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.