Eyes wide shut

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Homelessness hits record highs nationally, but feds refuse to acknowledge the role of mental health and addiction issues in the crisis, leading to counterproductive Housing First strategies. WSJ editorial.

Restrictive zoning and environmental regulations reduce housing supply and drive up prices. Compare the number of new housing permits issued last year in Texas (232,373) and Florida (193,788), versus California (117,760), New York (48,807) and Illinois (16,863).

New York City’s “right to shelter” policy also encourages migrants to take advantage of government-supported housing, including hotels in midtown Manhattan. But most migrants who can’t find work and housing eventually move to places where they can.

Go Deeper:

• Fighting homelessness requires acknowledging ties with addiction, mental illness, and crime
• Progressive/nonprofit model of treating homelessness and addiction is “mistreatment of the foulest sort” say critics
• Report: Strengthened substance abuse services needed to break homelessness cycles

Most of the increase in what HUD calls “chronic homelessness” owes to mental illness and drug abuse, which the report fails to mention, if you can believe it. This is obvious to anyone who walks past an urban homeless encampment, or for that matter any street in certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

Progressives ignore such clear social ills and instead call for more spending on low-income housing. But such “housing first” policies have failed, as demonstrated by the rising number of homeless in progressive states.

HUD spends $72 billion a year, mostly on affordable housing, and progressive states spend billions more each year. California spent $24 billion to reduce homelessness in the last five years, but there are more homeless. The Administration even granted California a waiver to use federal Medicaid funds to help the homeless obtain housing. Meantime, drug rehab centers in the state are closing because of inadequate government reimbursements.

Florida and Texas have taken a more practical and effective approach. They prosecute drug possession and public disorderly conduct as a lever to induce addicts and the mentally ill into treatment as an alternative to jail. This is more humane than leaving the homeless to their own vices on the streets. Alas, progressives prefer the latter.

Read the whole thing here.

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