By now, you've probably read a lot about the homeless crisis in California. Calling it a crisis, in fact, may be putting it mildly. As of 2018, California had four times as many homeless people as Florida, which had the second-largest homeless population of all the states. You can look here to see the exact numbers, as well as to get a sense of where your state ranks relative to others with respect to its homeless population.
With a budget surplus of well into eight figures, to say nothing of a broad range of charities and foundations, California's state government would not seem to lack the financial resources to address the problem of homelessness. From a public policy standpoint, the biggest culprit in all of this goes all the way back to the 1970s and the decision made then to de-institutionalize the mentally ill, on the theory that they could be more effectively treated on an outpatient basis. In retrospect, the patently obvious failure of this theory seems to have been a precursor of our current, broader health care crisis, brought about in part by the for-profit age of super-pharmaceuticals that work miracles but cost the patients a small fortune to use. Man (including all genders here) does not live by drugs alone--or profits alone, for that matter--when it comes to health care needs, regardless of the nature of those needs.
Reversing this trend would seem to be one obvious solution, along with public policies that addressed the need for a higher minimum wage and more affordable housing. But it's that latter point that seems to be the real sticking point in addressing the homeless crisis.
Commentators on the right often blame California's problem with homelessness on allegedly excessive land use regulations for the purpose of preservation, whether of eco-systems or historic properties. This line of commentary, even putting aside its inherently self-serving nature, runs into two problems. The first is the afore-mentioned surplus, something that would not exist if all of those pesky regulations were as crippling as conservatives keep forcing themselves (and the rest of us) to believe. The second is the fact that California, to put it mildly, is a very big state. Finding room for all of the homeless in it, as large as the number of homeless is, should be relatively easy.
The core of California's problem, apart from its mental-health dimension, is the fact that the vast majority of its homeless population is concentrated in its largest and fourth-largest cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco. That makes it not merely highly visible; it also has reached the point at which it has come close to shutting down otherwise functional neighborhoods. And, because both cities are filled with thriving neighborhoods, relocating the homeless within city limits runs up against the NIMBY problem in a hurry.
And here is where we come to the heart of the problem: California, due to its success under Democratic government, has become the most popular place in the nation to live. Correspondingly, the value of property is sky-high, and those who own it have an incentive to sell it to people who then want to develop it in ways that will make even more money. That means luxury developments, not middle- and lower-middle-class ones. And fewer places in which to live and work for the majority of people who have come from other states to try cashing in on California's success.
Then again, are California's homeless simply a cohort of people who took Horace Greeley's famous advice about going west and struck out? In part, perhaps. Is it a case of people finding work that simply doesn't pay enough to afford housing in a superheated real estate market? Again, in part, perhaps. State and local governments have recently made increases in the minimum wage; in time, those could have an impact on the homeless numbers.
Then again, are most of these people here voluntarily? Or is this the consequence of red states deciding that the only spending their failed policies permit when it comes to the homeless is a one-way ticket out of town for each of them? Take a look.
I'm going to raise one more possibility. One that has a personal dimension.
As I've said previously on more than one occasion, I am a former evangelical Christian who is now a converted Jew During the peak of my born-again fervor, I went through a period during which I"bought into" (pun intended) the prosperity-gospel nonsense that many evangelical leaders (I hesitate to call some of them preachers) promote that the more faithfully one tithes, the more G-d rewards the the tither. Like many before me, and many more since, I learned the hard way that this is simply not the case. Indeed, if one reads the New Testament very carefully, one will discover that the so-called "prosperity gospel" is not even part of the Gospels. It is a line of "theology," however, that is very effective in lining the pockets of the false prophets with real profits provided by the spiritually bereft and easily gullible.
How many members of the homeless population in this country, including the ones in California, are among the bereft and gullible? How many of those people were systemically robbed of their hard-earned money to support the criminally rich lifestyles of the pious and hypocritical? Especially by this miserable excuse for a man, who shouldn't be allowed on television anywhere, anytime (and don't you love the fact that Wikipedia describes him as a felon before it mentions his checkered career as a televangelist)? I swear, if we took all of these people, turned them upside down, and shook them until all of their money fell on the ground, we'd have more than enough money to pay for the homeless. That is, the people that Jesus told people again and again they should care about the most.
I don't have an answer to that question. But I do know that, whether due to fake political policies or fake faith, there are too many people in this country who suffer unjustly. I hope and pray that we can do something to end this state of affairs. And, due to its successes in other areas, I feel confident that California will be able to lead the way.
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