Trump and Harris offer starkly different visions for how to end homelessness

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

The proposal, which some advocates for the homeless have compared to internment camps where Japanese Americans were held against their will during World War II, is an extreme reflection of a larger trend. Across the nation, a growing number of communities are electing to criminalize homelessness, a choice likely to grow more common in the months ahead. In June, the US Supreme Court issued a decision upholding the rights of Grants Pass, Ore., to fine and jail homeless individuals who violate an ordinance against camping on public property, even when there is no shelter space available. Lower courts had ruled the ordinance violated the Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

Massachusetts, home until last fall to a sprawling encampment 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 passed measures that aim to outlaw homeless encampments in public spaces. The Brockton City Council is considering ordinances that would ban sleeping and loitering on public property, even if there is no shelter space. Boston and Salem passed ordinances in 2023 banning camping on public property when emergency shelter is available.

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

Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s main rival in the presidential contest, supports the approach that has been at the heart of federal programs for much of the last decade, known as “housing first.” The policy, which its advocates say is backed by an overwhelming body of academic research, prioritizes getting the homeless into stable housing before providing the “wrap-around” services needed to deal with larger problems such as addiction and mental illness.

“People are more willing to accept treatment when they are permanently housed and stay housed,” Bobby Watts, CEO of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, said. “Housing first is not housing only. It’s getting them stabilized with their roof over their head and then offering services, not mandating them. And we find that people take it.”

To facilitate housing first policies, Harris supports programs such as expanding rental assistance, providing working families with up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance, and providing a host of incentives aimed at spurring the construction of inexpensive new 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 homeless policies are consistent with a wholly different approach, one that suggests stabilized, permanent housing should be made available only after certain treatment benchmarks are met, experts say.

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

The Trump and Harris campaigns declined to make representatives available for an interview, but the Trump campaign provided a statement listing policies also designed to spur new construction and help home buyers, and the Harris campaign referred questions to a Biden administration policy adviser who provided a list of administration policies designed to reduce homelessness.

Some advocates worry what would happen to the programs they rely upon if Trump wins a second term. There are about 10,000 units across the state that provide supportive housing, many of which receive HUD funding under housing first policies, said Joyce Tavon, chief executive officer 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 homelessness czar in the waning days of his administration, compared the housing first approach, which became national policy under the Obama administration, to awarding a Pell Grant with unlimited money to a college student without requiring they attend class, or have a high GPA or “a goal or a program you’re working toward.”

“They started giving away free housing with no accountability and no treatment plan at all,” said Marbut, who is a senior fellow of Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty, a Seattle-based, conservative, free-market think tank, and has been in regular contact with the campaign. “It hasn’t worked.”

Not so, said Jeff Olivet, who succeeded Marbut as executive director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates the efforts by the executive branch 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 out of homelessness,” Olivet said.

In the 1990s, the Clinton administration joined Republicans in pushing policies designed to increase household self-sufficiency and minimize dependence on government programs, such as job training as a condition for housing vouchers.

Housing first grew out of experimentation that followed a realization those approaches weren’t working, said Watts. One systematic review of 26 studies comparing the two approaches found housing first programs decreased homelessness rates by 88 percent and improved housing stability by 41 percent, compared to treatment first models, according to researchers from 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, yet saw the number of homeless and unsheltered in the state surge 47 percent between 2015 and 2019.

The stakes for Massachusetts have only continued to grow.

“I’ve been working on this issue 25 years, and I have never ever seen as many people living in their cars, living in tents,” said Robyn Frost, executive director at the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless. “They can’t get into family shelters. They can’t get into individual shelters because they’re all full. It’s an avalanche.”

A surge in migrant families is partially to blame. But inflation and a shortage of affordable housing have also driven thousands of families to the brink. They now account for roughly half of the families who need emergency shelter, said Kelly Turley, associate director of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless.

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

Adam Piore can be reached at adam.piore@globe.com.