Washington, DC, crews clear a homeless encampment near the Kennedy Center on Aug. 14, 2025.
Albert Townsend is the director of Lived Experience and Innovation for the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

After 17 years working to end homelessness, I thought I had seen it all. But this administration has taken it to the next level.

While our social media feeds are flooded with images of the National Guard and federal law enforcement's takeover of Washington, DC, one issue is flying under the radar: the president’s executive actions on homelessness.

It reminds me of my own days as an unsheltered neighbor when there was limited permanent housing available. I don’t normally talk about my personal unsheltered experiences, but the past several weeks, I’ve gotten flashbacks thinking about how hard it was back then, and how much harder it must be today.

Homelessness isn't a crime. Treating it like one only sets us back.

Just stop and imagine for a moment, if you had no housing, no family and no dignity. Imagine the exhaustion and stress of having to walk the streets all day, every day, because community support is increasingly off-limits to you. Imagine watching your possessions – your eyeglasses, ID, medicine, even your photos of your mother – all callously thrown in a garbage truck during an encampment raid.

Imagine the hurt of hearing the president of the United States tell the nation that people like you are nothing more than criminals, to say nothing of a Fox News anchor recently calling for the execution of unsheltered people.

It makes my heart ache for my unhoused neighbors.

This is no longer just an issue for Washingtonians to deal with. Recently, President Donald Trump has threatened majority-Black citieslike Baltimore, Memphis and New Orleans, and cities with largely underserved Black populations like Chicago, with similar tactics, so it is essential that we all understand the harms of this approach: an approach that explicitly conflates homelessness with criminality, resorts to strong-arm tactics over real solutions, and ignores the expertise of local providers and the communities they serve.

These are policies that will unnecessarily set all communities back in our efforts to get people off the streets.

In my role as a leader, an advocate and a person with lived experience of being unsheltered, I have always had my head and my heart in communities. My experience is that this is the best way to understand local challenges and identify what people need. After all, homelessness may be a national crisis, but it relies on a community response.

What I see from the Trump administration is the exact opposite: a forceful, one-size-fits-all all approach that is dismissive of these communities’ input and indifferent to overdue investments. It aims to rip power and autonomy from local communities. It aims to marginalize the trained providers who are best able to serve their most vulnerable neighbors. And it doesn’t offer a dime to support homeless response in these communities, or to address the unsustainable rise in rents across the nation.

The president has boasted about the number of encampment raids in the nation's capital, but I haven’t heard about anyone whose homelessness was ended by these tactics.

Trump has power to fund programs to end homelessness

Every day, I am thankful that I got off the streets. But it wasn’t from a jail cell, and it wasn’t at the direction of law enforcement. I wasn’t a criminal, and I didn’t need “reforming.” I was homeless, and I needed a home.

I got off the streets because of my community and the providers who invested in me. They listened to my experiences and my needs, and it changed the entire trajectory of my life.

I, and the lived experience advocates I work with across this nation, are living proof of the power of community, the importance of housing, and the critical first step of actively listening to people’s needs before we try to solve their problems.

For those who’ve lived through the margins, whether it is poverty, incarceration, addiction, disabilities or systemic discrimination, a new administration isn’t just a political shift. It’s a test of whether our community’s voices will be heard ‒ or once again drowned out by polished political briefs and judgment from those who are perceived to be more worthy.

Right now, the administration is failing that test.

My message to the Trump administration is this: You must be very careful when making decisions on behalf of communities. Decisions that fail to take direct feedback from the community – leveraging their expertise and their understanding of their needs – are doomed to fail. That doesn’t benefit anyone, housed or unhoused. Yet, that is exactly the path this administration is on.

Despite the deep harm of the administration’s actions, I believe that President Trump has a golden opportunity to accomplish something that no president has ever achieved: He could fully fund the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s homelessness programs that get people off the street, and the prevention programs that keep them in their homes. This would cement a truly historic legacy for him, and it would transform this nation.

It's a bold goal, to be sure. But if the president were willing to truly listen to the people and the providers on the front lines of this crisis, it certainly wouldn’t be impossible.

Albert Townsend is the director of Lived Experience and Innovation for the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump is wrong. I've been homeless. I wasn't a criminal, I just needed a home. | Opinion

Reporting by Albert Townsend / USA TODAY

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