This story was originally published by Atlanta Civic Circle.
One of the nation’s most widely embraced strategies to combat homelessness — getting people housed first and then addressing other needs around mental health, addiction, and employment — faces an existential threat in the upcoming presidential election.
Like Democratic and Republican administrations before it, the Biden White House has employed this housing-first approach to help people get off the streets and stay housed — but a possible Trump presidency could roll back the model that housing experts and public officials have championed for more than two decades.
Created in the 1990s to address the high rate of homelessness among veterans, the housing-first approach adopted by the federal and many local governments aims to provide people with safe, stable living conditions as the foundation for then dealing with any substance use or employment issues that are barriers to staying housed independently.
But former President Donald Trump’s Agenda47 policy platform indicates that he would instead adopt a treatment-first policy for unhoused people receiving government housing subsidies and services. That approach is favored by many conservatives, including organizations backing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 manifesto.
Point 22 of Trump’s Agenda47 addresses homelessness: “Our once-great cities have become unlivable, unsanitary nightmares, surrendered to the homeless, the drug-addicted, and the violent and dangerously deranged,” he says in the accompanying video.
Trump adds that as president he would open up “large parcels of inexpensive land,” and set up government-funded “tent cities” to corral unhoused people, while doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, and drug rehab specialists identify and treat their problems.
“For those who are just temporarily down on their luck, we will work to help them quickly reintegrate into a normal life,” Trump says in his Agenda47 plan. “For those who have addictions, substance abuse, and common mental health problems, we will get them into treatment. And for those who are severely mentally ill and deeply disturbed, we will bring them back to mental institutions, where they belong, with the goal of reintegrating them back into society once they are well enough to manage.”
“We want to take care of them, but they have to be off our streets,” he adds. Relatedly, Trump’s plan for ameliorating homelessness would ban unhoused people from sleeping on public land. “Under my strategy, working with states, we will BAN urban camping wherever possible,” he says.
