Talk:Housing First

Undue weight of criticism section

The criticism section is a wonderful example of politically-motivated WP:UNDUE and WP:CRYSTAL. We have five paragraphs predicting the failure of the program in the U.S. and its imminent demise, while current reliable sources say the exact opposite, and describe it as the most successful homelessness program in American history. Viriditas (talk) 00:02, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

I agree with Viriditas that the criticism section is unduly weighted still, although I assume the article's contents have changed a fair amount since 2015.

Now, the criticism section mainly cites one paper where the only criticism is that Housing First policies don't sufficiently take ideological values into account and mainly rely on evidence. The paper itself uses the word 'positivist', but in how I read it they almost treat that word akin to 'empiricist but unjustifiably so'. The paper also makes a sweeping statement about what they claim critics of positivism argue, yet this statement in the paper itself has no citation to refer to. How it is quoted in the WP article, it seems the main critique of Housing First policies is that it is a progressive policy that in the US was implemented by a conservative administration and therefore incongruous (which is therefore bad?). This is in and of itself an unjustly simplistic view of conservatism, where the assumption of 'If scientific, empirical evidence dictates that a progressive policy (e.g. Housing First) would be better at achieving the desired result (e.g. reduce homelessness) than a conservative one (e.g. anti-homeless legislation such as park/metro benches one cannot sleep on or anti-vagrancy laws), a conservative executive should not implement it solely because it is progressive in nature' is made.

Also, the criticism is made that Housing First does not address or deal with other issues that correlate with homelessness such as substance abuse or mental illness. This criticism seemingly assumes that Housing First procludes other additional policies from being made to deal with those issues, or that Housing First is somehow incompatible with mental health support or rehabilitative programs. This is mentioned in the second paragraph to some extent, but then this is unjustifiably undermined due to the somewhat anti-empiricist claims by the main paper that is cited in the criticism section.

Finally, the criticism (again, mainly based on one article from 2011) fails to take into account all of the overwhelmingly, almost unanimously positive outcomes that Housing First policies have had in other countries (before and after the publishing of the article). The section on Housing First outside the US mainly talks about aims and predicted outcomes, but there is now plenty of data to provide for each of these countries and more (e.g. Finland, where this policy has been introduced on a national level and now it is one of the few i(f not the only) EU country where homelessness is actively and consistently falling, even taking people who are 'couch-surfing' into account). The section on evidence and outcome only discusses results from the US, which is a problem with this article as a whole.

If someone wants to quickly find out about criticisms of Housing First and only scrolls down to the criticism section, this section would give a very biased, US-centric, anti-scientific view of Housing First, where conservative ideology is strawmanned and policy efficacy claims rooted in verifiable data and falsifiable hypotheses are equivalent to ideological values rooted in origins of any kind, be they biased, religious, prejudicial, apocryphal, etc.

Furthermore, the exceptions section adds nothing to this article. LynTu (talk) 16:09, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. This was the version I was criticizing back in 2015. How do you propose moving forward with the new version? I just took a look at the edit history and it appears this topic has been heavily edited by people who identify as arch right wing conservative libertarians, who frankly take an ideological position at odds with this article. I would like to suggest a major rewrite that pays close attention to any bias that’s been introduced by these editors. As it stands, the preferred policies of these editors has increased and exacerbated homelessness in the US, not decreased it, and their social Darwinist perspective tends to be in favor of homelessness, not against it. This presents major problems for neutrality and accuracy. Viriditas (talk) 22:21, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

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