Yves here. This article describes how the Democratic Parry lack of interest in addressing homelessness has created a policy vacuum that right wing extremists are happily occupying.
By Sonali Kolhatkar, an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly subscriber-funded television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her books include Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World Is Possible (Seven Stories Press, 2025) and Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and was a senior editor at Yes! Magazine covering race and economy. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
A 2024 Treasury Department report articulated the leading cause of homelessness in the United States: “For the past two decades, rents and house prices have been rising faster than incomes across most regions of the United States.” The logic of this claim—based on documented evidence—is straightforward. People aren’t earning enough to pay rent or their home mortgage, and subsequently end up living in cars or on the streets.
But, to the Cicero Institute, a right-wing, Texas-based think tank, people choose to become homeless so that they can take advantage of publicly funded housing. According to Cicero’s website, “Permanent supportive housing doesn’t address homelessness—it creates demand for more homelessness.”
Such a claim would be ridiculed as disconnected from reality. Except that Cicero, created by tech billionaire and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, is promoting a dystopian solution to homelessness that includes bans on street camping, involuntarily institutionalizing mentally ill people, and building camps outside cities for unhoused people. According to the Housing Not Handcuffs campaign, as of April 2026, 22 states across the country are considering or have passed legislation based on Cicero’s ideas.
Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center has strong words for Cicero’s policies, calling them “racist, backwards, and frankly, ineffective solutions to homelessness that focus on jails and arrests and forcing people off of the streets.”
“Billionaires and politicians have fundamentally misdiagnosed the cause of homelessness,” says Rabinowitz. “There is a mistaken but pervasive belief that homelessness is a choice, that people are choosing to sleep outside, and that if we make it a crime to be homeless and make homelessness harder, people will choose something else.”
This dangerous right-wing vision of tackling homelessness is flourishing in Donald Trump’s America. The president, in a disturbing 2023 campaign video, denounced homeless people as “deeply unwell” and “dangerously deranged” who are ruining the quality of working people’s lives and promised he would use every tool to “get the homeless off our streets.”
Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis echoed this language. Instead of acknowledging that no one should be forced onto the streets because they can’t afford rent, he said, “You should not be accosted by a homeless, like we see. You should be able to walk down the street and live your life.” Instead of promising all Floridians the ability to live safely, he instead offered a vision of a state where the homeless disappear from view: “We’re going to have clean sidewalks. We’re going to have clean parks. We’re going to have safe streets.”
Study after study proves the obvious—that when housing is too expensive, people can’t afford it. “Every time rents go up $100, homelessness increases by 9 percent,” explains Rabinowitz. “People should think back. How many times in the past decade has the rent gone up by $100? That is why more people are sleeping outside and have nowhere else to live.”
Cicero’s vision is most notably being realized in Utah, where state authorities are building a 1,300-bed camp for homeless people on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, complete with in-house facilities to force people into treatment for mental health and addiction. Cicero’s Devon Kurtz called Utah’s experiment “a harbinger of the future.”
“The foremost goal is not to punish,” said Kurtz in an NPR interview. “But,” he added, “there are situations where we just can’t accept the status quo.”
The status quo is that people are being priced out of their homes, but rather than address the causes of homelessness, Kurtz, Trump, DeSantis, and other conservatives want to spare themselves the sight of homeless people, to punish them for falling through the gaping cracks of the modern American economy.
To be fair, liberal mayors and Democratic politicians have also embraced similar approaches minus the overtly dystopian rhetoric. For example, in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass has backed a program that pushes the unhoused into motels as transitional housing. She has come under criticism from housing rights groups for failing to back permanent housing solutions and address the root causes of homelessness. Meanwhile, California Governor Gavin Newsom has instituted bans on encampments and criminalized homeless people.
The failures of Democratic politicians to effectively tackle homelessness have only fed right-wing derision toward permanent housing and other proven solutions rooted in addressing inequality.
In addition to state-level bills to force the unhoused into camps, the Trump regime has wrecked long-standing federal housing policies enacted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). In December 2025, HUD staffers struggled to keep unhoused people safe in harsh winter conditions, with their funding being slashed. Trump took a page straight out of Cicero’s book in ending federal “housing first” policies that emphasize subsidized housing and meeting homeless people’s needs.
As worthy as pre-Trump federal housing policies have been, they were never comprehensive enough. Rabinowitz traces the failures of federal housing policy to former President Ronald Reagan’s decimation of public housing.
“We know the solution to homelessness is housing and supports,” says Rabinowitz. “At the same time, since at least the ’80s, the federal government has abandoned its responsibility to ensure that everyone has a safe place to live. So, cities and states across the country are left carrying the water for decades of failed federal housing policy.”
Because downstream solutions such as subsidized housing and other government supports don’t go far enough, and because there is no political will to implement upstream solutions to rising wealth inequality and housing costs, homelessness continues to be a serious problem.
A recent California-based experiment sheds light on this. As part of a partnership between nonprofit organization Miracle Messages and the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, 103 unhoused people were given $750 in cash per month between 2022 and 2024. Recipients who received this basic income spent it on necessities such as food, transportation, and housing costs. But, after a year, the funding did not drastically change long-term outcomes. Researchers concluded that, “While $750 a month helps, it doesn’t come close to covering rent in high-cost areas like the Bay Area or Los Angeles.” The solution is more money, not less.
“We will never solve homelessness until we address the underlying factors, the number one of which is that the rent is just too damn high,” says Rabinowitz. “We know that housing solves homelessness. There’s just not nearly enough [affordable housing] to go around,” he added.
Rabinowitz’s organization launched an effort in early 2026 to prevent tax dollars from subsidizing camps for the unhoused, as Utah is doing. The “No Federal Funding for Homeless Detention Camps” campaign has harnessed the political support of progressive elected officials and nonprofits to demand that federal tax dollars don’t go toward such projects.
“Hiding the problem doesn’t solve the problem,” says Rabinowitz. “Just like you wouldn’t want your kids to sweep all of their crumbs under the rug, we don’t want to hide homelessness.”
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Fixing the economy is insufficient. Housing is now a haves vs. have-nots situation, with the haves defending their privileges using legislation, zoning and the NIMBY abuse of legal processes to block the construction of new housing so as to keep the value of theirs high.
If that is not addressed, e.g. by making the right to housing an explicit human right, no matter how much or how fairly the economy grows, rent-seekers will simply absorb the entire surplus for themselves.
Indeed. I happen to live in a corner of the globe where homelessness has been diminishing 40 years in a row* but some years back we got the most right-wing government in 50 years, and after they have now “fixed the economy” for some time, homelessness is rising once again. As is poverty, hunger and crime.
* a really simple idea: give homeless people homes, and there will be no homeless people.
Fixing the U.S. economy is a long-term challenge requiring sustained effort from the federal government. It’s not an issue that individual governors or mayors can resolve within their terms of office. However, since they must show voters that they are addressing homelessness, it’s only natural that they resort to short-term solutions, such as building shelters and housing people in them.
I think there are a number of people who just find life to be overwhelming. Solving problems are always viewed as climbing a mountain and there is sometimes a why me explanation. I realize circumstances, like a rent increase, can cause homelessness but for others they need help getting out of a hole.
Some people, if told to join Maga, would not know what to do. Likewise, if telling others to join the Socialists, they wouldn’t know how to fit in either. Everybody, however, is forced to adapt to the Capitalist system and some people naturally fit in better than others.
I remember once reading that social workers working with the homeless had greater success if the homeless person worked continuously with the same person, rather than a different person each week of so. In other words bonding with someone was part of the process of change even when drugs were involved.
I understand the logic of the Cicero Institute but if you change a few words one could just as easily say, bailing out the banks doesn’t address the financial crisis, it creates demand for more fraud.
Well as ex-UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman put it, sleeping rough is a “lifestyle choice” so this sort of thinking is on both sides of the Atlantic. You would think that you could go to conservatives in the US and show them how housing homeless people is a far, far cheaper solution with long-term benefits long term. Sort of appeal to their wallet nerve. I regret to say that it is too late for that. I think that we are at the point where the homeless are evolving into their very own industry and are now becoming the source of a lot of lucrative government contracts. California threw a few billion dollars at the homeless problem but nothing changed – except a lot of people either made bank or dipped their beaks. Look at that 1,300-bed camp outside Salt Lake City. Lots of money will be made by the right people there. So I think that nothing will be done to solve homelessness but instead they will be monetized. Maybe they can set up a new Fed organization to deal with it nationally. Call it the Government Housing Efficiencies for Transients & Tramps Organization or something
Not a bad idea at the end of your comment. Unfortunately, your idea is strongly opposed by the lobbyists working for various Selfish Individualists Legislative Organizations. {Our Motto: Out of sight, out of mind.}
One pernicious aspect of the present-day penchant for Narrative based Politics is that entire demographic cohorts can be “written out” of the ‘story.’
Stay safe.
Nothing will be done, unless an updated version of the Bonus Army shows up on Washington’s doorstep.
I’d love the concept of free and universal provision of public goods get into mainstream conversation. Housing, healthcare, food and urban transportation should be freely available to all without means testing. Public education is a working model which is a reason it’s constantly under attack. It should be a basic function of government to maintain whatever quantity of public housing units is necessary to meet demand. Most people with means would doubtless pay to own a private home, but public housing should be an option for anyone who wants it. How many people are in unsafe situations because they have nowhere else to go? How many parents could stay home with their kids if they didn’t have to hustle BS jobs to pay the rent? Free and universal provision of public goods would improve macro-level quality of life and go a long way towards saving the planet at the same time.
Reading “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” by Matthew Desmond gave me my first gut understanding of what it is to live in poverty about 10 years ago. And it was a wallop. Admittedly, my consciousness had been well primed by the great Barbara Ehrenreich and her “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” back in the early 2000’s.
IMHO, these two stupendously well-written books offer a world of wisdom about the whys and wherefores of who suffers because of poverty (almost everyone) and who really profits (ultimately, always the top one percent). They should be required reading in every public school.
I cried when Ehrenreich died.
I haven’t read those books, but I’ll check them out – your reaction alone is recommendation enough.
That said, there’s a longer arc here that’s hard to ignore. Nothing much changes under capitalism except the language we use to describe it. If you go back to Seebohm Rowntree’s Poverty: A Study of Town Life (York, early 1900s), you see the same structure laid bare with almost shocking clarity.
Rowntree’s work was extraordinary not just for its statistical rigor but for the imagination behind it. He effectively held up a mirror to Victorian sensibilities and demonstrated that roughly 30% of the population was living in poverty, not because they were feckless or morally deficient, but because the economy simply did not pay living wages. That was a radical claim at the time.
He went further and did something conceptually new: he defined a poverty line – a minimum income required for physical subsistence – and used it to distinguish between “primary” poverty (insufficient income) and “secondary” poverty (income misallocated but still inadequate for full participation). Even in the early pages and tables, you can see how methodically he tied wages, rents, food, and family structure into a coherent system of constraint, not choice.
And crucially, his work fed directly into policy: early welfare reforms, old-age pensions, and eventually the architecture of the modern welfare state.
Fast forward 125 years and the language has changed: “affordability,” “insecurity,” “housing crisis”, but the underlying mechanism is intact. Low wages relative to the cost of living. Structural, not personal. Persistent, not accidental.
What has perhaps changed most is not the condition itself, but our willingness to name it. “Poverty” has become an unfashionable word in our Brave New World – too blunt, too revealing. Better to diffuse it into softer categories and keep the system intellectually intact.
Rowntree would recognize the pattern instantly. And, I suspect, he would be less surprised than we like to think – not at the persistence of poverty, but at our continued capacity to look away from it.
The great American story told to all is that anyone with grit and determination and who works hard can get ahead. Therefore, any healthy and fit adult who is poor has only themselves to blame.
That’s the story. Whether or not that’s true is another matter.
Re: “’Poverty’ has become an unfashionable word in our Brave New World – too blunt, too revealing.”
My favorite example of this is the current insistence on calling people “food insecure” rather than hungry, which is what they are.
Thanks very much, DFWCom, for the introduction to Rowntree. I was not familiar with him. Interesting that he entitled his second study, in 1936, “Poverty and Progress,” presumably a nod to “Progress and Poverty” by Henry George, with whose life and work Rowntree undoubtedly would have been familiar. My own exposure to George was unavoidable since my great-grandfather, grandmother and mother were all Georgists.
Yes. And, to fix the economy, change the tax law changes that led to this sorry state of affairs over time. That will mean going against the interests of the uniparty’s big donors. / Not holding my breath.
One example from Financial Accounting & Corporate Transparency (FACT) :
Step One to Saving Domestic Manufacturing? Stop Giving Tax Breaks for Offshoring
https://thefactcoalition.org/tariffs-manufacturing-tax-breaks-for-offshoring/
Now I hear politicians and some regular people floating the idea that sales taxes should be raised. Sales tax are one of the most regressive taxes out there. The poor must spend the majority of their income on necessities every month. The rich spend hardly a fraction of their income on necessities compared to the poor.
I understand why politicians in service to their donors would float the idea. I don’t understand why regular people would support the idea.
Then Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s “real time experiment” in tax cutting for the well to do and businesses led the state to look for offsets to cover the shortfall in state revenue. One “offset” was to raise the sales tax on everything, including food. This resulted in a 10% sales tax on grocery store foods. The sales tax on food, not prepared food but on grocery store foodstuffs, led to an increase in hunger and a deepening of poverty among the poorest in the state.
(These tax cut give aways have since been reversed, after the “experiment” nearly destroyed the public school system and the state’s budget.)
Yes, grocery sales tax is one of the most regressive I could think of, and sales taxes in general are regressive.
Why do people “vote” against their interests? They are told a pack of lies and hollow promises, and the “other” party has the same policy. The illusion of choice should be wearing thin by now.
The problem with “fix the economy, not housing” is not that it’s wrong, it’s that it stops halfway.
Yes, people aren’t earning enough to pay rent. Yes, rents are too high. But framing the issue that way subtly preserves the illusion that this is a housing affordability problem rather than what it plainly is: an income distribution problem.
The economist, Blair Fix, has covered this – https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2024/08/22/from-commodity-to-asset-the-truth-behind-rising-house-prices/
When you look at averages, there is almost nothing to see. House prices relative to average income have not exploded, and median rents have even fallen as a share of income over long periods. That is precisely the point. Averages are doing the ideological work.
What matters is not the relationship between housing and the average, but between housing and the bottom of the distribution – and there, the story is catastrophic. The number of people earning less than a fraction of house prices or rents has multiplied since 1970.
Meanwhile, for the top 1%, there is effectively no housing crisis at all.
So the claim that “rent is too damn high” is only half the truth. The more uncomfortable half is that incomes at the bottom are too damn low – and have been allowed to drift ever further from the social norm.
The real scandal, however, is not simply the divergence. It is that the gap between the bottom and the average is almost never reported.
We are endlessly told about wealth concentration at the top – often with a tacit shrug that it is earned. We are told the middle class is “under pressure,” though still broadly intact. But the widening gulf between the 10th percentile and the median – now on the order of fifty thousand dollars in the US – is effectively invisible in mainstream economic reporting.
It is a statistical blind spot with enormous political consequences. Because once you stop looking at that gap, the problem can be safely rebranded:
• not poverty, but “insecurity”
• not hunger, but “food insecurity”
• not structural exclusion, but “affordability challenges”
In other words, the language is euphemized, the data is averaged, and the underlying reality disappears.
Fix’s work goes further. The housing “crisis” is not primarily about supply constraints, zoning, or even speculative excess. It is the downstream effect of a second Gilded Age – a distributional shift that leaves averages intact while hollowing out the bottom.
And yet policy continues to circle the drain:
• tweak supply
• subsidize demand
• manage symptoms
All while avoiding the one lever that would actually matter: income at the bottom. That brings us to the most uncomfortable point of all: the minimum wage and the ideological rigidity surrounding it.
There is a broad, almost unspoken consensus across elites – politicians, economists, even many advocates – that meaningful redistribution via wages is somehow off-limits. Instead, we get tax credits, subsidies, pilot programs, and endless technocratic workarounds. The system bends over backwards to avoid the obvious.
Which is why even well-meaning analyses end up reproducing the problem they describe. If you begin with “rent is too high,” you will end with housing policy. If you begin with “incomes at the bottom are too low,” you end somewhere much more politically dangerous.
The tragedy is that we know the answer. Fix states it plainly: if you want to make housing affordable, ignore housing prices and focus on income.
But that requires confronting distribution directly – something our discourse, our data, and our politics are systematically designed to avoid.
So yes, fix the economy. But let’s be clear what that means.
It does not mean marginal adjustments to housing supply or modest income supports. It means addressing the structural gap between the bottom and the average – something we have spent fifty years refusing to even measure properly.
Until then, we will continue to rename poverty, manage its symptoms, and call it progress
Great comment. Thank you.
Brilliantly stated. My thanks as well.
A key problem to solve with homelessness is that eventually you lose your documentation, your credit cards, debit cards, your ID, passport, tax documents, etc., all forms of proving who you are. And then you are locked out of the banking system which is regulated to require all of those forms of proof, so now you also have no bank account. The economy for the most part is built on proof of identity, thanks to anti-fraud, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorist financing, etc., so now as an homeless person you’re locked out of the economy too. And also criminalized – because without your papers you’re a criminal, not allowed to be free, in the eyes of the paddyrollers.
Any solution to the homelessness issue will need to address this, as well as lack of housing and, soon, widespread lack of jobs. My prediction is the majority of the population of the US (and the world) will become homeless.
Comments above bring up good points as well, my twenty bucks (two cents adjusted for inflation):
Sonali outlines how so-called liberals and D party politicians have slick rhetoric but right-wing policy (Gavin Newsom being a posterboy), where is the political choice? If the D and R uniparty are all funded by the same “donors” (bribe-masters) how can there be any significant policy change? I don’t see how lawless oligarchy is compatible with any semblance of democratic choice.
The two parties are firmly right-wing (anti-labor) and authoritarian. The only differences are largely superficial and emotional identity issues, yet both parties support obscene DoD budgets, wars, genocide, and corruption. The same old “no money for health care, housing, infrastructure, education” but seemingly unlimited funds for Israel, MICIMATT, subsidies, tax breaks etc.
If US “voters” continue to legitimize a fraud by voting for D and R candidates who just exacerbate the steadily declining quality of life, then what can we realistically expect?
My conclusion is that there needs to be some real political will and effort to clean up the institutional corruption, as well as the increasing lawlessness of people in high places, otherwise conditions will continue to worsen for the vast majority of the population.
The upcoming Financial Winter that Michael Hudson, Steve Keen and others have been talking about will likely bring about a crisis that will bring all of this to a head. Maybe the country will have to hit rock bottom before emerging from denial.
I decided years ago that both the Demicans and Republocrats were culpable for our shared state of affairs and that neither party would ever get my vote ever again, anywhere on the ballot. I would sooner vote for a Wiccan for County Treasurer than either a D or R candidate.
The problem is that the Dem/Rep Uniparty (DRU) has set up a system to ensure theirs are the candidates elected. Getting onto a ballot is no easy task, and the DRU political machine is set up that way on purpose.
In my view, a fairly comprehensive flushing of the system is needed, with the fresh perspective of new blood less tainted by the mechanics of the looting and pillaging griftage so endemic in the system. New eyes to come in and look at things and say “Wait, what’s been going on here?”
I’m happy to tell the youngsters that they now have the numbers to effect significant change, and the tools via social media to collectively vet a fresh generation of political leaders and representatives. But of course the DRU political machine will go to great lengths to ensure that does not happen, viciously destroying anyone who might be a threat in whatever way necessary to make them pariah.
Luckily I’m already pariah, in oh so many ways, so I’ll never have to worry about being in elective office.
Well, Ken – Maybe you will VOTE for Glenn Turner for State Treasurer on the Green party. I was sick and tired of this system and decided to run for CA state Treasurer. Here is my website – GlennTurner26.org Check it out I’ve got the bare bones of my “platform” there.
The Green party and Peace and Freedom party have joined together in a down slate from their Gov candidates. It is called the Left Unity Slate and also has a website leftunityslate.org I find it very exciting that the local left is finally working on “getting-it-together. I have no illusions that I’ll get the “job”, but see this as a spear tip to open up the obvious need for a real Left.
I know I’m just a retired retail shop keeper, but I have been reading NC here for years and am a local climate activist, MH activist, copwatcher etc. etc. So I am hoping I might get 10 – 15% of the vote, higher that the usual 5%. We are living in times where most of my friends refuse to vote D ever again.
Nixon stopped the feds from building affordable housing, and Reagan, as he cut income taxes on the wealthy roughly in half, cut HUD’s affordable housing budget by 75%. Democrats haven’t stepped up to reverse those measures, in fact, Clinton signed the Faircloth amendment limiting how much housing relief the feds could provide.
In a more hopeful vein, an organization called “Destination: Home” is providing emergency funding for those on the verge of homelessness in Silicon valley.
Meanwhile, Sacramento County is debating whether to enlarge its County jail. Sure, the jail is full, but 60 – 80% of the inmates aren’t convicted of anything except being unable to afford bail. The County lost a lawsuit (the “Mays Decision”) for mistreating prisoners.
William Murphy has more to say about this (did I get this link in NC?)
We’re now up to 8.3 billion human lives in being in a global economy that was designed for 2.5 billion of us. The “market” no longer values human lives thanks to over-supply and planetary labor arbitrage. Add to that our barren screen-driven ideology of individualism and personal greed that has encouraged a radical concentration of wealth at the top and we will never solve “homelessness.” Instead we are devolving into the dog-eat-dog dystopia of round-ups and concentration camps imagined for us by the psychopathic Palantir caste.
I guess that’s one way to “cull the herd.” Count me out, on moral grounds.
A lot of sharp comments from people whose views I respect. Yet when I control-f for “landlord”, there are no hits. A structural pillar of our housing model is that much of the stock should be owned by rent collecting money vacuums whose place in the economy is a vestige of feudalism. It would, however, be difficult politically to announce a platform of taxing away landlordism, because real estate capital is a major donor to political campaigns, especially at the local and state levels.
If, like most of us, you’re born without assets to your name, there is an estimable if not exactly calculable debt you owe to private interests. To find it, you’d add average rent for an average lifetime, average medical costs, &c. Looking then at average wages over that span, and factoring in things like disasters, job displacement, wars, and social disruption of all kinds, we could see how many people would likely fall out of the housing market. Whatever this number is, like the rent, it’s too damn high.
So long as we have to keep our general economic model, I’d be partial to Michael Hudson’s proposed solution of taking some of these costs away from workers and using the government to subsidize these costs.
Infinite immigration drives up real estate prices in finite metro areas. We consider that part of the solution. A large illegal workforce makes it hard for blue collar workers to get jobs and lowers wages. We consider that part of the solution. Sending jobs to other countries makes it hard for workers to get jobs and lowers wages. We consider that part of the solution.
So nothing will get fixed as everything the rich consider sacred is what increased homelessness and the rich control the government.
I should add that some amount of homelessness is due to mental illness and drug or alcoholic k addiction (although addicts would have an easier time finding jobs if we had labor shortages due to enforcing immigration, stopping immigration and ending job export). So people need to want to pay for housing the mentally ill and addicts. But after Reagan closed the mental institutions in California people didn’t call for them to be reopened. It is similar to when we let prisoners out early due to overcrowding. Rather than paying to house them we prefer mentally ill and criminals are on the streets.
A great contradiction in U.S. society is the coexistence of smug social Darwinism with the routine economic protection of distressed family members. Almost everyone knows of a middle class family with a child that “under performed,” but these individuals are seldom homeless. The scope of public compassion has shrunk to the family or clan unit, leaving all distressed outsiders literally in the cold. It is this lack of social compassion that underlies the harsh and ineffective government responses to homelessness, and this is what makes the policy problem politically intractable.
I often see RV’s, 5th wheels and trailers at homes that are never going on vacation as family or friends are living there now, de facto homeless, were it not for the generosity shown towards those struggling.
What if we concentrated on fixing the educational system; in the sense that we teach logic to young students, and structures of philosophy to later ones? And then, perhaps, people would be more inclined to vote for politicians who didn’t need fixing, themselves, but were the product of these same schools. In any case–whether the politicians are trained in these schools, or voters en masse fix the mainstream political parties, or (more likely) establish new ones–then the politicians might be inclined to actually admit they know what must be done to fix homelessness, and actually do something serious and credible about the problem and all the issues surrounding it.
None of this, of course, is likely. But without shifting who controls the levers of government, will we ever see homelessness and its causes acknowledged the way many of us do?