‘I would be homeless’: 4,100+ disabled Miamians could lose housing under Trump budget
Blessed.
That’s how David Murray described himself as he hobbled around his crowded living room, jabbing his cane at the healthy collections of stuffed animals and constructed Lego figurines he keeps around for his dozen-plus grandkids. Their pictures — some framed, others taped bare — adorn the walls of his rent-subsidized apartment in Miami.
It’s one of Miami-Dade County’s more than 4,100 units of permanent supportive housing — mostly federally funded dwellings that provide rental assistance and support services to once-homeless people with disabilities. Thousands of Miamians live in such housing. Without it, many of them would be homeless again.
And they might soon be without it.
Per the Trump administration’s 2026 budget blueprint, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funds many of the country’s homelessness service providers, could see its budget nearly halved at a time when homelessness in America is at a record high.
The proposal represents a stark departure from decades of federal housing and homelessness policy, advocates say.
It plans to defund permanent supportive housing, the keystone of a widely held and data-supported theory that argues the best way to keep people out of homelessness is to quickly place them in stable housing and give them access to support services.More than 300,000 people live in permanent supportive housing across the U.S. All of them are disabled and had been chronically homeless.
That theory, called Housing First, offers services to people with substance abuse or mental health issues but doesn’t require them to resolve those problems before receiving permanent housing. The White House considers that model enabling.
Instead, the Trump administration wants to fund short-term, time-bound housing solutions, like shelters, where people experiencing homelessness must first deal with whatever underlying issues they face before being eligible for long-term housing support.
While the White House purports that its plan is best poised to “eliminate street homelessness,” advocates are sounding the alarm. Just under 900 people sleep on Miami-Dade’s streets, according to the county government. But if the federal budget is implemented on Oct. 1 as it’s currently written,the thousands of people with disabilities living in permanent supportive housing — many of whom are seniors or veterans or, like Murray, both — could lose their homes and fall back into homelessness, threatening an explosion in the number of people sleeping on the county’s streets.
If he loses his apartment, Murray, 67, fears he could be one of them. At one point, he was.
It was the late 1990s, and Murray, a welder, tore his meniscus. He blamed the injury on lingering knee damage sustained during Air Force basic training that never quite healed and on his physically taxing job.
Unable to walk properly, Murray was fired. “I lost my career,” he recalled.
In its definition of “homeless,” Congress includes those who sleep in places “not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings.” That includes places like the unventilated garage that Murray moved into with his oldest son. They shared it, through sweltering heat waves and punishing hurricanes, for more than a decade as Murray, unable to work, grappled with chronic pain and depression.
“I got so frustrated. I couldn’t pay for anything,” he said, squeezing his cane. “I couldn’t take my kids out on the weekend. We couldn’t do anything.”
It was only 12 years ago that Murray again had his own place — a two-bedroom apartment in Little Haiti that he shares with his wife and one of his sons and for which he pays $618 a month. Murray’s apartment is subsidized by permanent supportive housing dollars.
“I’m so grateful, so thankful to be in this building,” he said, admiring through the living room window the treetops that shade Little Haiti. “I love it here, my family loves it here.”
The barebones budget
In his 2026 federal budget request, Trump proposed nearly $33 billion in cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development — roughly 45% of the agency’s resources.
As part of that reduction, it seeks to eliminate the $3.7 billion “Continuum of Care” initiative that funds local service provider networks — in Miami-Dade’s case, the Homeless Trust. Those continuums often includesome combination of local government, businesses, nonprofit service providers like shelters, and even religious organizations. The idea was that diverse groups of stakeholders could better account for a community’s homelessness needs than, say, state or local governments alone.
Per the budget proposal, the Continuum program’s funding will merge with that of a program providing housing for people with AIDS and be rolled under the umbrella of a short- to medium-term housing initiative known as the Emergency Solutions Grant. That pays for crisis interventions — taking people off the streets and putting them in shelters, funding those shelters and placing homeless people in temporary housing that’s capped at two years.
What the Emergency Solutions Grant explicitly does not fund: permanent supportive housing.
Those changes might seem largely administrative, but they’re representative of a major shift in homelessness policy, said Ned Murray (no relation to David Murray), who focuses on affordable housing in South Florida as associate director of Florida International University’s Metropolitan Institute.
Housing First vs. treatment first
Homeless services providers have long held to Housing First as the most effective method for keeping people off the streets. “The evidence is overwhelming” that the modelis successful, said AnnOliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
Such housing programs, Oliva said, have never received sufficient funding to end homelessness in America, which is at an all-time high. So scrapping Housing First on the argument that it’s ineffective “is very much like saying people keep getting sick, so the emergency room doesn’t work,” she quipped.
The Trump administration has instead adopted an approach that requires homeless people to deal with whatever substance or mental health issues they may be facing before entering stable, long-term housing.
Vicki Mallette, executive director of Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust, is skeptical of such a policy’s efficacy. “If we wait for people [sleeping] on bus stops and street corners to solve problems that may have lasted decades, we’re not going to reduce” homelessness, she said at a recent Trust board meeting.
“We’re going to be trying to make perfect people,” she added, and working against “what it is we really want: fewer people experiencing homelessness.”
Homeless Trust Chairman Ron Book put it more bluntly: “Doing away with Housing First is ridiculous. It’s a terrible idea.”
The Homeless Trust reports that between 97% and 99% of people it places in permanent supportive housing remain there stably for at least two years.
Under the proposed budget, those who do enter medium-term housing will have no more than two years to figure out a more permanent living situation for themselves.But for someone coming out of chronic homelessness, especially someone who’s disabled, that’s often not enough time to become self-sufficient, said Stephanie Berman-Eisenberg, president of Carrfour Supportive Housing, which develops and manages permanent supportive housing projects in Miami-Dade,including the one Kim Miller lives in.
Miller, 68, left her 30-year career as a pharmacy tech to care for her mother, who was succumbing to dementia. That was 13 years ago. Since then, Miller emptied her retirement savings to cover her late mother’s medical costs and moved out of her house into a shared apartment — which she and her roommate had to leave after they couldn’t keep up with rising rent.
But Miller got lucky. Before ending up on the streets, she was placed in a Carrfour-operated building for permanent supportive housing, where she pays $500 a month in rent. “I think it’s the best thing in the world that happened to me,” she reflected.
The building’s coordinator, Kenneshia Sparks, thinks many of her residents would “absolutely” fall back into homelessness if their stays were limited to two years.
“We can’t put a timing on mental health,” she said, noting that some people require years of assistance to reach stability.
But under the Trump administration’s budget proposal, those who can’t hold down a steady job and live without support services after that two-year cap could be on their own — potentially back out on the streets, said Berman-Eisenberg.
And that’s expensive.
Financing the repeated, short-term interventions that accompany higher levels of street homelessness is far more costly than simply getting people into stable housing and caring for them there, said Leeanne Sacino, executive director of the Florida Coalition to End Homelessness. And while Housing First programs benefit from the federal government’s purchasing power, the relatively high cost of short-term interventions falls squarely on local communities, whose hospital and criminal justice systems will shoulder much of the burden at local taxpayers’ expense.
To keep someone jailed in Miami-Dade runs the county about $300 per inmate per day — nearly $105,000 per year. For them to stay overnight in the hospital costs even more — at least $2,200 per day, the Homeless Trust estimates. And, upon leaving either, “they’re still homeless,” Sacino pointed out, “so I really don’t get it.”
By contrast, the Homeless Trust reports that it spends roughly $80 a day per permanent supportive housing unit, many of which house multiple people, including the 14% of units that lodge families with children.
But it’s a hard financial — and political — lift for the local government to fill the $50 million federal funding gap for permanent supportive housing.
“For so long, the federal government has been the main source of support,” saidU.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson, a Democrat who represents the northern parts of Miami-Dade County. “With that funding disappearing and no one stepping in to fill the gap, I fear we’re headed for a real crisis.”
None of the county’s Republican representatives in the U.S. House responded to the Herald’s multiple requests for comment.
Should the Miamians in the 4,000-plus federally funded homes lose their housing subsidies, it’s unclear where they’ll go.
“I’m on overload,” said Book. “My shelters are full.”
Though the Homeless Trust is working to stand up additional emergency beds and housing units, they won’t be enough to accommodate all those in permanent supportive housing.
Asked if he thought the number of people sleeping on Miami-Dade’s streets would increase if thisversion of thebudget is implemented, Book answered: “I would be extremely concerned about what our community will look like should things get adopted as proposed.”
That concern is all too real for Murray, Miller and the thousands of other disabled Miamians who might be returned to homelessness.
“What would I do if [housing provider Carrfour] didn’t help me? Where would I go?” Murray wondered aloud.
“I would be homeless again,” he figured, his eyes settling on something in the middle distance. “I would be homeless again.”
This story was produced with financial support from supporters including The Green Family Foundation Trust and Ken O’Keefe, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners. The Miami Herald maintains full editorial control of this work.
This story was originally published July 2, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
