For decades, people have claimed that homelessness is just a housing problem. Sure, many also have substance use and mental illness issues. But if we just give homeless people their own own studio apartments, and decriminalize public camping, drugs, and shoplifting, the problem will go away, many claimed.
That hasn’t happened. Instead, the open drug scenes have worsened. Nationally, drug overdoses and poisonings increased from 17,000 in 2000 to 108,000 in 2021. And California, which pioneered the “Housing First”/decriminalization approach saw its homeless population increase 31% between 2011 and 2020, even as homelessness declined 18% in the rest of the country.
I debunked the lies about homelessness in San Fransicko, in hundreds of articles, and on dozens of TV and podcast appearances. But when it comes to educating the public, nothing has been more impactful than the video interviews of homeless people that I’ve conducted over the last few months with my friend Leighton Woodhouse, a documentary filmmaker, as part of my run to become governor of California.
Now Leighton has assembled those interviews into a two-minute 20 second video we’ve posted on Twitter. It’s a must-watch. It’s only been on-line for a few hours, and over 130,000 people have seen it.
