On July 24, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that directs federal agencies to assist jurisdictions that criminalize people experiencing homelessness. The order rewards cities, counties and states that act to enforce bans on camping, squatting, public drug use and loitering; further, it encourages the growth of involuntary treatment programs for mental illness and addiction. In short, this is not a homelessness plan; it is a punishment plan.
I emphasize the importance of “lived experience”; I do not just write this as a housing scholar and as a former COO of a supportive housing organization. I write this as someone who has slept on the streets. I know what it means to be unhoused, invisible and trashed by systems that exist to serve everyone but you. Trump’s order does not create the conditions for stability or safety. It reverts to the worst instincts of an America that thought it could solve social problems by imprisoning people.
The framing of the order, that homelessness is a law-and-order issue, misrepresents the reality of the homelessness crisis. Homelessness is not a crime; it is the result of dysfunction and a failure to address our lack of affordable housing, a lack of access to mental health services and wages that fail to meet the cost of living. No one chooses to sleep outside in defiance. People end up outside when every other option has been closed off.
Trump’s order takes us back to the same punitive approaches that we have long since accepted have failed. Indeed, research indicates that clearing camps or arresting people for “quality of life” violations does not reduce homelessness, only moves it. When a person has no alternative option and the only means of survival is to sleep, to sit, to urinate or defecate in public, it does not provide an element of “good living”; it provides the means of punishing people for being poor.
What is more dangerous is the effort for forced institutionalization. This executive order states that states can use this rule to force people into mental health or drug treatment programs without their buy-in. We have done this before, during the era of mass institutionalization, when people with mental health illnesses were housed in deplorable conditions with no path to autonomy or integration into the community. That system collapsed when it could no longer endure its own cruelty. Why are we pretending we succeeded?
This order also directly threatens harm-reduction strategies like safe consumption sites, strategies that successfully lowered overdose deaths in the last four years. At a moment in time when communities are still reeling from synthetic opioids like fentanyl, putting a stop to life-saving treatment and safety measures is both short-sighted and deadly.
There is a better path. We have decades of research to support Housing First strategies that eliminate barriers that depend on preconditions to permanent housing. Cities that have invested in Housing First, like Houston, Texas, and Salt Lake City, Utah, have had serious decreases in the number of chronically homeless persons. Housing First works because it defines housing as a right of every human being, not a privilege based on worth. It meets people where they are, instead of forcing them to be “better” before they are “worthy” of shelter.
Homelessness is not a homogeneous experience; it impacts veterans, young adults aging out of foster care, survivors of domestic violence and hardworking and low-waged people who cannot economically survive the high rents. A just response must reflect this heterogeneity. It must increase supportive housing capacity and vouchers, eliminate zoning barriers currently in place prohibiting affordable housing development, and create a fully funded mental health and substance use supportive services within the community, not in an institution.
This executive order is not a solution to an exacerbating issue; it is a diversion. It gives the appearance of addressing and minimizing the plight of poverty, but it places the blame on them for the violence of their poverty, instead of recognizing that deleterious economic and racial inequalities are the very foundation for the experience of homelessness. It offers concrete walls over safety nets, coercion over care.
As someone who has personally fallen through the cracks, I earnestly implore the elected leaders to reject this as a vision. Instead of vilifying people for their pain, let us create systems and structures to dignify their existence. Let us expand investment in housing, not cuffs. Let us measure our society by how we treat our most vulnerable community members, not by how delegitimized we make their existence.
Antoine Lovell is an assistant professor at Morgan State University’s School of Social Work and a member of the Research Council at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. A formerly homeless youth, his work focuses on homelessness policy, housing justice and inequality.