Tag Archive for: Homeless Industrial Complex

How Trump Can Declare War on the Homeless Industrial Complex

California’s homeless crisis is now visible to everyone living in the state. Along with tens of thousands of homeless who are concentrated in various districts of the major cities, additional thousands are widely dispersed. If you drive into most major urban centers, you will see their tent encampments along freeway junctions, under bridges, along frontages, beside drainage culverts. Even in very small towns, they congregate by the dozens in parks and parking lots, along the streets and in the alleys. In California’s largest cities, by the tens of thousands, they erect makeshift housing along sidewalks, using tarpaulins draped over shopping carts, tents, boxes. It is completely out of control. Billions have been spent to ameliorate the situation, and these billions have only served to make the situation worse than ever.

It’s hard to identify ground zero for California’s homeless crisis. But the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County host, between them, well over 100,000 of California’s estimated 130,000 homeless. And in both of those metros, local government policies have utterly failed. This failure is partly because local elected officials are hampered by state laws which make it nearly impossible to incarcerate petty thieves and drug addicts, or institutionalize the mentally ill, and court rulings that prohibit breaking up homeless encampments unless these homeless can be provided free and permanent “supportive housing.”

The state and federal governments have even mandated that providing “housing first,” and getting every homeless person under a roof prior to any allocations of funds for treatment to overcome drug addiction or manage mental illness, is a condition of  receiving government funds to help the homeless.

As if these laws and court rulings that have made homeless populations unmanageable weren’t enough, California’s state legislators have crippled the ability of developers to cost effectively construct any type of housing. State laws designed to prevent “sprawl” have caused land prices within cities to skyrocket. California’s environmental laws, most notably CEQA (the California Environmental Quality Act), require a dizzying, time consuming and expensive, seemingly endless array of reports from developers seeking project approvals. There are literally hundreds of various applications and fees that developers have to file with dozens of state and local agencies, and often these agencies will take months if not years to process the applications.

But instead of challenging these laws, local elected officials have used them as an excuse to engage in one of the most corrupt misuses of government funds in American history. Without first changing these laws, the problem cannot be fixed. But a special interest movement has been created to spend the money anyway. This alliance of special interests constitutes what has now become a Homeless Industrial Complex, comprised of government bureaucracies, homeless advocacy groups operating through nonprofit entities, and large government contractors, especially construction companies and land development firms.

They have used money from the state general fund, from state bond funds, from special local taxes and fees, and from local bond measures, to construct housing for the homeless, heedless of the per unit cost. While a few thousand units of actual housing units have been constructed so far, billions have already been spent.

An audit recently released by L.A.’s City Controller Ron Galperin exposed the City’s inability to build enough homes with the $1.2 billion in Prop HHH voter approved bond funds to address the crisis of homelessness. At an average cost of $550,000 per apartment unit of “permanent supportive housing,” small wonder. Similar or even higher average per unit costs are typical of previous efforts in Los Angeles as well as throughout California.

Diverting nearly all funding to “Housing First” at the expense of treatment, and elevating the costs of that housing through legalized corruption, guarantee that billions more will be wasted as homelessness in California only gets worse. California’s local, county, and state governments have demonstrated themselves to be administratively and ethically inept. It is time for the Federal government, under the vision and leadership of President Trump, to intervene and solve this problem with a comprehensive interagency response.

If several federal agencies launched a coordinated effort to get California’s homeless crisis under control, it could be accomplished in months instead of several years. As it is, California’s homeless crisis is out of control and getting worse every day. Federal action would not solve the homeless crisis overnight, but it would prevent something truly catastrophic occurring such as a disease epidemic, and it would set the stage for Californians more swiftly implementing permanent solutions, for which there currently is no end in sight.

For example, the IRS could reform the laws governing nonprofits to curb the legalized waste of billions that pour into what have become special interest behemoths.

The SEC could classify the taxpayer as having investor rights, in a long-overdue move that would make it a lot more difficult for public projects to squander public funds.

The SEC could also require consultants to public agencies to register as financial advisers and be subject to the same restrictions on political donations that govern these consultants in the private sector.

The Justice Dept. could investigate some of the more egregious wasteful projects allegedly launched to help the homeless to possibly uncover cases of collusion or racketeering.

The Justice Dept. could also send in DEA agents to break up the criminal gangs and drug traffickers who exploit California’s lenient drug laws and hide among the homeless encampments.

The Dept. of Housing and Urban Development could reform the Low Income Tax Credit program to put a cap on per unit costs for housing projects to qualify. They could repeal the disastrous “housing first” mandate that prevents homeless programs from prioritizing treatment equally to constructing shelters.

The Dept. of Education could get even more aggressive against the teachers union which resists competition in K-12 education, and is consequently responsible for thousands of students graduating into homelessness instead of productive lives.

The Centers for Disease Control could declare a health emergency and sweep through the homeless encampments, cleaning up the trash and human excrement.

The EPA could participate in that effort by declaring – quite accurately – homeless encampments to be Brownfields, in order to save California’s soil, water, and runoff to the ocean.

The Dept. of Labor could implement an executive order preventing Project Labor Agreements from being used to inflate the cost of housing projects, as if with the shortage of construction laborers in California, there is any need for PLAs.

And the Dept. of Veterans Affairs could house homeless veterans on unused sections of California’s abundant military bases.

These and other suggestions are covered in detail in the remainder of this article.

How Federal Agencies Could Work Together to Tackle the Homeless Crisis

Treasury Department/Internal Revenue Service (IRS)

One of the biggest sources of legalized corruption that victimizes the American taxpayer is the fact that there has been no reform to nonprofit tax law. A nonprofit is the most tax-advantaged way to legally launder profits and act as an advocacy wing of major corporations. The US Tax code has been greatly abused by large national nonprofits who have turned charity work into a bankable industry, the power of which now rivals the private sector. 

Today’s large charitable organizations are part of the Homeless Industrial Complex. These nonprofits outrival many small businesses today by using the tax code to their benefit. Why pay taxes if you can find a loophole in the tax code? According to one report the nonprofit sector – 10% of the American workforce or 11.4 million jobs – is the third largest workforce in the U.S., behind retail and manufacturing. Total charitable giving in the U.S. in 2016 was about $390 billion, a 2.7% increase from 2015.

One of the most tax advantaged ways to legally embezzle public dollars is via a nonprofit entity, which then creates a for-profit subsidiary. All of the revenue goes directly to the nonprofit controlling entity, wherein there are no caps on salaries and everything is effectively a write-off, and it becomes a zero sum game to show zero profits. They can pay consulting and contracting fees to for-profit entities, which often can result in additional pay if the same employee is on the payroll of both entities. Why use a for profit business to own property when you can create a nonprofit entity, therefore excluding yourself from property taxes? The really savvy nonprofits know how to use the tax code to their advantage by hiring the most sophisticated tax attorneys and accountants, and creating multiple entities in order to do this.

Recommendations: The IRS should comprehensively reform the regulations governing nonprofits. For example:

  • Set a threshold for annual (pre-tax) revenue from all sources of income and contributions, and once that maximum is exceeded, the IRS will automatically reclassify the nonprofit as a for profit entity, and tax accordingly.
  • Require all tax-exempt organizations to file public consolidated financials to replace current 990 requirements. Currently, under IRS guidelines, whether or not a tax-exempt organization has a parent, affiliate, subsidiary, and/or related entities, only the tax-exempt organization needs to file a public tax return. This is how they avoid disclosing their true assets and total salaries paid to employees. When an organization has multiple entities, an employee can work for any of these entities, with different titles and roles, while also receiving a salary from each of them. Without consolidated financials, it is impossible to determine how much a nonprofit executive, board member, or consultant makes. Additionally, Private Foundation tax-exempt entities are not required to disclose current 990’s to the IRS, which every other tax-exempt entity is required to do.
  • Make the above requirement effective to-date, with a 2 year retroactive look back provision in order to be in good standing and maintain its tax exempt status. By doing so, you would likely see a sudden drop in organizations seeking a tax exempt status, and find many entities suddenly converting to traditional for-profit organizations. If an entity was not in compliance within a certain time frame, you could freeze its tax exempt status until it was able to do so, ultimately cutting off their fundraising ability.
  • Impose a tax on excess executive compensation among tax-exempt organizations. Even a limit of $500,000 for any individual or executive pay would have a huge impact. While a limit of $500K per year may seem high, some of these nonprofit executive salaries are much higher. At these rates of compensation the entity is no longer a public benefit, as it now benefits a specific employee.
  • Tax all public charity organizations in the same manner, as private foundations. While there are 30 types of 501(c) organizations, there are two different types of 501(c)(3)s, Private Foundations vs. Public Charities. Private Foundations pay taxes on net investment income which generally includes interest, dividends, rents, royalties, and capital gain net income, and is reduced by expenses incurred to earn this income. In reaching the asset threshold, the assets of related organizations are considered. A 501(c)(3) public charity follows different taxation rules from that of a Private Foundation.
  • Disallow Private Foundations from 501(c)(3) exemption. A Private Foundation consists of nonprofits that don’t qualify as public charities. Foundations may be sub-classified as private operating foundations or private non-operating foundations and receive some of the advantages of public charities. Well-known foundations include the Rockefeller Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Getty Foundation. In essence, highly profitable, multinational corporations have figured out how to take advantage of the tax code, and the creation of a private foundation is THE best and most tax advantaged way to do so.
  • Tax tax-exempt organizations for any business activity outside of their chartered IRS exemption.
  • Hold all 501(c)(3) organizations to the same lobbying disclosure rules. Other tax-exempt organizations that lobby, must either notify their members as to how much of their dues are nondeductible because they’re spent on lobbying or pay a proxy tax at the highest corporate rate, yet this rule does not apply to 501(c)(3) organizations.

Nonprofit organizations have become corrupt and politicized, and gone far beyond the charitable missions for which their tax exempt status was originally conceived. Reforming the tax laws governing nonprofits will not only result in leaner, more effective nonprofit advocacy for the homeless, which translates into less expensive homeless shelters and less expensive housing for the homeless. It will remove the incentives for individuals and organizations to abuse the nonprofit exemptions in all segments of American society.

Securities and Exchange Commission 

Affordable housing developers are not disclosing the value of City Land, therefore engaging in what is arguably taxpayer backed fraud by not disclosing the full project costs to the investor, which in this case is the taxpayer. All real estate – whether it is single family, commercial, or investment – is an investment made by an individual, who pays property taxes to local governments. Property taxes are allowable deductions for investment properties, therefore, the property owner is an investor.

Recommendations: Use the SEC Act of 1933 and 1934 to do the following:

  • Recognize the American taxpayer as a protected class of investors by the SEC.
  • Recognize any interest in real estate meets the definition of a “security.”
  • Apply insider trading laws to real estate investing.

If the American taxpayer is afforded the same rights that investors are accorded in private investment transactions, it will become far more difficult for public agencies to get away with waste and fraud. This will not only lower the costs for public homeless shelters and public housing for the homeless, it will lower the costs for all taxpayer funded public projects.

Securities and Exchange Commission / Division of Enforcement 

Local elected officials accept campaign donations from special interest groups, and in return, give them the rights to large redevelopment projects. This is a pay to play scheme. These groups are not registered as investment advisers, yet they provide investment advisory services to municipalities. 

Recommendation: Apply Section 206(4) of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 to all industries who partake in municipal contracts, requiring that investment advisers are subject to a two-year timeout from providing compensatory advisory services or political contributions. 

Why should investment advisers have to register and adhere to campaign finance restrictions in the private sector, but not in the public sector? Holding them to the same rules as in the private sector will eliminate obvious conflicts of interest, and make the bidding process for homeless projects and services more competitive.

Justice Department / AntiTrust Division

The special interest movement known as the Homeless Industrial Complex may be engaging in collusive practices to substantially lessen competition, and this may include price-fixing schemes where one person holds property for the benefit of another. We are facing a manufactured crisis today by special interest groups and elected officials, who stand to benefit financially from the crisis, thus potentially making this a racketeering case.

Recommendation: Invoke the Sherman Act of 1890, the Clayton Act of 1914 and the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, to prohibit cartels and the abuse of monopoly power.

Taking these steps will make all the stakeholders involved in helping the homeless, where billions have already been spent, far more careful in what sorts of partnerships they form, and what sort of “arms-length” transactions they execute.

Justice Department / Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)

In California, voter enacted Propositions 47 (downgraded property and drug crimes) and 57 (early release of nonviolent inmates) have worked together as a perfect storm only to perpetuate a constant cycle of drug use and the need to commit crimes to pay for them. Drug dealers now operate their businesses with minimal deterrents. Organized drug traffickers are able to hide under the guise of homelessness within homeless encampments. 

Recommendation: Drugs are still illegal on a federal level, and the DEA needs to get involved in fighting drug trafficking that is camouflaged within the homeless communities. 

California’s policymakers have abandoned their citizens to an epidemic of drug use. State laws make it nearly impossible to stop public use of hard drugs. Traffickers and users operate with near impunity, and the state has become a magnet for both. With rampant drug use comes organized crime, exacerbated mental illness, property crimes to support drug habits, and public disorder. A federal crackdown will get this all back under control.

Justice Department / Law Enforcement Agencies 

The State of California and City of Los Angeles no longer enforce the core responsibility of any government, which is to guarantee public safety. Private property is no longer respected under this diminished rule of law, thus violating the civil rights of law abiding residents victimized by a state of lawlessness. 

Recommendation: Activate and deploy Federal Law Enforcement Agencies such as the US Marshals and Federal Bureau of Investigations to restore law and order to citizens. 

With federal agencies cooperating with local law enforcement to enforce federal crimes, including robbery and larceny, the deterrent against property crimes that went away with the enactment of Prop. 47 will be reestablished.

Housing and Urban Development / Federal Housing Administration

Federal tax credit programs and taxpayer-backed dollars are being abused by special interest groups, under the guise of social redistribution policies. Specifically, the LIHTC (Low Income Housing Tax Credit) program may be unduly influenced by non-profit housing developers with no incentive to build cost effective solutions, and are now reaching “affordable housing” per apartment costs that can exceed $750,000. These high costs are due to California’s state and local governments requiring hundreds of permits with exorbitant fees and lengthy processing times, excessive environmental regulations, and prevailing wage requirements. Very few developers are capable of complying with this punitive array of obstacles, ensuring that the “subsidy” goes to powerful and favored special interest groups, defeating the underlying policy of the program in general.

Recommendations:

  • Repeal “housing first” which prevents funds from immediately being shared with treatment programs.
  • Federal tax credits must be prioritized towards projects that are cost-effective.
  • Withhold Community Developer Block Grants from the State of California.
  • Require the exemption of state prevailing wage requirements in order to use the Federal LIHTC.
  • Set a maximum costs per bed/unit in order to receive public funding.
  • Reform the LIHTC program so that it only financed “affordable housing” within 60-120% of area median income, but require developers to prove that residents could afford to live there, using household budgeting tools that take into account utilities and surrounding expense factors.
  • Reform LIHTC so that deeper LIHTC subsidy models in the 30-50% of AMI have their own program, similar to HUD programs like Section 8.
  • The HUD Office of Inspector General should identify examples of abuse of federal subsidies and prosecute offenders.

By setting conditions on federal funds for homeless projects, and by removing the “housing first” rule that prevents treatment from getting equal priority to shelter, for more assistance will be possible with the same amount of funding.

Department of Education

Where you live determines where you go to school, so California’s inner city youth are most impacted. For a child education is destiny, and it is the only way out of poverty. We are spending billions of dollars on the homeless crisis and job training for the uneducated, and public schools in California rank 40th in the nation. Unless we provide opportunities to Americans, they will fall victim to substance abuse. We have witnessed a market failure in public education, and the only way to correct market failures is to open up competition.

Recommendations:

  • We need an “Education First” policy that recognizes that the teachers union is the primary barrier to improving educational outcomes in the United States;
  • We must improve our failing public education system by allowing competition via new charter schools and allowing for a robust opportunity scholarships (AKA, voucher) programs. 

California’s public education system has been fatally undermined by the teachers unions, which oppose any sort of competition to traditional public schools. Breaking their monopoly through charter schools or even vouchers will provide opportunities to students who today are graduating to homelessness instead of living productive lives.

Health and Human Services / Centers for Disease Control

Our homeless crisis is in large part a mental illness and drug crisis, masked as an “affordable housing” crisis by special interests. The mentally ill are our most vulnerable population, requiring our most help as they are a danger to themselves and others. A recent study by the Los Angeles Times has found that 78 percent of the unsheltered homeless in the City of Los Angeles suffer from mental illness.

Recommendations:

  • Declare a health emergency to address mental illness and substance abuse among the homeless, and,
  • Create a federal tax credit to build and reopen mental healthcare facilities, for locations based outside of urban areas. We are witnessing a mental health and drug addiction epidemic afflicting tens of thousands of homeless, making Los Angeles’ “Housing First” policy ineffective.
  • Subsidize the costs and regulate addiction treatment programs which can cost $30-60K per visit. Funding on these programs needs to revised criteria that creates an incentive for providers who can do it cost-effectively.
  • Directly pay individuals who directly provide care for and house a family member with a severe mental illness.

Getting people back into mental health treatment, either through more cost-effective publicly funded programs, or by making it easier for family members to care for their mentally ill loved ones, would ameliorate some of the most tragic consequences of the ineffective approach to-date.

The homeless crisis is also creating a risk of a disease epidemic. The trash and human excrement accumulating in homeless encampments has spawned an exploding population of disease carrying animals and insects that thrive in these conditions: rats, fleas, mosquitoes, ticks, mites, lice. Los Angeles already has outbreaks of typhus, hepatitis and tuberculosis, as do other cities in California. Shigella, a communicable form of diarrhea, is now common among the homeless. There have even been outbreaks of trench fever, spread by lice.

Recommendation: The Centers for Disease Control should declare a health emergency to swiftly clean up the trash and human excrement. The out-of-control populations of rats, fleas, mosquitoes, ticks, mites, and lice should be exterminated.

California’s policymakers have utterly failed to protect the public from the diseases being spawned and spread by the trash and excrement piling up in homeless encampments. Declaring a health emergency and applying federal resources to the problem can fix it before it’s too late.

Environmental Protection Agency

California’s state legislature recently passed AB 1197, and it was quickly signed by Governor Newsom. The new law only pertains to the City of Los Angeles, and exempts any homeless housing project from the California Environmental Quality Act. Yet because of the homeless, our streets are littered with feces, needles, and trash. While many are campaigning about climate change, far more imminent threats to public health and quality of our oceans is linked to the growing homelessness crisis in California with thousands of tons of human excrement and drug paraphernalia runoff flowing directly in our oceans and water systems. California’s environmentalists have somehow forgotten that all drains lead to the ocean. Equally troubling, the trash and human excrement in these homeless encampments has lead to an explosion of disease carrying rodents. Now there are issues with homeless related fires.

Recommendations:

  • Declare areas where the homeless are concentrated as Brownfields, via the EPA Brownfields program;
  • Mandate a community EPA liaison on any state project given an environmental exemption in order to deter environmental crimes.

Using Brownfield status to bring financial resources and regulatory leverage to bear on homeless encampments may be the only way to stop ongoing degradation of California’s soil, water, and ocean runoff.

Homeland Security

Today we are witnessing organized crime hiding within the extensive homeless encampments, taking advantage of permissive laws to conduct many illicit actives in broad daylight. Criminal organizations are growing among the homeless, understanding our laws and using them to their benefit, in order to diminish the role of law enforcement.

Recommendation: The Department of Homeland Security needs to infiltrate these homeless encampments and root out organized criminal networks.

If the DHS and the Justice Dept. work together to bring federal power and federal statutes into what have become lawless areas of California, the laws that tie the hands of local law enforcement can be overridden.

Department of Labor

States with the highest homeless populations, such as California, are run by special interest groups which require union memberships to work. 

Recommendations:

  • Implement a presidential executive order that exempts housing programs from prevailing wage laws and project labor agreements.
  • Require At Risk Targeted Persons (ARTPs) Employee Hiring Mandates;  ex-felons, persons with mental illness, chronically homeless individuals; sober ex-drug addicts;
  • Develop meaningful federal tax incentives and tax abatements to small business to incentivize employment of ARTPs and provide on-site workforce housing.

By exempting housing programs from prevailing wage laws and project labor agreements, the Dept. of Labor can lower the per unit costs of shelter beds and units of housing. California’s labor market is so tight that these exemptions will not harm the workers. Similarly, by creating incentives for employers to hire at risk individuals, more of the homeless will begin to reenter society. Organized labor should compete for projects and should not hinder the ability of organizations and companies to hire at-risk individuals as nonunion workers, and the Dept. of Labor can ensure that through executive order.

Department of Veterans Affairs

Veterans experience homelessness at a higher rate than the civilian population. About 7 percent of people in the U.S. can claim veteran status, but former service members make up around 13 percent of the country’s homeless population, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

Recommendations:

  • Use military bases to house homeless veterans.
  • Work with Department of Labor/ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Veterans’ Employment and Training.

Offering on-base housing to homeless veterans is an idea whose time has come. Giving them this respect after their service to our nation is fitting, and could make use of surplus facilities throughout California’s extensive network of military bases.

Federal Intervention Could Quickly Get America’s Homeless Crisis Under Control

The objective of these recommendations is not to presume they offer the complete set of answers, or even the complete list of federal agencies that can be involved. These solutions that involve the federal executive branch are limited only by how conscientiously and how creatively they can be crafted. But the impact of the recommended changes would be immediate and profound.

If these recommendations were implemented, California’s homeless crisis would quickly improve. Criminal drug traffickers would be looking over their shoulders. The CDC and EPA would declare an emergency and clean up homeless encampments. Homeless veterans would find immediate shelter. And the power of the Homeless Industrial Complex, a special interest movement that has been enriched by going slow and overspending on everything, would be shaken to its foundations.

Nonprofits would no longer be able to legally squander funds intended to help the homeless. Taxpayers would have the same rights as private sector investors, making it less likely public agencies could waste money on projects. Federal funds would be contingent on cost-effective projects. Unions would have to compete to participate in projects, and with the shortage of construction workers in California and the many projects awaiting funds, that would not be a hardship to them. Over time, maybe a sustained effort by the Dept. of Education to introduce competition to the monopolistic union controlled public schools might even change both the aptitude and the attitude of students graduating into California’s workforce.

Eventually, maybe the other root problem connected to homelessness, prohibitively expensive housing, could get addressed. Not only through many of the reforms proposed here, which could apply to low income housing as easily as to permanent supportive housing, but through a loosening of the requirements to run building permit applications through an obscene gaggle of local and state agencies. Projects that take as little as 20 days in Texas to get approved, and at most 20 months in most states, can take up to 20 years in California. Small wonder there’s a housing shortage. These countless applications with their exorbitant fees and endless delays constitute criminal negligence and naked, insatiable public sector greed, masquerading as a public service.

In California, at the state and local level, despite well-funded rhetoric to the contrary, there is a shortage of creativity and a shortage of conscientiousness. The residents of the most hard hit cities facing this problem are trailblazers, pointing out that Emperor Newsom has no clothes, yet their cries for help have been ignored.

California’s policymakers are puppets of special interests. Those special interests include their own bureaucracies, which are controlled by public sector unions that gain membership dues and power whenever a public sector challenge worsens. Similarly, the other special interest members of the Homeless Industrial Complex, developers and nonprofit corporations, gain profits and revenues when the homeless crisis worsens.

It is time for the federal government to take decisive action where our public servants on the state and local level have utterly failed the public. It must never be forgotten that this failure victimizes not only the taxpayers and the members of the public who live in areas overran with homeless people. It also victimizes the homeless themselves, who are not getting shelter, and who are not getting treatment.

The power of the special interests who have turned homelessness into a self-serving, taxpayer funded industry, must be broken.

An executive order from President Trump declaring a state of emergency, followed up by an interagency effort according to a blueprint patterned after this checklist, could get America’s homeless crisis under control. And it could happen in months instead of interminable years.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

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How Federal Intervention Can Ease California’s Homeless Crisis

On October 24, Curbed LA reported that the Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted to provide an additional $24 million in homeless housing bonds to “repurpose a building (207) on the Veterans Affairs campus in West Los Angeles for housing for veterans.” According to the article, the rehabilitated building would provide 59 units of permanent supportive housing for homeless and chronically homeless senior Veterans.”

According to Ryan Thompson, writing for VeniceUpdate.com, the developer’s budget for this rehab project is $54.6 million, which equates to a per unit cost of $926,000. In his write-up, Thompson not only questions the astronomical per unit price tag, but the entire process whereby these contracts were awarded and how the designated developers were selected. It warrants close reading.

Spending up to one million dollars per unit to not even create new housing, but to upgrade an existing structure, is not an outlier. These astronomical costs are typical. In Venice Beach, a new structure being proposed to accommodate homeless and low income residents is budgeted, including the value of the land, at over $200 million, in order to create 140 new apartment units. That’s a cost of $1.4 million per unit.

In order to assist the homeless, in 2016, Los Angeles voters approved Prop. HHH, authorizing $1.2 billion to construct “supportive housing.” As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the total project cost, on average, for the few thousand units that will eventually get built is $550,000 each.

Up north, the San Francisco Bay Area’s local politicians are equally adept at spending unbelievable sums of money to create housing for the homeless and for low income families. The City of Oakland provides a typical example, the “Estrella Vista” affordable housing project, wherein 87 housing units were constructed at a cost of $64 million, which equates to $736,000 per unit.

And then there’s San Francisco’s Prop. A, set to be voted on November 5th. This $600 million bond will be used to construct low income housing, but a close analysis of the bond estimates that it will eventually fund, at most, 650 units of new housing and 450 units of rehabilitated existing housing.

Why are our public officials spending a half-million per unit, or more, to build housing units for homeless and low income families in California? How on earth do they think they will ever solve California’s homeless crisis, when they’re unable spend less than a half-million dollars each, to get a roof over someone’s head?

A Crippling Assortment of Laws and Regulations Have Enabled Corruption Instead of Cures

The San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County host, between them, well over 100,000 of California’s estimated 130,000 homeless. And in both of those metros, local government policies have utterly failed. This failure is partly because local elected officials are hampered by state laws which make it nearly impossible to incarcerate petty thieves and drug addicts, or institutionalize the mentally ill, and court rulings that prohibit breaking up homeless encampments unless these homeless can be provided free and permanent “supportive housing.”

The state and federal governments have even mandated that providing “housing first,” and getting every homeless person under a roof prior to any allocations of funds for treatment to overcome drug addiction or manage mental illness, is a condition of  receiving government funds to help the homeless.

As if these laws and court rulings that have made homeless populations unmanageable weren’t enough, California’s state legislators have crippled the ability of developers to cost effectively construct any type of housing. State laws designed to prevent “sprawl” have caused land prices within cities to skyrocket. California’s environmental laws, most notably CEQA (the California Environmental Quality Act), require a dizzying, time consuming and expensive, seemingly endless array of reports from developers seeking project approvals. There are literally hundreds of various applications and fees that developers have to file with dozens of state and local agencies, and often these agencies will take months if not years to process the applications.

But instead of challenging these laws, local elected officials have used them as an excuse to engage in one of the most corrupt misuses of government funds in American history. Without first changing these laws, the problem cannot be fixed. But a special interest movement has been created to spend the money anyway. This alliance of special interests constitutes what has now become a Homeless Industrial Complex, comprised of government bureaucracies, homeless advocacy groups operating through nonprofit entities, and large government contractors, especially construction companies and land development firms.

It is Time for the Federal Government to Get Involved in California’s Homeless Crisis

An executive order involving several federal agencies could launch a coordinated effort to get California’s homeless crisis under control. Federal action would not solve the homeless crisis overnight, but it would prevent something truly catastrophic occurring such as a disease epidemic, and it would set the stage for Californians more swiftly implementing permanent solutions, for which there currently is no end in sight.

For example, the IRS could reform the laws governing nonprofits to curb the legalized waste of billions that pour into what have become special interest behemoths.

The SEC could classify the taxpayer as having investor rights, in a long-overdue move that would make it a lot more difficult for public projects to squander public funds.

The SEC could also require consultants to public agencies to register as financial advisers and be subject to the same restrictions on political donations that govern these consultants in the private sector.

The Justice Dept. could investigate some of the more egregious wasteful projects allegedly launched to help the homeless to possibly uncover cases of collusion or racketeering.

The Justice Dept. could also send in DEA agents to break up the criminal gangs and drug traffickers who exploit California’s lenient drug laws and hide among the homeless encampments.

The Dept. of Housing and Urban Development could reform the Low Income Tax Credit program to put a cap on per unit costs for housing projects to qualify. They could repeal the disastrous “housing first” mandate that prevents homeless programs from prioritizing treatment equally to constructing shelters.

The Dept. of Education could get more aggressive against the teachers union which resists competition in K-12 education, and is consequently responsible for thousands of students graduating into homelessness instead of productive lives.

The Centers for Disease Control could declare a health emergency and sweep through the homeless encampments, cleaning up the trash and human excrement.

The EPA could participate in that effort by declaring – quite accurately – homeless encampments to be Brownfields, in order to save California’s soil, water, and runoff to the ocean.

The Dept. of Labor could implement an executive order preventing Project Labor Agreements from being used to inflate the cost of housing projects, as if with the shortage of construction laborers in California, there is any need for PLAs.

And the Dept. of Veterans Affairs could house homeless veterans on unused sections of California’s abundant military bases. For less than $926,000 per unit!

If these recommendations were implemented, California’s homeless crisis would quickly improve. Criminal drug traffickers would be looking over their shoulders. The CDC and EPA would declare an emergency and clean up homeless encampments. Homeless veterans would find immediate shelter. And the power of the Homeless Industrial Complex, a special interest movement that has been enriched by going slow and overspending on everything, would be shaken to its foundations.

Nonprofits would no longer be able to legally squander funds intended to help the homeless. Taxpayers would have the same rights as private sector investors, making it less likely public agencies could waste money on projects. Federal funds would be contingent on cost-effective projects. Unions would have to compete to participate in projects, and with the shortage of construction workers in California and the many projects awaiting funds, that would not be a hardship to them. Over time, maybe a sustained effort by the Dept. of Education to introduce competition to the monopolistic union controlled public schools might even change both the aptitude and the attitude of students graduating into California’s workforce.

Eventually, maybe the other root problem connected to homelessness, prohibitively expensive housing, could get addressed. Not only through many of the reforms proposed here, which could apply to low income housing as easily as to permanent supportive housing, but through a loosening of the requirements to run building permit applications through an obscene gaggle of local and state agencies. Projects that take as little as 20 days in Texas to get approved, and at most 20 months in most states, can take up to 20 years in California. Small wonder there’s a housing shortage. These countless applications with their exorbitant fees and endless delays constitute criminal negligence and naked, insatiable public sector greed, masquerading as a public service.

California’s policymakers are puppets of special interests. Those special interests include their own bureaucracies, which are controlled by public sector unions that gain membership dues and power whenever a public sector challenge worsens. Similarly, the other special interest members of the Homeless Industrial Complex, developers and nonprofit corporations, gain profits and revenues when the homeless crisis worsens.

It is time for the federal government to take decisive action where our public servants on the state and local level have failed. It must never be forgotten that this failure victimizes not only the taxpayers and the members of the public who live in areas overran with homeless people. It also victimizes the homeless themselves, who are not getting shelter, and who are not getting treatment.

The power of the special interests who have turned homelessness into a self-serving, taxpayer funded industry, must be broken.

An executive order from President Trump declaring a state of emergency, followed up by a coordinated interagency response, could get California’s homeless crisis under control. And it could happen in months instead of interminable years.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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Crazy and Woke on the Western Front of Progressive Insanity

The reason progressive extremism persists in America today is because progressives are either making money by embracing progressive policies, or because progressives are not living on the front lines of progressive insanity.

It is hard to imagine a place that would have an electorate any more progressive than Venice Beach. Located on the shores of West Los Angeles in California’s 33rd Congressional District, Venice Beach is represented by Democrat Ted Lieu, who was reelected in 2018 with 70 percent of the vote. But a revolution is brewing in Venice Beach, because Venice Beach is on the front lines of progressive insanity.

Thanks to progressive ideology as expressed in laws and court rulings, in California today you cannot arrest and hold vagrants for petty theft or possession of hard drugs; you cannot move them out of public spaces unless you can provide them with free and “permanent supportive housing;” you cannot commit demonstrably insane people to asylums; and publicly funded shelters must offer food and urgent care without any preconditions whatsoever.

The Streets of Venice Beach Are An Open Sewer

Testimonials from residents of Venice Beach provide ample evidence of what happens when you impose these progressive policies on an urban area bordered on the west by some of the most inviting beaches and agreeable weather in the world. An estimated 1,200 homeless people have set up permanent encampments in this three square mile beach town. They almost never use actual toilets.

According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, the average human produces one pound of feces per day. Simple math therefore tells us that every week, the homeless population deposits more than four tons of feces onto the gutters and sidewalks and driveways and lawns of Venice Beach residents, where they are dutifully hosed into the sewers and eventually make their way into the ocean.

The reality of being on the front lines of progressive insanity requires more than hard numbers. The homeless don’t shit in their tents, or anywhere near their tents. They walk into the neighborhoods to relieve themselves. Consider this eyewitness account from a Venice Beach resident:

“People have to hose this [shit] down where it runs down the street to the sewer on Main Street. Westminster Elementary school serves the children of local residents. Kids pick stuff up, dogs walk in the stuff. This is all tracked into homes and classrooms. They leave bottles of urine in their water bottles [figure around 16 tons per week] and leave the bottles. The only way these bottles don’t accumulate forever is because property owners have to pick them up.”

Insoluble Homeless Problem Benefits Politicians

If anything stinks more than the shit that is deposited each day in Venice by the homeless, it’s the corruption that prevents action. All the laws and court rulings that prevent decisive action could be bypassed if Governor Newsom would declare a state of emergency. But why on Earth would California’s progressive, woke governor do any such thing, when the progressive elite in Los Angeles are exploiting these laws and court rulings to make billions of dollars, while the problem only gets worse?

Here is an excerpt from an email sent to Mike Bonin, the Los Angeles City Councilmember whose district includes Venice Beach:

“Councilmember Bonin: I just received my property tax bill. It sort of feels like a sick joke. Can you please let me know how I can deduct for services not rendered? I’m not paying for your bloated administrative costs anymore. Our streets are lawless, they are covered in feces and our crime rate is spiraling. How can you force us to live in such horrible conditions? Don’t you see that the City of Los Angeles is actually the #1 slumlord in the nation?”

Or this one, also sent to Councilmember Bonin, along with many of his colleagues on the Los Angeles City Council:

“Councilman and City Officials: I cannot emphasize enough how dangerous this is becoming for all constituents – the homeless and the housed both. Increasingly, we are witnessing acts of violence and being subjected to very disturbing spreading of dangerous bodily fluids and needles on the streets of Venice. Sadly, this is why many of us have actively embraced the federal government to intervene in our city in order to begin some sense of sanity and rights to our neighborhoods. I join my fellow Venetians in calling upon you to step up and take immediate steps to stop these wild, wild west actions that are now taking place on a daily basis, and restore safety for all in Venice Beach.”

Or this lengthy, vivid appeal:

“I was almost attacked by three dogs off leash fighting with another dog early this evening. Told another neighbor to walk his dog the other way. He appreciated the advice. This is ridiculous. To our ‘respected’ (NOT) council and city people: You pad your pockets, and don’t think we don’t know it. We are not blind and dumb. We get poorer so you can pocket money and yet our living conditions have gone to hell in a handbasket. And you drove the bus.

Make amends. LISTEN to us. We are not just rich NIMBYs. We are hard working in all variety and type of work, peoples who come together to help each other. Some people are wealthy, some fighting for their very last dollar to maintain at least an apartment.

Start doing something about the actual problem rather than seeing what developers with whom you can seek prosperous deals can do for your OWN BANK ACCOUNTS. DO SOMETHING! And DO it NOW!!!!!

You may not like what I say, but I stand firmly that I am correct in my assessments that you mismanage money and somehow it comes back to your own bank accounts. Once again don’t think we are stupid. You can say what you want, but we know the truth and you cannot dodge it every chance you get.

We will find ultimately what you did. Much like a felon, just admit now to what you did and get it over with before you end up with the wrath of the power of the people you purport to represent.”

Residents Are Recognizing That Political Corruption Prevents Solutions

These excerpts from emails sent to the local elected officials who run the City of Los Angeles represent a minute fraction of the avalanche of emails, letters, phone calls and public statements pouring forth from an enraged electorate.

The corruption is obvious. You don’t spend over a half-million dollars per unit to provide “permanent supportive housing” to homeless people, taking years to build them, all the while leaving the vast majority of the homeless on the street. In Venice Beach these “progressive” public officials are considering a 140 unit apartment for the homeless that will cost an estimated $205 million – nearly $1.5 million per homeless person.

This is insanity. This is blatant corruption that deserves criminal prosecution. Yet thanks to laws and court rulings pushed by progressive ideology, it’s all perfectly legal.

And the “woke” progressives on the front lines of this war are indeed waking up. This comes from a Venice resident whose ideology has shifted in recent months:

“Two years ago, I would’ve voted for anyone but Trump. After watching Bonin and Garcetti attract drug addicts and criminals to LA and Venice, I’ll never vote for a Democrat again. Bonin and Garcetti lie about the drug and crime epidemic calling it a “housing crisis” so they can pay their donors with HHH money. Don’t believe me? Look at who is donating to their non-profits. Housing developers and service providers.

Women, elderly and even men are afraid to walk the streets at night. Two of my friends were attacked by homeless criminals in the last month alone. The new encampment on Hampton, (who say they are waiting for the MTA bridge home to open), are doing drugs and chopping up stolen bikes in broad daylight. A group of us are working with the White House. They are close to an intervention to protect us. Instead of asking the Fed for Federal land to build housing out there, Garcetti is asking for money to give to his donors. We are going to escalate this to the national level until the Federal government comes in to protect us.”

Venice Beach is Becoming Unlivable for Residents

And meanwhile, the war goes on. The residents are losing this war. They are losing their homes. They are losing their community.

Across the streets of Venice Beach, there is glass everywhere because of discarded and shattered liquor bottles. There is homeless on homeless violence, and to protect themselves and their property, many of the homeless have dogs.

One resident, who, like most, does not want to be identified, had this to say about the dogs:

“Last week, a woman was bit by a homeless person’s pit bull. About an hour later the police showed up at the van where the dog lives with his owner, but the owner fled. Nothing was done. If you walk by a tent or a van, the dogs will lunge at you, because they are protecting their property and their owner – never mind if the ‘property’ is a public sidewalk. ‘Off-leash’ pit bulls and other large dogs are everywhere. The animals are being used as weapons. Residents are intimidated and have to avoid the entire area. It isn’t worth the risk of getting bit. The dog could cause a serious injury, they could have rabies. If you have your own dog, there are very few safe places to take the dog for a walk because the dogs of the homeless will attack your dog and possibly kill it.”

The stories coming from the shell shocked residents of Venice Beach are endless. Back in July, a mentally ill man stole neighborhood trash bins to construct a personal fortress. The police removed the man but left the bins, which cannot be identified and reclaimed. Three months later, still there, the pile of bins have become a magnet for trash. A broken television, a couch, and the ubiquitous needles. Throughout Venice Beach, an entire new urban ecosystem has been created by the trash. Rats and mice and skunks eat the trash; they in turn become victims of hawks.

When it comes to open drug use in Venice, there is a perverse twist to the story. As told by a resident:

“There are more discarded needles up in San Francisco, because the drug of choice in Venice seems to be meth. On the other hand, this is worse, because meth users become violent and agitated. I would prefer to encounter a heroin user because you can run from them.”

Just the fact that residents have had to learn how to size the homeless up and figure out what they’re on is part of the tragedy that has befallen this city. Residents are constantly assessing their risk factor. As another resident explains:

“You constantly have to be aware of who you are around. Always stay visible to other people so you can call for help. Stay near places that are open or where people can hear you calling for help.”

And colorful characters become part of the landscape.

“Drug use is totally out in the open. We have a man living in the bushes on Main Street, he smokes crystal meth in the open, he shits in the same bushes, and he wears a loincloth. He walks around all day defecating in the bushes and smoking crystal meth from a pipe. He is almost always high, but he gets violent when he comes down. All the residents know him. You don’t want to be around these people when they’re coming down.”

Homeless Encampments Create No-Go Zones

Entire blocks of Venice Beach have become the site of permanent homeless encampments, where residents cannot park their cars, walk their dogs, or, in some cases, patronize local businesses which leads to those businesses closing their doors. As described by an eyewitness:

“It’s like a whack a mole. When they’re cleared out they just pop up in a new place. When they were temporarily cleared off the beach they moved to Rose and 3rd, the ‘no ticket zone’ because you can do anything there and not get written up. It’s considered a ‘contained encampment,’ a place that the LAPD have designated as a defacto homeless haven. They are like Favelas where the homeless know they can retreat to and there is no law.

These areas where they are concentrated is evidence of how much property they have. Tents, chairs, bicycles, umbrellas; they take up a lot of space and claim the sidewalks. There are frequent fights over the space, a lot of homeless on homeless stabbings, they are fighting over property. On what we call ‘RV Row,’ there are over 30 RVs on Main Street that they have to move every Monday for street cleaning. They move their cars exactly when the sweepers come.

Many of these RVs are not drivable so they literally push them to the other side of the street, then push them back again. There is a whole crew that controls RV Row, putting their RVs up on blocks to level them off. Residents can forget about ever parking their cars on the street. And then there are the vans filled with homeless, which are all over Venice, and they are even worse. The occupants will do drugs all night in their van; you can hear them partying in the vans. They park in front of homes constantly playing music and shouting etc. all night long.”

Nearly All Venice Homeless Are Drug Addicts

You don’t have to be a clinical psychiatrist to tell when someone is obviously insane, or under the influence of narcotics. You just have to live in Venice Beach for more than a few days.

According to residents, and contrary to the pandering progressive nonsense that comes from the Homeless Industrial Complex, nearly everyone who is homeless in Venice Beach is a heavy drug user. The population might be generally subdivided as follows:

About one-third are mentally ill and heavy drug users. Another one-third are heavy drug users who have become mentally ill because of the drugs. And the final one-third are just heavy drug users.

None of these people belong unsupervised on the streets, shitting and fighting and stealing, destroying a community, while the progressive politicians get rich pretending to fix the problem. Letting this happen is a despicable betrayal of the residents by these politicians. And it’s not doing these homeless people any favors, either. They are lost souls. They need help, and they’re not going to get it.

And so, day after day, the story goes on. As those of us in more peaceful neighborhoods listen to the weather reports, the besieged residents of Venice Beach listen to reports of fights, thefts, rapes, and murders. Here’s one of the latest dispatches from the Western Front of Progressive Insanity:

“I cycled down the boardwalk at 7 a.m. today. Cool looking guy with blue sunglasses openly selling drugs. Homeless all over the place and rubbish all over the side of the boardwalk. A huge shit on the bike path. Then fire trucks, cop cars and life guard cars at one of the life guard towers. Apparently they found a dead body and started a homicide investigation. Such an exciting place for tourists to take their kids for a walk in the morning and then write home to tell all their friends to come and visit. Where else can you be in a life crime scene on a daily basis?”

The Woke Plan to Bring the Western Front to EVERY Neighborhood in America

The consequences of progressive policies towards the homeless embrace a host of interlinking flawed beliefs. This is why it is not enough to stop the LA City Council from building a 156 bed “wet” homeless shelter on three acres of city owned property at 100 Sunset Avenue in the heart of Venice Beach, at a cost of well over $100 million (the property alone is worth over $90 million), or a 140 unit apartment to provide “permanent supportive housing” at a cost of well over $200 million, on another three acres of city owned property in the median between North and South Venice Boulevard, one block from the sand, also in the heart of Venice Beach.

These two projects are perfectly legal, but nonetheless are morally criminal examples of corruption. Because there isn’t enough money in the world to see all of them through, eventually projects like this will be stopped, even if those two abominations are pushed through to completion. But stopping these projects is not enough, because the fall back plan being pushed by progressives is just as bad, if not worse.

Progressive extremists believe that simply providing a safe, well appointed dwelling will cause the pathology afflicting homeless people to subside. They also believe that dispersing homeless people into subsidized dwellings in tranquil neighborhoods everywhere will be “inclusive” and further alleviate their pathology. And there are powerful financial incentives for them to pursue this policy.

By pretending the homeless crisis is inextricably linked to a shortage of housing, and because it is considered heresy to expand the urban footprint, draconian new state zoning guidelines are poised to become laws that will override local ordinances. It will become permissible to demolish single family homes in single family neighborhoods and replace them with multi-family dwellings. At the same time it will become mandatory for landlords to accept Section 8 and other subsidized renters.

California’s progressive lawmakers are planning to seed California’s suburbs with high density dwellings, randomly placed, and fill them with taxpayer subsidized renters. This is where they will relocate the homeless, including substance abusers and mentally ill. The cost of supervising these people when they are disbursed throughout the cities and suburbs will make it scarcely less wasteful than constructing gargantuan palaces at $500,000 (or more) per unit, but progressive ideology and corrupt financial opportunism make this an attractive Plan B for the woke.

Across the suburbs of California in the coming years, expect homes to become worth more to buyers to demolish and replace as a Section 8 fourplexes. And as these suburbs fall prey to increased crime, the state will move in, extending to residential courts and cul de sacs the same pervasive surveillance that already blankets our cities.

There are alternatives to destroying our cities and suburbs in order to feed profits to investors and power to corrupt politicians and bureaucrats. But it will require more than a revolution that merely moves policy from the obviously unworkable Plan A (expensive palaces that “help” only a few) to the insidious yet feasible Plan B (rezone suburbs for subsidized multifamily units).

It will require a realignment that allows conservatives and liberals to join together to demand quick, decisive, cost-effective action. Call in the national guard who can work with law enforcement to round up the homeless, move them into quickly erected tent cities on state-owned land away from residential areas, and use the billions in savings to get them treatment. If the governor declared a state of emergency, it could be done in a matter of weeks.

From an ideological standpoint, that will require a common recognition that the rights of hard working and responsible people have to be given, at the very least, equal priority to the rights of drug addicts and psychotics.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Discussing the Homeless Industrial Complex in California

AUDIO:  An in-depth discussion of possible solutions to California’s homeless crisis, with a focus on the Homeless Industrial Complex. Solutions air at 11:20 into the segment – 19 minutes on KUHL Santa Barbara – Edward Ring on the Andy Caldwell Show.

America’s Homeless Industrial Complex – Causes and Solutions

In his final speech from the White House in January 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation that the military had joined with the arms industry and had acquired unwarranted influence over American politics. His term for this alliance was the “military industrial complex.”

Since that time, Eisenhower’s term has been co-opted by other critics of special interests pooling their resources to exercise dangerous influence on America’s democracy; one example would be the so-called “homeless industrial complex.”

This label has been around awhile, and has bipartisan origins. In 2012 a guest editorial appeared in the liberal Washington Post entitled “Dismantling the social services industrial complex.” In it, the author explains “an odd mirror image of this huge complex has emerged in the very ‘industry’ that seeks to feed, clothe and otherwise meet the needs of the poor and vulnerable in our society. It’s a social services-industrial complex, if you will, one that could prove even more difficult to subdue than its military counterpart.”

In 2013, writing for Poverty Insights, author John Roberts asked “Is There a Homeless Industrial Complex That Perpetuates Homelessness?” And in January 2017, a former homeless activist published in the ultra-liberal Huffington Post an article entitled “The Homeless Industrial Complex Problem.”

The alliance of special interests that constitutes what has now become the Homeless Industrial Complex are government bureaucracies, homeless advocacy groups operating through nonprofit entities, and large government contractors, especially construction companies and land development firms.

Here’s how the process works: Developers accept public money to build projects to house the homeless – either “bridge housing,” or “permanent supportive housing.” Cities and counties collect building fees and hire bureaucrats for oversight. The projects are then handed off to nonprofits with long term contracts to run them.

That may not sound so bad, but the problem is the price tag. Developers don’t just build housing projects, they build ridiculously overpriced, overbuilt housing projects. Cities and counties create massive bureaucracies. The nonprofits don’t just run these projects – the actual people staffing these shelters aren’t overpaid – they operate huge bureaucratic empires with overhead, marketing budgets, and executive salaries that do nothing for the homeless.

None of these dynamics are terribly unique. Government funded programs are rarely considered bargains. And despite prodigious waste, America’s military is nonetheless the most fearsome in the world. Similarly, despite mismanaging literally billions in proceeds from bonds and taxes collected to help the homeless, in absolute numbers America’s population of homeless may have actually declined over the past 10 years.

How Many Homeless Are There in America?

This surprises a lot of people, but there’s a lot more to that story. According to the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), in 2007 there were 647,000 homeless people in the U.S., but by the time the most recent count was released in 2018, that number had declined to 543,000. Why, if so much money is being wasted, and the homeless crisis seems to be more acute than ever, are the absolute numbers of homeless actually falling? First of all, the numbers may be incorrect. These counts may be grossly understated.

An illuminating critique of how HUD’s “point-in-time” homeless count may be understating the numbers was published by CityLab in March 2019. Author Alastair Boone participated in an official count, covering a section of Oakland, California, in the early hours of January 30, 2019. HUD requires cities and counties to complete the count, on this day, every two years, in order to receive federal funding for homeless programs. But canvassing the streets of any city during the pre-dawn hours during the coldest month of the year is bound to miss a lot of people. Quoting from the article, “The count is during the winter early in the morning, when it’s harder to actually find folks because they’re seeking some sort of refuge. They want to stay out of sight in general for their own safety.”

Knowing just how many Americans are homeless is further complicated by competing definitions of homelessness. The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) claimed in a 2015 report that 1.3 million K-12 students were homeless in that year. But NCES defines the homeless as not only those who are unsheltered or in homeless shelters, but those sharing housing due to loss of their own home, or living in hotels or motels.

Even in California, a state where homelessness is now a crisis célèbre for state legislators in Sacramento, and a cautionary horror story for conservative critics of California politics, at first glance, the overall numbers suggest the problem is overblown. On the map depicted below, using HUD data, the state by state homeless trend is shown for the ten years from 2007 to 2017. California’s total homeless population actually dropped by 3.4 percent.

But reports from around the state dispute the HUD assessment. According to a June 2019 article published in the New York Times, “in Alameda County, the number of homeless residents jumped 43 percent over the past two years. In Orange County, that number was 42 percent. Kern County volunteers surveying the region’s homeless population found a 50 percent increase over 2018. San Francisco notched a 17 percent increase since 2017. When Los Angeles officials released the results of their most recent count, homelessness was up by 12 percent over last year in the county and up 16 percent in the City of Los Angeles.”

Nobody seems to know whether these flaws and ambiguities in how the homeless are counted mean that the crisis is in fact worse now than ever, despite official numbers showing a decline. But total numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. How the homeless are treated, and where the homeless are concentrated, has changed a great deal in the past ten years. This is the real reason the homeless crisis today is worse than ever.

The next map, below, using data from the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, shows 2018 estimates of the total homeless population by state. Viewed in this context, the states where homelessness increased dramatically over the past ten years, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming, nonetheless confront a relatively insignificant challenge. As of 2018, the estimated homeless population of all three of those states combined totaled only 2,340 people.

Most homeless, on the other hand, are concentrated in states that share one or more of three characteristics; a mild winter climate, large urban centers, and liberal politics. New York, with the nation’s second largest homeless population, fulfills two of those three criteria. Sunny California, in first place with an estimated homeless population exceeding 129,000 in 2018, fulfills all three.

 

Whether the numbers of homeless people are up or down in California is only half the story. How California’s homelessness has worsened over the past ten years represents a qualitative change. The mismanagement of California’s homeless can be attributed to the Homeless Industrial Complex, but other policy failures are also to blame. All in all, California’s response to homelessness is a textbook example of how to get almost everything wrong.

Policies That Made California’s Homeless Crisis Worse

An assortment of policy failures can be directly linked to why homelessness in California is a bigger problem than ever, even in the unlikely event the numbers of homeless have not dramatically increased. These policy failures have taken the form of overzealous court rulings, citizen approved ballot measures that wreaked havoc in their unintended consequences, and flawed legislation.

Court Decisions: The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, unsurprisingly, is the author of at least three rulings that have tied the hands of law enforcement in dealing with the homeless. The first of these is Jones v. the City of Los Angeles, decided in 2006, that ruled that law enforcement and city officials can no longer enforce the ban on sleeping on sidewalks anywhere within the Los Angeles city limits until a sufficient amount of permanent supportive housing could be built. Subsequent to the Jones ruling, activist attorneys have repeatedly sued cities and counties to force them to define “permanent supportive housing” with specifications that make it far more difficult and expensive to get anything built.

An analysis published by Washington State based municipal law attorney Oskar Rey in June 2019 describes similar cases in other states. The Jones ruling was reinforced in Sept. 2018, quoting from Rey, “in the case of Martin v City of Boise, where the 9th circuit found that the City of Boise’s enforcement of ordinances prohibiting camping, sleeping, or lying in public violated the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment if an individual does not have a meaningful alternative (such as space in a shelter or a legal place to camp).” Rey continues:

“A different Ninth Circuit case, Lavan v. City of Los Angeles, decided in 2012, addresses a related issue—due process requirements for the removal of unauthorized encampments on public property. Prior to clearing encampments, local governments must provide notice to camp resident (72-hour minimum notice is common). It is also important to have outreach personnel present during encampment removal, whose job it is to help individuals in an encampment identify shelter options or alternative locations to go to. Personal property found during the encampment removal must be held for a certain amount of time so that it can be claimed by the owner.”

The practical impact of these cases is to create private space wherever a homeless person camps on publicly owned property. Apart from trying – often ineffectively – to prevent the homeless from blocking passage on roads and sidewalks, if a homeless person wants to camp in a public space, they cannot be removed.

State Ballot Initiatives: In 2014 California voters approved Prop. 47, which downgraded drug and property crimes. Prop. 47 has led to what police derisively refer to as “catch and release,” because suspects are only issued citations with a court date, and let go. With respect to the homeless, passage of this initiative has made it a waste of time for police to arrest anyone for openly using illegal drugs or for petty theft. Only very serious crimes are still investigated. Prop. 47 has enabled anarchy among the homeless and in the neighborhoods where homeless are concentrated.

In 2016, California voters approved Prop. 57, intended to make individuals convicted of nonviolent felony crimes eligible for parole. About 7,000 inmates became immediately eligible, and as of early 2016, there were about 25,000 nonviolent state felons that could seek early release and parole under Proposition 57. Hopefully most of these released inmates reintegrated successfully into society. But those among this at-risk population who did not joined California’s homeless.

State Legislation: Flawed legislation by California lawmakers would include AB 109, passed in 2011, which released tens of thousands of “non-violent” criminals out of county jails due to overcrowding without providing adequate means to monitor and assist their transition back into society. Thousands of these inmates were coping with drug addiction and mental illness, and they have found their way onto California’s streets and parks. Many of them are “non-violent” drug dealers or convicted thieves. As with Prop. 57, AB 109 has changed the character of California’s homeless population.

And then there’s the infamous AB 953, a ridiculous bit of legislation that epitomizes the mentality of California’s utopian leftist politicians. As if there weren’t enough laws and court rulings tying the hands of law enforcement, AB 953, the “The Racial and Identity Profiling Act of 2015” makes it even harder. This law, supposedly intended to address dubious claims, especially in California, of discriminatory policing, requires police departments to submit to the State of California an annual report of their “stop data.” The following table, drawn from this report, shows the “Officer Reporting Requirements.”

When it comes to the practical effect of AB 953, it’s hard to find anything good. Every single time they interact with a citizen officers have to input 17 variables into a form that is either paper (four pages, requiring reentry into a database), or onto a tablet, cell phone, or in-car laptop. The mere fact that this is a time consuming process will prevent a police officer from making as many stops during a normal shift, and may deter them from even making some stops. Worse, the data collected is designed to either prove or disprove that officers in any given police department are stopping a disproportionate number of citizens who are members of “protected status groups.” Needless to say, officers, and their departments, may become reluctant to exceed their “quotas,” and as a result have an incentive to not make stops when stops are warranted.

No summary of counterproductive state legislation would be complete without mentioning the laws that make it nearly impossible to get treatment for mentally ill homeless people. According to a report published by CalMatters, this problem began way back in 1967 in California with “a law signed by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan. Aimed at safeguarding the civil rights of one of society’s most vulnerable populations, the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act put an end to the inappropriate and often indefinite institutionalization of people with mental illnesses and developmental disabilities.”

Ever since, and especially in recent years as the percentage of homeless who suffer from mental illness has increased, attempts to reform the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act have been tenaciously resisted by the ACLU and other homeless advocacy groups. As reported by San Francisco’s public radio station KQED, during 2018 three laws were introduced by California legislators that would “attempt to change conservatorship rules to allow city health workers to help homeless people with substance abuse and mental health problems by legally and temporarily stepping in to force a mentally ill person into treatment.” Only one, SB 1045, became law, and the final version was so watered down that San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed, a liberal Democrat, claimed “As drafted, SB 1045 would allow us to help fewer than five individuals.” There are an estimated 7,000 homeless living on the streets of San Francisco.

Most of these court rulings and laws, nearly all of them passed or decided in the last decade, have made it far more difficult to manage California’s homeless population. Their effect has been to increase the proportion of mentally ill, drug addicts, and criminals as a percentage of the homeless, at the same time as police and social service workers have far less ability to detain, relocate, or even offer help to the homeless.

Mismanaged Homeless Encampments Raise Threat of Medieval Disease Epidemics

Notwithstanding the many passed or proposed state laws that attempt to create more housing, or throw additional billions at the Homeless Industrial Complex to be largely squandered, another set of state laws – either proposed or already passed – threaten to turn California’s homeless epidemic into a serious disease epidemic. In 2014 the California Legislature passed AB 2657, banning rat poison that uses anticoagulants. The reason for this legislation was to protect endangered species who feed on the poisoned rats and themselves become poisoned. While the law didn’t explicitly prohibit use of the poison within inner cities, the City of Los Angeles has stopped relying on the poison, and instead is setting traps and considering bringing in “working cats” to control the rodent population. It’s not working. An even more restrictive ban on effective rodenticides, AB 2422, is currently moving through California’s state legislature, and is expected to pass.

Most people agree that using poisons this potent should be restricted in suburban areas bordering wildlife habitat. But the consequences of denying its use in the downtown core of Los Angeles could be catastrophic to the human population. And the mountains of trash that create rat habitat are not just coming from homeless people, they are a product of a disastrous decision by the Los Angeles City Council that has led to mountains of uncollected trash from businesses and residences.

In 2017, the Los Angeles City Council began to implement the “RecycLA” program, where they gave seven companies the exclusive right to collect trash. Putting small haulers out of business in the name of saving the streets from excessive traffic, the measure was sold as a way to create economies of scale. Instead, these companies were unable to smoothly absorb the additional work, at the same time as in many cases they doubled or tripled their collection fees. The consequences of these failed schemes are that Los Angeles now has two sources contributing to the mountains of trash in the city – homeless encampments, but also illegal dumping by disgruntled businesses and residences.

Where there’s trash, there are rats, and where there are rats, there are disease carrying fleas. Dr. Drew Pinsky, an outspoken celebrity doctor and Los Angeles native, recently quoted on Fox News, said: “Rats have taken over the city. We’re the only city in the country, Los Angeles, without a rodent control program. We have multiple rodent-borne, flea-borne illnesses, plague, typhus. We’re going to have louse-borne illness. Measles could break into that population. We have tuberculosis exploding.”

All of this is easily confirmed. Los Angeles has already had outbreaks of typhushepatitis and tuberculosis, as have other cities in California. Shigella, a communicable form of diarrhea, is now common among the homeless. There have even been outbreaks of trench fever, spread by lice. As reported by the Atlantic earlier this year “Medieval Diseases Are Infecting California’s Homeless.”

To-date, except for those people living and working in proximity to the many encampments, the homeless crisis in America has been an abstraction. But now there is a possibility that this perfect storm of neglect, indulgence, and corruption may lead to disease outbreaks on a scale not seen in this country for over a century. The homeless problem has become a timebomb.

Homelessness Around the United States

When it comes to mismanaging the homeless, California may be leader of the pack, but other major urban centers are not far behind. The following table shows which American cities have the largest homeless populations. While four out of the top ten – Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco – are in California, it is New York City with the most homeless. An estimated 78,000 homeless are living on the streets of the Big Apple. As usual with numbers, however, there’s more to this story. According to a report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, New York City has one of the lowest levels of unsheltered homeless at 5 percent, while in Los Angeles, 75 percent of people were found in unsheltered locations. Overall, over half of all homeless people live in one of the country’s 50 largest cities. In fact, nearly a quarter of all people sleeping unsheltered did so in either New York or Los Angeles. ‘

But how is it that New York City manages to get 95 percent of their homeless into overnight shelters, whereas Los Angeles only gets 25 percent of their homeless into shelters? An interesting analysis published in Medium in May 2018 explains how New Yorkers addressed the problem of homelessness. The approach was first to simply build more shelter beds. The correlation between the number of available shelter beds and the number of sheltered homeless is high across the nation, as the graphic below illustrates.

What New York City did was to prioritize getting people under a roof for the night. In other cities where this has been tried, such as Columbus, Ohio, the number of unsheltered homeless has been brought under control. But New York City has gone a step further, offering reasonable conditions and incentives to their sheltered population even at this most basic first step of assistance. Quoting from Medium:

“In New York, shelters have common areas and guests are allowed during certain hours. People can leave during the day — they are expected to look for a job if they’re able to work, and they receive assistance in that pursuit — but must come back by 10 p.m. in most cases, unless they receive a job-related exemption. All facilities have access to laundry and showers, and residents receive 3 meals a day. New York shelters provide a small platform from which people can rebuild their lives, but are also affordable enough to be able to scale to meet the city’s immense problem.”

As the next chart shows, New York City’s nearly 800 shelters with an overnight capacity of over 62,000 individuals gives them a rate of unsheltered homeless of only 45 per 100,000 residents. San Francisco and Los Angeles, by contrast, have a rate of unsheltered homeless ten times higher; Seattle, five times higher. What’s different in these cities?

Part of it is New York’s legacy of providing assistance to the homeless dating back to the Great Depression of the 1930’s. New York’s network of overnight shelters were acquired over decades, meaning New Yorkers today are able to allocate a higher percentage of the nearly $1.7 billion in city, state and federal money on caseworkers and shelter subsidies, and relatively less on acquisition of new shelter capacity. And because New York City prioritizes providing immediate shelter over the far more expensive “permanent supportive housing,” what seems like a prodigious amount budgeted to help the homeless comes out to only around $21,000 per homeless person.

One obvious challenge facing cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other West Coast cities facing a homeless crisis is the high cost of housing. But other policies have helped cause the problem, and are making the problem worse. As described, state and local laws, court rulings and citizen initiatives have all made California’s homeless crisis much harder to manage. Not only is it harder to compel the homeless to seek shelter, or get them into treatment for addiction and mental illness, or prosecute them for criminal offenses, but the emphasis on permanent supportive housing takes money away from funds that could be used for overnight shelters. Up north, Seattle faces similar policy failures.

Four articles published in City Journal over the past six months by Christopher Rufo, a research fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Wealth & Poverty, offer a blistering critique of Seattle’s inept response to homelessness, and the growing backlash from residents. For starters, the Seattle metro area spends more than $1.0 billion fighting homelessness every year. That equates to nearly $100,000 per homeless individual living in Seattle, nearly five times as much as New York City spends. And yet, as previously shown, Seattle’s rate of unsheltered homeless is five times greater than New York City. By these measures, New York City is twenty-five times more efficient at battling homelessness than Seattle.

Why is it that Seattle, the “Emerald City,” home to what is arguably the second biggest high-tech nexus on earth, a locus for fabulous wealth and a place of dazzling scenic beauty, with per capita income 50 percent higher than New York City, can’t begin to manage their homeless problem?

Rufo attributes the root cause of Seattle’s failure to what he calls “unlimited compassion,” and calls for a complete rethink of the assumptions that guide policies towards the homeless. It would not be much of an overstatement to characterize Rufo’s lengthy first article, from the Fall of 2018, entitled “Seattle Under Siege,” as a seminal manifesto challenging the entire ideological framework of the “compassion brigades” that dominate Seattle politics. This ideology is not unique to Seattle. It informs failed homeless policies across the U.S., especially in blue states, and especially on the West Coast.

The Socialist/Liberal Ideology That Fails to Help the Homeless

What Rufo identifies as the “four ideological power centers” that frame the homeless debate in Seattle (and elsewhere) are “the socialists, the compassion brigades, the addiction evangelists, and the homeless-industrial complex.” The first three fit nicely into a Socialist/Liberal ideology. The last of Rufo’s categories, his shared concern about the “homeless industrial complex,” is a bit more complicated, and motivated not by ideology but by desire for power and profit. More on that later.

An interesting fact about the urban centers on the West Coast is that their high-tech driven wealth is highly correlated with higher wealth inequality, along with higher home prices and higher rents. And where the rich and poor live elbow to elbow at the same time as the cost-of-living soars, socialists come out of the woodwork, offering indignant soundbites and instant solutions. In Seattle, along with San Francisco, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, avowed socialists sit on the city councils, offering a political agenda that’s guaranteed to make everything worse for the people its supposed to help.

In Seattle, the “Socialist Alternative” city council member is Kashama Sawant, who along with Adrienne Quinn, the new of boss the homeless activist group “All Home,” promotes an agenda that is all too familiar for anyone watching urban politics in cities controlled by liberals. For Sawant, that agenda includes rent control, public housing, minimum-wage hikes, and punitive corporate taxation. As for Quinn, Rufo writes: “In an op-ed in the Seattle Times, she lays out her plan to ‘address the root causes of homelessness’ by solving ‘racism,’ ‘wage inequity,’ ‘climate change,’ ‘housing costs,’ ‘public transportation,’ ‘green building,’ ‘sanctuary cities,’ the ‘child-welfare system,’ ‘brain injuries,’ and ‘mental-health and addiction services.'”

Needless to say, this socialist agenda will never solve the problem of homelessness. Rent control discourages investment in housing; public housing is rarely built cost-effectively, especially in blue cities with extreme environmentalist building codes and costly labor laws, minimum wage hikes are job killers, and punitive corporate taxes send corporations packing for Texas. The most ironic thing about the socialist agenda in 21st century America is that it is inevitably co-opted by the corporate Left. The only thing these two special interests have in common, ultimately, is a vested interest in never seeing lasting solutions to any of the problems they’re supposedly fighting to solve. Lasting solutions would end their revenue streams.

Compassion brigades, as Rufo puts it, “are the moral crusaders of homelessness policy, the activists who put signs on their lawns that read: ‘In this house, we believe black lives matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal,’ and so on. They see compassion as the highest virtue; all else must be subordinated to it.”

What Rufo refers to is expanded on by the idea of six universal moral foundations, first expressed in 2004 by Jonathan Haidt, a professor of social psychology at the University of Virginia. These virtues (and their opposites) are: “Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, Sanctity/degradation, and Liberty/oppression.” Needless to say, Haidt’s paradigm is fodder for ideologues of all stripes. Liberals are accused by conservatives of possessing only two of these virtues – Care (compassion), and Fairness. As an aside, conservatives accuse Libertarians of only possessing one of these virtues, Liberty. For themselves, conservatives familiar with Haidt’s work rather immodestly consider themselves to possess all six universal virtues.

But regardless of what social psychologists theorize, or how those theories are latched onto by various ideologues, Rufo’s assertion that the “compassion brigades” ascribe inordinate emphasis to compassion, at the expense of other moral considerations, is evidence based. And understanding this moral weakness in the moral arguments of liberal advocates for the homeless is a prerequisite to developing counter-arguments that offer equivalent moral worth.

Which brings us to Rufo’s third ideological power center, the “addiction evangelists,” who he describes as the intellectual heirs of the 1960’s counterculture. This time, the counterculture wants to “elevate addicts and street people to a protected class.” Rufo identifies Seattle’s proponents of this ethos, but they’re found everywhere. One primary justification for the pro-addiction movement is “harm reduction” by providing clean needles, and safe injection sites. But providing addiction infrastructure has the predictable consequence of attracting addicts, and the more addiction infrastructure is provided, the more addicts are attracted.

In all of these ideological movements – socialism, compassion, addiction evangelism – Rufo documents how the unintended consequence has been to increase the number of homeless people and the number of drug addicts on the streets of Seattle. Another consequence has been to invite a growing backlash from residents who have had enough. But progress is slow, especially when the will of the people isn’t enough. When over 70,000 Seattle residents submitted a ballot measure to ban safe injection sites, it was thrown out in court. Apparently “public health policy is not subject to veto by citizen initiative.”

The Homeless Industrial Complex

As is usually the case with leftist movements in America, public policies would not embrace the movement unless powerful special interests saw an economic benefit. In the case of the homeless, this economic benefit has grown over time. Litigation and legislation, as described, have increased the cost of providing shelter for the homeless. These costs have also increased because the character of the homeless population has changed due to a variety of causes, making it more costly to effectively help them: permissive drug laws combined with easier access to harder drugs such as opiates, mass release of nonviolent prison inmates, and laws restricting the ability to compel treatment for addiction or mental illness.

At the same time as per capita costs have risen, public awareness has led to massive increases in funding to provide assistance. Institutions have arisen that benefit from perverse incentives. If the problem gets worse, they get more money. Seattle provides dramatic examples of this. Again, from Christopher Rufo:

“It wasn’t always this way. When I spoke with Eleanor Owen, one of the original co-founders of Seattle’s Downtown Emergency Service Center, she explained that the organization’s mission has shifted over the years from helping the homeless to securing government contracts, maintaining a $112 million real-estate portfolio, and paying a staff of nearly 900. ‘It’s disgraceful,’ she said. ‘When we started, we kept our costs low and helped people get back on their feet. Now the question is: How can I collect another city contract? How can I collect more Medicaid dollars? How can I collect more federal matching funds? It’s more important to keep the staff paid than to actually help the poor become self-sufficient.'”

Nowhere, however, is the mismanagement of homeless more acute than in the deep blue state of California, where land values and anti-development legislation, along with a host of other laws and court rulings as previously described, combined with the most forgiving winter weather in America, have combined to make it America’s homeless capital.

California’s homeless are estimated to number over 130,000, living on sidewalks, parks and parking lots, vacant lots and on the beach. In Los Angeles County, the most recent count puts the number of homeless at 59,000. And in greater Los Angeles, there is plenty of money available to help the homeless. In 2016 Los Angeles voters approved Measure HHH, allocating $1.2 billion in bonds to build 10,000 units to house the homeless. Since then, Los Angeles voters approved a quarter cent sales tax increase, also to help the homeless. Additional hundreds of millions are coming from the state to help the homeless.

Every major city in California is spending tens of millions or more on programs for the homeless. But most of the money is being wasted. Why? Because there is a Homeless Industrial Complex that is getting rich, wasting the money, while the homeless population swells.

A disgraceful example of wasteful spending can be found in the homeless shelter being built in Venice Beach, where a permanent population of over 1,000 homeless have taken over virtually every public venue, including the beach. Because their tents are now protected by law as private space, they not only serve as housing, but as pop-up drug retailers and brothels. To get these folks off the streets and off the beach, a 154 bed shelter has been approved by the Los Angeles City Council. It will be a “wet” shelter, meaning druggies and drunkards will be able to come and go as they please. The estimated cost for this shelter so far is at least $8 million, which equates to over $50,000 per bed.

These costs, grossly inflated and far too expensive to offer a solution scaled to the overall problem, are nonetheless unsurprising if you consider the cost of any new construction in exorbitant California. But this isn’t new construction, it’s “temporary” construction of very large tents on three acres of land. Eight million dollars (or more), to put up some large tents and plumb for bathrooms and a kitchen. As a “wet” shelter, it will become a hotel for freeloading partiers as much as a refuge for the truly needy. Not only is it only capable of housing a small fraction of the 1,000+ homeless already in Venice, it will attract more homeless people to relocate to Venice.

The story gets worse. This property, owned by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit District and located on some of the most precious real estate on earth, could have been sold to private investors to generate tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Why wasn’t that choice made? Why, for that matter, aren’t homeless shelters being built in Pacific Palisades, or Brentwood, or Beverly Hills, or the other tony enclaves of LA’s super rich? The answer speaks to the hypocrisy of the proponents of these “solutions” as much as it nurtures the cynicism of its critics. Because as with all boondoggles that destroy neighborhoods in the name of compassion, the Homeless Industrial Complex knows better than to foul their own nests.

The Homeless Industrial Complex’s expensive maltreatment of Venice Beach in particular, and taxpayers in general, is an example of how “bridge housing” projects are co-opted and corrupted. But even more horrendous waste is exemplified by the efforts to construct “permanent supportive housing.”

According to an NPR report from June 2018, “when voters passed Measure HHH, they were told that new ‘permanent supportive housing’ would cost about $140,000 a unit. But average per unit costs are now more than triple that. The PATH Ventures project in East Hollywood has an estimated per-unit cost of $440,000.”

A privately funded development company, Flyaway Homes, has debuted in Los Angeles with the mission of rapidly providing housing for the homeless. Using retrofitted shipping containers, the company’s modular approach to apartment building construction is purported to streamline the approval process and cut costs. But the two projects they’ve got underway are too expensive to ever offer a solution to more than fraction of the homeless.

Their 82nd Street Development will cost $4.5 million to house 32 “clients” in 16 two-bedroom, 480 square foot apartments. That’s $281,250 per two-bedroom apartment. The firm’s 820 W. Colden Ave. property will cost $3.6 million to house 32 clients in eight four-bedroom apartments. That’s $450,000 per apartment.

These costs are utterly unsustainable. But the Homeless Industrial Complex has grown into a juggernaut, crushing the opposition. At community hearings across California, “homeless advocates,” who are often bused in from other areas expressly to shout down local opposition, demand action, because “no one deserves to live on a sidewalk.”

Money is squandered, and the population of homeless people multiplies.

The “Transformation” vs “Containment” Approaches to the Homeless

San Diego has the fourth highest number of homeless of any city in the U.S., over 8,500. According to Paul Webster, operator of a privately funded homeless shelter in San Diego, there are two ways to treat the homeless, the “transformational model” and the “containment” model. The transformation model works to identify homeless individuals who are able to transition back to self-sufficiency and gives them the training and services to accomplish that. The containment model emphasizes getting shelter for the homeless before offering additional services. Webster is critical of a relatively recent federal law, the 2009 Hearth Act, that bureaucratized the process of getting public money to combat homelessness at the same time as it made it harder to secure funding for transformational programs. Since 2009, all organizations set up to help the homeless have to submit applications through regional quasi-government organizations called “continuums of care.” The applications have to be “evidence based” and reliant on data such as the HUD “point in time” counts. All grant requests as well have to include “homelessness management information systems” that facilitate “coordinated entry” of the homeless into supportive care.

The new guidelines, enforced by HUD, also incorporated “low barrier entry” requirements in order to “reach the most vulnerable.” This meant applicants could not prohibit drug use, they can’t require work, and they cannot require program compliance. Applicants for state and local grants have to adhere to these same HUD guidelines.Webster’s organization, Solutions for Change, requires no drug use, work, they have roommate restrictions, partying restrictions, and they do drug testing. This means that they can’t accept federal funds and they also aren’t eligible for state funds because of the “housing first” rule, meaning that housing has to be provided before providing any other solutions to homelessness.

The implications of the Hearth Act on how the homeless are treated go well beyond determining who gets funds. It has created an incentive for homeless organizations to prioritize helping drug addicts, because one of the ways to attract benefits to help the homeless is by getting Social Security Disability income. The so-called “housing navigators” who help qualify people for SSDI know it is easier to secure this benefit if the person is afflicted with drug addiction.

According to Webster, there are three types of homeless. The “cannots” who are mentally ill or disabled; these comprise about 15 percent of the homeless. Then there are the “have nots” who could succeed if they were trained to acquire new skills and had access to services. The have-nots are often not counted; they live doubled up in homes, with friends, in cars, many of them are single mothers who want to avoid living on the street. These have-nots are about 42 percent of the homeless. The third group are the “will nots” who do not want to change. Most of these are drug addicts or alcoholics. These are the most problematic of the three.

The will-nots know they have safe havens on the street, where they can get drugs cheaply and readily. The will-nots become very sophisticated at getting things for nothing – the government doesn’t make a distinction between the unwilling and the unable – as a result the unwilling will always have the ability to crowd out the unable. The result of laws aimed at helping the homeless, the Federal Hearth Act, or at criminal justice reform, California’s Prop. 47 and AB 953, are that the will-nots generally receive the bulk of the services aimed at helping the homeless, despite the fact that their treatment is invariably more expensive, and the likelihood they will ever change is much lower. Left behind are the cannots and the have-nots. Also left behind, at least when it comes to funding, are organizations that work on permanent transformation, instead of mere containment.

To state the obvious, all of this must change. Here are some ways to make that happen:

Solutions to America’s Homeless Crisis

Pick Up the Trash: With Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and other cities already facing the imminent threat of a breakout disease epidemic, this measure comes before all others. It ought to be easy, America’s cities in the second half of the 20th century were not inundated with tons of uncollected trash on the streets. In the case of Los Angeles, if their recently launched “RecycLA” program is truly the corruption riddled, ineffective, price gouging, trash neglecting disaster it appears to be, then cancel the program and go back to what worked in the past.

The failure of large urban cities to even pick up their trash points to larger shifts in culture and governance that have to be addressed. Some cities, notably New York City, still manage to fulfill most of these basic obligations of local government. To the extent that piled up trash remains a problem after waste management contracts are restructured and the system of garbage collection works again, these larger structural issues have to be addressed – starting with the homeless encampments.

Time could be running out. If rodent populations aren’t brought under control – perhaps also by temporarily permitting application of otherwise problematic rodenticides in infested urban settings – large numbers of innocent people may become afflicted with deadly diseases. If this does happen, it will be something that was totally avoidable. Look for an avalanche of lawsuits and possible criminal prosecutions against negligent local politicians.

Lower the Cost of New Housing: This is a monster topic, but cannot be excluded from any discussion of the homeless crisis. In some respects it is an excuse, since with other policy revisions it would be possible to shelter the homeless without having to engage in ridiculously expensive housing solutions. But the cost of housing, especially in blue states that are dominated by extreme environmentalists and labor unions (in that order), is artificially high as the result of policies that must change if costs are to come down.

California, ever the cautionary example, needs to eliminate or dramatically reduce the scope of extreme environmentalist inspired mandates, starting with the California Environmental Quality Act. This law, passed in 1970, has been abused by opportunistic attorneys and state bureaucrats to stop most housing developments in their tracks. It takes years, if not decades, to approve housing projects that in other states would take weeks or months to get approval. CEQA and similar California laws are the reason why the median price of a home in California is $547,700, whereas in Texas it’s $196,100.

Also afflicting blue states is what might be termed the “density delusion,” that is, the delusional conventional wisdom among liberal policymakers that the only environmentally correct way to permit housing construction is to engage in “infill” within the borders of existing urbanized areas. Somehow, the theory goes, if everyone lives in tightly packed cities, “greenhouse gas” emissions will be reduced. That, and preservation of “open space,” are the moral arguments for high density housing. But these arguments are flawed.

The “climate” argument for high density housing ignores the extra fuel burned as more and more commuter vehicles idle on a finite allocation of congested roads. It ignores the fact that jobs move to the urban periphery when new homes are constructed out there, relieving rush hour congestion. It also ignores the fact that high rise housing costs far more per unit, because of the massive quantities of cement and steel required for any construction over three stories. And it is cruelly indifferent to the destruction of established suburban neighborhoods as apartments are seeded onto lots right next to single family dwellings. America is less than four percent urbanized. There is plenty of extra “open space,” and it is futile to expect infill alone to enable housing supply to increase enough to lower prices.

Politically contrived housing scarcity creates a real-estate bubble, something that is in the economic interests of wealthy investors and speculators, pension portfolio managers, and local governments who collect higher property tax revenue. It also increases profits to those mega-development firms that have the financial clout to push their projects through the approval process. This is perhaps the true motivation for “smart growth.” Reversing these policies will not solve the homeless crisis, but it will make it less likely for the hard working “have nots” (roughly 40 percent of the homeless population) to lose their homes and rentals, and it will make it easier for them to afford housing once they get back on their feet.

Quit Blaming Homelessness on Prejudice and Privilege: According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, African Americans make up 13 percent of the general population, but more than 40 percent of the homeless population. Similarly, American Indians/Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, and people who identify as two or more races make up a disproportionate share of the homeless population. Clearly, minority communities are disproportionately represented among the homeless.

While these statistics are probably accurate, they are used to reinforce the liberal catechism that finds all disparities by race to be the result of white racism. Accepting this catechism results in policies that are ineffective, expensive, and divisive. Rather than granting preferences and entitlements to people based on their alleged status as victims of racism, it would be far more productive to identify the more likely cause of individual criminality, addiction, unemployability, which is the parental status of the homes they grew up in.

The next table, below, shows parental status by race for children under 18. As shown, 57 percent of Black children in 2014 were being raised by single mothers, compared to only 18 percent of white children. Note the remarkable degree of correlation between the proportions of homeless by race, and the proportions of single parent households by race. It’s easy, and plays well to the crowd, to attribute minority homelessness to racism. But a growing body of evidence suggests that intact families are the prevailing indicator of individual success in life. Until that evidence is confronted by the communities affected by it, other suggested causes for minorities being disproportionately represented among the homeless lack authenticity, and smack of opportunism.

Untie Hands of Law Enforcement: The theory of “Broken Windows,” or “order maintenance” policing argues that “tolerating too much local disorder created a climate in which criminal behavior, including serious crimes, would become more likely, since criminals would sense that public norms and vigilance were weak.” Broken Windows policing, whereby police crack down on low level crimes, was begun in the 1990s in New York City and is often credited with greatly reducing crime rates.

At the other extreme is the near lawlessness that prevails on the streets of Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities experiencing a homeless crisis. In California, as described, well-intentioned citizen approved ballot measures and ill-conceived legislation have tied the hands of law enforcement. Public intoxication, petty crime and vagrancy are all either decriminalized or have been downgraded to the point where offenders have to be released almost immediately after apprehension. California’s legislature has even passed laws supposedly necessary to prevent “racial profiling” which in practice make police hesitant to make stops both because of possible repercussions and because of the time consuming new reporting requirements.

The consequences of tying the hands of law enforcement are obvious. It is preposterous that criminals, drunks, drug addicts, and insane people are permitted to take over entire sections of cities and neighborhoods, but that’s exactly what’s happened. It is important to stress that of while a little over 40 percent of the homeless are so-called “have nots,” these people almost all find shelter, often with friends or family. The remainder, the “cannots” and the “will nots,” are the ones found living on the streets. Virtually all of these “cannots” and “have nots” are either mentally ill, alcoholics, or drug addicts; many of them are criminals.

In every state where they’ve been enacted, measures that tie the hands of police have to be overturned by voters or repealed by the legislature. The police need to be allowed to do their jobs.

Make it Easier to Incarcerate the Mentally Ill: It’s worth wondering how anyone can think it is compassionate to allow a raving schizophrenic, terrified by their own thoughts, to roam unmedicated on crowded city streets. But that’s exactly what’s been happening in the interests of protecting their human rights. Certainly it is important to avoid overreach, but at this point laws available to compel the mentally ill into treatment are inadequate. Often the afflicted have family members that have the means to help, and are desperate to get their relative into treatment, but the laws prevent them.

Approximately 15 percent of the homeless are mentally ill; arguably, the alcoholics and drug addicts are also suffering from a form of mental illness. Together these cohorts constitute well over half of all homeless, and nearly all of the unsheltered homeless seen on the streets. Families, caseworkers, and mental health professionals need to be given the legal tools to help these people.

Overturn Jones vs Los Angeles and similar court rulings: Starting over a decade ago with the 2006 decision in the case Jones vs the City of Los Angeles, homeless cannot be prohibited from sleeping on the street unless “permanent supportive housing” is available. Similar rulings have been issued in Idaho and Washington State. The impact of these rulings, combined with the other constraints on law enforcement, make it nearly impossible to clear the streets of homeless encampments. The problem has been exacerbated by subsequent lawsuits to enforce the Jones decision which have defined “permanent supportive housing” in ways that make it more expensive. The practical impact of the Jones case has been to make it financially infeasible to ever deliver adequate housing alternatives to the homeless. A major city with the financial wherewithal to pay for a sustained legal battle needs to challenge the Jones decision all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, with the objective being a ruling that will permit less elaborate, more cost-effective housing and shelter solutions to be allowable.

Set Limits on Costs: In Los Angeles today, a temporary shelter (designed to last three years) is being constructed at a cost of over $50,000 per bed, and “permanent supportive housing” units are being constructed for, on average, over $400,000 each. Los Angeles is also planning to deploy mobile toilets for the homeless to use, with the expected cost per unit of $339,000 per year. In Seattle, the cost for existing programs to help the homeless is approximately $100,000 per homeless person per year. Given the number of unsheltered homeless in Seattle, this spending is totally ineffective. These costs are absurd. Designing solutions that cost less, but offer shelter to 100 percent of the homeless, is vastly preferable to solutions that cost so much that only a fraction of the homeless get assistance.

Creative solutions exist that cost far less. Off the shelf tents, sheds, prefab “tiny homes,” and prefab homes made from shipping containers are all less costly options. Relocating the homeless to repurposed industrial or retail sites that are already built out and not on premium real estate would cut costs. Putting shelters in the middle of some of the most expensive real estate on earth not only squanders finite available funds, but when the unused property is government owned, the chance is lost to sell that property and invest the proceeds in less expensive locations. Somehow, pressure has to bear on politicians to recognize that costs are out of control and act accordingly.

Assert the Moral Argument for a New Approach: Most citizens who live in neighborhoods or commercial centers overrun with homeless people feel a justifiable anger at the failure of civic leaders to get the problem under control. But no serious conversation about solutions should fail to acknowledge the fact that the homeless are people who deserve compassion. For every predator, opportunist, or slacker, there are far more who have simply lost their way. Who knows what happened in the life of an inmate just thrown back onto the streets, or a teenager who just aged out of foster care?

When discussing new policies to manage the problem of homelessness, the importance of compassion can remain first among equals when considered along with other moral virtues; fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, liberty. When offering new solutions, practical solutions, solutions that work for everyone affected by homelessness, reformers have to emphasize the moral worth of their ideas. They may have to shout this over the well-orchestrated objections coming from the compassion brigades. But fighting the compassion brigades does not require one to lack compassion.

The culture of normalizing drug use, protecting the rights of the mentally ill to their detriment, insisting on prohibitively expensive accommodations for the homeless – these are all morally flawed arguments. The deterrent value of strictly enforced laws against vagrancy has moral worth, because individuals – specifically, the “will nots” – will not be enabled to more easily choose a life of idle indulgence. Compelling the mentally ill to submit to treatment is a humane policy, not oppression. Similarly, compelling addicts and alcoholics into treatment facilities where they can detox and work productively is often the only way to offer them a chance to recover their dignity and regain control of their lives. Part of this moral conversation must examine the wisdom of the “housing first” policy of containment that is now a condition of receiving federal funds for homeless programs. Proponents of new approaches to helping the homeless should consider the success of transformational programs, which offer job training, counseling and sobriety programs in addition to shelter.

When discussing the moral worth of a new approach to combating homelessness, perhaps the most urgent area to demand reform is to put an end to the waste and corruption that infests the entire process as it is today. The absurd costs of any sort of construction, the myriad parties to the process, all with their hands out, all of them hiding behind righteous rhetoric. The Homeless Industrial Complex has spawned far too many charlatans and opportunists. They must be exposed and expelled.

America’s Homeless Industrial Complex has acquired money and power by presiding over a problem that has only gotten worse, year after year. The worse the problem has gotten, the more money and power they have acquired. Creative solutions exist, and only await a critical mass of networked citizens and conscientious policymakers to insist on change.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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The Homeless Industrial Complex

Los Angeles could be at risk of a deadly typhus epidemic this summer according to Dr. Drew Pinsky, an outspoken celebrity doctor and specialist in addiction medicine. Pinsky, a Los Angeles native, recently quoted on Fox News, said: “We have tens and tens of thousands of people living in tents. Horrible conditions. Rats have taken over the city. We’re the only city in the country, Los Angeles, without a rodent control program. We have multiple rodent-borne, flea-borne illnesses, plague, typhus. We’re going to have louse-borne illness. Measles could break into that population. We have tuberculosis exploding.”

All of this is easily confirmed. Los Angeles already has outbreaks of typhushepatitis and tuberculosis,  as do other cities in California. Shigella, a communicable form of diarrhea, is now common among the homeless. There have even been outbreaks of trench fever, spread by lice. As reported by the Atlantic earlier this year “Medieval Diseases Are Infecting California’s Homeless.”

There are estimated to be over 55,000 homeless in Los Angeles County, and at least 130,000 statewide, living on sidewalks, parks and parking lots, vacant lots and on the beach. There is no sanitation and no trash collection. The populations of disease carrying animals and insects that thrive in these conditions are exploding: rats, fleas, mosquitoes, ticks, mites, lice.

The problem of the homeless could be completely solved in a few months if there were the political and judicial will to get it done. The national guard could be deployed, working with city and county law enforcement. The homeless could be sorted into groups; criminals, substance abusers, mentally ill, undocumented aliens, and all the rest. For each of these groups, separate facilities could be built on vacant or underutilized government land in or near urban centers but away from downtowns and residential areas. They could consist of tents, porta-potties, and mobile modules providing food and medical services.

There’s plenty of money available to do this. Just in Los Angeles, in 2016 voters approved Measure HHH, allocating $1.2 billion in bonds to build 10,000 units to house the homeless. Since then, Los Angeles voters approved a quarter cent sales tax increase, also to help the homeless. Additional hundreds of millions are coming from the state to help the homeless.

Every major city in California is spending tens of millions or more on programs for the homeless. But most of the money is being wasted. Why? Because there is a Homeless Industrial Complex that is getting filthy rich, wasting the money, while the homeless population swells.

WHAT IS THE HOMELESS INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX?

Here’s how the process works: Developers accept public money to build these projects to house the homeless – either “bridge housing,” or “permanent supportive housing.” Cities and counties collect building fees and hire bureaucrats for oversight. The projects are then handed off to nonprofits with long term contracts to run them.

That doesn’t sound so bad, right? The problem is the price tag. Developers don’t just build housing projects, they build ridiculously overpriced, overbuilt housing projects. Cities and counties don’t just collect building fees, they collect outrageously expensive building fees, at the same time as they create a massive bureaucracy. The nonprofits don’t just run these projects – the actual people staffing these shelters aren’t overpaid – they operate huge bureaucratic empires with overhead and executive salaries that do nothing for the homeless.

An example of wasteful spending can be found in the homeless shelter being built in Venice Beach, where a permanent population of over 1,000 homeless have taken over virtually every public venue, including the beach. Because their tents are now protected by law as private space, they not only serve as housing, but as pop-up drug retailers and brothels. To get these folks off the streets and off the beach, a 154 bed shelter has been approved by the Los Angeles City Council. It will be a “wet” shelter, meaning druggies and drunkards will be able to come and go as they please. The estimated cost for this shelter so far is $8 million, which equates to over $50,000 per bed. Why doesn’t anyone ask why?

These costs aren’t that bad if you consider the cost of new construction in exorbitant California. But this isn’t new construction, it’s “temporary” construction of very large tents on three acres of land. Eight million dollars, to put up some large tents and plumb for bathrooms and a kitchen. As a “wet” shelter, it will become a hotel for freeloading partiers as much as a refuge for the truly needy. Not only is it only capable of housing a small fraction of the 1,000+ homeless already in Venice, it will attract more homeless people to relocate to Venice.

Finally, this property, owned by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit District and located on some of the most precious real estate on earth, could have been sold to private investors to generate tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Why wasn’t that choice made? Why, for that matter, aren’t homeless shelters being built in Pacific Palisades, or Brentwood, or Beverly Hills, or the other tony enclaves of LA’s super rich? Because as with all boondoggles that destroy neighborhoods in the name of compassion, the Homeless Industrial Complex knows better than to defecate where they masticate.

The Homeless Industrial Complex’s expensive maltreatment of Venice Beach in particular, and taxpayers in general, is an example of how “bridge housing” projects are co-opted and corrupted. But even more horrendous waste is exemplified by the efforts to construct “permanent supportive housing.”

According to an NPR report from June 2018, “when voters passed Measure HHH, they were told that new ‘permanent supportive housing’ would cost about $140,000 a unit. But average per unit costs are now more than triple that. The PATH Ventures project in East Hollywood has an estimated per-unit cost of $440,000.”

A privately funded development company, Flyaway Homes, has debuted in Los Angeles with the mission of rapidly providing housing for the homeless. Using retrofitted shipping containers, the company’s modular approach to apartment building construction is purported to streamline the approval process and cut costs. But the two projects they’ve got underway are too expensive to ever offer a solution to more than fraction of the homeless.

Their 82nd Street Development will cost $4.5 million to house 32 “clients” in 16 two-bedroom, 480 square foot apartments. That’s $281,250 per two-bedroom apartment. The firm’s 820 W. Colden Ave. property will cost $3.6 million to house 32 clients in eight four-bedroom apartments. That’s $450,000 per apartment.

These costs are utterly unsustainable. But the Homeless Industrial Complex has grown into a juggernaut, crushing the opposition. At community hearings across California, “homeless advocates,” who are often bused in from other areas expressly to shout down local opposition, demand action, because “no one deserves to live on a sidewalk.”

Money is squandered, and the population of homeless people multiplies. This is not compassion in action, rather, it’s corruption in action.

WAYS TO REIN IN THE HOMELESS INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

(1) Acknowledge there’s a problem. Agree that it’s no longer acceptable to throw money at the homeless epidemic without questioning all the current proposals and the underlying premises. Billions of dollars are being wasted. Admit it.

(2) Recognize that a special interest, the Homeless Industrial Complex – comprised of developers, government bureaucrats, and activist nonprofits – has taken over the homeless agenda and turned it into a profit center. They are not going to solve the problem, they are going to milk it. Their PR firms will sell compliant media a feel-good story about someone who turned their life around, living in a fine new apartment. What they won’t tell you is that because of the $400,000 they charged to build that single apartment unit, dozens if not hundreds of people are still on the street with nothing.

(3) Act at the municipal and state level to set a limit on the cost per shelter “bed.” This cost must represent a compromise between ideal facilities for homeless people, and what is affordable at a scale sufficient to solve the problem. There is no reason the capital costs for a shelter bed should be $50,000 each, but that’s exactly what’s proposed in Venice – $8 million for a semi-permanent “tent” with 154 beds. Similarly, there is no reason a basic apartment unit for the homeless should cost over $400,000, but in Los Angeles, by most accounts, that’s what they cost. This is outrageous. Durable tents and supportive facilities should be set up for a small fraction of that amount. Pick a number. Stick to it. Demand creative solutions.

(4) Stop differentiating between “bridge housing” (basic shelter) and “permanent supportive housing.” Permanent supportive housing IS “bridge housing.” Amenities better than a durable, dry, sole occupancy tent and a porta-potty can belong exclusively in the realm of privately funded nonprofits and charities. Until there isn’t a single homeless person left on the street, not one penny of taxpayer money should be paying for anything beyond basic bridge housing.

(5) Accept that homeless shelters will be more cost-effectively constructed and operated if they are in industrial, commercial (where appropriate), or rural areas, and not in downtown areas or residential neighborhoods.

(6) Abandon decentralized solutions that involve seeding safe neighborhoods with mini-homeless shelters in converted residential homes. Estimates vary, but between 35 and 77 percent of homeless people suffer from substance abuse, and between 26 and 58 percent have mental illness, and by some accounts over half of them have a criminal record. It is not just too expensive, it is dangerous to mix a homeless population into family neighborhoods.

(7) Go to court. Challenge the decision in Jones vs the City of Los Angeles, that ruled that law enforcement and city officials can no longer enforce the ban on sleeping on sidewalks anywhere within the Los Angeles city limits until a sufficient amount of permanent supportive housing could be built.

(8) File a state ballot referendum to overturn Prop. 47, which downgraded drug and property crimes. Prop. 47 has led to what police derisively refer to as “catch and release,” because suspects are only issued citations with a court date, and let go.

(9) Recognize that the rights of the homeless must be balanced with the rights of local residents, and that homeless accommodations should be safe but should never be better than the cheapest unit of commercial housing.

10) Confront the fact that a lot of homeless people are homeless by choice, not because they’ve ran out of options, and they DON’T WANT HELP. Act accordingly: Do we give these people control over our public spaces, our neighborhoods, our parks and beaches? And what of the others? The mentally ill, the substance abusers, the criminals? Do we give them control of over our public spaces?

It is terribly difficult for proponents of rational policies to be heard in public hearings on the homeless. Professional activists, often hired by developers or well-heeled nonprofits, abetted by sincere homeless advocates who simply haven’t ran the numbers, will usually outnumber and shout down neighborhood “NIMBYs” who have come to raise objections. But the NIMBYs are right.

We have a moral obligation to help the homeless. But we are not obligated to cede our downtowns, our tourist attractions, and our residential neighborhoods to homeless encampments. And as a society, we also have a moral obligation to protect the general population from rampant infectious diseases. What if Dr. Pinsky is right? What if there is a major infectious disease epidemic in Los Angeles this summer? Is that what it’s going to take before we clean up our streets and get the homeless into cost-effective, safe, supervised, sanitary encampments?

The moral question of how to help the homeless cannot rest apart from financial reality. It is impossible to solve the homeless crisis under current law and according to current policies. Therefore a new approach must be taken.

Before criticizing the suggestion that we spend a $5,000 per bed (or less) instead of $50,000 per bed (or more) to build bridge housing facilities, imagine what could be done with all the money we save. We might be able to help a lot of people get their lives back on track. Instead of feeding the insatiable excesses of the Homeless Industrial Complex, which helps a few but neglects so many.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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