Despite Donald Trump’s campaign vows in 2024 that he would fix the housing crisis that’s affecting more than a million Americans across the country, the president’s administration has been doing seemingly all it can over the past year to cut off assistance to people without homes. 

The New York Times reported on a policy announced this week by extremist-friendly Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner, which will gut “Housing First” programs by diverting $1.2 billion from programs that support long-term living arrangements for people without homes and route that money instead toward short-term housing programs that focus on addiction and mental health. 

The Times explained the dire picture that could play out as a result:

The plan, which seeks to promote “law and order,” is a scaled-back version of one the administration issued last fall. Congress and a federal court blocked that proposal after critics warned it could send as many as 170,000 formerly homeless people back to the streets. The administration’s revised plan is still a frontal assault on the longstanding model of homelessness aid known as Housing First. The move is likely to shift about $1.2 billion away from housing programs, with the risk of displacing current tenants. It constitutes the sharpest change in homelessness policy in a generation.

In a press release announcing the policy, Turner said “the ‘housing first’ experiment failed Americans by warehousing the vulnerable without results,” and that the change, which threatens housing options for many Americans, will help promote “self-sufficiency.” This is the same illogic the administration is using to justify cuts to food aid, which have put millions of Americans at risk of going hungry.

I would argue that another phrase for “warehousing the vulnerable” is “housing the vulnerable,” and that it does have results, namely that people have homes, at least for as long as they’re allowed to benefit from such policies. There is no evidence that cutting Americans off from housing programs, as Turner’s preferred short-term programs inevitably do, improves their prospects for finding long-term housing. 

Turner also said this shift to short-term housing programs is about stemming a housing crisis “driven by addiction and mental illness,” promoting stereotypes that experts for years have noted don’t apply to the majority of unhoused people. Experts typically cite other causes, like rapid increases in housing costs and poor wage growth, which have nothing to do with drug addiction or mental health.

Trump has openly said he doesn’t want housing prices to come down. 

Turner is not unlike Ben Carson, who was HUD secretary during Trump’s first term. Both are Black conservatives who have denounced federal programs that help others escape poverty, even as they have touted their personal stories of having done so. Neither Turner nor Carson entered their position with any experience in leading a large bureaucracy like a federal agency, much less directing housing policy. This lack of expertise is especially important, given the fact that Turner is proposing ideas rooted in bias that stand to worsen America’s housing crisis rather than improve it. 

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