Will Trump Create More Homelessness In San Francisco?
On 16 April 2025, National Public Radio reported that the Trump regime’s Department of Government “Efficiency” has placed all the employees of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness on administrative leave, effectively gutting the agency.
Though the sworn mission statement of DOGE has been to reel in government spending, considering that the USICH had a budget of just south of $4.5 million and contained less than twenty employees, this move is as short-sighted as it is penurious. The agency, established in 1987, was created to optimize the federal government’s response to homelessness through collaborations with numerous federal executive departments. Though the cost of housing someone experiencing a lack thereof can be appreciably high, it could well be considered a form of cheap insurance against numerous dynamic costs associated with homelessness, such as healthcare costs, emergency services, and bills from civil and criminal court. All of the above expenses can easily spiral out of control if homeless people are neglected and left on the streets to fend for themselves.
As a result of this and other callous policies on the part of the Trump regime, affordable housing nonprofit organizations in San Francisco are feeling one hell of a pinch, especially in the form of the unexplained stoppage of federal grants previously allocated for programs meant to deal with homelessness. For example, in March 2025, San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing officials informed numerous nonprofit organizations that grant money from a funding program backed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had not yet arrived, for reasons neither known nor disclosed as of this writing. Executive directors from both the Mission Housing Development Corporation and Chinatown Community Development Center each expressed expectations of challenges and delays in terms of developing, building and operating low-income housing.
This crisis comes at a particularly challenging time, as San Francisco has a state-mandated deadline to expand its housing inventory by 82,000 new units, half of which must be reserved for low-income tenants, by 2031. Fortunately, the City has agreed to pick up the slack for the time being.
It can be at least surmised that the Trump regime’s evisceration of USICH and the withholding of grant monies set aside to combat homelessness is part of the President’s personal and political vendetta against programs and agencies that support diversity, equity and inclusion.
A chronically homeless person can cost taxpayers between $30,000 and $50,000 per year. The most recent information from HUD, dating from January 2024, indicates that 771,480 Americans were experiencing homelessness. Crunching the numbers, we see an annual cost ranging from $23.1 billion to $38.6 billion. If the Trump regime decides to do away with agencies and programs meant to deal with homelessness, over time, the cost to taxpayers will go up, especially taking into account the added legal and medical expenses incurred as a result of neglecting the homeless. And in a country where income is often insufficient, rent is usually unaffordable and medical expenses can and will bankrupt people, we are liable to see an increase in homelessness over the course of Trump’s tenure.
In fact, homelessness in the U.S. has been on the rise already, with the number of both sheltered and unsheltered homeless people growing by 18% since 2023 and 32.5% since 2022. In San Francisco alone, the total number of people experiencing homelessness increased from 7,754 in 2022 to 8,323 in 2024. If this trend continues, between that and Trump cutting funding for programs and agencies meant to address this particular problem, the resultant cost to taxpayers will no doubt swell and spiral out of control.
Conservatives often ask, “How are we going to pay for all these handouts to these lazy, shiftless, good-for-nothing charity cases?” The better question to ask is, how are we going to afford paying for the messes created by letting the problem of homeless go unchecked?
A quick little read between the lines gives the awful impression that the Trump regime has far less interest in reducing government waste than they do in targeting poor people, especially those who are black, Latin American and/or immigrants, undocumented and otherwise. Perhaps I shouldn’t jump to conclusions, but if I didn’t know any better – and I don’t – I’d say that it sure looks to me that Donald Trump and Elon Musk reckon that any government program that they believe gets in the way of them fattening their wallets is a waste and I’d also guess that they know just as well as anybody else does that if homeless shelters end up closed due to funds being cut by the Trump regime, police and ICE officers will likely have an easier time flushing out the people they want to arrest and/or deport.
Howdy! My name is Katy Atchison and I'm an Associate Editor for Broke-Ass Stuart.
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