Some thoughts on Trump’s “Agenda 47” plan for Homelessness
Or "Why isn't Alex Jones yelling about Trump's FEMA camps?
Trump has put forth his ideas for dealing with homelessness in America in his “Agenda 47” video series. But first, some background.
In the late 70s HUD was producing 300,000 affordable housing units per year. That ended with the Reagan administration, and many of those housing units were shut down in the following period. Instead many regions shifted to a “voucher” system, forcing vulnerable people trying to provide housing for families into competing in the market for apartments, producing a scarcity of housing and driving prices up for everyone. This left an enormous number of people who lost housing in the 2008/2009 mortgage crisis scrambling to find a place to live in competition with already homeless people and even more increases in the cost of housing in many cities. Some of those people never recovered, or recovered to a point where the slightest added expense...medical, car failures or other emergencies...could drive them back into homelessness.
Too many pundits and commentators claim that most of our homeless dilemma is due to drug addiction, and yet in cities and towns where affordable housing was widely available during the Opioid crisis there wasn’t anywhere near the homelessness seen in places with housing scarcity. In fact, when you really dig into the issue what becomes evident is that Homelessness is, for the greatest part, an affordable housing problem. Chronic Homelessness is a different issue, and most of our nation’s homeless problem isn’t even seen by the majority of the public because there are so many people living in cars, sleeping on people’s couches or otherwise struggling to keep their jobs while trying to dig their way out of a financial hole.
The plan Trump articulates is the product, I personally believe, of two people advising him. Pastor Jim Garlow and local San Diego politician Darryl Issa. Both have intimate knowledge of the non-profit I used to work at which houses, clothes and feeds 400+ otherwise homeless people. (I have photographic evidence of Issa and Jim Jordan touring our El Cajon campus...no, really! You can see the door to the room I lived in in one of the pictures.) Jim Garlow was a supporter of what we did, and he had a family member go through our program. Both had input to various degrees into the proposed “Sunbreak Ranch” project which sought to create a tent city far away from neighborhoods in San Diego where they could meet the requirement for the number of beds needed to start arresting people for being homeless if they didn’t want to accept going to the camp.
Trump’s stated plan is to first criminalize homelessness. Just make it illegal to be homeless in public if it means you have no place to go other than a public place to sleep. You’ll be arrested and given a choice between internment in jail, or internment in a camp. Because the desire is to make the homeless invisible these camps will be out of the way, and most often a distance from transit opportunities and commercial locations like grocery stores and pharmacies. If you’re homeless and have a job you might lose that employment because you’ll have an impossible commute. You’ll become trapped in the camp system and be forced into chronic homelessness, but because you’re living in the camp you won’t be counted as homeless, you’ll be considered housed after 28 days. The NIMBY elitists who want minimum wage employees to make their latte, stock store shelves and wash their cars desperately desire that you live someplace other than the neighborhoods where those jobs get done, and they certainly don’t want a homeless shelter close to those tasks, they want the help to bus in from elsewhere.
In fact, you would now have more of a right to own a firearm than to be without permanent shelter...but you can bet that they won’t let you keep your gun in the internment camp because, as a second class citizen, it’s assumed you would be a danger because the only thing that can stop a bad homeless person with a gun is to take it away from them. So without the ability to get to work without an hour or more walk to a transit station that lets you catch the two hour bus ride to work, possibly making you late for dinner after your 14 hour day, you may be late often enough to find yourself stuck at the camp. But there’s good news, because the camp will find work for you to offset the cost of your stay at the camp. Maybe it’s picking up trash on the side of the freeway, or working in some industrial facility that the camp provides transportation to. You won’t get enough money in your pocket to move out of the camp, you’ll just keep working and settling into your new life as an institutionalized camp dweller. You move 16 tons, and what do you get?
And the people running the camp will know what they’re doing because they’ll be subsidiaries of companies with names like Core Civic, GEO Group and Correction Corporation of America. And because you haven’t been convicted of anything, your rights are different than the prisoners these companies usually deal with, meaning there are some things they won’t have to do for you that they have to do for the incarcerated. Prisoners might just have more rights than you.
It’s not about solving the root causes of homelessness, it’s about making homelessness invisible.
The place I had worked at was in a neighborhood where there was a bus stop right out front, and at least three grocery stores and 2 pharmacies within walking distance. It was an old motel, and while it had it’s problems...what non-profit doesn’t?...one of the things I respected was that it offered to help people find a program in the area that better met their needs if they didn’t want to be part of a one year Christian program, but the thing that set it miles apart from what Trump described was that it immediately put a roof over a person’s head, fed them and gave them agency. Nobody was blocking a person’s exit if they wanted to leave, and when someone reached a point where they could look for work and maybe get a job, it provided transportation for a while to work until they could provide it for themselves.
Cynically warehousing people in the middle of nowhere (The aforementioned “Sunbreak Ranch” would have been on a plot of land near a freeway a short distance from a Marine base, far from the nearest neighborhood.) to simply make a problem “go away” won’t work. Claims that it would save money on hospitalization and police action are hollow, the hospitals will still have the same amount of staff, as will the police, and chronically homeless people accumulate enough medical problems that, once they get on Medicaid or Medicare, a doctor will often diagnose all manner of ailments they have been living with, many which require long term treatment or even surgery which is the opposite of cutting medical costs. No police department will lay off officers because several hundred homeless people are no longer on sidewalks, or sleeping in parks. And besides, the reductive act of treating the rehabilitation of a homeless person’s life like it’s a budgetary problem to be solved is probably the most heartless, cynical and un-Christian act possible.