A missed opportunity

Washington—On the campaign trail leading up to the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump repeatedly decried conditions in the nation’s capital city.

“It’s so horrible. You know our parks are littered and dirty and disgusting, and many, many homeless are living there,” he said at a 2023 rally in Derry, N.H. He promised that when he took office again, he would change that.

Late last month, President Trump signed an executive order titled, “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful,” directing authorities to crack down on crime and detain illegal immigrants living in the city. He also included a provision banning homeless encampments on federal property that the National Park Service manages in Washington, D.C.

While cleaning up homeless encampments could help beautify parts of the nation’s capital and make it safer, homeless advocacy groups say Trump’s executive order represents a missed opportunity to work to help eradicate homelessness, not just move it off federal property. And it’s an opportunity that advocates say officials in other cities across the country are also missing.

Nearly a year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that cities could ban homeless encampments on public property. Since then, roughly 160 U.S. cities have passed camping bans, and about 85 more are considering similar measures, the National Homelessness Law Center told WORLD.

During a 2023 point-in-time count, roughly 4,900 people in Washington were homeless, according to the latest data from the State of Homelessness Survey. That’s about 7% of all the people in the United States who were homeless at the time. Roughly 72 out of every 10,000 Washington residents are homeless, according to the survey. That’s more than 3½ times the average rate for the United States as a whole, the survey reported.

The size of the homeless population in the capital has gone down by 7% since 2007, but the subset of those individuals who are living unsheltered and on the streets has more than doubled in size. Many of them camp on street corners—huddled in blankets or living in a tent. Documented problems with homeless encampments include public health dangers such as vermin and the spread of blood-borne diseases, along with increases in violent crime—making such camps dangerous for the people who live in them and for neighbors.

Cities across the United States that have recently banned homeless encampments are still struggling with the presence of homeless people inside and outside of shelters.

Falls River, Mass., prohibited camping or sleeping on public property last August. The law granted local officials the authority to clear any such encampments. Violators would be subject to a fine unless they were homeless, no shelter beds were available, and they were willing to go to a shelter as soon as a place opened up for them. Two months after the city imposed the ban, Falls River’s Herald News reported that homeless individuals were still living in encampments throughout the city and shelters were nearing their capacity.

Rochester, Minn., passed a similar law in March 2024. A year later, the city reported that it had 35% more people in shelters than it did the same time the year before. Even so, the city still had hundreds of homeless individuals and families, and the number was rising with dozens of evictions per week, the report said. Most of those evictions were for nonpayment of rent.

San Diego has banned homeless encampments on public property since the summer of 2023. Even so, the total number of homeless people in the city increased by 3% from 2023 to 2024, according to the city’s annual point-in-time count. Meanwhile, the number of homeless people living on the streets increased by 18%, and the number of people in shelters dropped by 12%.

“Political leaders, when faced with a problem like this, they want to look like they’re doing something. But a lot of times they don’t actually want to do the work to really implement what really works,” Steve Berg, chief policy officer at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, told WORLD. “So if they say, ‘Oh, we need to lock people up or chase people out,’ I think they think it looks like they’re doing something. And they get political support for that.”

Many advocates say that city leaders in Washington need to offer more affordable housing if they want to reduce homelessness. “In D.C., housing is so expensive that you need to work 79 hours a week at minimum wage to afford a one-bedroom rental,” said Jesse Rabinowitz, campaign and communications director for the National Homelessness Law Center. “So it’s not that people aren’t working, it’s that housing is too expensive.”

Even outside the Beltway, Rabinowitz explained that more than half of Americans struggle to pay rent—and many of them are also one or two missed paychecks away from being homeless themselves. The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported in 2020 that homelessness jumped by 9% in areas where rents increased by $100 a month.

“When rents go up, homelessness goes up,” Rabinowitz said. “I used to do outreach to these very encampments, and the No. 1 reason people were living outside was because they couldn’t afford the rent.”

The city of Washington provides numerous housing voucher programs to individuals with extremely low incomes. Sometimes, if the individual has no income, the city pays the entirety of their housing costs, Jim Lindsay explained.

But those programs have one drawback: “Those places with the vouchers don’t require people to be clean and sober,” Lindsay said. “So you can live there and you have a roof over your head, but there’s nothing really helping them with the underlying problems of alcoholism, drug abuse, dealing with their mental illness if they have some.”

Christ House, a hospital in the northwest part of the city, treats homeless men struggling with physical ailments. Roughly three decades ago, it set up a homeless shelter just down the street from its location in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. Kairos House—named after the Greek word for an opportune moment that doesn’t come along very often—allows men to live on the premises for as long as they want. But living there comes with strings attached.

“It’s a spiritual recovery program. They have to go to [Alcoholics Anonymous] meetings and [Narcotics Anonymous] meetings. They do have to come to church here,” Christ House Executive Director Jim Lindsay said. “It’s a very structured, permanent housing.” Some of the buildings’ residents have been there since it opened 30 years ago, Lindsay said.

Rabinowitz with the National Homelessness Law Center explained that banning homeless encampments doesn’t necessarily mean more people will check themselves into shelters or places like Kairos House. It also doesn’t mean that more of them will get into housing.

“When the government comes in and clears encampments, they often throw away people’s vital documents, like a birth certificate, that they need to get housing,” Rabinowitz said. “They often throw away people’s medication or other medical aids like wheelchairs, or things like that, that people need to stay healthy. They often throw away people’s bikes and work uniforms that people need to go to work. And they displace people from their communities and make it harder for their social workers and their service providers to find them and connect them with the services they need.”

For nearly a decade, city authorities in Washington have worked to clear homeless encampments when they begin to pose a clear health or safety risk or when they interfere with the use of public places. Often the city works with organizations such as Friendship Place, which runs a network of homeless shelters across the city, to help individuals move into shelters if they want to. But shelters aren’t always a significantly better alternative.

“Frankly, there’s not really a whole lot of meaningful difference between shelters and encampments,” said Barbara DiPietro, senior director of policy at the National Health Care for the Homeless Council.

While shelters might provide better hygiene facilities and put a roof over people’s heads, they often aren’t much safer than encampments, DiPietro said. People steal each other’s personal belongings in shelters the same way they do in encampments, she explained. Violence and abuse also occur in shelters.

“I’m not arguing for encampments here, but I am clarifying the fallacy that shelters are awesome,” DiPietro said. “The reason that some people do not want to go to shelters is because they’ve had terrible experiences at them. That said, they can go to encampments and have bad experiences. … I really want to caution against setting up this idea that shelters are somehow the solution to encampments, because they’re not always a better living environment.”

In its published protocols for handling encampments that need to be cleared, the city says it will provide notice a week in advance in the form of posted signs near an encampment. While the city endeavors to protect personal property at encampments that it clears, it also says that any personal property that hasn’t been removed from the area before officials show up to clear the site will be disposed of.

The city has a list of encampment locations that authorities plan to clear in the coming weeks—areas separate from those targeted by Trump’s executive order. The National Park Service told WORLD that it has worked with local authorities when addressing homeless encampments on its property in the city in the past. But the agency has not yet determined how it will implement the directives in Trump’s recent order.

Pushing encampments off that property means drastically limiting the space available for homeless camping. Most of the city’s 61 square miles of land is taken up by paved roads or residential, commercial, government, and industrial buildings. The city contains roughly 12 square miles of open park space. In addition to park space, the city has roughly 6.6 square miles of roadway property that isn’t occupied by the asphalt that cars drive on, according to a land use document published by the city.

Of those nearly 19 square miles of open space where a homeless encampment could easily be located, the National Park Service owns 10.5 square miles, according to the city government. Essentially, half of the places where a homeless encampment could easily fit are no longer available to those without another means of housing.

“I can understand, in a way, where the president’s coming from,” Lindsay said. He acknowledged that the president’s executive order sought to beautify the area, but he argued that preventing homeless people from camping in a certain area doesn’t mean that they’re not homeless anymore.

“It’s not a magical solution,” Lindsay said. “It might move the homeless away, but they’re still here, they’re still somewhere, and it’s not really looking at the underlying roots and trying to help the people.”