Trump and the ‘Infection’ of the Homeless
He told Tucker Carlson that the situation was a ‘disgrace’ that needed to be ‘cleaned up,’ mirroring his language about immigrants — and…
He told Tucker Carlson that the situation was a ‘disgrace’ that needed to be ‘cleaned up,’ mirroring his language about immigrants — and the language of authoritarians past.
Donald Trump apparently has homelessness in his sites — or is it the homeless that he plans to target? That’s the main question today’s report in The Guardian raises.
As reported by Tom McCarthy, Trump told the conservative Fox News host Tucker Carlson that he “might ‘intercede’ to ‘clean up’ homelessness in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and probably elsewhere. But the language Trump used leaves me wondering whether his goal is to address the issues that cause people to live on the streets, or to deal with the optics.
In his interview with Carlson (I’m relying on McCarthy, because I only saw snippets of the interview), Trump repeatedly talked about how world leaders “can’t be looking at scenes like you see in Los Angeles and San Francisco,” and he seemed to place the blame solely on mental health or the homeless themselves.
In a rambling summary, he opined on a multitude of factors in the crisis: “Some of them have mental problems where they don’t even know they’re living that way. In fact, perhaps they like living that way … We cannot ruin our cities. And you have people that work in those cities. They work in office buildings and to get into the building, they have to walk through a scene that nobody would have believed possible three years ago.”
The reality of homelessness is far more complicated. Trump is right that many suffer mental health conditions, though their conditions do not necessarily leave them not knowing that their living conditions are problematic so much as make it difficult or impossible for them to work regularly and live independently without help.
The statistics on homelessness, which because of the transitory nature of the population being surveyed are less that perfect, show a few things (From the National Alliance to End Homelessness):
While the numbers have trended downward in recent years, more than a half million men, women, and children, are likely to be homeless on any given night across the country. This, according to many advocates, translates to the likelihood that several million individuals might experience some form of homelessness at some point during the year.
The population is disproportionately black and Latinx — just 49 percent of the total homeless population is white, far less than the approximately 79 percent of the total population. In addition, the population is overwhelmingly male — seven out of 10.
Causes vary and include a lack of affordable housing — too many people are priced out of the housing market, and there are too few affordable units, partly because communities still use restrictive zoning to ensure that smaller houses and multi-family buildings cannot be built. There also is a shortage of federal and state housing supports, and a lack of necessary support systems for those who need them.
As I’ve covered this issue over the years, those who work directly with the homeless say the most successful efforts — such as one in Bergen County, N.J. — do three things: They move homeless individuals into permanent housing quickly, places them in integrated housing (i.e., mixes them into market-rate buildings), and provides supports, such as employment and life skills. counseling and mental and physical health assistance.
Causes vary and include a lack of affordable housing — too many people are priced out of the housing market, and there are too few affordable units, partly because communities still use restrictive zoning to ensure that smaller houses and multi-family buildings cannot be built. There also is a shortage of federal and state housing supports, and a lack of necessary support systems for those who need them.As I’ve covered this issue over the years, those who work directly with the homeless say the most successful efforts — such as one in Bergen County, N.J. — do three things: They move homeless individuals into permanent housing quickly, places them in integrated housing (i.e., mixes them into market-rate buildings), and provides supports, such as employment and life skills. counseling and mental and physical health assistance.
The lack of housing is only one aspect of the problem. Income inequality and a maze of bureaucracy seemingly designed as a deterrent to prevent those in need from getting access to the programs that will provide help (Michael Harrington writes about this in The Other America) work together to maintain a level of homelessness that should have all of us hanging our heads in shame.
I’ve written before that a comprehensive approach to homelessness would require a complete rethinking of our economy and what we consider to be basic human rights. The homeless are treated as nuisances, as effluent, as trash. They are unable to contribute by generating profit for the corporations that manage our economy, so they are treated like the exhaust that gets pumped out of smokestacks and car exhausts, as just a byproduct of our ability to consume.
We rarely make this connection, but it is central to the way our economy functions. Corporations are focused solely on profit-making, and they do that by trying to keep costs as low as possible. One way to do that, perhaps the most successful way, is to socialize costs, to spread the costs of doing business onto the general population. Keeping wages low — or even illegally withholding them — forces many onto public assistance, onto public health care, into public housing, etc., which means that we are covering the difference between the incomes people need to survive in our culture and what business is willing to pay. This is happening despite record high earnings for corporations.
The kinds of public programs we offer are useful at ameliorating this, but they cannot fully address the problem because they leave the larger system untouched. We are constrained by our lack of imagination, by our inability to think in new ways about how best to organize not just the economy but society itself. I would argue that there are goods that should be seen as rights — housing, health care, education, food, chief among them — and that our societal systems need to be arranged to ensure that all of us have access to them regardless of income. Other goods, however, might not need to be treated this way.
To get back to the question of homelessness in the United States (and globally), our inability to see it as a deeply rooted, systemic problem has us tinkering around the edges, hoping to ameliorate the pain for some while aggressively seeking to sweep the problem out of public view. This is why we have seen local ordinances around the country that outlaw so-called public camping and the provision of food, even free food, without a license — laws that overwhelmingly are used to roust the homeless from the centers of public life and onto the side streets or the woods of our imagination.
This is how Trump framed his remarks on Tucker Carlson, painting it as a nuisance and even as a health crisis — but not as one that affects those on the streets. It was about the optics, about the people who work in office buildings, about law enforcement, about world leaders. His concerns did not appear to be about the homeless — in this he was like so many others who pretend concern about the homeless but just want them out of sight. For Trump, they are an infection that will ruin American cities and must be “cleaned up” — language that mirrors his attacks on immigrants and that should scare us all.
Hank Kalet is the author of As an Alien in a Land of Promise, a book-length poem written after spending about a year visiting a camp for the homeless in the woods in Lakewood, N.J. He’s written extensively on homelessness, the economy, and immigration for publications including The Progressive, In These Times, The Progressive Populist, and N.J. Spotlight. Purchase As an Alien in a Land of Promise here.