The Patriot Post® · In Brief: The Problem of the Homeless
The homeless, or what used to be called vagrants, aren’t the typical topic of conversation. In fact, most of them are nearly invisible to us for many reasons. Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Chuck DeVore, now with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, lays out some of the problems with the response.
In Austin, Texas, in a 24-hour period in March less than a mile apart, a woman was punched several times and sexually assaulted, suffering a split lower jaw and bruises over her body; then a building was burned down, damaging adjacent buildings, causing about $1.5 million in damage. The common thread: Homeless men living on the street are the accused.
The homeless are on the streets because they don’t have homes — or so many of their so-called advocates claim. They see homelessness as a disease and prescribing housing as the first step to a cure — with housing seen as a right, like they believe health care should be.
But these advocates ignore the reasons at least three out of every four people experiencing homelessness end up sleeping on the sidewalks and asking passersby for cash: They suffer from untreated mental illness, drug or alcohol addiction, or both. Their chaotic, self-destructive behavior caused them to be unemployable, and they burned the bridges to their immediate family.
With that, he recounts a little history:
In 1955, before the advent of commercially available psychotropic drugs to treat mental illness, some 550,000 Americans were confined in mental asylums, with one of the common “cures” being a frontal lobotomy. Today, that number stands at about 40,000. But accounting for population growth, if the mental health system of 65 years ago were in use today, there’d be more than 1.1 million people institutionalized.
That shouldn’t carry the stigma that it does. People need help, and there’s no shame in that. Yet there are an estimated 600,000 homeless in America today. DeVore says roughly 40% live on the streets, and many end up in and out of jail. He gives one city’s awful example:
The Seattle metropolitan area has grappled with its homeless challenge for many years now. But the more money it throws at the problem, the worse it gets. In 2018, Chris Rufo calculated that more than $1 billion annually was spent to address homelessness — almost $100,000 a year for every homeless person. Moreover, because of the way the taxpayer funds are spent — on housing with no rules or expectations of treatment (a policy known as “Housing First”) — addiction, violent crime, sex trafficking, and thievery have increased, especially in neighborhoods hosting facilities that house more than a couple dozen homeless people in one place.
Then he gives another one:
Returning to Austin, the city’s residents have suffered leftist public policy firsthand as the city council defunded and disempowered the police while welcoming the homeless. And, as Rufo has found, the homeless are attracted to locations more amenable to their lifestyle, especially when they’re offered shelter with no rules. In short order, the unhoused — the new euphemism for many people who, at one time, were called bums, tramps, vagabonds, vagrants, or beggars — filled the sidewalks, parks, and freeway underpasses.
He concludes:
The damage caused by the homeless extends beyond self-harm. When a homeless person assaults or rapes someone, shoplifts from a small business, or gets hit by a driver who is subsequently traumatized, public safety and peace of mind are shattered. Added to that, homeless individuals suffering from an overdose or a mental crisis make repeated trips to emergency rooms or the local jail that cost millions of dollars. …
Left-wing mismanagement of our urban areas can’t continue indefinitely. If the voters and those they elect won’t change, the cities will decline and lose relevance, following the path of Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, and now even Los Angeles. The other possibility is that frustrated residents and courageous politicians will buck leftist orthodoxy and work to reform civil commitment laws and drug treatment systems, and start to put criminals behind bars.