The U.S. spends billions of dollars per year to solve homelessness–it’s not working because of stigma in public policy.

Experts describe what truly effective solutions look like and why we are not implementing them.

Even with a federal budget of $3.7 billion and a California state budget of over $3 billion, the United States has a homeless population that has only been increasing. Experts argue that this is a result of significant cultural bias against unhoused people, which stops the public from supporting the policies and measures that would create meaningful change.

In a series of events that have concerned unhoused rights activists nationwide, President Trump has taken a hard stance on homelessness, promising to arrest thousands of homeless people and forcefully move them to large tent cities. Though these cities will supposedly be staffed with doctors and social workers, our history of relocating unhoused has rarely produced positive results.

“There is nothing compassionate about letting these individuals live in filth and squalor rather than getting them the help that they need,” Trump said.

As the Trump administration begins replacing heads of organizations with key roles in the fight against homelessness, such as HUD or the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, the U.S. could likely scrap progressive policies common in California, such as “Housing First.” Housing First advocates for the strategy of giving unhoused individuals housing as the very first step in helping them (regardless of their mental health or addiction status).

“It’s also a good bet California would see large cuts to funding for federal housing and homelessness programs–including the voucher program that subsidizes rents for hundreds of thousands of Californians,” says Sharon Rapport, director of California state policy for the Corporation for Supportive Housing.

Additionally, a recent ruling has also imposed criminal penalties for public camping and sweeping. Previously, municipalities were only allowed to sweep someone off the street if they offered them a place to stay the night; however, in June the Supreme Court overturned this protection via the Grants Pass decision. Now localities can impose criminal penalties for public camping and sleeping without violating the Eighth Amendment (which bans cruel and unusual punishment). This has caused an uptake in the amount of sweeps, despite significant research that moving encampments does nothing to solve the larger problem of homelessness.

“I think it is only a matter of time before criminalization policies are seen as a total failure, but in the short term it allows people to feel as if at least something is happening,” said Benjamin Henwood, Albert G. and Frances Lomas Feldman Professor of Social Policy and Health at the University of Southern California.

In fact, sweeping is a very common practice. The city of Los Angeles reported 4,000 requests a month to demolish homeless encampments in 2022. While understandable that it may be challenging to live next to homeless encampments, from a zoomed out perspective such intense public demand puts pressure on public officials to get results in a small amount of time. Perhaps too little time.

“Pressure to act quickly on several programs at the same time shorten[s] community planning time, which makes implementation [of programs] challenging,” said Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

According to formerly unhoused Sonja Verdugo, one such example of a program put in place to look good publicly but not produce results is Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe.

(Image courtesy of Academia.edu)

Benjamin Henwood, Albert G. and Frances Lomas Feldman Professor of Social Policy and Health at the University of Southern California.

“The [numbers they count are] so wrong it’s not even funny,” Verdugo said.

Although Inside Safe has counts of 3,600 people who supposedly moved into housing since the beginning of Inside Safe, there are more than 75,312 unhoused people who live in Los Angeles, and 181,399 people were experiencing homelessness in California. Additionally, Verdugo says this number is likely inaccurate. If someone goes inside a hotel and gets kicked out only days later, they are counted– despite the fact that they are not actually getting housing. 

“We know. We are on the street. We know that people are just being shuffled around and nobody is actually being housed,” Verdugo said. “I can count the number of people– including me– who have been housed on one hand…come and walk the streets with us one day and see how great it is working. You know what I mean because it is not.” 

(Image courtesy of Capradio)

Sonja Verdugo Baumgartner, formerly unhoused

As a result of the desire to show progress towards this systemic issue, policies such as sweeping or criminal penalties can be enacted in excess, which can be traumatizing to those involved.

“And you know, the cops are probably scarier than anything to be honest with you. It depends on the incident but they are the ones who are out there the most regularly, they are the ones who harass regularly, they are the ones that you never feel like you’re safe around. And they are not out there to do anything good for you. To them, people who are unhoused are like the bottom of the barrel,” said Sonja Verdugo, formerly unhoused.

Many unhoused people will describe the unsettling feeling of never having a place where they can put their stuff down and trust that it will be okay. Or, the people who should really be there to help offer little assistance.

“The real break in here is that they are supposed to have advocates or people that help you get into housing–they do not help. I met my person one time. After I was housed. I housed myself, she didn’t help me at all. She forgot,” Verdugo said. 

More than half of the sweeps carried out in LA involve police contact, with barely 15% involving an unhoused outreach worker. 

“Whoever has control over whether the cops show up usually chooses to have them be there. Why, I don’t know. All it does is bring up anxiety,” Verdugo said. 

From 2016 – 2022, 38 percent of all LAPD arrests and citations combined were of unhoused people, including nearly 100 percent of all citations and over 42 percent of all misdemeanor arrests. (HRW) Additionally, despite the fact that the unhoused constitute just 0.01 of L.A.’s population, unhoused people have been given 99 percent of all citations for minor “quality of life violations” such as sitting or lying on the sidewalk, drinking in public, leaving behind personal belongings, and illegal possession of tobacco and alcohol. Clearly, our current process of criminalization is not fair. 

Additionally, criminalization is expensive. We devote so much money to a practice that simply moves people around without actually solving the issue at hand. 

Although the law previously stated that groups are only able to sweep unhoused if given a place to stay, most of our current options for housing unhoused are generally not great. Vouchers, tiny homes, hotel rooms, shelters, and other forms of permanent housing are the most common. But even in some of the best of these, like nice hotel suites– which are few and far between– unhoused are treated poorly, again revealing this common perception that they are beneath common courtesy.

“The hardest part about it was the lack of communication. They treat everybody in there as if you were in prison. Like don’t ask me questions you don’t need to know, we will tell you when you need to know kind of thing. And then, the lack of being able to have any kind of community. That isolation is hard on people. Especially when you are coming from being on the street, you are so used to the noise, the people, whatever community you are in, and just to be siloed off into a room is very depressing and hard. Thank god my husband was around, you know what I mean,” Verdugo said.

The people who manage the hotel would go into their rooms without asking, not service the elevators, and leave black mold growing on the walls.

“One lady was dead in her apartment for a month before they went in to check on her. The residents would go in and tell the office “this lady walks her dog everyday, we haven’t seen her, we are worried about her,” and they kept hearing the dog barking. They finally came in a month, a month later. The dog was dead,” Verdugo said.

Additionally, many landlords will even reject vouchers from unhoused individuals because they doubt they will be good tenets.

“Hey! You can’t just deny somebody because of their voucher. We have a housing problem. If you are guaranteed this money every month, what is the problem,” Verdugo said.

Outside of the issues with the housing available, the main reason why homelessness exists in California and the broader U.S. is because we simply do not have enough housing. It is likely only the government that could solve this issue, but that would require how the United States views housing. 

“From an economic point of view, if we recognize [housing as] a social good and stop trying to ask who deserves it and who doesn’t and who can afford it and who cannot, then everyone should have access to some sort of affordable housing. We are not seeing housing as a public good and so the government is not as involved as it should be to ensure that we have enough of it,” Henwood said.

Not only is the U.S. not seeing housing as a social good, but voters are not electing politicians who will make the changes necessary to solve the problem, in part because of systemic cultural stigma towards unhoused.

“Here is a perfect example, this country wanted to incentivize home ownership…So it gives a subsidy to homeowners, and the bigger the mortgage the bigger the break you get. Now, that is great and all, but arguably those homeowners would probably still owe a mortgage and still own a home, even if they didn’t have that. [However, only] one-fourth of people who qualify for Section 8 housing vouchers get it. GAO found that if you get rid of this subsidized mortgage and reallocate that money, you could make it so that everyone who needs a Section 8 voucher could get one…but the problem is that homeowners would have to elect politicians who would go in and change the tax code.,” Henwood said.

While at the moment around .5% of the California state budget goes to solving homelessness, which is quite a lot, there are many questions about the efficiency of how the money is spent. It is invested into a variety of programs– like Inside Safe– which are not always the most effective, and are often rushed solutions. There are more direct approaches, but they will likely never be invested in.

“We pay for social workers and housing navigators and police– what if we just wrote a check and paid everyone 100,000 dollars…People are saying, ‘why don’t you just do cash transfer programs’. But I imagine a lot of people are like, ‘no way we are just paying money to the homeless, they will just spend it on drugs.’ So it’s kinda hard to look into that because there is so much resistance to these kinds of things,” Henwood said.

Outside of stigma’s effect on public policy and elected officials, it can hurt the people it is directed at as well.

“Oh god yeah. I think that was like the worst part. Especially when I first got out there, there were always people constantly walking by and to realize that people either don’t acknowledge you at all, you get no eye contact or if you do it’s like a disgusting eye contact. That to me was the most degrading, humiliating feeling. And that stuck with me for a long time,” Verdugo said.