Robert Marbut’s appointment to lead USICH is a big step backwards in our country’s bipartisan efforts to end homelessness, one that risks undermining over a decade of learning, research, understanding and practice to end homelessness. 1/
He ignores ample evidence of the underlying cause of homelessness – which is our country’s severe shortage of homes affordable to its lowest income renters – and instead blames homelessness on what he perceives as personal fault.
His work as a consultant has been to encourage local governments to warehouse people experiencing homelessness on campus-type facilities with a host of required “24/7 programming.”
Marbut’s approach is a deeply condescending and dehumanizing one that, while it may successfully hide homelessness, does nothing to end or even alleviate it. His approach harkens back to 19th century poorhouses.
In one St. Petersburg campus that Marbut created, homeless people were made first to sleep on mats outside – only with “good behavior” could people make their way indoors to the air conditioning and, after further proving their worthiness, bunk beds.
Marbut encourages cities to “cut the goodies” that make living on the streets too enticing (!). He says he doesn’t believe in criminalizing homelessness, but he supports criminalizing much of what makes being homeless & living on the street bearable.
He advocates for outlawing “street feeding,” sleeping in public, panhandling. If someone who is homeless is then found sleeping on the street, for example, the police offers the person a “choice”: go for “24/7 programming” at the homeless campus, or jail.
Marbut was appointed by a president who only ever utters the word “homeless” as an insult to California politicians, and he will work with a HUD Secretary who advocates for deep cuts to programs that house the lowest income people.
Most of @SecretaryCarson proposals would *increase* homelessness.
He has proposed tripling rents for the lowest-income subsidized renters and raising rents for all other residents of HUD-subsidized homes.
He has proposed tripling rents for the lowest-income subsidized renters and raising rents for all other residents of HUD-subsidized homes.
Carson has proposed forcing mixed-status immigrant families, including 55,000 American children - some of the lowest income and most vulnerable people in our country - to separate or be evicted from federally assisted housing.
And @SecretaryCarson has proposed allowing shelters to refuse to serve transgender and other LBGTQ people experiencing homelessness, forcing them to instead sleep on street where they are at extraordinarily high risk of violence.
So Trump’s appointment of Robert Marbut, a man who believes in “Housing Fourth” and “homelessness recovery programs,” to lead the only federal agency tasked with ending homelessness isn’t surprising - but it is reprehensible and deeply regrettable.
Homelessness is one of our country’s most urgent, tragic and *solvable* crises - but this administration continues only to politicize it. Using some of the most destitute & vulnerable people in our country as a political tool is truly deplorable.
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