The Hypocrisy and Callousness of the Left’s Homeless Outrage
Marta gets up at 3:45 a.m. each morning to ride a combination of buses and metros to get to her job in the cafeteria in the building where I work. Breakfast begins at 6:45 and she’s always there, ready to ring up my coffee and oatmeal. She’s the face of the working poor in Washington, D.C., who must risk their safety to walk to work through homeless encampments where angry, raving homeless men accost and shout at them.
In Washington, the received wisdom of the entitled class is that Donald Trump is being cruel and heartless by deploying the National Guard to deal with the crisis of crime and homelessness that plagues the city. How can he so casually relocate these homeless encampments? They shriek at the thought of National Guardsmen taking down tents and ushering homeless people from the sidewalks and parks.
Is it kinder to allow Americans to live in squalor on the street? Is it kinder to allow Marta and the countless other working poor to take their chances as they brave the lawless squalor that litters our streets? These folks struggle to keep what little is left over after the city taxes their homes, their paychecks, their cars, their food, their electricity, and their phones. They cannot afford to also pay the exorbitant parking fees common in the nation’s capital city.
There are approximately 5,000 homeless people living on the street or in temporary shelters in Washington, D.C. The city spends over $1 billion dollars (just in local funding) supposedly “fighting” their homelessness. Of that sum, approximately half goes to direct aid for the homeless.
In addition to that $1 billion, the federal government provides $33.6 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and from some miscellaneous grants originating in other federal agencies. Again, there are approximately 5,000 homeless people living in D.C.
So given all this money, why hasn’t homelessness in D.C. been eradicated?
The answer isn’t obvious until we ask another question. Do the agencies that fight homelessness have an interest in ending homelessness? Do they make more money or less money when there are more homeless people? Even if one grants the sincerity of every individual person working in the homeless-industrial complex and believes they all want to bring an end to homelessness, the real-world incentives of the institution matter more than the intentions of its employees.
When beleaguered taxpayers drive past homeless encampments, they feel pressure to demand their government “do something” about homelessness. The encampments, in other words, drum up business. They serve as living infomercials for these programs and they keep homelessness as a top of mind concern for the politicians who control the purse strings. The homeless are props and they’re meant to harass and bother people because that’s how these organizations obtain more funding.
Organizations that fight homelessness are paid to fail. Their budgets go up when they fail. They justify hiring more staff when the problem expands, not when it contracts. These institutions extract wealth from the homeless problem like an oil well extracts it from the ground. More homelessness means more demand for more programs.
The real object of a homeless aid program is to facilitate continued street living. There are undoubtedly lots of job training programs and reintegration counselors trying their hardest to reverse the problem. But the institutions they work for have no incentive to make these people successful.
The problem seems complex and insurmountable until you look at it through the prism of organizational incentives. Even the well-intentioned people working within the system cannot easily perceive how the system organizes itself to increase its own budget..
Fixing the homeless problem begins by refusing to allow the homeless to occupy the public square. They do not have a constitutional right to inflict misery on the taxpayer. In 2023 the Supreme Court reiterated this in Grants Pass v. Johnson. The president promised to move the homeless “far away” from D.C. and homeless advocates and the left howled. What short memories these pearl-clutchers and social justice advocates have. Do you remember the mass protests that filled the streets when San Francisco relocated its homeless problem in anticipation of the APEC conference in 2023? Me neither. It’s always somehow different when Trump does it.
The reality of the problem is worse than this hypocrisy, however. The real tragedy is that the homeless are being exploited by the left to expand the social programs that enable street living. The programs are shockingly expensive and clearly make the problem they claim to address worse. This isn’t compassion. It’s short-sighted, feel-good gestures in the serve of special interests like contractors and government employees. Enough is enough. The homeless problem begins by moving the homeless people out of the public square into shelters where they can be cared for. They are not zoo exhibits, and we should no longer tolerate treating them as such.