Trump To Put A Beatdown on Homeless People

Ever since the Trump administration forced Matthew Doherty, Obama's director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH), to resign, they have been looking for someone to lead a crackdown on homelessness.  Well, it now seems that Robert Marbut, a former community college civics professor and San Antonio City Council member, is the best candidate for that job.

Marbut has touted the belief that homelessness is caused by behavior and that providing services on the street such as food and supplies encourages vagrancy; he has done so in his role as a policy consultant for cities including Key West and St. Petersburg in Florida; Fresno, California; and San Antonio, Texas. Marbut calls providing food and supplies to people outside of shelters "street feeding" and says that most panhandlers are not actually homeless but instead are grifters who rely "on the good nature of citizens to get tax-free dollars." Marbut recommends shelters that are open all day but that harshly punish rule-breaking.

A shelter in St. Petersburg using his plan had a success rate of 7% of residents obtaining permanent housing within two years. More than 80% of residents either just left the shelter or were kicked out for breaking rules, including things like poor hygiene. A former resident of that Florida shelter, Marcus Franklin, told HuffPost that residents were forced to sleep outside when beds were full, even during storms. "That whole area’s flooded and you still got to sleep out there," he said. He described metal tents erected for "housing" residents, saying, "Those things have no sides on 'em. The water's still hitting you. You're soaking wet."

"His approach is literally to have people sleeping on mats in a shelter courtyard and to call that ending homelessness," Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told Mother Jones. "It's absurd." She says that Marbut talks about homelessness "like it's a personal flaw. [...] He dismisses the clear structural challenges of a lack of affordable housing that exacerbate homelessness."