America’s next shantytowns already have parking spaces, recreational vehicles, tarps, generators, improvised storefronts, and boundaries that cut across public and private land. In south Seattle, an encampment near 42nd Avenue South and Beacon Avenue South has expanded from a small cluster of tents and RVs in June 2025 into a site reportedly covering several acres. Neighbors describe persistent trash, discarded needles, environmental damage, and a level of disorder that the city has monitored but not resolved. Recent video appears to show trees being cleared as the camp expands, along with informal sales of goods. Those images are disturbing, but they are not proof that the goods are stolen or that every person living there is responsible for every condition. They are evidence of something more basic: government has allowed an emergency shelter system, an outdoor survival system, and an unregulated land-use system to collapse into one another.

We need a political name for that failure. I propose Trumpvilles: contemporary encampments that grow as federal economic policies make housing harder to build or afford, and as public officials at every level normalize tents and vehicles as long-term substitutes for homes. The name is deliberately modeled on “Hoovervilles,” the shantytowns of the Great Depression. It should never be used to degrade people who are homeless. It should be used to identify the public decisions that make homelessness a permanent feature of American life.

Seattle’s several-acre warning

KOMO News reported that the Seattle camp sits across multiple public and private properties and has grown dramatically since the summer of 2025, when a man was killed in a shootout there. The city’s Unified Care Team says it monitors the site, conducts outreach, and performs trash cleanups every other week while developing a resolution plan. Officials also said the camp has been assigned a lower priority than other sites with more acute hazards. That explanation may describe the city’s triage system, but it does not answer the central question: how long can an encampment expand before “monitoring” becomes a euphemism for acceptance?

The public has a right to expect basic health, fire, sanitation, property, and environmental rules to be enforced. Encampment residents have an equal right not to be shuffled from block to block without a realistic route indoors. Those obligations are not opposites. A city that allows people to remain in unsafe conditions indefinitely is not being compassionate, and a city that removes them without shelter, storage, treatment, or housing is not solving homelessness. Community safety fails when government offers only those two choices.

Why “Trumpville,” and what history permits us to say

During the Great Depression, Americans who lost jobs, savings, and homes built shacks from scrap wood, tin, and cardboard. The settlements were called Hoovervilles because the public associated visible deprivation with the president under whose administration they spread. The label did not mean Herbert Hoover personally caused every eviction or every camp. It was a verdict on national leadership during a cascading crisis.

The tariff analogy must also be historically honest. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, signed in June 1930, raised duties on more than 2,000 items despite a public warning from more than 1,000 economists. Retaliation and contracting trade worsened an already unfolding economic catastrophe, but serious history does not reduce the Great Depression, or Hoovervilles, to a single statute. In the same way, no available evidence establishes that President Trump’s tariffs caused the specific encampment in Seattle or the vehicles in the Bronx. Homelessness reflects decades of housing scarcity, rent burdens, weak income supports, behavioral-health gaps, family disruption, and fragmented government.

The comparison is nevertheless a legitimate warning. Policies that raise the cost of steel, aluminum, copper, lumber, appliances, or other construction inputs can make new housing more expensive precisely when the country needs far more of it. An April 2026 report from the Democratic staff of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee estimated that recent tariffs and economic uncertainty were raising construction costs and suppressing housing activity. Because that is a partisan analysis, it should be read as such. The Trump administration responds that tariffs protect national security and domestic manufacturing, and it has paired them with efforts to reduce regulatory barriers to homebuilding. Both claims deserve scrutiny. The test is not the slogan attached to a policy; it is whether more people can obtain safe, stable housing at prices their incomes can support.

A national emergency outside educational institutions

The 2025 federal point-in-time count identified 745,652 people experiencing homelessness on a single night, including 266,320 people in unsheltered locations. That total was slightly lower than the record 2024 count, but it remained 27 percent above the 2013 level. King County’s 2026 count found 18,365 people experiencing homelessness, 11,829 of them unsheltered. The region reported only one shelter bed for every three people counted as homeless. These figures do not explain every local condition, but they make clear that Seattle’s camp is not an isolated curiosity.

The same contradiction is visible in the Bronx. From my vantage point, I regularly see roughly seven to ten RVs, cars, vans, or similar vehicles being used as homes near the Bronx High School of Science. “Bronx Science” is one of the country’s most selective public high schools, and only blocks from Lehman College’s social work program. Still, the setting matters. We are educating exceptional young people and future helping professionals within walking distance of an outdoor housing crisis that institutions too often treat as background scenery.

Elsewhere in the Bronx, News 12 has documented vehicle encampments on Jerome Avenue and Bronx Boulevard. Residents have complained about generators, waste, and blocked space; people living in the vehicles have described high rents, pets that shelters may not accept, and nowhere else to go. Enforcement operations can clear a street, but towing a family’s RV may also eliminate its last form of shelter. The public policy problem is not resolved simply because its evidence is moved.

Naming failure without dehumanizing residents

“Trumpville” should name an administration-era policy outcome, not a class of people. Homeless people are not environmental hazards, criminal categories, or campaign props. At the same time, housing status cannot confer permission to cut trees, accumulate dangerous waste, threaten neighbors, obstruct access, or appropriate land. The humane position is not boundarylessness. It is a system in which rules are clear, assistance is immediate, and compliance is connected to credible exits from the street.

This is especially important when informal markets appear inside encampments. A table of goods is not evidence of theft. Cities should investigate specific complaints and enforce ordinary laws based on facts, while avoiding collective suspicion toward every resident. The same principle applies to violence, drug activity, and property damage: identify conduct, establish evidence, protect victims, and avoid treating homelessness itself as the offense.

Community safety requires rules and exits

An effective response begins with a named interagency lead and a public plan for each large encampment. The plan should map property ownership, fire and environmental risks, sanitation needs, vulnerable residents, available shelter, vehicle status, and the number of people who can realistically be placed in permanent housing. It should include regular trash removal and hygiene services, but it cannot stop there. Outreach teams need access to identification documents, benefits, medical and behavioral health care, pet-friendly and couple-friendly shelters, storage, safe parking options, landlord mediation, and flexible funds for deposits or arrears.

The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness has described a coordinated model in Lane County, Oregon, where an encampment coordinator connected property owners, neighbors, law enforcement, public works, outreach, housing, health, and social services. USICH reported that three encampments were closed and 79 percent of residents obtained permanent housing. That is the outcome that should define success, not how many tents were removed in a morning, but how many people remained housed months later and whether the surrounding community became measurably safer.

Vehicle homelessness needs its own pathway. Seattle is considering a permit-based program combining outreach, safe lots, storage, case management, and escalating enforcement. New York needs a comparable strategy: designated short-term safe parking with sanitation and time limits; rapid assessment; rules against dumping, fires, intimidation, and environmental damage; and a genuine route to housing. The alternative is the current oscillation between tolerated disorder and expensive displacement.

Finally, federal officials should publish a housing-cost impact statement for major tariff actions affecting construction inputs. If a tariff is justified on industrial or national-security grounds, the government should still disclose its expected effect on rents, starter-home prices, affordable-housing production, and shelter demand, and offset those effects where necessary. A government cannot claim to confront homelessness while obscuring policies that may raise the cost of ending it.

Hoovervilles became enduring symbols because they made policy failure physically impossible to ignore. Trumpvilles are taking shape in tents, RVs, cars, and improvised settlements from Seattle to the Bronx. The term will be deserved if national leaders continue to celebrate economic policy while local communities absorb the housing consequences. It will become unnecessary only when our measure of progress is no longer how efficiently we relocate human suffering, but how reliably we prevent it and end it.

Selected sources

• KOMO News: South Seattle encampment grows as neighbors seek action
• King County Regional Homelessness Authority: 2026 Point-in-Time Count
• U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development: 2025 homelessness count
• National Archives: The Ordeal of Herbert Hoover
• Herbert Hoover Presidential Library: The Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930
• Joint Economic Committee Democratic staff: April 2026 housing report
• The White House: Administration rationale for updated metals tariffs
• U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness: Seven principles for addressing encampments
• News 12 Bronx: Woodlawn neighbors and RV residents describe competing concerns