The leader of the organization that operates the city’s family shelter is concerned about a housing policy change ordered by President Donald Trump in July that the Department of Housing and Urban Development has started to implement.

Lisa Hann of Family Services Inc. is worried that HUD’s renouncing of its previous policy of “housing first” will make it harder for her organization to secure permanent housing for clients of the organization’s family shelter when they have reached the end of their approximately month-long stays there, she said at a recent meeting of the city’s Hope for the Homeless committee.

The prior housing-first policy called for obtaining housing for individuals struggling with substance abuse or mental health problems, so they have a stable base from which to launch attempts at recovery, but the Trump administration’s proposed new policy calls for individuals “who suffer from substance use disorder or serious mental illness (to) use substance abuse treatment or mental health services as a condition of participation” in federal housing and homelessness assistance programs.

Hann would prefer that the policy change not “come to fruition.”

“It (will make) our job so much more difficult,” she said.

In the early 1990s, prior to the adoption of the housing first policies that Hann favors, it was thought that individuals had to be “clean and sober and in recovery” to warrant being helped with housing, according to online sources and Hann.

But that old policy was problematic, because it is difficult to focus on recovery without a roof over your head, according to Hann.

“If you’re on the street, struggling to find a place to stay every night, you don’t have a routine,” Hann said, suggesting that developing a routine can help with recovery.

“Desperation breeds using other coping mechanisms” — like addictive substances, she said.

Even with housing provided, recovery isn’t easy, given life’s other stressors, she said.

She’d like to see the housing first model continue, despite Trump’s executive order — provided the federal government also provides the additional resources that are necessary to make things work for struggling individuals, she said.

Actually, housing first “depriortize(s) accountability and fail(s) to promote treatment, recovery and self-sufficiency,” the executive order states.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.