The Biden administration drew the ire of housing advocates this past February when the National Park Service (NPS) swept a homeless encampment at McPherson Square, located just a block away from the White House. The original plan was to evict camp residents in April so that social workers would have time to connect them with housing and other services. But citing illegal drug use and overdoses as well as general public safety concerns, Washington DC’s local Health and Human Services Department called for the sweep to be moved up to February 15.

Given two weeks’ notice of the truncated timeline for eviction, social workers and service providers scrambled to find housing options for the approximately seventy people who remained at the camp by the deadline. By the time NPS workers clad in white jumpsuits began tossing people’s belongings into trash trucks, only two people had been placed in permanent housing. Twenty people accepted temporary bridge housing, and a few more went to shelters. Two-thirds remained on the street.

The clearing of McPherson Square follows similar sweeps of encampments in Houston and Portland. Portland recently paused camp evictions, but only because it ran out of money to conduct them. Despite the Biden administration publicly embracing a housing-first strategy, the primary goal of homelessness policy in America — including the federal government, as NPS’s participation makes clear — remains to keep the unhoused out of the view of wealthy property owners and shopping district consumers. A particularly odious op-ed coauthored by NBA Hall of Famer Bill Walton made this clear by asserting that the only viable solution to homelessness in his city of San Diego is to move them away from the “civilized taxpayers of our society.”