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Message to partners and media:
 
Earlier this week, President Trump ordered White House officials to launch a sweeping effort to address homeless encampments in California. While the Law Center agrees that unsheltered homelessness is a crisis in California and across the country, we are concerned that the Administration is considering a plan that is inhumane, costly, and counterproductive.
 
According to our Housing Not Handcuffs report[[link removed]] on the criminalization of homelessness, the Housing First model is not only more effective at ending homelessness and improving formerly homeless persons’ life and health quality, but it also is more cost-effective than endlessly cycling people through courts, jails, and back onto the streets.
 
The Trump Administration’s own Federal Plan to End Homelessness[[link removed]], developed through consultation with 19 different federal agencies, focuses on these permanent solutions to homelessness, and also explicitly supports the reduction of the criminalization of homelessness. These agencies have put forth specific guidance[[link removed]] on ending encampments through housing that should be the baseline for any efforts to end the crisis in
California and across the country. For more information on:
The apparent growth of encampments of people experiencing homelessness, check out our Tent City USA report[[link removed]] and our own Encampment Principles and Best Practices[[link removed]]. An existing federal program that requires federal agencies to make unused buildings and land available at no cost to house and aid homeless people, see our Public Property/Public Need
toolkit[[link removed]].
The Law Center hopes the Administration will not adopt a “crackdown[[link removed]]” approach, but if plans sacrifice the Constitutional rights of our unhoused neighbors, we stand ready, as we have before, to challenge these in court.
 
 
Contact: Crystal Letona
Communications Associate
202-638-2535 x109 – [email protected][mailto:[email protected]]
Follow us on social media: @nlchphomeless

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Address postal inquiries to:
National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty
2000 M Street, N.W., Suite 210
Washington, DC 20036