When the Money Runs Out, You Find Out What Matters: Buenos Aires and the No-Exclusion Model
The cracks are where the light gets in. Visual by deluxmultimedia.
When the Money Runs Out, You Find Out What Matters: Buenos Aires and the No-Exclusion Model
Letters to the Housed — by Paul Asplund of SecondGrace.LA
Last week I wrote about Lisbon's social enterprise restaurant model and the gap between LA's restaurant labor shortage and the tens of thousands of people who need a path back to work. This week I want to talk about a city that faced something we're facing right now: a government slashing social spending while homelessness accelerates. And instead of retreating, they rebuilt their system from the ground up.
Buenos Aires is not a success story with a neat ending. It's a story about a city making hard choices during an impossible situation — and getting some things right that LA has been getting wrong for years.
The Crisis
To understand what Buenos Aires did, you need to understand what was happening around them.
In December 2023, Javier Milei took office as Argentina's president on a platform of radical austerity. He cut government spending by 4.5% of GDP in a single year. Public infrastructure investment dropped 77%. Energy subsidies were slashed, transit costs skyrocketed — the Buenos Aires metro increased 360% overnight in May 2024 — and transfers to provinces were cut by nearly 68%. Milei vetoed increases to pensions and disability spending. Soup kitchens that had relied on federal food supplies stopped receiving them.
The results were immediate. Poverty hit 53% in the first half of 2024, up from 40% the year before — the sharpest jump in two decades. By January 2026, the number of people experiencing homelessness in Buenos Aires had risen 28%, reaching 5,176 people. Nearly 38% had become homeless within the past twelve months.
"If this sounds familiar, it should. The scale is different, but the pattern is the same one playing out in the United States right now: a federal government pulling funding while telling cities to figure it out themselves."
What They Built
While the national government was cutting, the Buenos Aires city government went the other direction. In 2024, they completely redesigned their homeless response system around three principles that directly challenge what we're doing in LA.
No-Exclusion Intake
Buenos Aires created a centralized Care Network (Red de Atención) that operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with teams of psychologists, social workers, and outreach staff in every district. The critical design choice: nobody is turned away.
People with mental health challenges, substance use disorder, criminal histories, people who've been kicked out of other programs — all are admitted. The system incorporates harm reduction. There are no sobriety requirements, no treatment mandates, no preconditions for help.
Segmented Services
Rather than running one-size-fits-all shelters, Buenos Aires classified its Social Inclusion Centers (CIS) by population: centers for single men, for women, for older adults, for families, for people in addiction recovery, for people with mental health needs. By January 2026, they had expanded to 58 centers with capacity for 4,900 people, up from 47 centers the year before. Ten new centers opened in 2025 alone.
Families Stay Together
This is deceptively simple but enormously important. In many LA shelters, families are separated by gender. A father can't stay with his wife and children. Buenos Aires made keeping families intact a design priority, with 180 dedicated family spots and growing.
"According to the IGH's 2026 Vanguard Cities report, within eight months of the redesign, Buenos Aires increased shelter capacity by 30%, decreased crisis hotline response time by 30%, and expanded their weekly caseload from 161 to 820 cases."
Proyecto 7: When People Lead Their Own Recovery
The government-run system is only part of the story. What makes Buenos Aires distinctive is how civil society organized from below — often in direct tension with government.
Proyecto 7 started in 2004 when a group of men living on the steps of Argentina's national library watched a friend die from an alcohol-induced coma. Instead of accepting that as inevitable, they organized. They marched on the Ministry of Labor demanding job training. They held a hunger strike in the Plaza de Mayo. In 2011, they took over the Centro de Integración Monteagudo, a government shelter, and turned it into something the city had never seen: a residential center run by its own residents.
Today, Monteagudo houses 110 men. Every Friday they hold assemblies where residents make decisions about operations, rules, and programs. The center provides education, employment training, and peer support — all designed and managed by people who have experienced homelessness themselves.
Proyecto 7 went on to become one of the most vocal advocacy organizations in Buenos Aires, conducting independent censuses that consistently found homeless populations three to five times higher than government counts. In 2019, their census identified 7,251 people experiencing homelessness while the government reported 1,141.
"That kind of accountability matters — because you can't solve a problem you refuse to measure honestly."
The parallel to LA is uncomfortable. RAND Corporation found a 32% undercount in our 2025 Point-in-Time data. In Skid Row, the PIT captured only 61% of what professional enumerators found. And LAHSA may not have funding to conduct the 2027 count at all.
What This Means for LA
Three specific things Buenos Aires is doing that LA should be studying:
First, the no-exclusion model directly contradicts the Trump administration's direction for homeless services. The executive order signed in July 2025 attacks Housing First as failing to "promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency." HUD's new Continuum of Care funding conditions require treatment-first approaches and ban harm reduction language. Buenos Aires went the opposite way and saw their system capacity and responsiveness improve dramatically. So did Lisbon. So did every city in the IGH report that adopted low-barrier intake.
The evidence runs in one direction. The federal government is running the other way. LA doesn't have to follow Washington off that cliff.
Second, segmented services are smarter than one-size-fits-all. LA's shelter system treats very different populations with essentially the same approach. A 60-year-old woman fleeing domestic violence and a 25-year-old man with untreated schizophrenia end up in comparable facilities with comparable programming. Buenos Aires recognized that different populations need different environments, different staffing, different program designs. In LA, roughly 40% of the people we serve are undocumented, and we work with domestic violence survivors and LGBTQIA+ community members who have specific safety needs. The current shelter system often can't accommodate those realities. Buenos Aires built accommodation around them.
Third, people with lived experience need to lead — not just advise. Proyecto 7 didn't wait for government permission to organize. They took over a shelter and ran it better than the government had. That's not an insult to the city's social workers. It's a recognition that people who have been through homelessness understand the system's failures in ways that policy analysts can't.
"LA talks about lived experience leadership. Buenos Aires practices it."
Uruguay's NITEP network was founded by people living on the streets. These aren't advisory boards — they're designing and operating programs.
What Buenos Aires Gets Wrong
This is not a perfect model.
Over 80% of people surveyed in the January 2026 census reported experiencing institutional violence, primarily from police and the Ministry of Public Space. Advocacy groups have documented people freezing to death on the streets while shelters claimed to have capacity. Access to Social Inclusion Centers still requires referral through the government's 108 hotline or outreach teams — and civil society groups have demanded that entry be available on "spontaneous demand," so people can walk in when they need help rather than waiting for a system that may not reach them in time.
And the national government continues to undermine the city's efforts. Milei's austerity may have reduced monthly inflation (from 25% to under 2%), but poverty still affects 38% of the population as of mid-2025, and the social safety net has enormous holes. The tension between a libertarian national government and a city trying to expand services is constant.
Sound familiar?
The Real Lesson
Buenos Aires didn't solve homelessness. Neither has any city. But they demonstrated something that matters right now: you can redesign a broken system while the walls are falling down around you. You can choose to expand access instead of restricting it. You can build services around people's actual needs instead of forcing people to fit your existing programs.
LA's new Department of Homeless Services and Housing launched January 1, 2026 with a $200 million budget shortfall and 30+ programs eliminated. Federal funding is under direct attack. The Olympics are two years away.
If there was ever a moment that demanded the kind of ground-up redesign Buenos Aires attempted, it's this one.
"You can redesign a broken system while the walls are falling down around you. That's not optimism. That's what radical hope looks like in practice."
Next week: Greater Manchester's youth prevention model, and why LA's failure to invest in keeping young people housed is the most expensive mistake we're making.
Join us at SecondGrace.LA. We're building what comes next.
In love and service, Paul
Sources
IGH Vanguard Cities Case Studies (2026)
Buenos Aires Herald: Homelessness increases by almost 30% (January 2026)
Buenos Aires Times: Homeless numbers up 14% (May 2024)
Buenos Aires Herald: Homeless people freezing to death (July 2024)
Al Jazeera: Argentina poverty hits new high under Milei (December 2024)
Human Rights Watch World Report 2025: Argentina
Global Press Journal: Proyecto 7 and Centro Monteagudo
People's Dispatch: Argentine movements demand government action (July 2019)
CNN: Argentina poverty rate soars above 50% (September 2024)
Argentina's Economic Shock Therapy: Impact of Milei's Austerity (Prime Economics, 2025)
LA County DEO/LAEDC Immigration Enforcement Economic Impact Report (February 2026)
LAHSA Coordinated Entry System
Página/12: Buenos Aires Ausente (workers denounce program conditions)
Buenos Aires City Government: Buenos Aires Presente (BAP)
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