We’ve written multiple times about the mass migration of people, money, and capital from blue-state to red-state America. It’s the biggest story shaping America – and one that the left sweeps under the rug – for obvious reasons.
But, hark: there is one group of Americans that is relocating en masse to blue states. It’s the homeless population.
HUD has released its 2023 homeless estimates and found that 653,000 people experienced homelessness earlier this year, up 12 percent from last year and the highest number since the current homeless count method began in 2007. (This is almost certainly an underestimate as a large percentage of homeless are never counted.) Blacks and Latinos make up 70 percent of homeless Americans.
Why are they disproportionately located in blue areas?
It would be reasonable to think that homelessness is a bigger problem in warmer states, than those with freezing temperatures at night in the winter, but then why has Florida’s homeless population fallen by 40% while California’s has expanded by that amount? There are more homeless in Los Angeles County than in Florida and Texas combined.
More than half the people experiencing homelessness in the country were in four states: California, New York, Florida, and Washington, with 28% of the nation’s homeless in California alone. New York’s homelessness went up more than three times the national rate.
https://www.discovery.org/a/
We’re not here to minimize the tragic plight of the homeless. There, but for the grace of God, goes you and me.
We should have smart programs that ensure that few Americans aren’t sleeping in the streets, and have access to clean and safe shelters so they can regain economic self-sufficiency.
In the blue states, the goal seems just the opposite. “In 2016,” the Discovery Institute reports, “California enacted a law that required that every state dollar spent on homelessness be spent on Housing First programs” and that the shelters cannot require anything in return from participants, such as having them stop taking drugs or that the mentally ill take their medications, or that the unemployed fill vacant jobs. At the federal level, those receiving free housing dollars cannot be compelled to search for work, receive job training, or even obey the law.
Is it any wonder that the squalor and despair of homelessness is spreading in the most “progressive” areas? As with almost everything the left touches, the results are REGRESSIVE, not progressive.
