The Trump administration cited misspending among the reasons for blocking funds to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. Mayor Karen Bass warned that “people will lose their lives.”
Congress and a court blocked a previous effort to revamp homeless programs. Even a scaled-back version marks the sharpest change in homelessness policy in a generation.
The modest drop marked the first decrease in homelessness in nearly a decade. The Housing and Urban Development report was published months later than usual.
State lawmakers declined to back a Trump-inspired plan to move 1,300 homeless people to a campus on the edge of Salt Lake City, but supporters are trying to keep the plan’s spirit alive.
Tyler Clancy, Utah’s new homelessness coordinator, is leading the state’s effort to design a plan to serve “high utilizers” of public services, increase shelter and housing capacity, and expand mental health care.
When the Trump administration proposed the rule in 2019, housing officials estimated it would also displace thousands of U.S. citizens and legal residents.
A homeless encampment in Chicago in March 2024. Local data collected by The New York Times showed that homelessness fell 60 percent in Chicago in the last year of the Biden administration.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development said it would punish public housing authorities that did not adequately verify tenants’ immigration status within 30 days.
Public housing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A spokesman for the city’s Housing Authority said in a statement that the federal government already required documentation of all tenants’ citizenship status.
Few aid policies have been studied as extensively as Housing First, and supporters’ faith that it is “evidence based” lends the debate special intensity.
The proposal would have required recipients to get treatment for addiction or mental illness as a condition of receiving housing funds. The administration has said it will try again.
Anmelden
