While attending the G20 Summit in Japan earlier this week, President Donald Trump suggested in a rambling interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson that he single-handedly “ended” homelessness in the District. The comment was spurred by Carlson’s observation that Osaka, the city hosting the summit, was much cleaner than some American cities, with no graffiti, no “junkies,” and “no one going to the bathroom on the street.”

“It’s very different from our cities … they’ve got a major problem with filth,” Carlson said.

Trump agreed, lamenting to Carlson that police officers in some cities get sick walking the streets, and that “the people living there [are] living in hell, too. Although some of them have mental problems where they don’t even know they’re living that way. In fact, perhaps they like living that way.”

According to Trump, the problem of homelessness started two years ago. It was even making an appearance in the District of Columbia, he says, before he quashed it to make a better impression on world leaders visiting the capital.

“You know, I had a situation when I first became president,” he said. “We had certain areas of Washington, D.C., where that was starting to happen, and I ended it very quickly. I said you can’t do that. When we have leaders of the world coming in to see the President of the United States and they’re riding down the highway, they can’t be looking at that. I really believe that it hurts our country. They can’t be looking at scenes like you see in Los Angeles and San Francisco.”

Of course, thousands of homeless people continue to live in the District of Columbia. City leaders have been grappling with the problem for many years, as housing prices skyrocket and the number of people without homes sometimes exceeds the space available in D.C. shelters.

There have been some improvements: this year, for the third year in a row, the city marked a decline in homelessness, mainly driven by a sharp decrease in the number of homeless families. The number of homeless individuals actually increased by nearly three percent over last year, according to a report from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. (The report was based on a point-in-time count and according to advocates, may not fully capture D.C.’s population of people experiencing homelessness. Advocates often point to the population of children experiencing homelessness, which they say are captured in school records but excluded from point-in-time counts.)

Methodological critiques aside, there are 6,521 people experiencing homelessness in the District (based on a count done on January 23, 2019). Trump has had no involvement in addressing the challenges that these people face, according to D.C. Department of Human Services director Laura Zeilinger.

“I found the president’s remarks offensive in that they dehumanize our neighbors who are experiencing homelessness,” Zeilinger said in an email to DCist.

There’s certainly disagreement about the way that the city should handle homelessness, but, nonetheless, everyone appears to agree the problem is far from “ended.”

This story has been updated with comment from D.C. Department of Human Services director Laura Zeilinger.