Welcome to the Mona Charin Show. So glad you could join us today. I am delighted to welcome for a discussion about homelessness, a scholar Michael Tanner, who is with the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. Michael was for many years at the Cato Institute, but he recently

made a change. He said, I don't feel like I fit in on the left or the right. I speak to people

of varying ideologies in ways that build common ground. I've been around Washington forever and I've seen

just about everything and I've come to the conclusion that maybe helping people escape poverty

isn't all about money. So Michael Tanner, welcome to the show. Glad you could be here.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you today. So this week, as we're

recording this, President Trump has announced that he is federalizing the National Guard in

Washington, D.C., and he is going to take a number of steps, including about the homeless population

in D.C. And you have written a piece for Free Up, which is the

Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, called Reimagining the Policy Approach to Homelessness.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that you don't think the Trump approach is the right one.

But before we get there, let's just have you sketch, if you would, the nature of the problem,

where we are, how many homeless there are, who are they?

Well, we actually have the highest number of homelessness of homeless people that we've had in several

years. It's been steadily rising. Some of that had to do with COVID and the pandemic, but even

after we came out of the pandemic and the recovery started, homelessness continued to grow. So we should

be aware that the population is still rising. It is not outrageously large.

It's between 6,000 and 700,000 generally is the estimate.

That's a point of time estimate.

It's not the best estimate.

If people go out one day, night a year, and they count people physically,

sort of like the census.

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