The National Homelessness Law Center (NHLC) hosted a webinar to address the Trump administration’s attacks on unhoused people, and some responses to those threats. Shelby R. King, Shelterforce’s investigative reporter, was a panelist.
The Feb. 20 webinar was moderated by Jesse Rabinowitz, the campaign and communications director at NHLC. Along with King, participants included:
- Peggy Bailey, executive vice president for policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
- Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.
- Shameka Parrish-Wright, director of VOCAL, Kentucky.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.
Jesse Rabinowitz: Before we dive in, I’m very excited to share some good news, which is not something we usually get to do. Our friends in Indiana today defeated a bill backed by the billionaires at the Cicero Institute that would have made homelessness worse.
I know many of us are feeling a lot of despair and angst about what we’re up against, but this is such an important reminder that when we come together and fight, we can win and we can beat back literal billionaires who are trying to throw our neighbors experiencing homelessness into jail and make the problem of homelessness disappear, but not actually help people. Congratulations to all of our Indiana folks and congratulations to everyone working across the country to beat back these harmful laws.
With that, I’m really excited to turn it over to Shelby King from Shelterforce to talk about how Trump’s agenda will make housing more expensive. If folks haven’t seen it yet, Shelby had a great article in Shelterforce that goes through some of this.
Shelby King: I work at Shelterforce, a national magazine. We’ve been around for 50 years and focus on community development, neighborhood stabilization, and affordable housing, and how all of that intersects health and well-being and education.
In the months since the election and then prepping for the inauguration, I found that it’s been really hard to get anyone to go on record. We’ve got a lot of folks that are just very uncertain about what’s going to happen. Then we’ve got a lot of folks that are wanting to hedge their bets and not make too many predictions in hopes, I think, that the worst won’t come true.
At the same time, I’ve spoken to a lot of affordable housing and market-rate industry insiders. I think uncertainty is the main theme, but there are also a lot of aspects of that uncertainty and things that we’re already seeing that are going to make both affordable housing and market-rate housing more expensive, and things that aren’t even necessarily related, such as the uncertainty and the disquiet that Trump’s threats of tariffs and deportations—and now the actions that are behind them—are going to create. Some of the predictions are for reduced appetite for investment.
There’s going to be less consumer spending, increased financial market volatility, slower economic growth, potentially higher interest rates. We’ll see delayed project starts, deferred decision-making. That’s really what I hear just from the market-rate housers. All of those things affect both the supply and the economic outlook. Those things affect prices for renters.
On top of all of those issues, which are amplified for affordable housing developers, the affordable housing development industry has its own set of complications and barriers, depending on which of the threats or campaign promises, whichever you call them, Trump follows through on. For example, tariffs and deportations are on everyone’s mind. We talk about supply shortages of lumber and of steel and different building materials, but . . . even if you can bypass the lumber or the steel or the labor shortages, there’s still potential that developers can’t get appliances. If you don’t get appliances, then you can’t get a certificate of occupancy.
There are all of these unseen complications that people aren’t really thinking of. In addition to the tariffs and the deportations, I mentioned delayed decision-making in the financial industry or in the development industry.
In the market-rate world, if you delay decisions on building housing, the delays cause prices to go up on your overall development. Market-rate housers can just increase their rent prices, whereas affordable housing providers, of course, can’t do that. Not only is there financial uncertainty in all of these issues that we’re coming up against, they can derail projects that would likely be able to weather these sorts of storms in the market-rate world.
Affordable housing just has so much thinner margins that it’s hard to weather the uncertainty that Trump is creating. Those are just the policies that we have seen coming to fruition. We just saw last month the uncertainty that came about when the federal funding was stopped or paused. That threw the affordable housing industry into a tailspin because nobody could get their rents paid.
If they attack Section 8, for example, it would discourage landlords from participating in Section 8, where they have that choice. Where they don’t have that choice, where they’re a source of income protection, there are different ways, of course, that landlords can make it so their homes are unavailable for Section 8. They can put rents higher than the AMI. They can make the deposits too much. Landlords who are not incentivized by having it as easy as it can be to be in the program are likely to do that.
Also, if the Section 8 budget is reduced at all or if the payments are late again, not only are the public housing agencies that are in charge of paying the rents, not only are they unable to pay the rents for their clients, they’re unable to keep the lights on or pay their own employees. There were a lot of folks in the tail end of January who were unable to access funds to even pay their own employees.
There’s also a really big chance that the reduced budget will reduce, obviously, the workforce, which will make fair housing laws harder to enforce, [and that will put ] people at a higher risk of being evicted or of being discriminated against or of having prices raised without knowing who to go to or without being able to get hold of anyone at HUD. There’s also the LIHTC program. Folks don’t necessarily think about LIHTC on a day-to-day basis, but in much of the LIHTC program, they rely on some amount of housing vouchers in the building in order for the finances of that building to work.
If there are more delays to payments or if there’s a full interruption of payments to Section 8, our entire financial system, in some ways, could be thrown into disarray because the mortgage holders on these large affordable housing investments won’t be getting their money. I think that, overall, the uncertainty is certainly going to affect the affordable housing industry more than the market-rate industry. I think that, on top of that, slashes to the HUD budget, slashes to Section 8, slashes to the federal workforce, all of these things put marginalized folks and tenants just at more risk of being discriminated against, paying more, getting fees leveled against them that they don’t know where to go to find out how to pay.
It also pits tenants against their public housing agencies. Something I heard while I was looking into my most recent story is that a lot of the tenants who were scared that their rent wasn’t going to get paid by Section 8 during the funding freeze, equate their public housing agency with HUD. They went to their public housing agency really upset and complaining. I think that creates some friction where there doesn’t need to be any.
A lot of the public housing agency workers are already overworked and stressed and underpaid and doing the best they can. I think that breakdown on the boots-on-the-ground level will also be pretty catastrophic if it happens again.
As we’re seeing across the country, more and more people are struggling to pay rent. We know that half of households struggle to make ends meet. We saw that 1 out of every 5 [renters] pay 100 percent of their income on rent. There is a lack of housing that people can afford in this country, and people are really struggling. These things that you mentioned aren’t going to help anybody. The Trump administration’s plans will likely make housing more expensive. We know that the cost of housing is already the No. 1 driver of homelessness, and that making housing more expensive certainly isn’t going to help that at all. I’m now really happy to turn it over to Peggy Bailey from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to talk about how the Trump administration’s cuts to the social safety net will impact homelessness.
Peggy Bailey: While a lot of our focus is obviously on the administration itself, this is an all-front effort when it comes to the administration and Congress being in lockstep and working together. While there are many buckets moving at the federal level, it’s important for us to understand that it’s all part of one fight.
When you think about Project 2025 and other Republican proposals that we’ve seen over the last couple of years, it’s all in the same theme. It’s all in the same fight. Therefore, while on this call we are focused on homelessness, it’s important for us to be a part of the broader landscape as well because those programs impact our folks too. That’s the frame for what I’m going to talk about because it’s just important to remember that these other programs are things that people depend on too.
What are the big buckets of fight? First, there’s the undermining government in general. That’s where the threats to federal employees fit in. Then things like the grant and funding pauses that we’ve seen happen and not happen and happen and sort of happen over the last few weeks. When it comes to the staffing piece, I think it’s important for us to talk about some of the things that Shelby teed up, that there are federal employees across the country who are in fear for their jobs and their own livelihood.
When it comes to thinking about equity, one of the points that we’ve been thinking about is just in D.C. A big driver of the D.C. Black middle class is the federal government and their being federal employees. What’s that going to do to undermine folks who may not have thought they were at risk of becoming homeless, but are one paycheck away from entering into homelessness and the increases that we could see across the country when it comes to that instability of folks’ income?
Then the grant pauses. Particularly for us, our concerns around the continuum of care grants not coming out quickly. Right now we’re in this lull period between the awards having happened, but grant letters and such not being signed and the first tranches of the money not going out the door. While there is some normalcy to that right now, we’re getting increasingly concerned that that money is paused in a way that actually is illegal and should be reversed.
There are other programs in our bailiwick that are suffering. About a week ago, there were community health centers that weren’t getting funded and some of them closed either temporarily or are still closed. That instability creates issues when people who are experiencing homelessness rely on those services as well, either while they’re unhoused or living in permanent supportive housing, or now they’ve gotten housing, but they still need their community health center to be able to provide the services that helps them keep their job and keep their housing.
The next piece at the federal level that’s threatening the safety net is happening in Congress as we speak. There’s what we call budget reconciliation bills moving through Congress. These are the bills that you hear about often that are usually pretty big. When we did the Inflation Reduction Act a few years ago, that was budget reconciliation. The bill that provided for the Emergency Housing Voucher Program, the [American Rescue Plan Act], was budget reconciliation. These are the bills that only require 50 votes in the Senate.
When you have a situation like we have right now where the House, Senate, and the White House are all the same party, these are the things you can move forward. They have to be budget-oriented, so it has to be either adding money or subtracting money that the federal government will spend. We’re really concerned about that last part, the subtracting money piece, because the major safety net programs are at risk, particularly when it comes to SNAP or food stamps and Medicaid and the health care tax credits that some middle-income folks are able to get.
Combined, we’re talking about 150 million to 170 million people who could be impacted by either SNAP or Medicaid or health tax credit cuts. It’s huge. There are things on the table like either creating or making harsher work requirements in either of the programs, just generally cutting benefits, increasing the amount of money that states have to pay into the system, either creating a state match in SNAP in that instance or making the state match more in the instance of Medicaid.
Also on the table would be [actions] harming immigrants. Obviously, we have the mass deportations and issues like that are happening, but in the context of the budget reconciliation bills, we could draw back benefits that immigrants are allowed to have. It’s important to remember that there are a variety of different immigration statuses, and some people are eligible for different federal programs. All immigrants are eligible in the homelessness space because we don’t ask. These are the kinds of things that are at play in that space.
We also know that even just threatening benefits to immigrants causes great harm because of the chilling effect and people not seeking services because they’re afraid of what could happen to them. That’s all moving right now. The biggest place to focus is in the House because that’s where you may have heard the president talk about the one beautiful bill that he wants to move, and the House is moving along those lines.
As I mentioned, the SNAP cuts could be $230 billion or more. The Medicaid cuts right now could be over $800 billion or more. Those are huge numbers and would impact large numbers of people, not just people who are unhoused today: Those programs are some of the pieces that help prevent homelessness.
The last piece I want to talk about is the appropriations fight that’s coming. Right now, the federal government is funded until March 14. It is unclear how we are going to get to a final appropriations agreement between the House, the Senate, and the president. It is typical in the last few years that Democrats are needed in order to pass these appropriations bills because there are so many Republicans that are just against spending overall.
There are levers that the Democrats might have in order to be able to pass appropriations bills or at worst, a yearlong continuing resolution with additional money put on that bill and additional provisions to make sure that programs are at least held harmless. For example, when we think about the Housing Choice Voucher Program, we need more money every year for that because of rent cost inflation. Level funding is actually a cut. We need at least a continuing resolution with more resources for the Housing Choice Voucher Program so that no one loses their assistance and we’re at least able to keep serving the same number of people as people roll off of assistance.
There are other broader fights from the federal level that could be threats to the safety net, but those are the big pieces. I can’t stress enough the need for us to be a part of these fights when it comes to Medicaid, health, immigration, because our folks need those things too in order to get access to housing and stay healthy.
Absolutely, all of these fights are connected and having someone have to pay more for groceries or pay more for health care isn’t going to help them if they’re also struggling to pay rent. All of these things are deeply connected and I appreciate you also lifting up that there are opportunities to fight back. There are ways we can make noise and push our elected officials to resist and reject these cuts.
I’m going to turn it over now to Donald who’s going to talk about the Trump administration’s plans to gut the Department of Housing and Urban Development and to roll back the proven mechanisms we’ve seen that actually solve homelessness.
Donald Whitehead: I have the unfortunate task of talking about what really would amount to worst case scenarios. We have already heard from our friends with knowledge of the issue that there have been DOGE members that have actually been at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and they have identified potential cuts at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. About a 50 percent decrease in staff is the number that we’ve heard and potentially an even greater decrease in [HUD’s office of Community Planning and Development] staff, which would be devastating to homeless providers around the country.
They’re looking at upwards of an 80 percent decrease in staff that could happen as soon as April. We are hoping that through advocacy, through calling our elected officials in the House and in the Senate, that we really can have an impact on making sure that doesn’t happen. We are also very conscious of the attack on permanent supportive housing; the same group of people that have been promoting criminalization throughout our country have also been promoting the idea that permanent supportive housing is not effective.
We’ve also heard that in Project 2025, there’s talk of homeless detention camps. Other things we’ve heard just recently are term limits in housing and also work requirements. All of that is in Project 2025. I was asked to talk about what it would be like if there wasn’t a Housing First program, if we get to that point. Again, advocacy is the one thing that can keep this from happening.
We know it’s been on the table, but losing Housing First, of course, would increase homelessness for those who are waiting, who’ve already been prioritized, and also those that are in permanent supportive housing. It would also limit the amount of supportive services that are available to people, would increase the cost overall in our country of health care and other social services. It would have a deep impact on the mental health and addiction services that are available. Certainly, it would have a devastating impact on local governments, robbing them of a resource that’s proven extremely effective across the board, and it would cause community displacement.
The people in that program have a closer connection to the criminal justice system if their issues are not met. It would definitely have public health concerns, and also, it would shift our funding priorities in a way that would not be sustainable.
I was also asked to talk about the very real but hopefully distant possibility that the entire Department of Housing and Urban Development could be eliminated.
Project 2025 does talk about moving on from permanent supportive housing. We hope this doesn’t happen, but people should start to prepare for the horrible reality that this could happen.”
Donald Whitehead
We’ve seen what homeless service provision is like, for those of us that have been around for a long time prior to the McKinney-Vento Act. HUD was created in 1965, but between ’65 and the McKinney-Vento Act, which was put in place in 1987, what we saw is FEMA in charge of being able to provide resources to shelters.
While the continuum of care is not a perfect system, what it did was eliminate a lack of coordination among the various programs that offer services in our community. We do have coordinated efforts, not perfect by any means, but agencies aren’t on their own, and there isn’t a fragmented system of service in our country. That would go away. Prior to the McKinney-Vento Act and the introduction of those resources, there was insufficient infrastructure, and many areas lacked the infrastructure to support emergency shelters. They were inadequate. They lacked sanitation, food preparation, and other health services. The funding was inconsistent.
With FEMA, the funding had to be spent by Sept. 30 and all of us know that if you’re operating an emergency shelter or other programs that the very critical time in most of the country is actually beyond that. It’s from September on when the weather starts to really get inclement. Also, during that time, there were a lot of limitations on the size of shelter, public awareness, and outreach. There were a ton of regulatory hurdles during that time. We would go back to a time in history when people really suffered in homelessness.
This is the longest period of homelessness in our history and we have not seen the kind of federal investment that we’ve seen in other periods of history. Without HUD, the federal investment would continue to shrink. Project 2025 does talk about moving on from permanent supportive housing. We hope this doesn’t happen, but people should start to prepare for the horrible reality that this could happen.
I am very hopeful that people will get involved both with contacting their legislators, but also—what happened to get us the McKinney-Vento Act was direct action— organizing on the ground, making sure that our elected officials understand both the need for these resources to remain in place, and the value of these resources.
We absolutely have to tell the story so that it doesn’t continue to be an issue that people believe is a moral issue, but it’s an issue that is a structural issue. Thank you very much and please do all you can. You got to go get involved in this fight right now. There is way too much for us to lose.
That paints even more of a scary and sobering picture about what we’re up against.
I am now going to talk briefly about what the Trump administration plans to do once people experience homelessness. We know this isn’t just about the 800,000 or so people experiencing homelessness on a given night, but it’s really about the millions of families that are just one missed paycheck away from experiencing homelessness. This isn’t about just people who are living outside right now. This is about the many, many, many people who are on the verge of experiencing homelessness.
During the campaign, Donald Trump said a lot of things. Two of the quotes that stood out to us are that he wants to create 10 cities where the homeless can be relocated and their problems identified. He also said that [his administration would] ban urban camping wherever possible. We know that in June, about seven months ago, the Supreme Court ruled in the Johnson v. Grants Pass case that cities can in fact punish people using things like jails and prisons for sleeping outside, even when they have nowhere else to go.
In the past seven months, we’ve seen 190 laws either passed or introduced across the country that will punish people for experiencing homelessness. Many of these laws have things like $1,000 in fines or time in jail. None of these laws are going to help people. None of these laws are going to solve homelessness. All these laws are going to do is make it easier for cities to use the harmful and expensive approach of criminalization to make homelessness worse. I say this because this makes it a whole lot easier for Trump to enact his awful anti-homelessness agenda.
We saw two weeks ago the newly confirmed secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development was asked questions, written questions, by senators about if he supported the creation of these homeless detention camps and how he felt about bans on camping and sleeping on public property. He didn’t answer that, which in our estimation is a very, very strong answer.
We believe that if you cannot stand up and say, “We should never put anybody in camps ever. That is a terrible idea. The solution to homelessness is housing,” then you are not qualified to work for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, let alone are you qualified to lead it. Unfortunately, we now have a HUD secretary who is on the record not rejecting the use of rounding up Americans and forcing them into camps, which is incredibly concerning. We know that this has happened before in this country. We know that the Trump administration has rounded up migrants and forced them into camps. It’s a very real possibility because they’ve done it before.
They’re saying out loud that they plan to do it again. We saw what this would look like on a small scale in New Orleans during the Super Bowl. Leading up to the Super Bowl, the city of New Orleans spent about $17.5 million to force about 100 people experiencing homelessness into a detention facility that was removed from the city, removed from services. Even though it was in the middle of the winter and it was unseasonably cold in New Orleans, they had issues with heat. They also had issues with running water. People were forced there under the threat of arrest.
They spent about $175,000 per person to force them into [this facility]. If the money had been used properly towards actual solutions like housing and support, that could have housed about 1,200 people for a year, which is about 80 percent of the homeless population in New Orleans. Again, we see criminalization, detention camps are incredibly expensive, and they don’t work.
Once the game was over and the tourists left and the media left, they closed the camp and people had to sleep outside again because again, the goal of these isn’t actually to solve homelessness. It’s to make homelessness invisible. We are fighting back and we’re going to end with how we can fight back. I did want to name that this is a very, very real and scary threat.
I am going to now turn it over to Shameka from VOCAL, Kentucky, to talk about what’s happening in Kentucky, to talk about their awful House Bill 5, and to see what we can learn from the work they’re doing and apply it on a national level.
Shameka Parrish-Wright: There is nothing that’s been talked about at the federal level that people like me in Kentucky haven’t experienced locally and on the ground. VOCAL, Kentucky is a membership-led organization. The best thing we do is leadership development where we have people who are directly impacted at these decision-making tables, at the judiciary hearings, and moving all across our state because we have a lot of commonality. Just as our country has struggled with housing since its very beginning, that in Kentucky is very evident.
A lot of times people write Kentucky off as just some red state, but we’re actually purple when it comes to the issues that are plaguing all of your other states and our whole country. We have been taught that advocacy, activism, and services don’t go together. I’m here to turn that notion on its head. I represent, as I’m sitting in my Louisville Metro Council office as an elected council woman, one of the only people that is on my Metro Council of 26 districts that has actually been homeless.
To have somebody who’s experiencing homelessness in Louisville, in Kentucky more than once with a family of six children, I know all too well what this looks like. When I heard about the premise of House Bill 5 and when people were talking about it, I first was thinking about it as one of our partners, KY Policy, described as more incarceration and criminalization of the poor.
From my previous bail reform work, I saw that we were trying to build prisons because I don’t trust any encampments that the government wants to build that won’t be a prison, that we are using this as a way to build prisons and house people in prisons and build this on the backs of poor and unhoused people. We’ve seen it all around. Kentucky is No. 7 in incarceration in the world. That is terrible per capita. We have a history of that. … Our lawmakers know this. They know the numbers. They don’t listen to the data. They don’t listen to the science. We are fighting something that was called the Safer Kentucky Act, which we, with our partners, have deemed the Suffer Kentucky Act.
The financial report is that this House Bill 5—his copycat legislation from the Cicero Institute—would cost us $1.5 billion. It’s already costing us. It was passed last year in 2023 through our state legislators, and it was enacted in July. Since July, there’s been over 90 people in Jefferson County alone cited and criminalized as a result of House Bill 5. There’s no real structure, no real money behind it, and it has so many sections that no one organization can keep up with it. The best way that we’re fighting back is through coalition work. Our coalition efforts have been intentional from the beginning.
We stood together with the Coalition for the Homeless, of which I am a board member, and so many other groups, [including] the ACLU of Kentucky, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. Hundreds of organizations and faith-based groups banded together to stop House Bill 5. We were not successful, but we were successful in reducing some of the harms because at the end of the day, whether it’s Housing First, social housing, Housing Not Handcuffs, nothing works on the dead. If you come together and you say that Kentucky is worth fighting for, then you have to stand for the least of us.
All of our organizations saw that this was going to be a downward slope and a way to perpetuate prisons and jails in our state. Bad policy kills. We already had anti-camping ordinances on the books. We already had many of the things that House Bill 5 says that it was going to make safer. We already have versions of that, but there’s no resources. There was no more money from our state to make sure that it was actually going to help someone.
Most recently, as we worked together with the National Homeless Law Center and so many others—and thank goodness this woman had a public defender that was able to give it the time—a pregnant woman was cited under the House Bill 5 while she was in labor. Even through that whole process—there’s a whole video out, the whole ordeal—she wasn’t even taken to a hospital that had a labor and delivery room. She had to be transferred again. She wasn’t even getting housing. She didn’t get housing for her and her newborn baby. What House Bill 5 did for her was criminalize her, nothing else.
Recently, because of the pushback, because of people like you who care and all of the media around it, her charges were dropped. That’s because of the advocacy and the people power. That’s how we lead the work with VOCAL Kentucky. It’s about justice, love, and compassion for all of us. I’m happy to tell you, because we need something to smile about, this beautiful woman came to our offices. We had known who she was because she is a member. She came to our offices last week with a healthy, beautiful baby, and she is working on getting housing.
I wasn’t scared of Project 25 because we’ve been living it in Kentucky for far too long.”
Shameka Parrish-Wright
Still, none of that comes from House Bill 5 or any of the things that these so-called lawmakers are doing to make Kentucky safer. It is a Republican agenda, and I wasn’t scared of Project 25 because we’ve been living it in Kentucky for far too long. We’ve seen this happen over and over again. What we are doing, though, is activating and motivating people to work together because we need a multifaceted approach with a menu of options for people who are dealing with housing and trying to get stable.
I would not be here if it wasn’t for McKinney-Vento funding, if it wasn’t for Continuum of Care, if it wasn’t for transitional housing, if it wasn’t for case management. I wouldn’t be here as an executive director of VOCAL, Kentucky and as an elected Louisville Metro Council woman. That came from building that stability after getting affordable housing. Now I have four of my six children that are graduates and in college and going on with healthy lives, but we were homeless while most of them graduated.
I am living proof of that, and I think it’s important to bring it down to the ground level because local politics are everything. Every decision that’s made, those that have discretion must make them. I really want you to know how we’re pushing back is we’re tracking the data, what’s happening, how people are being arrested. They did set up a homeless citation court [and] that court is next week. We’re doing court support. We’re following up with our partners. We’re making sure people get connected to services, to make sure that they’re not out here being rearrested or re-cited.
There is an amnesty day. This is our third year of amnesty court, and we’ve worked with that with partners. There’s been a lot of jail deaths, and so we formed a stakeholders group to end those jail deaths. How much do you want to bet that most of the people who died in our local jails recently were also unhoused, also did not have a place to go. There’s a direct relationship with that. We also have groups like Louisville Showing Up for Racial Justice that are meeting with judges and prosecutors because what happens when people are given these citations, frivolous or not, the judicial system sometimes hammers in on another level of trauma if people aren’t treated fairly.
If the beautiful woman did not get the help from her public defender, she wouldn’t be able to get out. We need to put pressure on everybody that has the context and the discretion to do it. I want to wrap up by saying none of this happens by one group. No one group can fight all of the negative impacts of copycat legislation in House Bill 5. The way that we move forward is with our faith community, with directly impacted people at decision-making tables, and through advocacy, activism, and services. Thank you.
I want to attempt to thread the needle behind all of this. It is not a coincidence that we are seeing an explosion of anti-homeless bills across the country that started long before the Supreme Court case. As Shameka mentioned, this is not new. This has been happening primarily in the South, primarily to Black people, since this country started. “This is not who America is” is actually not correct, but it’s good to see people realizing that there are issues in this country and we need to work together to fight back.
The same people who are behind the Johnson v. Grants Pass case and are behind the House Bill 5 and are behind the Department of Government Efficiency, which is working to devastate the federal government, are the same billionaires working together. They have names. They’re real people. Their names are Joe Lonsdale and Elon Musk. They are unified. They’re well-funded and they’re well-coordinated. I want folks to know that this is not a coincidence. They are organized and we are organized as well. Even though they have billions of dollars, we have things that they will never have, like compassion and truth and morality and a deep care for people’s lives.
We’re going to wrap up with some steps for action. One thing that is really great to know, the law center following the Johnson v. Grants Pass Supreme Court case created some template legislation named the Gloria Johnson Act, named after the same Gloria Johnson from Johnson v. Grants Pass that restores the rights that the Supreme Court gutted.
We’ve seen this law introduced in five states: Maryland, Virginia, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. We are expecting more states to introduce this law any day now. If you live in a city or state that you would like help support introducing this law, please reach out to us. We hope to see this introduced in Congress and all over the country. We know this is not the be all and end all, but this is an important way to restore the rights that the Supreme Court gutted as we continue to push for the housing that we know we need.
Another way that folks can get involved is to join the Housing Not Handcuffs campaign. We are using this list to build a nationwide movement of fighting things like jails and handcuffs to solve homelessness, and instead, focus the conversation back to real solutions like housing and support. I am now going to quickly invite our panelists to just talk for one minute about what folks can do to fight back and stay connected.
King: Form tenant unions, become a part of a tenant union, write your Congress person, go call your Congress person. I wish that I had actually something that was new and informative to offer here, but I think that I’m going to say just the tried and true methods that I know to do, which is don’t hide, get involved, be brave, which I know not everyone can do. If you have the privilege to be able to be brave, do that and get involved.
Shameka, the stories that you told, I think are wonderful. In places where there are such weak tenant rights, I think banding together and having strong folks like Shameka in your corner is what you got to go do.
Bailey: A couple of things. One from a messaging standpoint. It’s important to make the point that they’re cutting the taxes of wealthy people, and to pay for that, they are cutting programs to people with low incomes. There’s over $1 trillion in cuts to wealthy people in what’s moving through the House. At the same time, they’re cutting about that same amount from Medicaid, SNAP, and other programs. Hammering that message is important.
In these bigger fights, if we’re talking about influencing Republicans, I think it’s really important to talk to your local elected officials who might be able to influence what your members of Congress and senators are doing. Whether it’s county officials, city officials, if you’re connected to state officials who could get to moderate Republicans in particular, that is particularly important.
Whitehead: All of the above, everything that you’ve already heard from the other members of the panel, but we’re also embarking on a grassroots organizing campaign that will involve a series of direct actions over the next year, hopefully culminating in a large action in D.C., similar to Housing Now, which brought us the McKinney-Vento Act and other resources. We hope you can join us in our Bring America Home Now campaign. Please go to the National Coalition for the Homeless website. If you want us to come to your community to support your efforts, please email us.
You can email me directly, [email protected]. Thank you so much. The main thing is get involved and make sure you do all the things you heard. Call your local, state, national representatives. They want to hear from you. It does make a difference.
Parrish-Wright: Everything that my colleagues have said is on board with our national groups. They’re being attacked in a bigger way because they help bring us together. They help spread that message on a federal level. It’s important that as we organize, organize, organize that we do the local, the statewide, and the federal. It’s our job as organizers and activists and legal professionals to connect the dots for people.
As Peggy said, the messaging needs to be succinct. Regionally, organizing is different, so making sure you’re meeting that organizing in the context of the regions that you’re in. I want to say the people will rise up. History has told us that. You want to make sure that you’re best positioned to do your part. We also know from this that federal government, local governments, state governments will not fund everything.
We need options of mutual aid and other ways that people can plug in. Put pressure on those with discretion. There’s a lot of things that could be done simply by that decision holder. Just like a police officer does not have to cite, does not have to arrest, we need to put pressure on those with discretion. Renters are being attacked as well. As somebody that’s been homeless a lot of my life, if I was homeless tomorrow, I would know what to do. What I’m worried about is people who are going to be new to homelessness and how dangerous it’s going to be for them.
The people will rise up. Know your part. Do your part. VOCAL Kentucky is focused on organize, organize, organize, building the leadership development it takes to have those impacted at the decision-making table. Stay connected. People’s Action Center for Popular Democracy, all of these groups, National Homeless Law Center is doing the work. Plug into their work too. Thank you.
Thanks so much, everyone.
I’m going to take moderator’s privilege to add one more thing. We know that Donald Trump has talked about either signing executive orders in D.C. or taking over the D.C. government entirely. Among the first of his goals would be to destroy the homeless communities where folks live without offering folks housing or support. D.C. doesn’t have a voting representation in Congress. This is just a heartfelt plea to someone who lives in D.C. without representation. If you have members of Congress, please call them to talk about all of these things that we’ve talked about.
Please also make sure they know that you don’t support Donald Trump using his unchecked power to further attack homeless people who happen to be living in the nation’s capital where we don’t have any representation.
Thank you so much.
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