Therefore, this week I want to investigate a simple claim that gets repeated in a thousand ways: we used to fund the safety net more, and now we don’t. The truth is both more complicated—and more revealing.
In many cases, funding didn’t disappear; instead, it shifted toward systems that respond after the fall (ERs, jails, crisis response) and away from systems that prevent the fall (stable housing, prevention, supportive services).
Misaligned
To begin with, federal homelessness assistance has grown over time, at least in raw dollars. For example, a long-running Congressional Research Service overview notes that Homeless Assistance Grants funding rose by roughly $1 billion over a decade, leading to FY2017 (from about $1.4B in FY2007 to nearly $2.4B in FY2017), but also explains why communities still feel squeezed: a large share goes to renewing existing grants, leaving less room to expand coverage. Congress.gov
Meanwhile, the deeper “30-year” story is that need outpaced capacity, especially as rents rose faster than wages, and as supportive housing supply failed to keep up. For instance, Harvard’s State of the Nation’s Housing 2025 notes that federal housing assistance has not kept pace with rising need and reiterates that only about one in four income-eligible renters receives a subsidy. Joint Center for Housing Studies+1
So yes—some lines grow, but the system still functions like a bucket brigade trying to put out a wildfire with cups.
Talk about It!
However, the most important reallocation isn’t always a “cut” to a homelessness line item. Instead, it’s the long-running imbalance where the U.S. spends enormous resources on housing through the tax code—benefits that lean heavily toward homeowners and higher-income households—while rental assistance that prevents homelessness remains rationed.
In other words, the government rewards certain housing choices with tax breaks (mortgage loans make more money for banks), and those rewards mostly go to people who already have more money. The funds cited for “housing” are in the billions and go as tax relief, not to help the homeless. It is a bit of a shell game.
To clarify, Benefits that lean heavily toward homeowners and higher-income households mean that most federal housing support flows through tax deductions only available to people who already own property, and the higher their income, the more valuable those deductions become. As a result, a household earning $200,000 with a large mortgage can save thousands each year automatically, while a renter on the edge of eviction receives no comparable support.
Loan(r)s
For example, CBPP has documented how federal housing expenditures are skewed toward homeownership and higher-income households, while rental assistance is deeply underfunded relative to need. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Meanwhile, even older budget-trend work from the National Low Income Housing Coalition highlighted that housing-related tax expenditures have dwarfed direct low-income housing assistance for decades, showing a structural tilt in federal choices. National Low Income Housing Coalition
Therefore, when someone says, “We don’t fund homelessness as we used to,” what they often feel is this: we fund housing—just not the kind of housing support that keeps the most vulnerable from slipping into the street.
Don't show me the Money!
On the state side, Illinois has tried to organize a more coordinated response. For example, the National Low Income Housing Coalition described Illinois’ creation of a dedicated “Home Illinois” line item as a historic investment, noting $85 million in new funding when it launched. National Low Income Housing Coalition
However, budgets tighten, and priorities show themselves. In July 2025 reporting, Illinois’ FY2026 budget was described as reducing funding for programs serving homeless people, including a cut to “Home Illinois.” Capitol News Illinois
How much of the $85M was reallocated? Roughly $30 million was taken, bringing the program’s effective funding down to approximately $55 million. As a result, about 35% of the original Home Illinois investment was removed within just a few budget cycles.
So the Illinois story is not “nothing is being done.” Rather, it’s that we keep trying to solve a rising, statewide systems problem with funding that is vulnerable to annual budget turbulence—even as the downstream costs (ER visits, crisis calls, encampment clearances, school disruption) stay on autopilot.
Where did it go?
Importantly, homelessness is expensive—even when we pretend it’s not. When preventive housing support is insufficient, spending often shifts into “response systems” that are more costly per outcome and less humane. In other words, the ledger still gets paid—just in different departments.
Here are four common destinations where effort and money are often reallocated when prevention and housing stability fall short. First, emergency healthcare and crisis response absorb a growing share of the cost. Therefore, when someone cannot stabilize through housing or supportive services, the hospital becomes the shelter of last resort. This outcome is not a moral failure or a lack of compassion on the part of medical providers; rather, it is the predictable result of a system designed to intervene only after a person reaches crisis.
Moreover, corrections and public safety systems quietly take on another share of the burden. As documented by organizations like the Prison Policy Initiative, communities across the country have learned—often at great expense—that cycling people through jails does not create stability or long-term safety.
Nevertheless, when housing options are limited, incarceration becomes an expensive substitute for care, even though it fails to address the root causes of homelessness.
Pay me first
However, even within homelessness funding itself, resources often tilt toward short-term shelter rather than long-term housing solutions. The tension between “managing the emergency” and “ending the emergency” remains unresolved.
Although federal policy frameworks increasingly emphasize permanent housing and supportive services, as reflected in ongoing debates and statutory language tracked by Congress.gov, funding structures still leave many communities stuck prioritizing immediate containment over lasting stability.
Meanwhile, administrative fragmentation continues to drain effectiveness from the system as a whole. Illinois’ own planning materials, including guidance from the Illinois Department of Human Services, repeatedly emphasize the need for coordination and centralized access points.
Implicit in that emphasis is an uncomfortable truth: when services are scattered across agencies, eligibility rules, and funding streams, resources leak, timelines stretch, and people fall through the cracks—often at far greater cost than prevention would have required.
FYI, three of the four above involve organizations that are paid by the state, and one is purely governmental. In other words, it reveals a system that reliably funds private companies to manage emergencies but treats prevention as discretionary.
Once of Prevention
So if the question is, “Where did the funds go?” the better and more productive question becomes: what if we moved money upstream on purpose? In Illinois, that shift would not require abstract theory or experimental policy. Instead, it would involve practical, measurable changes that focus on preventing homelessness before it becomes a crisis.
Expanding rental assistance and eviction prevention would reduce the number of families ever entering shelters in the first place, while scaling permanent supportive housing would stabilize high-acuity individuals who currently cycle through emergency rooms and jails at far greater public cost.
At the same time, funding street outreach and navigation services that are directly tied to housing placement—not merely encampment movement—would help convert first contact into lasting stability. Moreover, applying a “pay for outcomes” approach would allow Illinois to measure real success through reductions in emergency room utilization, jail bookings, and school mobility, rather than simply counting services delivered.
Most importantly, when resources are shifted upstream, the moral argument and the budget argument finally align: prevention is not only more humane—it is consistently less expensive than crisis.
Souls desire
Ultimately, it’s easy to talk about homelessness like it’s a personal defect. However, the pattern we’re watching—rising housing costs, limited rental subsidies, patchwork services, and response systems that cost more than prevention—is a systems design problem.
Therefore, if we want a different outcome, we don’t start by shaming the person on the street. Instead, we start by asking: What did we fund reliably, for decades, and what did we treat like a yearly debate? Because when housing stability is treated as optional, instability becomes inevitable.
And yet, even now, the fix is not mystical. It’s structural. It’s coordinated. And it’s deeply human. Moreover, when we choose to invest upstream, we aren’t just “helping them.” We’re reducing pressure on hospitals, schools, taxpayers, neighborhoods, and families—because all of this is connected.
