Why Do We Force People To Be Homeless?

Being homeless is a choice. Not THEIR choice, of course. But people who have the power, money, and resources to end homelessness — TODAY —  are choosing not to. The fact is, we don’t know how many homeless people there are in the United States - and it’s not because we can’t find out, or that it’s too expensive, it’s not. We just don’t care. Ending homelessness is simple and surprisingly cheap. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, it can be totally eradicated, for $20 billion dollars annually. 

That’s a fifth of what we spend on our PETS every year. So why the wait? Even before Covid, homelessness was a crisis out of control. There are about 10,000 unhoused families in New York City, and almost 20,000 vacant apartments and condos in Manhattan alone. Just last month when unhoused people in New York and DC were targets of a killing spree, it was discovered that as much as 10% of the city’s 25,000 apartments specifically dedicated for homeless housing were vacant. 

This is because the process of matching people to housing is still done manually and on paper. But the city still finds the time to invest billions in tax breaks for luxury housing that will eventually be bought by foreign investors and ALSO sit empty as more and more ghost towers are added to Billionaire's row. 45% of people without homes have a mental health condition, which without resources, can lead to self-medicating through drug use. 

But politicians have decided that it’s cheaper to criminalize homelessness rather than treat mental illness by making it illegal to loiter or panhandle, effectively shifting their status from being sick and in need, to being criminals deserving of punishment. And if you think this is just an East coast thing think again. Even supposedly progressive cities like San Francisco install anti-homeless spikes that make public benches and other outdoor locations actively hostile to people seeking shelter. 

Los Angeles has created zones all over the city that criminalize sleeping on the street without providing stable, alternative shelter for the unhoused population. And as the LA mayoral race heats up, the biggest debate topic is “how to get the unhoused off the streets”, with even the most liberal candidates calling for encampment bans and more policing. And by and large, the police responsible for addressing this crisis are not even remotely trained to deal with mental illness or drug addiction, which is why, in San Francisco for example, most of the people who are killed by police are mentally ill. 

Did they deserve to die because they were suffering from a medical condition, or did they die because as a society we’ve made peace with the idea that instead of spending less than one-tenth of one percent of our GDP on ending homelessness forever, we figured it was cheaper and easier to just ignore it and let the cops kill the ones who needed the most help?