As the Trump administration once again voices false concern about our national homeless crisis, skepticism needs to be the order of the day. A few months ago, President Trump first raised his concerns about homelessness — concerns being a polite way of saying that he was personally offended by the aesthetic blight of homelessness, as opposed to being moved to compassion for the actual human beings suffering it. He also clearly saw the issue as a way to bash Democratic opponents.
Today’s news that his administration has just sent a fact-finding team to California as part of a federal initiative on homelessness should fill any reasonable citizen with doubt and dread. As critics interviewed by both the The Washington Post and The New York Times note, the Trump administration has spent the past three years making things worse for homeless Americans and others, not better. National Low Income Housing Coalition president Diane Yentel notes that “The White House this year proposed cutting the HUD budget by about 20 percent, eliminating the programs that build and preserve homes for the lowest-income people,” and “has also proposed cutting federal rental assistance for a quarter of a million families, as well as evicting 55,000 children from subsidized housing.” The Coalition also noted in a statement that:
The solution to homelessness is affordable homes — not further criminalization, punishing poor people for their poverty, sweeping people experiencing homelessness into increasingly unsafe areas or warehousing people in untenable and unsustainable conditions, all of which are proposals that the White House is seriously considering.
Indeed, given the precedent of the inhumane and dangerous conditions in which migrants are being held along the southern border, it should sent a chill up every decent person’s spine to read that “among the ideas under consideration are razing existing tent camps for the homeless, creating new temporary facilities and refurbishing existing government facilities.” The idea that this administration would make any effort to provide homeless folks, one of the least politically powerful classes of people in our country, with safe and dignified housing, doesn’t withstand the slightest scrutiny.
The administration makes no secret of the fact that this latest move is simply a continuation of the president’s desire to attack his political opponents. According to a White House spokesman, “Like many Americans, the president has taken notice of the homelessness crisis, particularly in cities and states where the liberal policies of overregulation, excessive taxation and poor public service delivery are combining to dramatically increase poverty and public health risks.” Democrats are apparently the cause of homelessness, and are the real target of this vague yet ominous planning. Nowhere in evidence is any expressed interest or sympathy in homeless individuals themselves, which would be the simplest thing in the world to do as window dressing; but the sociopath’s White House cannot even accomplish this fakery.
What’s particularly galling about this cynical and worrisome Trumpian faux interest in taking care of homelessness is that his critique of liberal cities is not without some merit — but not for all the reasons he thinks. There is plenty of NIMBYism that has stymied efforts at higher density and more affordable housing in cities like Los Angeles, and this is shamefully self-interested behavior by people who might otherwise believe themselves to be progressively minded. Likewise with the refusal of some Democratic politicians to push for sufficient taxes to provide needed shelter. Yet these are not failures of liberals, but of all Americans, as such policy failures are echoed in locales where both Democrats and Republicans hold office. And in point of fact, Los Angeles has indeed raised taxes and passed a bond recently to build housing for the homeless.
These new moves by the president show the dystopian direction in which our politics can head when liberalism fails to live up to its ideals. Homelessness is deeply intertwined with the growing inequality of American society, economic disruptions like the Great Recession, and the lack of a comprehensive social safety net. Having shied away for too long from the structural and democratizing changes needed to create a fair economy and ensure that anyone who needs a home can have one, progressives have been complicit in a growing socioeconomic morass that Trump now exploits. Just as Trump has no real cure for the economy’s ills, he has no real plan for the homeless who have been mass produced by incredible economic pressures and insufficient public support. Instead, homelessness becomes yet another area in which he tries to perform his authoritarian strong man act, taking care of a complex humanitarian issue by dehumanizing a whole population, no people too vexing a problem that they can’t be handled by putting them in a shitty camp somewhere far from prying eyes.