Apparently President Donald Trump’s impetus for tackling homelessness is improving the quality of living standards for non-homeless people.
During a trip to California Tuesday, Trump told reporters that homelessness is ruining cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco for people who moved to those locations “because of the prestige.”
“And all of a sudden [the cities] have tents,” Trump said. “Hundreds and hundreds of tents and people living at the entrance to their office building. And they want to leave.”
The President’s new crusade against homelessness could include using the police to get people off the streets, according to a report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers published on Monday.
In the report, the administration blames several factors on homelessness, including “more tolerable conditions for sleeping on the streets.”
One of the administration’s proposed solutions for making the conditions less tolerable is having law enforcement crack down on those who live on the streets, writing that some states engage in “more stringent enforcement of quality of life issues like restrictions on the use of tents and encampments, loitering, and other related activities.”
The report argues that policing “may be an important tool to help move people off the street and into shelter or housing where they can get the services they need, as well as to ensure the health and safety of homeless and non-homeless people alike.”
The suggestion is repeated near the end of the report, which says that so-called the “tolerability” of sleeping on the streets “may be affected through policing of street activities.”
The federal government doesn’t have any direct control over local communities’ police forces and has limited control over homelessness policy, so it’s unclear how the Trump administration would seek to enforce such efforts.
According to a Washington Post report last week, the Trump administration is also considering moving homeless people into government facilities.
