Last week, President Donald Trump announced that his administration will get more homeless people off the streets. The order has some good parts to it, including additional support for mental health and addiction services. If he meant it, it’s not bad.
But what Trump is really trying to do is to touch another raw nerve with Americans, and he’s succeeding.
Let’s be honest. Too often public spaces in American cities are challenging. We are beset by panhandlers, shouted at by unstable wanderers, and forced to abandon our own plans to the claims of others who have made public places theirs exclusively.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Trump has statistics to back up his view that not all homelessness is caused by rational people who simply have no place to go. A 2010 study affiliated with the Department of Justice indicated that most homeless people offered shelter reject it. A California estimate said that as many as 78 percent of homeless people have mental-health issues and 75 percent suffer from substance abuse. Trump says merely leaving these people in the streets is the Democratic solution to the problem and that he has something better to offer.
Democrats haven’t helped themselves here. Portland, San Francisco, and other cities were dragged down deeply by administrations that were so scared of offending anyone that they handcuffed everyone. It has been a sore point with millions of Americans and Trump is pressing down hard on it while Democrats play catch up.
Two legal decisions show the contrasting approaches. Confronted with the question of whether a city could stop people from sleeping in public parks, a San-Francisco-based federal appeals court held that police could do nothing unless they could prove that an involuntarily homeless person had an “adequate” place to spend the night that wasn’t run by a religious institution.
Because of the impossible burden placed on the police to daily calculate the ratio of involuntarily homeless people to adequate, secular beds, the effect of the order was to make camping in public places worsen dramatically.
The Supreme Court rightly saw the matter differently. It disagreed with the notion that prohibiting a person from camping on public land was a “cruel and unusual punishment” forbidden by the Constitution. It recognized the absurdity of the standard set by the appeals court, particularly in Los Angeles, where a single count of the fluctuating number of the homeless takes three days and requires thousands of volunteers.
The Court didn’t reveal the right answer to the problem of homelessness, but it did recognize a legally wrong one—granting people a constitutional right to occupy parks, sidewalks, and other public spaces to the exclusion of everyone else.
So, what’s the right answer? Trump talks about treatment and housing in his order. He even talks about money that might be used for those purposes, but his real emphasis is on reviving wider use of involuntary commitments of the mentally ill—the guy screaming on the street corner and wandering into traffic.
Here again, he’s not entirely wrong. The mentally ill need a place to go and sometimes involuntary commitment is the only way. In the days depicted in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, thoughtless incarceration of the mentally ill was too common. Tragically, the reaction to the film wasn’t to create better housing and better treatment for the mentally ill. It was to save billions by shutting down the institutions and pushing the mentally ill onto the streets.
It was a classic example of a public policy pendulum swinging too far one way only to go careening back the other way based on public outcry. Does Trump want us to swing back the other way now? Is he seeking to use the law to create an Alligator Alcatraz for America’s homeless?
Who knows? Trump isn’t good on details. He should give the job to those who understand it. A study featured in 2024 by the National Institutes of Health points to contemporary thinking that permanent supportive housing—skill-building dependency shedding—permanent homes should take the place of prisons and part-time shelter placements. Good judgment matters. Voluntary housing whenever possible. Involuntary when unavoidable. If Trump supports it— for once—he might have paired the right problem with the right solution.
Thomas G. Moukawsher is a former Connecticut complex litigation judge and a former co-chair of the American Bar Association Committee on Employee Benefits. He is the author of the book, The Common Flaw: Needless Complexity in the Courts and 50 Ways to Reduce It.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
