Homeless camps on the streets. (Photo: Edward Escobar)
America’s Streets Are Not Shelters: Time to Rethink Homelessness Policy
Compassion without structure is chaos
By Edward Escobar, August 12, 2025 2:45 am
Walk through any major American city today—San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle—and you’ll see the same troubling pattern: sidewalks turned into encampments, public parks overtaken by tents, and transit stations rendered unusable. This isn’t just a humanitarian crisis. It’s a public safety emergency, a sanitation nightmare, and a glaring indictment of failed policy.
Let’s be clear: no one is guaranteed a home simply by virtue of living in America. What we can and should offer is temporary, transitional shelter—a safe place to stabilize, not a permanent entitlement. But instead of enforcing this principle, our cities have allowed the streets to become de facto housing, with little oversight and even less accountability.
The Real Crisis: Oversight, Not Just Compassion
Many of those living on the streets face serious challenges—mental illness, substance abuse, trauma. These are not conditions that resolve themselves. The state has a custodial responsibility to intervene, not abandon. That means enforcing laws, offering treatment, and ensuring that public spaces remain safe and functional for everyone.
But instead of real solutions, we get performative compassion—billions funneled into nonprofit organizations that promise progress but deliver stagnation. These groups, often politically connected, operate with minimal transparency and maximum funding. Their executive directors earn six-figure salaries while the streets they claim to serve grow more dangerous and dysfunctional.
Cronyism Masquerading as Charity
Let’s call it what it is: grift disguised as goodwill. Elected officials funnel taxpayer dollars to nonprofits that support their campaigns, creating a feedback loop of exploitation. The suffering of the homeless becomes a business model, not a problem to solve. And when the public demands answers, these officials feign confusion—“We don’t know why it’s getting worse,” they say, as billions vanish into bureaucratic black holes.
This isn’t socialism. It’s not even capitalism. It’s cronyism, pure and simple. And it’s unacceptable.
A New Path Forward
We need policies that are firm, fair, and focused:
– Mandatory transitional shelter with clear timelines and pathways to treatment or employment.
– Enforcement of public space laws to protect safety and cleanliness.
– Audits and accountability for every dollar spent on homelessness programs.
– Mental health and addiction services that are compulsory for those who need them—not optional.
Compassion without structure is chaos. America must stop pretending that letting people suffer in tents is humane. It’s not. It’s abandonment.
Let’s reclaim our cities—not with cruelty, but with courage. Let’s demand results—not rhetoric. And let’s stop subsidizing failure.
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- America’s Streets Are Not Shelters: Time to Rethink Homelessness Policy - August 12, 2025
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The mentally ill need inpatient treatment, the drug addicts and alcoholics need to choose treatment or jail, and those who willingly choose the lifestyle need to be hounded out of the state. As well, the NGO principles who can’t explain where the money went need to be brought up on fraud charges and boomarang cash from government to NGOS back to politicians is somewhere between political money laundering, embezzlement and illegal kickback. Some of this might sound harsh, but when you feed wild animals and stray pets they tend to hang around and become a nusiance.
What about liberals? They celebrate diversity! And that requires plenty of bums too! Not just racial groups and crossdressers. Ever attend a big liberal diversity bash? You’re certainly invited.
The author does a good job of describing the grifters in the Homeless Industrial Complex. Instead of using taxpayer money to “offer treatment” the money should be used to mandate treatment. Don’t give tax money to grifter NGO’s. Pay private entities who can create secured facilities where drug addicts can be detoxed and provided with counseling and job training. Incarcerate the drug dealers and throw away the key. Drug dealing in Singapore is a capital offense. Singapore does not have a serious drug problem.
Missing from your list of policies: Policies mandating the construction of affordable housing, including transitional housing and housing for those making a very low income.
“Affordable housing” is regarded in political circles as being a bargain at ten times the going rate of normal construction, and the homeless tend to damage/destroy such housing including, whether accidental or intentional, setting those places on fire. Otherwise, subsidized “affordable housing” becomes a magnet for drug dealing and other crime. For the wildly overpriced costs of consructing and maintaining “affordable housing” where does the money go? I personally know that living the room mate lifestyle really sucks, but throwing taxpayer money down a bottomless pit doesn’t solve any problems.
Great perspective with a common sense perspective!
Mr. Escobar, please run for office.
Just invest in a large chartered bus and $50 bucks cash, a bucket of KFC and a fifth of ice cold Night Train for each bum and “hire” them to relocate to far away Niagara Falls, NY! And give these winos a brand new life!
It’s also time to stop criminalizing the homeless. All people that are unhoused are not criminals, and are not all the same. Take a look at the corrupt system in the US. People parading as social and supportive services! Mandated treatment? Just remember that a majority of people that work and are housed have some drug addiction and mental issues. (Just because they’re in pill, liquid or paper form, or legal, doesn’t mean they aren’t addictions.) and what applies to one applies to ALL! You can’t discriminate and demand people can be “sent away”, unless you agree to be sent yourself. You forget that this earth belongs to all of us and just because you want to set the rules, doesn’t subject anyone and everyone to them, as we all have a right to be here and live on the earth, and from its resources. There is no golden rule that everyone follow an order, housing being one. The indigenous people here before lived off the land and off the grid as some choose to today, for whatever reason.. There are too many that have exploited others to take a greater benefit from those resources, unfortunately, and this is why we are in this mess today. Greedy people always worrying about what may be taken from them, when they just need to mind their own business and live their own lives. There will always be things that you aren’t going to be happy about, when sharing the planet. Get over it.
this is truly nonsensical comment and this mentality is why we are inthe situation we are in…you can have any addiction you want as long as you aren’t requiring public to feed, cloth and house you
this is truly nonsensical comment and this mentality is why we are inthe situation we are in…you can have any addiction you want as long as you aren’t requiring public to feed, cloth and house you
excellent essay … maybe some of these criminal politicains and NGOs need to go to prison for harming our cities, exploiting the unhoused and endangering everyone else with excuses and lies …
When people were forced to get treatment they ended up in hell holes. Reagan let them out. I talk to the homeless all the time. Let them live how they want. Very very few are dangerous. I go to Skid Row and hand out clothes and they are polite and share and often want hugs. The shelters are horrible and they are kicked out with all their belongings at six in the morning. Awful. Some countries give each one two thousand and they live well. Good idea. They can get clean and get a job. Some live in the street happily with their own routine. Don’t mandate anything!
You are wrong: As I’ve reported for many years, don’t blame the homeless population in California on former Governor Ronald Reagan – he did not choose to close the state’s mental hospitals as the leftist media has incorrectly repeated for 50+ years – he was ordered to.
It was President John F. Kennedy who in his October 31, 1963 legislation –The Community Mental Health Act of 1963 — ordered the building of 1,500 mental health centers, while closing many mental health hospitals over time, known as deinstitutionalization. Governors were just required to execute on the President’s Order, while at the same time, Congress failed to fund the mental health centers. This was three weeks before Kennedy’s assassination.