Why Can’t We Handle Homelessness?

If you walked through parts of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle—pick your ultra-blue city—would you guess that you were in the richest society ever to exist?

You wouldn’t just see poverty. You’d see psychosis. You’d see addiction so advanced it has become a kind of zombie state. You’d see people who aren’t merely “down on their luck,” but profoundly unwell—often incapable of caring for themselves, sometimes dangerous to others—and increasingly treated as if their predicament is some kind of “lifestyle” we’re obligated to accommodate.

That accommodation isn’t working.

It’s not love or dignity, and it certainly isn’t effective governance. It’s a moral failure dressed up as freedom.

And here’s what makes it so hard to talk about: the moment you point out the obvious—that much of modern homelessness is a mental health and addiction crisis—you run straight into a legal and cultural minefield.

If you care about civil liberties, you should be uneasy about the state confining people without a criminal conviction. The history of forced institutionalization includes real abuse and real horror.

But if you care about human beings, you should also be uneasy about the alternative we’ve come to accept: people who cannot care for themselves living and dying on sidewalks, cycling through emergency rooms and jails, deteriorating in public view while our government burns piles of cash on “solutions” that clearly aren’t working.

At some point, the business-as-usual approach becomes outright cruelty.

The political class can feel the ground shifting. When even Barack Obama publicly acknowledges that something has gone wrong in blue-state cities, you can hear the subtext: this is not a winning strategy.

Yes, we should insist on every person’s humanity. But if your version of “help” includes asking normal families to navigate tent cities and open-air drug use while throwing good money after bad—and chastising anyone who objects—then you’re on shaky ground.

This isn’t just a political issue to dunk on Democrats over. It’s a tragedy on a shocking scale—a wealthy country leaving hundreds of thousands of people to rot outdoors. Politics is how we got here, but I’m skeptical that it’s the way out.

What DOESN’T Work?

In the depths of the pandemic in 2021, I produced a documentary called Beyond Homeless. We tried to understand how California’s crisis got so out of control and looked at alternatives around the country that were actually showing signs of progress.

To understand the California disaster, you first need to learn the following innocent-sounding phrases: “housing first” and “harm reduction.” The state went all in on these ideas, which have failed miserably. In fact, they supercharged the problem along just about every dimension.

The word “homelessness” itself is misleading. It’s not just one problem, and it usually isn’t mainly about housing. This is why “housing first” fails right from the start.

While housing costs, wages, and overall cost-of-living pressures do matter, any real solution must first tackle the epidemic of severe mental illness fused with hard-drug addiction.

People spiral. They lose work. They start self-medicating. Relationships fracture. The guardrails that once might have caught them—family, church, community—either aren’t there or aren’t empowered to step in before things get catastrophic.

“Harm reduction,” the other half of this policy death spiral, focuses on reducing the acute risks of drug use—overdose, disease spread—rather than prioritizing sobriety and recovery. It’s an attempt to treat the end-stage symptoms of the disease without actually looking for a cure, or better yet, prevention.

Dr. Drew Pinsky, who you’ve probably seen on the show over the years, doesn’t mince words on this: “Drug addiction is a progressive disorder that ends in death.”

Many of you have faced these realities up close and personal. Many of you have been lucky enough to only watch from afar. However, especially for parents of kids still on the way to adulthood, none of us can afford to let this continue unchecked.

Our kids are growing up in the very culture that produced this mess. Most of them are educated in institutions that increasingly treat fragility as identity and boundaries as oppression. They’re told intervention is violence and “authentic expression” means never being told no.

What kind of adult does that produce?

If hundreds of thousands from older generations are now on the streets, what happens when this generation is out in the world?

Resilience doesn’t come from endless affirmation. It comes from love disciplined by truth—from parents, teachers, and role-models who aren’t confused about reality.

To be fair, living on the streets does require a certain kind of resilience. But survival mode isn’t the same thing as productive resilience—building a life that’s meaningful to the individual, useful to others, and stable in the face of unforeseen challenges.

The homelessness crisis is a warning of what happens when we lose clarity about human nature and what it means to live a good life.

The 60-Year Decline

For all of Gavin Newsom’s very real failures, California’s crisis didn’t start with him. This story goes back more than 60 years.

Mid-20th-century America faced a serious crisis in mental health institutions: overcrowding, abuse, neglect. Reform was necessary.

Then two major shifts set us on a new course.

First, the psychopharmacology revolution. Drugs like Thorazine created significant optimism that severe mental illness could be managed outside of long-term institutions. That breakthrough really mattered. However, the assumption that institutions had suddenly become obsolete and that outpatient “community mental health centers” were the way of the future proved to be less of a breakthrough, and more of a disaster.

Second, the philosophical shift. Influential thinkers began arguing that “mental illness” was more of a social label than a medical diagnosis. Within reason, I actually agree with this view, especially in 2026.

When every other teenager claims depression, anxiety, PTSD, and often all three, it’s fair to ask whether we’ve stretched those categories well beyond medical reality. At the extremes, these are very serious and debilitating conditions, but too often we medicalize normal, temporary struggles. For some young people, “mental illness” has become a ready-made identity.

However, the original critics of “mental illness” as a concept were more concerned about its potential as a tool of social control, especially against free-thinkers, oddballs, and sometimes outright degenerates—I’m looking at you Foucault—like themselves.

When distrust of power becomes your entire worldview, even legitimate diagnoses of severe mental disorders are reframed as propaganda and brainwashing. Over time, social norms go out the window altogether, resulting in the disaster you now see on blue-city streets.

What DOES Work?

A stable society has to hold two truths at once:

1. Civil liberties matter…

2. and some adults are not capable of consenting their way out of psychosis or addiction.

I’m a liberty-minded guy. I don’t have a perfect answer for how we balance those two truths as a matter of policy. Luckily, that’s not my job.

What I do know, and what we actually have a lot of influence over as parents, is the cultural side of things.

If we convince ourselves that intervening on behalf of a loved-one struggling with mental illness somehow violates their individual dignity, then we’ve lost the plot.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s happened.

Our society has internalized the idea that “harm reduction” is the only choice. On the streets, that looks like “clean needle” programs and special facilities where you can shoot up. At home, that looks like failing to set standards and draw boundaries until it’s too late, for fear of pushing your struggling family member away.

So how did the nation of rugged individualism end up here?

Maybe this isn’t the whole explanation, but here’s something to consider: over the past 60 years, the ever-expanding welfare state has crowded out the family and community systems that once made American individualism work.

When we see a homeless encampment in 2026, half of us want to throw money at it. The other half would rather have the police clear it out. The one thing we all can agree on is that it’s someone else’s problem to solve.

I’m not talking about entitlement, although that plays a role too. The bigger issue here is the belief that most problems are too big for us to solve, or at least improve, as individuals. Psychologist Martin Seligman called it “learned helplessness”—the belief that nothing you do matters, that agency is an illusion, and when push comes to shove, that decline is inevitable.

We are not going to solve this crisis with another billion dollars. California has tested that theory many times over.

We also are not going to solve it by turning back the clock to abusive institutions.

Some amount of policy reform—those details are above my pay-grade—along with reliable enforcement of public order are certainly part of the solution. But if we actually want to get back to a country where families take responsibility for one another, the hardest fix will be cultural.

The state cannot love. It cannot form character. It cannot sit with someone through months of painful recovery.

If we want fewer tents and fewer overdoses, we have to be willing to intervene before personal struggle turns into public spectacle.

For those of us fortunate enough to avoid these struggles in our own families, we also have a job to do: we must raise children who understand that freedom is not the absence of restraint, but the capacity for self-governance.

That’s how we get our streets back.