[rad-green] Trump's Plan to Criminalize Homelessness Is Taking Shape

*https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/markets/trumps-plan-to-criminalize-homelessness-is-taking-shape/ar-BBY5jxy
<https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/markets/trumps-plan-to-criminalize-homelessness-is-taking-shape/ar-BBY5jxy>MSN
News          12/19/2019*

*Trump's Plan to Criminalize Homelessness Is Taking Shape*
*By Kriston Capps*



The White House is taking steps toward decisive new action on homelessness,
bucking policies favored by advocates in favor of an aggressive approach
that centers the role of law enforcement. Some of these efforts hit
roadblocks this week, but more measures are in the works—including a
rumored executive order on homeless encampments.

Advocates say that they expect an executive order on homelessness to assign
new resources to police departments to remove homeless encampments and even
strip housing funds from cities that choose to tolerate these encampments.
It’s one of several efforts being steered by the White House’s Domestic
Policy Council in concert with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development.

On Monday, Housing Secretary Ben Carson met with local officials in
Houston, part of a push for federal action on homelessness that could soon
take shape in cities across the country. The secretary visited an emergency
shelter and was slated to tour a former Harris County jail facility,
according to advocates familiar with his agenda. Officials at HUD have been
looking at real estate in several cities since the fall, when President
Donald Trump ordered a sweeping federal response to homelessness
<https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/09/california-homeless-crisis-trump-intervention-los-angeles/597790/?utm_source=msn>
.

Carson’s latest stop is yet another signal that the administration is keen
to take a hands-on approach to people who sleep on the street. Advocates
say that the government is looking closely at ways to turn former
correctional facilities and federal buildings into shelters, a
controversial approach backed by Robert Marbut, the newly appointed White
House czar on homelessness
<https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/12/trump-homeless-shelter-agency-robert-g-marbut-texas-housing/603280/?utm_source=msn>
.

One advocate for a Washington, D.C.-based housing organization says that
HUD has narrowed its focus to a list of 24 cities and states, all of which
have large numbers of unhoused people sleeping outside. Most are located on
the West Coast, where Trump has sought to embarrass progressive officials
by intervening. Houston is among the cities on this list, obtained by
CityLab, where local and regional bodies known as continuums of care (CoCs)
face high unsheltered counts. In addition to 20 cities, four of the places
named on the list are states that have homeless populations outside the
largest urban centers.
[image: image.png]
*© Provided by CityLab (David Montgomery/CityLab)*

While Houston made its way onto HUD’s potential action list, the city has
made significant progress in recent years in curbing homelessness,
especially relative to other cities in Texas. Over the last decade, the
city has cut the number of people experiencing homelessness by more than
half. And despite a recent increase following Hurricane Harvey, the trend
is still stable or downward, unlike in Dallas, Austin, and other places.

Yet housing advocates fear that the White House favors a punitive approach
for Houston, where—as in other Texas cities—homeless encampments are
increasingly visible. “I hope that what [Carson] takes away is that if you
really turn all your resources to permanent housing and ending
homelessness, instead of managing the condition of homelessness, it can
have dramatic results,” says Eva Thibeaudeau, CEO of Temenos, a community
development corporation that operates about 140 performance supporting
housing units in Houston.

Since 2011, the city has marked a 54 percent decline in people experiencing
homelessness, according to local point-in-time counts. Thibeaudeau credits
the falling numbers of people living on the streets to the city’s adherence
to a set of principles known as Housing First. The policy has enabled
Houston to put more than 18,000 people into permanent housing situations
with their own leases. “We shifted a lot of dollars out of short-term,
temporary, high-barrier projects, and reallocated them all toward permanent
solutions,” Thibeaudeau says. “That really is the reason that our
homelessness has been driven down.”

Housing First runs contrary to the approach favored by Marbut, the
consultant who was named director of the U.S. Interagency Council on
Homelessness last week. Marbut has pushed for shelters that set up barriers
to treatment, namely sobriety. For example, at Haven for Hope, a shelter
founded by Marbut in San Antonio, homeless people with substance-abuse
problems must sleep outside in an exposed courtyard until they can pass a
drug test.

In Houston, Temenos manages so-called wet housing: The group works with
city and county officials and sobering centers to identify people
struggling with long-term alcoholism and addiction who are facing chronic
homelessness and give them permanent support, including three meals per day
and a lease.

In September, when the White House released a report on homelessness, it
signaled a change away from the Housing First direction long favored by the
Interagency Council on Homelessness. Going forward, the administration
appears to be leaning on a prominent role for law enforcement, with a focus
on shelters that sequester homeless people away from downtown in large,
centralized facilities.

Late in November, an official at HUD sent an email to Portland Mayor Ted
Wheeler and other officials in Oregon to express Carson’s interest in
determining whether an unused jail in Portland could be repurposed for a
pilot program to address homelessness, according to a report in Willamette
Week. And in September, Carson and other officials at HUD visited a former
federal office building just outside Los Angeles, a move that sparked fears
among housing advocates that the Trump administration could be planning a
crackdown on Skid Row’s unhoused population.

The Trump administration may pursue its agenda on homelessness on other
fronts. An executive order—said to be the brainchild of Benjamin Hobbs,
special assistant to the president for domestic policy—might not
materialize for weeks (if ever). But such an executive action would
reinforce the dynamic in Texas, where the conservative governor has sought
to overrule the work of liberal leaders in Austin to legalize tent
encampments, for example.

But the broader campaign to criminalize homelessness hit a snag on Monday,
when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case from Boise, Idaho,
about whether local and state governments can make it a crime for people to
sleep outside. A Supreme Court decision that overturned the federal appeals
court’s decision might have enabled cities to prosecute people forced to
sleep outside.

*Related video: Supreme Court won`t take up homeless camping case *(provided
by KTXL)

“We’re thrilled that the court has let the 9th Circuit decision stand so
that homeless people are not punished for sleeping on the streets when they
have no other option," Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National
Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, told USA Today.

In yet another front of the administration’s efforts, the White House also
pushed hard to strip Housing First language from funding measures in the
appropriations bill passed on Monday night, according to advocates. But the
bill still retains language from 2018 that prioritizes funds for groups
that adhere to Housing First goals.

There are still some legal impediments to banning encampments or stripping
funds from groups that choose to put housing needs before behavioral
modification. But those may not be enough to prevent the White House from
implementing a strategy that local leaders describe as an about-face from
what they’ve been pursuing for years.

“The Houston approach in general has not been to pour a lot of money into
emergency-type facilities,” Thibeaudeau says. “We’ve chosen instead to use
that money to increase our supply of permanent supportive housing.”

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