As winter fast approaches, in the wake of Connecticut’s most recent housing bill passing into legislation, it is clear that we are ignoring one of our most vulnerable populations: unsheltered homeless individuals.

Housing First is the only approach proven to significantly reduce the number of people living on the streets, and it is actually more cost-effective than leaving people outside.

Research shows that supportive housing dramatically lowers hospitalizations, emergency room use, psychiatric crises, and shelter stays, which creates net savings for taxpayers. It is the humane approach and the financially responsible one.

With the exception of promising a pilot program for portable showers and laundry services, Connecticut’s new housing bill (HB 8002) offers nothing to the 500+ people sleeping outside tonight. These are people who cannot wait for zoning reforms, planning committees, or long-term market shifts.

HB 8002 may reshape how development occurs and create a savings account for middle-class home-buyers, but none of its provisions will bring unsheltered homelessness down and help people trapped in a vicious cycle of trauma. Only Housing First could do that.

I know this not just from policy research, but also from seeing it affect the lives of people I love.

I was grateful to meet a woman in recovery who shared with me her incredible story. She told me about how she once lived unsheltered for over a year. While on the streets, she became a victim of human trafficking, was sexually assaulted by a group of men, and fell deeply into addiction and psychosis, which layered trauma on top of already existing complex post-traumatic stress disorder and schizoaffective disorder.

This wasn’t the result of laziness on her part. She was set up for failure from childhood after being abused by her family, and later faced more abuse in romantic relationships. She bounced around from one unsafe situation to another, without the tools to get help or help herself.