IN DEFENSE OF RAMPANT HOMELESSNESS

National Review

 

Humor

 

In Defense of Rampant Homelessness

By Noah Rothman

July 25, 2025 12:06 PM

 

How dare President Trump try to make streets safe for the privileged. 

 

Maybe it was callousness that inspired it. Perhaps demonic cruelty suffices for a motive. Whatever the rationale, Donald Trump’s latest executive order takes dead aim at one of American society’s most vulnerable populations — the involuntarily unhoused — revictimizing the already beleaguered and helpless.

 

“Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe,” the president’s executive order supposedly aimed at “ending crime and disorder on America’s streets” reads. The contemptable document makes a variety of observations that a more enlightened society would discourage anyone from saying out loud.

 

Trump’s order contends that the “overwhelming majority” of the nearly 275,000 residentially challenged Americans enlivening the country’s streets suffer from “mental health conditions” or consume recreational narcotics. In combatting the imagined scourge of vagabondage, the president is “encouraging” — coercing, more like — municipal governments to involuntarily commit “individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time.” In addition, the order instructs executive agencies to prioritize funding for mental health programs and drug courts over “harm reduction” programs, which allegedly facilitate drug use. In a violation of state sovereignty, the order seeks to extort America’s cities into enforcing laws proscribing open-air drug use and sales, “urban campaign and loitering,” and squatting.

 

“Critics warned that such a policy threatens returning the nation to a darker era when people were often unjustly locked away in mental health institutions, and does nothing to help people afford housing,” the Washington Post’s David Ovalle observed. The president’s critics could not be more right. With a pen stroke, the president has reverted America to a Dickensian status quo in which undesirables are spirited away in the night, deprived of any legal recourse, and warehoused in impossibly inhumane conditions with beds and food and warmth. And all so elites can reclaim the illusory sense of “safety” that allows them to avoid confronting the inequities and indignities that typify how the other half lives.

 

The MAGA right will bombard you with data that supposedly justify this edict. They’ll tell you that over 76 percent of displaced persons struggle with mental disorders. They’ll insist that dozens of controlled evaluations and randomized experiments establish a clear link between policing disorder and vagrancy leads to overall lower crime rates. They’ll probably try to convince you that the anecdotes from city after city indicating that the majority of homeless refuse shelter services are suggestive of broader trends.

 

They will not contend with the fact that those who refuse sheltering services did so because charity is wholly insufficient to their needs. As one forward-thinking author observed, when we bother to ask the homeless why they refuse assistance, the “single most common reason” listed was “wants tiny home.” Is that really so much to ask?

 

There might be a handful of conservatives who are thoughtful on this issue. Maybe they who observe that the unhoused are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it, who concede that substance abuse is more probably a response to destitution than the cause of it, and who are branded criminals “primarily because many of their daily survival activities are criminalized,” as a New York University primer on the issue observed. But those voices, if they exist, have been shut out of this White House.

 

Here’s a thought: Have we as a society ever just tried giving the housing-deprived homes? Yes, we have, and experiments with permanent supportive housing (PSH) programs have fairly consistently yielded an increasing population of people living on the streets, as well as the abuse of those programs by the undeserving. That’s no reason to stop trying.

 

The heartless may lead you to believe that involuntarily committing those who are experiencing neuro-atypical behaviors somehow benefits them. There are surely unrepresentative instances that appear to make that case. Take this March Wall Street Journal profile of Rob Dart, for example. Suffering from mental health issues, he made a life for himself on the streets of Los Angeles, where he was shot, robbed, and tormented daily until his family compelled him to seek treatment — after which, Dart got his law license restored and enjoys renewed contact with his formerly estranged son.

 

The underlying assumption that Dart’s immense white privilege is somehow universally applicable is the Journal’s sin. After all, the familial interventions from which he benefited are not common among a population with few social or interpersonal connections. Why burden this population further with invasive programs that aim to do what family and friends can’t or won’t?

 

The American right has been talking about bringing back the insane asylums for decades. Perhaps they are ignorant of the history of these institutions as repositories for inconvenient women, problematic minorities, and other social outcasts deemed repulsive by America’s entitled and comfortable elites. Who is to say whether American society and its expectations have changed at all since the 19th century?

 

Trump’s order isn’t just thoughtlessly dismissive of the unhoused population’s liberty. It’s also contemptuous of the freedom that America’s cities should have to establish their own preferred social compacts. This attack on a vibrant feature of modern urban life sacrifices the texture and flavor of city living in service to a gauzy, nostalgic ideal that prescribes purging the urban form of its invigorating eccentricities. And, sure, if you have to take a subway or bus, frequent the local parks, or walk from one destination to the next after sundown, you might be seduced by the notion that enforcing the law will beget less lawlessness. But ask yourself what we’re sacrificing. What will be lost? One thing’s for sure: The rich and dynamic cityscape I look down upon from my penthouse will be a lot less vivacious.