Matt Yglesias

Homelessness

One of the few policy successes of the Bush administration has been Phillip Mangano’s “Housing First” initiative which has slightly increased costs of federal homelessness policy and dramatically increased the success of said policies. McClatchy had a good story on this topic over the weekend, which prompted Ed Morrissey to whine that there hasn’t been enough coverage of Bush’s successes in this regard. Maybe yes, maybe no. But if you want to learn more about Mangano and Housing First, check out Douglas McGray’s 2004 Atlantic article. There was also a good Boston Globe piece last year and a New York Times article over the summer.

The further good news is that the initiative doesn’t actually appear to be especially controversial, so the prospects for continuing to build on the past several years worth of success are good. The bad news is that one of the major candidates is promises to cut domestic discretionary spending indiscriminately which really would threaten a lot of the success that Mangano’s been able to achieve with what’s still, at the end of the day, a pretty small amount of money.