The Trump administration’s attacks on unhoused people have drawn intense controversy, and for good reason. Instead of addressing the structural causes of homelessness, like skyrocketing rents, stagnant wages, inaccessible healthcare, and systems that fail to support trauma recovery, the focus has been on criminalizing and punishing people who are already struggling to survive. Sweeps of encampments, increased policing, and rhetoric that frames unhoused people as a threat only deepen stigma and push vulnerable nervous systems further into survival states. From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, these policies actively harm, stripping away the safety and connection that people need to heal and rebuild.
From an IPNB perspective, homelessness is not simply the absence of housing; it is the culmination of repeated blows to human safety, belonging, and stability. Vulnerable people are not unhoused because of some inherent flaw, but because the social, political, financial, systemic, and structural forces in this culture push them there and then keep them there.
Most unhoused people I’ve known or learned from have lived through repeated trauma. Many were abused or neglected as children, some endured combat or sexual violence in the military, and many more were crushed by exploitative workplaces that demanded endless output while offering little safety, dignity, or stability. The mainstream culture insists on an inhumane level of performance and conformity. When someone can’t keep up–because their nervous system is already burdened by trauma, they are ill, or they lack family wealth or a safety net–they are cast aside.
Instead of being met with care and community, highly vulnerable people are punished with stigma, criminalization, and bureaucratic systems that are almost impossible to navigate. Shelters are overcrowded and unsafe, services are fragmented, and even when someone qualifies for help, the waitlists stretch for years. Meanwhile, rents rise, wages stagnate, and the disease management industry extracts profits while failing to support overall well-being. Under the current administration, these pressures are intensifying, as the costs of survival rise and support falls.
I know this terrain. I spent time unhoused in childhood and adulthood, moving from place to place, living in a van and a tent in the woods, poaching campsites at state parks, crewing aboard various sailing vessels, and spending a summer in a house with no electricity or running water. These do not indicate a character flaw. They were the result of a culture that treats human lives as expendable while rewarding those who exploit and control.
From an IPNB lens, this is a failure of access to the basic conditions nervous systems require for regulation and stability: safety, community, continuity, and dignity. Without those, people don’t fall through the cracks. They are pushed. Until we shift away from a culture that prioritizes profit and punishment over human well-being, homelessness will continue to grow, and the people enduring it will keep carrying the compounded weight of trauma that they never should have been forced to bear.
