Late 2025 was a chaotic time for the organizations and agencies that provide services for people experiencing homelessness in Northeast Ohio. In November, the federal government announced funding changes so radical and swift that it appeared that thousands of people in Cuyahoga County would lose their housing in a matter of months.
“I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve just never experienced anything like what is happening right now,” Elaine Gimmel, executive director of housing provider EDEN, Inc., said a few weeks after the announcement. Anxious clients living in housing owned or subsidized by EDEN were hearing about the changes in the news and calling the staff seeking clarity. Staffers explained as well as they could — there was a lot they didn’t know either — while quietly wondering if their jobs were in jeopardy.
Since then, the outlook has improved somewhat. Amid a lawsuit and political pressure, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) withdrew the new guidelines set to take effect in January. Then Congress passed a spending bill that ensured funding and scaled back some of the changes, at least for this year.
But major changes are still on the horizon and could hit Cleveland and Cuyahoga County hard. Federal funding currently supports housing for about 2,700 people in the county, and as many as two-thirds of them could lose that assistance in a couple of years.
For more than 20 years, local officials have used a model called “housing first.” The approach gets people into stable housing as quickly as possible. Providers offer mental health, substance abuse or employment help – but participation isn’t mandated to get help with housing.
HUD has funded and encouraged housing first programs for most of this century. But last summer, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that called for a shift to what’s called transitional housing, which requires participation in services and cuts off housing support after two years.
The last few months have been “a whirlwind,” said LeVine Ross, director of the Cuyahoga County Office of Homeless Services. “We have been getting our [federal] grants in seamlessly, so we’re hoping that will continue for this year.”
Meanwhile, she and everyone else working with the homeless in Greater Cleveland anxiously await the new guidelines.
An option for people with ‘the highest barriers’
The housing first model was developed in New York City in the 1980s. Cleveland-based EDEN (which stands for Emerald Development and Economic Network) was an early adopter. Its West St. James facility, opened in 1991 in Cleveland Heights, was the first local example of a key tenet of the housing first approach, permanent supportive housing. It brought housing and social services together and promised both indefinitely.
In 2001, the county Office of Homeless Services, the Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland and the Enterprise Foundation pitched the concept to the Cuyahoga County Continuum of Care, HUD’s term for a coalition of organizations working together to address homelessness in a given area. (The county’s Office of Homeless Services receives funding from HUD and disperses it among the local providers. Today there are around 40.)
Housing first advocates argued that permanent housing with optional services was the best way to serve people who had experienced long-term or repeated periods of homelessness due to mental health or addiction struggles. In Cuyahoga County, that group included higher percentages of single adult males, African Americans and veterans than the national averages, according to a 2002 report by a Cleveland State University researcher.
Housing first is effective for people who have “the highest barriers to housing, who have significant trauma, substance use disorder or mental illness,” said Corrie Taylor, CEO of FrontLine Service, a behavioral and primary healthcare provider, in an interview.
Between 2006 and 2017, chronic homelessness in Cuyahoga County dropped 86%, according to a report from EDEN andFrontLine Service.
HUD and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which adopted housing first models in 2012, extensively studied effectiveness. The VA reviewed the evidence in 2023 and found that housing first “leads to quicker exits from homelessness and greater housing stability over time.”
HUD’s review the same year cited multiple studies showing that housing first saves the government money by keeping people out of more expensive residential treatment facilities and prisons. That report is only available on the Internet Archive. In late December it disappeared from HUD’s web site.
‘It’s going to be devastating’
When HUD rolled out its new guidelines in November, HUD Secretary Scott Turner said in a statement that it marked the end of steady funding for “the failed ‘Housing First’ ideology, which encourages dependence on endless government handouts while neglecting to address the root causes of homelessness, including illicit drugs and mental illness.”
Going forward, only 30% of funding could be used on those programs. Clients would be required to participate in the social services that were previously voluntary — up to 40 hours per week — and their housing would be capped at two years. (The average length of stay at an EDEN facility is about four years, Gimmel said. Many people are able to find and move into their own places.)
Local providers said the most striking change was in the funding formula.
For years, 90% of funding was essentially guaranteed year to year and 10% was “competitive,” or contingent on scores in a review process. The new guidelines flipped that to 30% guaranteed and 70% competitive. And scoring included new metrics like client participation in services; a policy of involuntary commitment to psychiatric or rehabilitation facilities for clients who refuse; reporting undocumented people; and cooperation with local law enforcement on issues such as drug use and sleeping outside (which is not illegal in Cleveland and could be a score reduction).
And all of this was to take effect in January.
Analysis by the National Alliance to End Homelessness showed that Cuyahoga County stood to lose more than $33 million in funding — more than all but six other places (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and the Houston area).
EDEN participated in a nationwide effort to persuade members of Congress to intervene. “We’ve probably done more advocacy over this last year than we ever have done,” Gimmel said in a recent interview. “We had people participating all over the state, all saying the same thing, ‘It’s going to be devastating.’ That really hit home with a lot of our representatives.”
Amid the lobbying and a lawsuit — filed by the National Alliance and joined by others — HUD backed off its plan to make the new guidelines effective immediately. Then in February, Congress passed a HUD spending bill that maintains funding levels for this year but resets the formula for next year at 60% guaranteed and 40% competitive.
That’s an improvement over the previously announced 30-70 split, but the bill also caps spending on housing first programs at 60% of total funding.
Ohio Senators John Husted and Bernie Moreno voted for the funding bill. A spokesperson for Husted told Signal Cleveland that his office had been in “consistent communication” with EDEN since September and had communicated the organization’s concerns to congressional colleagues and the Trump administration.
The guidelines for next year’s funding are expected in June.
“I do not see [the Trump] administration changing course,” said Marcy Thompson, vice president of programs and policy at the National Alliance. “I think they made it very clear the direction that they intend to go” in last year’s executive order, which was titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.”
The administration’s position seems to be that “anybody who is sleeping outside has a mental illness or a substance use disorder, and everybody who has a mental illness or substance use disorder is a criminal,” Thompson said.
‘Never let anyone go back into homelessness’
The funding changes come at an extraordinarily challenging time.
The National Alliance’s 2025 State of Homelessness report, released in September, was the latest in a series since 2020 to show that, across the country, progress made in the 2010s is being undone by dwindling housing stock, skyrocketing costs and stagnant funding levels for rental assistance and other helpful programs.
In Cuyahoga County, the number of people experiencing chronic homelessness rose more than 50% — from 204 to 315 — between 2022 and 2025.
Cuyahoga County continuum leaders are sorting through the implications. How many of the 2,700 people currently living in permanent supportive housing will be able to stay? How many can they transfer to transitional housing? And how much will they be able to do over the next couple of years, with possibly reduced funding, to prepare people for the day their assistance runs out?
EDEN will focus on “the people who have been homeless the longest amount of time and people who have the most severe disabilities,” Gimmel said.
FrontLine is figuring out how to ramp up its employment and substance use disorder services, Taylor said, as well as how to meet HUD’s new requirements for providers to report on their clients’ participation in services.
“We’re also thinking through what it means for people who are not successful after two years,” she added. “Are we going to see a huge increase in individuals becoming homeless in two years when they’re not able to make that transition to being fully independent without any supportive services?”
Avoiding that is the top priority, Ross said.
“The overarching goal,” she said, “is never let anyone go back into homelessness. That’s the last thing we want to see happen.”
