A leading affordable-housing advocate warned this week that the U.S. has reached a “tipping point” in its treatment of people experiencing homelessness, with rhetoric increasingly veering toward hostility, vilification, victim blaming and even violence.
“Like so many of you who have called, emailed, or texted me in recent days and weeks, I’ve never been as concerned about the trajectory of our country’s response to homelessness as I am today,” Diane Yentel, the president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said in an email Wednesday to members, supporters and partners of the coalition.
“We are seemingly further away than ever from implementing evidence-based solutions at scale, and people experiencing homelessness are now increasingly being attacked, harmed, and even killed,” she added.
Yentel’s statement came a little more than a week after Daniel Penny, a 24-year-old U.S. Marine Corps veteran, was seen on video putting Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old former Michael Jackson impersonator who was unhoused, in a fatal chokehold while riding the New York City subway.
Penny surrendered to police Friday, 11 days after the killing and one day after the Manhattan district attorney’s office said it would charge him with second-degree manslaughter, the New York Times reported. Penny’s attorneys said Thursday that they were confident he would be “fully absolved of any wrongdoing” after all the facts were known, according to the paper. A representative for the attorneys working with Neely’s family declined to comment, though the attorneys said in a statement last week that Penny needed to be in prison.
Read more: Marine Corps veteran whose chokehold on New York subway rider led to death turns himself in to NYPD
The law office representing Penny did not immediately return MarketWatch’s request for comment. Attorneys for Penny have previously said he didn’t intend to harm or kill Neely, who they alleged was “aggressively threatening” Penny and other passengers, while also highlighting Neely’s history of mental illness, according to NBC News.
Reports have indicated that Neely didn’t physically attack anyone, and a freelance journalist who recorded a video of the incident has said Neely didn’t appear to want to hurt people, though he was yelling that he was “fed up,” in need of food and drink, and “ready to die,” according to the New York Daily News.
“Last week, Jordan Neely, an unhoused Black man in New York City, was killed on a crowded subway for shouting about his hunger, thirst, and exhaustion,” Yentel said in her email. “Several bystanders assisted in the killing, while others cheered or recorded the violence. Nobody intervened.”
The subway killing heightened what was already a charged conversation on homelessness nationwide. Nearly 600,000 people were homeless in the U.S. as of January 2022, and two out of every five of those people were considered unsheltered, meaning they sleep somewhere “not meant for human habitation,” like in a car or on the street, according to federal data.
Meanwhile, no state or major metropolitan area has enough affordable-housing supply to shelter all renters with extremely low incomes, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. As a result, many advocates for unhoused people have long urged compassion and a “housing first” approach — or prioritizing permanent housing before people can begin to address other concerns, like employment or substance abuse — for those forced into homelessness or unable to escape it due to a lack of cheap places to live.
From the archives (February 2020): Why hospitals and insurers are paying for housing for these patients
Yet others who see homelessness less as a result of housing and more as a result of mental illness, drug use or societal disorder have advocated for punishments, institutionalization and “sweeps,” or efforts to remove homeless people from public spaces where they’re camping. Former President Donald Trump, for example, said in a video for his reelection campaign last month that he would ban outdoor camping and give homeless people the option to move into tent cities with doctors and social workers, saying cities were currently “making many suffer for the whims of a deeply unwell few.”
“And they are unwell, indeed,” Trump continued in the video posted to his social-media platform, Truth Social. “The homeless have no right to turn every park and sidewalk into a place for them to squat and do drugs.”
Yentel said in her message to coalition members and supporters Wednesday that there was a “dominant public narrative” blaming homelessness on individuals “rather than the obvious structural failings that have led to their homelessness.” She expressed concern about the increased “voices of fear and hostility toward unhoused people,” and said such backlash had turned “increasingly dangerous.”
Neely wasn’t even the only unhoused person to be killed this month, she noted: A former UC Davis student was arrested in Davis, Calif., in early May after police accused him of killing a college senior and a local homeless man, as well as stabbing a homeless woman through her tent. (The suspect pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.)
Yentel also cited a Sunday incident in which a man also plowed a car into a group of people — killing eight and wounding 10 — by a Brownsville, Texas, shelter that serves homeless people and migrants. The man accused of driving the car has since been charged with eight counts of manslaughter, according to CNN. Authorities are still investigating whether the crash was intentional, reports say.
“Each of these killers must be held accountable, and the killing of people without homes must be treated with as much urgency as that of housed people,” Yentel said. “At the same time, we must recognize that these appalling killings were not random acts of violence. They occurred in an environment plagued by pervasive, ongoing, structural racism and marked by increasingly hateful rhetoric against the unhoused. They were enabled by policymakers who criminalize people for being without homes, by media that stoke fear to generate clicks, by those who manipulate data to advance an ideological agenda, and by our own communities, when they oppose homeless shelters or affordable housing in our neighborhoods.”
Homelessness is a solvable crisis, Yentel added. She urged affordable-housing supporters to “be resolute in our commitment to achieve housing justice” amid backlash against homeless people.
“By demanding better of us all, and by advancing an aligned, concerted approach — one that values our shared humanity, leads with evidence, centers impacted people, works towards racial justice, and funds solutions at the scale needed — we can get our country back on track to ending homelessness, once and for all,” Yentel said.
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