Don't turn Maryland into a tent city

From the Washington Examiner

President Joe Biden came into office promising to use California, a state people are literally fleeing because of its high taxes and deteriorating quality of life, as his policy model for the nation. But even he probably didn't expect other cities and states to take the very worst aspects of California and adopt them voluntarily.

In Maryland, Del. Sheila Ruth, a Democrat, has proposed a state law that would result in homeless tent cities springing up throughout Maryland, making it impossible for municipalities to shut them down.

Surely, Marylanders have already seen the deleterious effects of massive homeless encampments in so many West Coast communities. The crime they spawn and the disease they spread are a blight upon formerly attractive downtown areas such as Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Over the last decade, these cities' inability to enforce rules against encampments has caused an explosion in the homeless population.

The West Coast's homeless disaster began, of all places, in Idaho. The city of Boise, which has the misfortune of being subject to the whims of the left-wing federal 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, was sued for ticketing people who appropriated public land by camping on city sidewalks and under overpasses. The city was ultimately enjoined from enforcing laws that had deterred vagrancy unless it could provide shelter beds to every single homeless person. After a protracted appeals process, the Supreme Court refused to take up the case in 2019, leaving cities throughout Idaho, Nevada, Montana, California, Oregon, Arizona, and Washington unable to enforce such laws.

Boise's weather is harsh enough that its homeless population was always relatively small, so it had the option of funding a few additional shelter beds and then building a skateboard park over the site of the homeless encampment. But larger cities with milder weather cannot possibly hope to do such a thing, leading to homeless populations that are far too large — in Los Angeles, the homeless population is greater than the entire population of Annapolis, Maryland.

Most people, both liberal and conservative, would like to avoid tent cities in their communities. As a recent poll shows, even residents of Washington, D.C., a city arguably more left-wing than San Francisco, believe that the police should shut down its homeless encampments yesterday.

The crisis of mass homelessness is not a function of housing being too expensive or unavailable. If that were the issue, then the homeless would just improve their situation by moving to any of the thousands of cities that currently have extremely cheap housing and abundant job opportunities. South Dakota, for example, is typical in that its unemployment rate is 2.6% and half of the places for rent cost less than $747 per month. But most long-term homeless cannot take advantage of this. They literally cannot hold down a job, no matter how many jobs are available, nor make regular payments, no matter what sort of income they could hypothetically gain access to. That's because three-quarters of long-term homelessness is the result of untreated mental illness, substance abuse, or both.

Some liberal jurisdictions have chosen to deal with this reality in a compassionate way, diverting those homeless who get arrested after petty crimes into treatment programs that will help them approach self-sufficiency. Others, such as California, are just throwing their money down the drain on useless, expensive home-building projects. Los Angeles's $1.2 billion initiative is costing as much as $837,000 to build each new housing unit — more than twice what was promised when voters approved it six years ago. That's enough to buy multiple houses for each L.A. homeless person in most midsized U.S. cities. And in six years, the program has produced only about 12% of the housing units it promised. To add insult to injury, the homeless population in L.A. has exploded since it was adopted.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration is making it harder to fight homelessness by conditioning all federal funding on adherence to its own version of the debunked "housing first" ideology, effectively defunding any program that has expectations about sobriety or work requirements. This is making it hard enough for cities everywhere to deal with their problems. But things can always get worse.

Maryland and other states and cities should at least avoid replicating the problems that liberal judges imposed upon West Coast cities. Baltimore has enough trouble already — it doesn't need to become the epicenter of East Coast homelessness on top of everything else.