The Trump regime is here. Let’s monitor these 10 areas

Unfettered, Trump will worsen homelessness and inequality

Illustration by Kaia Sand

The three richest billionaires in the United States shared the dais with Trump for his inauguration. Not one of the several million* people who are homeless did.

That sums up who is valued and who is not, and gives us a glimpse at the soul of this nation. In an era of jarring inequality, I’ve compiled ten areas I encourage you to watch as the Trump administration begins:

1. Trump plans “tent cities.” He pins homelessness primarily on mental illness and drugs, and then offers draconian ideas for how these should be treated — police, jails and institutions. Mental illness and substance use should be treated as public health issues, not penal issues, and it’s very difficult for this health care to be effective while someone is homeless.

2. Arresting people for being homeless is not just a Trump stance. It’s popular among plenty of Democrats. Dozens of cities have added anti-homelessness laws since the Supreme Court ruled that cities could do so last June. California’s Gavin Newsom has led the way. It will be easy to blame Trump alone, but for our longterm good, we need to track how bashing the homeless is a bi-partisan affair.

3. If a buck is to be made, it’s to be made off a poor person’s back. Among those who have Trump’s ear, each crisis is an opportunity for profit. Take every weather disaster. People who are newly homeless face price gauging and daunting hurdles, some people driven into long-term homelessness. Or take the subprime mortgage crisis. Financiers made money not only by slicing and dicing mortgages of people’s real homes, but also, on foreclosing those homes. Pay close attention to how crises are exploited when financiers are even more unfettered.

4. Fossil-fuel exploitation in a disrupted climate exacerbates homelessness. Trump and his ilk are pushing poor people further into poverty for fossil-fuel profit. The disrupted climate drives weather disasters that harm people who are already homeless, and push more people into homelessness.

5. Rollbacks on DEI programs worsen homelessness. Without extraordinary equity efforts, communities that are disproportionately homeless — people who are Black, Indigenous, veterans, disabled, formerly incarcerated, trans — will face further disparities in programs and services.

6. Don’t trade on trans people’s lives. Trans youth, in particular, end up homeless at high levels. Teens despair without support, when they are demonized and discarded by powerful people. It was disturbing to see how mainstream Democrats so easily pushed this aside in the recent election cycle.

7. Prisons and institutions don’t replace housing, and are usually more expensive, anyway. Track the hypocrisy — do politicians find it politically viable to spend more money on jailing a person than housing them? Let’s call that out.

8. Whether U.S.-born or immigrant — when someone lives without a home, they are homeless. Don’t succumb to Trump’s rhetoric pitting people against each other (“with all the money we will save by ending mass unskilled migration, we will have a huge dividend to address this crisis in our own country”). This is a path to our collective peril.

9. Homelessness and colonization are bound together. Trump’s colonial rhetoric must not be normalized. Indigenous people are disproportionately homeless, whether in the United States, in Greenland — or in Europe where they are displaced from their homes colonized by the countries in which they now survive. Trump’s wild comments represent devastating ideologies that drive homelessness for generations.

10. Plant the seeds for what will be possible at some point. This is not an empty bromide of hope. During the last Trump administration, Portland was able to seed Portland Street Response, a police-free first responder system that addresses street crises created from the ideas and needs of unhoused people, and I’m hopeful we will be able to grow it during this one. Sometimes political opportunities crop up at surprising times.

I encourage you to notice not only the wild actions of Trump, which often make the headlines, but also how society could subtly drift under the Trump regime. Maintain mooring; notice the quiet changes too.

Just because it’s not popular doesn’t mean it’s not right. That’s going to be really difficult going ahead. It’s our collective challenge.

* The Point in Time count is based on where people slept on one January nights, and many people are missed. I estimate locally that if we triple that number we are likely closer to an actual number.