Louisiana Advances One of the Country’s ‘Cruelest’ Anti-Homeless Bills

Conor here: The bill in Louisiana is another example of ignoring policy that actually works—that is, if the goal is to actually help the homeless get off the streets rather than punish and profit from them. New Orleans has a housing first program, which prioritizes getting a homeless individual into housing and then assists with mental health care, addiction treatment, and other support if needed. As the following piece notes, it has been successful. The biggest challenge is funding.

And Trump’s cruel executive order issued last summer made it that much more difficult to pursue Housing First policies. From that order:

The Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development shall take appropriate actions to increase accountability in their provision of, and grants awarded for, homelessness assistance and transitional living programs.  These actions shall include, to the extent permitted by law, ending support for “housing first” policies that deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency; increasing competition among grantees through broadening the applicant pool; and holding grantees to higher standards of effectiveness in reducing homelessness and increasing public safety.

And so the administration has effectively killed a Housing First program by the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which had gotten veteran homelessness rates to a record low since detailed counting began in 2009. Instead the administration prioritizes “accountability” and “treatment.”

Behind such buzzwords is probably the true driving force: money.

Out in Utah, which has become a sort of model state for Trump homeless policy and Salt Lake City is building an isolated homeless “campus” on the outskirts of the city. Utah revamped its homelessness planning board last year; the businesspeople are in charge now and led by the management consultant Randy Shumway who says “success is not permanent housing — success is human dignity. We are in the business of lives, of humans, of souls.”

Shumway is also in the business of making money. His firm is pushing data collection software, called Know-by-Name, used in homeless case management, and the state homeless board now headed by Shumway wants it to be used statewide.

And there are plenty just like Shumway preaching about saving souls while looking to cash in off the expansion of the carceral state. It’s no wonder that homeless policy in the US is now largely being driven by the social policy visions of tech billionaires through the Cicero Institute.

By Stephen Prager, a staff writer for Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams. 

The Louisiana House of Representatives voted this week to pass what the National Homelessness Law Center says is “one of the cruelest anti-homeless bills in the country.”

Like many other anti-homeless bills being advanced around the country following a 2024 Supreme Court decision allowing states and cities to criminalize homelessness, House Bill 211, which passed by a vote of 70-28, makes unauthorized sleeping in public spaces a crime.

It is punishable by a fine of up to $500, imprisonment for up to six months, or both. Repeat offenders could face one to two years in prison with hard labor and a $1,000 fine.

The bill, which will now advance to the GOP-controlled state Senate, has been nicknamed the “Streets to Success Act” because, according to its sponsor, state Rep. Debbie Villio (R-79), the goal is not to jail homeless people but to “connect them to service providers.”

BREAKING: Louisiana has advanced one of the cruelest anti-homeless bills in the country. It would force homeless people to choose between jail and involuntary treatment, make them pay for it, and if they can’t pay, force them to perform unpaid labor. https://t.co/0J9rBRtKkA

— National Homelessness Law Center (@homeless_law) April 16, 2026

Those who are convicted of sleeping outdoors could be given the option to avoid jail time by instead entering into a mandatory treatment program for at least 12 months. The bill authorizes local governments to set up semi-permanent camps in remote areas, where defendants would be required to stay and receive treatment.

The bill requires homeless defendants to pay “all or part of the cost of the treatment program to which he is assigned,” a steep cost for many, as the average cost for residential drug and alcohol rehab treatment in Louisiana is more than $4,400 per week, according to the addiction referral service directory Addicted.org.

According to the bill, those who cannot afford this steep cost would be required to perform unpaid labor for the state or a local community center in lieu of payment.

Bill Quigley, director of the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University New Orleans, called the bill’s entire premise “a farce.”

“If people had the resources to pay for housing and physical and/or mental health services, they would not be on the street,” he told Common Dreams.

He described it as a “cruel theater of the absurd” based on “the lie that people choose to be homeless.” The law, he said, “assumes our communities have plenty of affordable apartments and lots of mental and physical health services available.”

In reality, he said, these services are chronically underfunded, and the city would need to build about 55,000 more affordable rental units to provide enough housing for its rent-burdened population.

Though it is not uncommon for homeless people to struggle with mental health or substance use issues, increases in the cost of housing have been shown to have a direct relationship with increasing homelessness.

Homelessness in New Orleans dropped considerably in the years following the Covid-19 pandemic, when Congress provided permanent housing subsidies for those in need. But after those funds have dried up, homelessness in the city shot up higher than before the pandemic, a study by the homelessness nonprofit UNITY of Greater New Orleans found in 2024.

New Orleans City Councilmember Lesli Harris (D), who has opposed the bill, pointed to the success of the city’s Home for Good program, which took a “Housing First” approach to homelessness, providing rental subsidies and allowing people to move straight from encampments into housing without requirements that they obtain treatment.

According to a May 2025 report, the program had moved 1,133 people off the streets and into supportive housing and allowed eight homeless encampments to close.

“Through our Home for Good program, we house an individual for roughly $21,844 per year. By comparison, jailing that same person costs an average of $51,000—and failing to act at all can cost up to $55,000 in emergency room visits and crisis rehousing,” Harris said. “HB 211 would steer Louisiana toward the most expensive option while producing no lasting housing, no services, and no real path forward for the people involved.”

Harris has also decried the bill’s creation of what she called “internment camps” for treatment. The bill’s text requires these facilities to be far away from downtown and other high-value neighborhoods, which she said separates those trying to rebuild their lives from work, public transit, and other critical services, and further isolates them from society.

Since the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which allowed cities to enforce public-camping bans against unhoused people even when shelter is unavailable, around two dozen states and hundreds of municipalities have passed various measures criminalizing poverty.

The homeless advocacy group Housing Not Handcuffs points out that many of the bills were written by the Cicero Institute, a far-right think tank with heavy backing from billionaire tech investors that now has deep influence over the housing policy of President Donald Trump, who has taken a hacksaw to funding for public housing programs under the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Housing Not Handcuffs said Louisiana’s bill, which would almost certainly be signed by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry if passed by the state Senate, “is an extreme take on the already extreme copy-paste legislation” peddled by Cicero.

“This bill forces homeless people charged with a crime to make the false choice between jail or at least one year of forced treatment,” the group said. “Louisiana has a long history—and present—of chain gangs, prison labor, and entrenched white supremacy. This bill clearly evokes debtor’s prisons, convict leasing, and the ugliest day of Jim Crow.”