Massachusetts’ homelessness crisis is getting worse. Trump and Harris offered very different solutions to solve it.

“A lot of them don’t want that,” he added. “But we will give them the option.”

The proposal, which some support for the homeless they compared to the internment camps where Japanese Americans were held against their will during World War II is an extreme reflection of a larger trend. Across the country, a growing number of communities are choosing to criminalize homelessness, a choice that could become more common in the coming months. In JuneThe US Supreme Court issued a decision upholding the rights of Grants Pass, Ore., to fine and jail homeless people who violate an ordinance against camping on public property, even when no space is available for shelter. Lower courts ruled that the ordinance violated the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

Massachusetts, home until last fall in a sprawling camp at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, known as Mass. and Cass is no exception. In recent weeks, Fall River and Lowell adopted measures which aim to ban homeless encampments in public spaces. The Brockton City Council is considering ordinances that would prohibit sleeping and loitering on public property, even if there is no shelter space. Boston and Salem passed ordinances in 2023 prohibiting camping on public property when emergency shelter is available.

The extent to which this trend continues will be influenced by the upcoming presidential election. The two candidates offer starkly different visions of how to deal with homelessness, and the results will have a major impact on the programs the federal government helps states fund.

Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s main rival in the presidential race, supports the approach that has been at the heart of federal programs for much of the past decade, known as “first of all housing”. The policy, which its supporters say is backed by a overwhelming body of academic researchprioritizes getting homeless people into stable housing before providing the “bridging” services needed to address larger issues like addiction and mental illness.

“People are more willing to accept treatment when they are permanently housed and stay housed,” said Bobby Watts, CEO of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council. “Housing First is not just housing. It is to stabilize them with a roof over their heads and then provide services, not mandate them. And we’re finding that people are taking it.”

To facilitate housing-first policies, Harris supports programs such as expanding rental assistance, giving working families up to $25,000 in down payment assistance and offering a range of incentives aimed at spurring the construction of new affordable housing, according to a plan unveiled in August. Advocates say they expect her to continue a number of other Biden administration policies geared toward a housing-first approach.

Trump’s homelessness policies are consistent with an entirely different approach, one that suggests stabilized and permanent housing should only be made available after certain treatment criteria are met, experts say.

“The tent city strategy will be much better and also much less expensive than spending large sums of taxpayer money to house the homeless in luxury hotels without addressing their underlying problem,” Trump said in his video. To help pay for his tent city proposal, Trump said he would reverse a recent proposal Biden administration policy expands health care coverage for young undocumented immigrant adults who have been in the US since they were children and are working or studying under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

The Trump and Harris campaigns declined to make representatives available for an interview, but the Trump campaign provided a statement listing the policies, also aimed at spurring new construction and helping homebuyers, and the Harris campaign referred questions to a policy adviser of the Biden administration that provided a list. of administration policies designed to reduce homelessness.

Some supporters worry what would happen to the programs they rely on if Trump wins a second term. There are about 10,000 facilities statewide that offer supportive housing, many of which receive HUD funding under housing policies, said Joyce Tavon, cexecutive director of the Massachusetts Housing & Shelter Alliance. HUD is also a major source of construction funds used to build new housing for the homeless.

In an interview with the Globe, Robert Marbut, who served as Trump’s homeless czar in the final days of his administration, compared the housing-first approach that became national policy under the Obama administration to giving a Pell Grant with unlimited money to a college. student without having to attend classes or have a high GPA or “a goal or program you are working towards.”

“They started offering free housing with no accountability and no treatment plan,” said Marbut, who is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Center on Wealth and Povertya Seattle-based free-market conservative think tank and has been in regular contact with the campaign. “It didn’t work.”

Not so, said Jeff Olivet, who succeeded Marbut as executive director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates the executive branch’s efforts to prevent and end homelessness.

“There’s a decades-long track record of housing first working very effectively for hundreds of thousands of people to help them get out of homelessness,” Olivet said.

In the 1990s, the Clinton administration joined with Republicans to promote policies designed to increase household self-sufficiency and minimize reliance on government programs such as job training as a condition of housing vouchers.

Housing first emerged from experiments that followed the realization that those approaches weren’t working, Watts said. One systematic review of 26 studies comparing the two approaches found that housing-first programs decreased homelessness rates by 88 percent and improved housing stability by 41 percent, compared with first-treatment models, according to researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research. .

In response, Marbut highlighted the experience of California, which enacted a law prioritizing housing first programs in 2016, but saw the state’s homelessness and homelessness increase 47 percent between 2015 and 2019.

The stakes for Massachusetts continued to rise.

“I’ve been working on this issue for 25 years and I’ve never seen so many people living in their cars, living in tents,” said Robyn Frost, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless. “I cannot enter the family shelters. They cannot enter individual shelters because they are full. It’s an avalanche.”

An increase in the number of migrant families is partly to blame. But inflation and a lack of affordable housing have also pushed thousands of families to the brink. They now make up about half of families in need of emergency shelter, said Kelly Turley, associate director of the Massachusetts Homeless Coalition.

Massachusetts is the only state in the nation with a law designed to protect children by guaranteeing families the right to shelter. But by August 2023, demand was so high, Gov. Maura Healey declared a state of emergency and capped the number of families the state would house at 7,500. In July, state officials announced the cost of operating the state’s emergency shelter system in the next fiscal year it was expected to exceed $1 billion.

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Adam Piore can be reached at [email protected].