Homelessness Isn’t an Unfixable Problem

California is home to nearly one-third of the nation’s homeless population and the problem—by almost everyone’s account—continues to worsen. The statistics tell part of the story: More than 170,000 people sleep in tents in public parks, under freeway bridges and on sidewalks in our cities and suburbs. The state has spent $20 billion to address the problem in five years.

The anecdotes are even more telling, given that the common, appalling street scenes cause businesses to shutter and discourage people from visiting downtowns or using public transit. I was chatting on my cellphone on a Sacramento street when a homeless man started screaming in my face. It doesn’t take many incidents like that to harden our attitudes.

Liberal Democrats, who typically run big-city governments, have understandably been reluctant to embrace enforcement-centric policies. That’s changing as scared and angry residents speak out. Gov. Gavin Newsom announced efforts to clear out 1,200 homeless encampments. Officials in San Francisco even unleashed the National Guard to tamp down open-air drug markets.

The governor’s office said the effort is “concentrated in or near the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods of the city.” Those neighborhoods are Ground Zero for homeless encampments, which should surprise no one. Sprawling tent cities have become like the Wild West—breeding grounds for illicit drug use, retail theft, and sex crimes.

Meanwhile, California’s official “Housing First” policy is failing. As a fact sheet on the Housing and Community Development website explains, “anyone experiencing homelessness should be connected to a permanent home as quickly as possible, and programs should remove barriers to accessing the housing, like requirements for sobriety or absence of criminal history.”

That approach is an outgrowth of progressive ideology. Housing First views homelessness primarily as a housing problem, thus downplaying the addiction and mental-health issues that are at the root of the crisis. Placing mentally ill people and those with substance-abuse problems unsupervised in housing units doesn’t provide them with the help they need. As one homeless expert told me, it mainly results in them dying alone in a room.

Even if Housing First worked, the state can’t afford to build—and certainly not quickly—the number of units needed. We’ve seen absurd news stories about affordable housing projects costing more than $1 million per apartment. Thanks to the usual governmental issues (poor management, environmental rules, union featherbedding), cities can’t even build a public toilet for less than $1.7 million.

The head of Orange County’s Rescue Mission has told me that the vast majority of people the nonprofit assists self-identify as having a mental health or addiction issue. Yet homeless activists and political commentators push the fiction that homelessness is primarily a housing issue—and advocate their usual litany of solutions: rent controls, eviction moratoria, and additional spending on subsidized apartments.

They make the problem sound easy to fix. As a headline in the Jesuit magazine, America, noted: “Homelessness is only getting worse, but we know the solution: a right to housing.” Declaring