The Patriot Post® · How Hidden Are the Homeless?

Big cities across America are known for their soaring skyscrapers, a blend of historic and contemporary architecture, entertainment districts, and public spaces providing a respite from the bustle of city life.

Another prominent feature in major cities from coast to coast is homelessness. Vagrants are everywhere, and you don’t have to search for them. In fact, they set up homeless camps right in the middle of downtown where people walk to work, school, or restaurants. In many cases, they’re so aggressive that you can’t avoid them if you tried.

“The sprawling tent encampments of Los Angeles and San Francisco have become shorthand for urban decline,” writes Scott Beyer of the Independent Institute. “Those and other cities, particularly on the West Coast, spent billions to combat the problem, yet have still seen dramatic growth in homelessness. As troubling as the sheer numbers are, the problem is compounded by a lack of behavioral standards in these cities. Thousands of people are allowed to camp, openly use drugs, and panhandle aggressively. The result is not mere poverty but disorder — creating permanent skid rows in certain sections.”

In New York City, instead of raising awareness of the problem head-on, a recent article in The New York Times by Emma Goldberg portrays the search for the homeless as a romantic quest to find the downtrodden and help them through the winter cold. Goldberg also gives readers the impression that the homeless are hard to find, tucked away in the city’s darkness, where only a trained team of city outreach workers can locate them.

“As darkness settled over New York City on Sunday night,” Goldberg writes, “a hulking white van raced through Lower Manhattan. Its driver, Christians Perez, peered through the windows, looking for the subtle signs of hidden life on city streets. It’s something you can’t exactly teach: how to spot the homeless New Yorkers trying to blend into the night — people resting on bus stop benches, curled up on doorsteps, tucked into the shadows of scaffolding.”

This is a depiction right out of a public television wildlife safari, with the hopeful passengers relying on a professional guide to catch a glimpse of a gazelle. In reality, it doesn’t take any skill or training at all to find the homeless in New York or any other American city, big or small.

Heather Mac Donald at City Journal responds, “Fortunately for Goldberg, the outreach team she shadows on this March night proves uncannily adept at detecting these ‘subtle signs of hidden life on city streets,’” darting, almost miraculously, from one vagrant to the next. She adds, “to which ordinary New Yorkers can only ask: in what world does Goldberg live? Street vagrancy is among the most visible features of the city’s public spaces; the disheveled bodies, surrounded by filthy bedding, uneaten food, and cardboard, are unmistakable at any hour. New Yorkers can only wish they were camouflaged.”

New Yorkers are compassionate people, but they’re growing frustrated with how the city is dealing with the homeless. As Rich Calder of the New York Post explains, “The homeless have a new perk thanks to Mayor Zohran Mamdani: turndown service. City sanitation workers did everything this week but put mints on the greasy pillows atop makeshift beds in a booming shantytown below a Queens overpass. Community leaders and residents complained that hobos were taking advantage of the socialist pols’ softer new guidelines for dealing with the homeless crisis and brazenly turning the public walkway into their own sprawling flophouse.” The softer guidelines refer to Mayor Mamdani’s policy of ending all sweeps of homeless camps.

The homeless population is an important part of the political Left’s culture. Yet they haven’t made any real effort to solve the problem in decades. Instead, they care more about understanding the homeless and their way of life. Some activists even volunteer to sleep in their own tents or cardboard boxes right next to other vagrants in order to understand their world. Politicians like Mamdani think sweeping the camps away will end this special way of life. And, of course, it keeps the issue alive and the money rolling in.

While the official “on the street” homeless population is estimated to be under 5,000 in New York, the city doesn’t think there’s a limit to how much money should be thrown at the problem. As Fox News [reports][(https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nyc-spends-more-per-homeless-person-than-typical-household-earns-year-data-shows), “The city’s own numbers show the unsheltered population grew from 3,588 in fiscal year 2019 to 4,504 in fiscal year 2025, a 26% increase from pre-pandemic levels. Over that same period, spending on services for the unsheltered jumped 262%, from $102 million to nearly $368 million. That works out to roughly $81,700 per unsheltered person in FY 2025 — slightly more than the city’s median household income.”

That’s the real takeaway here.

Helping the homeless is noble and compassionate. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with telling heartwarming stories about homeless individuals or the organizations helping them live another day. But in the end, we can’t avoid tackling the reality of homelessness or its impact on society. Unfortunately, Mayor Mamdani and other city leaders around the country don’t really want the problem to go away because of the political and monetary benefits of keeping people on the streets.