Trump Is Right About Homelessness

President Donald Trump’s return to Washington, DC took an unexpected turn when he spent more than ten minutes discussing how homelessness is ruining American cities. The speech, delivered at the America First Policy Institute’s summit, described how homeless tent cities and associated increases in crime are destroying communities across the country.

Twitter predictably erupted in outrage at his policy prescriptions to clean up city streets and require the homeless to move to shelters and get help. But Trump is right. As he stated, “Some people say that’s horrible. No, what’s horrible is what’s happening now.” Thankfully, state leaders across the country are taking on this growing problem and rejecting failed local policies.

As Trump said, homelessness is a public safety issue. A Cicero Institute poll found that seven in ten Georgia voters think that homeless camps threaten public safety. This concern is one reason why an even higher percentage of voters want the state legislature to ban street camping. Given that three-quarters of the homeless living on the streets suffer from serious mental illness, three-quarters are addicted to drugs or alcohol, and the majority have both afflictions, it is cruel to allow these individuals to suffer and most likely die on the streets.

During his speech, President Trump shared many horrifying stories about the victims of crime. But another gruesome story that he could have shared was Chelsea Friday’s. Chelsea lives in Phoenix, Arizona in a working-class area of the city where local politicians decided to allow open air drug markets and unsupervised homeless camps. (It is not a coincidence that even the most progressive cities clear homeless camps in wealthy neighborhoods?). After she and her husband helped a homeless man by giving him food for a few days, the man returned to their home and tried to break in. A neighbor, noticing the disturbance, came by to try to stop the forced entry. He was stabbed by the homeless man and died on Chelsea’s front porch.

Senator Livingston brought Chelsea in to share her story outside the Arizona capitol to highlight the need for his homelessness reform bill. Unfortunately, strong opposition from Phoenix’s government and certain homelessness nonprofits led to the legislature missing the chance to condition new homelessness funding for expanded shelter options on localities enforcing their street sleeping bans. Beyond the harms to local communities, more than 500 homeless people died on Arizona’s streets in the first half of 2022—before the city’s oppressive summer heat hit. This horrific number is on pace to more than double from only two years earlier. If Phoenix continues allowing lawless tent cities, this number will only grow.

Atlanta is another blue city in a red state that has clearly failed to deal with homelessness. This spring, nearly 100 advocates piled into a Senate committee hearing to demand that the legislature stop debate on any new ideas to get the homeless off the streets and into services. Instead, their only prescription was for more money for the same failed policies. Despite advocates’ best efforts, next week, the state Senate will host hearings chaired by Senator Summers on how to address unsheltered homelessness.

Summers will focus on alternatives to the prevailing permanent supportive housing model (free or subsidized apartments for life with no required treatment or services). In the early 2000s, permanent supportive housing proponents promised to end homelessness in a decade. Despite (or, perhaps because of) the federal government mandating this model, street homelessness has increased since its adoption.

To see why permanent supportive housing is a failure, just look at San Francisco. San Francisco has built enough housing units to house every single chronically homeless individual in the city back in 2011, yet street homelessness has only increased since then. Trump summarized this model’s failure when he said, “To build millions of houses or hold homeless people in luxury hotels, costing a fortune for the government, and have no medical or rehab professionals available—it’s fruitless.”

Similarly, Representative Dallman’s homelessness reform in Wisconsin passed the state Assembly but died after the Governor made it clear he would veto the bill. Among other things, Dallman’s bill would have instituted pay-for-performance standards for nonprofit shelters to correct the misaligned incentives that often lead to more funding when homelessness gets worse and more visible.

While advocates and big cities in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin successfully killed needed reforms, other states have seen recent success. The most notable is Missouri, where Governor Parsons just signed a comprehensive homelessness bill into law.

The Missouri law, authored by Representative DeGroot and Senator Rehder, sets the standard for contemporary homelessness policy. Rather than allowing street camping and pouring endless money into permanent supportive housing, the state will use its funds to expand traditional and new shelter options. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as permanent supportive housing has monopolized government homelessness funding, the number of shelter beds in many cities has declined. As Rehder wrote, “Chronic homelessness is about more than lacking a home, and always has been. It’s time our government recognize that.”

The law also requires cities with high numbers of homeless living on the streets to enforce their camping bans or else lose state funding. And it establishes rewards for nonprofits and localities that find innovative ways to lower the number of days the homeless spend incarcerated, hospitalized, or on the streets.

A few months ago, a Tennessee bill to ban street camping carried by Representative Williams and Senator Bailey became law. These state leaders understand that the necessary first step to help the homeless is getting them off the streets. Over the coming year, Tennessee is expected to follow up its recent reforms with sweeping changes to mental health admittance and treatment criteria, along with increased funding for nonprofits when they hit metrics to help the homeless improve their lives.

In Utah, Representative Eliason sponsored a bill that allows the state to step in and expand shelter capacity if a city fails to do so—a needed change given that some homeless individuals are found frozen to death in parks during Salt Lake City’s frigid winters. The bill also empowers the state to withhold these shelter funds from cities that do not save homeless lives by moving them off the streets. Another Eliason bill that was signed into law makes it easier for those clearly experiencing a psychotic episode to be taken off the streets and stabilized.

Last year, Texas, a longtime leader on local preemption, enacted a bipartisan bill sponsored by Representative Capriglione and Senator Buckingham that allows the state to pull all state funding from any city that does not enforce its camping ban. This bill followed Austin city residents voting overwhelmingly to force the city council to reinstate its street camping ban. Notably, enforcement of the camping ban has led to only one arrest, and that arrest only resulted in a referral to services. Most of the former homeless on the streets returned to safer shelters to get services or left for cities that continue allowing street camps and turn a blind eye to open air drug use.

One part of Trump’s speech that received a lot of attention was his call for sanctioned homelessness service areas on the outskirts of cities. He may have gotten this idea from Texas, where Governor Abbott established the Esperanza Community on state land. This community provides a safe area for the homeless to set up their tents under law enforcement supervision. Its model works because the homeless are kept safer and have access to basic sanitation. And, importantly, it is much easier to connect the homeless with needed treatment and services compared to unregulated camps dispersed across neighborhoods in a city. Missouri’s new law allows the state and localities to use their homelessness funding for low-cost options like sanctioned camping areas.

President Trump summarized his policy prescriptions by stating, “The homeless need to go to shelters, the long term mentally ill need to go to institutions, and the unhoused drug addicts need to go to rehab.” This commonsense solution has been systematically ignored for decades, with predicably terrible results. The days of San Francisco setting national homelessness policy are numbered. With President Trump’s blessing, expect conservative homelessness reforms to spread much faster across the states.