The Homeless Crisis Explained

Anyone who is looking for a daily dose of Schadenfreude need look no further than the homeless encampments in true blue California. From San Francisco to Los Angeles the Golden State has allowed its city streets to turn into third world sanctuaries. It could not have happened to nicer people.

Schadenfreude notwithstanding, it is good to have a cogent analysis of the problem. For that we turn to Rich Lowry who has aptly summarized the work of Stephen Eide, from the Manhattan Institute. (via Maggie’s Farm)

First, cities eradicated the low cost housing in what is called skid row. Those who would normally have lived there moved to the streets. (Otherwise they found permanent residency and three meals a day in prison.)

Lowry writes:

Cities wiped out or drastically diminished their skid rows, once a last-ditch housing recourse for men who had hit bottom. As urban renewal and regulations to improve the quality of housing eliminated these down-on-their-luck areas, the people who once lived there decamped to public places.

And, in another fit of do-goodism, we deinstitutionalized the mentally ill:

We “deinstitutionalized” the mentally ill, too often a euphemism for dumping them onto the streets and into jails. About 20 percent to 30 percent of the homeless are mentally ill.

Lowry and Eide also note that the breakdown of the family and the increase in single mothers contributed to the problem:

Meanwhile, the number of single-parent families drastically increased. Women only rarely lived on skid row, but poor families headed by single mothers are a large component of the homeless.

Eide notes that in New York City “two-thirds of the homeless population is comprised of families with children, and around 90 percent of those families are headed by single mothers.”

Also contributing to the problem were judges. Following the lead of the ACLU judges defended the rights of the homeless to live where they wanted and to do what they pleased. Defecating on the sidewalk became a protected right of free expression… sort of.

These large-scale trends have been met with a new restrictive legal environment. The Supreme Court in 1972 made it more difficult for city police forces to hustle along vagrants, and subsequent free-speech jurisprudence has made outlawing panhandling tricky. Civil commitment of the mentally ill has become highly restricted. The ACLU is a great de facto friend of vagrancy.

And the ACLU is a great friend to the psychotics roaming the streets, even those who occasionally open fire on a school. We do not know, from this article, how many of the California homeless are illegal migrants… lured by the promise of sanctuary.

What can we do about it? Lowry offers some answers:

But the beginning wisdom is to consider the status quo intolerable, and resist the advocates who want to normalize panhandling and camping, and the associated drug abuse, petty crime and disorder. Houston has had success with a tough-love policy of more services, coupled with a crackdown on encampments and other public nuisances.

One of the advantages of modern society is that people don’t have to live in public, or in squalor. That it is widely accepted in some of our greatest cities is an outrage of our age. It is deeply harmful to our civic life, and does no favors for the men and women living in parks and highway underpasses.

The problem, in Los Angeles and San Francisco, continues because the grandees who run those cities simply do not care. Lowry calls it a major policy failure, and rightly so. When are the advocates of these policies going to admit their mistakes and take steps to rectify the situation?