We’ve discussed a few times in the past couple months the ominous and politicized plans emerging out of the Trump White House to “crack down” on homelessness in order to embarrass the president’s political enemies and rid American cities of the aesthetic blight of those who lack basic shelter. The bad news has continued, as a couple weeks ago the president chose Robert Marbut as executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. Marbut has consulted with many American cities on how to address homelessness, and his views are both controversial and at odds with the consensus that has emerged over the past couple decades on the best approaches to this crisis. During that time, a broad agreement emerged among those who concern themselves with this crisis that, perhaps not surprisingly, finding housing for those who lack this basic human right should be integral to the cause. As NPR describes it, this “Housing First” approach means that “you need to get people into housing before you can effectively solve the other problems that they may be having.”
Disappointingly, Marbut is not on board with this consensus position, and embraces more of what some might call a tough love, and what others might call a sadistic, approach to helping Americans in need. His preference is for services over shelter, and for an approach that sounds a lot like criminalizing homelessness. For instance, the Tampa Bay Times reports that for Clearwater, Florida, he recommended “preventing the homeless from lying down on sidewalks, banning bathing in fountains and sleeping in public places, expanding rules about panhandling and 'hoarding' in backpacks or shopping carts, and expanding police arrest authority for what are now minor offenses that now just result in a ticket.”
And a letter co-signed by 75 members of Congress who object to his appointment describes some of Marbut’s other efforts:
In one [. . .] campus that he created in St. Petersburg, people experiencing homelessness were made to first sleep on mats in a courtyard outside the facility; only with “good behavior” could people make their way indoors to the air conditioning and, after further proving their worthiness, bunk beds.
Marbut also takes issue with feeding homeless people on the street, we can only assume for fear of encouraging their dependence on food.
Homelessness is an issue that has vexed politicians of both parties and the efforts of many, many compassionate and dedicated individuals, including some who have made it their life’s work to help people in such dire need, and there has been no silver bullet to this crisis. But as I’ve said before, particularly frustrating is that American failures on homelessness are hardly the sole fault of Donald Trump or the Republican Party. Disappointingly, plenty of Democratic politicians have enacted policies criminalizing the homeless in cities across the United States.
Yet it is undeniable that since 2010, and particularly since the Obama administration’s implementation of Opening Doors, described as “the nation’s first strategic plan to solve homelessness,” the number of people in the United States without shelter has decreased significantly.
Rather than building on progress that’s been made, Donald Trump appears set to reverse the gains made in sheltering vulnerable Americans, both out of ignorance of the best practices developed over time, and out of an overriding need to politicize this issue to attack his political enemies. Since Christmas, the president has resumed his Twitter obsession with homeless people in California and New York, and accusing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo of shirking their responsibilities on this front. As Aaron Rupar at Vox points out, though, Trump tellingly continues to hold his fire on GOP politicians in Florida, the state with the third-largest unsheltered population. It is not too much of a stretch to imagine that the president has no problem making the homeless crisis worse, in order to increase the size of the cudgel he thinks he can wield against Democrats. After all, among his comments about this issue, you will search in vain for even a glimmer of acknowledgment that most of the unhoused are fellow Americans, and all of them fellow human beings, deserving of both compassion and respect.
Moving steadily to eliminate homelessness means providing homes and adequate services to this population, not sweeping them into holding camps and making them jump through hoops to earn a bed to sleep in. Revulsion at Trump’s plans on this issue should go far beyond turning it into a political liability for the president. This is a crisis for our entire society and any claims we have to a common morality. There are many elements of our status quo that will shock the conscience of those Americans who come after us, but surely our tolerance and mass indifference to those without shelter will be near the top of the list. That we have struggled so long to form a national consensus that people without housing should unconditionally be provided this basic human right is a sign of our society’s moral shortcomings, not the shortcomings of those without housing. Prolonging a humane resolution of this crisis due to a collective reluctance to commit adequate resources is doubtless a component of our inability to address the pressing needs of those in less perilous but still abominable circumstances, from students crushed by college debt to Americans imperiled by a lack of health insurance. When we establish no clear floor to how far we will allow anyone to fall in our society, we are all left floundering for less basic but still vital needs. Promoting false solutions to homelessness assaults our common dreams far beyond the crisis of Americans living on the street.