Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 76. Sunrise is 6:11 and sunset is 7:42 for 13 hours 31 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1970, Vietnam War protesters bomb Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, killing university physics researcher Robert Fassnacht and injuring three others.
Two destructive forces threaten Wisconsin’s successes in combating homelessness: a worsening economy and a federal government decision to abandon a proven method to reduce homelessness:
According to a recent Wisconsin Policy Forum report, the state’s homeless population increased to 5,495 this year, a 4.8 percent increase over 2025. It was the fifth consecutive year of increases after years of decline.
The report said factors including rising housing costs, worsening economic conditions and the expiration of pandemic-era supports may be behind the rise.
Don Cramer, a researcher with the Policy Forum, said there is uncertainty whether there will be programming available to aid the increasing number of people who are struggling to keep their homes due to rising costs.
“The fear is that more difficult economic conditions will cause more people to have housing insecurity, and that the homeless population will rise for that reason,” he said.
[…]
The Policy Forum report said the previous decline in homelessness in Wisconsin was likely fueled by a number of factors, including the roll out of housing first programs. The housing first approach prioritizes providing homes to people before addressing other issues by providing them with mental health care or addiction treatment programs.
Many housing first programs in Wisconsin rely on federal funding from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. That funding may be in jeopardy.
Michael Basford, director of Wisconsin’s Interagency Council on Homelessness, said HUD has announced it plans to redirect funds from away from housing first programs to treatment first models.
“This proven model for ending homelessness is going to be put aside in favor of a model which we know doesn’t work as well as housing first,” Basford said.
Treatment first models require individuals to receive mental health or addiction treatment before they receive permanent housing.
See Elissa Eaton, Wisconsin’s homeless population may be increasing due to rising housing prices and declining economy (‘The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development may shift their funding from ‘Housing First’ to treatment first programs’), Wisconsin Public Radio, August 24, 2026.
The most effective overall economic approach, reaching the most people, would be an end to trade wars, federal budgets that redistribute federal funds to the privileged, and a relentless campaign against immigrant workers that has ruined individuals while leaving the economy enmired in stagflation.
And yet, as with so much else about populism, it prefers the economic myths of its strident members over empirically proven approaches. And look, and look, the populists’ conviction that treatment must come before housing makes sense everywhere except in reality — actual human experience shows that housing should come first as a practical solution to homelessness.
If, by contrast, the first goal of federal policy under populism is the populists’ own sense of what is disqualifying apart from practicality, well, then, they will inevitably find themselves on the other side of a majority that finds populism’s various prejudices and delusions no less disqualifying.
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Forthcoming topics (in no particular order): Development in Downtown Whitewater (Follow-Up), the Value of a UW-Whitewater Education, A New Ethics Ordinance, Polling Places in the City (Further Considerations), and Steps for a Public Interest Campaign.
Firefighters battle human-caused wildfire as it approaches Reno: