A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked a Trump administration homelessness plan that would have ended support for most long-term housing programs and required more people to seek treatment for addiction or mental illness.
The plan, released in November, sought the most significant changes in decades to policy affecting homeless people and would have governed $3.9 billion in awards to community organizations under a program called Continuum of Care.
Groups opposed to the move said that only Congress had the authority to shift the program away from its longstanding approach, called Housing First, and that the speed of the change could send as many as 170,000 people back to the streets.
Judge Mary S. McElroy of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island issued a preliminary injunction that prevents the sudden rule change. “Ensuring lawful agency action, continuity of housing and stability for vulnerable populations is clearly in the public interest,” she said.
Her ruling applied to two lawsuits raising similar issues, one by Democratic attorneys general and another by a mix of advocacy groups and local governments. Among those groups are the National Alliance to End Homelessness and the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
The groups said the ruling offered vulnerable people “respite from the government’s assault.”
About 90 percent of the annual spending typically goes to renew existing programs. But the administration’s efforts to end that practice and distribute the money under new rules have left most local programs uncertain if they can continue to house people next year.
The funding decisions are months behind schedule, and annual contracts start to expire as soon as next month. But Friday’s ruling may not be the last word amid some unusual legal maneuvering.
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In a move that drew the judge’s complaint, the Department of Housing and Urban Development withdrew its plan last week to make “appropriate revisions,” and government lawyers then suggested Judge McElroy should not rule on the withdrawn document because it was moot. Rejecting that argument, Judge McElroy said on Friday that HUD was trying “to evade court jurisdiction.”
John Bailey, a Justice Department lawyer representing HUD, said the department planned to reissue the rules, but by Friday evening it had not done so. It was not clear if the revisions would address Judge McElroy’s concerns. While the machinations can seem esoteric, the stakes are high. Homelessness is at a record level, and the Continuum of Care program is the federal government’s main response.
Housing First provides chronically homeless people long-term housing and offers treatment for addiction or mental illness. But it does not require them to accept that treatment.
Proponents emphasize that a large body of research shows the approach works better than treatment mandates in getting people housed and hail it as “evidence based.” But the once-bipartisan policy has come under sharp conservative attack, and the rules HUD issued in November would have cut funding for long-term housing by about two-thirds.
The Trump administration argues the prospect of free housing encourages irresponsible behavior, and grant-making rules penalize groups like rescue missions that favor sobriety mandates. In issuing the new rules, Scott Turner, the HUD secretary, said Housing First had driven homelessness higher by neglecting the “root causes of homelessness, including illicit drugs and mental illness.”
In the effort to impose new rules, HUD also sought to use homelessness money to advance unrelated priorities related to gender and race. The rules would have allowed the department to reject community groups that previously or currently embraced policies that “facilitate racial preferences” or “use a definition of sex other than as binary in humans.”
A HUD spokesman, asked about the legal developments, said the department was “committed to program reforms” and would proceed according to the law.
Jason DeParle is a Times reporter who covers poverty in the United States.
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