New York City, as the WSJ pointed out, has a serious homeless problem, and it’s failing across to deal with it. The article centered on the city’s socialist Progressive-Democrat mayor, Zohran Mamdani’s current failure, but in truth, the problem is rampant across all of our nation’s cities.
Dave Giffen, Coalition for the Homeless Executive Director thinks he has the answer.
The simplest solution is to build more affordable housing.
No, it isn’t. It is, though, the only idea the economically bankrupt Left can conceive.
It’s always either throw more money into failed programs, or build ever more government housing projects, or both. In truth, though, Leftists and their Progressive-Democratic Party politicians don’t care a penny about programs or policies that actually work; they just want the spending and building (the latter especially for their union benefactors’ jobs), and then to call it good. Sadly, as the rest of us understand, “more affordable housing” just perpetuates the homeless’ isolation from society by facilitating their dependency on government and trapping them in increasingly dilapidated government housing.
Contra Know Betters like Giffen and his ilk, the simplest solution isn’t as pie-in-the-sky simple as those virtue-signaling money wasters so favored of the Left, but it is eminently straightforward. This entails getting government regulations out of the way of private enterprise, so more jobs, including those for the unskilled, become much more available; encouraging private enterprises and charitable organizations wholly unaffiliated with government to run job training programs; and thereby providing the homeless with both the incentive and the means to get jobs and earn their own income and get into their own homes. (The general housing shortage is a separate problem.)
In parallel with that, encourage private enterprises and charitable organizations wholly unaffiliated with government to set up drug rehabilitation programs for those addict homeless who want off their drug dependency the treatment they need to achieve that. In parallel with this particular phase, it’s critical for government at all jurisdictional levels to get truly draconian and move the drug pushers off the streets and their suppliers out of their facilities and into jail. This is one of the very few aspects of homelessness in which government has a legitimate role.
There will remain a few homeless who are truly hopeless; these would be wards, first, of local church and charity, and only last of government, beginning first with local government.