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HAVE THE DEMOCRATS GIVEN UP ON THE HOMELESSNESS CRISIS?  
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Casey Quinlan
February 24, 2025
The New Republic
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_ Liberal lawmakers need a real message on this issue because the one
they have now is nonexistent at best—and a mirror of the right’s
cruel ideology at its worst. _

A homeless encampment stands in front of a city water and power
building in the Skid Row community in Los Angeles, California. , Mario
Tama/Getty Images

 

While the chaos in our federal government has rightly absorbed the
lion’s share of the media’s attention over the past month,
life—and worries about where most of us will do our living—isn’t
getting any easier further afield. At the moment, more people are
facing displacement from climate disasters
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as they also contend with a housing affordability crisis that forces
people onto the street. If Democrats truly want to lay claim as the
only responsible political movement in town, they will need to come to
some quick decisions, even while locked out of power on Capitol Hill:
Will they continue to embrace many of the same out-of-sight,
out-of-mind policies that have fallen so hard on the homeless of late,
and which have earned the endorsement of conservatives in the Supreme
Court and the wider right wing? Or will they choose to see unhoused
people as part of the working class they often claim to represent?

Many Democrats serve as mayors in cities that have chosen some of the
most punitive policies against the homeless—cities such as
Washington, D.C., where unhoused people routinely have their
encampments cleared
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but the organizations that serve them have little support
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Los Angeles, where 38 percent
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of LAPD arrest warrants and citations between 2016 and 2022 were for
unhoused people; and New York, where homeless New Yorkers filed a
lawsuit calling Eric Adams’s sweeps inhumane and unconstitutional
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Bass has publicly stood against the criminalization of homeless
people, the sweeps of encampments continue on her watch.
Meanwhile, the United States saw an 18 percent increase in
homelessness from 2023 to 2024. Thirty-nine percent more families with
children experienced homelessness in that time frame, according to
U.S. Housing and Urban Development data. This is a policy crisis in
itself: With nothing but bad ideas being deployed to solve this
crisis, the crisis is only deepening.

But lawmakers are seemingly content to double down on the bad wagers
they’ve already lost. In Los Angeles, Democratic council members
rejected eviction protections for tenants who were financially
affected by the Los Angeles wildfires and thus unable to pay rent on
time. Despite providing a cap on the number of months they would have
these protections and requiring documentation to access the
protections, council members still voted “no,” with some claiming
there was not enough data to support the proposal or that it would not
solve structural housing issues, the LAist reported
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But there’s no getting around necessities: Tenants need support now
as they face rent spikes
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of more than 10 percent on what they’re already paying in pricey
markets, lest they also find themselves on the street and subject to
punitive restrictions.

Moreover, along with the failed attempt to criminalize homelessness
into extinction, there have been equally myopic efforts to criminalize
the provision of support to unhoused people. In one example of this
disturbing trend, the Fremont, California, City Council voted
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in favor of a ban on encampments, and on “aiding and abetting”
those residing in those encampments, last month.

With Republican antipathy toward this vulnerable populace an immutable
fact of life, Democrats find themselves at a crossroads. They need a
real message on homelessness in America because the one they have now
is, at best, muddled and at worst a mirror of the right’s
demonization. As homelessness increases, experts on public opinion say
that more Americans are beginning to understand the root cause of
homelessness as connected to issues of affordability and housing
supply, even as political leaders try to send a different message,
blaming the victims. Where Democrats fail to connect the dots of
homelessness and rising inequality, Republicans have a freer hand to
bring increasingly cruel and punitive policies to market, which end up
being burnished with a bipartisan gloss.

“Housing first” policies, which give priority to providing
permanent housing along with supportive services to provide stability
to those in crisis (as opposed to withholding such benefits until
certain criteria, such as employment or substance use treatment, are
met), have taken a hit. Often, conservatives have vilified unhoused
people by linking them with civic disorder and the spread of disease.
They have also connected unhoused people with their dehumanizing
messages on immigration. President Donald Trump has said he will
essentially back further sweeps of homeless encampments, commenting
that
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“the homeless have no right to turn every park and sidewalk into a
place for them to squat and do drugs.”

Elon Musk, the billionaire head of the Department of Government
Efficiency, a temporary government organization created by President
Trump’s executive order that is sowing chaos through gutting federal
agencies, has made
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numerous inflammatory remarks about unhoused people. He has said that
the word _homeless_ is a “propaganda word for violent drug addicts
with severe mental illness” and referred to San Francisco’s
homeless population as “violent, drug zombies.”
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As many housing advocates have told _The New Republic,_ housing cost
and supply issues are the main drivers of homelessness. Regardless of
the reasons people find themselves without a stable place to live, no
one deserves to live like that, without privacy and basic amenities,
and often with a greater threat of violence
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“During and since his presidency, Donald Trump repeatedly made
statements that equivocated homelessness with crime, drugs, and mental
illness,” Ann Oliva, CEO at the National Alliance to End
Homelessness, or NAEH, said, during the election. “His current
campaign platform advocates for the forced treatment and involuntary
commitment or arrest of unsheltered people.”

Oliva told _The New Republic_ in February that even though she
hasn’t seen specific policies targeting “housing first” yet,
Project 2025 and the Trump campaign have been clear about their
rejection of these policies, and that she has noticed “that key
resources related to housing first have been removed from HUD’s
website at HUD.gov [[link removed]].”

The Trump administration is set to continue its attacks on unhoused
people. It has already halted a HUD equal access rule for housing
programs that encouraged trans-inclusive homeless shelters by
requiring equal access by gender identity when shelters receive
federal funds. The White House is also working on an executive order
that would impose draconian policies penalizing unhoused people in
D.C. for essentially existing outside, according to _The Washington
Post_’s reporting
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But in this latter example, at least, it can’t be said that the
administration’s goals clash with those of the District of
Columbia’s Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser. The _Post_’s sources
said
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that she sees “shared interests” on this matter with Trump, in
stark contrast to her public tone in 2020, when she embraced the
public image of herself as a representation of resistance to the
president at the height of George Floyd protests, despite her own
carceral policies.

Larry, an unhoused person living in a homeless shelter in Silver
Spring, Maryland, said he has been without housing since May 2024,
having lost a stable domicile after a chronic illness forced him to
miss work for an extended period of time. It’s his first experience
with being unhoused, he said. He’s just one among a rising
population of first-time homeless
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individuals.

“As far as politics go, these days I don’t see much difference in
terms of results between Democrats or Republicans,” he told _The New
Republic_. “In terms of rhetoric, I think Republicans, especially in
this age, are more upfront about their methods, whereas Democrats
offer a lot of lofty idealism that ultimately falls short when it
really counts.”

Democrats, along with the Biden administration, did belatedly appear
to recognize that they made a mistake; to more rigorously pursue more
robust and sensible responses to the country’s affordable housing
crisis. Data continued to show that housing costs were the primary
culprit in dragging down the financial well-being of an untold number
of Americans. Even here, however, they fell short on addressing the
burgeoning homelessness crisis, despite it being the logical end point
of so many people caught up in the teeth of this crisis. The NAEH’s
Oliva said it was “disappointing” to not hear as much from the
Harris and Trump campaigns on addressing homelessness, even as they
commented on housing.

Housing advocates nevertheless offer Democrats some praise for the
progress they made on the housing affordability front while on the
campaign trail. Kamala Harris vowed to increase housing
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by three million new homes by the end of her first term in office; the
topic of housing affordability was a mainstay during her campaign, and
she released a bevy of policy ideas to address the huge cost burden
weighing down many Americans’ finances.

But the approach from Harris and other political leaders this year did
not really acknowledge that the affordability crisis pushed many
people from stability to shelters—or into a position where they
faced encounters with the criminal justice system for ending up on the
street. The Biden administration did, at times, demonstrate how
targeted attention could move the needle: Under its watch, the Biden
White House’s policies made substantial inroads against homelessness
among veterans and rural residents—the homelessness rate among
veterans, in fact, fell by 8 percent. Advocates nevertheless say that
a much broader approach is necessary to maximize these small but
significant gains.

Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the
Homeless, said while he applauded some of the efforts from the Biden
administration to address homelessness, such as providing more money
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for programs for rural people in need of stable shelter, these efforts
fell well short of the mark.

“I do think those measures are incomplete and inadequate. Because in
order to stop the inflow of homelessness, the issue has to be
addressed in a comprehensive way.… I think these targeted approaches
may help in the short term for that population, but they really do
nothing to address the overall issue,” he said.

Warner Johnson, a formerly unhoused person who now lives in Takoma
Park, had been homeless for about three years until September 2024.

“I’m one step away still from being homeless again. Everybody
really is these days because we don’t know what’s going to
happen,” Johnson said of the economic and political uncertainty of
our times, compounded by a range of looming crises, such as the
president’s deportation scheme and the burgeoning prospect of a bird
flu pandemic.

That we’re in the grips of a systemic affordability crisis is not
lost on him. “We’ve seen in these past 20 years that the rent,
regardless of who’s been in office, has been steadily going up,”
he said. “At one time it was a good mortgage rate, but slowly all of
that went out the window—where do they come with the extra money to
send for wars? I never understood that.”

Johnson believes that the government should devote more resources to
housing solutions. In this, he is not alone: Polling has shown that
housing affordability and homelessness are priorities for a majority
of voters and that more than 70 percent of voters
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would support candidates who support housing first policies rather
than punitive approaches. According to a 2024 Morning Consult poll
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majority of Democrats and Republicans have said it should be a
priority for the federal government to make sure people have safe and
affordable places to live and 53 percent said it should be a top
priority.

“As more and more Americans feel insecure about their own housing
situation and feel that housing costs are rising at a rate that
they’re worried about whether they’re able to keep up with them, I
think that that has impacted the lens through which they view
homelessness,” said Rebecca Naser, partner with Hart Research.

An August and September 2024 Hart Research Associates poll
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on housing policy in South Carolina found 90 percent of voters—and
even 87 percent of Republicans—supported policies that protect
renters from excessive rent increases, harassment, and discrimination
from landlords and unfair evictions. In Ohio, the numbers were
similar, with 92 percent of voters and 87 percent of Republicans
supporting these policies.

Democrats frequently treat homelessness as a social issue instead of
an economic one. Advocates say that this approach falls short in one
important regard: It prevents those who aren’t facing these crises
from understanding their connection to the experiences of the unhoused
and how bad policy decisions contribute to people being plucked from
the ranks of the haves into the mass of have-nots. Forging these
connections is more than possible: As more people become homeless,
more voters know people who have lost their homes, giving rise to
avenues for unity and solidarity. Democrats can make the most of this
by elucidating plans to help reverse this process, bringing the
homeless back into the ranks of the housed, and shoring up stability
for all.

“During the campaigns, we heard a lot of conversation about the
unaffordability of housing and the cost of rent going up,” said Kim
Johnson, manager of public policy at the National Low Income Housing
Coalition. “But rarely was that really connected to ‘Hey, housing
is unaffordable, people are not being paid enough to live, and that is
the root cause of why people are experiencing homelessness.’ I
think, too often, they are treated as two separate issues when in fact
they’re deeply intertwined and can’t be separated.”

As the political pundits keep reminding us, Democrats are on a voyage
of “soul-searching”: a vision quest to figure out what it is,
exactly, the party should stand for. If surveys of voter sentiment are
any guide, homelessness is an issue of ever-ripening importance. The
data beyond the polling also suggests that this is a foundational
concern: Even as more Americans lose their grip on housing, those who
have maintained stable accommodations are finding themselves drawn
into this vortex; growing numbers of Americans say
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they have had a homeless friend, and many others
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say they have had a homeless family member. With so many Americans
coming to understand that they have a stake in standing up for
homeless people, it would be political malpractice for Democrats to
fail to rise to this occasion.

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Casey Quinlan [[link removed]]

Casey Quinlan is an economic and political reporter. They have been
published in States Newsroom, _The Guardian_, _Glamour_, Bustle, _Teen
Vogue_, and _In These Times_.

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* Housing; Homelessness; Democrats; Republicans;
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