Christmas gives many a much needed break-including social services and shelters, but people who need those services don’t get a break for the holidays.
Take a moment to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Maybe they don’t have a meal, a roof or someone else to spend Christmas with.
“It’s essential to know that not everyone has those comonalities” said Chasit Higgins of Catholic Charities’ Dorothy Day Place Campus in St. Paul, Minnesota.
In the midst of winter, Higgins says some folks sleep outside. On Christmas, Catholic Charities’ Dorothy Day Place Campus fills those needs with a roof for warmth, food for an empty stomach and an invitation to everyone under the sun.
“There’s people,” said Neal of Saint Paul. “I can go home and be by myself or be amongst people.”
Neal sat down with WCCO on Thursday to share part of his story.
“Holidays don’t mean a lot when you’re by yourself, but when you’re amongst people, you get negative energy, but you also get more positive energy,” he said.
Catholic Charities relied on volunteers to serve the more than 300 guests who received a Christmas Day meal.
A person holds a meal at Catholic Charities’ Dorothy Day Residence in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Dec. 25, 2025.
WCCO
Some helped with the cooking, others helped with the serving and several people brought their musical talents to the table.
“I have seen a higher number of individuals. I don’t know why,” said Higgins. “But we do have a bit of a population uptick in our population coming through here.”
Neal added, “No matter where we are in life or the route we choose to take, there’s always ups and downs,” said Neal.
He added that it’s how you persevere that is the key.
“Trying to think positive, trying to make positive steps. I stumble and fall and try to get up,” Neal told WCCO.
Catholic Charities says they’re here for anyone who needs help. Learn more here.
The future of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County’s homeless are up in the air following a month of political uncertainties and policy shifts in Washington, D.C.
Cleveland, through its Home For Every Neighbor program, has housed 188 people since the initiative kicked off in 2024, rapidly housing those on the street by clearing hurdles to traditional housing. Thirty have “graduated” from the program, health director David Margolius told Scene this week, including five who’ve secured permanent housing vouchers—free rent—with Cuyahoga County’s Emerald Development and Economic Network.
EDEN, meanwhile, currently serves 2,700 households,.
But Trump’s hardheaded approach to the less fortunate, shown in a July executive order that vilifies housing-first, has now officially seeped into the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development. Since November, the winds have shifted from a Biden-era get-‘em-housed mentality to one pinning “personal accountability” on America’s homeless, spelling HUD’s desire to greatly curtail federal dollars spent on thousands of nonprofits across the country serving the unhoused population.
While the overall budget for HUD’s contributions won’t change much, and in fact will grow slightly, cuts are coming to any programs that are focused on permanent housing. Sixty percent in fact. Which means EDEN could go from serving those 2,700 households to just over 550.
“Our philosophy for addressing the homelessness crisis will now define success not by dollars spent or housing units filled,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said, “but by how many people achieve long-term self-sufficiency and recovery.”
Turner’s perspective on how to solve such a crisis now seems at odds with those leading Cleveland’s and the county’s efforts to keep people off the street and in stable housing. Local advocates are doubtful as to whether programs like HFEN or EDEN will be as effective without federal assistance.
Not to mention what the redirected federal assistance and Trump’s own words mistakenly say about the issue.
“I think it’s kind of like the classic ‘It’s the individual’s fault that they’re homeless,’” Chris Knestrick, the director of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, told Scene.
A person can be denied housing for a myriad of reasons: they are a survivor of domestic violence; they have a poor credit score; they have a history of evictions; they have mental health issues; they have a criminal record; they have a disability; their landlord isn’t okay with their lifestyle.
Robert Lucas, a beneficiary of Home For Every Neighbor, in his apartment in Old Brooklyn. Lucas is currently living on a voucher from the county’s Emerald Development and Economic Network program. Credit: Mark Oprea
All common complaints amongst HFEN applicants Knestrick says are ignored by HUD’s new policy.
“It doesn’t recognize any of those,” he said. “It just says that people have done something wrong, that’s why they’re experiencing homelessness.”
Such a mentality shift means that HFEN’s chiefs, like Margolius, are figuring out how they can clarify to HUD that their program is transitional housing after all: it’s meant to better Clevelanders’ lives for the year it supplies them with free rent.
And with finding housing afterward, a prospect that is looking worse heading into 2026.
Along with the potential HUD cut, the EDEN program is set to lose about a fifth of its funding from the county after its biennial budget bill was passed earlier this month.
“It is not an easy time for us,” Gimmel said. “I’ve been here 30 years and I’ve never seen an environment like this.” (Gimmel didn’t respond to a request for additional comment.)
As for when HUD will certify any cuts, it’s unclear.
But Cleveland has received donations from Rocket Mortgage’s Community Fund and from the Old Stone Church downtown to help offset any drop in HUD funding, Margolius told Scene. He hopes to receive more “foundational grants” to match the $2 million City Council usually budgets annually in rent payments for those 200 or so people.
In other words, Cleveland will likely find a way to sustain Home for Every Neighbor despite whatever happens in Washington.
“That’s been the beauty of our program,” Margolius said. “While you’re still on that wait list, you know, we will make sure that you’re not living outside.”
“We’re making sure that you’re in an apartment that we’re going to pay for,” he added. “And we’ll have case management, help make your appointments, help you get a state ID. Help you get through all the bureaucratic hurdles that are so hard.”
Kimberly Miller has worked with people on Denver’s streets for years, so she was ready for a somber evening when she arrived at the City and County Building Sunday night. It was the winter solstice — the longest night of the year — when the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless (CCH) held its 36th-annual vigil for people who died this year without stable housing.
She did not expect that it would feel so personal. Before the program began, she spied the name of someone she knew written on one of the 276 luminaries glowing on the stone steps. It was a woman she’d once helped, then lost touch with. She was crushed to find out like this that the woman had died.
“Oh my God. Trena. Trena’s gone,” she remembered thinking. “These are our people. These are our neighbors. And it makes my heart so heavy.”
Each solstice, service providers read the names of people who died in homelessness over the last year.
The Coalition’s list for 2025’s remembrance was shorter than the last, marking a second decline since the nonprofit recorded a record 311 deaths in 2023. It’s a positive sign for a city that has struggled to address visible poverty for decades. Still, many are worried that momentum might run out next year.
A luminary for Trena Rossman sits on the steps of Denver’s City and County Building during the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless’ 36th-annual vigil for people who died in housing insecurity. Dec. 21, 2025.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Pastor Libbie Reinking, of Wheat Ridge’s Holy Cross Lutheran Church, kneels before a luminary made for man she knew, during the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless’ 36th-annual vigil for people who died in homelessness. Dec. 21, 2025.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
The trend was a silver lining around a somber event.
As each name was read Sunday night, the crowd responded together: “We will remember.”
Cathy Alderman, spokesperson and policy lead for CCH, said the event has always been about providing last rites to people who didn’t get them.
“Many of these people won’t otherwise have a ceremony in their honor, and so we do it together as a community,” she said.
Data Source: Colorado Coalition for the Homeless
Alderman said CCH generates its numbers each year with help from Denver’s Office of the Medical Examiner, which cross references names with a database of services for homelessness. Then, CCH canvasses other service providers to find cases that didn’t make the medical examiner’s list. CCH’s numbers are always higher than the city’s official count.
Though this second drop in recorded deaths was good news, numbers are still well above pre-COVID levels.
But Alderman said Mayor Mike Johnston’s work to address visible poverty, namely opening hotels as shelters, likely played into the reversal.
“The non-congregate shelter sites have brought more people inside, and that is a good thing. And I do think that that has contributed to fewer deaths outside,” she said. “But what I think that also screams to us is that we can’t now stop providing those spaces, or roll back the ability to provide those spaces, by not providing the funding and the support to the providers.”
The city has been touting successes this year, but many are uneasy about the future.
Early this year, Mayor Johnston took credit for numbers that claimed an unprecedented drop in unsheltered homelessness, even though housing insecurity grew overall. His administration celebrated the completion of new affordable apartments. They said nobody died “as a result of cold weather exposure” last winter, which spokesperson Jon Ewing said was the first time that’s been recorded in Denver.
Then again, Alderman said on Sunday: “Look at all the names here.”
Cold weather was likely a contributing factor to the deaths remembered here, she said, even if it wasn’t listed as the official cause. And though the city has made strides in a positive direction, economic pressures are sure to complicate things next year.
People gather at Denver’s City and County Building for the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless’ 36th-annual vigil for people who died in homelessness. Dec. 21, 2025.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
People gather at Denver’s City and County Building for the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless’ 36th-annual vigil for people who died in homelessness. Dec. 21, 2025.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
“We’re also very concerned about the state budget, because there are going to be significant gaps,” Alderman added.
Jessica Ehinger, CEO of the Colorado Village Collaborative, whose tiny home villages inspired Johnston’s plans, said her organization is preparing for less capacity next year. One of her villages will close next spring because of cuts in Denver’s budget. Her concerns about the future have tempered her perspective on any positive progress.
“It is absolutely very frustrating. I think that’s the message that we’ve really been trying to relay to the city, to funders, that I don’t think we’re at a point to make a victory lap,” she said before the vigil began on Sunday. “I would love to imagine that we’re going to put ourselves out of business the next few years, but again, with everything that’s happening, especially at a federal level, it’s really hard to imagine that happening.”
Meanwhile, Johnston’s critics are growing louder.
Kimberly Miller met Trena, the woman whose name was read into the dusk on Sunday, two years ago in a blizzard. Trena and her partner, Ray, were struggling to find somewhere warm to sleep when Miller and other volunteers arrived with a van.
Miller said police showed up next and arrested Ray.
“They have him in the cop car, and he’s her caregiver. She’s in a wheelchair. Meanwhile it’s a snowstorm and I have her in my car,” she remembered. “What am I going to do?”
Hundreds of quilts line Bannock Street in front of Denver’s City and County Building, organized by the Homeless Remembrance Blanket Project. Dec. 21, 2025.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Hundreds of quilts line Bannock Street in front of Denver’s City and County Building, organized by the Homeless Remembrance Blanket Project. Dec. 21, 2025.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Miller is a volunteer with Mutual Aid Monday, which feeds people outside of city hall each week. As the city works to prevent tent encampments from appearing, she said advocates like her have seen people scatter instead to darker corners of the city. People are hiding, she said, and she worries that will cause more outdoor deaths.
“They’re dispersed and driven more into the margins and the shadows. And then with that comes a full on hardcore enforcement of the camping ban, so that people can not even be on the sidewalk with a blanket or a tarp, let alone a tent,” she said. “I feel like it’s almost back to square one, where we were with Mayor Hancock in some ways.”
So there was some irony when Colorado Coalition for the Homeless CEO Britta Fisher invited anyone who needed warmth to grab a free blanket on Sunday night. CCH partnered with the Homeless Remembrance Blanket Project this year, who laid out over 600 hand-made quilts on Bannock Street as a symbol of the country’s ongoing housing crisis.
“They’re just going to get taken away,” someone in the crowd said.
When Fisher thanked the city for its partnership in helping to address homelessness, there were audible groans and boos from the crowd.
A sign left at the foot of Denver’s City and County Building, during the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless’ 36th-annual vigil for people who died in homelessness, reads, “They didn’t die — they were failed.” Dec. 21, 2025.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Someone dropped protest signs in front of the luminaries. One read, “They didn’t die — they were failed.”
Still, when it came time to read the names, everyone in the crowd joined in to repeat “we will remember” together. As the city reckons with existential pressures and internal division, Miller said it’s as important as ever to center the humanity embedded in these debates.
“Behind every name is a life and a story,” she said. “It makes me more determined than ever to fight for justice for people that are forced to be on the streets.”
Prince William and his eldest son, Prince George, put on aprons to help make Christmas lunch at a homeless shelter, a charity that the Prince of Wales first visited as a child with his mother, the late Princess Diana.The royal father and son were seen decorating a Christmas tree and helping with meal preparations in the kitchen at The Passage in central London, in a video posted to William’s YouTube account on Saturday.“Proud to join volunteers and staff at The Passage in preparing Christmas lunch – this year with another pair of helping hands,” read a post on the social media account of William and his wife, Princess Catherine.William is the royal patron of The Passage, which he first visited when he was 11 with his mother, Diana. The heir to the throne has visited the charity in recent years, but this was the first time George, 12, joined him.The young royal signed his name in a book on the same page that Diana and William had written their names 32 years ago, in December 1993.William was shown pouring Brussels sprouts onto an oven tray, while George helped set out Yorkshire puddings and set a long table for dozens of attendees.William launched his Homewards project in 2023 to tackle homelessness.
LONDON —
Prince William and his eldest son, Prince George, put on aprons to help make Christmas lunch at a homeless shelter, a charity that the Prince of Wales first visited as a child with his mother, the late Princess Diana.
The royal father and son were seen decorating a Christmas tree and helping with meal preparations in the kitchen at The Passage in central London, in a video posted to William’s YouTube account on Saturday.
“Proud to join volunteers and staff at The Passage in preparing Christmas lunch – this year with another pair of helping hands,” read a post on the social media account of William and his wife, Princess Catherine.
William is the royal patron of The Passage, which he first visited when he was 11 with his mother, Diana. The heir to the throne has visited the charity in recent years, but this was the first time George, 12, joined him.
The young royal signed his name in a book on the same page that Diana and William had written their names 32 years ago, in December 1993.
William was shown pouring Brussels sprouts onto an oven tray, while George helped set out Yorkshire puddings and set a long table for dozens of attendees.
William launched his Homewards project in 2023 to tackle homelessness.
WASHINGTON — Every night, Abdullah Ibrahim retreats from the streets into a wooded stretch along the Potomac River.
As night falls and temperatures drop, he erects a tent and builds a fire beneath a canopy of pine, hemlock, and cedar trees.
He evades authorities by rotating use of three tents of different colors at three campsites. As day breaks, he dismantles his shelter, rolls up his belongings, and hides them for the next night. “They don’t see you if you’re in the woods,” the 32-year-old said. “But make sure it’s broken down by morning or they’ll find you.”
During the day, he wanders, stopping at a public library to warm up or a soup kitchen to eat. What’s important is to not draw attention to himself for being homeless.
“Police want us out of the way,” he said, dressed in a gray jacket and carrying none of his possessions. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
Abdullah Ibrahim is homeless on the streets of Washington, D.C. He hides his tent nightly to avoid authorities conducting encampment sweeps.
Angela Hart/KFF Health News
Ibrahim has been deliberate about blending in since August, when President Trump placed the district’s police under federal control and ordered National Guard soldiers to patrol its streets. The president also ordered homeless people to leave immediately. “There will be no ‘MR. NICE GUY,’” he posted.
The Trump administration says encampment sweeps have reduced the visibility of homelessness, thereby enhancing the city. “There is no disputing that Washington, DC is a safer, cleaner, and more beautiful city thanks to President Trump’s historic actions to restore the nation’s capital,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said.
While there may appear to be fewer homeless people in the nation’s capital now, they have not disappeared.
In interviews, homeless people said they are in a constant shuffle, hiding in plain sight. During the day, they stay on the move, grabbing meals at soup kitchens and resting on occasion in public libraries, on park benches, or at bus stops. At night, many unsheltered people bed down in business doorways, on park sidewalks, and on church stoops. Some ride the bus all night, while a few shelter in emergency rooms. Others find respite in the woods or flee to suburbs in Virginia or Maryland.
There are about 5,100 homeless people in Washington, D.C., including in temporary shelters, according to an early-2025 homelessness tally. After Mr. Trump ordered the crackdown on public homelessness, people living in makeshift communities scattered and are now living in the shadows. City officials estimated in August that nearly 700 homeless people were living outdoors without tents or other shelter.
As winter draws near, they are exposed to the elements and grow sicker as chronic ailments such as diabetes and heart disease go untreated. Street medicine providers say that, since the National Guard was deployed, they have faced enormous difficulty finding patients. Many caught up in sweeps have had their lifesaving medications thrown away, and they are more likely to miss medical appointments because they are constantly on the move. Street medicine providers say they can’t find their patients to deliver medication or transport them to medical appointments. The constant chaos can suck patients with mental illness and substance use deeper into drug and alcohol addiction, raising the risk of overdose.
Caseworkers report similar disruptions, saying as clients get lost, they break connections essential for obtaining housing documents, particularly IDs and Social Security cards.
District officials and health providers say this cascade will make homelessness worse, threatening public health and public safety and racking up enormous costs for the health care system.
“It was already hard locating people, but the federal presence just made it worse,” said Tobie Smith, a street medicine doctor and the executive director of Street Health D.C.
The homeless shuffle
Chris Jones was born and raised in Washington, D.C., but now is homeless, having been pushed out of his tent near the White House in the initial days of the federal homelessness crackdown. He said two of his tents were taken during sweeps. Now, sleeping on a sidewalk outside a church, he doesn’t bother trying to get another one. “Why? What’s the point? It’ll just get thrown away again.”
Chris Jones experienced the homelessness crackdown ordered by President Donald Trump in August 2025, when authorities swept through Washington, D.C., dismantling homeless encampments and evicting people from their tents.
Angela Hart/KFF Health News
Jones, 57, has a severe knee injury that prevents him from walking some days and said he was scheduled for a knee replacement in December. He said it’s important to stay where he is — he relies on a nearby drugstore to refill his medications for bipolar disorder, diabetes, and high blood pressure. When he’s hungry, he goes to a soup kitchen for a meal or tries to get a cheeseburger and a soda from a fast-food joint across the street.
It’s important for him to stay outside the church, he said, so his case manager can find him when a permanent housing slot opens up. If it gets too cold, he said, he will cross the street and sleep in the doorway of a business, which can provide a bit more shelter. He wants to get indoors, but for now, he waits.
Since taking control of Washington’s police force, the Trump administration has ratcheted up pressure on cities and counties across the nation to clear homeless encampments under threat of arrest, citation, or detention. It has ordered or threatened similar National Guard deployments in Los Angeles; Portland, Oregon; and other cities with large homeless populations.
Rogers, the White House spokesperson, said the president is maintaining National Guard and federal law enforcement presence in the nation’s capital “to ensure the long-term success of the federal operation.” Since March, city and federal officials have removed more than 130 homeless encampments, she said, though some local homelessness experts say that number could be inflated.
A shopping cart next to a tent in Washington, D.C.
Angela Hart/KFF Health News
The Supreme Court last year made it easier for elected officials and law enforcement to fine or arrest homeless people for living outside. Then, in July of this year, the president issued an executive order calling for a nationwide crackdown on urban camping, including a massive removal of people living outdoors and forced mental health or substance use treatment.
President Trump is also spearheading an overhaul of homelessness policy, moving to slash funding for permanent housing and services for homeless people. The move would limit the use of a long-standing federal policy known as “Housing First” that offers housing without mandating mental health or addiction treatment. The National Alliance to End Homelessness warns the move risks displacing at least 170,000 people in permanent supportive housing. The Department of Housing and Urban Development paused the plan on Dec. 8 to make revisions, which it “intends” to do, federal housing officials said.
City officials say they are complying with the Trump administration’s forceful campaign against homeless people sheltering outside. Pressured by the White House, local officials said they’ve gotten more aggressive in breaking up camps. Advocates for homeless people say some of the sweeps have been conducted at night and others with little or no notice to move. City leaders believe they could be done more compassionately by offering services and shelter.
“We’ve pivoted from the notion of allowing encampments if they didn’t violate public health or safety to a position of, ‘We don’t want you in the streets,’” said Wayne Turnage, deputy mayor for District of Columbia Health and Human Services, who oversees encampment cleanups. “It’s unsafe, it’s unhealthy, and it’s dangerous.” Yet he acknowledges the encampment sweeps can waste city resources as caseworkers and street medicine providers scramble to find their clients and patients.
Tobie Smith, a street medicine doctor with Street Health D.C., checks a homeless person with a stethoscope in November 2025.
Angela Hart/KFF Health News
Advocates say the Trump administration is inciting fear and mistrust between homeless people and those working to help them while wasting taxpayer dollars used to provide care and place people into housing. There are, however, far fewer tents and large-scale encampments visible to tourists and residents.
“People found safety in those communities and service providers could find them. Now there are people with guns and flashing lights dislocating folks experiencing homelessness without notice and just throwing stuff away,” said Jesse Rabinowitz, campaign and communications director for the National Homelessness Law Center.
District officials say some people have accepted emergency shelter. But even as the city works to connect people with services and expand shelter capacity, officials acknowledge there isn’t enough permanent housing or temporary beds for everyone.
And there will be fewer places for people living outside to go.
The city, in its fiscal year 2026 budget, concentrated its homelessness funding on families, funding 336 new permanent supportive housing vouchers. Yet it cut funding for temporary housing for both families and individuals and provided no new permanent supportive housing vouchers for individuals. That means fewer housing slots for single adults, who make up most of those wandering the streets. City officials said, however, that they have slotted 260 more permanent housing units for homeless individuals or families into their construction pipeline.
Worsening health care
The fallout is inundating local soup kitchens with demand, including Miriam’s Kitchen in Foggy Bottom. The local institution provides hot meals, housing assistance, and warm blankets to people in need.
Caseworkers say it’s becoming increasingly difficult to help clients secure IDs and other documents needed for housing and other social services.
“I’m looking everywhere, but I can’t find people,” said Cyria Knight, a case worker at Miriam’s Kitchen. “Most of my clients went to Virginia.”
It’s unclear how much of the district’s homeless population has fanned out to neighboring Virginia and Maryland communities. There were an estimated 9,700 homeless people in the region in January, months before the Trump crackdown. Four of six counties around Washington saw homelessness rise from 2024, while it fell 9% in the district.
“I’m not seeing my patients for a month or more, and then when I do, their chronic conditions are uncontrolled. They’ve been in and out of the ER, and they’re more likely to be hospitalized,” said Anna Graham, a street medicine nurse practitioner for Unity Health Care, a network of clinics in Washington. “It’s just setting us back.”
Graham’s team stations its mobile medical van outside Miriam’s Kitchen at dinnertime to better find patients.
Willie Taylor, 63, was figuring out where to sleep for the night after grabbing dinner from Miriam’s. He saw Graham to receive his medications for advanced lung disease, seizures, chronic pain, and other health disorders.
Willie Taylor, who lives outside and has difficulty walking, gets regular medical care for his chronic health conditions in a mobile medical van. Anna Graham, a street medicine nurse practitioner with Unity Health Care, helped him organize his bags of medication on a cold night in November 2025.
Angela Hart/KFF Health News
He has difficulty walking and needs a wheelchair, which is complicated because he doesn’t have a permanent address. Taylor and his medical providers say his previous wheelchairs have been stolen while he slept outdoors at night. He uses a shopping cart to keep him steady, walking around all day, until nightfall.
On a cold November night, Graham helped Taylor figure out his daily medications and checked his vitals. The team handed him a warm coat and hand warmers before sending him back outside.
After walking for about 45 minutes, he found a piece of park pavement where he could build a bed out of tarps and sleeping bags.
“My body can’t take this,” Taylor said, preparing to sleep. “There’s ice on the concrete. I’m in so much pain; it hurts so much worse when it’s cold.”
Homeless people die younger and cost the health care system more than housed people, largely because conditions go untreated on the streets, and when they do seek care, many go to the ER. Among Medicaid enrollees, homeless people have been estimated to incur $18,764 a year in spending, compared with $7,561 for other enrollees.
Over at the So Others Might Eat soup kitchen earlier that day, Tyree Kelley was finishing his breakfast of a sausage sandwich and hard-boiled eggs. He was considering going into a shelter. The streets were becoming too dangerous for someone like him, he said, referring to the police and National Guard presence. He was feeling the loss of an encampment community that would watch his back.
He’s been to the ER at least seven times this year to get care for a broken ankle he sustained falling off an electric scooter. The accident caused him to lose his job and health insurance as a garbageman, he said. His situation has caused him to sink deeper into a depression that began three years ago after his mother died, he said.
Then his father and sister died this year. He began to numb his pain with beer.
“You get so depressed, being out here,” said Kelley, 42. “It gets addictive. You start to not care about even changing your clothes.”
His depression also led him to seek out marijuana. Then he smoked a joint laced with fentanyl. The overdose sent him to the hospital for days.
“I actually died and came back,” he said, crediting other homeless people with administering naloxone and saving his life. “I need to get out of this, but I feel so stuck.”
A few blocks west of the White House sits a vacant plot of land that earlier this year held more than a dozen tents. Workers in the area sense what they don’t always see.
“I was here when this was all cleared. A bulldozer came in, and all their stuff was thrown in a garbage truck,” said Ray Szemborski, who works across the street from the now-empty lot. “People are still homeless. I still see them around underneath the bridge. Sometimes they’re at bus stops, sometimes just walking around. Their tents are gone but they’re still here.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
VATICAN CITY (AP) — In 2018, German artist Michael Triegel asked a homeless man in Rome to pose for a drawing, thinking that he would make an ideal model for St. Peter if he ever needed to paint the first pope.
Seven years on, the man’s likeness has gone on display in the Vatican, a reunion of sorts that came about by improbable chance.
This is a story both big and small, of art and faith and a human tragedy that caught the attention of Pope Francis: homeless German man Burkhard Scheffler died from the cold in 2022 on the edge of St. Peter’s Square.
The saga began in Germany, where Triegel in 2019 won a commission from the Protestant cathedral in the city of Naumburg to create a new central panel for its altar by Renaissance master Lucas Cranach the Elder. The panel would replace an original that was destroyed in 1541 during the Reformation, the upheavals that convulsed parts of Europe as Protestantism emerged in the 16th century.
Cranach’s two side panels survived. Triegel, a Catholic convert, leapt at the prospect of a “collaboration with Cranach.”
“They had the idea of completing this altar again, in what I find a beautiful gesture — not to undo these wounds from the 16th century but to mitigate them, to heal them,” he said in an interview in his studio in Leipzig.
St. Peter finds his place
Triegel planned out his painting and drew on that encounter he had in 2018 with the homeless man in Rome.
The man took his place as St. Peter among the saints gathered around Mary and the infant Jesus. Triegel said it was important that his subjects not be idealized archetypes but figures the viewer would feel were people “who could have something to do with me in the here and now, who are not just historic.”
St. Paul was based on a rabbi Triegel drew in Jerusalem, while Mary was modeled on the artist’s daughter. In the back was Protestant pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an opponent of the Nazis who was executed in 1945.
Triegel’s St. Peter is bearded, wears a red baseball cap and holds a small key — a reference to the biblical keys of heaven that are often associated with the saint.
The artist found his saint sitting at the entrance of a Roman church begging. As he was about to give the man money, Triegel recalled, “he looked at me and at that moment I had the feeling, if you ever need a Peter for a picture, he would be your Peter — that flowing beard and those alert eyes.”
Triegel asked the man in Italian whether he could draw and photograph him, and the man just nodded — “so I had no idea what nation he was from.”
Unbeknown to Triegel, his St. Peter had a rough time after their 2018 encounter.
The man, Burkhard Scheffler, had suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic. Under Italy’s harsh lockdowns, fewer and fewer people ventured out to provide handouts and food to those in need.
Scheffler was arrested in May 2020 after he apparently threatened someone with a knife for refusing to give him change. He was sentenced to three years in prison and released in late 2022.
Known to many in the Vatican, Scheffler had grown weak in prison. “His hands, which were always warm, had grown cold,” a Vatican journalist, Gudrun Sailer, would later recall.
On the night of Nov. 25, 2022, Scheffler died from the cold.
The pope honors the homeless
His death caught the attention of Francis, who had made a priority of caring for the homeless people around the Vatican. Under Francis’ watch, the Vatican installed showers, a barber shop and clinic in the colonnade of St. Peter’s. Francis’ almsgiver went out on cold nights to distribute sleeping bags.
Hours after Scheffler died, the Vatican spokesperson issued a statement saying he had been cared for by the Vatican’s charity office but “unfortunately, the rain and cold last night contributed to aggravate his fragile condition.” The spokesperson said Francis remembered in his prayer that day “Burkhard and all those who are forced to live without a home, in Rome and the world.”
Shortly after, Francis said in his weekly Sunday prayer: “I remember Burkhard Scheffler, who died three days ago under the colonnade of St. Peter’s Square: died of cold.”
And the pope returned to the theme in his Palm Sunday homily in April 2023. “I think of the German so-called street person, who died under the colonnade, alone and abandoned. He is Jesus for each of us. So many need our closeness, so many are abandoned.”
Francis asked that Scheffler be buried at the Teutonic cemetery on the grounds of the Vatican, alongside many German-speaking priests, pilgrims and notables. His simple tomb is in the small pilgrim section, in the shadow of St. Peter’s Basilica and just a few yards from the tomb of the real St. Peter.
Back in Germany, Triegel spent three years working on the altar for the Naumburg Cathedral, but a problem arose.
There were concerns that the Triegel-Cranach altar could cost the building its place on the UNESCO World Heritage List. UNESCO experts felt that it hindered the overall view of the west chapel, including famous statues. In July, regional authorities said the verdict was that the altar could stay — but would have to be shown elsewhere in the cathedral.
While that discussion played out, the idea arose of lending the altar to the Catholic chapel of the Teutonic pontifical college at the Vatican, a residence for German-speaking priests adjacent to the cemetery. The chapel has an altar of its own from the period of Cranach’s original.
Putting the pieces together
And it was then in the Teutonic chapel that a Vatican-affiliated art expert recognized Triegel’s St. Peter as none other than Scheffler.
“Someone said, ‘This guy with the red cap, we know him because he was living here at St. Peter’s Square,” said Monsignor Peter Klasvogt, rector of the Campo Santo Teutonico, as the complex is known. “That was a moment you never forget.”
The altar is now on a two-year loan to the chapel, a stone’s throw from Scheffler’s grave, itself just steps from the tomb of St. Peter.
When Triegel learned that his altar might end up next to Scheffler’s grave, he recalled thinking, “there can’t be so many coincidences.”
With the arrival of the painting, “the story gets another outcome and another exit, and this is so wonderful to see,” Klasvogt said. “We honor him with the altar, we honor him with his grave and we pray here in the church for him.”
After the argument about the altar’s placement in Germany, the coincidence also appeals to the artist.
“If this whole dispute was necessary for this picture to go to Rome and for this man to be seen again, for him to get a name, for … people to take notice of him and remember him, then this whole Naumburg project was really worth it for me,” Triegel said.
Geir Moulson and Kerstin Sopke reported from Leipzig, Germany. Pietro De Cristofaro contributed from Leipzig.
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Homeless individuals attempted to salvage their tent during a encampment sweep in Manhattan, Dec, 2022.
Photo by Dean Moses
The sight of homeless encampments on the streets of New York is truly tragic. No one should have to live out in the elements; the fact that people choose to live this way speaks volumes about the affordability and mental health crises in New York City.
While acknowledging that tragedy, however, we must also realize that homeless encampments themselves are a blight on the neighborhoods in which they exist. Unkempt and poorly constructed, they instill a sense of apathy and disorder while sending an unspoken message to the rest of the population that can be summed up in one word: apathy. Any sense of apathy is a danger to the rest of the city, and an invitation for crime and other problems.
Not long after taking office in 2023, Mayor Eric Adams sought to have homeless encampments disbanded. It was a controversial campaign, but a necessary one in order to reduce the sense of public apathy while also reaching out to people in desperate need of help.
On Tuesday, the incoming mayor said his administration would seek only to dismantle encampments as long as there are guaranteed indoor alternatives in shelters that are safe. Many homeless New Yorkers living on the streets have often said they do not feel safe in the city’s shelter system, and it’s going to be a challenge for Mamdani and his administration to shatter that perception.
Even if an ideal shelter isn’t immediately available, the city cannot afford to do nothing when it comes to homeless encampments set up under bridges or in public parks. Just ignoring or looking the other way sends a horrible message, not just to the city but to those in the encampments themselves, many of whom already feel undesired and unwanted.
Most New Yorkers recognize that many homeless people living on the streets and in our subway system suffer from mental illness. Often, those with extreme, untreated mental illness left to live on the street lash out against bystanders in a violent way. That risk grows if the city government looks the other way on street homelessness.
Mayor-elect Mamdani has made addressing mental illness a campaign promise, and he must fulfill it from Day 1 in order to ensure that the mentally ill are cared for, not left to fend for themselves while living in tents on the streets.
He must also advance programs to create supportive housing and genuinely safe shelters that turn no one away and give no one an excuse to live on the streets.
Business owners on Daytona’s beachside say safety concerns have become a daily challenge, and they are calling for help. Managers and employees along the busy corridor report frequent disruptions tied to people experiencing homelessness, including panhandling and confrontations with customers.Patricia Williams-Fay, manager of the Starlite Diner, said the issue is affecting business.”They come in at times, and they’ll harass our customers,” she said. “Panhandle in the building, panhandle out front. And as much as we would like to be able to give them whatever they want, we can’t afford to do that.”As concerns grow, the Beachside Redevelopment Board is weighing whether to add dedicated patrols throughout the district. In fact, the city’s Beachside Redevelopment Board, which acts like an advisory board, said there needs to be a change.Board members previously requested a quote from First Coast Security, the same company that patrols Beach Street. But because the Beachside area is significantly larger, foot patrols like those used on Beach Street are not practical. Instead, two alternative options were presented.Golf cart patrol costing $135,000 per year, operating Monday through Saturday, and vehicle patrol costing $148,000 annually, with the same schedule.The city is also exploring the option of hiring a detail police officer, though the cost has not yet been determined. Thomas Caffrey, a board member, said a foot patrol may not be necessary on Main Street, but the Beachside and A1A boardwalk corridor, especially the boardwalk, would benefit from one. Other board members said they support the golf cart option.Caffrey said the board will decide Wednesday night whether to recommend private security or a dedicated police officer, noting that private security would guarantee consistent coverage.”The hired security is nice because they are guaranteed to be there. If we get a police officer, there is a chance it could be called outside of the district.”The proposed patrol zone would begin on Seabreeze Boulevard and run south to International Speedway Boulevard.Business owners say increased security presence could make a major difference. Still, Williams-Fay said efforts should also focus on getting people experiencing homelessness the help they need.”I think that it would be a good idea that this force, whatever they put over here, can take them to the hospital to wherever they need to go to get help, you know,” she said.”The board’s recommendation will move next to city staff, and they’ll decide whether to present it to the Daytona Beach City Commission for further consideration.
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. —
Business owners on Daytona’s beachside say safety concerns have become a daily challenge, and they are calling for help.
Managers and employees along the busy corridor report frequent disruptions tied to people experiencing homelessness, including panhandling and confrontations with customers.
Patricia Williams-Fay, manager of the Starlite Diner, said the issue is affecting business.
“They come in at times, and they’ll harass our customers,” she said. “Panhandle in the building, panhandle out front. And as much as we would like to be able to give them whatever they want, we can’t afford to do that.”
As concerns grow, the Beachside Redevelopment Board is weighing whether to add dedicated patrols throughout the district.
In fact, the city’s Beachside Redevelopment Board, which acts like an advisory board, said there needs to be a change.
Board members previously requested a quote from First Coast Security, the same company that patrols Beach Street. But because the Beachside area is significantly larger, foot patrols like those used on Beach Street are not practical. Instead, two alternative options were presented.
Golf cart patrol costing $135,000 per year, operating Monday through Saturday, and vehicle patrol costing $148,000 annually, with the same schedule.
The city is also exploring the option of hiring a detail police officer, though the cost has not yet been determined.
Thomas Caffrey, a board member, said a foot patrol may not be necessary on Main Street, but the Beachside and A1A boardwalk corridor, especially the boardwalk, would benefit from one. Other board members said they support the golf cart option.
Caffrey said the board will decide Wednesday night whether to recommend private security or a dedicated police officer, noting that private security would guarantee consistent coverage.
“The hired security is nice because they are guaranteed to be there. If we get a police officer, there is a chance it could be called outside of the district.”
The proposed patrol zone would begin on Seabreeze Boulevard and run south to International Speedway Boulevard.
Business owners say increased security presence could make a major difference. Still, Williams-Fay said efforts should also focus on getting people experiencing homelessness the help they need.
“I think that it would be a good idea that this force, whatever they put over here, can take them to the hospital to wherever they need to go to get help, you know,” she said.”
The board’s recommendation will move next to city staff, and they’ll decide whether to present it to the Daytona Beach City Commission for further consideration.
Some might say the new Aurora Regional Navigation Campus that opened recently in a former 255-room hotel is undergirded by one of humanity’s seven deadly sins — envy.
The intent is to turn that feeling into a motivational force. For his part, Mayor Mike Coffman prefers to refer to the three-tiered residential system at the homeless navigation center as an “incentive-based program” — one that awards increasingly comfortable living quarters to those showing progress on their journey to self-sufficiency.
“The notion here is (that) different standards of living act as an incentive,” Coffman said in early November during a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the campus, which occupies a former Crowne Plaza Hotel at East 40th Avenue and Chambers Road. “The idea is to move up the tiers into much better living situations.”
Clients in the new facility, which opened its doors on Nov. 17, start at the bottom with a cot and a locker. They can eventually migrate to a hotel room, with a locking door and a private bathroom.
But that upgrade comes with a price.
“To get a room here, you have to be working full time,” Coffman said.
It’s an approach that the mayor says threads the needle between housing-first and work-first, the two prevailing strategies for addressing homelessness today. The housing-first approach emphasizes getting someone into a stable home before requiring employment, sobriety or treatment. A work-first setup conditions housing on a person finding work and seeking help with underlying mental health and addiction problems.
“We’re providing a continuum of services that starts with an emergency shelter,” said Jim Goebelbecker, the executive director of Advance Pathways.
Advance Pathways, the nonprofit group that ran the Aurora Resource Day Center before its recent closure, was chosen through a competitive bidding process to operate the new navigation campus in Aurora — with $2 million in annual help from the city. Goebelbecker said the tiered approach at the new facility “taps into a person’s motivation for change.”
The Aurora Regional Navigation Campus’ debut nearly completes a mission that has been in the works for more than three years. It is the fourth — and penultimate — metro Denver homeless navigation center to go online since the Colorado General Assembly passed House Bill 1378 in 2022.
The bill allocated American Rescue Plan Act dollars to stand up one central homeless navigation center. The plan has since shifted to five smaller centers, with locations in Aurora, Lakewood, Boulder, Denver and Englewood. The Colorado Department of Local Affairs in late 2023 approved $52 million for the centers. The final center, the Jefferson County Regional Navigation Campus in Lakewood, is undergoing renovations and will open next year.
Aurora’s center, with 640 beds across its three tiered spaces, is by far the largest of the five facilities.
Cathy Alderman, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, said the opening of Aurora’s navigation campus is “a really big deal.” Aside from serving its own clientele, she expects the center to send referrals to the coalition’s newly opened Sage Ridge Supportive Residential Community near Watkins, where people without stable housing go to address their substance-use disorders.
“A person can go to one place and get multiple needs met,” Alderman said, referring to the array of job, medical and addiction treatment services that give homeless navigation centers their name. “We are excited that the new campus is now up and running.”
The new Aurora Regional Navigation Campus, operated by Advance Pathways, photographed in Aurora on Thursday, Nov. 6, 2025. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)
‘How do I move up?’
Walking into the Aurora Regional Navigation Campus feels like walking into, well, a hotel.
The swimming pool was removed during renovation, as was a water fountain in the lobby. Everything else stayed, including beds, bedding, furniture — even a stash of bottled cocktail delights. But not the alcohol to go with it.
“They left everything, down to the forks and knives and a wall of maraschino cherries,” said Jessica Prosser, Aurora’s director of housing and community services, as she walked through the hotel’s industrial kitchen.
The kitchen, which was part of the $26.5 million sale of the Crowne Plaza Hotel to Aurora last year, was a godsend to an operation tasked with serving three meals a day to hundreds of people. The city spent another $13.5 million to renovate the building.
“To build a new commercial kitchen is a half-million dollars, easy,” Prosser said.
The layout of the navigation center was deliberate, she said. The hotel’s convention center space is now occupied by Tier I and Tier II housing. The first tier is made up of nearly 300 cots, divided by sex. There are lockers for personal belongings and shared bathrooms. Anyone is welcome.
On the other side of a nondescript wall is Tier II, which is composed of a grid of 114 compartmentalized, open-air cubicles with proper beds and lockable storage. The center assigns residents in this tier case managers to help them treat personal challenges and get on the path toward landing a job.
The Tier II “Courage” space, which offers overnight accommodation for people who are working on recovery, employment and housing pathways at the new Aurora Regional Navigation Campus in Aurora, on Thursday, Nov. 6, 2025. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)
Tier III residents live in the 255 hotel rooms. They must have a full-time job and are required to pay a third of their income to the program. Residents in this tier will typically remain at Advance Pathways for up to two years before they have the skills and stability to find housing on the outside, Goebelbecker said.
People living in the congregate tiers can house their dogs in a pet room, which can accommodate 40 canines. (No cats, gerbils or fish). The center also doesn’t accept children. Around 60 staff members, plus 10 contracted security personnel, will work at the facility 24/7.
Shining a bright light on the path forward and upward inside the facility — the windows of some of the coveted private rooms are fully visible from the lobby — is an “intentional design feature,” Prosser said.
“How do I move up?” she mused, stepping into the shoes of a resident eyeing the facility’s layout. “How do I get in there?”
The Tier III “Commitment” space, which provides private rooms that will serve people who are in the workforce and are building towards financial independence, seen at the new Aurora Regional Navigation Campus in Aurora on Thursday, Nov. 6, 2025. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)
It’s a system that demands something of the people using it, Coffman said, while at the same time providing the guidance and help that clients will need.
“This is not just maintaining people where they are — this is about moving people forward,” the mayor said.
The approach is familiar to Shantell Anderson, Advance Pathways’ program director. She told her life story during the ribbon-cutting ceremony, bringing tears to the eyes of some in the audience.
A native of Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood, Anderson fell in with the wrong crowd. She became pregnant at 15 and got hooked on cocaine. She spiraled into a life on the streets that resulted in her children being sent to an aunt for caretaking.
But through treatment and by intersecting with the right people, she recovered. She earned a nursing degree and worked at RecoveryWorks, a nonprofit organization that operated a day shelter in Lakewood, before taking the job at Advance Pathways.
The Tier I “Compassion” emergency shelter, which provides immediate short-term shelter for those in need at the new Aurora Regional Navigation Campus in Aurora on Thursday, Nov. 6, 2025. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)
“This is a system that honors people’s dignity,” Anderson said, her voice heavy with emotion.
In an interview, she said assuming the burden to improve her situation was critical to her transformation.
“I actually did that — no one gave me anything,” said Anderson, 48. “If it was handed to me, I didn’t appreciate it.”
How much responsibility to place on the people being helped by such programs is still a matter of intense debate by policymakers and advocates for homeless people. The housing-first approach favored by Denver and many big cities across the country is anchored in the idea that work or treatment requirements will result in many people falling through the cracks and staying outside, particularly those who face mental-health challenges.
The Bridge House in Englewood, one of the five metro area navigation centers, follows a “Ready to Work” model that is similar to that of the upper tiers of the Aurora Regional Navigation Campus.
Opened in May, the Bridge House has 69 beds. CEO Melissa Arguello-Green said the organization asks its clients (called trainees) to put skin in the game by landing a job with Bridge House’s help and then contributing a third of their paycheck as rent.
“We help them find employment through our agency so they can leave our agency,” she said. “We’re looking for self-sufficiency that will get people off system support.”
Arguello-Green said she would like to see more coordination between the metro’s five navigation centers, though she acknowledged it’s still in the early going.
“We’re missing that come-to-the-table collaboration,” she said.
Advance Pathways volunteer outreach coordinator Evan Brown organizes the clothing bank before the Aurora Regional Navigation Campus’ grand opening ceremony in Aurora on Thursday, Nov. 6, 2025. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)
Homeless numbers still rising
Shannon Gray, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, said her department had started convening quarterly in-person meetings across the locations.
“While each navigation campus is unique and reflects community-specific strategies, they are all a part of a regional effort to bring external partners together onsite to provide needed services and referrals,” Gray said. Together, they are “building towards a larger regional system to connect homeless households to a larger network of opportunities.”
The centers are permitted to “tailor their approach to their unique needs and vision,” she said. While Englewood and Aurora use a tiered system, Gray said, the other three centers don’t.
“It is important to understand that DOLA serves as a funder for these regional navigation campuses — we do not oversee their operation or maintenance,” she said.
Denver’s navigation center, which opened in December 2023 in a former DoubleTree Hotel on Quebec Street, offers 289 rooms to those in need, said Julia Marvin, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Housing Stability.
She called the facility an “integral component of Denver’s All in Mile High homelessness initiative,” Mayor Mike Johnston’s ambitious effort to appreciably reduce homelessness in the city. The center is just one of several former hotels and other shelter sites in the system.
Earlier this year, his administration cited annual count numbers showing a 45% decrease in the number of people sleeping on the streets since 2023 — dropping from 1,423 to 785 people, despite overall homelessness continuing to increase in that time.
In fact, homelessness numbers are still going in the wrong direction across the seven-county metro, per the latest Point-in-Time survey from the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative, which captures a one-night snapshot. The January count revealed that 10,774 people were homeless on the night of the survey, up from 9,977 in the count the year before.
Anderson, the Advance Pathways program director, said the new Aurora facility was opening at just the right time. Despite a recent calming in runaway home values in metro Denver, the $650,000 median price of a detached home in October still demarcated a housing market that was out of reach for many.
“I am excited,” Anderson said of the Aurora navigation campus’ debut. “I’m waiting for people to walk through the door and start the next chapter of their journey.”
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta sued the Trump Administration Tuesday seeking to stop a federal policy change that advocates say could force 170,000 formerly homeless Americans back on the streets or into shelters.
The lawsuit focuses on a federal program known as Continuum of Care that sends money to local governments and nonprofits to fight homelessness.
This month, the Trump Administration announced it was drastically cutting the amount of money the program will pay for rental subsidies in permanent housing and shifting those dollars to temporary housing and services instead.
With subsidies for permanent housing reduced, advocates say 170,000 people could return to homelessness. Locally, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority has warned 5,000 L.A. County households, containing 6,800 people, could be at risk of losing their homes, which would erase the small decline in homelessness reported this year.
“This [federal] program has proven to be effective at getting Americans off the streets, yet the Trump Administration is now attempting to illegally slash its funding,” Bonta said in a statement.
HUD did not immediately respond to a request for comment. This month, the department said its policy change “restores accountability to homelessness programs and promotes self-sufficiency among vulnerable Americans” in part by redirecting most money to transitional housing and supportive services that it sees as more effective than permanent housing.
Bonta filed the lawsuit along with 19 state attorneys general and two governors.
The lawsuit alleges the HUD policy change violated the law in several ways, including that the department failed to properly notice the change and that the new restrictions on funding violate the separation of powers because they were not imposed by Congress.
In addition to capping the amount of funds that can be spent on permanent housing, HUD is requiring more total homeless dollars be subject to competitive bidding.
Bonta‘s office said the new rules also “eliminate funding to applicants that acknowledge the existence of transgender and gender-diverse people” and make it harder for cities and counties to get funding if they don’t “enforce certain policies this Administration favors, like bans on public camping.”
The defamed actor hopped on X (Twitter) on Sunday to address the rumor he’s homeless after claiming he’s been “living in hotels” and “Airbnbs” in the wake of his sexual assault scandal. During an interview with The Telegraph published earlier this week, Kevin claimed all his belongings are “in storage” and said his financial situation is “not great.” Seemingly hinting at his mountain of legal fees, he confessed “costs over these last seven years have been astronomical. I’ve had very little coming in and everything going out.”
As we know, Kevin was accused of sexual assault by numerous victims over the past seven years. He was found not liable for assaulting actor Anthony Rapp in a 2022 lawsuit, and was acquitted of nine other charges in a UK trial the following year.
In his message on Sunday, the House of Cards alum blamed “the media” for manipulating his words and told followers:
“To the thousands of people who have reached out over the past few days offering me a place to stay, or have just asked if I’m OK, to all of you, let me first say I am truly touched by your generosity, full stop. But I feel it would be disingenuous of me to allow you to believe that I am indeed homeless in the colloquial sense.”
The Baby Driver star went on to clarify his comment about living in hotels and Airbnbs as he’s been “going where the work is,” much like he did “when [he] first started out.”
“I’ve been working nearly nonstop this entire year, and for that I have so much to be grateful for.”
He went on:
“There are many people, as we know, who are indeed actually living on the streets, or in their cars, or in terrible financial situations, and my heart goes out to them. But it is clear from the article itself that I am not one of them, nor was I attempting to say that I was.”
The Seven star criticized the outlet for running a “knowingly misleading headline for the sake of clicks,” before thanking fans for “all the kindness” they’ve shown him.
You can hear him talk more about the situation (below):
Frederick, Maryland — On this November day, 45-year-old Wade Milyard of Frederick, Maryland, is driving around his washing machines in his bus, stopping where needed and doing the laundry of homeless people.
“This is just something that they don’t have, you know?” Milyard told CBS News.
Before retiring, Milyard worked as a canine officer for the Frederick Police Department. While he was done with policing, he didn’t want to stop helping people.
“I wanted to serve,” Milyard said.
It was about 18 months ago, while he was still working as an officer, that he found what form his service would take in retirement.
In the spring of 2024, Milyard responded to a domestic dispute at a homeless camp. As he was wrapping things up with the couple, he says he heard a voice “out of nowhere.” He was not sure where it came from. He believes it was God. And the voice said, “Ask them about their laundry.”
So he did ask, and the couple responded that they did their laundry in a nearby creek.
“And I just kind of took it from there,” Milyard said.
So, using his own money and donations, he built out a bus and started Fresh Step Laundry — a free fluff and fold service. Today he does dozens of loads a week for people like Chris Washington.
“If you’re clean, you just feel better,” Washington said. “You feel a little bit more proud of yourself.”
“That’s the thing – you’re doing it to maybe give them a little bit of boost,” Milyard said.
Milyard has willfully taken on a very unpleasant and humbling task. But he says that when you feel a calling like that, there’s not a sour smell in the world that can steal that sweet sense of purpose.
“If having clean clothes can help them just a little bit, then my mission is fulfilled,” Milyard said.
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Sleep Out is a participatory event where Covenant House Georgia supporters give up their beds for one night to sleep outdoors on CHGA’s campus, in support of young people experiencing homelessness and escaping trafficking. Photo by Isaiah Singleton/The Atlanta Voice
Sleep Out is a participatory event where Covenant House Georgia supporters give up their beds for one night to sleep outdoors on CHGA’s campus, in support of young people experiencing homelessness and escaping trafficking.
Imagine turning 18 years old and not having a warm bed or a place to call home. This is the case for many youths, not just in Atlanta, but all over the nation. On Thursday, Nov. 20, Covenant House Georgia held their annual Sleep Out event to raise awareness to youth homelessness in Atlanta and around the nation.
Covenant House Georgia is a non-profit organization that provides emergency shelter and support services for young people, ages 18-24, who are experiencing homelessness or escaping human trafficking in the Atlanta area. Covenant House Georgia is also an LGBTQ+ safe space.
Sleep Out is a participatory event where Covenant House Georgia supporters give up their beds for one night to sleep outdoors on CHGA’s campus, in support of young people experiencing homelessness and escaping trafficking.
Photo by Isaiah Singleton/The Atlanta Voice
When you Sleep Out, participants join a worldwide movement to end youth homelessness! As part of the larger Covenant House International federation of shelters, Covenant House Georgia works in partnership with our peers to plan the best possible event, combining Sleep Out best practices with the unique needs of our Atlanta community
Some services they offer are Drop-in & emergency shelter, transitional housing, healthcare, educational support, job training.
According to the Covenant House Georgia, over 3,300 youth experience homelessness in Atlanta. 49% of youth experiencing homelessness have been sexually exploited. 40% of youth experiencing homelessness are LGBTQ+, despite only 7% of the general population of youth identifying as LGBTQ+. Moreover, LGBTQ+ youth are more likely to be victimized than non-LGBTQ+ youth on the streets.
Photo by Tabius McCoy/The Atlanta Voice
Additionally, 16-19-year-olds have the highest unemployment rate of any age group, at 12.6% (more than 3x the national average) and higher for at-risk youth. This leaves many without options to escape homelessness.
Board Chair of Covenant House Georgia, Ben Deutsch, said every child deserves to have a place they call home and a haven.
“Every child should have a place that they feel safe in,” he said. “Our young people are not invisible or forgotten. This is why the Covenant House Georgia was created and why we continue to sleep out every year to highlight such a critical issue. We will do this in solidarity with 100 young people who will be sleeping inside because of all the arduous work, and all the goodness that you have all done tonight with donations.”
Covenant House International Director of Programming Kedren Jackson said the sleep-out is not a reenactment of homelessness nor a performance.
“This is not just for fun; this is not simply to hang out. This is an invitation to move through this space with humility and to see our young people with a different level of clarity and respect,” she said. “Tonight, we may see their humor, leadership, vulnerability, creativity, hesitation, raw emotions, and uncertainty. None of this is random, and it all comes from somewhere.”
Throughout the event program, participants were able to experience a talent show displayed by former and current youths in the program, a candlelight vigil to remember youths who were lost this year due to homelessness, a tour of the campus, and then the sleep-out event.
The night ended with everyone camped outside in their sleeping bags by fire pits, mingling until they fell asleep.
What was thought of as just a sleep-out event to some turned into not only a transformational but also an in-depth, hands-on experience for people. Between hearing from the youths and everyone sitting around the pit fires and sleeping, it turned into more than just sleeping outside; It became a purposeful movement.
First-timer participant of the sleep out, Vanessa Wright, and her friends said they wanted to find ways to give back to the community.
“This was something I’ve always wanted to do but never knew where, and one of my friends told me about this and brought me along,” she said. “I am so glad we are doing this, and I’m also grateful it’s not too cold as I thought it might be. This type of thing is important, and more people should know about it and be willing to do things that can be uncomfortable.”
Another participant, who also happened to have experienced homelessness as a youth, Kenneth Dwight, said he has been doing the sleep-out for a few years now and is happy to be able to contribute.
“What’s crazy is I was once in some of these guys’ positions. Going home from home, living out on the streets not having a stable home or resources. It was tough for a while, but I was able to find some stability through my uncle, who took me in,” he said. “Programs like the Covenant House Georgia are crucial because youths not only in Atlanta but all over the country are on the streets being exposed to all kinds of bad things that aren’t growing them, so I’m just happy to help in any way I can because I was once one of them.”
Before the end of the night, everyone bundled up in their sleeping bags and drifted off to sleep to the sounds of crickets and fire cracking.
Dozens of Minnesota nonprofits and advocates warn that planned federal housing grant changes could mean thousands of Minnesotans overcoming homelessness will return to the streets.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans to cap the amount of money communities can use for permanent supportive housing in the next round of grants for the Continuum of Care program, which is the largest source of funding for homelessness prevention.
Chris LaTondresse, president and CEO of Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative, called it the “backbone” of the nation’s response to homelessness and said 82% of the $48 million Minnesota received last year focused on supportive housing. Under the proposed HUD changes, he said Minnesota could lose half of these dollars, leaving many people displaced.
“At a time when we need to be having conversations about how to put taxpayer dollars to their highest and best use, to walk away from the most proven and cost-effective solution we have on homelessness is just a real head scratcher,” LaTondresse said.
LaTondresse, a former Hennepin County commissioner, said this approach helped the state’s most populous county slash homelessness by 30% in five years. He also said it costs half as much as emergency room visits and shelters, which are the default for people who don’t have supportive housing options.
The agency did not respond to WCCO’s request for comment on Monday afternoon. But a spokesperson told The New York Times that “HUD will continue to serve the American people through means-tested measures to encourage self-sufficiency.”
Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative joined 180 other advocacy groups and nonprofits in signing a letter to the Congressional delegation warning that the cuts to housing support could impact 3,600 Minnesotans and 170,000 Americans nationwide.
“We use Continuum of Care funding for critical rental subsidies and supportive services for 103 Minnesotans moving from homelessness to stability,” Jessie Hendel, executive director for Alliance Housing in Minneapolis, said in a news release. “Without these funds, rents will become unaffordable, and formerly homeless individuals will be back on the street.”
Hendel’s organization manages 370 affordable housing units for people with very low incomes.
There is bipartisan concern about the changes to how the grants are awarded. GOP Congressman Pete Stauber of Minnesota’s 8th District joined two dozen other House Republicans late last month in a letter to HUD Secretary Scott Turner, urging the agency to press pause on the changes for now.
“We recognize that HUD’s efforts to modernize the CoC program and strengthen performance metrics are rooted in data-driven policymaking and a results-oriented approach. We fully support these goals,” the letter said. “However, substantial changes to the [notice of funding opportunity] process or funding priorities should be implemented carefully to avoid destabilizing programs that serve individuals with severe disabilities related to mental illness, chronic health conditions, or substance use disorders, as well as seniors with disabilities.”
More than 9,000 Minnesotans experienced homelessness during a single night count last year, according to a report submitted by HUD to Congress last December. And the state had the second-highest rate of unaccompanied youth experiencing homelessness at that time compared to elsewhere in the country.
In Atlanta, journalist Brian Goldstone introduces us to the intersection of Memorial Drive and Candler Road – the threshold of two neighborhoods. On one side: a liberal arts college and cafés. “And you cross over, and it’s dialysis centers, it’s liquor stores, it’s payday lenders,” he said. “Other areas of Atlanta are booming, but this area sort of stayed stuck in this period of decline. … The poor are out here on these peripheral areas.”
Goldstone has devoted his book, “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America,” to describing the challenges faced by literally millions of the working poor looking for a place to live. He has spent the better part of six years trying to understand why so many people who work full-time jobs with low wages are homeless.
“The story we as a nation have told ourselves, that hard work is the key to success, that work is an exit from poverty, not having a home, being homeless – what these people show us is that there’s something profoundly not true about that story anymore,” he said.
In the course of his reporting, Goldstone met Celeste (he changed her name for her privacy). Celeste has been known to work two and three jobs at a time to support her eight children. (All but one are now adults.) She’s inspected boxes at a warehouse, worked at a fast-food restaurant, even sold plates of food from her room. She’s resourceful. “I was working in a corner store from the time I was ten years old,” she said. “It always gave me, like, a sense of pride to do a good job at whatever I’m doing.”
If she doesn’t have a car, she’ll walk to work. Sometimes that boils down to cleaning and tidying up a convenience shop.
Just surviving is a constant struggle. For one month, she slept in her car with the kids.
Celeste has worked two or three jobs at a time to support her family.
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What Celeste does not have is a passing credit score. “I could have the most money, but if my credit score isn’t a 700, then you don’t want me in your property,” she said.
What totally destroyed her credit score was when an ex-boyfriend set fire to the home that she and her children were renting. “Walking into that house was like walking into a black hole,” Celeste said. “We had nothing.”
Goldstone said, “What pushed her and her children into homelessness was the fact that this home was owned by a private equity firm who demanded that she pay rent for the current month’s rent and an additional month as well, and she wouldn’t get her security deposit back. This was to break the lease on this home that had burned down.”
The sheriff put an eviction notice in the mailbox of the uninhabitable house. By the time Celeste found the notice, the judge had handed down a default judgment. “And by that point her credit score had been destroyed,” Goldstone said.
“Come for a night, stay for a while”
Which is what brought Celeste – what brings so many desperate people – to what’s called an “extended stay hotel.” Celeste lived there with two of her youngest children for about three months. To stay there, she had to pay $520 a week, about $75 a day. “And that’s only if you book online now,” she said. “If you don’t book online and you have to pay them cash at the window, then you’re paying the $80 a day.”
Over the years, Celeste has lived in about half a dozen extended stays. “That’s how they advertise it, too,” Celeste said. “It actually says, ‘Come for a night, stay for a while.’”
A fire at her home led to an eviction notice for Celeste and her family, which destroyed her credit score – and forced her into an extended stay hotel.
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But the slogan, she says, is a trap: “A lot of these places are substandard. One of the places where I stayed, there was, you know you put the mats down in the bathtub to cover supposedly slipping or falling or anything? Well, I pulled my mat up and there was a big hole in the tub. A lot of places have mold or mildew; they cause health problems. If you don’t have them already, you will develop them.”
Celeste was still living in an extended stay when things went from bad to a whole lot worse. She found out she had breast and ovarian cancer.
I asked, “Why didn’t you go to the doctor?”
“Life was lifing,” she replied. “People who are the primary breadwinners in a low-income family, you can’t take the time off to go to the doctor. Because me missing a ten-hour shift at work, that’s the difference of me paying for my room that day. So, of course, I want to keep a roof over my head. So, sick and all, I’m still going to go to work.”
“What struck me over and over again is just how incredibly resilient you were, even after the cancer,” I said. “How? Why?”
“Because that’s the face you have to show the world,” Celeste said. “There were many nights that I just was on my hands and knees, praying and believing that God made me a promise, and I was going to do my part, because I knew He was going to do His.”
Taking advantage of desperation
Many of these stories are variations on a similar theme, and disproportionately, they seem to impact people of color.
Rhea, for example, has four children. In the last two years, she has lived with her kids in friends’ apartments, in her car and, most recently, in extended stay hotel rooms.
The room she shares with her children has no closets, and a single small bathroom. Three of the kids sleep in bed with her; the oldest sleeps on an air mattress. “I try to get one of them to sleep with him, but they don’t want to. They all want to be piled in the bed with mama,” she laughed.
Rhea has been on her own with the kids since she left a domestic violence situation with the father of her children. Rhea says he never abused the kids, but “he put his hands on me a couple of times,” she said.
Rhea eventually got a temporary protective order. No more abuse, but also no more child support. “He’s not allowed to be around me or the kids for two years,” she said. “So, I can’t talk to him, his family, no one. So, everything is basically on me.”
Rhea’s 20-year-old son helps where he can working some overnight shifts at Amazon, but she also has a seven-year-old son with major medical issues. “He was born with congestive heart failure and he has severe asthma,” she said. “I’ve been in and out of hospital with him three or four times a month. I’m in and out of ICU with him.”
And that makes it all but impossible to keep a full-time job. Rhea struggles to pay $375 a week just for that extended stay room working a patchwork of part-time jobs, including driving for Uber.
In Atlanta, Rhea works a patchwork of part-time jobs, like driving for Uber, as she struggles to pay $375 a week for a room for herself and her children.
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Goldstone said, “I think what was so shocking is that this kind of living situation is not cheaper than an apartment. It is often double, or even triple, what an apartment down the street would cost.”
What explains that? “When people are desperate, and those who own these properties know that they are people who are desperate, they will take advantage of that desperation,” Goldstone said.
The big business of homelessness
Extended stay hotels are often the last resort for low-income families with poor credit who have become homeless – and, Goldstone said, homelessness has become big business. “These hotels, they don’t look like much, but there is a lot of money being made off of them,” he said.
It’s happening in a lot of our cities, but especially here in Atlanta: Urban renewal, the renovation and improvement of mostly low-income neighborhoods, restoration, gentrification – it’s all good, unless you’re one of the families being squeezed out.
“It’s the same Wall Street investors who are leading families and individuals to become homeless to begin with, because they buy up the rental housing and then, if you’re even one day late on your rent, you have an eviction automatically filed against you,” Goldstone said. “Before you know it, you’re out, and you don’t have a home anymore.”
These days, things are much better for Maurice and Natalia (not their real names). They have an apartment; life is manageable. But only five years ago, they were on the brink of disaster.
Maurice worked for a rental car agency, and Natalia for an insurance company. But when Natalia gave birth to their third child, her salary stopped.
“That threw everything off,” Natalia said. “I didn’t get income for, like, a point in time. And then next thing you know, you’re out in the street with a baby.”
Because? “We were late,” she said. “I remember I begged her. She was like, ‘Do you have it now? Can you get it now?’ And all we needed was to get to Payday. It was crazy because, like, my mindset was, like, it was raining. The sheriff let me sit in his car.”
“That still gives me anxiety,” Maurice said. “Just getting the call from work, and having to leave work in a hurry, and you come home and you see that, kind of does something to you as a man. … It transforms you. It breaks you. And it will continue to break you if you’ll allow it.”
Natalia said, “When we get to storage, there’s another family there, too, and it’s like, we don’t say anything to each other, but we know that look, and all you know is, just nod. It’s gonna be okay. Put your stuff in there, let’s try to figure out somewhere to go.”
“When you see a family at a bus stop with, you know, luggage, you know they’re not going to the airport,” Maurice said.
Natalia said what haunts her most is the black trash bags: “When you get evicted, all your stuff … well, it was black, but now it’s clear bags.”
I asked, “When did you first realize that you really were homeless?”
“I was, like, filling out that paperwork and you would hesitate,” Natalia said. “They’ll ask you where you are living specifically – are you renting? Are you a homeowner? Or are you homeless? You sit there and you struggle for a minute. You’re like, ‘Well, I have a roof over my head, but it’s not mine, and it’s temporary, and I could actually literally be booted out tomorrow.’ So, you check the box homeless. That’s what we are.”
“An expensive prison”
It was 2020, during the pandemic, and the family of five was living in an extended stay hotel room. Natalia was working remotely answering customer service calls. “I got flagged because of the noise,” she said. “And they were asking me if I could go to a quieter spot. So, I sent them a picture of where I’m at, because I’m telling them I’m in a hotel, and they were like, ‘Oh, we travel to hotels all the time. You could just go over to this …’ ‘Ma’am, my bed is right here! The kitchen is right here! And that’s where I’m working from. Please help me find this quiet space. I’m trying my best, you know?”
During the pandemic, Natalia was living with her family and working (answering customer service calls) in an extended stay hotel.
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Maurice said, “I remember just realizing this is like an expensive prison. I was just looking at the bill. My kids can’t go outside, there’s no playground. We’ve got to keep the curtain closed because people walk through the hotel, they’re going to look into your room, so there is no privacy.”
In eight months, they spent $17,000 on the extended stay room, nearly twice as much as they had paid on their old apartment.
Goldstone said, “I think it’s really important that we not talk about all of these families and individuals as if they’re falling into homelessness; they are being pushed. This is an engineered neglect, and at every turn there are entire business models that are set up to capitalize on their predicament.”
Crown
Asked if she was embarrassed about what happened, Natalia replied, “If I could be honest, yes, ’cause remember, it’s not supposed to happen to people like us. We do everything that we were supposed to be doing. We tried our best. But you know, you still end up in a hole, in a hell hole.”
“Why isn’t it supposed to happen to people like you?” I asked. “You’re educated?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You’re hard working?”
“Yes. And we tried our best. You follow all the rules of life.”
As does Rhea, the single mother of four who pays $375 a week for that small extended stay room.
A car is her livelihood right now, but she no longer has one of her own. The car she’s renting costs her $60 a day; she’ll have to drive for Uber two or three hours after work just to pay the car off.
The car already has 187,000 miles on it, and the tires, she says, are “horrible.”
I asked, “When you lie awake at night, what are you thinking about?”
“Sometimes I want to give up,” Rhea said.
“I can understand that. But you’ve got children, so you can’t, right?”
“Yeah, my kids keep me going,” she said. “It’s so hard right now, I don’t even know.”
Sometimes when things are at their darkest, help comes in the person of someone who’s known hard times herself, someone like Sherri McCoy, who has a nonprofit for the homeless called Blessing Bags of Warmth. Rhea calls Sherri “her angel.”
“I wake up every day with a goal to help at least one person,” said McCoy. “We are a mutual aid organization, so I reach out to our generous community, and oftentimes people donate. Sometimes they don’t, and that’s when we dip into the reserves of good old credit cards, my own personal ones.”
To keep her family going – between the room, the car, and other expenses – Rhea has to make $1,200 a week. “I’m constantly driving from 2:00 in the morning, and sometimes I won’t sit down ’til 8:00 at night,” she said.
I asked, “Could you work any harder?”
“If I could, I would,” Rhea smiled.
READ AN EXCERPT: “There Is No Place For Us” by Brian Goldstone For his new book, the journalist examines why so many people who work full-time jobs with low wages are homeless in America.
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Story produced by Deirdre Cohen. Editor: Ed Givnish.
In America we are taught hard work is the key to success. But despite having full-time jobs, many families are locked out of the rental housing market, due to low wages, soaring rents and poor credit, and have been pushed into homelessness. In this two-part report, senior contributor Ted Koppel talks with Brian Goldstone, author of “There Is No Place For Us: Working and Homeless in America,” about the big business of homelessness; and with families who have struggled to pay inflated rates at “extended stay hotels” catering to the desperate.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — It’s a harsh reality, but several people in the Tampa Bay community are spending their night on the street.
Nearly 2,000 people are experiencing homelessness in Pinellas County in a single night, according to the Pinellas County Point in Time Count.
What You Need To Know
At St. Raphael Catholic Church, about 20 teens slept outside with minimal shelter to learn what it’s like to be houseless
The kids could only bring three items. Some brought boxes, pillows, and tarps
Guest speakers, like Pinellas Hope representatives, talked to teens about the issue
They also made donations to shelters
On Saturday night, dozens of teens slept outside without shelter to get a glimpse into the life of a person experiencing homelessness.
Out in a field behind the St. Raphael Catholic Church, about 20 teens slept outside with almost nothing.
“I slept in a cardboard box,” said Hudson Maphet, a teen participating in the program.
They were only allowed to bring three items. Maphet brought a pillow a blanket and deodorant. It’s all part of the homeless retreat where teens from five churches are learning what it’s like to be houseless.
“I’m kind of used to the cold, so it didn’t hit me too hard until I decided to walk around in socks in the cold, wet grass. It was not it,” Maphet said.
Participants heard from experts about the issue. The director of the temporary emergency shelter, Joe Pondolfino of Pinellas Hope, spoke to the group Saturday night. He said he was hoping to clear up any misconceptions the teens had.
“It’s not about just looking at somebody on the street corner and saying, ‘Oh, what did they do wrong?’ It’s really what happened to them. So it’s really important to look at each person individually and it’s important for the next generation to help us tackle this problem,” said Pondolfino.
And the problem is not going away. Pondolfino said Pinellas Hope is seeing about 20 new people a week.
“It tells me that the problem still exists. It’s not gotten much better at this point, even though we do have some great successes. It’s something that we can’t take our eye off the ball,” he said.
After hearing from Pondolfino and sleeping in the wet grass, Maphet said even though they are teenagers, there are little things they can do to make a difference.
“Just a conversation, just a ‘How are you?’ A handshake — something, something of acknowledgment, because most of those people out there, they feel like they’re invisible and they’re very much so seen,” Maphet said.
It was more than an experience, it was also an outreach event.
Teens packed up lunches along with hygiene products that will be distributed to shelters like Pinellas Hope.
The City of Minneapolis on Thursday escalated its legal battle against developer Hamoudi Sabri and fined him $13,000 for failing to clear the homeless encampment on his property.
The fine is being assessed as a special tax levy, according to city officials, and covers the cost to the city’s public works department, which cleared the lot earlier this fall.
“I’d rather have the city fix the issue. I’m here to help the city fix the issue. I see the city being run very poorly with no business skills,” a defiant Sabri told WCCO on Thursday. “My culture, my belief, I cannot see someone abused and watch it. I have to do something about it. I’m raised that way.”
A judge granted the city’s request to remove the encampment from Sabri’s parking lot, but the business owner said it’s left people without their belongings, resources and a place to go, and he blames Mayor Jacob Frey.
“Minneapolis used to be beautiful and a good place to invest. When the city gets rotted, the state is going to get rotted. It’s spreading to Rochester and St. Cloud,” Sabri added.
Presence of drug paraphernalia and hazardous sharps
Improperly stored or accumulated solid waste and refuse
Lack of water access or adequate sanitation facilities (sewage disposal)
Unstable and unsafe structures (e.g., tents, makeshift shelters)
Presence of junk and debris hazardous to health and safety
Evidence of open fires and uncontrolled combustibles
Sabri is appealing those violations and the special assessment, his attorney confirmed, with another hearing with a City Council committee scheduled for early next year.
On her first day in office, Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency on homelessness.
The declaration allowed the city to cut through red tape, including through no-bid contracts, and to start Inside Safe, Bass’ signature program focused on moving homeless people off the streets and into interim housing.
On Tuesday, nearly three years after she took the helm, and with homelessness trending down two years in a row for the first time in recent years, the mayor announced that she will lift the state of emergency on Nov. 18.
“We have begun a real shift in our city’s decades-long trend of rising homelessness,” Bass said in a memorandum to the City Council.
Still, the mayor said, there is much work to do.
“The crisis remains, and so does our urgency,” she said.
The mayor’s announcement followed months of City Council pushback on the lengthy duration of the state of emergency, which the council had initially approved.
Some council members argued that the state of emergency allowed the mayor’s office to operate out of public view and that contracts and leases should once again be presented before them with public testimony and a vote.
Councilmember Tim McOsker has been arguing for months that it was time to return to business as usual.
“Emergency powers are designed to allow the government to suspend rules and respond rapidly when the situation demands it, but at some point those powers must conclude,” he said in a statement Tuesday.
McOsker said the move will allow the council to “formalize” some of the programs started during the emergency, while incorporating more transparency.
Council members had been concerned that the state of emergency would end without first codifying Executive Directive 1, which expedites approvals for homeless shelters as well as for developments that are 100% affordable and was issued by Bass shortly after she took office.
On Oct. 28, the council voted for the city attorney to draft an ordinance that would enshrine the executive directive into law.
The mayor’s announcement follows positive reports about the state of homelessness in the city.
As of September, the mayor’s Inside Safe program had moved more than 5,000 people into interim housing since its inception at the end of 2022. Of those people, more than 1,243 have moved into permanent housing, while another 1,636 remained in interim housing.
This year, the number of homeless people living in shelters or on the streets of the city dropped 3.4%, according to the annual count conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. The number of unsheltered homeless people in the city dropped by an even steeper margin of 7.9%.
The count, however, has its detractors. A study by Rand found that the annual survey missed nearly a third of homeless people in Hollywood, Venice and Skid Row — primarily those sleeping without tents or vehicles.
In June, a federal judge decided not to put Los Angeles’ homelessness programs into receivership, while saying that the city had failed to meet some of the terms of a settlement agreement with the nonprofit LA Alliance for Human Rights.
Councilmember Nithya Raman, who chairs the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, said the end of the emergency does not mean the crisis is over.
“It only means that we must build fiscally sustainable systems that can respond effectively,” she said. “By transitioning from emergency measures to long-term, institutional frameworks, we’re ensuring consistent, accountable support for people experiencing homelessness.”
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
SEATTLE (AP) — Democratic Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell faces a tough reelection fight against progressive activist Katie Wilson as voters in the liberal city recoil from President Donald Trump’s second term and question whether the incumbent has done enough to address public safety, homelessness and affordability.
Harrell, an attorney who previously served three terms on the City Council, was elected mayor in 2021 following the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice protests over George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police.
With crime falling, more police being hired, less visible drug use and many homeless encampments removed from city parks, the business-backed Harrell seemed likely to cruise to re-election at this time last year. He’s been endorsed by Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson, Attorney General Nick Brown and former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
But Trump’s return to office has helped reawaken Seattle’s progressive voters. The lesser-known Wilson, a democratic socialist running a campaign that echoes some of the themes of progressive mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in New York, trounced Harrell by nearly 10 percentage points in the August primary.
“Voters in places like Seattle are frustrated with the status quo, particularly in the context of Trump’s attacks on blue cities,” said Sandeep Kaushik, a Seattle political consultant who is not involved in the race. “They’re kind of moving back into their progressive bunker and are much more inclined to say, ‘Yeah, we should go our own way with our own bold progressive solutions.’ That all that plays into Katie’s hands.”
Wilson, 43, studied at Oxford College but did not graduate. She founded the small nonprofit Transit Riders Union in 2011 and has led campaigns for better public transportation, higher minimum wages, stronger renter protections and more affordable housing. She herself is a renter, living in a one-bedroom apartment in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, and says that has shaped her understanding of Seattle’s affordability crisis.
Wilson has criticized Harrell as doing too little to provide more shelter and said his encampment sweeps have been cosmetic, merely pushing unhoused people around the city. Wilson also paints him as a city hall fixture who bears responsibility for the status quo.
She has been endorsed by several Democratic organizations as well as by U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Harrell, 67, played on the Rose Bowl champion University of Washington football team in 1978 before going to law school. His father, who was Black, came to Seattle from the segregated Jim Crow South, and his mother, a Japanese American, was incarcerated at an internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho, during World War II after officials seized her family’s Seattle flower shop — experiences that fostered his understanding of the importance of civil rights and inclusivity.
Harrell has said Wilson, who has no traditional management experience, isn’t ready to lead a city with more than 13,000 employees and a budget of nearly $9 billion. He also has criticized her for supporting efforts to slash the city’s police budget amid the 2020 racial justice protests.
Wilson has said that proposal was based on some fundamental misunderstandings and that she since has learned a lot about how the police department works. She says she supports having a department that is adequately staffed, responsive and accountable to the community.
Both Harrell and Wilson have touted plans for affordable housing, combatting crime and attempting to Trump-proof the city, which receives about $150 million a year in federal funding. Both want to protect Seattle’s sanctuary city status.
Wilson has proposed a city-level capital gains tax to help offset federal funding the city might lose and to pay for housing; Harrell says that’s ineffective because a city capital gains tax could easily be avoided by those who would be required to pay it.
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