A few years ago, I was staying at a motel in Arlington, Virginia, beside the Robert E. Lee highway, one of the principal roads leading into our nation’s capital. The motel had government approval to serve as a way station for homeless families, and to collect their rent from municipal authorities. Every night a local church sent around a van loaded with hot meals in Styrofoam cartons. The van parked in the motel’s parking lot and people came out from their rooms to collect supper for themselves and their children.

On one side of the motel was a little slope of woods, running down to a small creek that flowed, a little further on, under a bridge across the highway. When that van parked, people materialized from out of those trees, climbing the slope in considerable numbers. A few were holding the hands of their children. Old and young, down on their luck, living by that creek as best they could. Most of them looked like they could really use that hot meal.

I thought of them following the Trump Supreme Court’s recent 6-3 decision empowering municipalities to make sleeping outdoors, including in encampments, illegal. It provides a taste of what a Trump era’s social policy toward the unhoused would look like. Over the past fifty years, the number of families without stable housing on any given night has skyrocketed. People living in harsh conditions of extreme poverty have been a feature of our national landscape ever since the beginning of European colonization, but rarely have so many been shown such little care.

In the early European colonies, families in extreme poverty were a fact of life. The New World was fraught with dangers: disease, accident, or death left some families unable to care for themselves. The community assisted these families one by one. As the nation’s population grew, so did the number of families requiring assistance, and public officials began to construct almshouses where the poor — children and adults — could be collectively housed. It was considerably cheaper to care for people in bulk and easier to weed out the undeserving.

For most of the nineteenth century, those families that needed help had to accept congregate housing or none at all. Today, the choice is the same: almshouses or nothing. And in today’s almshouses — called shelters — it is not unusual to find children thrown together with mentally ill adults, just like in an eighteenth-century almshouse. Children have no choice but to sleep and wake in congregate shelter amid families not their own, and some of those families will include individuals who are truly mentally disturbed, or just plain weird. These children are at higher risk than their stably housed peers for poor health, bad grades, domestic abuse, and low self-esteem.

On any given night, over one hundred thousand children experience homelessness with their families in the United States, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). “Homeless” once meant single men sleeping rough, but now it is just as likely to mean families in dire economic circumstances, who can’t afford a place to spend the night. Public shelters are often full or unsafe, leaving mothers and children who are living in extreme poverty with no other choices than to sleep in their cars, or motel rooms, or mattresses on floors, packed into small spaces with too many friends or family.

City officials in many places, desperate to cleanse their streets of people experiencing homelessness in plain sight, made it illegal to bring them food. A multitude of cities and towns have “vehicle dwelling bans,” on their books, which make it illegal to live in your car. These laws are usually enforced in municipalities with limited shelter space for those experiencing homelessness, leaving people to fend for themselves, even those with families. In many places, people in this fix often wind up in encampments of tents and jackleg dwellings, temporary solutions that provide a sort of place to stay. In 2022, Tennessee made camping on public land a felony crime. But the court’s ruling in favor of a municipality’s right to prohibit camping on public land will further criminalize homelessness.

What does it mean to us as a nation that somewhere in our home states, in every state, children among us are experiencing homelessness? It meant little to the first Trump administration. Budget cuts to HUD were constant and deep, with no protest from the department’s secretary, Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon with no prior experience in the field of housing. Secretary Carson often said he believes those with the will and desire can lift themselves and their families out of extreme poverty by hard work and that government subsidies discouraged a can-do attitude.

Under a second Trump administration, this would serve as a rationale for cuts to federal funding for assistance to the unhoused. In the eighteenth-century, towns and municipalities could banish someone from their precincts, and often did so with extremely poor families so that they would not become public charges. The criminalization of homelessness allows blame to be placed solely on the shoulders of the person experiencing it, absolving the rest of us from having to provide others with basic shelter, even when those others are children.

Family homelessness has steadily worsened under both political parties for the past quarter-century as income inequality increased, making it ever easier to fall into extreme poverty, unable to earn enough to both feed families and make mortgage or rent payments. Blame is bipartisan. Bill Clinton’s welfare reform in 1996 helped swell the rolls of the extremely poor. The 2008 recession generated a record number of families experiencing homelessness, but even in the Clinton and George W. Bush years of prosperity that preceded it, and the Barack Obama years of recovery that followed, the numbers of homeless families kept rising across the country. It is safe to posit that in a second Trump mandate, many children would live in extreme poverty and experience homelessness. These children will be affected physically and mentally in ways that may hamper them for their entire lives.

Children who experience homelessness are likely to have higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which in turn can have lasting effects on both mental and physical health. Normally, this hormone is helpful, allowing individuals to respond quickly in an emergency, or when threatened, but when cortisol levels are chronically elevated it can cause permanent changes in the brain, according to experts in pediatric neurology. Many children experiencing homelessness may frequently feel unsafe and threatened, and the resulting levels of cortisol puts them at risk of having their minds and bodies permanently affected. These kids will have higher chances of failing in school, or spending time incarcerated. They are more likely to be victims of domestic abuse when children and to inflict it when they are adults.

The best strategy for reducing the number of homeless children in our communities is rapidly rehousing families that fall into homelessness. We need to work with these families and get them into stable housing, both for their good and for our own. Studies have shown that a majority of families experiencing homelessness who are provided rent subsidies are likely to continue being able to pay the rent when the subsidies have run out, and will not experience homelessness again, according to a HUD report.

To institute a policy of rapid rehousing, however, a community must be willing to provide rent subsidies for, say, a year, and to have a stock of decent housing with accessible rental prices. A community commitment is needed to assure that our children do not have to live in cars or motel rooms. By converting homelessness into a crime, communities can turn their collective backs on these people without feeling qualms.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of children as young as eight years old were putting in twelve hours a day doing hard jobs for little pay in mills and factories. Children had to work so their families could afford food and shelter. To us, only a little more than a century later, it appears coarse and brutal that parents could have sent their eight-year-olds out to work, no matter how desperate their financial situations. It is likely to seem equally coarse and brutal to Americans in the twenty-second century that we allowed millions of children to grow up with nowhere to call home.