WASHINGTON, D.C. – Senator JD Vance (R-OH) questioned witnesses during a hearing of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs regarding homelessness and so-called ‘Housing First’ policies.
Watch Senator Vance’s full exchange here:
“I worry about this in this particular context, because whether it’s in our urban communities or in our rural communities, if we don’t treat the root cause of homelessness, we end up creating cycles of despair where even when you get women like this into a good home, ultimately it can be very destructive and not ultimately solve the very problem that we’re trying to solve,” said Senator Vance.
“I really worry that what Housing First has done is taken a lot of people who are very much struggling and very much deserving of our compassion, though I think how we provide that compassion is up for debate, but it also introduces people with serious drug problems, with serious mental illness problems, into communities with kids who are already in a very unstable situation. And now they’re having things like drug use normalized around them.”
###