With Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025, U.S. social policy underwent a sharp and unmistakable turn - from a model of social inclusion to one of disciplinary control. The new regulatory course, unveiled through an executive order billed as restoring an “end to crime and chaos on America’s streets,” effectively criminalized homelessness, shifting it out of the realm of social welfare and into the domain of national security and public order. The document was not merely an administrative measure; it marked an ideological pivot. Humanitarian tools were sidelined in favor of coercive ones, and social vulnerability was rebranded as a threat to the state’s internal stability.
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, by January 2024 the number of people without permanent housing had reached a record 771,000 - up 12 percent from 2022. Roughly 40 percent were living unsheltered, without access to emergency housing. About 22 percent suffered from serious mental illness. In other words, one in five homeless individuals in the United States has a clinical diagnosis, yet more than 70 percent receive no consistent medical or psychiatric care.
Trump’s order formalized a trend that had been gathering momentum for years: the shift from the welfare state to what might be called a risk-management state. Under the logic of “zero tolerance,” homelessness ceased to be a condition demanding care and became a political design element - one that justifies the expansion of police powers and surveillance authority.
Social Engineering by Repression
At the core of the executive order lies a directive authorizing the forced hospitalization of homeless individuals in the name of “restoring public order.” In practice, this transfers sweeping enforcement powers to state-level executive authorities, creating a precedent for federally sanctioned coercion masquerading as social prevention.
Instead of investing in long-term rehabilitation, the administration opted for a strategy of social cleansing. Local governments were instructed to impose bans on “illegal encampments,” “vagrancy,” and “public drug use.” The result has been a wave of mass sweeps in states such as Florida, Texas, and Arizona, where homeless people are detained for minor administrative violations and then confined in closed facilities - often without medical evaluations or court orders.
Attorneys at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund have drawn explicit parallels to the Black Codes of the late nineteenth century, which allowed Southern states after the Civil War to prosecute Black Americans for lacking employment contracts or fixed residences. Today’s enforcement practices revive the same social archetype: control through criminalization, discipline through fear, order through exclusion.
The economic logic behind this punitive turn is equally revealing. Internal Congressional Budget Office data show that maintaining a psychiatric hospital bed costs the government an average of $270 per day, while a housing subsidy under the Housing First model costs about $48. Yet the political payoff of visible “order” outweighs fiscal rationality. Voters are shown a crackdown on “street chaos,” not the slow, unglamorous work of social reintegration.
Housing First: Evidence, Not Ideology
Over the past two decades, both U.S. and international experience has consistently pointed to Housing First as the most effective response to homelessness. Developed in the early 1990s through the Pathways to Housing initiative, the model received federal backing under the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations. Its premise was simple but transformative: homelessness is not the result of individual failure, but a structural outcome of economic and social imbalance. The solution, therefore, must also be structural - housing first, then therapy, then reintegration into the labor market.
The program rested on three principles: unconditional access to housing without prior rehabilitation requirements; integrated support services, including social workers, mental health professionals, and employment counselors; and voluntary participation based on trust rather than coercion.
Research by the RAND Corporation found that participation in Housing First reduced the likelihood of returning to homelessness by 83 percent and cut emergency service usage by more than half. The Corporation for Supportive Housing reported that in cities where the program had operated for more than a decade, street homelessness fell by 30 to 45 percent, while spending on jails and hospitals dropped by up to 40 percent.
Every dollar invested in Housing First returned between $1.60 and $2 to the broader economy through reduced policing and healthcare costs. These findings were echoed in a 2023 report by the National Alliance to End Homelessness and in analyses by the Brookings Institution, which described the model as the only evidence-based standard for sustained reductions in homelessness in high-income countries.
International comparisons reinforce the case. Finland reduced homelessness by 68 percent between 2008 and 2024, virtually eliminating street homelessness in major cities such as Helsinki and Tampere. Norway cut its homeless population nearly in half between 1996 and 2020. Canada’s At Home/Chez Soi initiative, launched in 2010, achieved a 65 percent housing retention rate two years after placement.
Housing First, in other words, is not a humanitarian gesture but a rational instrument of social stability and fiscal efficiency. Its dismantling under Trump signals a return to the 1980s paradigm, when homelessness was framed as deviance to be disciplined rather than inequality to be addressed.
The Economics of Exclusion
From an economic standpoint, current policy produces a paradox of inefficiency. While the government claims to be cutting costs, it fuels a policing and medical infrastructure whose expenses far exceed those of social programs. According to the Urban Institute, the forced hospitalization of a single homeless person costs roughly $98,000 per year, compared with $27,000 to $32,000 for comprehensive support under Housing First.
Studies by the Cato Institute show that about 90 percent of municipal “homelessness budgets” go not to prevention but to managing the aftermath - raids, arrests, camp clearances, and short-term shelter placements. These measures do not solve the problem; they recycle it. Individuals shuttled through the cycle of street, hospital, and street again become trapped in what U.S. sociologists call the “poverty carousel.”
Over time, this system deepens not only social but spatial segregation. Major metropolitan areas - Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York - have begun exporting homeless populations beyond city limits under the guise of relocation to treatment centers, effectively offloading costs onto neighboring counties. The result is spatial dumping: the displacement of marginalized groups and the emergence of new pockets of poverty on the urban periphery.
At the same time, a new institutional economy of repression is taking shape - a homeless management complex encompassing private security firms, prison service contractors, and companies specializing in “urban cleanup.” In 2025 alone, the sector’s combined revenues exceeded $12.3 billion, nearly three times federal spending on affordable housing programs. Homelessness, in this configuration, is less a social tragedy than a market opportunity, generating profit through exclusion.
From Law and Order to Homeless as Threat
America’s contemporary approach to homelessness reflects a revival of the Law and Order doctrine first articulated under Richard Nixon in the late 1960s. Amid antiwar protests, rising crime, and urban decay, poverty and dissent were reframed as deviance requiring police intervention. That narrative underpinned Ronald Reagan’s policies in the 1980s, when social spending was slashed and street poverty criminalized.
The Trump administration is resurrecting the same symbolic machinery. Threats from “below” are repackaged to mobilize a self-styled “silent majority.” In political rhetoric, the homeless person is no longer someone in crisis, but a source of disorder endangering the American way of life. An analysis of presidential speeches and Republican leadership statements since early 2025 shows that in more than 70 percent of cases, homelessness is discussed in terms of security threats, drug crime, or moral decline.
The media ecosystem reinforces this stigmatization. Conservative outlets, particularly Fox News, have amplified calls to “clean up the streets.” A telling moment came in September 2025, when host Brian Kilmeade suggested on air that “forced injections” be used on those who refuse treatment. Although he later apologized, audience reaction revealed a striking tolerance for punitive measures: 46 percent of respondents in a Pew Research survey said such actions were acceptable when public order was perceived to be at risk.
Homelessness in the United States is thus being transformed into a moral and political category governed less by economics than by symbolism. The state institutionalizes fear, turning marginalized populations into a convenient enemy - one that helps legitimize authoritarian tendencies within a democratic façade.
Media, Politics, and the Fear Industry
The media ecosystem plays a decisive role in manufacturing what might be called the “image of threat.” According to the Media Research Center, between January and October 2025 American television networks paired the word homeless with crime in 63 percent of mentions - twice the rate recorded in 2019. The pattern was especially pronounced in coverage of violent crimes committed by people with mental illness. Cases like the murder of Ukrainian national Iryna Zarutska in North Carolina are folded into emotionally charged storylines that amplify a sense of social panic.
What emerges is a media–political symbiosis: politicians produce violence through policy, while media outlets provide it with moral legitimacy. This is a classic construction, described decades ago by Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault - the shift from a disciplinary society to a managed one, where control is exercised through the production of fear rather than overt coercion.
In Trump’s public rhetoric, homelessness is folded into a broader catalogue of perceived threats, alongside undocumented immigration, drugs, and urban “decay.” The issue thus acquires an ethnopolitical dimension. Statistics showing that roughly 40 percent of the homeless population is African American and 23 percent Latino are mobilized to reinforce racial and cultural anxieties within the white electorate.
As a result, the humanitarian agenda is displaced by a moral one. The state no longer claims to protect people, but to protect the “cleanliness” of streets; not life, but the “image” of the city. The country is pushed back into a familiar paradox of the 1980s: moral order is secured through exclusion rather than integration.
Exclusion as Internal Security Policy
From a practical standpoint, Trump’s executive order fits neatly into a strategy of “internal stabilization” - the creation of a manageable social environment by reducing the visibility of crisis. Forced hospitalization, the dismantling of tent encampments, and cuts to humanitarian programs are aimed not at addressing root causes, but at the visual sanitization of public space.
An analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies characterizes the new approach as security-driven social management. It rests on three pillars: control of space through zoning rules, camping bans, and forced relocation; control of the body through involuntary hospitalization, treatment without consent, and police detention; and control of perception through media legitimation and the cultivation of threat narratives.
While such measures may temporarily reduce the visible presence of homelessness, they corrode trust between citizens and the state. Gallup polling from the fall of 2025 shows that 71 percent of Americans support “tougher action against street encampments,” but only 28 percent favor increased funding for rehabilitation programs. The cultural norm of helping one’s neighbor is steadily giving way to a norm of isolating the other.
Against this backdrop, the United States is becoming an outlier among advanced democracies. While Europe doubles down on integration strategies, America is reverting to exclusion as a tool of internal cohesion.
The Macroeconomics of Housing and Social Stratification
Homelessness in today’s United States is not merely a social pathology; it is an economic indicator of a dysfunctional housing market. Over the past two decades, housing costs have risen steadily while real incomes stagnated. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, between 2000 and 2025 the median home price increased by 134 percent, while median household income rose by just 37 percent.
This gap has produced a condition of structural housing unaffordability for lower-income and much of the middle class. Estimates from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies show that more than 22 million American households spend over half their income on rent, well beyond the threshold of financial stability. Meanwhile, affordable housing programs are funded at levels sufficient to meet only about 26 percent of potential demand.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the inflationary surge of 2021–2023 pushed the housing crisis into a chronic phase. In 2024, average rents in major U.S. cities rose by 9.2 percent, and by more than 14 percent in San Francisco and New York - nearly three times the rate of real wage growth. As analysts at Brookings have noted, homelessness increasingly appears as a natural outcome of market dynamics rather than individual behavior.
The Geography of Poverty and New Social Fault Lines
Federal housing data show that of the 771,000 homeless people counted in 2024, half live in just five states: California, New York, Washington, Florida, and Texas. California alone accounts for 44 percent of the national total - nearly 340,000 people. In Los Angeles, one in every 45 residents lacks permanent housing. In San Francisco, the rate stands at 778 homeless individuals per 100,000 residents, eight times the national average.
Structurally, these figures reflect territorial segregation. States with strong economic growth and large innovation sectors - California, Washington, Massachusetts - also exhibit the highest concentrations of street poverty. This is the paradox of affluent homelessness: regions flush with capital and tech investment fail to secure basic living conditions for their own populations.
Research by the Urban Institute suggests that housing costs are the dominant driver. Each one-percent increase in housing prices leads to a 0.8 to 1.2 percent rise in homelessness, while a one-point increase in unemployment raises homelessness by just 0.3 percent. Housing unaffordability, not joblessness or education levels, is the decisive factor.
Cuts to Social Support and the Privatization of Welfare
The Trump administration’s fiscal policy has intensified the privatization of social responsibility. In 2025, federal funding for affordable housing programs such as Section 8 and Community Development Block Grants was cut by 18.4 percent, while spending on addiction treatment fell by 23 percent. At the same time, tax incentives were introduced for private operators running so-called “adaptation centers,” effectively transferring core welfare functions from the state to the market.
This model aligns with the logic of neoliberal governance - rule through markets rather than social policy. The state acts not as a guarantor of welfare but as a regulator creating conditions for the commodification of poverty. A new class of “social contractors” has emerged: non-state actors operating on municipal contracts whose profits depend less on solving homelessness than on managing it.
A September 2025 report by the Government Accountability Office found that 74 percent of contractors involved in homelessness-related services are for-profit entities. Their combined revenues exceed $8.9 billion, yet no more than 38 percent of allocated funds actually go toward housing or treatment. The resulting conflict of interest is obvious: success is measured in processed cases, not in lives rebuilt.
The Cycle of Reproduced Poverty
A systemic view suggests that the United States has entered a self-reinforcing cycle of homelessness, operating on four interconnected levels: economic, through rising housing costs and stagnant incomes; political, through cuts to social protection; cultural, through the stigmatization of poverty as personal failure; and institutional, through the commercialization of assistance.
Together, these forces produce chronic homelessness - defined as remaining unhoused for more than twelve months. Federal estimates put the number of chronically homeless individuals at around 180,000, with annual growth of 6 to 8 percent. Forced hospitalization and punitive measures not only fail to reduce this population; they expand it. Upon release, people often lose their last remaining social ties, making reintegration even less likely.
What emerges is not a policy failure but a policy choice - one that trades integration for control, and long-term stability for the short-term optics of order.
International Parallels and Strategic Consequences
In a global context, the United States now stands out for its antisocial drift - an anomaly among advanced democracies. While Europe, Canada, and Australia continue moving toward humane models of social reintegration, American policy is reverting to methods of disciplinary coercion.
The contrast with the European Union is especially stark. By 2024, according to Eurostat, social housing and rental subsidy programs covered more than 9 percent of the EU population. In the United States, the figure remains below 2 percent. Finland, which has applied the Housing First model for more than fifteen years, has reduced homelessness by roughly two-thirds and eliminated tent encampments in its cities altogether. France, the Netherlands, and Germany emphasize social inclusion - bringing people back into communities through employment, education, and participation in local civic life.
The U.S. is moving in the opposite direction. What we are witnessing is the militarization of the social sphere. Forced hospitalizations, raids, and police operations in homeless encampments are tools once associated with criminal justice, now redeployed as instruments of social policy. This shift does more than erode public trust; it alters the nature of the state itself, transforming it from a social state into a coercive one.
American democracy, built on the primacy of individual liberty, is thus caught in a deep internal contradiction. The right to personal autonomy is increasingly supplanted by the state’s asserted right to intervene in private life under the banner of “public order.” This is a form of internal de-democratization: authoritarian practices are normalized through institutional procedures rather than through the formal suspension of rights.
Social Control as Domestic Strategy
From the standpoint of political theory, Trump’s executive order reflects not social policy but identity politics. American society has entered a phase in which the fight against internal “abnormalities” becomes a way of affirming a collective norm. In this logic, the homeless person is not simply poor, but alien - someone who does not fully belong to the nation.
Such strategies are typical of periods of structural crisis. The state consolidates the majority by marginalizing a minority. As Howard Koh, a professor at Harvard’s School of Public Health, has noted with disarming clarity: “You can’t arrest your way out of a social problem.” Yet the political rationality of 2025 operates differently. Arrest becomes a tool for managing uncertainty.
This returns the United States to a foundational dilemma of liberal democracy: can freedom be preserved through instruments of unfreedom? At this stage, the answer appears to be no. Repressive regulation of the social sphere reshapes not only policy practices, but the very values on which society rests.
Institutional Risks and a Strategic Outlook to 2030
If the current trajectory holds, the United States faces several structural risks by the end of the decade.
First, the degradation of social infrastructure. Chronic homelessness could exceed one million people, with as many as 40 percent requiring psychiatric care.
Second, soaring fiscal costs. Estimates suggest that combined spending on forced hospitalizations and policing programs could reach $180 to $200 billion annually - comparable to the military budgets of mid-sized developed nations.
Third, deepening polarization. Ethnocultural and class divisions are likely to intensify, giving rise to “fortress cities” where social isolation becomes the norm rather than the exception.
Fourth, institutional erosion of trust. A drop in confidence in federal authorities below 30 percent would fuel political turbulence and increase the risk of fragmentation within the party system itself.
Yet an alternative path remains viable. Strategic scenarios proposed by leading policy institutes envision a return to an inclusive model: renewed investment in social housing, the integration of mental health services, and the expansion of cross-sector partnerships. The experience of Canada and the Nordic countries demonstrates that, over the long run, rehabilitation costs less than repression - and produces higher levels of public safety.
Conclusion: From Managed Fear to Managed Hope
America’s approach to homelessness has become a litmus test for deeper changes within the society itself. What was once understood as a humanitarian obligation of the state is now framed as a threat. This is not merely an institutional shift, but a civilizational one - from solidarity to segregation, from trust to control, from assistance to punishment.
At the core of any democracy lies the ability to see in the vulnerable not an enemy, but a fellow human being. President Trump’s executive order, whatever its short-term political appeal, undermines that moral foundation. In the long run, the United States risks forfeiting what has long been its greatest strength: the capacity to integrate rather than exclude.
The true strength of a state is not measured by its ability to suppress chaos, but by its capacity to transform chaos into order without violence. Where fear becomes the primary tool of governance, trust inevitably disappears - and with it, the very idea of freedom.