California's homeless problem... throw more money at it!

When I was in high school, the homeless were my personal cause. I probably leaned a lot more to the liberal side back then. Learning about the sources of homelessness, the psychology of the homeless, and the problems associated with homelessness—I was avid about all of that. But year after year, the problems persisted. If anything, they only got worse. Years later, in the 90s, I watched with admiration as Mayor Rudy Giuliani implemented a work program (excoriated by the liberal press) to restore in people a sense of worth and dignity as they earned their way back to having a place to call home. Since that era, over two decades ago, all that has faded away as successive mayors have failed to show anywhere near the level of care and tough love that Giuliani showed in his heyday.*

Despite earnest efforts, though, homelessness is a burgeoning problem all over America and in much of the modern West. My inner totalitarian—the polar opposite of my bleeding-heart, teenaged self—thinks it's best to round up all the vagrants, drop them on a deserted island, then bomb the island. Does that solve the problem? Of course not: we won't have eliminated the causes of homelessness. You'd just have to bomb another group of people in five years. But if there's a solution to this problem, I'm not seeing it. I know the human-biodiversity crowd will say that you need less diversity, but here in Seoul, you can see a major homeless problem when you visit the Seoul Station part of town. I've seen hundreds of lost souls congregating in the subway tunnels and underground passageways. South Korea, despite having a 2% non-Korean population, is still relatively un-diverse compared to most modern Western countries, and yet despite that lack of diversity, you've got a ton of homeless people.

But all eyes are on California right now. Worse than DC, worse than New York or Chicago, worse than Seattle, worse even than Portland, California has become a cesspool of homelessness and drug use, and all anyone can think to do is throw more money at the problem—money that never lands where it's intended. 

Whatever's been tried up to now can be thrown into the "non-solution" category. Let's see some real solutions, maybe along the lines of what Giuliani did in the 90s. But I think Governor Gavin Newsom needs to leave before anything real can happen.

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*Many New Yorkers will sneer at this characterization, but they've been hypnotized by the leftist press for so long that they can't find their assholes if they fart.