Por Eve Ottenberg
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| Photo by Nathan Dumlao |
Donald Trump’s policy on the homeless is not “housing first” (to state the obvious). It is “incarceration first,” for despite its minimally commendable emphasis on treatment for the insane unhoused, it relies on coercion for a goal not often compatible with the indigent’s interests, namely, “cleaning up the streets” by removing unsightly paupers from view. Granted many homeless people need medicine and could benefit from a supervised stay on a psych ward. But putting this determination and execution in police hands belies the true motive: forcibly cleansing U.S. cities of people so poor they lack a roof over their heads. Because don’t think for a minute that this power to commit to a mental hospital, in the hands of the police, will only be wielded with regard to lunatics and drug addicts. It won’t. The police paint with a broad brush. Anyone in rags, anyone sleeping in a tent under an overpass, will be fair game.
“Housing First…promotes non-conditional access to housing,” wrote CBS News July 29, “that is, without requiring sobriety, compliance with treatment or making other demands of recipients…Mr. Trump’s order…[promotes] involuntary psychiatric treatment – or ‘maximally flexible civil commitment’ of individuals with mental illness who ‘pose a danger to others or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves.’” This sounds deceptively reasonable enough. But the line separating dirt poor from “cannot care for themselves” is so dim as to render the distinction hollow. Plenty of working poor people are homeless. The lucky ones, thousands of them, sleep in their cars or in shelters. Less lucky ones sleep in tents. On the utterly bedraggled, desperate bottom run of the social ladder, the weariest vagabonds sleep on sidewalks. Does this mean those that sleep in their cars cannot care for themselves? Or does it mean they’ve committed the crime of being unable to make ends meet in a ruthless, madly expensive, decayed, late capitalism that leaves 80 percent of Americans financially precarious?
Remember, according to Bankrate, nearly 60 percent of Americans cannot afford a financial emergency. AI claims it’s less – 53 percent cannot cover a $1000 emergency expense and roughly 19 to 24 percent of Americans have zero emergency savings. Meanwhile Wikipedia tells us that the top 20 percent of Americans owns 86 percent of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50 percent holds 2.5 percent of U.S. wealth. So we are a nation of poor people and a few obscenely rich people – among them a president, whose GOP parasites labor to shred an already tattered social safety net.
According to the Debt Collective August 14, Nebraska Medical Director Drew Gonshorowski recently bragged about booting hundreds of Nebraskans off Medicaid. Happily, he has since resigned. But he could perform his medical executions because Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” cut $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. (Those Nebraskans are hundreds of newly uninsured people, by the way, now one medical calamity away either from death or sleeping under the stars.)
“These devastating cuts are to be carried out,” per the Debt Collective, “largely via ‘work verification requirements’” designed to drop eligible Medicaid recipients. “More than 15 million Americans are expected to lose healthcare as a result.” These are not people with disposable incomes. They cannot afford a doctor on the so-called open market. So they will go without and lots will die. That’s what that One Big Beautiful Bill was about: killing the dispossessed.
Under the execrable Gonshorowski, Nebraska tightened these federal Medicaid work screws “eight months before almost every other state in the nation.” Pity Nebraska! Its low-income residents started cancelling doctor visits before people anywhere else. Who needs to see a doctor anyway, when the iron logic of the economic system you live under is that if you’re not affluent, you’re disposable? Thank God for orgs like the Debt Collective, bringing these abuses to light along with the welcome departure of dehumanized monsters like Gonshorowski.
Trump’s ukase argues, per CBS, “that ‘public order’ would be restored by committing homeless people to ‘long-term institutional settings for humane treatment.’” So the mask is off. The welfare of the destitute is a ruse and a cover for some amorphous “public order,” evidently measured by the degree of discomfort for someone from a higher social class when he or she sets eyes on a vagabond. “Public order,” is a dangerously elastic catch phrase. Not to jump to extremes, but suffice it to say that historically fascists have deployed it.
Are our cities really in a state of disorder? I don’t think so. Current crime rates, nationally and locally, show “substantial declines,” according to AI, with homicides plummeting to “a historic multi-decade low,” while violent crime fell notably, as has property crime. In my city of Philadelphia – supposedly the poorest large city in the nation and thus where you’d expect lots of armed robberies and theft due to poverty – the stats are eye-popping drops in violent and deadly crime, while not far away in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York City, incidence of major crimes cratered, with “overall crime dropping 6.6 percent year-to-date through July 2026,” alongside a 12.7 percent decrease in July alone. That’s two major cities off the top of my head NOT in need of more assistance with “public order.” Trump can take his deceitful slogan elsewhere; if he wants a verbal bludgeon to clobber the homeless with, let him do so openly.
What is “public order” really about in practice? Well, to quote Invisible People on X August 15: “A man was dragged out of a NYC subway in handcuffs during a blizzard and had nowhere to go. This is what a 3000 percent spike in arrests for sleeping on the subway looks like in practice.” According to Invisible People, NYC arrests for lying down in the subway, which surged under mayor Eric Adams, have continued under mayor Mamdani, “despite his promises to do otherwise.” Now maybe Mamdani’s police commissioner didn’t get the memo; maybe the police act on their own, but a surge of 3000 percent for annoyances like sleeping in public won’t do. It may be easier for cops to arrest helpless paupers whose only crime is snoozing than arresting armed robbers, but easier doesn’t cut it. Let the police chase criminals – or better yet, investigate white-collar crime.
Meanwhile in Sacramento, a Motel Shelter Program ended abruptly, with no explanation to residents. This was back in June, and people living in the motels, like Samantha Rubio, a disabled single mother of two, ended up sleeping in her sedan with her young sons. “Rubio is one of dozens…who sued Sacramento over its decision to end the Motel Shelter Program,” Invisible People reported August 14. This program “had become far more than a temporary place to stay,” for many unhoused people. “What began as an emergency response had, for many residents, become the closest thing to housing stability they had experienced in years.”
The Department of Housing and Urban Development claims that roughly 745,000 people lack shelter in the U.S. But this stat does not count people in and out of motels or couch surfing. In fact, this statistic is a bold-faced lie. Federal agencies estimate roughly 2.5 million children experience homelessness each year. Assume they are not all orphans. If there’s one adult with every 2.5 children, then one million adults are homeless, plus the kids, that’s 3.5 million people not counting the single adults without children. So we’re looking at 4 million people without a permanent address at least.
Like the unemployment statistics that, mirabile dictu, don’t count the millions of unemployed people who have given up looking for work, the homeless statistics amount to a titanic undercount. You can speculate about the motives for that, and none of them look good. Supposedly there are 6.9 million unemployed people in the U.S. But if for every one of them there is – a conservative guess – one “discouraged” worker not looking for a job, then that’s closer to 14 million unemployed. In short, our economic arrangement brutalizes poor people and then lies about it; it even brutalizes the middle class – never forget Barack “Evict the Homeowners” Obama. Ten million middle class people lost their homes thanks to Obama.
I’ll tell you who our so-called free-market setup doesn’t brutalize – a fabulously wealthy cohort of market manipulators. Those are the high-rollers the American economy functions for, and they’re making out like bandits.
Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is “Death Calls It a Day.” She can be reached at her website.
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