Trump's executive order on homelessness
I had been thinking about writing about homelessness, or at least adding to the comments in my "Quote of the day: homelessness" entry from 2022, because of the Seattle Times article, "Homeless people visited ER less after moving into King County’s hotels."
The concept of "housing first" is based on the idea that putting people in a more stable housing situation, regardless of whether or not they continue to partake in drugs and alcohol or exhibit mental illness, they are easier to help, and it saves the government money, even if it doesn't fit with moral, "you should stop," concepts about who "deserves" help and who doesn't.
Then Trump came out with an executive order ("Ending crime and disorder on America’s streets") changing federal policy on homelessness, towards the "moral" side, not the practical evidence-based policy side. Among other elements it bans encampments on public space, something he has no control over unless it is federal property.
From the Los Angeles Daily News article "Trump’s crackdown on homelessness: What does it mean for California?,"
Trump doesn’t want to stop at banning homeless encampments and pushing people into treatment, and that’s where he and Newsom diverge: The president wants to upend two core tenets of California’s homelessness policy.
Trump wants to abolish federal support for “housing first,” which is the idea that homeless individuals should get housing even if they are still using drugs, and “harm reduction,” which focuses on preventing overdoses and otherwise making drug use safer. Both tenets are backed by research and have been the gold standard in California — and at the federal level — for years.
Groups are concerned that their systems of program delivery for homeless services will no longer qualify for federal funds. From the LADN:
Trump’s order also prioritizes committing more people to institutions from the street. The order seeks to make it easier to commit people with mental illness who can’t care for themselves, while also promising grants and other assistance to help ramp up commitments, and threatening to divert funding away from places that don’t push people into treatment facilities “to the maximum extent permitted by law.” It also promises to prioritize funding to expand mental health courts and drug courts.
The likelihood of federal monies being provided to local and state governments to deal with mental illness in this way is remote given the cutbacks in other programs like Medicaid.
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I can't remember what article I read, but it made the point that the overall counts of homeless people done by local governments include people who are housed in domiciles in which they are guests. While I knew that, it accounts for research finding that a majority of the homeless don't have substance abuse or mental health issues ("Here's what largest study in decades of California homelessness found," San Francisco Chronicle)..
The fact is that the etiology of street homelessness is different than homeless in temporary housing.
More seniors are homeless. The major point of the LA Times column "Trump’s order on homelessness gets it all wrong, and here’s why," is that despite reports showing a stabilization of numbers in the homeless population, the mix is changing and that more seniors are finding themselves unhoused because of income and high housing costs, not from behavioral issues.
Labels: health and wellness planning, health care, homelessness, mental health services, policy research, public policy, seniors
posted by Richard Layman @ 6:02 PM&Permanent Link
3 Comments:
Older people on the margin too.
How a Generation’s Struggle Led to a Record Surge in Homelessness
Late baby boomers have endured challenges that have left many economically vulnerable and dependent on parents for help. With their parents dying, they are ending up on the streets in growing numbers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/us/politics/homelessness-baby-boomers.html
Mr. Forrest’s displacement in late middle age began a homelessness spell that has lasted more than 15 years, and it epitomizes an overlooked force that has helped push homelessness among elderly Americans to a record high: the loss of parental aid. Without it, “I hit the skids,” said Mr. Forrest, now 70. “That’s when I became homeless.”
Throughout their lives, late baby boomers like Mr. Forrest — people born from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s — have suffered homelessness at uniquely high rates, for reasons many and varied. Their sheer numbers ensured they came of age facing fierce competition for housing and jobs. They entered the work force amid bruising recessions and a shift to a postindustrial economy that pummeled low-skilled workers.
https://www.texasobserver.org/dallas-texas-monty-bennett-homeless-policy/
A Dallas Megadonor, a New Nonprofit, and the War on ‘Housing First’
Today’s homelessness crisis has relatively modern origins.
In the 1970s and into the ’80s, a global economic crisis blended with Reagan-era austerity and the longer-running trends of destruction of cheap single-room housing and defunding of federal low-income housing programs. This birthed the problem as we now know it, with a greater portion of unhoused women and families, younger men, and people who are employed and lack addiction issues but simply can’t afford rent. The mid-century failure to provide community-based services to the mentally ill following deinstitutionalization also played a role that experts debate.
In the 1990s, Dallas joined cities across the country taking a more punitive approach by enforcing “quality of life” ordinances prohibiting public sleeping and panhandling while aggressively dismantling encampments. The city particularly cracked down ahead of the 1994 World Cup. After authorities displaced residents of a shantytown under Interstate 45 despite insufficient shelter beds, homeless plaintiffs sued the city but were ultimately unsuccessful.
In the 2000s, business-development pressures led Dallas leaders—including then-city homelessness czar and future mayor Mike Rawlings—to make the presence of the unhoused a key issue and back construction of The Bridge, now the largest shelter in Dallas, located on the outskirts of downtown. But visible homelessness persisted and criminalization continued: Between 2003 and 2022, the city continued to pass new panhandling-related restrictions.
But critics have long said these tactics don’t actually work.
“They in fact result in an increase in homelessness,” said Hannah Lebovits, the interim director of the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington. “In the years following the passage of these laws, not only do we not see a sustained drop, but we actually see an increase,” while the unsheltered are also pushed into more-dangerous locations.
Between 2015 and 2021, even as the city invested in shelter space and beds filled up, unsheltered homelessness quadrupled, noted the Housing Forward CEO Kahn. “We tried to manage that inflow in emergency shelters with more outreach workers and temporary solutions,” she said. “But what we realized is we were not adequately investing in pathways out of homelessness.”
During the same timeframe, some nonprofits moved to embrace a different approach: housing first. In 2016, Dallas organizations started experimenting with placing homeless individuals into housing prior to solving other problems, such as mental illness, which affects approximately 40 percent of the homeless in Dallas County. In 2021, Kahn said Housing Forward worked to reorient the whole homeless services system around “investing in diverting people from homelessness and rehousing out of our current shelters, as opposed to building new ones.” This shift began yielding “incremental progress across the community,” she said, though not all in the community have perceived the change.
The “housing first” paradigm reversed a longstanding logic that the homeless must first seek treatment, maintain sobriety, and even hold a job to receive housing assistance. Instead, the approach focuses on swiftly getting them into stable housing, where services will be more effective.
But today, a systematic right-wing attack has dislodged the housing-first approach and ushered in a new era of criminalization, with Texas leading the way. The Cicero Institute has now helped spread its camping ban legislation or influenced other homelessness legislation in around 20 additional states. In tandem, TPPF has pushed a similar agenda through a stream of policy papers and blog posts, lobbying, and panels involving lawmakers and Cicero. Ultimately, Trump’s second electoral victory broke the dam.
‘Unimaginably inhumane’: Federal cuts threaten to undo Boston’s progress fighting homelessness
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/01/12/business/trump-homeless-housing-funding-cuts/
On Washington Street in Jamaica Plain, a modern-looking apartment building is Pine Street Inn’s latest bid to end homelessness in Boston.
The five-story building looks much like the luxury apartment complexes cropping up across the region, where rents regularly top $3,000 a month. But instead of well-off 20- and 30-somethings, this place is home to people who were chronically homeless not long ago, the sort of people cities such as Boston have long struggled to help.
Here, formerly homeless people live in their own apartments, and have access to supportive services like case workers and counseling, all under the same roof. This model of pairing housing and support services — most commonly known as permanent supportive housing — has successfully housed some of the city’s most vulnerable residents, keeping people with severe mental and physical disabilities and those who struggle with addiction off the street and out of shelters, Pine Street said.
But the federal government no longer wants to pay for these projects: The Trump administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development is pushing to slash funding for permanent supportive units.
The cuts — which are being challenged in federal court by a group of cities — would shift most of the money that pays for permanent supportive housing to transitional housing programs designed for shorter-term stays. The changes, service providers said, would likely put more people on the street, because the funding pays for thousands of leases across Massachusetts for formerly homeless people. Without it, they said, some of the state’s most vulnerable people will likely be evicted and end up back in the temporary shelter system.
Cities have long developed their own homeless strategies, but many of the resources people rely on — overnight shelters, transitional housing, and permanent supportive units — are funded with federal money. Last year, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development distributed $3.6 billion in homeless funding nationally, $136 million of which went to Massachusetts. The vast majority of the state’s funding — some $91 million — went toward leasing and maintaining nearly 4,000 permanent supportive housing units.
The agency didn’t give an explicit reason, but in an executive order last year, President Trump sought to end funding for those sorts of units altogether, saying that they “deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency” by allowing tenants to stay long term. (Unlike permanent supportive housing, federally-funded transitional housing units and shelter beds typically have limits on how long people can stay.)
Simply providing shelter beds to those people frequently results in them ending up back on the street, said Danielle Ferrier, CEO of Heading Home, one of the region’s largest homeless services providers. Permanent supportive housing provides not just a bed and a roof over their head, but services aimed at addressing the issues that put people at risk for homelessness to begin with, all in one place.
“We are housing folks through this model who are really struggling with daily function in a way that keeps them from making it in society,” said Ferrier. “The reason this kind of housing exists is because there isn’t another system for people with this kind of complexity.”
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