07/25/2025
The Trump administration’s new executive order on “ending vagrancy and restoring order” is just more of the same we’ve seen for generations: pushing needy and often unhoused people out of one area and around a given region with zero meaningful or specific plan, or follow through, to give them services or resources that could get them off the streets and into a safer place.
Lock them up, harass them, drive them away, etc. has been the stated or enacted policy of the vast majority of governments throughout the United States within the lifetimes of most Americans currently alive. It has not reduced houselessness. In fact, it keeps growing, reaching a fever pitch during the eviction crisis of 2020 and 2021 COVID.
What reduces— even virtually eliminates— houselessness is giving people houses, or safe places to live, with safe roofs over their heads, with consistent, determined and robust wraparound services to treat mental health, drug addiction and other ills. Then, and only then, can these troubled people even begin to recover their lives.
Housing-first solutions are some of the few ways state and local governments have done anything to move the needle in humane and productive ways to reduce homelessness significantly. This process is immensely complicated, and to eradicate houselessness will take a societal and political undertaking heretofore unseen. No two unhoused people have the same exact problems or needs. But the very first step is actually relatively simple: give them places to live.
Food Not Bombs Tallahassee, along with Humanists of Tallahassee, will continue to soldier on in providing a small respite to the people we serve. This is out of compassion to the needy and spite toward the cruel policy agendas and discompassionate attitudes that the Trump administration, liberal big-city governments and many everyday people, who all seem to think that doing more of the same of what’s come before will change anything for the better.
