HHS Names Eight Communities for $96 Million STREETS Program

The Department of Health and Human Services on Friday named the eight communities that will share $96 million over four years through a new federal program aimed at people who are homeless and living with addiction, serious mental illness, or both, closing a competition the agency opened in June.

Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the selections in Houston, one of the winning jurisdictions. Each of the eight will receive $3 million a year for four years through the Safety Through Recovery, Engagement, and Evidence-based Treatment and Support program, known as STREETS and administered by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The money is meant to build coordinated systems of care rather than to fund a single clinic or shelter bed: HHS asks grantees to assemble local government, behavioral health and medical providers, housing partners, law enforcement, courts, first responders, and community organizations into one network, with an emphasis on rapid, street-based outreach and sustained engagement.

The eight recipients

• Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board for Montgomery County, Ohio
• Cherokee Nation, Oklahoma
• City of Detroit Health Department
• City of Houston Health Department, Human Services Division
• City of Huntington, West Virginia
• Miami-Dade County, Florida
• Robeson County, North Carolina
• Tangipahoa Parish Government, Louisiana

Huntington has been one of the most closely watched jurisdictions in the opioid crisis, and its selection follows a year in which West Virginia's own drug policy leadership turned over. The city's mayor, Patrick Farrell, said the award would let Huntington press further into work already underway.

"The goal is to break down silos and bring law enforcement, health care providers, housing organizations, and community partners together with a unity of purpose," Farrell said in a separate release. "We want to connect people with effective treatment and recovery support, strengthen accountability, and make Huntington safer for everyone." He credited Sen. Shelley Capito, who chairs the Senate subcommittee that funds the health department. City officials scheduled a news conference for Monday morning to outline next steps.

A program built around "treatment first"

STREETS is the operational arm of an approach the administration calls Treatment First, which treats engagement and clinical care as the entry point to housing rather than the other way around. That framing has drawn scrutiny from researchers and public health groups who argue that the housing-first model it displaces has the stronger evidence base for stabilizing people with complex needs. The administration first announced the program earlier this year as a roughly $100 million initiative and posted the $96 million funding notice in June; those earlier stages were covered in the blog's report on the June funding announcement.

"STREETS takes treatment directly to Americans living on our streets and connects them to the care and support they need to recover," Kennedy said. "Under President Trump, we will no longer accept a system that manages human suffering instead of ending it."

SAMHSA Chief of Staff Timothy W. Westlake described the design as an inversion of the usual burden on patients. "We are organizing systems around recovery instead of asking people in crisis to organize themselves around systems," he said.

The program advances President Trump's executive order on ending crime and disorder on America's streets and the Great American Recovery initiative, which Kennedy co-chairs with White House Senior Advisor for Addiction Recovery Kathryn Burgum. "STREETS brings that mission directly to Americans in need by connecting Treatment First with sustained recovery support, housing, and a pathway toward stability," Burgum said.

What the money does not settle

The awards do not answer the questions that hung over the program's launch, including how grantees will be measured and what happens to communities that do not hit their benchmarks. HHS has said payments depend on demonstrable gains in housing stability, treatment engagement, and long-term recovery, a structure that providers serving the most chronically unsheltered patients have warned can penalize the programs that take the hardest cases.

Nor does the announcement address the capacity constraints underneath it. Medication for opioid use disorder remains unevenly available across the eight jurisdictions, and many of the people the program targets carry co-occurring mental health conditions that require care coordinated across systems that rarely talk to one another. The counties and tribes named Friday now have four years to show that a single grant can change that.