America’s Streets Are Not Shelters: Time to Rethink Homelessness Policy

Walk through any major American city today—San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle—and you’ll see the same troubling pattern: sidewalks turned into encampments, public parks overtaken by tents, and transit stations rendered unusable. This isn’t just a humanitarian crisis. It’s a public safety emergency, a sanitation nightmare, and a glaring indictment of failed policy.

Let’s be clear: no one is guaranteed a home simply by virtue of living in America. What we can and should offer is temporary, transitional shelter—a safe place to stabilize, not a permanent entitlement. But instead of enforcing this principle, our cities have allowed the streets to become de facto housing, with little oversight and even less accountability.

The Real Crisis: Oversight, Not Just Compassion

Many of those living on the streets face serious challenges—mental illness, substance abuse, trauma. These are not conditions that resolve themselves. The state has a custodial responsibility to intervene, not abandon. That means enforcing laws, offering treatment, and ensuring that public spaces remain safe and functional for everyone.

But instead of real solutions, we get performative compassion—billions funneled into nonprofit organizations that promise progress but deliver stagnation. These groups, often politically connected, operate with minimal transparency and maximum funding. Their executive directors earn six-figure salaries while the streets they claim to serve grow more dangerous and dysfunctional.

Cronyism Masquerading as Charity

Let’s call it what it is: grift disguised as goodwill. Elected officials funnel taxpayer dollars to nonprofits that support their campaigns, creating a feedback loop of exploitation. The suffering of the homeless becomes a business model, not a problem to solve. And when the public demands answers, these officials feign confusion—“We don’t know why it’s getting worse,” they say, as billions vanish into bureaucratic black holes.

This isn’t socialism. It’s not even capitalism. It’s cronyism, pure and simple. And it’s unacceptable.

A New Path Forward

We need policies that are firm, fair, and focused:

– Mandatory transitional shelter with clear timelines and pathways to treatment or employment.

– Enforcement of public space laws to protect safety and cleanliness.

– Audits and accountability for every dollar spent on homelessness programs.

– Mental health and addiction services that are compulsory for those who need them—not optional.

Compassion without structure is chaos. America must stop pretending that letting people suffer in tents is humane. It’s not. It’s abandonment.

Let’s reclaim our cities—not with cruelty, but with courage. Let’s demand results—not rhetoric. And let’s stop subsidizing failure.