To Deal with Homelessness, We Need the Police

H omelessness is, without question, a complex problem. For someone to wind up on the streets, many things had to go wrong, with respect to lifestyle choices, dysfunctional government programs, and broader societal breakdown. As to what should be done, the debate tends to be straightforward. Some call for more housing. Others call for more law enforcement.

That debate was central to recalling San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin. Progressives chalked up the recall to voter ignorance, the exaggeration of crime (said to be not as bad in deep blue cities as conservatives allege), and the conflation of crime and homelessness (which prosecutors should have no major role in, since they are parts of the criminal-justice system). The dominant progressive view on homelessness is that it’s a housing problem best handled by the experts who know how to finance, build, and manage subsidized housing. We can’t arrest our way out of homelessness.

Those who proclaim that homelessness is a housing issue rarely grasp that they’re restating the problem, not pointing to a viable solution. In a given market, if private ownership can’t provide enough units affordable to extremely low-income adults and families, then it’s also difficult for government to do so, unless we are talking about some mass-scale seizure of private housing stock to transfer to the homeless and poor.

The lead policy response to homelessness in California has been housing-oriented. Historic levels of resources have been allocated to develop housing for the homeless. In several notable cases, the public directly authorized these new resources. California’s voters agreed to spend more on housing-for-the-homeless programs through Measure H (Los Angeles County, 2017), Measure HHH (Los Angeles City, 2016), Proposition C (San Francisco, 2018), and “No Place like Home” (statewide, 2018). And nearly 8 million voters opposed recalling Governor Gavin Newsom, whose budgets have included big outlays for homeless services.

Disappointingly, the new resources did not ease the crisis on the streets. Flows into tent cities continued unabated, while flows out did not amount to much more than a trickle. The California experience suggests that housing your way out of homelessness may be just as hard as arresting your way out of it.

When public places are converted into private accommodations, they’re no longer “public” in any meaningful sense. It’s not just lack of access to housing that separates encampment dwellers from ordinary Americans. No viable community can largely consist of single adults who are addicted to drugs and/or seriously mentally ill. Living on the street is dreadful for one’s health. According to Los Angeles County’s most recent report on homeless mortality, transportation-related fatalities were the third most common cause of death from 2019-21. Had LA recently been less tolerant of homelessness-related crime and public disorder, it is doubtful that quite as many homeless people would have been fatally struck by cars.

Per many advocates, cities should accommodate encampments until a private apartment is available to everyone on the street. In practice, once housing becomes available to someone, the years he has spent unsheltered may have caused his health to deteriorate to the point where housing merely provides somewhere to live out the final years of life before dying prematurely.

Street homelessness creates public disorder and law-breaking, which could merit a law-enforcement response. To the extent that people mean “homelessness” as rampant public disorder, the police can reduce homelessness. Arrests and other tactics — including the mere presence of cops — restore order to parks, sidewalks, plazas, train stations, and other public places. When prosecutors decline to prosecute, they exert a dampening effect on any and all police activity, so disorder spreads.

Critics point out that arresting a homeless person doesn’t end his homelessness, and by creating a criminal record, it becomes more difficult for him to get a job and secure housing. But it is misleading to portray law enforcement as only ever counterproductive in addressing homelessness. Police can reduce the high rate of homeless-on-homeless crime, crack down on the (often housed) drug dealers who exploit the vulnerable, and help site housing-for-the-homeless facilities by promising locals that crime around new facilities won’t be tolerated.

The homelessness debate could be improved in two ways. The first is laying off all talk of a definitive “way out” of homelessness. Though some still speak of “ending homelessness,” that Bush/Obama-era goal has begun to fade, just as the Great Society era’s goal of “ending poverty” gradually faded. In America, it’s understood that politicians running for office don’t have to commit themselves to ending poverty if they are elected. We haven’t achieved quite that level of realism in the case of homelessness, but we’re getting there.

The second improvement to the debate is more focus on the intermediate future. Robert Marbut, President Trump’s homelessness czar, was fond of asking, “What can you do today, tomorrow, and in the next week, not three years from now?” Housing-oriented progressives don’t offer many intermediate improvements to the homelessness crisis. But one possibility would be directing the police to enforce higher standards of order in public spaces. Unless California Democrats have a better idea, more voter backlash looms.