You know, I was walking to the studio this morning,
cutting through the park, and I saw a guy asleep
on a bench. He had the layers of coats, the bags,
the whole image. And I did what I think 99 %
of us do. I clocked him. I felt a quick pang
of, I don't know, pity, maybe a little discomfort.
And then I kept walking. I just... I filed him
away in my brain under the single category of
homelessness. It's a reflex, isn't it? We have
this mental snapshot, almost like a stock photo
of what homelessness is. Right. It's the rough
sleeper, the tent under the overpass, the person
asking for change at the intersection. That's
the folder it goes into. Exactly. But after reading
through the stack of research for today's deep
dive, I realized that my mental snapshot isn't
just incomplete. It's actually profoundly misleading.
That guy on the bench. Yeah. He's the exception,
not the rule. He's what we're allowed to see.
He is the visible tip of a massive submerged
iceberg. I mean, if you only look at the street,
you are missing the vast majority of the crisis.
It's not even close. So today, we are going to
look under the water. We are going to completely
dismantle this idea that homelessness is just
about rooflessness. We're going to talk about
net cafe refugees in Japan who go to work every
day in suits, but... you know, sleep in these
tiny little cubicles. Or the families living
out of their cars in a Walmart parking lot. Exactly.
Or the hidden homeless, the families couch surfing
through the suburbs, hoping they don't wear out
their welcome. And we are going to tackle the
uncomfortable why. We're moving away from the
sad news story frame. I think we have to. We
need to look at this as a systemic engineering
failure. A system failure. Not a person failing.
For the most part, yes. Homelessness isn't usually
a character flaw. It's a process. It's a slope
that people slide down, often triggered by things
that happened to them decades before they ever
lost their keys. And we're going to get into
the economics, which, spoiler alert, just blew
my mind. The math suggests it is literally more
expensive for us, for society, to keep people
on the street than to house them. It's fiscally
irresponsible to not solve it. It's a wild thought.
Completely wild. But OK, before we get to the
solutions, we have to define what we're actually
looking at, because even the word homeless is
it's really tricky. It is. And language matters
here because it shapes policy. It shapes how
we think. If you think homelessness equals sleeping
outside, then your solution is just, well, build
a shelter. Problem solved. Check the box. Right.
But the United Nations has a much, much wider
definition. I have the UN definition right here.
In 2004, the UN Department of Economic and Social
Affairs defined a homeless household as one without
shelter that falls within the scope of living
quarters. That sounds surprisingly bureaucratic.
It is, but look at how they break it down. In
Europe, they use a typology called ethos. It's
a framework that frames homelessness not as a
static state like you are or you aren't, but
as a spectrum of exclusion. A spectrum, not a
light switch. Exactly. Think about it physically,
legally, and socially. So you have rooflessness,
which is the street. That's the obvious one.
The guy on the bench. The guy on the bench. But
then you have houselessness. This is where you
have a place to sleep, but it's a shelter or
a temporary institution. You don't have a key.
You don't have autonomy. So you have a roof,
but you don't have a home. You have no control.
Precisely. Then there's insecure housing. Maybe
you're renting illegally or you're under threat
of eviction or there's domestic violence in the
home. You have a roof and you have a key, but
you have zero safety. Ethos counts that as a
form of homelessness. And that just, it massively
expands the numbers. I mean, the scale changes
completely when you define it that way. It does.
And I noticed in the reading there's a distinct
shift in how we talk about the people involved.
We are trying really hard not to use the homeless
as a noun. Right. And for good reason. The Associated
Press, for instance, changed their style book
on this in 2020. When you say the homeless, it
sounds like a different species, like the birds
or the trees. It implies a permanent monolithic
identity. It effectively dehumanizes them. It
groups everyone, the veteran with PTSD, the teenager
who aged out of foster care, the family fleeing
abuse. It just lumps them all into one category.
Exactly. The preferred term now is people experiencing
homelessness or unhoused people. It uses person
first language. It reminds us that this is a
situation happening to a human being, not the
definition of that human being. Speaking of definitions
and history, I have to take us on a little detour
here because I fell down a total rabbit hole
on the historical terms. I always thought hobo,
tramp, and vagrant were just old tiny insults.
Synonyms for being poor and on the move? Yeah,
I thought they were all the same thing. Most
people do. If you call someone a tramp today,
it's just an insult. But if you were riding the
rails in America in 1890, getting those terms
mixed up could actually get you into a fistfight.
No way. Oh, yeah. There was a strict class system
on the road. A real hierarchy. Okay, so lay out
the hierarchy for me. Who was at the top of the
freight train food chain? That would be the hobo.
Really? The hobo is the aristocrat. That's not
what I would have guessed. Absolutely. The hobo
was an itinerant worker. That is the crucial
distinction. Hobos were often skilled laborers
who traveled the country following the work.
So they're not avoiding work. They're chasing
it. They're chasing it. They followed the harvest.
They worked on construction. They laid railroad
track. They often carried their own tools. They
called themselves the Knights of the Road. Knights
of the Road. I love that. So they had a kind
of a professional pride. A huge amount of pride.
They were a vital part of the industrial economy.
They had a code of ethics. And they definitely
looked down on the other groups. Okay, so that
brings us to the tramp. The tramp travels, just
like the hobo. But the tramp chooses not to work.
He wanders. Ah, the classic, I dream of a life
of travel and leisure, but I have zero dollars.
Right. I wander, but I do not toil. And then
at the very bottom of this social ladder, you
had the vagrant or the bum. Okay. The bum neither
travels nor works. They stay in one place and
typically rely on begging or drinking. So if
you called a hardworking hobo a bum, you were
insulting his entire work ethic, his whole identity.
You were saying he'd given up. And historically,
this matters because the public perception shifts
between these archetypes. In good economic times,
we tend to see unhoused people as tramps or bums,
lazy people refusing to work. Individual moral
failing. Right. But in bad economic times like
the Great Depression, we start to see them as
hobos, as victims of the economy just looking
for a chance. That brings us right back to the
present day. We aren't dealing with people hopping
steam trains anymore for the most part. We're
dealing with a modern crisis. And going back
to that iceberg analogy, the research divides
this into primary and secondary homelessness.
This is the data distinction that explains why
the counts are always, always wrong. Primary
homelessness is what you saw in the park this
morning. Rough sleeping, no shelter, the visible
tip. Right. Secondary homelessness is the hidden
mass beneath the water. This is couch surfing.
This is staying in emergency accommodation. This
is living in your car. And then there's the hidden
homeless, the people who never even show up in
the stats. These are the people who are terrified
of the system, often for very good reasons. They
might be squatting in an abandoned building or
staying on private property where no one can
see them. Because they aren't on a street corner,
they aren't counted in the census or the point
in time counts that cities conduct. The point
in time count. That's where volunteers go out
for one night a year and literally try to count
heads, right? Yes. And just think about how flawed
that methodology is. If you are a woman fleeing
domestic violence, are you going to be? sleeping
on a park bench where you can be easily seen
and counted. Absolutely not. You are going to
make yourself as invisible as humanly possible.
Exactly. You are going to hide. Which brings
up a huge demographic surprise for me in the
research. The stats say homelessness is overwhelmingly
male, something like 70 percent in the U .S.
I saw one stat for Dublin that was 85 percent
male. Yeah. But looking at this hidden definition,
are we just. Are we just missing the women? We
are absolutely missing the women. It's not even
a question. Women's homelessness is often invisible
because it relies on what researchers call transactional
relationships. That sounds ominous. It is survival.
Yeah. It's a woman staying with a man she doesn't
want to be with or even a man who is abusive
because it provides a roof. She is trading her
safety, her bodily autonomy. For shelter. Because
the alternative is so much more dangerous. The
alternative sleeping on the street opens her
up to an almost certain risk of extreme sexual
violence. So she doesn't look homeless on paper.
She has an address. But she is absolutely unhoused
in terms of safety and freedom. That's a sobering
reality check. It makes the numbers we do have
feel even heavier. Yeah. What are the global
estimates we're looking at? It's staggering.
And honestly, the numbers feel almost too big
to comprehend. In 2005, the UN estimated about
100 million homeless people worldwide. Which
is already a huge number. A huge number. But
looking at the trajectory of urbanization, displacement,
and economic inequality, the estimate for 2025,
that's next year, is around 330 million people
experiencing absolute homelessness. 330 million.
That's basically the entire population of the
United States without a home. And that's just
absolute homelessness. If you expand the definition
to include insecure housing people living in
slums or dangerous overcrowded conditions, the
number balloons to 1 .6 billion. 1 .6 billion.
A fifth of the planet. Yeah. This feels like
a good moment to ask the big philosophical question
that keeps coming up in all the texts. Is housing
a human right? If you look at the founding documents
of our modern world, the answer is an unequivocal
yes. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
Article 25, passed in 1948, explicitly lists
housing as part of the right to an adequate standard
of living. Right alongside food and clothing.
Yes. It's considered a fundamental building block.
But I feel like there is a big terms and conditions
asterisk next to that, especially in the U .S.
There is a massive cultural disconnect. Former
President Jimmy Carter did an interview back
in 2017 where he touched on this. He said, and
I'm paraphrasing, a lot of people don't look
at housing as a human right, but it is. In the
US, we culturally view housing as a commodity.
It's an asset, an investment. It's a reward for
working hard. It's a marker of success. It's
not viewed as a baseline requirement for being
alive, like clean water. Which explains why our
history of dealing with this is so, well, so
punitive. I was reading about the UK history
in the source notes, and it seems like for 600
years, the basic strategy has been... Make it
illegal and painful to be poor. It really has
been. And go back to the English poor laws of
1383. 1383. We are talking medieval times after
the Black Death. Right. And the law basically
said that if you were a vagabond, someone wandering
without visible means of support, you were a
criminal. The assumption was idleness. By 1547,
the law was so harsh that vagrants could be branded
with a V on their chest and sentenced to two
years of servitude. Branded. Like cattle. for
being poor it established a deep legal precedent
homelessness is a moral failing it is a character
defect that needs to be punished out of you and
that led to the workhouses right yes the workhouses
and bridewells these places gave you shelter
but they were intentionally designed to be miserable
the principle was called less eligibility The
condition of the pauper must be less desirable
than the condition of the lowest paid laborer.
Exactly. They were terrified that if charity
was too nice, people would just stop working.
And that fear, that idea of moral hazard, still
underpins a lot of policy debates today. But
in the U .S., didn't the Great Depression change
that? At least for a while. Briefly, it had to.
When 25 % of the country is unemployed, you can't
blame it all on individual laziness. The structural
failure was just too obvious to ignore. That's
when FDR and the New Deal brought in public housing
on a large scale. It was a clear admission that
the market had failed. But then, then we hit
the 1980s. The 1980s were the pivot point. We
saw massive cuts to federal affordable housing
budgets. The federal government essentially stepped
back and said, let the market handle it. And
the market did what markets do. It maximized
profit, not housing security. Exactly. And that's
when the modern era of visible street homelessness,
the crisis we see today. really began to spike.
Which leads us directly to the structural causes.
We can't talk about homelessness without talking
about gentrification. It's the classic story
we see in every major city. Wealthier people
move into a low -income neighborhood. It's revitalized.
Property values go up. New coffee shops and boutiques
open. But the people who lived there for generations,
the people who made the neighborhood distinct
in the first place, see their rents double or
triple, they get pushed out. And this brings
us to that San Francisco study from 2019. I read
this part three times because it felt like a
complete logic puzzle. It's about rent control.
This is where economics gets really, really counterintuitive.
OK, so the premise of rent control is simple.
Freeze the rent or limit increases so people
don't get displaced. And the study said. It worked.
In a very specific way, yes. It worked for the
people inside the apartments. If you were a tenant
in a rent -controlled unit in San Francisco in
1994, you were roughly 20 % less likely to be
displaced over the next few years. For you, individually,
you were safe. Great. Mission accomplished. Problem
solved. Not quite. Enter what economists call
the Cobra Effect, the unintended consequence
that makes the problem worse. While the tenants
stayed put, The landlords reacted. They aren't
charities. They are running a business. They
looked at their buildings and said, I can't raise
the rent to market rates, so this is now a bad
investment. So what did they do with their bad
investment? They utilized a loophole in the law.
They converted their rental units into condos
or tix tenancy in common. I see those tick signs
everywhere in cities. What does that actually
mean? It's a way of selling a building to a group
of people who own it together, rather than one
person renting it out to many people. Essentially,
the landlord takes the unit off the rental market
and puts it onto the sales market. They cash
out. So the apartment still exists, but it's
no longer available for rent. It's for sale to
someone wealthy enough to buy it. Precisely.
And the study found that because of this loophole,
the overall supply of rental housing in San Francisco
dropped by 15 percent. 15 percent. That is a
massive chunk of inventory to just vanish from
the rental market. It's huge. And when supply
drops that hard and demand stays high or even
increases. Prices explode for everyone else,
for every apartment that's left. Right. So while
rent control protected the incumbents. the people
lucky enough to already be inside, it pulled
up the drawbridge for everyone else. It fueled
the citywide rent increase. It actually accelerated
the gentrification it was trying to fight by
making the remaining market rate apartments incredibly
expensive. That is maddening. It's like squeezing
a balloon. The problem just bulges out somewhere
else even bigger. That's the structural side.
But I want to zoom in on the individual level
because there is a statistic in these sources
that fundamentally changed how I view the person
on the street. We need to talk about traumatic
brain injury or TBI. This was the biggest aha
moment for me in all the reading. We assume that
if someone has a brain injury on the street,
it's because they got beat up or fell down while
they were homeless. It's a result of their situation.
That's the common assumption. It's a consequence.
But a major Canadian survey completely flipped
the causality on its head. They found that TBI
is incredibly widespread among homeless populations,
far, far higher than in the general public. But
the key finding was the timing. For around 70
% of the respondents, the brain injury happened
before the onset of homelessness. So the injury
might be the cause, not the effect. It's a massive
potential cause, a smoking gun. We need to walk
through... what a TBI actually does to a person.
It's not just headaches or memory loss. It strikes
at the very core of what we call executive function.
Executive function. That's like the brain's CEO.
It's the ability to plan, to organize, to regulate
your emotions, to foresee consequences, to manage
time. Think about the administrative burden of
modern life. Oh, it's huge. Paying bills on time,
showing up to work every day, navigating a dispute
with a landlord without screaming at them, filling
a... complex forms all the invisible tasks of
just being a functional adult right if you have
a severe tbi that part of your brain is compromised
it's damaged you might have the money for rent
but you simply cannot organize the multi -step
task of getting the check and mailing it on time
you might lose your job because you have poor
impulse control and lashed out at a manager and
if you don't have a strong safety net a family
that understands what's happening you unravel
Your support network burns out because you're
suddenly difficult or unreliable. Eventually,
you end up on the street. It reframes homelessness
not as a moral failing or a lifestyle choice,
but as a potential medical outcome. If a person
had a broken leg, we'd offer a crutch. If they
have a broken executive function, we evict them.
And that ties into the childhood predictors too.
The data on foster care is just heartbreaking.
It is a pipeline. A history of being in foster
care and frequent moving during childhood are
massive predictors of adult homelessness. If
you age out of the foster care system at 18 with
no family support, no accumulated wealth and
no safety net. You're on your own at 18. You
are statistically incredibly vulnerable to falling
through the cracks. So we have these huge structural
forces like the housing market and we have these
deeply personal triggers like TBI and childhood
trauma. But I feel like we have to address this.
choice argument because you hear it all the time.
Oh, some of them just want to live like that.
They don't want rules. They prefer being free.
Look, does that person exist? Sure. There is
an exceedingly small sliver of the population
that consciously rejects societal norms and chooses
a nomadic lifestyle. But the research is overwhelming
on this point. For the vast, vast majority, homelessness
is what's called involuntary displacement. It's
not a choice. It's a lack of choices, a lack
of options. Exactly. It is a game of musical
chairs where the music stopped and there wasn't
a chair left for them. It's not a preference
for sleeping in the rain. So let's talk about
that experience, sleeping in the rain. We have
a segment here we're calling... the daily battle.
And honestly, it sounds like a war zone. It's
not just the elements. It's the city itself that's
actively fighting you. We call this hostile architecture.
It is urban design that is specifically engineered
to exclude certain human bodies and certain human
behaviors. I've seen this. And once you see it,
you can't unsee it. Benches that are slanted
so you slide off if you try to lie down. Or benches
with that third armrest bolted right into the
middle. It looks like a convenience, but its
only purpose is to prevent someone from lying
down. And the spikes, the metal studs in doorways.
The London spikes in 2014 were a real turning
point in public awareness. A luxury apartment
building installed these metal studs in the ground
level alcoves to stop people from sleeping there.
And it caused an uproar because it was just so
visually aggressive. Just so blatant. It was
the city saying you are vermin. We will make
this space physically painful for you to occupy.
But this goes back further than 2014. The notes
mention Robert Moses, the legendary and controversial
New York urban planner. Moses was a master of
exclusion through infrastructure. He designed
the parkways leading out to Jones Beach on Long
Island with intentionally low overpasses. Too
low for. Too low for public buses. He wanted
the beach to be for people who owned cars, the
white middle and upper classes. He physically
engineered the poor who relied on public transit
out of the space. Hostile architecture today
is just the modern. smaller scale evolution of
that same idea. And if the architecture doesn't
get you, the bureaucracy will. The ID catch 22.
This sounds like a nightmare loop from a Kafka
novel. It's a perfect trap. To get a home, you
need a job. Okay. To get a job, you need a government
issued ID. Makes sense. To get an ID, you need
a permanent address to have it mailed to. And
often you need other documents like a birth certificate.
But you don't have an address. That's the whole
problem. So you're stuck. And here's the kicker.
When cities conduct sweeps, when they raid homeless
camps to clear them out, what happens to people's
possessions? It all gets thrown in a dumpster.
Tents, sleeping bags, everything. Including their
backpacks, which often contain their documents,
their birth certificates, their Social Security
cards, their old IDs. When you lose those, you
effectively cease to exist in the system. You
lose your citizenship in a practical sense. You're
erased. And physically. I need to ask you about
street feet. I had never heard this term before,
and the description was just horrific. It's a
condition that soldiers in World War I knew as
trench foot, and it is a medical crisis caused
by a simple solvable problem, a lack of dry socks.
Just wet socks. That's the cause. That's it.
If you are walking all day in a city and your
feet get wet from rain or sweat, and you cannot
take your shoes off for days or weeks at a time
because you're afraid they'll be stolen while
you sleep, the tissue begins to macerate. It
breaks down. It leads to fungal infections, open
ulcers, nerve damage, and eventually gangrene
and amputation. All because of a lack of laundry
and a safe place to sleep. It's a completely
preventable problem that leads to permanent disability.
And the victimization stats also blew my mind.
We are taught to be afraid of the dangerous hobo
from the time we're kids. The data flips that
narrative entirely. People experiencing homelessness
are far far more likely to be victims of violent
crime than perpetrators. They are incredibly
vulnerable. There's a concept in psychology called
desanitizing. Desanitizing? What's that? It's
when we stop viewing another human being as a
person and instead see them as a pathogen, a
dirty thing, a threat to hygiene and order. When
you view someone as a germ, you don't feel empathy
for them. You feel disgust. And that disgust
can license violence. It's why hate crimes against
the homeless are often so brutal and random.
This is a heavy picture. But I think it's important
to realize this isn't just a US problem or a
UK problem. I want to take this global tour we've
mapped out because the way different cultures
handle this or hide this is fascinating. Let's
start in Asia, Japan. Japan is unique. After
their economic bubble burst in the 90s, homelessness
became more visible in the traditional sense.
But more recently, we've seen the rise of these
net cafe refugees. I've read about this. These
are people with jobs, right? They're not unemployed.
Often, yes. They are the working poor. They can't
afford the massive upfront costs of a Japanese
apartment. the key money, the security deposit,
the guarantor fees. So they live in 24 -hour
internet cafes. What does that actually look
like on a day -to -day basis? Imagine a small
cubicle, maybe six feet by four feet, with a
reclining chair, a computer, and a door that
locks. It's quiet. It's relatively safe. You
can buy instant noodles from a vending machine.
You can pay a few extra dollars for a shower.
It costs maybe $15 or $20 a night. But it's not
a home. It's not a home. You have no privacy,
no space for possessions beyond a small... bag.
It's a form of invisible homelessness. If you
saw them on the subway in their work suit, you
would never, ever know. And then there are the
McRefugees. Right. People who spend their nights
in 24 -hour McDonald's restaurants, nursing a
single coffee just to have a warm, well -lit
place to sit until morning. Moving to China,
the system there seems to enforce a kind of a
caste system based on where you were born. The
Huku system. It's a household registration system.
If you are born in a rural village, you have
a rural Huku. If you move to Beijing or Shanghai
for a construction job, you are physically in
the city, but legally you are still a villager.
So you don't get the city perks. You're an outsider.
You don't get access to subsidized housing, to...
urban health care or to public schools for your
children. You are a migrant in your own country.
It creates this massive floating population of
hundreds of millions people that live in precarious
substandard housing on the literal and figurative
edges of the city. Then you go to India and the
sheer scale of it all just explodes. India challenges
our Western definitions because the numbers are
so vast. We are talking about pavement dwellers,
entire families who live, cook, sleep and raise
children entirely on the sidewalk. It's their
And there's this bizarre phenomenon of slum tourism.
The slumdog millionaire effect. Tourists paying
money to take walking tours of the Dharavi slum
in Mumbai. That feels, I don't know, gross. Like
a human zoo. It's ethically very complex. Supporters
say it brings money and awareness to the area
that wouldn't get there otherwise. Critics say
it fetishizes poverty and turns human suffering
into an attraction. But it highlights how visible
and integrated poverty is there compared to how
we try to hide it and push it to the margins
in the West. What about Russia? The Soviet history
is really interesting here. Well, the Soviet
Union claimed to have abolished homelessness.
How do you just abolish homelessness? Did they
build enough houses for everyone? No, they made
it a crime to be homeless. Everyone had to have
a propiska, which was a residency permit stamped
in their internal passport. If you were stopped
by the police and didn't have one, you could
be prosecuted for social parasitism. So if you're
homeless, you go to jail. Problem solved. Essentially.
It hid the problem by criminalizing the victim.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the
whole system fell apart. The Propiska system
was gone. State housing guarantees vanished.
And there was a massive explosion of homelessness.
People were selling their apartments for vodka
or getting scammed out of their deeds by organized
crime. The mortality rate for homeless people
in Russia in the 90s was just horrific. And finally,
let's look at Europe. We see a really stark contrast
between North and South. Scotland is often held
up as the gold standard right now. They have
a right to housing that is actually legally enforceable.
If you are unintentionally homeless, the local
government must find you a permanent home. It's
right, not a charity. It's a legal entitlement.
Yeah. And in Greece, they have a term I'd never
heard. Seismopathous. Earthquake struck. It refers
to people made homeless by natural disasters.
In Greece, you have entire communities of formerly
middle -class people living in these container
cities for years, sometimes decades, after an
earthquake. It's a powerful reminder that nature
doesn't care about your bank account. You can
do everything right in your life and still lose
your home in 10 seconds. Okay, so we've defined
the problem. We've toured the world. We've seen
the history. Now we have to talk about solutions.
Yeah. Because the most frustrating thing about
reading these sources is the realization that
we know what works. We just don't seem to want
to do it. We have the cure. We just struggle
with the political will to administer the prescription.
Love walk about housing first. This seems to
be the big revolutionary shift in thinking. For
decades, the model was treatment first, or what's
sometimes called the staircase model. Explain
that. What's the staircase? The idea was you
are homeless because you have problems, drug
addiction, alcoholism, mental health issues.
So before you deserve a house, you have to fix
those problems. You have to get sober while living
in a shelter. Then maybe you graduate to transitional
housing. Then if you're good, if you follow all
the rules, you finally get a key to your own
apartment. Each step is a reward. It sounds logical
to a certain Puritan part of the brain, you know,
earn your keep. You have to prove you're ready.
But practically, it fails constantly. Imagine
trying to recover from a heroin addiction while
sleeping in a crowded room with 50 other strangers,
guarding your shoes so they don't get stolen,
and getting kicked out onto the street at 7 a
.m. every morning. It's impossible. You cannot
build a life on quicksand. So Housing First just
flips the entire script. Completely. It says,
give them the apartment first, no conditions,
no sobriety tests, just... Here is a safe, lockable
door. Then once they are stable, once they are
in survival mode 247, you bring in the social
workers, the addiction counselors, the job training.
You offer help, but you don't mandate it. And
does it actually work? The retention rates are
massive. In study after study, people stay housed
at rates of 80 or 90 percent. It turns out it's
a lot easier to stop drinking when you aren't
freezing to death under a bridge. Stability is
the foundation for recovery. Not the reward for
it. OK, I'm going to play devil's advocate here.
I'm the skeptical taxpayer. I work 40 hours a
week to pay my mortgage. It's a struggle. And
you're telling me the solution is to take my
tax dollars and just give a free apartment to
someone who is actively using drugs. How is that
fair? It's a completely valid emotional reaction.
It feels unfair. But if we can put our feelings
aside for a moment and just look at the wallet
test, the argument completely flips. OK. Show
me the math. Let's look at that big Central Florida
study. They tracked the actual costs. When a
person is chronically homeless, they aren't free
to the system. They're constantly interacting
with the most expensive public services we have.
Emergency rooms and police cars. Exactly. The
most expensive ride in the city is an ambulance.
The most expensive hotel room is a jail cell
or an ER bed. The study found that maintaining
one person on the street, the cycle of ER visits,
police calls, jail stays, court costs, costs
the public. Roughly $31 ,000 a year. The $31
,000 a year just to manage their misery and keep
them moving. Yes. Now compare that to permanent
supportive housing. You pay their rent. You pay
a case manager to check on them and connect them
to services. The total cost. $10 ,051 a year.
So it is literally three times cheaper to just
give them the house. It is fiscal conservatism
disguised as social progress. You are saving
the taxpayer $20 ,000 per person per year by
ending their homelessness. But politically, it's
poison to try and sell. Because it looks like
a reward for bad behavior. We would rather pay
$31 ,000 to punish someone than pay $10 ,000
to help them and save ourselves money. That is
the central paradox of American homelessness
policy. And speaking of punishment. The legal
landscape in the U .S. just shifted dramatically
in the other direction, away from solutions.
It did. In 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that
cities can criminalize homeless camps even if
there is no shelter space available for people
to go to. Wait, explain that. even if there are
literally no beds in the entire city. Yes. Previous
lower court rulings had said you couldn't arrest
someone for sleeping outside if they had nowhere
else to go, that it amounted to cruel and unusual
punishment for the status of being homeless.
The Supreme Court overturned that. Now, cities
have a green light to arrest and fine people
for sleeping in public, regardless of shelter
capacity. So we are criminalizing the act of
existing in public. If you don't have a home
and there's no shelter bed, your very existence
is illegal. It returns us to a punitive approach,
not unlike the vagrancy laws of the 1300s. It
focuses on making the problem invisible by clearing
the streets, not on actually solving the problem.
But there is innovation happening, too, on the
ground. I want to end on some of the smarter
ideas that are bubbling up. Cargo texture. I
love this. It's using shipping containers to
build housing. They are modular, they're stackable
and they're incredibly strong. The Hope on Alvarado
project in L .A. is a great example. You can
build apartment buildings out of them and it
drastically cuts down construction time and cost.
And there's also just acknowledging reality like
the safe parking programs. This is such a pragmatic
and humane solution. Santa Barbara has done this
really well. They acknowledge that for many,
many people, their car is their last asset. It
is their home. And usually if you're found sleeping
in your car, you get a ticket. Or you get towed
and then you're really and truly screwed. Exactly.
So Santa Barbara created legal designated lots.
You can park there overnight. There is security.
There are portable toilets and handwashing stations.
You don't get harassed by the police. It stabilizes
people enough so they can keep their jobs and
try to get back into housing. It turns the car
into a stepping stone, not a trap. And finally,
empowerment. The idea of giving people a voice
and a purpose. Things like street newspapers.
You see these in many cities around the world.
It's not begging. The person buys the papers
for a small fee, say 25 cents, and sells them
for a dollar or two. It's a job. It's a micro
business. It requires salesmanship, money management.
It builds dignity. And voting. This is huge.
Ensuring people experiencing homelessness can
vote gives them a voice in the very policies
that affect their lives. When you have no address,
registering to vote is a bureaucratic nightmare.
But advocates are fighting to ensure that Park
Bench, Corner of Main and First, or Salvation
Army Shelter is a valid address for registration.
We've covered a lot of ground today. We've gone
from the hobo on the train tracks to the net
cafe refugee in Tokyo to the working family living
in a sedan in a church parking lot. It's a massive,
complex spectrum. And the big takeaway for me
at the end of the day is that homelessness isn't
usually about a person failing. It's about systems
failing. The housing market, the health care
system, the foster care system. It is the cracks
in society. And some people fall through those
cracks. I want to leave our listeners with a
thought from the source material that really
stuck with me. It describes home not just as
a shelter, but as an extension of self and identity.
When we deny someone a home, we aren't just denying
them a roof. We are denying them a place in the
human story. It denies them the ability to be
a citizen, to participate. So here's the question
for you to think about. If you lost your address
today, just that one line of text on your driver's
license, how long would your identity survive?
Without the documents, the bank accounts, the
ability to receive mail, the social standing
that rely on it, how long until you were erased?
It's a terrifying thought. Something to think
about the next time you walk past that bench.
Thanks for diving deep with us today. Thanks.