By Steve Pomper
From the results of the “War on Homelessness” or whatever euphemism the HIC (Homeless Industrial Complex) is using these days, you’d swear their actual goal is not to eliminate “homelessness,” but to increase it. And that creates a terrible drain on public safety resources as police and fire personnel routinely respond to the crime, drug, and mental illness fallout from disastrous city policies.
Talk to any cop working in a jurisdiction where the leaders tolerate people illegally occupying public spaces, including sidewalks, bus/train stops, and parks, and they’ll tell you all about the “homeless” connections to crime. Just yesterday, the New York Post reported 100 illegal immigrants “sheltering” at Logan Airport in Boston, “arriving at all hours.”
You’re a citizen or legal immigrant. With all the supposed TSA security restrictions, could you go down and take up residence at your local airport?
While every jurisdiction of any size will always deal with some number of people living on the streets, many don’t experience it as a crisis. We know this because there are places where “homelessness” is not a crisis because the jurisdictions combine compassionate resources for those who will accept it, but also enforce the laws. “Homelessness” should not exempt people from the law.
I’ve written about this issue before, but it’s worth repeating. The first thing the HIC radicals did back in the 80s and 90s was to change the definition of “homeless” thus imbuing people living on the streets with some sort of automatic virtue. I’m sure some folks living on the street are virtuous, and their situations will be temporary. But no one is entitled to an assumption of virtue based on their “housing” status. That’s just weird.
We used to describe true homelessness as people temporarily without a home often for emergency reasons like a house fire, a loss of a job, domestic violence, or a medical crisis. For too many people, living on the streets is a choice.
Just watch or listen to people like KTTH radio host Jason Rantz or journalist Jonathan Choe up in Seattle. Their excellent reporting repeatedly shows “homeless” folks who routinely rebuff offers of assistance. Instead, they choose to remain on the streets.
One problem is the HIC’s “housing first” emphasis that pretends the people living on the streets do so because there isn’t enough housing. That is a ruse. Anywhere they try “housing first,” it doesn’t work. And, add to that, anywhere they refuse to enforce existing laws against the “homeless,” the problem remains unsolved.
Here’s an excellent recent example from the two largest cities in Arizona: Phoenix and Tucson. The Goldwater Institute just studied the issue and found that after pouring tons of money into attempts to solve the “homeless” crisis, it hasn’t worked.
According to Virginia Allen, “Austin VanDerHeyden, municipal affairs liaison for the Goldwater Institute, told The Daily Signal, ‘We’ve seen Phoenix and Tucsonspend, combined, almost half a billion dollars on this issue with very minimal improvements in the area of homelessness.’”
Goldwater has found through its investigation that Phoenix has dumped truckloads of cash into “address[ing] homelessness between July 2021 and March 2023.” According to Goldwater’s findings, since 2021, Phoenix has spent more than $250 million to tackle “homelessness,” which, the report says, “has not moved the needle on the problem.”
So, where did that taxpayer money go? It’s money, so we know it went somewhere. The money likely goes to a giant HIC spiderweb of non-profits who disperse the funds to who knows? The bookkeeping seems lacking.
But what are the taxpayers getting for their buck? After all of the tremendous spending, the Goldwater report found that “Phoenix reported in May that the ‘total population of people experiencing homelessness in Phoenix decreased by just over 1%, from 6,902 in 2023 to 6,816 in 2024.’”
However, “In Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, the housed and unhoused homeless population was 6,298 in 2018 and has risen to 9,435 in 2024.”
It seems the HIC is doing just enough not to allow “homelessness” to get worse but also not to get better. And what does that do? It will enable the cash spigot to continue to flow while communities and their cops continue to deal with the self-induced crisis.
And the cops continue to deal with the residue of insane public policies regarding “fixing” the “homeless” crisis. And public safety continues to suffer.
