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homelessness
How Corporate Media Let Real Estate Industry Define Housing Crisis in Southern California
By the end of three years, local news about an LA mansion tax had evolved to be largely negative and dominated by just two narrative frames: that it "reduced housing development” and needed "to be reformed”—meaning weakened or eliminated entirely.
Oct 25, 2026
Billionaires in California are pushing to sink the wealth tax proposition on this fall’s ballot in California, which would levy a one-time 5% wealth tax on those California billionaires, with the scary—and empty—threat that they’ll leave the state and ruin the economy.
Appeals to appease the wealthiest—lest they take their money and bolt—are a common plea in California, even when society’s least wealthy are the ones most afflicted. Consider, for example, the ongoing resistance of wealthy developers to Los Angeles’ “mansion tax,” and the ability of their grievances to dominate a sympathetic news media.
In 2022, Los Angeles voters approved Measure ULA to create a dedicated, long-term funding source for solutions to homelessness in LA, including funding the construction of affordable homes and preventing homelessness by helping low-income tenants stay in their homes. The funding comes from a new tax on the most expensive real estate transactions in LA, affecting fewer than 4% of property transactions, and is one of the most ambitious measures ever taken by a US city to address the problem of homelessness and the related housing crisis.
The US desperately needs more housing, and those programs must include specific plans and sufficient funding for affordable housing to keep low-income people securely housed.
But, by the end of three years of local news coverage about Measure ULA from the Los Angeles Times and LAist, two of LA’s largest news organizations, the news about Measure ULA had evolved to be largely negative and dominated by just two narrative frames: that “ULA reduced housing development” and “ULA needs to be reformed”—meaning weakened or eliminated entirely.
At the same time, local stories about what Measure ULA was doing to reduce homelessness and support affordable housing, and the people who were aided by its programs, were exceedingly rare. For example, of the 97 reports about Measure ULA from the Los Angeles Times and LAist over three years, only 7 stories included any sourcing of people who were homeless or who were helped by a tenant program to stay in their home. And, over 30% of the stories didn’t even mention the words “homeless” or “homelessness.” This is based on my research in a study of news stories of Measure ULA in the Los Angeles Times and LAist.com from April 2023 (when the law went into effect) to March 2026.
The news coverage of Measure ULA has wide political impact. Today, those negative news frames about Measure ULA have informed the positions of local politicians (including the mayoral battle between incumbent Karen Bass and challenger Nithya Raman), have helped to put a statewide measure on the ballot to make approving local taxes more difficult, and have been adopted unproblematically by the national news media as the official story of the shortcomings of LA’s so-called mansion tax. A May 20, 2026 story in The Wall Street Journal, for example, completely encapsulated the dominant narrative set by the Los Angeles news media. The WSJ headline read: “Los Angeles Tried to Tax Mansions. Apartment Construction Tanked.”
Yet, the LA news media got it wrong, and it has warped how Southern California and the nation think about homelessness and the housing crisis.
The LA news media of this study unquestionably accepted the commercial building industry’s idea of “filtering,” which posits that building more market-rate housing will ultimately increase low-cost affordable housing by increasing overall supply. The news media popularized the trickle-down notion of filtering (without using the term) in the Los Angeles housing environment despite the existence of ample expert counterevidence.
For example, researchers at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California wrote in 2020 that “filtering can no longer be taken for granted as a ‘naturally occurring’ source of affordable housing. For one thing, the shortage crisis has caused all housing to be unaffordable, consuming a larger share of occupants’ incomes—even in the middle class—than deemed acceptable.” Similarly, a Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality study in 2026 concluded that the “market” alone doesn’t solve the problem for affordable housing, and that “public investments are necessary for the production of income-restricted, affordable housing.”
The news media’s commonsense acceptance of this business-oriented filtering mindset to housing development ends up undermining the ability of Los Angeles—and other cities across the country—to adequately respond to the need for public investment in affordable housing. The US desperately needs more housing, and those programs must include specific plans and sufficient funding for affordable housing to keep low-income people securely housed.
Meanwhile, after getting delayed by lawsuits and resistance from the real estate industry, Measure ULA has started to work: Homelessness dropped significantly in Los Angeles from 2023 to 2025, yet none of the ULA-related stories from the Los Angeles Times or LAist noted this. Although homelessness increased slightly in a 2026 report, it is still down 5.6% overall in LA since 2023. Moreover, by May 2026, the city reported that a round of $360 million in ULA funding supported 80 projects for “5,241 affordable housing units—1,528 newly constructed units and 3,713 units preserved or stabilized.”
The news media—and all of us—need to better understand the relationship of affordable housing and homelessness, and not let powerful developers and real estate interests insist that less taxation and more market-rate development will solve the problem. It won’t.
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'Pathetic Excuse for a Man': Ramaswamy Slammed Over Ad Featuring Acton’s Estranged Mother in Ohio
Acton's brother said the ad was a "despicable low," noting that their mother stood by their stepfather after he was charged with raping Acton at the age of 12.
Oct 20, 2026
With just two weeks left until Election Day, Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is drawing criticism from across the political spectrum over a vicious attack video featuring his Democratic opponent Amy Acton's estranged mother, whom she has accused of abandoning her after she was sexually abused as a child.
The 60-second video, which surfaced on social media Monday and was amplified by conservative accounts, features Donna Arthur, Acton’s biological mother, urging Ohioans to vote against Acton and accusing her of lying about experiencing homelessness and living in a tent during her childhood.
"I love my daughter, but when I saw her lying about her opponent, it's not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar," Arthur said. "She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She's lied her entire life."
After the ad went viral on social media, Acton's brother, Philip Stearns, accused Ramaswamy of sinking to "a despicable low." In a statement Tuesday, he noted that "after he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy's rapist until he died."
Stearns called the ad an "attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at 12 years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point."
It remains unclear who produced the ad, which contains no sponsorship disclosure indicating whether Ramaswamy's campaign or a supporting political action committee was behind it. Acton's campaign, however, has blamed her opponent.
Ramaswamy's political allies have previously attacked Acton over therapy she received following the abuse. Ramaswamy himself drew criticism in April after claiming that his opponent had no vision for Ohio "other than to complain about what someone else did to her."
“This desperate, disgusting attack reveals exactly who Vivek Ramaswamy is at his core,” Stearns said, describing him as “a pathetic excuse for a man who is willing to hurt anyone as long as it gets him what he wants.”
Though President Donald Trump won Ohio by double digits in 2024, several recent polls show Acton with a substantial lead over Ramaswamy, a staunch ally of the president.
In a statement to HuffPost, the Ramaswamy campaign did not take credit for the ad, but defended its substance.
"We don't know what happened between Amy and her mother, who first spoke out about Amy in 2020, but we know that Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth that the public needs to be aware of before deciding who to entrust as governor," said Connie Luck, a spokesperson for the Ramaswamy campaign.
She added: “Everyone who knows [Acton] best—her former boss, her former state colleagues, her fellow physicians, and now her own mother—are clearly warning Ohioans not to vote for her. Ohioans deserve to know that.”
Acton has spoken on the campaign trail about the hardships she experienced as a child and has made them central to her pledge to make life more affordable for struggling Ohio families.
"I know what it feels like to go hungry, to not have enough," Acton said during an interview in August. "My brother and I actually were in a tent in the middle of winter growing up, so these problems are real to me."
She spoke about these experiences long before she ran for governor. In a 2019 profile by The Youngstown Vindicator, Acton—then serving as the director of Ohio's health department under Republican Gov. Mike DeWine—recounted a childhood marked by poverty, neglect, and abuse.
By age 12, she said, she and her brother, Stearns, had lived in roughly 18 different homes. She said her stepfather had already faced molestation allegations when her mother married him—a claim confirmed by newspaper reports and court records from the time. She said her family was living in a tent at a campground outside Youngstown in the winter when her stepfather raped her.
After charges were filed, Acton and her brother went to live with their biological father and his relatives, who had been granted custody. She recalled trying to kiss her mother goodbye at the courthouse, only for her mother to turn her cheek away.
"That was the last time I ever saw her," Acton said. According to the profile, her mother and stepfather subsequently fled town while he was out of jail on bond.
The attack on Acton has drawn bipartisan outrage.
Ohio state Rep. Allison Russo (D-7), who is running for secretary of state, described the ad as "among the most vile political attacks I’ve ever seen."
"Millions of adults from all walks of life are estranged from a parent, often because of childhood abuse and trauma that are far too common in our society," she said. "Exploiting that deeply personal pain for political gain is cruel, shameful, and deserving of unequivocal condemnation."
US Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) agreed that it was “one of the most despicable things I’ve ever seen in politics.”
"He’s arguably the most unlikable person in the history of people… because of stuff like this," he said of Ramaswamy. "By the end of the day, Ohioans will learn what happened to Amy as a 12-year-old girl, how her mother lost custody of Amy as a result, and what a disgrace Vivek is for pulling this."
Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-Calif.), who previously prosecuted child sexual assault cases, said that Arthur’s defense of her late husband despite her daughter’s assault allegation is something he has witnessed “too frequently.”
"A child victim discloses the abuse by a stepdad or mom’s boyfriend, and mom takes the abuser’s side because she can’t bear to think that she had exposed her own child to a monster," he said. "Mom is protecting mom—not the child."
He added that "Ramaswamy has embraced the Trumpian role of taking the side of the predator."
While right-wing influencers, including Donald Trump Jr., amplified the ad and treated it as a “bombshell” October surprise that could upend Acton’s campaign, some conservatives also expressed dismay.
GOP strategist Liz Mair called the ad "terrible" and said it is "going to remind people of that one family member who hates them for no rational reason at all and make them feel sympathetic towards Acton."
“In brief, it pushed me towards Acton, not away from her,” Mair continued. “And this is genuinely the only thing I’ve seen or read about Acton to make me think anything positive of her."
"It seems crazy to me [that] one would assume this would work and not backfire," said conservative commentator Mary Katharine Ham. "An estranged mom from a rough childhood going straight to camera to trash her daughter as a trustworthy messenger?"
Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney predicted bluntly that "This ad could sink Vivek."
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In a Trumpian World, Be Like Dolly
The best way to honor Dolly Parton’s legacy is to counter Trump’s cruel inhumanity with generosity, kindness, compassion, respect, and unity.
Sep 04, 2026
I’ve been a fan of Dolly Parton since her terrific 1980 movie (and hit song) 9-5, on the struggle of working women organizing for dignity and respect—and against sexual harassment. Along with millions of others, I’m saddened by the Queen of Country’s passing.
But I’m miffed about people who opposed what Dolly stood for now trying to claim her legacy as their own.
For instance, President Donald Trump has claimed that Parton was a supporter of his, even sharing a fake AI photo of the two of them together. Dolly’s sister Stella set the record straight, calling Trump’s behavior “deranged, ugly, and nasty.”
In life Dolly Parton was the opposite of Donald Trump. She was compassionate, humble, generous, humorous (including poking fun at herself), and accepting of people from all walks of life.
She never forgot where she came from and acted on her religious beliefs of “Love your Neighbor” and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Dolly Parton turned down the presidential medal of freedom three times, saying she didn’t deserve it. Trump brags of his own self-importance, flies giant self-portraits from federal buildings, places his picture in passports, demands the Nobel peace prize, renamed the Kennedy Center after himself, and declares he is a genius.
As a tribute to her hardworking sharecropping father who never had the opportunity to learn to read, Dolly Parton created and funded the Imagination Library, providing hundreds of millions of books to young children—my grandchildren included. President Trump, who never lacked financial opportunity, is now pushing to slash funding for education, libraries, and literacy.
Dolly Parton embraced Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI.) She was supportive of the LGBTQ community, expressed support for Black Lives Matter, and uplifted those with disabilities. Trump has attacked DEI as “woke” and un-American, ridiculed the trans community, mocked people with disabilities, and labeled Black Lives Matter protesters as domestic terrorists.
Dolly Parton appeared with PBS’s Sesame Street characters to promote values of inclusivity and equality among children. Trump defunded PBS and Sesame Street, declaring them “radical left monsters.”
Dolly Parton celebrated women workers and was a proud union member for over 60 years. Trump crushed the union rights of over 1 million federal workers, paid millions in a lawsuit for sexual abuse, and carries on with the massive cover-up of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking.
Dolly Parton donated millions to medical research, including to children’s hospitals, cancer research, and the Covud-19 vaccine. Trump threatens the existence of rural hospitals with cuts to Medicaid, slashed federal funding for medical research, and eliminated the agency overseeing patient safety.
Dolly Parton donated substantial relief funds to those in her Tennessee Appalachian region whose property and lives were shattered by natural disasters. The Trump administration has undermined, delayed, and politicized disaster relief.
Dolly Parton had empathy toward the homeless and was known to give the “shawl off her back” to those in need. Donald Trump criminalizes the homeless and sent thousands of National Guard troops to rid DC of its homeless population.
Dolly Parton empathized with the plight of migrant workers. She loved John Steinbeck’s famous book The Grapes of Wrath and covered Woody Guthrie’s song “Deportee.” Trump demonizes hardworking immigrants as rapists and criminals and has unleashed an army of violent masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to terrorize our neighbors and communities.
I don’t have to agree with everything Dolly Parton did or didn’t do over the decades to recognize that she was a generous soul. She never forgot where she came from and acted on her religious beliefs of “Love your Neighbor” and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Donald Trump hoards his riches and uses the power of the presidency to enrich himself, his family, and oligarch cronies to the tune of billions.
The best way to honor Dolly Parton’s legacy is to counter Trump’s cruel inhumanity with generosity, kindness, compassion, respect, and unity. And while we are celebrating her life, sit back with family and friends (as I have done) and watch, or rewatch, 9-5. You will laugh, cry, and applaud!
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Trump’s National Guard in DC Costs Millions Each Day, But Hardly Ever Stops Crime
Though National Guard troops now outnumber police officers in the capital, Reuters found they’ve been involved in just over 1% of criminal cases in the city, and most of them have been for minor offenses.
Aug 19, 2026
It's been about a year since President Donald Trump began his military occupation of Washington, DC. But while costing taxpayers millions of dollars per day, a new investigation reveals that his National Guard deployments have done almost nothing to stop violent crime.
Crime in DC was already at its lowest level in decades when Trump sent in the troops last August, as was the case in many of the cities that came under unprecedented federal occupation.
But while Trump claimed that these soldiers—who can only detain suspects but must call police officers to make arrests—were the only force capable of saving DC from "crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor," a Reuters investigation out Wednesday found that they’ve had a role in responding to only a tiny fraction of criminal cases.
Since their arrival last August, National Guard members have been mentioned in only about 1.3% of the criminal cases filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, which handles nearly all the city's criminal prosecutions.
And though Trump has repeatedly credited his troops with protecting residents from being murdered and mugged, charging documents show that his soldiers "mostly responded to minor incidents in neighborhoods that are wealthier, whiter, and less dangerous than the rest of the capital."
Many of the cases where troops intervened, Reuters found, were to stop offenses like subway fare evasion and shoplifting.
Reuters said it "could find no reference in court records to soldiers doing any kind of law enforcement in the neighborhoods where about 82% of the city’s 859 murders occurred over the past five years."
The investigation describes a pattern of soldiers simply standing around while crimes occurred and waiting for police to arrive. In one instance, police officers arrived to arrest a man stomping on a woman outside a nightclub.
According to one of the officers who responded to the scene, "There was approximately 15 National Guard members in the area on routine patrol who did not take any action.”
In another case, soldiers called emergency services after finding a man who'd been stabbed in an upscale waterfront area. But believing him to have only been intoxicated, they left him lying on the ground without performing emergency measures.
They only realized once the police arrived that he'd been "stabbed so severely his intestines were spilling out." He died two hours later after being brought to the hospital.
The administration has portrayed the mere presence of troops as a "deterrent" against crime. But violent crime in the city has actually risen slightly in the year since they arrived. Data from the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) shows 1,712 violent crimes in 2026 versus 1,645 at the same point in 2025—a 4% increase.
Meanwhile, the grassroots group Free DC has been documenting hostile encounters between guard troops and city residents. The group has cataloged several instances in which troops have detained people, including those protesting their presence, with what it says was “absolutely no cause.”
"They harass people a lot more than they are actually doing police work,” said the Rev. Norman Nixon, the pastor of the Union Temple Baptist Church, who spoke with Reuters.
DC now has over 4,500 troops patrolling the streets. Despite lacking the ability to perform many ordinary police functions, they now outnumber the city’s police force, and maintaining the National Guard's presence is costing more each day.
According to a report from the nonpartisan Niskanen Center, a deployed Guard member costs around $607 per day, compared with about $384 for an MPD officer. The Trump administration has estimated that keeping the Guard deployed until the end of Trump's term in 2029 will cost about $1.4 billion.
The troops also played a role in the administration’s campaign to remove homeless people from DC and help federal agents dismantle encampments last summer as part of what Trump described as a war against “vagrancy.”
Last year, researcher Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project estimated that the deployments, which then cost an estimated $1.1 million per day, was costing four times as much as it would to provide an affordable housing unit for every homeless person in the city, which was pegged at about $257,000 per day.
The Defense Department has since estimated that the cost of the deployments was nearly $1.7 million per day. But that was before the number of troops doubled.
Applying Homestead's methodology today would mean that deploying the National Guard is now nearly 9-10 times as costly as providing housing for the Washington, DC's homeless population, all while providing little apparent benefit to public safety.
"I can think of many other ways that federal resources could have been invested to make the nation’s capital safer," said Clinique Chapman, the CEO of the DC Justice Lab, in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post earlier this summer.
“For what it costs to deploy the Guard in [the] US for just six days,” Chapman said, taxpayers could have instead paid for the annual cost of running trauma recovery centers in each ward to help crime survivors heal and connect them to treatment and support.
For five days of the expenditure, the US could fund a mental health crisis response program like Denver's, which responds to hundreds of calls for service each month and reduces arrests, for one year.
For 41 days of what the National Guard deployment costs, the District could fund a year of living-wage jobs and pay the rent on a one-bedroom unit for every US resident returning home from the Bureau of Prisons.
ACLU-DC executive director Monica Hopkins emphasized that the point of the deployments was never to improve the lives of DC residents or enhance public safety, but a “political prop.”
"The Pentagon’s acknowledgment that the deployment will continue until 2029 confirms what we’ve said all along—there is no real emergency here," she said in a statement to mark the one-year anniversary of the deployment. "As was true one year ago, armed military troops are not needed and are not wanted on our streets."
"Because the nation's capital is not legally recognized as a state, extremist politicians have used DC as a testing ground for anti-democratic orders," she added. "We cannot let military deployment on the streets of the United States become normal or acceptable as a part of daily life here or anywhere else."
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Mamdani Announces Plan to Build 200K New Affordable Homes
"We are the largest city in the nation," the mayor said of the bold new proposal. "We have the resources, the talent, and the will to achieve this."
May 26, 2026
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled his long-anticipated plan on Tuesday that he said will confront the city's housing crisis "with the urgency it demands," setting out the goal of building and preserving 400,000 affordable housing units.
Aimed at driving down housing costs in one of the nation's most expensive rental markets, the mayor described his program—titled "Block by Block: The Housing Plan For A New Era"—as one that will set about meeting "two of the most ambitious housing targets in modern New York City," during a press conference in Brooklyn on Tuesday.
Using a $22 billion capital investment over the next five years, the city is set to build 200,000 new affordable and rent-stabilized homes while preserving and stabilizing another 200,000 over the next decade.
According to a press release from the mayor's office, the large investment—which makes up about a sixth of the mayor's five-year capital plan—will be paired "with an ambitious land use agenda to boost housing production across the five boroughs and innovative new financing tools to build and preserve affordable housing more quickly and efficiently."
It will also include modifications to the zoning code to create hundreds of housing co-ops.
Mamdani said on Tuesday that the construction and maintenance of these units would increase the number of homes available to New Yorkers facing homelessness by 45%.
"We are the largest city in the nation. We have the resources, the talent, and the will to achieve this," Mamdani said on Tuesday, surrounded by a coalition of housing advocates, labor union representatives, and city officials.
He said the construction boom will "kickstart" the city's economy. According to the city's Department of Housing Preservation & Development, the program will create an average of 30,000 jobs per year during construction and 12,700 permanent jobs once it's completed.
Mamdani is also directing around $5.6 billion to the New York City Housing Authority to renovate existing units and reduce long wait times. NYCHA has over 170,000 units, and many of them are decades old and badly in need of repairs.
In addition to around $5 million aimed at helping landlords to fix longstanding maintenance issues and cover missed rent, the plan also targets landlords with troubled histories with "roof-to-cellar" inspections of their properties.
"This is about putting city government in the driver's seat. This is about delivering the changes that New Yorkers have been demanding with little avail," Mamdani said. "We will prove that government can deliver on the solutions to the toughest problems, not just debate them."
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Louisiana Advances One of the Country’s ‘Cruelest’ Anti-Homeless Bills
One homeless advocacy group said the bill, which would require homeless people to perform unpaid labor to pay for involuntary treatment, "evokes debtor’s prisons, convict leasing, and the ugliest day of Jim Crow."
Apr 18, 2026
The Louisiana House of Representatives voted this week to pass what the National Homelessness Law Center says is "one of the cruelest anti-homeless bills in the country."
Like many other anti-homeless bills being advanced around the country following a 2024 Supreme Court decision allowing states and cities to criminalize homelessness, House Bill 211, which passed by a vote of 70-28, makes unauthorized sleeping in public spaces a crime.
It is punishable by a fine of up to $500, imprisonment for up to six months, or both. Repeat offenders could face one to two years in prison with hard labor and a $1,000 fine.
The bill, which will now advance to the GOP-controlled state Senate, has been nicknamed the "Streets to Success Act" because, according to its sponsor, state Rep. Debbie Villio (R-79), the goal is not to jail homeless people but to "connect them to service providers."
Those who are convicted of sleeping outdoors could be given the option to avoid jail time by instead entering into a mandatory treatment program for at least 12 months. The bill authorizes local governments to set up semi-permanent camps in remote areas, where defendants would be required to stay and receive treatment.
The bill requires homeless defendants to pay “all or part of the cost of the treatment program to which he is assigned," a steep cost for many, as the average cost for residential drug and alcohol rehab treatment in Louisiana is more than $4,400 per week, according to the addiction referral service directory Addicted.org.
According to the bill, those who cannot afford this steep cost would be required to perform unpaid labor for the state or a local community center in lieu of payment.
Bill Quigley, director of the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University New Orleans, called the bill's entire premise "a farce."
"If people had the resources to pay for housing and physical and/or mental health services, they would not be on the street," he told Common Dreams.
He described it as a "cruel theater of the absurd" based on "the lie that people choose to be homeless." The law, he said, "assumes our communities have plenty of affordable apartments and lots of mental and physical health services available."
In reality, he said, these services are chronically underfunded, and the city would need to build about 55,000 more affordable rental units to provide enough housing for its rent-burdened population.
Though it is not uncommon for homeless people to struggle with mental health or substance use issues, increases in the cost of housing have been shown to have a direct relationship with increasing homelessness.
Homelessness in New Orleans dropped considerably in the years following the Covid-19 pandemic, when Congress provided permanent housing subsidies for those in need. But after those funds have dried up, homelessness in the city shot up higher than before the pandemic, a study by the homelessness nonprofit UNITY of Greater New Orleans found in 2024.
New Orleans City Councilmember Lesli Harris (D), who has opposed the bill, pointed to the success of the city's Home for Good program, which took a "Housing First" approach to homelessness, providing rental subsidies and allowing people to move straight from encampments into housing without requirements that they obtain treatment.
According to a May 2025 report, the program had moved 1,133 people off the streets and into supportive housing and allowed eight homeless encampments to close.
"Through our Home for Good program, we house an individual for roughly $21,844 per year. By comparison, jailing that same person costs an average of $51,000—and failing to act at all can cost up to $55,000 in emergency room visits and crisis rehousing," Harris said. "HB 211 would steer Louisiana toward the most expensive option while producing no lasting housing, no services, and no real path forward for the people involved."
Harris has also decried the bill's creation of what she called "internment camps" for treatment. The bill's text requires these facilities to be far away from downtown and other high-value neighborhoods, which she said separates those trying to rebuild their lives from work, public transit, and other critical services, and further isolates them from society.
Since the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which allowed cities to enforce public-camping bans against unhoused people even when shelter is unavailable, around two dozen states and hundreds of municipalities have passed various measures criminalizing poverty.
The homeless advocacy group Housing Not Handcuffs points out that many of the bills were written by the Cicero Institute, a far-right think tank with heavy backing from billionaire tech investors that now has deep influence over the housing policy of President Donald Trump, who has taken a hacksaw to funding for public housing programs under the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Housing Not Handcuffs said Louisiana's bill, which would almost certainly be signed by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry if passed by the state Senate, "is an extreme take on the already extreme copy-paste legislation" peddled by Cicero.
"This bill forces homeless people charged with a crime to make the false choice between jail or at least one year of forced treatment," the group said. "Louisiana has a long history—and present—of chain gangs, prison labor, and entrenched white supremacy. This bill clearly evokes debtor’s prisons, convict leasing, and the ugliest day of Jim Crow."
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Rent Control Will Protect Students Against Homelessness
The situation is dire. Students and their families are suffering right now, with young people’s futures at stake—as well their immediate well being.
Mar 21, 2026
The numbers are dire. More than 1.4 million students are homeless in the United States. In California, there are more homeless students than ever: At least 230,000.
Something needs to be done, and quick. Rent control will provide the relief that students and their families need right now.
Numerous experts have pointed out that students need stable, affordable housing to learn and thrive. California Homeless Youth Project Director Pixie Pearl, for example, told LA School Report that unhoused students struggle with a lack of access to nutritious foods, mental healthcare problems, and chronic absenteeism, among many other issues. It’s incredibly difficult to receive an education when one is homeless.
We also know that unaffordable rents are linked to higher mortality rates, as reported by Eviction Lab, the prestigious think tank at Princeton University, and a wide-ranging UC San Francisco study on homelessness found that most people are pushed into the streets because of sky-high rents. So immediately addressing skyrocketing rents is key, and rent control is the tool to use.
Yet corporate landlords and certain politicians want to keep the status quo, saying that we merely need to build more housing to drive down rents. Not only is there no urgency in that approach, which has serious flaws and does nothing for students right now, but developers build almost exclusively luxury rental housing—a key fact that Zillow’s chief economist pointed out as a major problem for improving housing affordability. And, of course, poor and middle- and working-class families with students can’t afford luxury apartments.
As a result, housing experts are increasingly calling for politicians to pass rent regulations to protect tenants.
University of Southern California Professor Manuel Pastor, co-author of the USC Dornsife’s Rent Matters report, wrote: “The housing crisis requires a range of strategies, [and] moderate rent regulation is a useful tool to be nested in broader strategy. It has fewer damaging effects than are often imagined, it can address economic pain, and it can promote housing stability. And housing stability matters because it is associated with physical, social, and psychological well-being; higher educational achievement by the young; and benefits for people of color.”
In response to a recent effort to pass rent stabilization in Providence, Rhode Island, University of Minnesota Professor Edward Goetz noted in a Boston Globe op-ed: “City officials are responding to the [housing affordability] crisis with a proposal to enact rent stabilization. Vocal critics of the policy make a wide range of doomsday predictions about what will happen if a city adopts it. But the actual record of rent stabilization across the country tells a dramatically different story. In fact, rent stabilization can be an effective approach to the affordability challenges faced by Providence renters, as it has been in other U.S. cities.”
In a 2023 letter to the Biden Administration, a group of 32 top economists wrote: “Through well-crafted policies, rent regulations can be designed in a manner that protects the general health and well being of renters, promotes affordability, mitigates future inflationary episodes, and maintains landlords’ ability to receive a fair and reasonable return on investment.”
But rent control isn’t the only tool to protect students against homelessness.
Housing Is A Human Right and other activists have long urged elected officials to quickly implement the “3 Ps”: Protect tenants through rent control and other tenant protections; preserve existing affordable housing, not demolish it to make way for luxury housing; and produce new affordable and homeless housing through such concepts as adaptive reuse and prefabricated housing.
It bears repeating. The situation is dire. Students and their families are suffering right now, with young people’s futures at stake – as well their immediate well being.
Rent control will immediately stabilize rent and bring quick relief. Politicians, across the country, have that tool at their disposal. They need to pass rent regulations. Pronto.
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Passports Welcome Here: The Importance of Crossing Borders at the Library
Back new bills now up for review to support libraries in providing passport application services, particularly in communities where it can be difficult or intimidating for people to use other federal offices.
Feb 28, 2026
Recent public announcements that many public libraries could no longer accept passport applications surprised many.
In a now unusual attempt at bicameral and bipartisan legislation, Rep. John Joyce (R-Pa.) and Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), have put forth bills (H.R.6997 and S.3733) that would enable all public libraries, whether they are organized as units of government or nonprofit organizations, to serve as passport acceptance facilities designated by the State Department.
As a university educator in Library and Information Science, I was at first taken aback by the passport application ban attempt. Many others were surprised that libraries had been accepting passport applications. But then perhaps neither the service nor the attempt to shut it down are a surprise at all.
Public libraries across the nation are an integral piece of our social and civic infrastructure. Librarians see up close the needs for social services in their communities, and they step up to meet those needs.
Libraries are where people step from one world into another, sometimes by opening books and sometimes by sharing space with people very different from themselves.
Libraries provide internet access for people who do not have the resources to get online from home or may not have a home where they can get online. Libraries provide physical shelter, in times of climate emergency like extreme heatwaves or intense freezes. They provide shelter for people who need to get off the street for a few hours to find a safe place. Recently, they have begin offering telehealth booths to support medical care in remote communities.
Libraries promote literacy, a lynchpin of economic security for both individuals and the communities in which they live. Indeed, there is considerable research demonstrating that there are higher literacy rates in communities with access to a public library, particularly in low income and rural areas.
There are approximately 17,000 public libraries in the United States, a number that has remained remarkably stable in the past few decades. Despite funding difficulties, skepticism about the value of physical libraries in the digital era, and political and social challenges to library collections, libraries remain at the center, meeting many of those communities’ needs.
Of course, it is perfect that libraries were places to apply for passports as they are places of border crossing. Libraries are where people step from one world into another, sometimes by opening books and sometimes by sharing space with people very different from themselves.
There is a public library that famously straddles the Vermont-Canada border where you can literally step across a border. That quiet fame has grown louder now that it plays a key role in Louise Penny’s latest novel, The Black Wolf.
To step into the world of the library at most you’ll need a library card. Everyone is welcome.
To be sure, not every library looks like it welcomes all people with open arms. Legacy architecture and practices can perpetuate the perception of the library as hushed and exclusive.
The precarity of funding for public libraries often prevents libraries from addressing that perception. Many libraries aspire to renovating and modernizing their spaces in ways that they simply cannot afford. Public libraries rely upon local taxpayers for much of their funding, but they also rely upon federal grants to innovate and develop new initiatives.
Nearly one year ago, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order intended to dismantle the only federal agency dedicated to funding library services, the Institute for Museum and Library Services. The agency awards almost $300,000,000 in grants every year, including more than $160 million that goes to states and largely supports the work of public libraries.
The executive order was successfully challenged in court by the attorneys general of 21 states, and on November 21 of last year, the US District Court for the District of Rhode Island struck down the Trump administration’s attempts to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
One result of this victory is that last month, IMLS awarded for eight projects “dedicated to building AI literacy.” Once again, libraries see a need and step up to meet it.
Many people voice public criticism and concern about the use of public libraries. Critics complain that they are overrun with noisy teens after school, socializing and playing video games. Some complain libraries are filled with sleeping, foul-smelling people who experience homelessness, or that they are opening the doors for children to step into obscenity.
But it is crucial to see the critical need for accessible public libraries in this country. It is important to support these bills now up for review to support libraries in providing passport application services, particularly in communities where it can be difficult or intimidating for people to use other federal offices.
More than that, it is essential for the country for policymakers, funders, and all Americans to support libraries through ensuring funding, community advocacy, and moral support. It is crucial to help libraries continue to be places where everyone can cross borders and step into new worlds.
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The Republican Policy of Making More People Homeless
More people than ever are being forced into homelessness or are spending more than half their income on rent.
Dec 21, 2025
As Congress continues to negotiate the next set of funding bills before the upcoming deadline at the end of January, policymakers must ensure sufficient and timely funding for critical housing and homelessness programs. These programs help millions of people afford housing, a basic need. But proposed cuts could leave more than 600,000 people struggling to pay the rent — a sizable share of whom would then be at high risk of eviction and homelessness (see table here for details by state). Congress should instead use a final 2026 funding bill to keep people in their homes and support communities’ efforts to make housing more affordable for everyone.
The Administration and congressional Republicans already made deep cuts to health coverage and food assistance in their megabill enacted earlier this year. They could impose similarly harmful cuts to housing and homelessness assistance through the appropriations bill now under negotiation. It’s critical that no families lose assistance and communities have the resources to at least maintain current levels of assistance.
To make that happen, a final funding bill for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) should:
- Help more than 170,000 formerly homeless people stay in their homes with access to services. HUD issued a funding notice for the Continuum of Care (CoC) program, the main homelessness solutions program, that would cap the percentage of funding that can be used to pair rental assistance with supportive services at 30 percent — compared to about 87 percent under current policy. That change alone would take housing assistance away from more than 170,000 formerly homeless people, HUD estimates.While HUD temporarily rescinded the notice, the department stated it will make “technical corrections” and reissue it. The funding notice includes other policy changes for the funding competition that are so drastically different from previous years that some communities could be left without any CoC funding in 2026 to connect unhoused people with housing.But the timing of the notice alone will cause chaos. Some communities are facing delays in their 2026 funding because HUD issued the new funding notice months later than the usual grantmaking timeline. CoC-funded projects are on a variety of funding timelines, so projects that are expecting money in January will receive nothing. The longer HUD takes to reissue a notice and complete the grantmaking process, the longer and more extensive the gaps in funding for housing and services for formerly and currently homeless people. Many communities do not have resources to fund these services in the interim, forcing them to scale back or end housing assistance and services, which will leave many people experiencing homelessness once again.Congress needs to ensure that communities have the funding they need. Congress can — and should — direct HUD in the final funding bill to renew existing grants for 2026 (which would complete the two-year grants that first provided funding in 2025). This would keep people stably housed, and prevent funding disruptions for communities across the country, all without any increase in funding.
- Maintain assistance for the more than 50,000 households that use the successful Emergency Housing Voucher (EHV) program to pay the rent each month. The EHV program has provided life-saving assistance to households at risk of or experiencing homelessness or fleeing domestic violence and trafficking, but its funding is expected to run out in 2026. While both the House and Senate include some helpful language in their HUD funding bills, neither proposal would fully address the funding cliff. A final bill should provide additional funding to ensure these households don’t lose assistance and the stability they’ve achieved.
- Sufficiently fund the Housing Choice Voucher program, the country’s largest federal rental assistance program. Neither the House or Senate annual funding bills for HUD include enough funding to keep pace with inflation and maintain existing levels of assistance in the voucher program. Without adequate funding, many agencies would have to stop issuing vouchers to new families as a way to control costs, leading to fewer people getting the help they need. This has already happened to many agencies this year, so HUD and housing agencies have nearly depleted existing emergency resources.We estimate that, under the House bill, about 411,000 fewer people could receive assistance, and about 243,000 fewer people would receive assistance under the Senate bill. Housing Choice Vouchers are a critical tool for helping people with low incomes afford housing, including people experiencing homelessness. It’s particularly important to ensure the voucher program has robust funding given the other threats to assistance discussed above.
Taken together, these cuts would further limit who receives housing assistance, leaving up to 600,000 more people without an affordable, stable home in the coming year. Rental assistance is a critical, evidence-based solution to reducing and preventing homelessness, but already eligible households can’t access it due to chronic underfunding. More people than ever are being forced into homelessness or are spending more than half their income on rent. Taking the steps outlined above could keep these problems from getting worse.
Cuts to rental assistance, on the other hand, will leave more people waiting for help, especially because the deep cuts to Medicaid and SNAP in the Republican megabill passed in July will make housing even less affordable for millions of families. Both of these programs support housing stability by covering other basic expenses, allowing families more room in their budgets for rent. Moreover, access to health supports is a critical component of the highly effective strategies that pair rental assistance with personalized health and social services to help unhoused or formerly unhoused people — the very supports the Administration is also attempting to drastically scale back.
More people than ever are being forced into homelessness or are spending more than half their income on rent.A final funding bill for 2026 must also protect against further partisan use of rescission authority and illegal withholding of funds by including language that ensures appropriated funding reaches the communities Congress intends, and that agencies have sufficient staff to manage these programs. Such guardrails along with the provisions described above would immediately benefit people across the country and are a necessary step for making housing and other basic needs more affordable.
Looking forward, Congress should do more to address housing affordability and homelessness. Housing costs are typically the single biggest part of a household’s budget, especially for people with low and moderate incomes. With record numbers of people being forced into homelessness and more than 24 million renters spending more than half of their incomes on rent, expanding rental assistance, in addition to increasing supportive services and the supply of affordable housing, are needed to make progress.
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The Words We Use to Describe Homelessness Will Get People Killed
A huge swath of the political and media spectrum sees a person living on the street as either an aesthetic nuisance or criminal-in-waiting. We should see them for who they are: a person suffering and vulnerable, deserving of our empathy.
Dec 01, 2025
Last month, Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade said of people living with mental illness on our streets: “Involuntary lethal injection… Just kill ’em.” He apologized—after the clip ricocheted across the internet—but the words were said, on air, to millions.
I run a nonprofit that directly serves the homeless. We meet people where they are—under overpasses, on subways, in shelters and supportive housing. I see, daily, how language like “vagrant,” or “zombie” strips people of their personhood. It lowers the public’s guard against cruelty and raises the political ceiling for punitive policies. We cannot afford to pretend that words don’t matter.
“Vagrancy,” once a legal catch‑all used to police and punish poor and Black Americans, is being rehabilitated in public discourse; historians have warned what that signals. And major tabloids routinely label our neighbors “vagrants” in crime headlines, blending poverty status with criminal identity in ways that echo the past.
Even federal policy is now framed around “fighting vagrancy.” That phrase isn’t from a century‑old placard; it’s the heading and premise of a July 2025 executive order, which opens by declaring “endemic vagrancy” a public menace and directs federal agencies to prioritize encampment removals and civil commitment.
The best research shows people experiencing homelessness are far more often victims of violence than perpetrators.
A huge swath of the political and media spectrum sees a person living on the street as either an aesthetic nuisance or criminal-in-waiting. To them, a person living on the street is barely a person at all but rather an indication of broader disorder that must be swept away or removed. But where should they be removed to? What should happen to them when they get there? Those questions are unimportant to certain portions of the media and political ecosystem.
The Supreme Court’s Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling in 2024 cleared the way for cities to punish sleeping outside even when shelter is unavailable. Some jurisdictions have read that as a green light for broader crackdowns rather than investments in housing and health care—turning survival behaviors into ticketable or jailable offenses. The July executive order doubled down, instructing federal agencies to preference grants for jurisdictions that enforce bans on “urban camping and loitering” and to support encampment removals with federal dollars. Words like “vagrancy” aren’t just stigmatizing; they now allocate money and power.
This year we saw what happens when the politics of sweeps outrun basic safety. In January, Cornelius Taylor was killed by a bulldozer during an encampment clearance in Atlanta—first chalked up to overdose, later shown by autopsy to be blunt‑force trauma. And in my home city of New York, Debrina Kawam was fatally set on fire by a stranger while she was sleeping in a subway car. Vocabulary that treats people as nuisances rather than neighbors makes such tragedies more likely.
I know public disorder is real. But I also know—by data and by name—that most of the people you step past on your commute are surviving traumas you don’t see.
The best research shows people experiencing homelessness are far more often victims of violence than perpetrators. In California’s landmark CASPEH study, 38% of participants experienced violence during their current episode of homelessness, and nearly three quarters reported violence at some point in their lives. Mortality data tell the same story of precarity. In Los Angeles County alone, 2,508 people experiencing homelessness died in 2023—an average of nearly seven people every day. The rate remains multiple times higher than that of the general population.
As a sector, we’ll keep doing our part: street outreach, housing navigation, medical and behavioral health care, and prevention. But leaders in government and media must stop normalizing language that primes the public for harm. Phrases like “person without housing” or “person who is homeless” more accurately reflect that homelessness is a temporary status, not an identity or permanent state of being. And in most cases, we can refer to our neighbors in media stories or political policy without any reference to their housing status.
I know public disorder is real. But I also know—by data and by name—that most of the people you step past on your commute are surviving traumas you don’t see. They are sons, daughters, parents, veterans, and caregivers. Some are literally recovering from yesterday’s assault. They are not “vermin.” They are not “zombies.”
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