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Trump’s Homelessness Crackdown Has Been Tried Before. It Didn’t Work.

A homeless man on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty

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This week, President Donald Trump announced that his administration will remove homeless encampments from Washington, DC. It came at a press conference in which he declared a public safety emergency in the nation’s capital, despite violent crime numbers hitting a 30-year low. But the announcement also illustrated something else: The way the country approaches homelessness is rapidly changing.

In July, Trump issued an executive order that not only makes it easier for cities and states to eliminate homeless encampments, but also directs authorities to involuntarily commit unhoused people struggling with mental health issues or substance abuse. The policies represent a dramatic shift away from an approach the federal government has used for years called Housing First, an evidence-based program that prioritizes housing over treatment. Sam Tsemberis first developed the Housing First approach in the 1990s. Tsemberis was working as a clinical psychologist in New York City, where he brought people who lived on the streets into hospitals for treatment, often against their will. He soon realized that many of those people ended up back on the streets, seemingly no better off. 

Housing First proved more successful than treatment-first models. It soon became the way cities, states, and the federal government approached homelessness, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, which used Housing First to cut veterans’ homelessness in half over the last 15 years.

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