No Matter Who Is At Fault, A Tent Is Not A Home.
Congresswoman Maxine Waters Condemns Trump Administration’s Attack on Homelessness Programs
By Charles Jackson
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Congresswoman Maxine Waters has delivered a forceful rebuke of the Trump administration over its latest confrontation with Los Angeles and the agencies attempting to address one of the region’s most persistent humanitarian problems: homelessness.
Waters, who represents California’s 43rd Congressional District and serves as the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, praised a federal court decision temporarily preventing the administration from suspending the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority from federal homelessness grant programs.
At stake is approximately $241 million in federal funding, along with additional near-term funding supporting programs that provide services to more than 11,000 people.
For Waters, however, the dispute goes well beyond dollars.
Los Angeles County continues to face a staggering homelessness crisis, with
nearly 73,000 people experiencing homelessness on any given night. They are individuals and families already living at society’s most vulnerable edge. Removing services designed to help them, Waters argues, does nothing to solve homelessness. It risks making an already desperate situation considerably worse.
Her criticism of the administration is unmistakable.
Rather than joining Los Angeles officials in confronting the shortage of affordable housing and the complicated causes of homelessness, Waters contends that the federal government has chosen confrontation. Suspending funding would threaten services without providing a meaningful alternative for the thousands of people depending upon them.
That is what makes the policy particularly troubling.
Government certainly has the right—and the responsibility—to demand accountability for taxpayer money. Homelessness programs should be expected to demonstrate results, operate efficiently and correct failures when they occur.
But accountability and abandonment are not the same thing.
Taking money away from programs serving people who have nowhere else to go does not magically produce housing. It does not lower rents, create shelter beds, expand mental-health treatment or provide permanent supportive housing.
It simply removes resources.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter’s intervention temporarily stopped that from happening, a decision Waters welcomed as an important reprieve. Yet she cautioned against confusing a courtroom victory with a solution to homelessness itself.
The larger problem remains.
Americans need affordable housing, stable communities and a federal housing policy capable of recognizing homelessness as something more complicated than people sleeping on sidewalks.
Waters has advocated increased federal investment through her Ending Homelessness Act and has also pointed to bipartisan congressional efforts on housing as evidence that lawmakers with significant political differences can still work toward practical solutions.
Her message is ultimately a simple one: Government cannot claim to be
fighting homelessness while simultaneously weakening the programs responsible for helping homeless people find their way back into housing.
The court may have protected these programs for the moment.
But the people sleeping in tents, automobiles, shelters and on sidewalks tonight cannot live on temporary court orders.
They need somewhere to live.
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Ms. Waters’ full text
https://iqconnect.house.gov/iqextranet/view_newsletter.aspx?id=107826&c=CA43MW
