Six drastic plans Trump is already promising for a second term

As Trump has honed a law-and-order message, packing his speeches with graphic accounts of violent offenses and bleak appraisals of America’s cities, he has particularly focused on images of people living on the streets. Trump’s solution is to move homeless people to “tent cities” on the outskirts of metropolitan areas, staffed with medical professionals and built to house hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.

“The only way you’re going to remove the homeless encampments and reclaim our downtowns is to open up large parcels, large tracts, of relatively inexpensive land on the outer skirts of the various cities and bring in medical professionals, psychiatrists, psychologists and drug rehab specialists and create tent cities,” Trump said on Aug. 6 at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas. “You don’t have time to build buildings, you can do that later, but you have to get the people off the street. We have to bring back, we have to reclaim our cities.”

In a July speech in Washington, Trump acknowledged that the idea would be controversial but argued it would be an improvement. “Now, some people say, ‘Oh, that’s so horrible’ — no, what’s horrible is what’s happening now,” he said.

There isn’t up-to-date national data on unhoused people, but shelter officials in 15 states have told The Post they’re seeing an increase in people seeking services, in part because of rising costs of living. Trump’s claim in July that the tent cities could be needed for “probably millions of people” is dubious, however; as of January 2020, an estimated 580,000 people were experiencing homelessness nationwide, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

Trump’s Washington speech happened to coincide with the alliance’s conference, setting off a ripple of concern among the 1,300 attendees and leading the group’s chief executive, Ann Oliva, to address it from the stage.

“The picture that he was trying to paint is that homeless people are dangerous and therefore need to be removed so the rest of us can go about our lives, and that is just not true,” Oliva said in an interview. “Spending a ton of money on newly built encampments that don’t have a plan to get people back into safe and affordable housing does not add up to me.”

Oliva, who used to run homelessness programs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, said it wasn’t clear which federal agencies could have the authorities or resources to implement Trump’s plan. Without a connection to federal property or federal crimes, U.S. authorities wouldn’t have jurisdiction to act without cooperation from local officials.

Any plan to relocate homeless people would have to comply with a 2019 federal appeals court decision called Martin v. City of Boise, which held that an ordinance could not ban sleeping in public without providing alternatives. “As long as there is no option of sleeping indoors, the government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors,” the court wrote. The ruling stands after the Supreme Court denied a high-profile bid to review the case. Judges would have to consider whether Trump’s tent cities could meet this standard.

During his speech, Trump suggested that as president he’d ordered the Secret Service to clear homeless encampments in Washington. (A Secret Service spokesman said that never happened. “The Secret Service does not enforce state and local laws, and we have not and would not take part in the clearing of any homeless encampments within the District of Columbia,” communications chief Anthony Guglielmi said in an email.)

Trump’s proposal recalls a 2019 venture by officials from HUD, along with the departments of Veterans Affairs and Justice, to use Federal Aviation Administration facilities as sites for relocated homeless people. That initiative never materialized.

The “tent city” plan also resembles some state efforts. A recently passed state law in Missouri directs money to temporary camps instead of permanent housing. The city of Miami this month abandoned a controversial plan to move homeless people to tiny homes on a barrier island.