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housing crisis
Want to Resist Trump? Treat the Homeless With Compassion
If you don’t want to acquiesce to the president’s way of doing things, might it not finally be time to make eye contact with those neighbors of ours who are homeless?
Sep 14, 2025
The federal takeover of Washington, DC rightfully attracted extensive media coverage, but an executive order called “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” quietly issued on July 24, received remarkably little attention. Perhaps it didn’t make a splash because it wasn’t specifically about policing (or, for that matter, National Guarding), but more generally about how we should treat people who already exist on the outermost fringes of society, human beings who have long been reduced to labels like “addict” or “homeless.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is counting on us to renounce those living on the streets, while struggling with their mental health or the cost of housing (or both). And if history is any guide, that may be exactly what most of us do. While the current moment may feel shocking in so many ways, the president’s order to end what he’s labeled “disorder” represents a further development of norms that have been in place for all too long. They are also norms that we have the power to change.
Identifying a very real crisis, the president’s July 24 executive order noted that “the number of individuals living on the streets in the United States on a single night during the last year of the previous administration—274,224—was the highest ever recorded.” The order went on to state that the majority of those who are unhoused have a substance use disorder, with two-thirds reporting that they have used hard drugs at some point in their lives. What followed was the administration’s solution: “Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings… will restore public order.” Precisely which institutions was unclear.
One thing we know is that the use of substances is often connected to past trauma or current hardship, including oppression and poverty. Regardless of that reality, not just the president but all too many of us tend to believe that people who use drugs are undeserving of our compassion or support. In 2021, a national survey found that 7 of every 10 Americans believed that those who use drugs problematically are “outcasts” or “non-community members.” (And yes, those were the terms used.)
The president’s executive order fuses drug use and homelessness into a single issue without revealing that homelessness can cause or exacerbate substance use disorder—because people use drugs to cope with privation. As addiction expert Gabor Maté has said, “Don’t ask why the addiction, ask why the pain.” Much like those of us who reach for wine or social media in order to escape, when people who are unhoused use drugs, they are usually searching for a way to make life tolerable. At the same time, they come to be regarded by their peers as non-community members, making it so much less likely that this nation will fight the president on his plans to round them up and erase them from our world entirely.
Meanwhile, many of us with homes never pause to consider our common habit of avoiding unhoused people in every possible way. We cross the street, shift our gaze, anything to avoid the briefest glimpse of their humanity—perhaps terrified to see ourselves in them. Here’s a thought, though: If you don’t want to acquiesce to the president’s way of doing things, might it not finally be time to make eye contact with those neighbors of ours who are homeless? Might it not be time to acknowledge their humanity and, in doing so, recover some of our own?
“Arbitrary and Prolonged Detention”
The Los Angeles nonprofit LA Más helps residents build security through collective economic power and home ownership. As Helen Leung, its executive director, put it recently: “Families who’ve been in their neighborhoods for generations are getting priced out. Vendors who work multiple jobs are sleeping in their cars. Kids have classroom friends disappear mid-semester because rent went up again.” She noted that immigrants and working-class households in particular are experiencing acute displacement pressure, which ultimately pushes some to become houseless—and now they find themselves in the crosshairs of the president’s July executive order.
That order proposes the vast expansion of a practice that has been around for a very long time. In recent years, in fact, in states across this country, there has been an uptick in involuntary commitment, a trade term for the forced institutionalization of people who are unwell—or, now, simply unhoused.
Evidence suggests that rounding up masses of unwell people and institutionalizing them will do anything but benefit public safety, while endangering the individuals who are locked up.
Elected officials of all political stripes, including the current president, have claimed that involuntary commitment is an evidence-based way to treat mental illnesses, including addiction. Research does show that, in certain cases, involuntary commitment can be beneficial. But in all too many cases, it’s both ineffective and inhumane. A recent report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that the institutionalization of individuals who were involuntarily hospitalized in “judgment call cases”—meaning cases where one physician might recommend hospitalization, while another would not—nearly doubled the risk of death by suicide or overdose. It also nearly doubled the likelihood of that person later being charged with a violent crime, perhaps because such institutionalization disrupted employment, subjecting people to still more dire economic circumstances. (Again, don’t ask why the addiction, ask why the pain.) Even a recent essay in the New York Times advocating forced treatment conceded that it must be well funded and thoughtfully carried out—conditions that are virtually certain to be unmet in the current climate.
In other words, evidence suggests that rounding up masses of unwell people and institutionalizing them will do anything but benefit public safety, while endangering the individuals who are locked up. On-the-ground data also indicates that, even before US President Donald Trump focused on that tactic, such commitment was unequally applied, with Black and Hispanic people more likely than White people to be institutionalized against their will.
“We’re not operating with an optimal treatment system, mandatory or voluntary,” according to Regina LaBelle, director of the Center on Addiction Policy at Georgetown University and the former acting director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. “We’re starting from a really bad system. And so pushing people into a really bad system will end really badly.”
In response to the president’s executive order, the American Bar Association published a statement saying that it raises grave constitutional and civil rights issues and “paves the way for arbitrary and prolonged detention.”
Housing Is a Human Right
A response to the president’s executive order, published in the Psychiatric Times, a journal for psychiatry professionals, noted that it “invokes fear of people with psychiatric illnesses, talks of indiscriminate incarceration of people who have not committed a crime, as well as collection and sharing of sensitive health information with law enforcement, and yet proposes no actual solutions.”
Unfortunately, the president and his crew undoubtedly do regard the involuntary commitment of unhoused people as an “actual solution.” Indeed, many people who have homes or apartments feel unhappy at the sight of human beings living on the streets of their neighborhood and want something done about it. But the underlying problem isn’t that people live on the street or use substances in public in order to tolerate despair. As Helen Leung put it, “When someone loses their housing, it’s not because they need to be institutionalized—it’s because we’ve allowed housing to become a commodity instead of a human right.”
“What works best is making sure that we have affordable housing for people,” says LaBelle. New research out of Philadelphia, for instance, found that a program of cash assistance for housing costs more than halved the odds of participants becoming homeless.
But our prevailing housing system—in which the purpose is less to provide shelter than to generate profits for those who own real estate—has resulted in rents or costs that are beyond reach for increasing numbers of Americans. And as if such a state of affairs weren’t bad enough, President Trump now plans to make “alternative” investment assets, including real estate, available to anyone with a 401(k). If he succeeds in doing so, far more people will compete to own real estate for the purposes of turning a profit, which will undoubtedly raise real estate prices yet more, driving rents higher still.
Notably, his July 24 executive order provides law enforcement with the vague instruction to institutionalize people who “cannot care for themselves,” which could result in a kind of real estate roulette. In essence, those who lack the cash to pay for housing at market rates—no matter how high those rates rise—could be deemed unable to care for themselves, and therefore would become eligible to be rounded up and taken… where?
Very Much Precedented
On one matter there is widespread agreement: There’s already a distinct shortage of mental health services, especially for those who can’t pay for them.
“Our current system does not provide for long-term institutionalization,” noted the Psychiatric Times in its response to the president’s executive order, which itself does nothing to expand the inpatient capacity of treatment facilities or increase funding for mental health services. The administration actually slashed funding for such programs this spring and has approved cuts to Medicaid, a program that currently funds 24% of all mental-health and substance-use care in the United States.
It’s easy to blame Trump, but far harder to engage in self-reflection: How have I participated in the dehumanization of unhoused people or those who use drugs?
So where will people be taken? Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has proposed rural camps for addiction recovery, but that (controversial) policy would require substantial new funding, rather than cuts, to healthcare. The president and Congress do seem to have an appetite for increasing funding for military and enforcement programs. The hastily constructed immigration detention facility in Florida known as “Alligator Alcatraz” offers a nightmarish example of how this administration pursues the development of new carceral space.
Already, immigrants are being rounded up and institutionalized, a practice likely to be expanded to still more of our neighbors. While all of this may feel unprecedented, it’s all too precedented. This nation has a long history of institutionalizing people who have not committed a crime, including Indigenous people and those with mental health struggles. It’s easy to blame Trump for all that’s now happening, and he certainly bears enormous responsibility, but he’s not responsible for everything.
He is not, for example, responsible for the longstanding and pervasive stigma attached to people who are unhoused or mentally unwell or both, which has pushed all too many of us in the wealthiest nation on Earth to live in isolation and poverty and even to perish. It’s easy to blame Trump, but far harder to engage in self-reflection: How have I participated in the dehumanization of unhoused people or those who use drugs? Do I have the capacity to recognize the humanity in everyone without exception?
ICE (Like Stigma) Now Operates in the Shadows
Perhaps it seems that acknowledging the humanity of those who have so long been dehumanized is far too little and too subtle to make a difference now. And it’s true that we need much more than that, including strong collective action to create housing that people can afford and that’s accessible to those who have experienced addiction and criminalization. But it’s also true that nonjudgmental support from peers makes a difference in the lives of those who are struggling, raising the odds that they may heal and go on to live fruitful and connected lives.
In the past half-year of Donald Trump’s second term as president, raids by masked US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have become a fixture of American life. ICE now operates in the shadows—and that’s how stigma works, too. Stigma toward people who use drugs or who live without homes is a corrosive force that makes it acceptable to withhold compassion, care, and connection from certain of our neighbors. But unlike forces equipped with military-grade tactical gear, stigma can be overcome by any individual who chooses to witness and affirm the humanity of all our neighbors. And in our present American world, doing so is surely a revolutionary act.
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The Grassroots Fight For Affordable Housing
From Tacoma, Washington to Kansas City, Missouri, people power is key to creating communities where working people can live.
Jul 23, 2025
In the United States, the housing situation is abysmal and getting worse.
A few statewide and local statistics are emblematic of a broader national problem. For example, in Washington state, according to the New York Times, rental housing prices rose by 43% from 2001 to 2023 while, during the same time period, the income of state renters grew by only 26%. Meanwhile in New York City, The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the average price of a two-bedroom apartment was $5,560. The Journal headline of the article in which that statistic was cited nicely embodied a rising feeling among ordinary New York City residents: “New York’s Housing Crisis Is So Bad That a Socialist is Poised to Become Mayor,” referring of course to Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who is the frontrunner to win the city’s mayoral election in November. Rates of homelessness, evictions, and foreclosures remain high around the country.
In the face of this ever growing crisis, mainstream politicians—Democrats and Republicans—have virtually nothing useful to say. They’ve doubled down on existing national, state, and local government subsidies for affordable housing—which do not even remotely begin to produce the supply of housing at levels needed—while insisting that the unregulated free market in housing (increasingly controlled by an ever smaller number of corporations) operate as much as possible.
Grassroots Resistance
Tacoma, Washington is a city of about 222,000, 35 miles southwest of Seattle. It is largely a working class town; the Tacoma News Tribune recently reported that 77% of the jobs within it “don’t pay enough for a single worker to be able to comfortably afford housing on their own.” In the whole of Pierce County (of which Tacoma is the county seat), 37% of renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing.
A group which has attempted to alleviate this situation, with modest but tangible success, is Tacoma For All (T4A), a group founded by United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 367 and the Tacoma Democratic Socialists of America. T4A’s most noticeable achievement has been launching and successfully influencing the passage of Initiative 1 by Tacoma voters in November 2023, securing relatively strong eviction protections for the city’s renters and a cap on rent increases.
In order to assist in meeting the crisis of affordable housing, KC Tenants and T4A have both made a strong push for government-funded social housing within their particular locales.
However, the most impressive achievement of T4A has been its building of an organization, democratically run by its dues-paying members, devoted to educating ordinary people about their legal rights as tenants and to acting in solidarity to protect the rights of other tenants against the depredations of corporate landlords. The organization regularly sends teams of organizers to knock on doors of Tacoma apartment buildings, asking tenants about any issues they might be having with landlords, and offering the organization’s assistance and solidarity in addressing those issues. T4A has established Tacoma Tenant Legal Aid to help tenants pursue their rights. The organization has achieved real successes in helping Tacoma residents stay in their homes
Another successful grassroots organization is KC Tenants in Kansas City, Missouri. It is profiled in Jonathan Tarleton’s 2025 book Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons. While the group is anti-capitalist, KC Tenants foremost approach to tenants is not to preach socialism but to help them navigate bread-and-butter housing issues. The presentation of their critique of racial capitalism or lessons on the virtues of social housing comes later in the process of integrating tenants into their organization. As KC Tenants organizer Tara Raghuveer told Tarleton, the group’s initial approach is to simply ask tenants, “How the fuck are you?...We knock [on] doors asking people how they’re living now, which by itself is a very politicizing line of questioning because the people are not living good.”
For tenants suffering from serious psychological trauma and anger because of housing issues, the approach of KC Tenants organizers—the message that people are here to offer assistance to them without judgement and structures for solidarity with other people going through similar issues—can be exhilarating, even liberating. Similar feelings have also been felt by KC Tenants professional organizers. One of them is Magda Werkmeister, who at one point left Kansas City for back East to complete a college degree but eventually returned to continue working with KC Tenants. She told Tarleton that she returned to the group because “I was missing out on something that makes life more joyous, and I think that was just the sense of community… and these people that you are able to care about and [who] care about you.”
Social Housing
In order to assist in meeting the crisis of affordable housing, KC Tenants and T4A have both made a strong push for government-funded social housing within their particular locales. Other municipalities have followed suit: For example, Seattle voters approved funding for a city social housing developer in February, and in May the Chicago City Council passed a Green Social Housing Ordinance.
Social housing is a form of public housing: It is meant to assist persons of a wide range of income levels (not merely low income) and utilize government subsidies to ensure the rents it charges are substantially below market rate. The most successful example of social housing in the world is found in Vienna, Austria. The success of Vienna’s social housing seemingly played a role in Economist Intelligence naming it in 2024 as the world’s most livable city.
The Bottom Line: People Power
It seems likely that Zohran Mamdani—who has cited the Vienna model of housing as a major influence—will have immense difficulties in implementing social housing in New York City, as well as his other proposals like free childcare and free bus service. These programs will require tax increases on the city’s businesses and wealthy as well as increases in New York City’s debt limit; both require the approval of New York’s business-friendly Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and she is unlikely to accommodate Mamdani’s requests to any significant extent. Moreover, there is risk that city business leaders and the wealthy—fearful of the threat to their bottom line should Mamdani win election in November and try to implement his relatively mild democratic socialist program—will engage in capital flight, wrecking the city’s tax base.
Regardless of whether Mamdani is, somehow, able to resist the establishment pressure and implement major parts of his agenda—or whether that pressure forces him to sell out that agenda—it is obviously crucial that ordinary people and grassroots activists stick unflinchingly to core principles and relentlessly pressure politicians to follow them.
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'Rigged System': Pro-Union Nebraska Candidate Shreds Private Equity for Jacking Up Home Prices
"Hard work should lead to home ownership, not permanent rental payments to corporate landlords," said Osborn.
Jul 21, 2025
Independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn, a mechanic and former labor union leader, posted a lengthy thread on the social media platform X on Monday in which he discussed the role that private equity firms play in increasing the cost of housing in the United States.
Osborn, who earlier this month announced he'd be running against Republican incumbent Sen. Pete Ricketts, drew a line between the lack of affordable housing and private equity firms that have gone on a buying spree of residential properties in recent years.
"Wall Street discovered they could make billions by turning homes into commodities," Osborn explained. "Since 2008, private equity firms and hedge funds have gobbled up hundreds of thousands of single-family homes—the exact starter homes that young families used to buy. Because of their financial strength and ability to pay in cash, larger investors can out-compete first-time homebuyers, making it harder for real people without millions to buy homes in neighborhoods where these corporate giants are active."
Osborn then pointed to reporting that the Flat Water Free Press did three years ago about how real estate firm VineBrook Homes aggressively bought up properties in Omaha, Nebraska, and then proceeded to evict current residents while also jacking up rents.
"From January 2020 through September 2021, VineBrook bought more Douglas County single family homes than anyone else, according to data from the Douglas County Registrar and Assessor of Deeds," the publication wrote. "All told, VineBrook Homes has bought up some 250 houses in the metro area since October 2019, a company spokesman said."
Osborn made the case that what VineBrook has done in Omaha is part of a concerted strategy by investors across the country to buy up single-family houses and raise rents for tenants. He then linked to a recent report from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution from earlier this year that found 30% of single family homes in the Atlanta metro area are now owned by investors.
"The shift to these corporate landlords almost NEVER brings an improvement in housing conditions or rent prices," Osborn charged. "New layers of bureaucracy and random new fees always seem to appear... And back in Nebraska, here's what the VineBrook situation was like for the North Omaha residents: '...tenants complained about unresolved maintenance issues, unfounded evictions, aggressive rent collection tactics, and poor customer service.'"
Osborn emphasized that he was "open" to a number of ideas to remedy this situation, including the removal of "unfair tax advantages that give private equity an edge over individual homebuyers"; ending "taxpayer subsidies for giant corporate mergers that create housing monopolies"; barring foreign investors from "buying up American neighborhoods"; and enacting "reasonable limits on how many homes Wall Street can control in any one community."
"Every kid deserves what we had—a real shot at the American Dream," he wrote in conclusion. "Hard work should lead to home ownership, not permanent rental payments to corporate landlords. Time to fix this rigged system."
Osborn kicked off his Senate bid two weeks ago by ripping into the budget megabill recently passed by Republicans that slashed roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade and enacted tax cuts that are heavily tilted toward the wealthiest taxpayers.
He launched his campaign following an unexpectedly close race with Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) last year, which he lost by fewer than 7 points despite being heavily outspent.
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