The headache issue that’s ready to meet Trump on day one of presidency

Donald Trump’s agenda is up Taking office on January 20 involves deporting millions of immigrants and stimulating the economy by cutting taxes, red tape and bureaucrats.

But an issue that has been festering for years has just exploded into a crisis, threatening the best-laid plans of the president-elect’s team.

He will return to the Oval Office after a staggering 18.1 percent increase in the number of homeless people this year — according to eye-popping federal data released this week.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) counted more than 771,000 homeless people as of January 2024 – a bitter legacy of the Biden administration.

During his campaign, Trump promised to make housing more affordable for everyday Americans and move homeless encampments outside city limits.

But the snowballing crisis, which has now left 23 out of every 10,000 people in the US without a home, can only jeopardize Trump’s goals for his second term.

It clearly complicates his plan for the “largest deportation” in US history, given the large number of undocumented immigrants working in construction.

In its 117-page report this month, HUD revealed that America’s crisis of unhoused people was spiraling out of control.

Homelessness rose by almost a fifth in total, but some population groups were hit much harder.

The number of homeless children increased by 33 percent; the number of entire families having to spend an evening outdoors grew by 39 percent.

Black people were more likely than others to sleep on the streets, in abandoned buildings, cars or shelters, it found.

California, the most populous U.S. state, still had the largest homeless population in the country, followed by New York, Washington, Florida and Massachusetts.

Officials attributed the surge to a lack of affordable housing, the end of protections during the pandemic and people being uprooted by natural disasters.

That included the 5,200 Hawaiians who slept in emergency shelters after a deadly wildfire devastated Maui in 2023.

They also blamed the flow of migrants across the southern border into major U.S. cities, which stretched shelters and other services to their limits.

In New York City, for example, asylum seekers were responsible for about 88 percent of the increase in sheltered homelessness, HUD found.

Scenes of homeless drug addicts stumbling on sidewalks and fears of violence and petty crime have emerged as a national political issue, with Trump mentioning it at 2024 campaign rallies.

In a video on homelessness released by his campaign, Trump said “hard-working, law-abiding citizens” were being sidelined and “suffered at the whims of a very sick few.”

He promised to “ban urban camping” and create “tent cities” for homeless people on “cheap land” where they would receive treatment for substance abuse.

“There is nothing compassionate about allowing these individuals to live in filth and misery instead of getting them the help they need,” Trump said.

Trump’s pick for HUD secretary, former NFL player Scott Turner, has opposed government housing programs in the past, calling them “destructive.”

Trump’s deputy, newly elected Vice President JD Vance, has linked high housing costs and homelessness to the millions of foreigners crossing the border in recent years.

“Illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce housing are one of the most important factors affecting home prices in the country,” Vance said.

Studies on whether immigration drives up housing costs, and whether a deportation blitz would lower rents, are inconclusive.

A mass removal of irregular immigrants would undoubtedly free up space in homes and shelters – but it is not clear how this would reduce housing costs.

It would also result in undocumented workers being deported, putting pressure on the construction sector and threatening the construction of new homes.

Trump’s transition team did not respond to DailyMail.com’s request for comment.

Still, Trump’s plan to crack down on homeless camps resonates with voters.

Two-thirds of American adults said homelessness was out of control and called on officials to move those sleeping rough to tent camps outside cities.

That’s according to a national DailyMail.com/TIPP survey of 1,401 adults in January, at the time of HUD’s annual homeless count.

The Democratic-leaning respondents to the poll were eager to resettle unhoused people.

About 74 percent of them wanted the homeless to move, compared to 64 percent of Republicans and 62 percent of independents.

Against this backdrop, Democratic mayors have begun to take a tougher stance on the homeless encampments that are driving down local home values.

Communities – especially in Western states – have enforced bans on camping as public pressure mounts to address what some residents say are dangerous and unsanitary communities.

That follows a 6-3 ruling earlier this year by the Supreme Court, which found that outdoor sleeping bans do not violate the Eighth Amendment.

Yet many homeless people and their advocates say the cleanup and relocation policy is cruel and a waste of taxpayer dollars.

The answer, they say, is more affordable housing, not a crackdown.

Bill Wells, the mayor of El Cajon, California, is among local Democratic officials who have changed his tune on homelessness.

Pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into a “homeless industrial complex” of housing nonprofits only exacerbated the problem, Wells recently wrote for Fox News.

Progressives “financially subsidized the lifestyles of the homeless, abolished laws that kept communities safe and clean, normalized addiction and destigmatized vagrancy,” he added.

Instead, he called for “enforcing laws that prevent street life while providing and sometimes requiring appropriate treatment.”

Similarly, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has indicated a willingness to work with Trump’s team on her city’s homelessness problem.

Bass recently told the LA Times that she was “on the same page” as Trump officials about building temporary shelters on federal property.

Democrats have made progress against the scourge in America’s second-largest city, the HUD report found.

LA, which increased housing for the homeless, saw a 5 percent decline in the number of unsheltered homeless people since 2023.

Meanwhile, Dallas, Texas, where the homeless system was overhauled, saw the number of homeless people drop by 16 percent between 2022 and 2024.

The HUD report also highlighted progress in bringing more unhoused veterans into their homes, with their numbers falling 8 percent to 32,882 by 2024.

There was an even sharper decline for veterans who were unhoused, falling 11 percent to 13,851 in 2024.

Ann Oliva, chief executive of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said there was a “clear roadmap to tackling homelessness on a larger scale”.

“With bipartisan support, adequate funding and smart policy solutions, we can replicate this success and reduce homelessness nationwide,” Oliva said.

The sharp increase in the number of homeless people over the past two years is in stark contrast to the progress the country has been making for more than a decade.

Looking back at the first 2007 survey, the U.S. has made steady progress in reducing the homeless population for about a decade, with a focus on unhoused veterans.

The number of homeless people fell from about 637,000 in 2010 to about 554,000 in 2017.

The numbers rose to around 580,000 in the 2020 census and remained relatively stable over the next two years of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Congress responded to the pandemic with emergency rental assistance, stimulus payments, aid to states and local governments, and a temporary eviction moratorium.

The number of homeless people has skyrocketed since the end of pandemic-era protections.