Sweep up the homeless vs. city-community solutions? Which, if any, work? | Opinion
MELINDA: Fox News claims that the reaction to Donald Trump’s push to get homeless people off the streets in D.C. is mixed among those actually living outside. To demonstrate the full range of their views, Fox posted a video of one man saying he didn’t know where he’d go if they pushed him out and another cursing the lousy job the District has done of helping him. So, the second man said, “We need somebody like a Big Daddy Donald Trump to step in and smack the s*** out of ‘em and kick ‘em the f*** out.”
Those praising our president’s so-called “beautification” plan for D.C., which as far as I can tell only involves bulldozers and bullhorns, seem to think you just send those folks away — FAR AWAY, Trump said — and poof, mess tidied: Why didn’t Gavin Newsom think of that? He can of course throw them all in jail, as according to his White House spokeswoman he seems fully prepared to do, solving nothing. Which we know because this, too, has been tried.
Yet the claim so popular among people like me that homelessness is really just about a lack of affordable housing isn’t true, either. I spent a lot of the year I was in Sacramento, California, in 2022 interviewing and writing about people living in tents or on a cardboard square by the river or on a sidewalk, and can say at least a couple of things about this complicated problem: Every single person you see out there has a story all his own, but everyone I met who was chronically homeless was there as the result of a wound so big that it made living out there feel safer than living in here. And that kind of trauma is not so easy to come back from.
DAVID: It is funny that you mention Gavin Newsom as you make the case that Trump’s big homeless roundup show in D.C. is not a real solution to the problem. If Trump doesn’t have a solution, Newsom doesn’t either. Million dollar apartments for the homeless. Housing first programs that let the clinically insane and substance abusers destroy property and prey on others. All while homelessness only grows.
The solutions to homelessness will be hard fought and only person by person. I think the solutions, if there are any, are family, faith-based charity, substance treatment and insane asylums. Newsom used to know the first part of that. When he was a mayor, he had a program to bus the homeless home where family could provide a helping hand in concert with government and charity.
Real compassion for the homeless is going to make many of the homeless really mad because they often are not in their right mind to know that they need help. It will not look like opening new shelters for the flavor of the month cause like the new multi-million dollar shelter for trans homeless in New York. The Newsom far-left approach put performance over substance every bit as much as Trump’s made-for-TV bulldoze the camps plan. Too few people are offering real compassion to the homeless.
MELINDA: Insane asylums? Are you also all in on bloodletting and phrenology? In any case, you are flat wrong about Newsom’s “far-left approach.” He’s done his share of sweeps, which as I said accomplish nothing. But he’s also done exactly what you said would “make many homeless really mad because they are often not in their right mind to know that they need help.” That’s a condition called anosognosia. It’s very real, and something I first saw when I spent several months shadowing a seriously mentally ill and also quite lovely homeless man named Maxwell Maxey in Dallas in 1986.
First, I feel like I need to say that not everyone living on the street suffers from a serious mental illness or addiction, though those who are there for any length of time do tend to decompensate and also to self-medicate; honestly, I think almost anyone would. The more powerful new meth has also pushed many into many of the same symptoms as those who suffer from schizophrenia, and this has made the problem far worse.
But I was in California when Newsom took on the lobbies who normally support him by pushing for and getting something called the CARE Court, which provides court-ordered treatment — up to two years — for those so impaired that they don’t know they need help. So many who are normally on Newsom’s side said this would be a gross violation of civil liberties, I guess because people should be free to choose to sleep in a bush, get robbed on the regular and eat out of a trash can. Sure, let freedom ring. Only of course they’re not truly free to choose, because their illness has robbed them of anything resembling real choice.
I can’t even tell you how fiercely Newsom’s own people fought him on this, and I’m pretty sure I was the only one on our editorial board who agreed with him. I wrote about my brilliant college classmate, who rejected all services right up to the end, and so left this world free of any intrusion on his “choice” to die alone in a Chicago shelter. So you bet I supported Newsom’s controversial plan to “take some damn responsibility to implement our ideals.”
Everybody else as I recall said if this law passed, well then everyone on the street would be locked up. Which struck me as ridiculous; locked up where, exactly? This is a limited program for the most severely impaired. And it’s a baby step, but such an important one.
So how is it going in California? It’s not at all the disaster that you paint it as. That’s not to say that the progress is all because of the CARE Court, which is limited in scope and only got going in late ‘23. The state has also put a lot of money into other behavioral health programs that this year were cut again, unfortunately, and that really is a problem.
But in the January point-in-time snapshot count, Santa Cruz County’s homeless population was down 20% from last year and Contra Costa County was down 26%, while in Los Angeles County homelessness dropped 4%, and that was the second yearly drop in a row. Diss Newsom all day if you want — only standing up to his own side in such a sustained way on this won me over to him, because you don’t see that very often — but don’t dismiss him based on sloppy stereotypes.
DAVID: Newsom made a lot of compromises that made those CARE Courts into something of a joke. In their first 18 months or so fewer than 200 people were ordered into treatment. As they roll out statewide from the originally limited pilot projects ultimately state officials think about 12,000 people will qualify out of a homeless population nearing 200,000. And the CARE Courts program includes more of that housing first approach for many people which is part of the problem.
At least you are right that the issue is not really a lack of housing, but the fact that many places with big homeless populations like New York and California are paralyzed when it comes to building housing for anyone, that is why it costs $800,000 or $1 million there to build a single supportive homeless apartment.
MELINDA: CARE Court was never supposed to have big numbers, contrary to what was feared, because only a small fraction of homeless people need that kind of intervention. As of last month, 3,366 Californians had been petitioned through that program, which to me means the chance at least of 3,366 lives recovered.
As for zoning, that is another problem that California has been addressing. Housing First hasn’t worked better because it was never funded properly and thus mostly became Housing Only. And while billions have been spent trying to solve the problems of homeless people, to say as you did that Newsom moved people from the street into million-dollar apartments is very misleading.
DAVID: I don’t think it is misleading at all. Democrats spent so much money on these programs that they lost track of it all according to the state auditor. If $24 billion isn’t enough then there never will be enough. For goodness’ sake, if my math is right, that is like $100,000 for every homeless man, woman and child in the state over just five years.
MELINDA: Where you’re right is that one person at a time is the only way this ever works, and I’ll add that each and every person can take a while, too. But that only happens with the help that will be cut even further thanks to the Big Beautiful Whatever That Was that I think I remember you were excited about.
I know you don’t mean to be cruel, but when you say only family and faith-based organizations can solve this, no. Even families who give their all and then some can’t walk their seriously mentally ill loved ones back from where they are, and yet the assumption is that they could if they cared. People in this situation need more help than relatives and churches can possibly offer, I assure you, or we wouldn’t have the problem that we do.
Telling these seriously wounded people, hey, just go to a shelter, where especially those with PTSD are terrified to be, has never worked. And when the Medicaid cuts to programs that helped those with addictions or a mental illness fully kick in after the midterms — tricky, right? — this problem is going to get considerably worse.
DAVID: I don’t mean to be cruel to families. I said that government had to be part of the solution. But bureaucracies won’t cure this problem. The best way to coordinate this care is through people who love the person suffering from homelessness and whatever demons drove them there.
MELINDA: A story in the Washington Post the other day quoted a homeless man named William Wilson, who said, “I’d like to invite the president to spend some time here in a tent with us. We’re nice people. We’re a family here — we get along.” What an interesting thought.
I mean, I know he wouldn’t do it, but what if he did? I learned a lot spending time in tents and broken-down RVs, and Trump could, too. Can you imagine the good he could do and the credit he’d get? People in homeless communities often do take loving care of one another, and though I’d never say it’s not dangerous out there, especially for women, virtually all of whom have been raped on the street, most people living there are not as scary as they are scared. The one time that a woman suffering from delusions hit me, out of nowhere, others in her encampment immediately intervened.
With so few brakes on anything Trump wants to do, he could if he chose make a dent in real problems instead of only pretending to, or as in this case and so many others, making a very real problem worse. Trump has the capital to improve lives, and instead he’s handcuffing abuelas and objecting to museums that depict slavery as bad.
The same Fox News story I mentioned in the beginning listed all of the “far left agenda items” D.C. had funded instead of building more shelter beds. Well, Trump could put the $45 billion that we’re wasting on prisons for immigrants, most of whom have done nothing wrong, into addiction and mental health services and housing. His supporters would approve, as they always do. And so would the rest of us, but he never seems interested in doing anything with appeal beyond his base. Now I see that ICE wants to spend millions on SUVs and custom, gold-detailed vehicle wraps emblazoned with the words “DEFEND THE HOMELAND.”
DAVID: Done nothing wrong? You mean other than break our immigration laws? That’s a whole other column. If you expect Trump to do anything productive, you’ll be more disappointed than if you hold hope that Democratic approaches to homelessness will solve or even dent the problem.
This story was originally published August 21, 2025 at 1:15 PM with the headline "Sweep up the homeless vs. city-community solutions? Which, if any, work? | Opinion."
