ANS group -- this is an essay about homelessness, and that it isn't a right or left problem, but a problem with the economy. Other countries don't have the homelessness problem we do. China doesn't. The democratic socialist countries don't. We should be ashamed.
--Kim
I’ve been living in San Francisco this month, and walking through parts of downtown, the homelessness is simply staggering, and depressing.
Not one person here, one person there. Whole blocks. Tents. People lying on sidewalks. People clearly sick. People clearly addicted. People who appear to be suffering from mental illness. People who simply look exhausted and destitute.
Hundreds of human beings living in conditions that no civilized country—certainly not the richest country on earth—should find acceptable.
And it got me thinking about something we hear constantly:
This is what happens when liberals run cities.
San Francisco. Seattle. Portland. Los Angeles. Democrats run them, homelessness explodes, crime explodes, therefore liberalism is the problem.
Except when you actually start looking at the data, the story becomes considerably more complicated.
There are conservative cities with serious homelessness and crime problems, too: Fresno, Oklahoma City, Bakersfield, Fort Worth, Colorado Springs, Virginia Beach, Mesa, Anchorage.
Meanwhile, some cities have reduced homelessness under Democratic administrations, and some have reduced it under Republican ones.
So perhaps we’re asking the wrong question.
Maybe homelessness isn’t fundamentally a liberal problem or a conservative problem.
Maybe it is an American economic problem.
More specifically, I think it exposes one of the profound failures of our particular version of capitalism: we have allowed something as fundamental to human survival as shelter to become unaffordable to millions of people, and then we act surprised when the poorest and most vulnerable eventually fall off the bottom.
Whenever homelessness comes up, people immediately point to mental illness and drugs. And of course those are enormous problems among people living on the street. But the data tells us something important that gets lost in that argument: at the population level, the places with the most homelessness are not simply the places with the most drug addiction or mental illness. They are overwhelmingly places where housing is scarce and people at the bottom of the economic ladder cannot afford it.
That doesn’t mean drugs and mental illness don’t cause some individuals to become homeless. They absolutely can. And once someone is living on the street, both problems can become dramatically worse.
But if addiction and mental illness were the primary explanation for why one American city has vastly more homelessness than another, we would expect homelessness rates to track those conditions closely.
They don’t.
What they track far more consistently is the cost and availability of housing.
Research has repeatedly found a strong relationship between housing costs, housing scarcity and homelessness. One widely cited analysis found that every $100 increase in median rent was associated with roughly a 9% increase in homelessness.
Think about that.
Because we desperately want homelessness to be about drugs.
Or mental illness.
Or laziness.
Or bad choices.
Because if those are the causes, then homelessness becomes an individual failure rather than a systemic one.
It’s not the system that failed; it’s the person sleeping on the sidewalk who failed.
And that fits neatly into the same argument we have used for generations to resist stronger social safety nets: people are poor because they’re lazy. They don’t want to work. They made bad choices. Therefore helping them merely rewards irresponsibility.
It is a comforting explanation because it absolves the rest of us—and the economic system itself—of responsibility.
But the data complicates that story enormously.
Mental illness and addiction are very real and often devastating factors in individual cases, but they do not adequately explain why homelessness is so much higher in some American cities than others. Housing costs and housing availability do a far better job of that.
And perhaps that is what makes the housing explanation so uncomfortable.
It forces us to consider the possibility that homelessness isn’t simply what happens when individuals fail capitalism.
Sometimes it is what happens when capitalism fails individuals.
And there is another uncomfortable truth: homelessness itself can intensify the very problems we then blame for homelessness.
A major UCSF study of homeless Californians found that among people who regularly used drugs, 42% said that their regular drug use began after they first became homeless.
Think about what living on the street actually means.
Imagine sleeping on a sidewalk night after night and remaining mentally healthy.
Imagine trying to get sober while sleeping in a tent surrounded by drugs.
Imagine trying to hold down a job when you don’t have a shower, an address, a safe place for your possessions or somewhere to sleep.
By the time we encounter someone screaming at invisible demons on a San Francisco sidewalk, we may be looking at the end of the story.
We need to start asking what happened at the beginning.
And very often, at the beginning, somebody couldn’t afford a place to live.
None of this means cities should simply surrender their streets. I don’t believe that either.
People should be able to walk down a sidewalk. Businesses should be able to operate. People openly selling fentanyl should be arrested. Violent people should not be allowed to terrorize neighborhoods. Someone experiencing a psychiatric crisis should not be abandoned on a sidewalk in the name of compassion.
We need public order.
We need police.
We need mental-health treatment.
We need addiction treatment.
But we also desperately need housing.
And not merely fantastically expensive “affordable housing” projects that take years to approve and build. We need apartments. SROs. Micro-apartments. Converted office buildings. Supportive housing. Public housing. Private housing. Subsidized housing. More density. Faster permitting. Fewer ridiculous zoning restrictions.
And we need emergency assistance that catches somebody who is $1,500 short of making rent before that person loses the apartment and enters a homelessness system that may ultimately cost society vastly more.
America once had enormous numbers of extremely inexpensive single-room-occupancy hotels. We systematically eliminated much of that bottom rung of the housing ladder through redevelopment, zoning and building regulations. Pew estimates that if the SRO housing stock had simply grown along with other housing, America would have roughly 2.5 million additional low-cost homes today.
That is a systemic failure.
Call it capitalism. Call it failed housing policy. Call it decades of NIMBYism. Call it government regulation. Call it inadequate government investment.
In reality, it contains elements of all of them.
The American housing market works spectacularly well for many people who own scarce property in desirable places. Rising property values create enormous wealth.
But every rapidly appreciating $2 million house is also telling us something else: land and shelter in that community have become extraordinarily expensive.
And somebody is always at the bottom of an economic ladder.
If the bottom rung is a $500 room, that person may have a room.
If the bottom rung is a $1,800 studio, eventually somebody sleeps outside.
That isn’t liberal.
That isn’t conservative.
That’s arithmetic.
And this is why I find the endless partisan argument about homelessness so maddening.
Liberals don’t want people living in tents.
Conservatives don’t want people living in tents.
Businesses don’t want people sleeping in their doorways.
Homeowners don’t want encampments in their neighborhoods.
And I feel fairly confident that the people living in the goddamn tents don’t want to be living in the tents either.
So why are we still arguing about which political tribe is to blame?
What I have seen walking around San Francisco this month is unacceptable. What I saw in Seattle was unacceptable. And I don’t care whether the mayor has a D or an R after their name.
A country as rich as the United States can do better than this.
But doing better costs money.
Housing people costs money. Building housing costs money. Mental-health care costs money. Addiction treatment costs money. Social workers cost money. Effective policing costs money. Rental assistance costs money.
We seem willing to spend extraordinary amounts dealing with people after their lives collapse while remaining remarkably reluctant to spend enough to prevent the collapse in the first place.
And underneath all of this, for me, is a very simple moral principle:
I believe the strong have an obligation to help the weak.
I believe the measure of a society is not how much its most fortunate can accumulate, but whether those who have enough are willing to reach back for those who do not.
We should feed the hungry, shelter those without a home, care for the sick, and lift up those who have fallen—not because they have earned our compassion, but because compassion should not have to be earned.
There but for fortune go any one of us.
And if we have the means to ease another human being’s suffering and simply choose not to, what exactly does our prosperity say about us?
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