Given that I happily reside in a rural community in south-central Alaska, I guess I remain an odd one to be writing about the state of America's urban areas. If you've been reading my work at all, you know I grew up in a rural setting in Iowa and am a content rural dweller myself now. I have little time for cities, despite having lived in them for four decades. I find them unpleasant; crowded, noisy, and, to be honest, they stink. I like the clean country air of the Susitna Valley, and if that means I have to put up with the occasional hawk nabbing a junco from my bird feeder, then, fine.
With that being true, why am I still worried about America's cities? Because our cities are the beating hearts of our nation. Much of the country's economic activity happens there. Urban areas contain a lot of the country's industry and academia. What's more, our cities used to be the pride of the nation, but that's not so much the case anymore. Rampant open-air drug use, huge homeless encampments, and rampant crime, including rioting against federal immigration officers, are taking their toll.
The homeless problem is a particularly thorny one. In places, our cities are becoming unlivable by the huge, trash-strewn homeless encampments. These enclaves are hotbeds of crime and open-air drug use. And in too many cases, the governments of these cities are doing all the wrong things to deal with this matter. A recent article at The Center Square points out some of the problems; one of the main issues is that the cities seem inept at even determining the extent of the problem.
The annual Point-In-Time (PIT) count, conducted by the Continuums of Care for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is a once‑a‑year estimate nationwide of the number of people experiencing homelessness, both sheltered and unsheltered, and provides insight into whether homelessness is on the rise or decline.
“It’s an imperfect measure,” Ryan Orsinger, director of Data Science and Research at Haven for Hope, told The Center Square. “If you get 100 volunteers in San Antonio one year, and you get a count, and then the next year you get 200 volunteers and they’re just all geared up, you could actually have a change in the measurement not based on the number of human beings who are actually experiencing homelessness, just because of measurement variance.”
There are a number of problems with these methods, as they may be affected by things as trivial as the number of volunteers or the weather. There doesn't appear to be any predetermined method of quantifying the issue. There doesn't appear to be any attempt to normalize the data for the number of volunteers. But that's just one of the trivial aspects of this problem, one that anyone even halfway competent in statistical analysis could rectify. No, it's the policies that these cities are implementing, and the resistance to Washington and the Trump administration, who are trying to set these areas on a saner path.
On July 24, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order revoking the housing-first policy and labeling homelessness primarily as a public safety and mental health crisis, arguing drug addiction and serious mental illness as the main cause of homelessness, and redirected federal homelessness policy toward law enforcement, involuntary treatment and stricter funding conditions.
Trump’s executive order was an attempt to address the root causes of homelessness using a treatment-first initiative, in hopes that taxpayer money no longer continues to fund programs deemed ineffective. Still, many homeless advocates and critics expressed displeasure with the executive order and current policy.
“The Trump administration has done everything in its power to target, attack, and punish people experiencing homelessness, from attempting to slash critical funding for housing to promoting an anti-homeless agenda based on myths and stereotypes,” the National Homelessness Law Center told The Center Square. “Trump’s policies have made homelessness worse, have made more people hungry and sick, and will leave us all less safe.”
The National Homelessness Law Center (NHLC) couldn't be more wrong. The use of the feather-headed term "experiencing homelessness" is just one sign that the NHLC is not only wrong, but wrong-headed. That soft-soaping language invokes the image the left wants us to associate with homelessness: Poor young single moms, who have lost their jobs, driven to live in an old car with their five adorable little tykes. Nothing could be further from the truth, and all it takes is an elementary look at the sprawling homeless enclaves and their residents to see that this is not the problem.
So why does the NHLC push this? Well, consider this: There's an old saying in the business world that "...if you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem." How many NGOs are soaking up government grants to "study" the homelessness problems? How many city employees have been dedicated to this issue? How much money has been spent, only to see the enclaves expanding?
Read More: The Downfall of America's Cities: Open-Air Drug Markets
The Downfall of America's Cities: Plague, Plague, and More Plague
This, the homeless-industrial complex, is as much the problem as the enclaves themselves. And each and every city that puts in the feather-headed policy of the left creates a magnet to draw more, and more and more people who are "experiencing homelessness," as the word spreads.
Homelessness and the bumbling approach to dealing with it are not just an American problem. In the United Kingdom, their version of the homeless-industrial complex is serving up a load of the same kind of horse squeeze.
Homelessness is spoken about as a policy problem, but we know it as something more personal. We know the reality behind the numbers: the pain and trauma that led us into homelessness. A system that should support us out of homelessness, instead compounding that trauma. The ongoing effects of that trauma for us and for our children.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the homeless-industrial complex is getting it all wrong. It's not a charity issue. The homeless enclaves are perfect examples of liberal thinking gone horribly wrong; they are a problem caused, not by lack of government spending, but by rampant crime, including open-air drug sales and use, addiction, and mental illness. The Trump administration has tried to change the focus, but in the end, it's the cities that have to fix this, and until they start seeing these enclaves for what they are, a crime and mental health issue, things will continue to get worse.
The first thing that has to be done, though? Stop shoveling money at activist groups.
