Trump’s demand to clear encampments doesn’t solve the real problem.

by Colbert I. King, WAPO, March 7, 2025

It should not have been left to President Donald Trump to call attention to homelessness in our nation’s capital. He did, however, and for reasons having little to do with the conditions of chronically homeless people living in tents and makeshift shelters on streets and in parks.

Stating the situation bluntly in a Wednesday night social media post, Trump said, “We have notified the Mayor of Washington, D.C., that she must clean up all of the unsightly homeless encampments in the City, specifically the ones outside of the State Department, and near the White House.”

It was unsightliness and the desire for beautification of public spaces that sparked Trump’s demand. This is not to say White House attention to homelessness is unwelcome. To the contrary, the more public focus, the better. At issue, however, is how best to constructively address the problem. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, acknowledging that the White House had called her about encampments, said she replied: “Thanks for the notice. We’ll take care of it.” And the mayor got going within hours of the call, ordering D.C. government workers to notify people living in tents to gather all of their belonging and to get going, too.

The problem is that although Bowser’s actions might shut down the encampments in question, homelessness will live on.

Homeless encampments are among this city’s most visible public health and humanitarian concerns. Closing them and cleaning up the sites has become an annual ritual, sending homeless people packing up and moving their tents to new locations — where they live until a new crop of residents, businesses and passing motorists stops trying to ignore them and instead regards them as public nuisances. Then clearings begin all over again.

The Office of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services has a boilerplate statement on the subject: “The safest place for people is in a shelter or permanent housing. DC’s case management teams continue to engage individuals and families experiencing homelessness and work to match them to housing resources and wraparound services such as behavioral health services and case management. Our primary focus is always working to move people experiencing homelessness into safer shelters or housing.”

The city has spent years trying to curb homeless encampments. However, as The Post has reported, the number of people living on the street or in temporary shelter in the region increased 12 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to the latest point-in-time count, an annual census of unsheltered individuals across the United States. The District was among the areas with the largest increase last year, with more than 5,600 on the street or in temporary shelters.

Many, probably most, need not only permanent housing but also the case management and behavioral health and substance abuse services that the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services says it provides. Reality speaks otherwise, as evident in the remaining encampments around the city.

Trump’s Truth Social post calling on Bowser to clear out homeless encampments — warning that “if she is not capable of doing so, we will be forced to do it for her!” — gets at the optics but not the heart of the problem: namely, that too many chronically homeless people are obviously not getting the help they need.

Clearing encampments takes the homeless out of sight but not out of mind or off the city’s hands. As the DC Fiscal Policy Institute has noted, the District has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the country. You might not know that, given the lack of full attention homelessness gets in the mayor’s and the D.C. Council’s deliberations or until displacement moves the problem into your sight. But unhoused people haven’t gone anywhere. Nor have their problems.