Criminalizing homelessness does not make communities safer. It makes vulnerable people harder to reach, harder to house, and less likely to survive. NeuroHomes was built on a different premise.
NeuroHomes Communities – March 2026 – Advocacy & Research
“Public safety reform should not be defined by how many arrests are made, but by how many people are safely housed, connected to care, and able to rebuild their lives.”
– Mojica, Bou Harfouch & Reynolds — Reason Foundation, January 2026
The Population No One Is Counting
The national conversation about homelessness and public safety has a significant blind spot: neurodivergent people. Autistic adults, people with ADHD, and others with neurological differences are disproportionately represented among the unhoused population, yet almost entirely absent from policy design, research frameworks, and intervention models.
That absence has consequences. Enforcement-based responses to homelessness, already documented as harmful for the broader unhoused population, are likely to be especially dangerous for people whose neurological profiles make police encounters more volatile, more traumatic, and less navigable. And yet the housing and service systems that are supposed to serve as alternatives frequently fail neurodivergent people as well: sensory environments, rigid compliance requirements, and lack of individualized support drive people out almost as fast as they come in.
NeuroHomes was founded to address this gap directly in the rural Pacific Northwest, where it is widest, and the infrastructure is thinnest.
National Context
A Record Crisis, and a Failing Response
The United States is in the midst of an unprecedented homelessness crisis. According to the most recent federal point-in-time count, 771,480 people were experiencing homelessness in January 2024, an 18% increase from the prior year. Rather than meeting this with a scaled-up investment in housing and services, the federal executive response has moved in the opposite direction.
In July 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing stronger law enforcement involvement in managing “visible homelessness and addiction.” As analysts at the Reason Foundation documented in January 2026, this has created a new operational reality in which police are asked to serve as de facto housing coordinators, mental health responders, and social workers, without the tools, training, or systems to do so effectively.
The data on what this approach produces are not ambiguous.
92+ Studies in a global review finding that repeated adversarial police contact worsens outcomes, intensifying stress, anxiety, and suicidal ideation
– Via Reason Foundation / Mojica et al., 2026
26% Of unhoused adults have a serious mental illness, compared to 5-6% of the general population
– Kaiser Family Foundation
11x More likely: people with mental illness experience police use of force compared to those without such conditions
– Via Reason Foundation / Mojica et al., 2026
One in four police shootings involves someone with a mental health condition. Among unhoused people with mental illness, 62% reported at least one police interaction over a four-year period, most often as suspects.
These are not anomalies. They are the predictable outcomes of a system designed to manage visibility rather than address need.
The Missing Variable
Neurodivergence, Trauma, and the Pipeline to Homelessness
Current epidemiological and policy framing largely treats homelessness, mental illness, and substance use as the relevant categories of analysis. Neurodivergence, and autism in particular, appears rarely and inconsistently. This is a methodological failure with real human costs.
Research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) provides one entry point. While roughly 12% of the general population reports four or more ACEs, that figure rises to 53% among unhoused people. ACEs are known to be significantly elevated among undiagnosed autistic and ADHD individuals, whose differences often go unrecognized until adulthood, after years of school failure, employment instability, family conflict, and system involvement have already accumulated.
The traumatic ACE-to-homelessness pipeline almost certainly has a substantial undiagnosed neurodivergence component. We do not have clean data on this because we have not built the research infrastructure to look. The consequences of that gap include:
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Misidentification in police encounters
Autistic communication differences, sensory overwhelm, and freeze responses are routinely misread as defiance, intoxication, or non-compliance, escalating encounters that could otherwise be resolved.
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Shelter and transitional housing failure
Standard emergency shelter environments, sensory conditions, social dynamics, and compliance structures are often incompatible with neurodivergent needs, producing rapid exits and cyclical homelessness.
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Service navigation barriers
Housing voucher programs, benefits enrollment, and case management systems require executive function, verbal advocacy, and bureaucratic literacy that many neurodivergent adults cannot reliably access without structured support.
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Co-occurring condition complexity
Autism and ADHD carry high rates of co-occurring anxiety, depression, PTSD, and chronic health conditions, often untreated due to diagnostic overshadowing or provider unfamiliarity with neurodivergent presentation.
These are not peripheral concerns. They describe the lived reality of a substantial portion of the unhoused population who remain statistically invisible within current policy frameworks.
What the Evidence Supports
Housing-First, Harm Reduction, and the Alternative Path
There is strong and growing evidence for what works. The Reason Foundation’s January 2026 analysis synthesizes research across housing, law enforcement, and behavioral health to make a coordinated case for a harm reduction approach grounded in stable housing as the anchor intervention.
The research on diversion programs is particularly instructive. Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD), which originated in King County, Washington, in 2011, connects people involved in low-level offenses with intensive case managers who provide crisis response, psychological assessment, and wraparound services, including housing. Evaluation research found that LEAD participants were twice as likely to obtain shelter and 89% more likely to secure permanent housing than those in traditional processing. Colorado LEAD pilots showed a 50% reduction in re-arrest among participants.
These outcomes are not accidental. They reflect what happens when the goal shifts from managing visible disorder to addressing underlying need. Housing stability is not just one outcome among many. It is the intervention that makes all other interventions possible.
For neurodivergent people specifically, housing-first approaches need to go further. Stable housing must be designed to actually work for autistic and neurodivergent residents, with attention to sensory environment, social structure, staffing models, and on-site support integration. Generic affordable housing, however well-intentioned, often replicates the same structural incompatibilities that produce housing loss in the first place.
The Supply Problem
Why Vouchers Alone Cannot Solve a Housing Shortage
Housing assistance programs are necessary but insufficient on their own. The Florida Policy Project’s Elevating Housing Vouchers Report makes this structural problem explicit: long wait times, landlord discrimination, and a chronic shortage of available units prevent voucher programs from functioning as intended. Recipients spend years on waiting lists only to find, once approved, that few landlords accept vouchers and that few suitable units are available. Without an adequate housing supply, financial assistance cannot function as a market solution. Expanding supply is not an ancillary policy goal. It is the precondition for making every other housing program work.
Zoning and land use policy are central to this supply constraint in ways that most homelessness policy frameworks fail to acknowledge. Restrictive zoning regulations determine where housing, treatment facilities, and harm reduction services can be located, frequently delaying or preventing the creation of the exact supportive housing stock that would stabilize people at the highest risk. Recent research published in the Urban Affairs Review found that only about 30% of major cities explicitly link their homelessness strategies to zoning or land use reform, despite clear evidence that local planning decisions directly shape housing supply and affordability.
16,700+ Reduction in Florida’s homeless population between 2007 and 2024, spending under $2 billion on homelessness programs
– Via Reason Foundation / Mojica et al., 2026
$34B Spent by California on homelessness programs over the same period, while its homeless population grew substantially
– Via Reason Foundation / Mojica et al., 2026
30% Share of major cities that explicitly link their homelessness strategies to zoning or land use reform
– Urban Affairs Review
The comparison between Florida and California is instructive, and not in the way it is often used politically. Florida’s outcomes were not produced by punitive enforcement but by regulatory reforms that increased housing construction and reduced barriers to building. California, despite spending roughly 17 times more on homelessness programs, saw worse outcomes because those programs were operating against a structural housing shortage that those dollars could not fix. Service spending and housing supply are not interchangeable. Communities that conflate them will continue to produce the same results.
For rural communities like those NeuroHomes serves, this dynamic plays out in compressed form. Wahkiakum County has a limited existing housing stock, no significant pipeline of new affordable construction, and zoning frameworks that were not designed with supportive or specialized housing in mind. The shortage is not abstract. It is the reason neurodivergent adults in this region have nowhere to go.
NeuroHomes’ Response
Building What the Rural Pacific Northwest Doesn’t Have
NeuroHomes Communities, Inc. is a Washington State nonprofit developing affordable, community-integrated housing with on-site supportive services designed specifically for autistic and neurodivergent adults in rural Wahkiakum and Clatsop County communities.
We are building in a region where the gaps between need and available infrastructure are acute. Rural communities face the same rising rates of homelessness and unmet neurodivergent need as urban centers, with fewer behavioral health providers, no specialized housing stock, and limited public transit connecting residents to services that do exist.
Our model is grounded in the convergence of housing-first principles, neurodivergent-led design, and trauma-informed care. We are not building a program. We are building a place where people can stay, because the building itself has been designed for them from the outset.
Core components of the NeuroHomes model:
Affordable units designed with neurodivergent sensory and spatial needs as primary criteria. On-site navigation support, peer support, and case coordination. Integration with local behavioral health and medical providers. Community governance structures that center on resident voice. Rural placement to serve populations excluded from urban-focused housing initiatives.
We are currently in the early capital development phase, pursuing support from the Washington State Housing Trust Fund alongside other public and philanthropic funding streams. We have received our federal EIN (41-4963918) and are positioning for HTF funding rounds opening April through July 2026.
Community Needs Assessment
What We Know, What We Need to Know, and What We Are Building Toward
NeuroHomes is actively engaged in documenting the needs of neurodivergent adults in our service region. Preliminary community engagement and existing public health data support the following assessment:
Documented Gaps
There are currently no housing units in Wahkiakum County designed or designated for neurodivergent adults. Behavioral health services in the region are limited, with long wait times and no autism-specialized adult providers identified within the county. Transportation barriers severely limit access to services in neighboring counties. Emergency shelter capacity is minimal and not adapted for sensory or communication needs.
Population Indicators
National data suggest that autistic adults face unemployment rates above 80% and are significantly overrepresented in poverty statistics. ADHD is associated with substantially elevated rates of housing instability. Both conditions carry high rates of co-occurring mental health conditions that compound housing risk. Rural communities systematically undercount these populations due to lower rates of formal diagnosis.
System-Level Failures
The current service system in Wahkiakum and surrounding counties is built around compliance-based models that create barriers for many neurodivergent adults. Requirements for sobriety, participation in group programming, and demonstrated “housing readiness” exclude people who could succeed in appropriately supported housing but cannot meet those preconditions. These structural exclusions are not neutral: they reflect a policy design built around a neurotypical norm that most of our target population cannot access.
What We Are Measuring
NeuroHomes is developing a formal needs assessment process in partnership with local service providers, county jurisdictions, and the neurodivergent community itself. We are collecting data on housing instability, service utilization gaps, unmet support needs, and barriers to existing housing programs. This data will inform both our initial site development and our advocacy for systems-level change.
The Argument We Are Making
Criminalizing homelessness is not a public safety strategy. It is the management of a symptom while the underlying condition worsens. For neurodivergent people, it is particularly dangerous: encounters that might be destabilizing for anyone are often actively traumatizing for people whose neurological profiles make police contact harder to navigate and harder to recover from.
The evidence base for a different approach is robust and growing. Housing-first models work. Diversion programs reduce recidivism. Trauma-informed response reduces escalation on both sides of the encounter. And housing that is actually designed for the people it is meant to serve produces outcomes that generic affordable housing cannot.
None of that infrastructure exists yet for neurodivergent adults in rural Southwest Washington. NeuroHomes is building it.
If you work in housing policy, behavioral health, county government, or philanthropy, we want to hear from you. If you are a neurodivergent adult or family member navigating these systems in our region, we especially want to hear from you. The need is documented. The model is ready. The work is underway.
Support the Work
NeuroHomes is building the housing infrastructure that neurodivergent adults in rural Washington deserve. We are seeking partners, funders, and community members who share this vision.
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