Elections and Homelessness Policy
I’m pasting an email that I sent to a homelessness researcher group that I interact with on 5 likely and specific policy impacts of an incoming Republican Presidential Administration.
Also, for those interested, I ended the previous post, titled “Elections”, with a wonky cliffhanger. Have not heard from anyone who was in suspense on this, but my work on Jim Sills’s mayoralty is progressing and I’ll post a quick follow up at the end of this post.
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[email text] In a response to a media inquiry I fielded this morning, I put together some talking points for myself on how the incoming Republican administration will impact housing policy. I’m sure people with more time and resources than I are working on more formal versions of this, but in the meantime there seems to be a vacuum on information on this.
Thus I’m posting a drafty, quick and almost certainly incomplete list my brainstormed items of likely, specific policy impacts in the hopes that this may be useful as a basis for others who are asked to comment on the same. Tried to stick to facts and keep opinions to a minimum. It also may lay some groundwork for the NAEH convening next month that Andrew is coordinating, and thus possibly start a conversation for the work we will engage in then.
And the usual disclaimer that I speak solely for myself, and not on behalf of the NAEH or any other organization, with these observations.
So, in no particular order and with items probably as no surprise to most of us, under the incoming administration, I expect that we will see…
An ending of federal support for housing first approaches. This is one of the few homeless-specific policy objectives in Project 2025, and was also a position taken by Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors and Bob Marbach, the USICH Director in Trump’s previous administration. From Project 2025: “Housing First is a far-left idea premised on the belief that homelessness is primarily circumstantial rather than behavioral. The Housing First answer to homelessness is to give someone a house instead of attempting to understand the underlying causes of homelessness.”
An adoption of a “housing last” approach that prioritizes behavioral health-oriented approaches to addressing homelessness over housing-based approaches. In Trump’s previous term, HUD and USICH policies cast homelessness much more in terms of mental illness and substance abuse as the primary drivers of homelessness. Project 2025 calls for an “end to Housing First policies so that the department prioritizes mental health and substance abuse issues before jumping to permanent interventions in homelessness.”
Increased acceptance of punitive responses to homelessness. Federal positions would be more supportive of local initiatives that prioritize law enforcement-oriented approaches towards addressing homelessness over more services-oriented and housing-based approaches. This includes encampment clearances, anti-panhandling ordinances, and proscribing activities in public spaces that became easier to enact following the Supreme Court’s Grant’s Pass decision earlier this year. Agenda 47, Trump’s 2023 campaign platform, states that: “President Trump will work with states to ban urban camping, offering violators the option to either receive treatment and rehabilitation or face arrest,” and that “Violators of these bans will be arrested, but they will be given the option to accept treatment and services if they are willing to be rehabilitated. Many of them don’t want that, but we will give them the option.”
Increased roles for institutionally-based approaches to addressing homelessness. Simply put, a deemphasis on seeing homelessness as housing means that more homeless people will likely spend longer periods of time in institutions such as homeless shelters, carceral facilities and psychiatric hospitals. Agenda 47 states that “When President Trump returns to the White House, he will open large parcels of inexpensive land, bring in doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, and drug rehab specialists, and create tent cities where the homeless can be relocated and their problems identified. In addition, President Trump will bring back mental institutions to house and rehabilitate those who are severely mentally ill or dangerously deranged with the goal of reintegrating them back into society.”
Cutbacks in social spending. A more conservative presidential administration and congress will be more likely to cut social spending. This could result in less funding available for homeless services and affordable housing initiatives, which would directly impact homeless policy, and more general cuts to a variety of programs that will leave more people who at risk for becoming unstably housed and/or homeless. Project 2025 also calls for the need to “restrict program eligibility when admission would threaten the protection of the life and health of individuals and fail to encourage upward mobility and economic advancement through household self-sufficiency. Where admissible in regulatory action, HUD should implement reforms reducing the implicit anti-marriage bias in housing assistance programs, strengthen work and work-readiness requirements, implement maximum term limits for residents in PBRA and TBRA programs … Notwithstanding administrative reforms, Congress should enact legislation that protects life and eliminates provisions in federal housing and welfare benefits policies that discourage work, marriage, and meaningful paths to upward economic mobility.”
Lastly, three links for those who want to dive deeper into this:
The HUD chapter in Project 2025, authored by Ben Carson –
The homelessness section in Trump’s Agenda 47 campaign platform
The 2019 Council of Economic Advisors report The State of Homelessness in America
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PS - in my previous post I discussed some historical work I’ve been doing focusing on Jim SIlls’s election as the first African American mayor of Wilmington. As I went through old newspaper clippings detailing the 1992 mayoral race, which Sills won in an upset, I openly wondered at whether his victory had any coattails for other local African American politicians who coordinated their campaigns in a loose alliance with his. The answer here is that some got elected and some didn’t, with no overt sign of Sills’s election being any clear mandate of Wilmington shifting to a more community-based orientation toward political power, which would have been a shift away from the control that corporations (first DuPont, then MBNA, now Buccini Pollen Group, have successively wielded in what remains essentially a company town. In particular, Blunt (who died this year), Holloway, and Bolden (now a long-time State Rep.) all won their races, while Hutt lost his race. Someday I’d like to flesh out this analysis.