WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump has promised to arrest thousands of homeless people sleeping on America’s streets and move them to large tent cities on “cheap land.” This is one of several plans in his plan to upend a national strategy focused on finding people and providing voluntary housing.
In a video announcing the policy last year, President Trump said, “We will use every tool, every tool, every power we have to get homeless people off the streets.” “There is no mercy in leaving these people living in squalor and squalor without giving them the help they need.”
Homeless advocacy groups, which have fought for decades to end stigma against homeless people, are preparing for a multi-pronged fight against policies they deem inhumane.
But Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who is trying to combat one of the nation’s largest homelessness crises, is eager to work with the incoming administration and has taken it upon herself to help house the city’s estimated 46,000 homeless people. He said he believed President Trump could find common ground.
“I’m certainly going to start out that way,” Bass, a Democrat who was sworn into office by Vice President Kamala Harris, said in an interview. “Throughout the years I spent in Congress, the 12 years I spent in Congress, I had a very significant relationship with the Republican Party.”
The city doesn’t have cheap or remote land, and Bass doesn’t see the need to use more aggressive tactics to remove people from the streets, she said. But Bass said she would prefer to use federal land for temporary shelters, as some Trump administration officials suggested during the president’s first term.
“We’re on the same page on that,” Bass said, adding that the city could potentially build shipping containers and other modular units for more stable forms of housing rather than tent cities. suggested something.
Bass said public opinion and recent Supreme Court rulings are paving the way for cities and states to take more punitive measures against homeless populations, which have skyrocketed in recent years due to rising housing costs. The government is trying to survive the changes in the political situation surrounding the country.
“The ground is fertile,” said Jesse Rabinowitz, campaign communications director for the National Homeless Law Center, which fights laws that criminalize homelessness.
President Trump has not yet chosen a housing secretary, and the transition team’s statement to the Times did not answer specific questions about Trump’s plans.
“The American people re-elected President Trump by a wide margin and gave him the authority to carry out the promises he made during the campaign, including reducing housing costs for all Americans. He will deliver,” Trump Vance said. spokeswoman Caroline Levitt said.
But homeless experts and advocates who reviewed public statements from President Trump and his top advisers and donors identified a number of possible changes. These include more aggressive policing, cutting funding to some low-income housing and shelter programs, forcing people with substance and mental health problems back into institutions, and banning alcohol. This includes ending national strategies to detain people without imposing conditions such as Participation in mental health treatment or faith-based treatment programs.
“Everyone is just trying to figure out what to do next,” said Sharon LaPorte, California policy director for the Supportive Housing Corporation, an advocacy group that also works with homeless nonprofits.
Trump campaigned largely on the idea that cities were chaotic and out of control, and that he could impose more order by cracking down on homeless encampments and open drug use.
“Where our kids used to play Little League baseball, there are horrifying, disgusting, dangerous, filthy junkie and homeless encampments that don’t let us play much anymore, right?” President Trump said this at a rally in Uniondale, New York, in September.
More than 650,000 people across the country are estimated to be homeless overnight in 2023, according to the most recent data available. More than 250,000 of them were left without shelter. California has the largest number of homeless people, with more than 180,000 people. It is widely believed that such counts underestimate the true number of homeless people.
While many homeless people struggle with addiction and mental illness, research shows that the biggest contributing factor to homelessness is a lack of affordable housing.
For example, West Virginia has the highest opioid death rate, but even with its smaller population, it has only a fraction of California’s homeless population. Mississippi has one of the lowest homelessness rates in the nation, despite extremely high poverty rates. But addiction, mental illness, and poverty can make it difficult for people to escape homelessness.
Most of the country’s homelessness policies are organized around a principle called “housing first,” which means people can move into housing without requiring abstinence, mental health treatment, or faith-based treatment. do. Theoretically, many homeless people do not need additional services, and those who do are likely to accept them once they are off the streets, given the stress caused by living without shelter. That’s what it means.
But the sense of disorder caused by open drug use and street camping has led more and more cities to crack down on homelessness by tightening laws that allow them to be removed or arrested. Even liberal politicians like California Governor Gavin Newsom have begun to prescribe more aggressive tactics to eliminate encampments.
And the Supreme Court ruled in June that cities can enforce camping bans even if they lack shelter for homeless people.
In January, with Republicans in control of both houses of Congress, President Trump said he would seek a nationwide ban on camping in urban areas. He said violators would be given the choice of accepting services or being forced into tent cities where doctors and other professionals would assess their needs.
It’s unclear whether President Trump can actually accomplish this part of his plan without local and state cooperation.
Federal park police can arrest people on federal land, but President Trump will likely need city and county police to enforce the camping ban in most areas of the country. During his first term, President Trump submitted a similar proposal to Los Angeles that included using federal land for temporary homeless shelters. But the plan fell apart, in part because city and state officials did not agree to his demands for the forced removal of Skid Row and other encampments.
Rabinowitz predicted that Trump would likely start building tent cities in more conservative states, such as Florida. Florida passed a statewide camping ban that went into effect in October.
Devon Kurtz, director of public safety for the conservative group Cicero Institute, said designated campgrounds will be closed to people resisting evacuations by bringing patrol teams of doctors and social workers to central locations. said to provide an effective way to contact them.
“It’s much easier to do it, but the only way you can really do it is if everyone is in the same place,” he said.
The Cicero Institute, which has been active in promoting legislation to crack down on camping across the country, was founded in 2018 by Joe Lonsdale, a venture capitalist who donated more than $1 million to the Trump campaign.
Mr. Kurz also wants to put more people into mental health facilities and use more federal housing funds for local homeless programs that force people to become sober and impose other lifestyle requirements. He said other changes are also expected, including legislation that could pave the way. housing.
“I think the pot of money is unlikely to shrink and may even increase,” he predicted.
But homeless advocates say Mr. Trump’s housing vouchers, which provide California with about $5.6 billion a year to provide housing to low-income people, will fund some housing programs, including social services. They are concerned that programs such as Medicaid could be cut.
More broadly, President Trump’s approach strips homeless people of their dignity and freedom for the crime of having no place to live, and removes them from public life without increasing the supply of affordable housing. They claim that it will be.
They argue that a focus on housing people regardless of their sobriety status has led to recent successes, such as reducing veteran homelessness, but that success would be undermined if President Trump reverses course. I am doing it.
“Requiring someone to be in shape and sober before they can access housing means more people fall by the wayside before they can get back into housing,” said California senior Alex Vysotsky. We know from years of evidence,” California senior Alex Vysotsky said. Policy Advisor for the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
While cities and states set their own homelessness policies, the federal government controls most of the funding and can shift the balance by tying grants to requirements that force local governments to change tactics.
“We’re concerned about the federal government giving local governments the green light to follow their worst political instincts, not the effects we know of,” Vysotsky said.
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