It’s one of the biggest questions in America—and among the most difficult to answer. The conventional explanation is that housing has simply gotten too expensive, especially in an era, like ours, when working people are being squeezed in the name of corporate profits.
Housing has always been expensive. In cities like San Francisco, Oakland, New York, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Seattle—the list goes on and on—housing prices soared in recent decades because so many people wanted to live there. This was also true forty years ago, but until around 2016, we never saw the massive numbers of homeless people we see today. So something has changed.
The debate is guaranteed to enter the upcoming presidential primaries and general election. Newsom’s Democratic opponents in the former will hit him on homelessness and housing affordability. If he’s the eventual Democratic nominee, Republicans will slam him for the same. In both instances, Newsom will have to come up with a convincing argument over whom or what to blame for California’s estimated 185,000 homeless residents.
The respected columnist, Dan Walters, wrote the other day about Newsom’s “unfulfilled promises,” referring to Newsom’s pledges for more than twenty years to end or significantly reduce homelessness. Walters’ column raises a number of interesting issues. He accurately claims Newsom “blam[es] local governments” for not spending enough on the problem. Newsom does frequently blame cities for things, not just homelessness but crime as well; he argues that local governments are in the best position to fight crime by, for example, hiring more cops and using more technology (e.g. Flock cameras). This debate over who’s more to blame for homelessness—Sacramento, local governments or even the Federal government—is not terribly productive. Nobody wins; the real issues get drowned out by the finger-pointing.
Allow me to throw a wild card into the debate. Doesn’t it seem possible that homeless people themselves are to blame for their problem? After all, if an individual chooses to basically drop out of society to live a life on the edge, using drugs and/or alcohol to numb themselves and having scorn for the conventional life of a job and a family, then we should not be terribly surprised when a good portion of those people end up on the streets.
It’s easy for homeless advocates to criticize government for not doing more to solve the problem. We hear from them every day that Oakland could build affordable housing to shelter all of the homeless people here, if it really wanted to. Most of us understand that that’s an unreasonable request, when a unit of housing in Oakland costs $500,000 to build, or whatever the latest number is. Yet these advocates constitute a majority of the City Council, as well as the nonprofits and liberals that regularly publicly comment at Council meetings. They also dominate the labor unions that run everything in Oakland, making it difficult for elected officials to do anything counter to union demands.
But at some point, it seems to me that common sense has to prevail. We—the citizens and taxpayers--cannot spend our way out of homelessness. If we go that route, we end up spending more and more money to subsidize homeless people in what seems a never-ending proposition, a permanent welfare state of infinite dependency. We thus drain money away from legitimate government purposes, like public safety and infrastructure, and throw it down a rabbit hole where it does no one any good, except the rapacious bureaucracies hired to oversee homeless funding and the unscrupulous politicians who get elected making promises to “house our unsheltered brothers and sisters.” Our taxes go up and up, breaking the middle class and crushing the lower. It’s unsustainable, and unjust.
The best way to end homelessness in the future is to prevent it in the first place. Today’s homeless population will gradually age out of the cohort; we need to make sure they’re not replaced by a generation to come. To do that does not involve analyzing what progressives love to call “the root causes” of homelessness, or of crime. Every human behavior that’s not part of the autonomic nervous system is caused by a conscious decision on the part of the person. This is a moral truth that progressives ignore. Misguided, stupid human behavior causes homelessness, not a lack of government funding, or the cost of housing. Sadly, stupid behavior has been on the rise in recent decades, especially in cities like Oakland, where progressives constantly tell people they can do anything they want and not suffer the consequences. As people are learning the hard way, actions do have consequences. Housing-first progressives lie for the most venal reasons: to make money and increase their power. They don’t give a damn about you and me, and I don’t give a damn about them.
Steve Heimoff