Criminalising Poverty

How US Policy Is Reframing Homelessness as a Choice

A homeless encampment in Seattle. Photo credit: Jason Rantz

A 2024 Treasury Department report articulated the leading cause of homelessness in the United States: “For the past two decades, rents and house prices have been rising faster than incomes across most regions of the United States.” The logic of this claim—based on documented evidence—is straightforward. People aren't earning enough to pay rent or their home mortgage, and subsequently end up living in cars or on the streets.

But, to the Cicero Institute, a right-wing, Texas-based think tank, people choose to become homeless so that they can take advantage of publicly funded housing. According to Cicero's website, “Permanent supportive housing doesn't address homelessness—it creates demand for more homelessness.”

Such a claim would be ridiculed as disconnected from reality. Except that Cicero, created by tech billionaire and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, is promoting a dystopian solution to homelessness that includes bans on street camping, involuntarily institutionalizing mentally ill people, and building camps outside cities for unhoused people. According to the Housing Not Handcuffs campaign, as of April 2026, 22 states across the country are considering or have passed legislation based on Cicero's ideas.

Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Centerhas strong words for Cicero's policies, calling them “racist, backwards, and frankly, ineffective solutions to homelessness that focus on jails and arrests and forcing people off of the streets.”

“Billionaires and politicians have fundamentally misdiagnosed the cause of homelessness,” says Rabinowitz. “There is a mistaken but pervasive belief that homelessness is a choice, that people are choosing to sleep outside, and that if we make it a crime to be homeless and make homelessness harder, people will choose something else.”

This dangerous right-wing vision of tackling homelessness is flourishing in Donald Trump's America. The president, in a disturbing 2023 campaign video, denounced homeless people as “deeply unwell” and “dangerously deranged” who are ruining the quality of working people's lives and promised he would use every tool to “get the homeless off our streets.”

Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis echoed this language. Instead of acknowledging that no one should be forced onto the streets because they can't afford rent, he said, “You should not be accosted by a homeless, like we see. You should be able to walk down the street and live your life.” Instead of promising all Floridians the ability to live safely, he instead offered a vision of a state where the homeless disappear from view: “We're going to have clean sidewalks. We're going to have clean parks. We're going to have safe streets.”

Study after study proves the obvious—that when housing is too expensive, people can't afford it. “Every time rents go up $100, homelessness increases by 9 percent,” explainsRabinowitz. “People should think back. How many times in the past decade has the rent gone up by $100? That is why more people are sleeping outside and have nowhere else to live.”

Cicero's vision is most notably being realized in Utah, where state authorities are building a 1,300-bed camp for homeless people on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, complete with in-house facilities to force people into treatment for mental health and addiction. Cicero's Devon Kurtz called Utah's experiment “a harbinger of the future.”

“The foremost goal is not to punish,” said Kurtz in an NPR interview. “But,” he added, “there are situations where we just can't accept the status quo.”

The status quo is that people are being priced out of their homes, but rather than address the causes of homelessness, Kurtz, Trump, DeSantis, and other conservatives want to spare themselves the sight of homeless people, to punish them for falling through the gaping cracks of the modern American economy.

To be fair, liberal mayors and Democratic politicians have also embraced similar approaches minus the overtly dystopian rhetoric. For example, in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass has backed a program that pushes the unhoused into motels as transitional housing. She has come under criticism from housing rights groups for failing to back permanent housing solutions and address the root causes of homelessness. Meanwhile, California Governor Gavin Newsom has instituted bans on encampments and criminalized homeless people.

The failures of Democratic politicians to effectively tackle homelessness have only fed right-wing derision toward permanent housing and other proven solutions rooted in addressing inequality.

In addition to state-level bills to force the unhoused into camps, the Trump regime has wrecked long-standing federal housing policies enacted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). In December 2025, HUD staffers struggled to keep unhoused people safe in harsh winter conditions, with their funding being slashed. Trump took a page straight out of Cicero's book in ending federal “housing first” policies that emphasize subsidized housing and meeting homeless people's needs.

As worthy as pre-Trump federal housing policies have been, they were never comprehensive enough. Rabinowitz traces the failures of federal housing policy to former President Ronald Reagan's decimation of public housing.

“We know the solution to homelessness is housing and supports,” says Rabinowitz. “At the same time, since at least the ’80s, the federal government has abandoned its responsibility to ensure that everyone has a safe place to live. So, cities and states across the country are left carrying the water for decades of failed federal housing policy.”

Because downstream solutions such as subsidized housing and other government supports don't go far enough, and because there is no political will to implement upstream solutions to rising wealth inequality and housing costs, homelessness continues to be a serious problem.

A recent California-based experiment sheds light on this. As part of a partnership between nonprofit organization Miracle Messages and the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, 103 unhoused people were given $750 in cash per month between 2022 and 2024. Recipients who received this basic income spent it on necessities such as food, transportation, and housing costs. But, after a year, the funding did not drastically change long-term outcomes. Researchers concluded that, “While $750 a month helps, it doesn't come close to covering rent in high-cost areas like the Bay Area or Los Angeles.” The solution is more money, not less.

“We will never solve homelessness until we address the underlying factors, the number one of which is that the rent is just too damn high,” says Rabinowitz. “We know that housing solves homelessness. There's just not nearly enough [affordable housing] to go around,” he added.

Rabinowitz's organization launched an effort in early 2026 to prevent tax dollars from subsidizing camps for the unhoused, as Utah is doing. The “No Federal Funding for Homeless Detention Camps” campaign has harnessed the political support of progressive elected officials and nonprofits to demand that federal tax dollars don't go toward such projects.

“Hiding the problem doesn't solve the problem,” says Rabinowitz. “Just like you wouldn't want your kids to sweep all of their crumbs under the rug, we don't want to hide homelessness.”