Who We Are: Homelessness Crisis
City Journal Audio
Manhattan Institute
4.7 • 656 Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2026
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Stephen Eide and Rafael Mangual sit down for a hard-hitting conversation on homelessness, mental illness, and the policies shaping America's cities. The discussion explores the breakdown of family support systems, the limits of government intervention, and the thorny questions surrounding institutionalization and public safety. Eide argues for a more realistic, balanced approach—one that confronts the realities of serious mental illness while pushing for practical, effective reforms.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal podcast. |
| 0:11.3 | I'm your host Rafael Menguall, and I am joined today by my colleague, Stephen Eyde. |
| 0:15.7 | For those of you who don't know, Stephen Ide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. |
| 0:19.5 | He's a contributing editor at City Journal, and he is our leading voice on all things, homelessness, mental illness, |
| 0:26.7 | and the intersection of those things with urban policy and public safety. So I'm really looking |
| 0:31.1 | forward to a fantastic conversation. Stephen, thank you so much. Welcome to the show. |
| 0:35.1 | Thanks for having me, Ralph. I'm always interested to hear people's stories. |
| 0:39.6 | You know, this series that we're doing called Who We Are is meant to kind of give people a sense of what work it is that sort of defines the Manhattan Institute and City Journal as institutions. |
| 0:51.0 | But I've been starting a lot of these conversations, which is questions about how people |
| 0:54.7 | got here, because what we do is kind of interesting and weird and in some ways on the margins. |
| 0:59.9 | And I think a lot of people are interested to know how it is that we ended up doing what we do. |
| 1:05.6 | So maybe we can start there and you just talk a little bit about how it is that you ended up writing about public policy, |
| 1:11.2 | ended up at a think tank? Is this something that you always wanted to do? Or it was kind of a |
| 1:15.0 | happy accident? Yeah. Well, my background is political philosophy. We have people on staff who are |
| 1:20.7 | PhD economists. We will have people like yourself who are lawyers. I went to graduate school to |
| 1:26.3 | study political philosophy, the history of political |
| 1:28.6 | thought, Plato, Locke, Rousseau. And so a lot of that has no direct connection to what I work on now. |
| 1:36.4 | But one question that preoccupied me at that time was just mental health. And it struck me at that |
| 1:43.0 | time that I could understand something really important |
| 1:46.1 | about America and American norms. If I understood, you know, why people decide some problem |
| 1:53.0 | is a mental health problem, as opposed to a moral problem, a problem of living. Is it okay to |
| 1:58.5 | just call someone unhappy or is that a clinical thing? And I've always thought |
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