The Christian Documentary that's Lying to you about Homelessness

Americans with No Address: a case-study in faith-based disinformation

This is the year that I committed to spend less time arguing with lies and more time telling the truth.

Today is a day where, to sleep well at night, I need to do both.

The reason? This documentary:

The documentary purports to communicate “a poignant exploration of the homeless crisis in America.” The movie has an unmasked bend towards faith-based shelter, framing these as the sound, obvious solutions. It gives endless screen time to the founders, CEOs, and advocates for faith-based institutions, and only interviews four (maybe five) individuals (and minimally, at that) who represent evidence-based models like harm reduction and Housing First. It drags these approaches through the mud without data, and then misrepresents the results of the institutions they deem successful. (I’ll go into detail shortly.)

Why is this important? Because they have a strong marketing push. It’s been my observation that churches are seeing this as the documentary “for them.” This week, I spent time with a church that did a group study of my book, then watched this documentary in preparation for me coming to give a lecture. I don’t blame this church whatsoever—this documentary is targeting the same audience that my book is, and offers what it suggests is a compassionate and faith-based response to a crisis affecting all of us. This particular church had the benefit of book-ending it with what I hope was a better message, but the vast majority won’t.

So with that, I want to present the biggest myths and outright lies that I observed watching Americans With No Address (AwNA). This won’t be comprehensive, primarily because I don’t want to have to watch it again. But I hope this is enough to ward off many from seeking this out, and to serve as a response to those who have or will.

1. AwNA claims that Housing First is a failed policy that leads to returns to homelessness

This is the most easily disprovable of the claims the film makes, not the least of which because it presents no data to support it. As I’ve written about countless times, Housing First is a method that has been proven empirically over and over and over and over to end homelessness with a success rate between 80-90%. The film’s depiction of this tried and true method is to interview staff of faith-based shelters who simply offer their own anecdotes and straw-man of what Housing First is. There are multiple interviews echoing something like this: “You can’t just take a person with mental illness and addiction and trauma and put them in an apartment and expect everything to be okay.”

But here’s the thing: that’s not Housing First. That’s Housing Only.

To be fair, there are many cities that claim they practice Housing First and are much closer to a Housing Only model. It harms everyone when we don’t practice Housing First with full fidelity: meaning, the housing comes first, and is surrounded by supportive services tailored to the individual. This is the model that can boast 80-90% success, and it has to be done the right way. And you know who the most vocal critics are of Housing Only? Housing First Advocates! As I’ve written before: Housing First did not fail us, but we are failing Housing First.

Housing First Didn't Fail Us

What’s especially interesting is that the documentary knows this. After lambasting Housing First for fifteen minutes, the documentary highlights Step Up, an organization I worked with frequently in Los Angeles. Billy Baldwin’s silky narration says, “There’s an organization in Los Angeles doing their own twist on Housing First”, before describing Step Up’s model. Guess what it is? It’s Housing and Supportive Services. So the documentary manages to misrepresent Housing First, call it a failure, and then celebrate an organization that is, to its core, doing the Housing First model.

Make it make sense.

2. AwNA misrepresents how many people experiencing homelessness experience mental illness and substance use disorder

At one point in the film, a number is thrown out suggesting that more than 70% of people experiencing homelessness suffer from mental illness. Immediately, I knew this was wrong. Every study I’d ever seen places it somewhere in the 20-40% range. Digging into where they pulled this statistic from, I found a footnote leading to this study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8423293/

Two key things to note about this study:

1. It includes alcohol and substance use disorders as diagnoses under the banner of “mental illness”. While it may have been relevant to this study to include them, to declare that 70% of unhoused people have mental health disorders under this broad term is misleading.

2. The data this study aggregates is from 39 studies conducted in 11 different countries. For a documentary called Americans with No Address, it’s disingenuous to fish for numbers in global waters.

The reason they do this is to serve a particular agenda that has been thoroughly debunked: that in order to solve homelessness, you first have to tackle drug use and mental health (and usually punitively.)

This method misunderstands how we address individuals experiencing homelessness versus systemic issues. Because it’s absolutely true that addiction, mental health, or other factors may contribute to a person becoming homeless. But it’s also true that there is no correlation on a systems perspective to high rates of mental illness or drug use as predictors of homelessness in a city, county, or state. The only correlative predictors of homelessness in an area are housing costs and vacancy.

Meaning, if you want to work with people experiencing homelessness, you’re going to end up working amongst people with substance use and mental health disorders. But if you want to create policies that change the landscape of homelessness, those policies should be about HOUSING.

3. AwNA misleads you on what “housing” means, frequently using it to mean shelter rather than permanent housing

In the final act of the film, we see interviews with faith-based shelter operators, who in contrast to the harm reduction and Housing First boogeymen presented prior, require people to accept services and promote Recovery (specifically sobriety) as a term of getting and/or keeping your bed.

But let’s talk about the bed. Because you can look pretty plainly behind the speakers during many of the interviews and see what they mean by “housing”: mattresses lining the floor, or bunk beds as far as the eye can see.

It’s so important we define our terms here, because it’s literally the difference between homelessness and not. To say someone is “housed” should mean they have permanent residence somewhere; their name is on a lease. If you are staying in a shelter, you are not housed. In fact, by every definition, you are still experiencing homelessness.

Very often, organizations and politicians will claim that folks are “housed”, but they mean “sheltered.” And it’s incredibly dishonest, because it leads the general public to believe that homelessness is being solved, when it’s actually just being moved.

That’s not housing; that’s warehousing.

4. AwNA claims that harm reduction (Narcan, needle exchanges, and safe-consumption) are enabling and ineffective

In one of its most “shocking” moments, the documentary tackles drug use in San Francisco. They begin by showing video of a person—ostensibly overdosing—being attended to by paramedics on the street. The crew then stands outside of a pop-up safe consumption site in San Francisco, while advocate Tom Wolf explains what it is, every word dripping with disdain. The filmmakers shake their head in disbelief, and the next segment of the documentary derides harm reduction. Rescue Mission CEOs explain that they refuse to take government money because it would require they practice harm reduction, which to them is antithetical to “Recovery.” One interviewee spirals into misinformation right before our eyes when she talks about how county vehicles will deliver safe supplies like needles to drug users, some of whom might take them into schools, before concluding—amazingly—that her taxes are paying for the government to put needles in schools. The path from facts to sensational lies has never been so slippery.

Harm reduction is easily the most controversial topic I deal with, and yet several things are undeniably true:

• Harm Reduction saves countless lives, from preventing and reversing overdoses, stopping the communication of diseases spread by sharing needles, educating people on how to make better and safer choices for themselves and each other while in the throes of addiction, and so much more. 2024 was the first year in over a decade that we saw a decrease in overdose deaths, in no small part because of the increased public health approach to drug use.

• Safe-consumption sites have proven successful in Canada and European countries, and for the last two years in NYC—not only at saving lives, but also referring people to recovery services. By demonstrating care and kindness without agenda through harm reduction, people choose to get better and have more access through these sites to get the treatment they need.

• When the federal government turned their backs during the AIDS crisis, unhoused and queer people saved generations of vulnerable by engaging in (often illegal) harm reduction practices that were later proven to be effective and adopted by public health departments. When we take care of each other, we survive.

If we let go of our engrained moral aversion to drugs and the people who use them, harm reduction makes absolute clear practical and ethical sense—especially for Christians. (For great resources on merging faith with these best practices, check out Faith in Harm Reduction.)

5. AwNA woefully misrepresents the outcomes of Haven For Hope in San Antonio, and fails to disclose its conflict of interest

Throughout the documentary, the person you hear from the most is a man named Robert Marbut. He is listed as “Former Federal Homelessness Czar” (they omit for which Presidents—it was Bush and Trump). If you pay attention, you’ll also see his name in the opening and closing credits as an Executive Producer. He also wrote the study guide for the documentary.

What the documentary doesn’t tell you? He’s also the founder of Haven for Hope in San Antonio, and served as its Executive Director for the first five years.

This lack of disclosure should already make you uncomfortable, given the way the documentary frames Haven for Hope as the best example of a homelessness response that should be replicated in every city across America. But on top of this conflict of interest, the documentary hinges its recommendation of Haven on a huge misdirect—or as I will call it, an outright lie.

The website for AwNA wants viewers to get excited about “How one of the leading nonprofits in the US reduced homelessness in their city by over 75%.” It’s referring to Haven for Hope, and the film repeats this claim—that homelessness has been decreased 75% since Haven for Hope opened. (Along with the claim that they “housed” over 17,000 people in this time period, when they mean “sheltered.”) 75% seems incredible, and would certainly be worthy of studying and replicating… if it were true.

What the documentary doesn’t tell you? The 75% reduction of homelessness is specific to Downtown San Antonio. Haven for Help is located, conveniently, outside of downtown, and shelters half of the city’s unhoused population.

Reminder: people who stay in emergency shelter, even long term, are still homeless by every definition of the word. Since Haven for Hope’s opening, criminalization of homelessness in Downtown San Antonio also ratcheted up. In the end, the unhoused who were living in Downtown San Antonio were forced out, many choosing to go to Haven for Hope under duress. Then Haven for Hope gets to claim they helped “reduce” homelessness by 75% in downtown without actually ending many people’s homelessness. In actuality, homelessness has increased in San Antonio, surpassing Houston and Austin to become the second largest unhoused population in Texas outisde Dallas. Haven for Hope simply reduced homelessness in one part of the city by concentrating it somewhere else.

And all God’s NIMBYs said, “Amen.”

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Here’s the thing: I’m actually really supportive of faith groups getting involved in homelessness. It’s kinda my whole thing.

But there is a a strong distinction, with a line growing ever more visible, between Christians who want to actually end homelessness, and those who want to keep running shelter programs with strict rules designed to select who is worthy and who isn’t. (And, if they can swing it, convert them to Christianity in the meantime.)

And the more that they lose on the data and outcomes, which don’t support their work, the more they will turn to things like this—narrative change through obfuscation, misrepresentation, and lies. We must push back.

That’s why I’m writing a book about this exact topic. But unlike this post, the majority of the book isn’t going to dwell on those doing it wrong. The greater part of the book will tell stories of people and communities of faith who are getting it right. It’s a book about how people who see Jesus in their unhoused neighbor, rather than his absence. I can’t wait for you to read it next year.

Book Two is OFFICIALLY on its way!

The best way to keep up with the book and my work is here on Substack, so don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t, and consider becoming a Paid Subscriber to allow me to do this work even more.

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Do you know someone who watched Americans with No Address, or a church considering screening it??

Consider sharing this post with them to balance the scales.

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