President Donald Trump’s July 24 executive order on reducing “vagrancy” is exactly the wrong approach to the pervasive problem of houselessness. It encourages, and funds, cities and states to treat people living in poverty and lacking housing like criminals and to confine them in involuntary, often inhumane, institutions. Trump takes this approach as his administration has massively cut funding for and access to health care and housing.
This dangerous step in the wrong direction comes despite overwhelming evidence that the only effective way to end houselessness is by keeping people housed and moving those on the streets into affordable, permanent housing.
More forced commitments and detention will not house people. It diverts resources away from more effective, more rights-respecting, and less traumatizing voluntary treatment, at a time when the federal government is cutting overall funding for any kind of social services. Historically, authorities have used mental health detention to hold gravely disproportionate numbers of Black and Latino people.
This approach will only deepen the crisis by diverting resources into punitive, short-term measures that do not create housing security. Instead, it builds additional traps that keep people locked in the vicious cycle of houselessness and poverty.
Trump pledges federal funding for state and local enforcement of laws criminalizing “urban camping and loitering” and for encampment destruction. This pledge comes just over one year after the US Supreme Court’s decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson authorizing local governments to punish people for simply existing in public spaces even if there is nowhere else for them to go.
Criminalization does not solve houselessness. It moves people, whose crime is being unable to pay rent, from one place to another. It forces local jurisdictions to bear increased costs of policing, court process, jailing, and hospitalization, without helping those without housing. It exposes people to greater danger by displacing them, isolating them, and forcing them into hiding. It disrupts service providers’ efforts to help.
US cities face dramatic affordable housing shortages. In Los Angeles, the nation’s leader in houselessness, half a million low-income households lack access to affordable housing, and hundreds of thousands pay more than they can afford or live in overcrowded situations. As a formerly unhoused community organizer Sonja Verdugo has said: “Pretty much most of Los Angeles is a paycheck away from being unhoused.” Unlike criminalization, keeping people in their homes and moving people from the streets into housing reduces the problem.
A second harmful component of Trump’s order is that it encourages and subsidizes taking away people’s rights to make basic decisions for themselves and confining them in mental health facilities. This approach is criminalization by another name. Rather than provide community-based voluntary treatment and housing with services that help people regain stability, pursue recovery, and receive support for their mental health needs or harmful substance use, Trump’s approach warehouses them in treatment facilities.
Trump’s approach is not unique. California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order calling for sweeps of encampments and proposed a “model ordinance” for cities to criminalize unhoused people and he and the California legislature are building a system of forced mental health care, through CARE Court, SB 43, Prop 1 and others, to address houselessness. New York’s political leadership similarly is turning toward forced commitments and encampment sweeps.
The political leadership’s embrace of coercive and punitive approaches to houselessness shows that they are not serious about solving the problem. Housing First, an approach Trump explicitly disavows, has proven successful repeatedly. It means housing people to give them stability and security, a place to sleep and shower that is their own, then helping them find jobs, attend school, care for children, and address their mental or physical health needs from that foundation. Housing providers using this approach report outstanding success rates.
LA County’s Project 50, a pilot program that used this approach for the most chronically unhoused people, helped them stay in housing, addressed their needs, and saved public money on emergency services. Milwaukee County and the state of Utah both successfuly reduced chronic houselessness using Housing First approaches.
Federal funding for housing, including public housing, cut long ago to nearly nothing, and Section 8 subsidies, which help people cover their rent, should be restored and enhanced to mitigate the nation’s housing crisis, promote public safety by housing people, and help countless people live healthy lives.
If Trump and other leaders truly wanted to solve houselessness, they would abandon ineffective and cruel strategies of criminalization and coerced institutionalization and instead focus on what works—housing.
