The notion of “housing first,” which is so popular among left wing activists in Oakland, has been criticized by Donald Trump, and for once, I agree with him. Housing first, says the Chronicle accurately, “provides chronically homeless people long-term subsidized housing…but does not require treatment for mental illness or addiction.” This is a huge loophole, which Trump correctly calls “a permissive approach” that blatantly allows, indeed rewards criminals, grifters and asocial types to benefit from the taxpayers’ generosity, but does nothing to actually address the causes of homelessness.
Why would we want to provide “long-term subsidized housing,” AKA free rent, to people who will continue to shoot up, snort and swallow illegal substances that make them unfit to be U.S. citizens?
As is usual in these debates about social policy, you can find studies ad infinitum that purport to support your point of view. Citing studies, which leftists love to do, thus is pointless. I don’t care if Professor X at prestigious university Y determined that “housing first” reduced homelessness by 17 percent in the first six months. That’s canceled out by Professor Z’s finding that housing first had no discernible impact after the first eight months. Instead of relying on dubious, politically-motivated studies, can we please use a little common sense, informed by morality?
The morality part of the equation is often overlooked by the Left, but we really need to employ it more often. Morality tells me that giving people free housing, at taxpayer expense, in which they can indulge their unnatural drug habits is wrong. It goes against the grain of what society has been trying to do for all of human existence: get people to behave properly. For all of our history, if people consistently refused to behave properly, society imposed sanctions on them. These sanctions have varied in severity, but every society we know of decided to penalize people who behaved badly and to deprive them of some of the freedoms to which they thought they were entitled. It wasn’t until our woke era, of sympathy for criminals, that things began to shift. As we’ve seen in Oakland for the last few decades, a lot of confused people believe that criminals are simply misunderstood victims of racism and capitalism and, as such, should be given free housing, free money, free psychotherapy, and so on, in order to heal and rejoin the rest of us in leading civil, lawful lives.
This is, I admit, one point of view. It’s also insane. It’s immoral, and runs counter to human experience. From a common sense point of view, we know that some people are simply bad. They may not have been born bad, but they’ve decided to be bad. They’ve made the free choice to do lousy drugs, to be bums, to destroy our city, to be horrible neighbors, to endanger all of us who are only trying to live simple, peaceful lives. These are your drug users, your fentanyl and crack addicts, your useless parasites (and muggers, thieves and bippers) who live off the productivity of the rest of us. These people have made the worst possible choices in their lives, and there has to be responsibility for their actions.
If they’re homeless because of their use of drugs and/or alcohol, let them contemplate their mistakes as they lay in gutters in the rain. Let them have an epiphany: it’s the first step toward readmittance to decent society. Or, if they refuse to admit their complicity in their own downfall, let them stay in their tent in the cold. I really don’t care either way, as long as they don’t set their tents up in public spaces, in which case we must roust them. In some cases, let us, the taxpayers, tithe ourselves to provide them with housing. But NOT UNLESS they agree to regular and comprehensive drug testing. If they don’t, they’re out of the shelter, back on their own, and it will be their own fault.
Steve Heimoff