This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 5th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Homelessness is up in recent years after a long slow decline,

so how have we addressed it in the past?

What cities have had the most notable successes?

Mary Thoreau is host of the documentary Beyond Homeless.

In it she details the house and wise of San Antonio's success in addressing homelessness and how it can be replicated.

How has the U.S. broadly speaking in a sentence or two addressed homelessness in the United States.

Very badly.

No, but what has its strategy been?

So several years ago, federal policy switched from shelters and transitional programming for homeless

individuals to a concept called housing first. And the theory is based on, well, people are homeless, so they need a home.

So if we give them a home, they won't be homeless anymore.

Housing First, therefore, is providing every homeless individual with what's called permanent supportive housing.

The problem with that is you're essentially warehousing people with the problems that drove them into homelessness in the first place.

It's morally very suspect that you think someone is not capable of movement beyond their current status.

And it's also very inefficient because the government building permanent supportive housing costs $500,000 up to $900,000 per unit.

So very little of it is actually produced. Very few people are moved into housing,

and they've turned the streets into the waiting room

for that housing.

And that's why there's so many more people in the streets,

because they shut down shelters

...