Donald Trump’s new Executive Order, Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets, is basically a PR stunt for cruelty. It blames poor and homeless people for being poor and homeless. The order pushes cities to tear down encampments, lock up unhoused people who are mentally ill, and cut off funding to anyone who won’t enforce anti-camping laws.
Here’s the kicker: California was already doing most of this before Trump even showed up. Governor Newsom called the order “grandstanding,” but let’s be real, he’s been doing the same damn thing. He’s out there doing photo ops, pretending to be tough on homelessness, threatening to pull funding from cities that don’t sweep their streets clean of poor people. San Francisco’s no better. The city backed the Grants Pass v. Johnson Supreme Court case that made it legal to arrest people for sleeping outside, even if there’s nowhere else for them to go. Former Mayor London Breed promised to get “a lot more aggressive” with the homeless. DA Brooke Jenkins said she’d make life “less comfortable” for them. And Mayor Lurie has only doubled down since Trump’s order in between hanging out with Sam Altman and hawking Labubus.
It’s all the same playbook: Democrats and Republicans pretending they’re different while waging the same war on the poor. It’s not about safety. It’s not about compassion. It’s class warfare. They’d rather criminalize poverty than fix it. Because fixing it means taking on the rich, and no one is courageous enough to do that.
We already know what works: it’s called Housing First. It’s not complicated. You give people housing — real housing — and then you help them get their lives together. Not the other way around. A massive review of 26 studies found Housing First programs cut homelessness by 88% and improved housing stability by 41% compared to “Treatment First” approaches.
Houston’s the proof. They moved over 25,000 homeless people straight into apartments, and homelessness dropped by 63% between 2011 and 2022. Two years later, almost all of them were still housed. Only 4% ended up back on the streets. Since 2020, Houston’s homelessness numbers have fallen another 16%. Meanwhile, California’s politicians are moving away from Housing First, back toward cops, crackdowns, and PR pressers.
San Francisco has already housed over 19,000 people in permanent supportive housing and 83% are still there. It’s working. But instead of scaling it up, leaders are throwing it out the window to look “tough.”
Let’s stop pretending homelessness is some moral failure. People aren’t poor because they’re lazy; they’re poor because rent’s insane, wages suck, and billionaires hoard the money that could actually fix this mess.
If we taxed the rich and built homes instead of jails, homelessness wouldn’t be a crisis. It’d be a solvable problem. But until our so-called leaders stop treating poverty like a crime, all these “cleanups” are just cover-ups that sweep human suffering under the rug so the rich don’t have to look at it.
You can argue with me all you want, but I’m right.
