Last fall, the Trump administration tried to drastically reduce the amount of federal grant money counties could use for permanent supportive housing. These programs integrate long-term housing with voluntary, flexible support services like addiction treatment and case management to provide people with stability.
The administration’s efforts for the current funding cycle were struck down in court. But if this year's requirements are similar, about 50 people in Monterey and San Benito counties would likely lose their housing.
KAZU has been talking to some of the people whose lives have been changed by these housing programs to understand what could happen if they disappear.
On a Sunday evening in late January, Tim Heavin is on the mic at KHDC, a small radio station in Salinas.
Heeding a listener's request, he plays a Charlie Puth song. Then he queues up an original, “Heir to Everything.” “This one's hot right now, so I'll play this one,” he says.
Heavin is a musician and DJ by night, but he also has a rare perspective on homelessness. He experienced it, then got out of it, and now spends most of his time as a community health worker and advocate for unhoused people. But he says that never would have happened if it weren't for the Helping Hands Program in Hollister.
“If I didn't get in that program, and if I would've stayed homeless, who knows where I'd be?” he said while sitting on a bench at a park near KHDC.
Helping Hands is a permanent supportive housing program. It provides housing as well as services like substance abuse treatment and job training.
Those services were important for Heavin. He'd spent time in jail and prison in the 2010s and was using drugs when he heard about Helping Hands.
“I still wasn't clean at the time when I got in there, and that was one of my fears, like, well, they're gonna find out I'm still using,” he said.
But Helping Hands follows an approach called Housing First, which prioritizes housing people without preconditions for sobriety, treatment, or income.
“There's a misconception, I think, with Housing First in that they think that, oh, we're just giving people housing,” Heavin said. “But no, 'Housing First' is just a stability. And then the treatment comes once you’ve got that stability.”
Heavin says he’s been clean for more than two years now. He works full-time as a case worker for seniors in Hollister and serves on several homelessness advisory committees in the Monterey Bay area and throughout California.
“I felt like we were really advancing as a compassionate society, but with this new administration and the federal government right now, I feel like we're taking so many steps backwards,” he said.
In November 2025, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) published a Notice of Funding Opportunity—known as a NOFO in the grant writing sphere. The NOFO was for a program called Continuum of Care, the single biggest source of federal homelessness prevention funding.
But this NOFO required counties to use less than 30% of the grant for permanent housing programs—like the one that helped lift Heavin out of homelessness.
“We were shocked by the 30% cap on permanent housing,” said Katrina McKenzie, the Executive Director of the Coalition of Homeless Services Providers for Monterey and San Benito counties. “That was really a gut punch to our Continuum of Care.”
In 2024, CHSP spent about two-thirds of its HUD grant on permanent housing.
“So, going into 2025, that is what we were doing,” McKenzie said. “This keeps people off the streets.”
A strong body of evidence suggests the Housing First model is the most effective way to reduce homelessness, and not just for people dealing with substance abuse.
“I didn't wake up one day and say I'm gonna be homeless,” said Bella Maddox, 68. “It happened, and it happened because my mom passed away and we had to sell her house. I had nowhere to go.”
Maddox serves on a local homelessness advisory board with Heavin. For the last few years, she's lived in a two-bedroom townhouse in Marina with her son and an ever-increasing number of cats.
But for about a decade before that, she was living out of an RV.
“Where do you go park without them harassing you, without them giving you a ticket?” she said. “It's always something.”
Maddox has disabilities that make it hard to work, so she couldn't afford to rent anywhere. It was only after years of fighting for housing vouchers and working with a handful of dedicated homeless services staff that she finally found a place to live.
“My apartment where I live is $2,400 a month,” she said. “I pay $322. Section 8 pays the rest. And it took me nine years to get on Section 8.”
Even now that she's been housed for years, Maddox still doesn't feel entirely secure.
“What if something happens tomorrow and I can't be here, then where am I gonna go?” she said.
That fear is rational. A judge forced HUD to reinstate the previous grant criteria for the 2025 NOFO. But Katrina McKenzie with CHSP is bracing for a similar effort this year.
“That 2025 NOFO that dropped in November was the precursor of what the future's gonna look like,” she said. “I strongly believe that, for the majority of wild and crazy things in that NOFO, that is what's going to drop in July of 2026.”
If that happens, dozens of people in the region could fall back into homelessness. But McKenzie's not giving up.
“Under my leadership, we're always going to do the right thing,” she said. “If we have to do the things that we don't wanna do, at least we're gonna do it with the utmost respect and dignity, and as harmless as we could possibly do it.”
McKenzie's views on homelessness differ from the Trump administration's in countless ways. But really, those differences boil down to where they land on a pretty simple question: should housing be something that's earned or guaranteed?
