The Phantom National Homelessness Crisis
Officials must recognize that behavioral issues are the primary cause of homelessness
PUBLIUS SPECIAL GUEST: Lawrence McQuillan, is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Entrepreneurial Innovation at the Independent Institute. He is author of California Dreaming: Lessons on How to Resolve America's Public Pension Crisis.
Politicians, government officials, and academic “experts” from coast to coast have been insisting for years that homelessness is a “national crisis,” as California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass both claim. That is a misdiagnosis, deflecting responsibility away from cities that should fix their own problems.
Every case of homelessness is tragic and complicated. According to new data, however, homelessness has reached crisis proportions only in a limited number of areas across the country, especially in California.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s recently published “Annual Homelessness Assessment,” a report sent to Congress in December, found that some 582,500 people experience homelessness across America on any given night. That is about 0.17 percent of the U.S. population.
A rule of thumb is that the number of people who cycle in and out of homelessness throughout a year is two to four times the “point-in-time” count. Even applying the larger multiplier of four, the number of people experiencing homelessness during a year is still less than 1 percent of the population. Those numbers do not indicate a national crisis.
In 2022, HUD divided the country into 387 “continuums of care” for reporting and funding purposes—that is, areas within which groups coordinate homelessness services. Thirteen percent of the continuums of care had fewer than 200 people experiencing homelessness, 43 percent had fewer than 500, two-thirds had fewer than 1,000 homeless people, and 84 percent had fewer than 2,000. These numbers describe a manageable problem across most of the country and a more serious problem—even a crisis—in a limited number of specific locations.
Nationally, California has the most people experiencing homelessness (171,521). And, not surprisingly, seven of the 11 cities and suburbs with the greatest numbers of homeless also are in California: Los Angeles, San Jose, Oakland, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, and Anaheim. The other four metro areas are New York City, Seattle, Phoenix, and Denver.
All of these cities, with the exception of Phoenix and, until recently, Anaheim (whose seven-member city council, following last year’s election, now consists of four Democrats, two Republicans, and one independent), are reliably “progressive” in reliably blue states—meaning they tend to share views and adopt similar homelessness policies that have resulted in concentrated urban areas of human misery with names like The Jungle (San Jose and Seattle), The Zone (Phoenix), Skid Row (Los Angeles), and the Tenderloin (San Francisco).
The progressive political class believes that an insufficient supply of housing is the primary cause of homelessness. In truth, homelessness is overwhelmingly caused by substance abuse and mental illness, typically resulting from untreated personal trauma.
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Lawrence McQuillan, is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Entrepreneurial Innovation at the Independent Institute. He is author of California Dreaming: Lessons on How to Resolve America's Public Pension Crisis.