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PLANNING WATCH - President Trump, like other crafty politicians, rarely lets a crisis go to waste. In this case it is the increasing numbers of homeless people in Washington, DC. His solution is to take over the District of Columbia police department and send in the National Guard. You don’t need to be a genius to realize that jailing the homeless or sending them fleeing to nearby Maryland and Virginia does not solve the problem of homelessness. It simply pushes the homeless out of view, whether it is the 1/3 resulting from mental illness and drug addiction, or the 2/3 invisible homeless trapped by stagnant wages and the high cost of apartments and houses. Of course these categories overlap because some mental illness and drug use is a consequence – not a cause -- of being homeless.
According to NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 16 million people out of a total US population of 344 million have severe mental illness, This means that 95 percent of those with severe mental illness are not homeless. Other factors, especially poverty, push the remaining 5 percent into homelessness. Once there, they join the 2/3 whose homelessness results from external economic forces.
When these factors collide, those with supportive friends and relatives can share a house or apartment. The rest end up on the streets and become victims of the police, and in Washington, the National Guard.
Historical precedent: Trump’s actions are not new. In 1932, about 40,000 World War I vets and their families set up temporary shelters in Washington, DC, to receive their long-promised bonus for their military service. President Herbert Hoover responded by sending in the US Army, led by Generals MacArthur and Eisenhower, to force them out of town. In the process, the US military killed two bonus marchers.
While we don’t yet know if the current DC homeless will also be subject to similar state violence, we do know that history is repeating itself. The police power of the government is again being used against the homeless in DC.
How did we again get into such a mess? The first cause was Richard Nixon’s suspension of public housing in 1973.
The second cause is the rising gap between the cost of housing and wages, which have been stagnant for the past half century.
As a result of housing prices rising much faster than incomes, more people have been forced to rent. Incomes have hardly changed when controlled for inflation, while rents have soared. Is it any wonder, then, that so many people have been priced out of housing and have become homeless, despite available vacant apartments.
Chickens coming home to roost. The primary explanation for the broad increase in homelessness, including in Washington, DC, is the rising percentage of income that people pay to keep a roof over their head. While the cost of housing is higher on the east and west coasts, all regions of the country are experiencing a housing crisis because of the neo-liberal housing policies that most Republicans and Democrats subscribe to. According to Bridget Taruvinga:
“In the 1970s . . . neo-liberalism was established as the dominant political ideology . . . characterized by deregulation, privatization, and welfare state withdrawal. . . The mission under neo-liberalism is to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation even in domains that have been formerly regarded as off-limits to the calculus of profitability, and one such contested area is low-income housing.”
The actions of President Trump, his appointees, and his silent supporters from the Democratic Party, rely on private-sector, neo-liberal housing programs, such as density bonuses, in lieu of former public housing programs. This approach is a colossal failure because homelessness keeps rising.
Never mind that these neoliberal housing policies make the overall housing crisis worse, while developers rake in handsome profits. These are NOT the consequences that Trump is trying to fix by federalizing the DC police and mobilizing the National Guard. His approach does not solve the underlying problem of people being priced out of housing because of wage stagnation and rising housing costs. Instead, Trump’s approach makes the overall housing crisis worse by forcing homeless people to flee to nearby areas. Out of sight, out of mind, while the bi-partisan housing approach stays the same.
This march of folly continues.
(Dick Platkin ([email protected]) is a retired LA city planner, who reports on local planning issues. He is a board member of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (UN4LA). Previous columns are available at the CityWatchLA archives.)
