According to Google’s AI Overview, approximately 653,100 people, uh, “experience homelessness” on any given night in 2023, up a crazy 12% from just the year before. It’s a stunning number, but one that probably isn’t surprising to you no matter where you live, because this has gone far beyond just being a ‘big liberal city problem.’ Likely, your small town in your red state is also “experiencing homelessness” more than it ever has. Walk down your typical formerly Norman Rockwellesque main street today and you’ll likely see more than a few shopping carts, dirty tents, and drug-addled vagrants sitting or lying around.
Likely though, these new ‘neighbors’ aren’t from your town or anywhere close. Instead, many if not most seem to move around, looking for easy marks and greener pastures. Your typical do-gooder small town mayor, even if he or she leans conservative, might think the right approach to this problem is to build shelters and invite ‘services’ to ‘help’ these people. But as anyone who has studied the issue more than a few seconds and has the capability to apply logic instead of raw emotion knows, making things easier for homeless people in your town only invites more homeless people. (Of course, you could always just ask my mom what happened when she fed just one raccoon who showed up at her back doorstep.) Pretty soon, just like residents of leftist-run cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles well know, you’re drowning in used needles, human urine & feces, and a noxious body odor stench that lingers in the air like a 70s big-city smog.
If you ask a typical lib what we as a society should do about the ever-growing homelessness problem, they would likely respond with a trite “build homes for them, duh!” But we know that won’t work. Even if DOGE saved enough money to build every homeless person in America a mini-mansion, the underlying factors, like addiction, mental illness, and just plain laziness, that caused the individuals to be homeless in the first place would just rear their ugly heads and they’d be right back where they were.
If you ask a typical conservative what to do about the problem, they might suggest dealing with those factors at the root cause - treat addiction and mental illness, teach and incentivize hard work - and they’d obviously be getting a lot closer to the solution. Do those things, or at least try, and society could likely shrink the homelessness population significantly.
The problem with all that is the fact that a majority of homeless people aren’t willing to be ‘treated’ voluntarily for their addiction or mental illness, and they’re certainly not willing to get rid of the welfare gravy-train that allows them to buy all that street corner weed.
The solution is obvious, but it requires a heavier state & local government hand than many of us are used to asking for. It’s time to make homelessness illegal. Yes, you read that right. State and local governments should make it illegal for anyone to loiter or sleep on the streets. Period. Full stop. You sleep on the streets, you go to jail. You loiter, you go to jail. Straight. To. Jail. No passing Go, no mercy. You get released and do it again, that’s a year. Do it again, and that’s a decade.
What would be the goal of such a policy, other than to reclaim and clean up our once-pleasant streets? The aim would be to remove the word ‘voluntarily’ from the question of whether or not they are going to get help. Because as anyone who has dealt with an addict knows, the vast majority are quite comfortable in their addiction and don’t want to change; because it’s not like mentally ill people are chomping at the bit to turn themselves in to their local insane asylum, even if those were still around; because as any experience with a lazy person knows, coddling them does absolutely nothing to encourage them to get off their asses and get to work.
I know this sounds heartless on the surface, but the goal wouldn’t be to simply lock these people up and throw away the key. Instead, hard punishments against being homeless coupled with a reintroduction of redesigned past solutions like mental asylums, publicly funded rehab facilities, and workhouses would ensure that nobody would have to be homeless, or go to prison, if they didn’t want to. You can’t really have one without the other. And as much as many conservatives would instinctively not like this, you would also need to have a decent social safety net for people who are actually working and still can’t afford a place to live.
Mentally ill people shouldn’t be on the street. They should be in insane asylums. Addicts shouldn’t be on the street. They should be in rehab, or in prison. Lazy people shouldn’t be on the street. They should be in workhouses learning how to make themselves useful to society. It isn’t about removing options from people, but instead giving them hard options that don't involve living on the street and forcing them, on pain of prison, to actually take one and give it a shot.
The alternative is what we’ve been enduring the past several decades, and it’s not working.
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