Like, for example, inability to consume alcohol or use drugs, which is half of the reason people in US refuse shelters (the other half is that shelters are full of homeless people).
Or designed to handle homeless cases not related to addiction. That the arguments “Not all homeless are drug addicts and/or mentally ill” and “homeless services not designed to deal with drug addiction and/or mental illness will fail” are often located close to each other annoys me. There is plenty of low hanging fruit to be had in dealing with the easier homeless cases. While we shouldn’t ignore the harder cases, it’s no excuse for waiting to pick that low hanging fruit.
Note that that is only a problem as long as you consider addicts consuming drugs in government-provided shelters a worse problem than addicts consuming drugs on the streets.
You can, at least for some drugs: in many places, possession of drugs is a criminal offense, carrying jail term. However, it is commonly understood today that jailing addicts so that they can recover in controlled setting is inhumane, as opposed to letting them overdose under the bridge.
Housing first works for easier homeless cases that don’t involve substance abuse or severe mental illness (or both). It makes sense to give people housing if they can handle maintaining it on their own. For the harder homeless cases, at best they will sublet for drug money and at worst, the neighbors aren’t going to be very happy. You can’t just handout housing without some treatment or supervision.
That's why it's housing first, not housing-only. Utah's successful experiment in it included using that housing to enable regular access to social workers and other services, for example; it's a lot easier to deal with a mental illness if you're not worrying about a roof over your head.
That’s not what the article says. Instead, it specified that costs increased and the state didn’t build new subsidized housing units to keep up with increasing demand.
So how much more money does Utah need to spend to really solve its problem?
I got the impression from the article that they would have to go through a social worker and explicitly apply for housing but that it's granted more or less unconditionally. I didn't look into details (actual website is down) but it doesn't seem like it's forced on people in a way that they would have to "refuse" it.
