The Homeless Problem Is A Drug Problem
Why LA’s “compassion” is actually neglect - and what real love looks like at the scale of a civilization.
Words shape how we see problems.
And when it comes to LA’s homeless crisis, we’ve been mincing words.
To be clear - I’m not saying these people aren’t homeless. They are. They don’t have private homes of their own to go to. The word is technically true.
But it’s imprecise. And imprecise diagnoses lead to wrong treatments.
Consider someone with kidney failure. Saying they have “a health problem” is technically true. But it’s so vague that it doesn’t tell you what to do. Tell a doctor “kidney failure” - and the response becomes obvious. Treat the kidneys.
That’s where LA is. We’ve been treating “a homeless problem” when the patient has a specific condition - drug addiction - that requires a specific strategy.
This is also why the obsession with policing words - “don’t say homeless, say unhoused” - is a waste of energy. The substitution doesn’t change anything that matters.
Most of LA’s visible street crisis is a mental health and drug problem that’s been mislabeled as a housing problem.
If you treat addiction as a housing shortage, you build more housing. The addiction continues.
If you treat it as a mental health and drug crisis, you focus on rehabilitation, treatment, and the boundaries that make recovery possible.
That’s why we’ve spent $218 million in 5 years on interim shelter beds that sit empty every night.
We’re solving the wrong problem.
What I Saw on Skid Row
I’ve been to Skid Row. I’ve done charity work there. I’ve handed out food to people on those streets.
It’s hell on earth.
Hell that they’re choosing.
According to RAND Corporation’s 2025 LA LEADS study, less than 50% accept group shelter when it’s offered - the most common type of shelter offer. The LA City Controller’s audit found over 3,000 shelter beds sit empty every night.
Meanwhile, 27,000 people remain unsheltered on the streets of Los Angeles.
They have options. They’re refusing them.
They Have Free Will. We’ve Stopped Believing It.
Homeless people have free will, just like everyone else. They’re exercising it. The choices we’re watching them make are choices.
This is the fact we have to start with, because it reorients everything else.
I want to be careful here, because this is where the conversation usually breaks down into two bad camps.
The right says: they have free will, so they should be acting responsibly. Their failure to do so is a moral failing on their part.
The left says: their circumstances are so overwhelming that talking about responsibility at all is cruel. They can’t be expected to choose better.
Both are missing the union of opposites.
Free will is inherent. Responsibility is developed.
Everyone has free will from birth. That’s not the variable. What varies - what develops or deteriorates over a lifetime - is the ability to exercise free will in ways that serve you and the people around you. That ability is what we call responsibility.
A two-year-old has free will. They want what they want. But they don’t yet have much responsibility - they can’t reliably channel their will toward outcomes that are good for them or anyone else. So we don’t give them unlimited freedom. We set limits. We provide structure. We let them experience consequences at a scale they can handle. And as they demonstrate more capacity, we expand their freedom.
But responsibility isn’t automatic. It doesn’t show up just because a person turned 18. It has to be built - through being treated as an agent, through encountering consequences, through having structure and support and standards.
What’s happened in LA, and in much of California, is that we’ve stopped doing the building.
We’ve decided that the visible street homeless population - many of whom are addicted, mentally ill, or both - can’t be held to standards. So we’ve removed the consequences. Removed the structure. Removed the expectations. Removed the very feedback loops that develop responsibility.
We didn’t decide they had no free will. They obviously do - they’re making choices every day, including the choice to refuse shelter that’s been offered to them. What we decided is that their underdeveloped responsibility means we shouldn’t engage them at all. We shouldn’t ask anything of them. We shouldn’t expect them to grow.
That’s cruel.
Because the only way responsibility develops is through engagement. Through being held to standards. Through experiencing both positive consequences when you make good choices and negative ones when you don’t. Remove those, and responsibility never develops - no matter how many programs you fund or how much housing you build.
The “treat them as victims” model has failed so completely because it doesn’t engage the human capacity to grow.
Treating someone as a moral agent capable of growth is what real respect looks like.
Treating them as someone who can’t be expected to grow - who must be permanently managed because they can’t develop - is what dehumanization actually looks like, no matter what compassionate language it’s dressed in.
The False Dichotomies
A trap gets erected whenever we try to discuss this honestly.
Individual or collective failure.
Personal responsibility or systemic factors.
Law and order or compassion.
But these are illusory choices. Both halves are required.
We can recognize the errors in someone’s choices while recognizing the collective responsibility to create better conditions.
We can acknowledge broken systems without evading bad personal decisions.
We can enforce law and order while constructing laws that are supportive, not punitive.
The solution is balance.
The problem is LA - which has been under one-party rule for decades - is the opposite of balance. Empathy has overridden logic.
And nature abhors imbalance.
What Support Without Limits Actually Produces
We’ve decided that the worst-off in society deserve total freedom without any responsibility.
The result is they get neither.
They’re free in the sense that living in chaos is “free.” They’re trapped in addiction, stress, and squalor. They have free will, but massive obstacles.
And they’re never asked to take responsibility for the choices that contributed to their situation - which means they never develop the skills to escape it.
Truly being supportive would mean providing both halves:
Positive incentives: safe, clean, healing shelters; a path to employable skills; dignity throughout.
Negative incentives: not allowing people to live on the streets or do drugs in public.
We’ve confused permissiveness with compassion. So we give the positive, but not the negative.
If you’re afraid to set limits for a child who’s misbehaving, that’s neglect, even with nice words.
If you’re afraid to enforce boundaries for a mentally ill family member who’s destroying themselves, you’re abandoning them.
That’s what we’re doing. Abandoning our fellow humans for fear of enforcing the negative.
What People Train You To Do
There’s a basic truth about human behavior that we’ve stopped applying to homeless people: people respond to incentives.
Everyone does. You do. I do. Every person on the street does.
When you allow someone to violate your boundaries without consequence, you’ve trained them how to treat you.
That’s exactly what’s happened at the scale of a civilization.
We’ve trained homeless people that they can defecate in public, do drugs in public, set up permanent tent cities in our nicest parks, threaten people walking by, and face zero consequences for any of it.
Then we act shocked when a portion of the population looks at that arrangement and decides, “You know what, I’ll take that deal.”
Humans respond to incentives, and the incentives we’ve created reward exactly the behavior we say we’re trying to reduce.
It seems complicated due to a lack of courage, not a lack of intellect.
What Real Compassion Looks Like
Real solutions require both compassion AND consequences.
Build genuinely good shelter - clean, safe, supportive, with the dignity people deserve. Make it the kind of place a person would actually want to be.
Then enforce a simple choice: shelter, rehab, or jail. Not three options that include “remain on the street.” Three options that all involve getting off the street.
This is what we’d do for a family member we love. If your brother was destroying himself with addiction, you wouldn’t tell him “you have the freedom to keep doing this in my home.” You’d insist on treatment. You’d set limits. You’d do it because you love him.
Democrat Matt Mahan has been doing this in San Jose. I wrote about it here. It works.
The principle is simple. The execution requires discipline.
Rejecting the principle is what confuses us into making this unnecessarily complicated.
What’s In The Paid Section
I’ve laid out the surface argument: LA’s homeless crisis is a drug crisis, the people on the streets have free will, and real compassion requires building the responsibility that lets them use it.
In the paid section, I go deeper on the philosophical problem underneath all of this:
Why our entire framework for “compassion” toward the worst-off is built on a myth - and how that myth is making everything worse
The principle that scales beyond homelessness to nearly every politicized issue in America right now
Why a society that doesn’t hold everyone responsible can’t hold anyone free
