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.

An ongoing surge in state borrowing to rebuild Connecticut’s aging transportation infrastructure must be rolled back, Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration projects, because of stagnant fuel and sales tax revenues.

But business leaders and a key legislator insist Connecticut has other options to maintain expanded financing for highway, bridge and rail upgrades, including scaling back one of the governor’s favorite programs: an aggressive effort to pay down pension debt.

And while Lamont downplayed the revenue challenges last week, saying the impact wouldn’t be felt for several more years, his budget staff projected borrowing levels to be reduced starting in the next fiscal year, which begins July 1.

Just 12 months after the Lamont administration reported that Connecticut was ready to increase a key element of its transportation construction budget by 40%, from $1 billion to $1.4 billion, by 2028, a new forecast held that three-quarters of that planned growth is unaffordable under the current system.

That $400 million in new borrowing anticipated for the 2026-27 and 2027-28 fiscal years should be stalled, according to recommendations in the Fiscal Accountability Report issued Nov. 20 by the Office of Policy and Management, Lamont’s chief budget and planning agency.

Reversing plans to invest hundreds of millions in infrastructure work will have a chilling effect on industry hiring plans, said Donald Shubert, president of the Connecticut Construction Industry Association.

“The minute they see any kind of uncertainty, or the minute they get any clue things are slowing down, they pull back,” Shubert told the Connecticut Mirror. “We pull back and that slows the economic activity or the economic benefits — immediately.”

The Connecticut Business and Industry Association’s vice president for public policy, Chris Davis, said that “any business that’s on the fence” about hiring or otherwise expanding, “they need that [state funding] stability to make those types of investments.”