One of the few areas where I sharply dissent from the norms of contemporary left-liberalism is that of homelessness. To be blunt, homelessness is terrible. It’s a failure of society. It is not OK to be homeless. It is an absolute blight on cities. Where we as a society became so focused on individual rights so that you have people arguing that being homeless is totally cool if people want to be and also if they want to shoot up on the streets, that’s cool too, well, that’s for future historians to figure out. But it’s bad. I grew up around this, being from Eugene, which had giant transient populations before it was cool, and I don’t have much tolerance for the intentionally homeless.
Now, there’s a lot of caveats here. The vast majority of homeless folks are not to blame for their plight and they want stable homes. Housing prices are ridiculous. People absolutely should have a constitutional and legal right to shelter. Cities need to build and build and build. We need to invest in mental health care. We need to find ways to take care of folks who are off their meds and in need of help. We need to provide the counseling needed to work with people to get them off addictive drugs and when that is not possible, as of course it is with a lot of addicts, to find them acceptable and safe housing. In terms of strategies to solve homelessness, I am there for all of them.
But I am not there with homelessness being acceptable and I never will be. It’s just not. Moreover, it’s the biggest political loser issue imaginable. So the great thing about pro-homelessness (and really, GTFOH with the “unhoused” language) advocates is that they are both wrong on the merits and engaging in disastrous politics that drive lots of people to the right! Great job folks!
So when I read this story about San Jose, I can understand the sentiments, even if calling the cops is rarely a good answer for anyone.
In San Jose, Mayor Matt Mahan, a Democrat, recently called for arresting homeless people if they refused shelter three times.
It’s rare for leaders in the liberal Bay Area to adopt such an approach, which critics say criminalizes homelessness. But his idea has drawn widespread support. While there remains opposition, interviews with residents, elected officials and advocates show that rising frustration with homelessness is making Silicon Valley voters desperate for action and leading them to proposals that once would have seemed too right-leaning for these heavily blue cities.
“We can have progressive goals, but we have to have pragmatic ways of achieving them,” Mr. Mahan said in an interview.
San Jose is the largest city in Northern California, with nearly one million residents, but it has long been overshadowed culturally and politically by San Francisco. Most of its population lives in suburban neighborhoods that are only slightly more affordable than the wealthy Silicon Valley enclaves north of the city.
Approximately 6,000 people in San Jose live in shelters, on the streets, along riverbanks and in vehicles. Homelessness is the top concern among San Jose residents by a two-to-one margin, according to city surveys.
Mr. Mahan, a 42-year-old moderate Democrat and tech entrepreneur who has been mayor since 2023, tapped into that anger and decried a crisis of homelessness, crime and dirty streets in San Jose the first time he campaigned for the city’s top job. He vowed to bring a “revolution of common sense.”
The goal of his new plan, he said, is to invest heavily in building more shelters in San Jose and to move homeless people who refuse housing into mental health treatment to help them onto a better path. But it is possible that those living on the streets could serve jail time.
“Homelessness can’t be a choice,” Mr. Mahan said. “Government has a responsibility to build shelter, and our homeless neighbors have a responsibility to use it.”
His proposal has drawn ire from advocates for homeless people, who have said that it ignores the root cause of homelessness: the high cost of living in San Jose and other California cities. But the San Jose City Council has given its initial approval, and a final vote is scheduled for June.
….
Raoul Mahone, 60, sat on a wooden pallet in front of the green tent where he sleeps each night. He nodded to the pinkish-purple blooms of the redbud tree under which he sought shade and the river behind him. Nothing, he said, could persuade him to go indoors.
“They take away paradise and put you in a shelter,” Mr. Mahone said. “They want to lock up the homeless people.”
So, I am most certainly concerned with what happens in shelters, which can be extremely traumatic to people and may well be worse than being out of the street. That’s not OK either. But the proposed program in San Jose seems…not too bad? And getting buy-in from people to have shelters in their neighborhood, that’s really important and good and yes, as a result, there are going to be demands on what happens. But you should not have the right to live on the streets. You should be able to sue the government if you can’t find a place to live. But if your paradise is disaster for others, well, something has to give.
As a reminder, left politics are not, or at the very least should not be, some form of extreme social libertarianism where everyone can do whatever they want to. We have so lost our sense collectivism in this country and the kinds of extreme individualism that the left gets hung up on these days really reflect that. Individual rights are important, but collective life is more important. Individual rights are great when they don’t have a negative impact on others. Have consensual sex with whoever you want! But seeing people losing their minds because they are off their meds on the streets of Portland, dudes taking a shit on the sidewalk, this kind of thing–all of which I have personally seen in the last couple of years while visiting my home state–this is outright bad for people, especially kids who should not be seeing this kind of trauma in person if we can help it.
Either way, if the left wants to be sure that they never win on policy ever again and no one ever trusts you with elected office, keep going down this road of it being completely fine if you choose to be “unhoused.” Homelessness is a social problem. It needs to be treated as a problem. And problems need to be solved. There will inevitably have to be some coercion in that, just like there is coercion in all parts of our society.
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