Executive Order “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets”
On July 24, 2025, the Executive Order (EO) entitled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” was issued. If fully implemented, this EO will have widespread negative effects on individuals experiencing homelessness and the services provided to them. Firstly, it directly attacks Housing First, a program that prioritizes providing immediate, permanent housing to anyone experiencing homelessness as quickly as possible, and subsequently connects them with supportive services. Secondly, under the guise of promoting public safety, this Order seeks to mandate the institutionalization of unsheltered homeless people. Additionally, last week’s EO would require recipients of federal funding to share their program participants’ personal, health-related data with law enforcement as a means of ensuring programs’ “effective and efficient operations.”
As written, this EO, in what Mayor Alyia Gaskins of Alexandria, Virginia deems a “callous command-and-control approach,” essentially ends support for Housing First policies rather than addressing the prevalent housing shortage. Whereas evidence has borne out that the criminalization of homelessness is ineffective, the Order calls for federal funds to go directly to local governments that vow to expand their use of law enforcement to crack down on illegal drug use and urban camping.
Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, notes that Housing First and other similar programs have a long-standing, evidence-based history of success in reducing homelessness. She points out that the one common denominator among people experiencing homelessness is not being able to afford a safe, consistent place to live, and that coupling housing with services people want and need to maintain stability is one of the most studied interventions in homelessness policy research. She explains that forcing hundreds of thousands of people into civil confinement amounts to placing them in camps, much like what has transpired on the immigration front. Ultimately, institutionalizing homeless people to remove them from public view is ”cruel and dehumanizing to the human beings who are experiencing incredibly traumatic situations in their lives,” she continues, especially when there is no concomitant investment in programs addressing the root causes of homelessness.
YWCA Greater Cleveland stands firmly against this Executive Order. The issue at hand is not political, as it has been framed over the past decade or so. Rather, it is a matter of human justice and dignity. We do not believe that victims of systems that have systematically worked against them should be criminalized, and we will persist in our mission to end homelessness by providing barrier-free, stable housing and supportive services for those in need in Cuyahoga County.