Trump administration policies worsen housing crisis and criminalize those harmed by it

A version of this column originally appeared in The Alpena News.

As Americans, we hold sacred the values of liberty and justice for all. But the Trump administration recently issued a chilling Executive Order (EO) intended to make it easier to lock up people with mental health disabilities and treat people as criminals just for experiencing homelessness. The further erosion of civil liberties should alarm all of us.

The EO is all the more sinister considering that the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA) was just signed into law, under which at least 246,000 Michiganders are at risk of losing their Medicaid health insurance, including access to mental health treatment. The administration is also pushing for billions of dollars in cuts to housing services in the budget year beginning Oct. 1.

Safe, affordable housing is already increasingly out of reach for many families, pushing U.S. homelessness to a record level last year.

A full-time worker must earn $19.66 per hour to afford just a one-bedroom apartment in Michigan, but some of the most common jobs in the state pay less than that. For nearly 827,000 Michiganders in critical jobs like home health aides, nursing assistants, food service workers, and cashiers, wages are too low to afford a modest rental home and all other basic needs like food and clothing.

A worker making Michigan’s minimum wage, for instance, would have to work 63 hours in order to afford a one-bedroom apartment at Fair Market Rent in our state. Simply put, minimum wage earners can’t cover the entire roof over their head, even working full time.

While we’re struggling with a housing crisis, the administration’s plan for the upcoming budget year calls for unprecedented and devastating cuts to rental assistance, homelessness programs and local development funds our communities rely on to ensure housing and a high quality of life for everyone.

They are calling for an astounding 44% cut to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which provides rental assistance to hundreds of thousands of Michiganders. These cuts would disproportionately harm seniors, disabled people and their families.

They also want to slash nearly $1 billion from rural rental assistance and homeownership programs through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In the current budget year, these programs have provided nearly nearly $193 million to Michigan families, the largest portion of which went to guaranteed loans for homeowners. 

If adopted by Congress, these cuts will undoubtedly push even more families into homelessness, making them part of the population the EO encourages states and local governments to target for lockup, either in psychiatric institutions or jails.

The U.S. House Republicans’ version of the HUD funding plan largely rejects the Trump administration’s severe cuts and even provides small increases to some housing programs, but with rents rising rapidly it falls far short of what American families need. The agency will not be able to serve all of the people it’s serving currently, let alone those who will fall on hard times in the coming years as rents increase and the harmful provisions of OBBBA take away their food and health care.

The self-styled “land of the free” already imprisons far more of its citizens than any other democracy in the world. More incarceration is not the answer to our nation’s persistent social problems. Mental health disabilities and homelessness can happen to any one of us. We must stand against the increasing reach of federal brutality and tyranny into our communities.