Jess Molasky stood proudly in a modern one-bedroom apartment at Sunhaven, his development group’s new three-story, 50-unit permanent supportive housing complex in the eastern Las Vegas Valley.
Molasky, the chief operating officer of Ovation Management, became animated during a recent tour as he spoke about the value of developments like Sunhaven that offer greater stability than shorter-term shelters and transitional housing.
“How between those two are you really supposed to get your life together?” Molasky said. “Like, what, you get a job and improve your credit score, and then get an apartment? It doesn’t really make sense.”
Sunhaven celebrated its grand opening in February, marking a major local investment in permanent supportive housing and the Housing First approach, which seeks to place people experiencing homelessness in stable housing without requiring them to first find a job or achieve sobriety.
Yet, as local officials and developers invest in projects like Sunhaven, the housing first model is coming under pressure. The Trump administration is moving to reshape federal homelessness policy by directing funds away from permanent supportive housing — a shift providers warn could jeopardize existing programs.
On June 1, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued its funding application for organizations operating within the Continuum of Care, a network that coordinates housing and support services and establishes local funding priorities. The grants are expected to fund programs beginning in 2027.
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the shift away from Housing First could put at least 97,000 residents of permanent supportive housing units throughout the country at risk of losing their housing, including 435 people in Nevada.
Fuilala Riley, the CEO of HELP of Southern Nevada, said this decision could have devastating effects for the people her organization serves.
“Essentially the funding source that pays their rent — that allows them to remain housed — would be eliminated,” Riley said.
A shift in federal priorities
The Trump administration has been critical of Housing First policies, saying they are ineffective partly because they don’t prioritize personal accountability. Officials argue that federal policy should instead emphasize a “Treatment First” model that mandates rehabilitation and employment compliance before an individual may receive long-term government support.
In a June news release, HUD Secretary Scott Turner said the administration is making “necessary reforms” to address a crisis driven by addiction and mental illness that housing alone would not solve.
“The ‘housing first’ experiment failed Americans by warehousing the vulnerable without results,” Turner said in the release. “This ideology promised to end homelessness. Instead, billions of taxpayer dollars were spent while homelessness increased to record levels.”
Nicholas Barr, a professor at the University of Utah College of Social Work, said the administration’s stance is flawed. He said Republican and Democratic presidential administrations have for decades supported the idea that a Housing First approach is a more effective way to address homelessness.
According to Barr, decades of research have demonstrated just how well it works.
One 2021 study by researchers affiliated with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Housing First programs reduced homelessness by 88 percent and yielded greater health benefits compared with housing programs that first required mental health and substance use treatment.
“If somebody is unhoused, meaning they’re still on the street, it’s just such a traumatic and unstable environment that they’re really not able to address other issues, whether that’s physical, mental, or behavioral,” Barr said.
The push for a different approach
Still, some conservative groups have long argued that the federal government should move away from a Housing First model.
John Gibbs, the director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, said he does not believe there is evidence to conclusively show that Housing First has reduced homelessness.
He argued that the number of people experiencing homelessness has continued to rise despite increased government spending. Gibbs cited a 2019 report on the general federal efforts to address homelessness commissioned by the first Trump administration that concluded federal efforts have not played a “substantial role in the reported decline in homelessness.”
“There’s a lot of evidence that more government spending on homelessness has actually not reduced homelessness,” Gibbs said. “People always say, ‘We know what works.’ That’s not really true, but we know that throwing more money at it doesn’t work.”
Gibbs acknowledged that Housing First policies appear to be effective at helping people remain housed. But, he questioned whether permanent supportive housing is the most cost-effective way to address homelessness, arguing that other approaches, such as transitional housing, may be more appropriate.
Providers face an uncertain future
The Trump administration has acted on this skepticism about the Housing First model.
In November 2025, HUD released an updated fiscal year 2025 funding application that attempted to cap the amount of funding localities could receive for permanent supportive housing at 30 percent of their total allocation. The cap would have shifted a large portion of federal funding toward transitional housing and programs with work requirements and mandatory treatment.
A federal court issued a preliminary injunction against these guidelines in December and formally struck them down in June. While HUD’s newest guidelines remove the cap on spending on permanent supportive housing, they introduce other restrictions that could still shift funding away from such programs.
Riley said that this back-and-forth has made it difficult for HELP to plan for the future.
Barr said homeless services programs operate on a “long runway,” meaning they must make decisions about their programs and staffing well in advance.
According to Riley, HELP of Southern Nevada’s planning is further complicated by the fact that individuals living in permanent supportive housing are not eligible for transitional housing, because they cannot “move back” through the system.
HELP of Southern Nevada recently submitted funding requests to the Southern Nevada Homelessness Continuum of Care, which in turn will submit a larger regional funding package to HUD by Aug. 26.
“We have had to spend a lot of time evaluating (whether) we can continue to operate certain programs with shifts in policy,” Riley said.
Ultimately, Riley said she was most concerned for people living in HELP’s permanent supportive housing units throughout the valley, since their housing could be on the line.
Demand remains high
Despite this debate, Molasky said Sunhaven was 75 percent full in late July with 160 applicants on a waiting list — a figure he said demonstrated the need for more permanent supportive housing in the region.
Sunhaven offers on-site social and health services and is designed for extremely low-income people experiencing homelessness or at imminent risk of homelessness. UNLV Health Mojave Counseling provides clinical and case management services on-site, and addiction treatment group WestCare provides life skills training, crisis response and other resources.
The project was supported by the Home Means Nevada initiative, a program that allocates $500 million of American Rescue Plan Act funding to boost affordable housing in Nevada.
The Southern Nevada Regional Housing Authority provides rental vouchers tied to the apartments, meaning the subsidy remains with the unit rather than the individual tenant.
Molasky hopes Sunhaven can serve as a model for expanding permanent supportive housing in Southern Nevada.
In its most recent point-in-time count on Jan. 29, Clark County volunteers identified 8,859 individuals experiencing homelessness.
Molasky said the county’s ability to quantify the number of people experiencing homelessness should make it possible to develop targeted solutions.
As providers navigate rising cost of living and uncertainty around federal funding, Riley said sustaining developments like Sunhaven and other investments in permanent supportive housing would require strong communitywide support.
“There are reductions coming, and it’s going to take more than HELP of Southern Nevada to figure this out,” Riley said. “We’re really in this together as a community, and we need to continue to have very strategic communitywide conversations about what we can do to minimize that impact on folks that have really worked hard to re-enter living indoors.”
Contact Sophie Baker at sbaker@reviewjournal.com.
