Democrats Are Giving Up On Solving The Housing Crisis

Liberal lawmakers need a real message on this issue because the one they have now is nonexistent at best—and a mirror of the right’s cruel ideology at its worst.

While the chaos in our federal government has rightly absorbed the lion’s share of the media’s attention over the past month, life—and worries about where most of us will do our living—isn’t getting any easier further afield. At the moment, more people are facing displacement from climate disasters as they also contend with a housing affordability crisis that forces people onto the street. If Democrats truly want to lay claim as the only responsible political movement in town, they will need to come to some quick decisions, even while locked out of power on Capitol Hill: Will they continue to embrace many of the same out-of-sight, out-of-mind policies that have fallen so hard on the homeless of late, and which have earned the endorsement of conservatives in the Supreme Court and the wider right wing? Or will they choose to see unhoused people as part of the working class they often claim to represent?

Many Democrats serve as mayors in cities that have chosen some of the most punitive policies against the homeless—cities such as Washington, D.C., where unhoused people routinely have their encampments cleared but the organizations that serve them have little support; Los Angeles, where 38 percent of LAPD arrest warrants and citations between 2016 and 2022 were for unhoused people; and New York, where homeless New Yorkers filed a lawsuit calling Eric Adams’s sweeps inhumane and unconstitutional. Although L.A. Mayor Karen Bass has publicly stood against the criminalization of homeless people, the sweeps of encampments continue on her watch.

Meanwhile, the United States saw an 18 percent increase in homelessness from 2023 to 2024. Thirty-nine percent more families with children experienced homelessness in that time frame, according to U.S. Housing and Urban Development data. This is a policy crisis in itself: With nothing but bad ideas being deployed to solve this crisis, the crisis is only deepening.

But lawmakers are seemingly content to double down on the bad wagers they’ve already lost. In Los Angeles, Democratic council members rejected eviction protections for tenants who were financially affected by the Los Angeles wildfires and thus unable to pay rent on time. Despite providing a cap on the number of months they would have these protections and requiring documentation to access the protections, council members still voted “no,” with some claiming there was not enough data to support the proposal or that it would not solve structural housing issues, the LAist reported. But there’s no getting around necessities: Tenants need support now as they face rent spikes of more than 10 percent on what they’re already paying in pricey markets, lest they also find themselves on the street and subject to punitive restrictions.

Moreover, along with the failed attempt to criminalize homelessness into extinction, there have been equally myopic efforts to criminalize the provision of support to unhoused people. In one example of this disturbing trend, the Fremont, California, City Council voted in favor of a ban on encampments, and on “aiding and abetting” those residing in those encampments, last month.