This summer, President Trump signed an executive order to end crime and homelessness on America’s streets. The order removes funding for government programs that address Housing First models of homelessness, and urges state and local governments to place people with mental illness or drug use disorders into treatment facilities.
Solomon Burchfield is executive director of New Beginnings, a nonprofit transitional housing community. He spoke with reporter Daniel Caruth last week and said this order will only make homelessness worse.
Solomon Burchfield: Yeah, it felt like a punch in the gut because they had this press conference and they identified homelessness as a public safety emergency. They’re partly right. It is an emergency, but it’s an emergency about housing. You know, the country is about 5 million homes short. It’s an emergency about mental health care and how our health insurance systems are leaving millions of people without insurance and even those that have insurance, there’s big gaps. So it is an emergency. But it doesn’t make sense to have our response be a crackdown. You know, criminalizing people who need housing, criminalizing people who need mental health care. So that’s kind of why it felt like a punch in the gut to me.
Daniel Caruth: Reading through that order, it makes it seem like a lot of the measures are punitive, and a lot of them address homelessness only from mental health or substance abuse issues. So it makes it seem like everyone who is homeless either has a mental health issue or is addicted to drugs. What does that say? I think, you know, when it comes to homelessness, it’s not one single issue that makes someone homeless. There are so many other issues that are involved. Can you sort of break down for people who don’t understand that, how someone can get in that situation and how varied it is?
Burchfield: That’s the one thing I wish everyone better understood about homelessness. We try to think of homelessness in really two categories.There’s people who are going through a situation of homelessness, and usually those folks, if you rewind their lives a few months, they had things together. You know, they were working, they had a home, they had their health, they had their relationships. They may have been living on the edge. And then life threw them a curveball. And that was the precipitating event that led to sleeping in my car or going to the emergency shelter. So situational homelessness is actually the majority of people who go through homelessness. It’s mostly an economic problem. You know, if wages stay flat and the cost of living goes up, it puts pressure on households to make ends meet. And then when there’s a crisis in life, they may fall off the edge. And so that’s actually the majority of people going through homelessness. There is a second category of people going through homelessness that we call chronic homelessness. And here it’s not just a temporary situation. It’s not people that just need a quick hand up. It is folks who’ve been trapped in homelessness for years and years. And usually there are some serious health issues involved — some mental illness, addiction challenges, lifelong trauma. Often this is part of the story for people who get trapped in chronic homelessness. And that’s a smaller percentage of the homeless population. But it’s also the group of people who are more costly on community systems. So when we think about how hospitals are part of responding, or jails and policing are part of responding to homelessness, the folks who are trapped for many years in homelessness and have serious support needs end up being 20 percent of the population, but probably 80 percent of the costs on our communities.
Caruth: With this executive order and a lot of the measures we’re seeing across the country— even here in Fayetteville, we saw a sweep of an encampment not that long ago — a lot of addressing homelessness comes as a punitive measure. It’s like criminalizing it. Can you talk a little bit about why that model doesn’t always work and why it’s maybe misguided? What about that do people get wrong?
Burchfield: Yeah. It’s a persistent narrative that I wish we’d let go of, that folks without housing are trying to defy our laws or ruin our public spaces. It’s just not true. It’s people who are struggling and need support. So these punitive approaches end up destabilizing people’s lives, uprooting them. You can’t camp here, you got to move. And then you can’t camp there, you got to move again. In that process, often people lose track of their possessions like birth certificates or IDs. They get separated from friends that have been a critical part of their support while they’re struggling with homelessness. And there’s just that mental depression, that fear and panic. I had someone sit in my office yesterday who relayed that the police had come and told him he had to not camp where he’s camping. And he just said, 'There is no legal place for me to go. So where am I supposed to go?' The punitive approaches just see people through the wrong lens. This executive order also targets what’s called Housing First approaches to ending homelessness. That’s one of the disheartening things in the executive order. It’s not yet in the budget of the Veterans Administration or in HUD. So it’s not clear yet how that’s all going to unfold. But if I take the executive order at face value, it says that Housing First approaches don’t work. Housing First is an approach to addressing homelessness that is about housing stability and recovery for people who are homeless but also struggle with mental health or addiction issues. It began in the 1990s with a doctor named Sam Tsemberis, who was a psychologist helping bring homeless folks into the hospital, often against their will, to get treatment and then release them. But he saw that basically he released them back to the street, and they just repeated that same cycle over and over again. So Housing First was a new approach that said, why don’t we intervene with affordable housing? And then from that place of safety and security, offer the individuals voluntary support services. This approach is really proven to work. The Veterans Affairs Administration uses this approach and has cut veteran homelessness in half in the last 15 years. And if we found funding to scale up Housing First programs for as many people who are chronically homeless, we would see huge reductions. So to see the executive order pivot away from that — these are strategies that are both inhumane and extremely expensive. Daily hospital stay is something like $1,000 to $2,000 a day. Sitting in a jail is something like $100.
Caruth: We’ve been trying to address homelessness in a myriad of ways for a long time, but it seems like it continues to go up year over year. What are these root issues? What are we missing? What needs to happen that can address this issue and also maintain people’s dignity in a way that is equitable and humane?
Burchfield: Right. There are some root causes that are really driving the increase in homelessness, which, by the way, we set records again this year in 2025 for both the highest number of homeless folks we counted across the nation in January and the fastest percentage increase. So it is at crisis levels. At the root of this social problem is that we are seeing a shortage of homes, which drives up the cost of the homes that do exist; the breakdown in cost of living versus wages; the deficiencies in our health insurance system; and systemic racism. We look at historical forces and social forces that organize homelessness. Why is there four times higher homeless rates in Native American communities and in Black communities? If we went back to that and addressed those root causes, we would see serious reductions in homelessness. But if we keep just putting Band-Aids, we will end up continuing to be frustrated.
Caruth: Here in Northwest Arkansas, in Fayetteville, what is the political will around here to address homelessness? How is it going right now, what is the temperature here? Has this order changed any of that?
Burchfield: I think the order has not yet been something that’s really implemented in the funding for homeless service provision. But I think our local community tracks with the national state of affairs. We have a lot of great organizations who collaborate, who do use some best practice programs to lift people out of homelessness. But at the same time, more people are entering homelessness than we can exit from homelessness. This executive order and changes that may be coming through the VA and HUD budgets is something that is mostly out of our control, but we are the ones that can decide how we will respond here in northwest Arkansas. There’s an obligation for city and county governments to promote policies that will generate new housing and provide financing for the kind of housing with support that markets really can’t produce, so that chronically homeless people have homes and support that they need to be stable. And I think we need our large, wealthy foundations whose patrons will benefit from some enormous tax breaks coming their way to start showing up now for housing solutions. Because trails and art murals are really nice, but there is nothing more beautiful than a community abundant with affordable homes.
Caruth: When it comes to putting in those policies, what has been the pushback, especially when it comes to housing measures? What has been stopping us from putting some of those into place?
Burchfield: In the weeds of the policies, I think we are today prisoners of a lot of decisions that were made about how we will use our land in the city, decisions that were made 50 and 60 years ago about you can only build single-family homes on three-quarters of the land in Fayetteville and in most cities. Now, Rogers has been really progressive in reforming their land use policies so that you’re not stuck only building single-family homes in your city. But those kinds of policy changes, I think, will help unleash the market to do what it can and should do, which is meet the demand for more housing in our region in responsible ways that work together with transportation and make life more affordable. So those kind of policy shifts, I think, are really happening, actually. There are leaders who are really focused on shifting toward more pro-housing policies. And then we have to be honest about what the market is not going to solve. Because I work with folks who live on a disability check of $900 a month. So tell me, where are developers going to build apartments that rent at $200, $300, $400 a month? That’s not happening. And so if we want below-market rate rental units, we have to find non-market financing. Looking at housing bonds, city and county investments, donating land, helping facilitate the production of housing that comes with support. And each unit we build of supportive housing, that’s a person who was chronically homeless who could now be stable and contribute to our community. So there’s a whole toolbox full of policy prescriptions. But I do think that overall we do need that political will, that this is a problem we can solve. And we as citizens need to be wind in the sails of public servants who are willing to tackle these hard problems.
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