“The purpose of a system is what it does,” British theorist Stafford Beer once observed. For decades, federal and state governments poured tens of billions of dollars into programs to reduce homelessness, providing free housing and treatment later. Thousands of jobs were created at nonprofit organizations in cities across the country, and millions of dollars in campaign donations were recycled back to the Democratic Party, but instead of falling, the homeless population rose to a record high of 771,480 last year.
The Supreme Court took the first step in restoring sanity to streets and parks last year when it overturned a 9th Circuit decision holding that homeless people had an Eighth Amendment right to vagrancy. Under Grants Pass v. Johnson, local governments may now arrest people who camp in public spaces without authorization. More than 100 cities have taken the resulting opportunity to crack down on homeless encampments, which are usually drug markets that befoul their communities with crime, disease, and stench.
President Donald Trump has now taken the next logical and welcome step to eliminate the homeless industrial complex. Last week, he issued an executive order, “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.” The federal government does not have direct control over state laws governing public spaces, drug treatment, or involuntary incarceration. But the departments of Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development spend billions of dollars in taxpayer money every year on grant programs for which states must apply to receive money. Trump’s executive order directs federal agencies to change grant criteria so that states sticking with the old, failed, housing-first faith are denied federal funds.
Under the new standards, states and cities will have to show they enforce prohibitions on public drug use, enforce bans on urban camping and squatting, and create systems in which people who are a danger to themselves are removed from the streets and placed in institutions to get the substance abuse or mental health treatment they need.
“Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order,” the order explains. “Surrendering our cities and citizens to disorder and fear is neither compassionate to the homeless nor other citizens.”
Trump’s order also calls for a ban on federal funding of all “harm reduction” programs, in which nonprofit groups give drug abusers kits including clean needles, condoms, and other drug paraphernalia that foster and perpetuate addiction. The assembly and distribution of such kits have always been a staple of the homeless industrial complex.
The era of throwing taxpayer dollars at homelessness without accountability is coming to an end. For too long, entrenched interests, including nonprofit organizations, bureaucrats, and the Democratic Party, have profited from failure. They have built an industry on managing homelessness rather than solving it. Trump’s executive order rightly demands results, not rhetoric.
Cities and states will now have to choose: continue enabling open-air drug markets and encampments, or take meaningful steps to restore public safety and human dignity by enforcing laws, removing addicts and the severely mentally ill from the streets, and offering real treatment in secure facilities. Compassion means not allowing people to die on sidewalks. Compassion is having the courage to intervene.
RUSSIAGATE MASTERMIND JOHN BRENNAN MUST BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE
The homelessness crisis has grown under a model that prioritized ideology over evidence. With more than three-quarters of a million people suffering without shelter, and communities buckling under the weight of disorder, the federal government must reward policies that work. Grants Pass v. Johnson opened the door. Trump’s action walks through it.
Now it’s up to governors and mayors to decide whether they want to keep propping up a failed system or end the homeless industrial complex once and for all. The public, and the homeless themselves, deserve better.