THE WEEKLY REVEAL
Saturday, August 16, 2025
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Trump’s Homelessness Crackdown Has Been Tried Before. It Didn’t Work.
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Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty
Hi, it’s Josh Sanburn, producer with More To The Story.
About a decade ago, I first wrote about Sam Tsemberis, a clinical psychologist who remade the way we approach homelessness in America. Back in the 1990s, Sam was tasked with getting people who lived on the streets in New York City into hospitals for treatment.
At the time, the way most cities dealt with unhoused people—a population on the rise because of the Reagan administration’s cuts to public housing and rent subsidies—was to deal with mental health and substance abuse issues first and provide housing later. But on his way to and from work each day, Sam noticed that the same people he got into treatment often ended up back on the streets. Nothing changed.
Sam soon came up with a new concept: Housing First. Get people into housing and then deal with underlying issues later through support services. The approach routinely proved to be twice as successful as a treatment-first strategy and became the basis for the federal approach to homelessness under the George W. Bush administration. Over the last 15 years, it helped cut veterans’ homelessness in half. So when I was writing about Sam a decade ago, Housing First was a success story.
But today, the Trump administration is rewriting that story and shifting the federal government away from Sam’s model and back toward a treatment-first approach, despite the many studies showing Housing First’s effectiveness. It’s merely the latest science-based policy being discarded by the current administration.
On this week’s More To The Story, host Al Letson sits down with Sam to take a look at how his approach is being abandoned 30 years after stumbling upon a new way forward and how that could have serious consequences for the hundreds of thousands of people who live on the streets every night.
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Find this episode wherever you listen to Reveal, and don’t forget to subscribe:
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What Police Weren’t Told About Tasers
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Kansas City police Officer Matt Masters first used a Taser in the early 2000s. He said it worked well for taking people down; it was safe and effective.
“At the end of the day, if you have to put your hands on somebody, you got to scuffle with somebody, why risk that?” he said. “You can just shoot them with a Taser.”
Then one day, his son Bryce was pulled over by an officer and shocked for more than 20 seconds. The result landed Bryce in the hospital with cardiac arrest. Masters’ training had led him to believe something like this could never happen.
As he went down a research rabbit hole following his son’s incident, Masters found reports of other Taser injuries and deaths and studies that showed the company that makes the Taser might have known its weapon was dangerous all along, but didn’t warn police. Instead, the company insisted there was nothing to worry about.
This week on Reveal, we partner with Lava for Good’s podcast Absolute: Taser Incorporated and its host, Nick Berardini, to learn the truth about Tasers and the company that makes them.
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🎧 Other places to listen: Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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