Yves right here. This text describes how the Democratic Parry lack of curiosity in addressing homelessness has created a coverage vacuum that proper wing extremists are fortunately occupying.
By Sonali Kolhatkar, an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and government producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly subscriber-funded tv and radio present that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her books embrace Speaking About Abolition: A Police-Free World Is Doable (Seven Tales Press, 2025) and Rising Up: The Energy of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (Metropolis Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economic system for All mission on the Impartial Media Institute and was a senior editor at Sure! Journal protecting race and economic system. She serves because the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity group the Afghan Ladies’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She additionally sits on the board of administrators of Justice Motion Middle, an immigrant rights group. Produced by Economic system for All, a mission of the Impartial Media Institute
A 2024 Treasury Division report articulated the main reason for homelessness in the US: “For the previous twenty years, rents and home costs have been rising sooner than incomes throughout most areas of the US.” The logic of this declare—primarily based on documented proof—is simple. Folks aren’t incomes sufficient to pay hire or their dwelling mortgage, and subsequently find yourself residing in automobiles or on the streets.
However, to the Cicero Institute, a right-wing, Texas-based assume tank, individuals select to develop into homeless in order that they’ll reap the benefits of publicly funded housing. In response to Cicero’s web site, “Everlasting supportive housing doesn’t handle homelessness—it creates demand for extra homelessness.”
Such a declare can be ridiculed as disconnected from actuality. Besides that Cicero, created by tech billionaire and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, is selling a dystopian resolution to homelessness that features bans on avenue tenting, involuntarily institutionalizing mentally unwell individuals, and constructing camps outdoors cities for unhoused individuals. In response to the Housing Not Handcuffs marketing campaign, as of April 2026, 22 states throughout the nation are contemplating or have handed laws primarily based on Cicero’s concepts.
Jesse Rabinowitz of the Nationwide Homelessness Legislation Middle has sturdy phrases for Cicero’s insurance policies, calling them “racist, backwards, and albeit, ineffective options to homelessness that concentrate on jails and arrests and forcing individuals off of the streets.”
“Billionaires and politicians have basically misdiagnosed the reason for homelessness,” says Rabinowitz. “There’s a mistaken however pervasive perception that homelessness is a selection, that persons are selecting to sleep outdoors, and that if we make it against the law to be homeless and make homelessness more durable, individuals will select one thing else.”
This harmful right-wing imaginative and prescient of tackling homelessness is flourishing in Donald Trump’s America. The president, in a disturbing 2023 marketing campaign video, denounced homeless individuals as “deeply unwell” and “dangerously deranged” who’re ruining the standard of working individuals’s lives and promised he would use each instrument to “get the homeless off our streets.”
Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis echoed this language. As a substitute of acknowledging that nobody needs to be pressured onto the streets as a result of they’ll’t afford hire, he stated, “You shouldn’t be accosted by a homeless, like we see. You need to be capable to stroll down the road and reside your life.” As a substitute of promising all Floridians the flexibility to reside safely, he as an alternative supplied a imaginative and prescient of a state the place the homeless disappear from view: “We’re going to have clear sidewalks. We’re going to have clear parks. We’re going to have secure streets.”
Research after examine proves the apparent—that when housing is just too costly, individuals can’t afford it. “Each time rents go up $100, homelessness will increase by 9 %,” explains Rabinowitz. “Folks ought to assume again. What number of occasions previously decade has the hire gone up by $100? That’s the reason extra persons are sleeping outdoors and have nowhere else to reside.”
Cicero’s imaginative and prescient is most notably being realized in Utah, the place state authorities are constructing a 1,300-bed camp for homeless individuals on the outskirts of Salt Lake Metropolis, full with in-house services to drive individuals into therapy for psychological well being and habit. Cicero’s Devon Kurtz known as Utah’s experiment “a harbinger of the long run.”
“The foremost purpose is to not punish,” stated Kurtz in an NPR interview. “However,” he added, “there are conditions the place we simply can’t settle for the established order.”
The established order is that persons are being priced out of their houses, however somewhat than handle the causes of homelessness, Kurtz, Trump, DeSantis, and different conservatives wish to spare themselves the sight of homeless individuals, to punish them for falling by way of the gaping cracks of the trendy American economic system.
To be truthful, liberal mayors and Democratic politicians have additionally embraced related approaches minus the overtly dystopian rhetoric. For instance, in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass has backed a program that pushes the unhoused into motels as transitional housing. She has come below criticism from housing rights teams for failing to again everlasting housing options and handle the foundation causes of homelessness. In the meantime, California Governor Gavin Newsom has instituted bans on encampments and criminalized homeless individuals.
The failures of Democratic politicians to successfully sort out homelessness have solely fed right-wing derision towards everlasting housing and different confirmed options rooted in addressing inequality.
Along with state-level payments to drive the unhoused into camps, the Trump regime has wrecked long-standing federal housing insurance policies enacted by the Division of Housing and City Growth (HUD). In December 2025, HUD staffers struggled to maintain unhoused individuals secure in harsh winter circumstances, with their funding being slashed. Trump took a web page straight out of Cicero’s e-book in ending federal “housing first” insurance policies that emphasize backed housing and assembly homeless individuals’s wants.
As worthy as pre-Trump federal housing insurance policies have been, they have been by no means complete sufficient. Rabinowitz traces the failures of federal housing coverage to former President Ronald Reagan’s decimation of public housing.
“We all know the answer to homelessness is housing and helps,” says Rabinowitz. “On the identical time, since not less than the ’80s, the federal authorities has deserted its duty to make sure that everybody has a secure place to reside. So, cities and states throughout the nation are left carrying the water for many years of failed federal housing coverage.”
As a result of downstream options equivalent to backed housing and different authorities helps don’t go far sufficient, and since there isn’t any political will to implement upstream options to rising wealth inequality and housing prices, homelessness continues to be a significant issue.
A latest California-based experiment sheds mild on this. As a part of a partnership between nonprofit group Miracle Messages and the College of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck Faculty of Social Work, 103 unhoused individuals got $750 in money per 30 days between 2022 and 2024. Recipients who acquired this fundamental earnings spent it on requirements equivalent to meals, transportation, and housing prices. However, after a 12 months, the funding didn’t drastically change long-term outcomes. Researchers concluded that, “Whereas $750 a month helps, it doesn’t come near protecting hire in high-cost areas just like the Bay Space or Los Angeles.” The answer is more cash, not much less.
“We’ll by no means clear up homelessness till we handle the underlying components, the quantity certainly one of which is that the hire is simply too rattling excessive,” says Rabinowitz. “We all know that housing solves homelessness. There’s simply not practically sufficient [affordable housing] to go round,” he added.
Rabinowitz’s group launched an effort in early 2026 to stop tax {dollars} from subsidizing camps for the unhoused, as Utah is doing. The “No Federal Funding for Homeless Detention Camps” marketing campaign has harnessed the political assist of progressive elected officers and nonprofits to demand that federal tax {dollars} don’t go towards such tasks.
“Hiding the issue doesn’t clear up the issue,” says Rabinowitz. “Similar to you wouldn’t need your children to comb all of their crumbs below the rug, we don’t wish to disguise homelessness.”
