Category: Politics

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When Compassion Becomes Neglect: California’s Homelessness Lesson

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Why good intentions, enormous spending, and permissive policies are not enough.

In my previous article, I examined Republican gubernatorial candidate, Steve Hilton’s proposal to address California’s homelessness crisis, which he calls Off the Streets and Back on Track. His plan combines shelter, medical care, addiction treatment, psychiatric services, job training, and assistance finding permanent housing with a renewed commitment to enforcing public camping laws.

I argued that this approach reflects an important Christian principle: genuine compassion sometimes requires intervention, responsibility, and the restoration of order.

But I want to go a little further.

Because California’s experience raises a rather uncomfortable question: How can a state spend tens of billions of dollars helping homeless people and still have so many people living on its streets?

And perhaps more importantly, why do we so often assume that spending more money is evidence of greater compassion?

The $24 Billion Question

Between fiscal years 2018–19 and 2022–23, California allocated nearly $24 billion to homelessness and housing programs. That’s billion with a B.

According to a 2024 California State Auditor’s report, nine state agencies administered at least 30 programs dedicated to preventing and ending homelessness.

And what did the auditors discover?

California frequently lacked the information necessary to determine whether its programs were actually working.

Of five programs examined, two appeared cost-effective. For the other three, the state had not collected sufficient data to evaluate their effectiveness.

Think about that.

Billions of dollars spent, and the government couldn’t adequately account for the results of major portions of its efforts.

I’ve made this argument before, particularly in discussions with my progressive Christian friends: Good stewardship is not optional for Christians.

When we give money to a charity, we reasonably expect evidence that the money is helping people. Why should we expect less when government spends billions of dollars taken from taxpayers?

The question isn’t whether California cares enough to spend money.
It’s whether California cares enough to find out what works.

When Government Makes Housing Unaffordable

Here’s another uncomfortable reality.

California’s extraordinarily high housing costs are not simply the unfortunate consequence of market forces. Government policy contributes to them.

Restrictive zoning, lengthy environmental reviews, permitting delays, development fees, and complicated regulatory requirements all increase the cost of building housing.

And when housing becomes prohibitively expensive, people living on the financial margins are the first to suffer.

Although the following example concerns California’s high-speed rail boondoggle (a government jobs program masquerading as a transportation project) it vividly illustrates the broader problem of excessive regulation, particularly in California.

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Cali Bullet Train FACTS:  Approximately $15.7 billion in baseline program expenditures (as of July 31, 2026); zero miles of high-speed track laid; and roughly 18 years since voter approval (or ~30 years since the Authority’s creation).

A major University of California, San Francisco, study found that unaffordable housing was a central factor in people’s pathways into homelessness. Participants reported a median monthly household income of just $960 in the six months before becoming homeless.

The irony is difficult to miss.

Government restricts housing production, housing becomes more expensive, more people struggle to afford shelter, and then government spends enormous sums attempting to address the resulting crisis.

This isn’t an argument for eliminating reasonable environmental protections or building standards.

It’s an argument for recognizing that regulations have consequences, including consequences for the poor.

According to the California State Auditor, newly constructed affordable housing in some parts of the Bay Area can cost as much as $1 million per unit.

Imagine how many people could be helped if the cost of producing housing were substantially reduced.

And imagine what that might mean for taxpayers, charitable organizations, and the people desperately needing somewhere to live.

Housing First—and Then What?

California has also embraced a policy framework called Housing First.

The underlying idea is understandable: provide stable housing without first requiring sobriety, employment, or participation in treatment. Once people have a roof over their heads, other problems may become easier to address.

For some people, this works.

A family facing eviction because of a temporary financial setback may need little more than rental assistance and an opportunity to regain stability.

But consider someone with a severe methamphetamine addiction, untreated schizophrenia, or a long history of living on the streets.

Housing alone will not adequately address those conditions.

And treating every homeless person as though the primary problem is simply the absence of an apartment risks misunderstanding the complexity of the crisis.

Critics of California’s homelessness policies, including researchers at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, have questioned whether the state’s approach adequately addresses addiction, mental illness, and other factors contributing to chronic homelessness.

A more comprehensive approach must distinguish among very different circumstances and provide different forms of assistance.

For some, that means affordable housing.

For others, intensive psychiatric treatment.

For others, addiction recovery.

For still others, job training, family reconciliation, and help rebuilding ordinary routines of responsibility.

Compassion requires understanding the actual problem—not merely applying the same policy to everyone.

Addiction, Mental Illness, and the Limits of Autonomy

Research from the University of California, San Francisco, makes the challenge unmistakable.

Its Behavioral Health and Homelessness report found that approximately 48% of surveyed homeless adults had complex behavioral-health needs, including regular drug use, heavy drinking, hallucinations, or recent psychiatric hospitalization.

Thirty-five percent reported regular illicit drug use.

Perhaps most troubling, 28% of respondents with regular drug use or heavy alcohol use had sought treatment during their current episode of homelessness but couldn’t access it.

What kind of compassionate society tolerates that?

One that speaks endlessly about respecting autonomy while failing to provide meaningful opportunities for recovery?

Certainly, civil liberties matter.

But Christian anthropology offers a richer understanding of human freedom than merely allowing people to do whatever they happen to desire.

A person enslaved by addiction is not flourishing in freedom.

A person suffering from untreated psychosis is not necessarily exercising meaningful autonomy simply because government leaves him alone.

Sometimes protecting human dignity requires more than respecting someone’s immediate wishes.

It requires helping restore the conditions in which genuine freedom becomes possible.

When Good Intentions Produce Bad Consequences

California’s experience with Proposition 47 offers another cautionary lesson.

Approved by voters in 2014, the measure reduced penalties for certain drug possession and theft offenses.

Its supporters hoped to reduce unnecessary incarceration and redirect resources toward more constructive responses.

Those are understandable objectives.

But a 2026 study by the Public Policy Institute of California found evidence that Proposition 47 likely contributed to approximately 7,000 additional people experiencing unsheltered homelessness between 2015 and 2019.

Researchers also estimated that the measure contributed to a roughly 20% decline in drug-treatment admissions, associated with fewer referrals from the criminal justice system.

These are statistical estimates, not a claim that Proposition 47 alone caused California’s homelessness crisis. But they raise serious questions about the unintended consequences of well-intentioned reforms.

A policy can emerge from sincere concern for suffering people and still make their circumstances worse.

And when that happens, acknowledging failure is not cruelty.

It is a moral obligation.

A More Christian Understanding of Compassion

I return to something I’ve been emphasizing for months.

The Christian obligation to care for the poor is unequivocal.

But Scripture does not tell us that compassion requires a particular government program, an ever-expanding budget, or the suspension of ordinary expectations about personal responsibility.

Those are matters requiring wisdom and prudential judgment.

The Good Samaritan didn’t merely express sympathy for the injured traveler.

He acted.

He provided immediate care, transported the man somewhere safe, and arranged for continued assistance.

Crédit : Wikipedia I Wallace Collection
Le Bon Samaritain, Rembrandt, 1632-1633.

His compassion was concrete, costly, and directed toward recovery.

That is the standard I would like to see reflected in our public policies.

Help people get off the streets.

Provide appropriate treatment.

Make housing more affordable.

Restore public spaces to their intended uses.

Measure results.

Hold government and nonprofit contractors accountable.

And enlist the tremendous resources of private philanthropy, churches, and community organizations.

None of this guarantees success. Any serious alternative, including Hilton’s, must demonstrate that it can deliver appropriate care, respect civil liberties, and produce better outcomes.

But surely we can agree that perpetually managing human misery is not the same thing as overcoming it.

In my previous article, I suggested that California’s extraordinary private wealth could become a powerful resource if philanthropists had confidence that their contributions would produce meaningful results.

I still believe that.

And I would like to see California test a comprehensive approach that joins public responsibility, private generosity, personal recovery, and measurable accountability.

The objective should not be simply to make homelessness less visible.

It should be to help homeless people become homeless no longer.

That’s a far more demanding understanding of compassion.

And, I would argue, a far more Christian one.

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We Don’t Have To Live Like This

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Getting People Off the Streets Is Compassion, Too

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I have no idea whether Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate for governor of California, is a Christian. And frankly, for purposes of what I want to say here, it doesn’t matter very much.

What interests me is his recently released proposal for dealing with California’s homelessness crisis, because I think it illustrates something Christians must think about more carefully: What does compassion actually require?

Hilton calls his proposal “Off the Streets and Back on Track.” The basic idea is remarkably straightforward. California would build a network of Homeless Recovery Centers where people currently living on streets, sidewalks, parks, and encampments could receive shelter, food, showers, medical attention, addiction treatment, psychiatric care, job training, and help moving into permanent housing.

Families, women, veterans, and elderly residents would have separate secure accommodations. People struggling with drug addiction would be offered treatment. Those suffering from serious mental illness would receive appropriate psychiatric care. Those capable of working would be connected with community colleges, apprenticeship programs, employers, and job training. Caseworkers would help individuals move toward stable housing and continue providing care when necessary.

And then comes the other half of the proposal—the half that will undoubtedly make some people uncomfortable.

The encampments would be cleared.

Public camping laws would once again be enforced. If a safe and appropriate place is available, declining that help would not confer a permanent right to occupy a sidewalk, public park, or street.

I find that combination—not one half without the other—very important.

Compassion and Order Are Not Enemies

For years now, I have been arguing with some of my progressive Christian friends about what we mean when we use words like compassion, justice, and care for the poor.

Christians are unquestionably commanded to care for the suffering.

There is no wiggle room there.

The widow, the orphan, the poor, the stranger, the sick, the prisoner, the abandoned—Scripture repeatedly directs our attention toward people who are vulnerable. A Christianity that simply walks past suffering and says, “Not my problem,” is difficult to reconcile with Jesus.

Credit : Wikipedia I Wallace Collection
Le Bon Samaritain, Rembrandt, 1632-1633.

But something else does not follow from that.

The Bible does not hand us a state budget.

It does not specify the proper size of Medicaid, the correct marginal tax rate, how much California should spend on homelessness, whether housing should come before addiction treatment, or under what circumstances someone suffering from serious mental illness should be compelled to receive care.

Those are questions of prudence.

Compassion tells us that the person sleeping beneath an overpass matters. Prudence asks: What will actually help him?

And those are not always the same question.

R. R. Reno recently made a related point while discussing immigration. Pastoral language about welcoming or accompanying people may express a genuine Christian moral concern, but it does not by itself tell governing authorities where limits should be drawn or how competing obligations should be balanced. Governments still have to govern.

The same principle applies here.

Is Leaving Someone in a Tent Compassionate?

Consider the strange situation we have created.

A man is living beneath a tarp. He may be addicted to fentanyl. He may suffer from schizophrenia. He hasn’t bathed in weeks. He is vulnerable to assault, disease, exploitation, overdose, heat, cold, and predatory drug dealers.

One “enlightened” response amounts to:

Here is a clean needle. Here is some food. Here is a blanket. We will respect your autonomy. Good luck.

Is that compassion or abandonment dressed in compassionate language?

Hilton’s proposal takes a different approach. Get the person inside. Feed him. Give him a bed and a shower. Find out what is wrong. Treat the addiction. Treat the mental illness. Help him acquire skills. Help him find employment if he is capable of it. Help him eventually find stable housing.

And, yes, establish some expectations along the way.

That strikes me as a much richer understanding of human dignity.

Human beings possess dignity precisely because they are more than bundles of immediate desires. We are embodied creatures capable of relationships, responsibility, work, recovery, community, and—in Christian terms—redemption.

Sometimes love comforts.

Sometimes love intervenes.

Often it does both.

Twenty-Four Billion Dollars Should Buy Accountability

There is another part of Hilton’s proposal that connects directly with something I have been writing about for months: government spending is not the same thing as compassion.

California allocated nearly $24 billion to homelessness and housing between fiscal years 2018–19 and 2022–23. That number does not come from a partisan campaign advertisement. It appears in the California State Auditor’s own report.

And what did the auditor find?

Not that every program was worthless. In fact, two of the five programs examined appeared to be cost-effective.

But the auditors could not adequately evaluate three of the five because California had not collected sufficient outcome data. The state had also failed to consistently track costs and results across its homelessness efforts.

Think about that.

Billions upon billions of dollars—and government often could not confidently tell taxpayers what was working.

I’ve made this point before: Christian stewardship should care about that too.

If I give $1,000 to a charity claiming to feed hungry children and discover that nobody is checking whether children are actually being fed, asking questions about the money does not demonstrate my lack of compassion.

It demonstrates stewardship.

Why should $24 billion of taxpayers’ money be morally different?

The proper measure cannot simply be: How much did we spend?

The question is: Did suffering decrease? Did people recover? Did they remain housed? Did addicts become sober? Did mentally ill people receive treatment? Did families get back on their feet?

Hilton proposes auditing homelessness spending, publishing costs and outcomes, and redirecting money away from programs that repeatedly fail toward treatment and recovery programs that produce measurable results.

That ought not be a left-wing or right-wing principle.

It is common sense.

Neither Cruelty Nor Sentimentality

The fundamental principle: We do not have to choose between abandoning people on the streets and abandoning public order.

A civilized society should be capable of saying two things simultaneously.

You may not live indefinitely on this sidewalk.

And:

We are not going to abandon you.

Come inside.

Here is a bed.

Here is food.

Here is medical care.

Here is addiction treatment.

Here is psychiatric treatment.

Here is job training.

Here is someone whose job is to help you get back on your feet.

But no, we are not going to pretend that living in a tent while addicted, mentally ill, sick, exploited, and isolated represents some higher form of human autonomy that the rest of society is morally obligated to preserve.

That isn’t compassion.

There is a distinctly Christian insight here.

Christian love never means simply affirming another human being exactly where he happens to be and then walking away. We meet people where they are because they bear the image of God.

But we love them too much to insist that they remain there.

For California’s homeless, perhaps genuine compassion begins with something as concrete as this:

Come in off the street. Let’s help you get your life back.

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Addendum: A Role for Private Generosity

One final thought. I’m confident that many of the tech titans who call San Francisco and Silicon Valley home would be willing to make substantial charitable contributions toward solving this crisis—if they had good reason to believe their money would actually make a difference.

But there’s another economic reality California’s political leadership would be wise to consider. Wealthy individuals and businesses can relocate, and California’s high taxes and recurring proposals for additional wealth taxes create incentives for them to do precisely that.

This is something advocates of wealth taxes, including those aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), don’t understand. Wealth today is not primarily land, as it was centuries ago. Much of it consists of financial assets, intellectual property, business ownership, and highly mobile capital. People can move, companies can relocate, and investment can flow elsewhere. Not without complications, of course, but much more readily than a landed estate could move in the eighteenth century.

And when wealthy entrepreneurs leave, California risks losing more than tax revenue. It can also lose jobs, investment, civic leadership, and substantial philanthropic resources.

California still has extraordinary private wealth and philanthropic potential. But government policies that discourage wealth creation or encourage its departure also diminish the very resources available to address problems like homelessness.

Imagine what might happen if government, private philanthropy, churches, and charitable organizations worked together around a serious, transparent, results-oriented plan. Not simply managing homelessness, but actually helping people escape it.

Accountability doesn’t discourage generosity. It gives generosity a reason to flourish. And sound economic policy helps preserve the wealth that makes such generosity possible.

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We Don’t Have To Live Like This

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Gaza, Israel, and the Christian Moral Imagination – Part 1

Gays for Gaza

Response to a Christian friend. (Footnotes provided for key terms.)

I’ve been thinking more about our exchange concerning Gaza, and I want to give you a more substantial response. But I don’t want to fire something off quickly, because the questions you’re raising—civilian casualties, proportionality, genocide, Hamas’s responsibility, humanitarian aid, and Israel’s conduct of the war—deserve something more careful than a few paragraphs.

So I’m working on a longer response that will become an extended blog post with links to supporting data. For now, here’s the short version.

The Civilian Death Toll—and What It Does Not Prove

First, I never said the Palestinian death toll isn’t extraordinary or horrifying. It is. Where I disagree with you is about what follows from that fact. The aggregate Gaza Health Ministry number, for example, is not simply a count of “Palestinian civilians killed by Israel.” It does not distinguish civilians from Hamas and other combatants in its headline total, nor, even if we accept the aggregate figure, does the raw number establish responsibility for every death. 

More importantly, a horrific civilian death toll does not by itself establish genocide. Genocide is a much more specific charge involving an intention to destroy a people as such. That is why I think Connelly1’Progressive’ Christian writer Shawn Patrick Connelly is much too confident simply calling Gaza a genocide. One can believe that particular Israeli strikes were excessive, disproportionate, and misguided, without concluding that Israel’s purpose was to destroy the Palestinian people. 

Hamas Cannot Disappear from the Moral Accounting

Second, I think Hamas too often gradually disappears from the moral accounting.

October 7 wasn’t merely an attack in which 1,200 civilians unfortunately died. Human Rights Watch concluded after interviewing scores of witnesses and examining hundreds of photographs and videos that the Hamas-led assault was designed to kill civilians and take hostages. The deliberate killing and hostage-taking were central features of the planned attack. [Source: Human Rights Watch]

Amnesty’s later investigation likewise concluded that Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, hostage-taking, and sexual violence. [Source: Amnesty International]

And much of October 7 was documented on video—including material recorded by the attackers themselves. [Video documentation in my next post.] I don’t think we should sanitize that reality or allow October 7 to become merely the subordinate clause preceding everything Israel subsequently did. 

The Kind of War Hamas Chose to Fight

Nor does Hamas’s responsibility end on October 7. The kind of war it chose to fight matters: an entrenched armed organization operating from within an extraordinarily dense civilian environment, with documented military use of civilian areas and facilities—like hospitals & schools. That doesn’t give Israel permission to ignore proportionality or civilian protection. But neither can Hamas’s method of warfare be erased when assigning moral responsibility for the terrible civilian consequences. 

The Oppressor/Oppressed Lens

There is another, broader question I want to explore: the interpretive framework through which much of the contemporary political Left—including portions of the ‘Progressive’ Christian Left—approaches conflicts like this one.

I think much of the contemporary political Left has absorbed an oppressor/oppressed framework from contemporary critical theories2Critical theory emerged from twentieth-century epistemological shifts, rooted in Marxist philosophy and associated with the Frankfurt School thinkers Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas. The approach rests on the conviction that all theories are human constructions shaped by specific contexts and interests, and critical theory’s task is to expose theories that justify oppressive practices and demand their reconsideration. It functions as an intellectual instrument of liberation. and then sometimes uses that framework as the first interpretive lens through which complicated political, cultural and moral questions are viewed.

Once the categories are assigned—colonizer/colonized, powerful/powerless, privileged/marginalized—the moral conclusions can begin to seem almost predetermined.

That can produce some very strange alliances. “Queers for Palestine” is perhaps the most obvious example: Western sexual-progressive movements aligning themselves symbolically with a society whose actual cultural and religious assumptions concerning sexuality are radically different from their own.

When Biblical Principles Become Political Programs

It’s related to the concern I raised in my recent Politics with a Proof Text piece. We begin with something Christians certainly affirm—love the stranger, protect the vulnerable, care about the poor—and then quietly import an entire political philosophy involving colonialism, oppression, reparations, redistribution, immigration policy, borders, and the Global North versus the Global South. At some point we have moved from biblical moral principles into prudential political judgments, while continuing to speak as though Scripture itself settled the policy question.

That’s something I want us to examine rather than simply assume.

Why I Support Israel

One other clarification about my own support for Israel. I’m not supporting Israel because I hold the dispensationalist or end-times theology common among many evangelical Christians. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, for example, has repeatedly grounded his support for Israel in biblical promises to Abraham and the Jewish people, and that broader Christian Dispensationalist tradition.3Dispensationalism places Israel at the absolute center of God’s redemptive timeline. The system holds that Old Testament covenantal promises to Abraham and David will be fulfilled literally in a future age, with modern Israel’s 1948 establishment representing the fulfillment of God’s land promise to the Jewish people. This conviction fundamentally shapes how dispensationalists interpret prophecy and understand contemporary events.

The entire dispensational prophetic scheme depends on Israel’s existence as a nation-state; without it, the entire framework collapses. Dispensationalists maintain that God maintains separate purposes for national Israel and the church, a distinction that remains central to their theological system.

Since Israel’s modern establishment, dispensationalists view the rapture of the church as the next prophetic event on God’s timeline. The tradition is often tied to a particular eschatological reading of the modern state of Israel. 

I don’t share that theology.

The Facts on the Ground

My support for Israel rests much more on the facts on the ground: Israel’s comparative religious pluralism, the rights afforded to religious minorities, the political participation of its Arab and Muslim citizens, freedom of worship, and the striking contrast between the continued presence of a large Muslim minority inside the Jewish state and the tiny or nonexistent Jewish communities across much of the surrounding Muslim-majority world. None of that makes Israel above criticism. But it does matter when I’m trying to decide what kind of society Israel is, what kind of societies surround it, and how Christians should think morally about the conflict.

Gaza, then, becomes an especially important case study in how we apply these moral categories.

The Larger Christian Question

The same larger question runs through a lot of what I’ve been writing about lately—Israel and Gaza, immigration and poverty, gender ideology, and our obligations toward vulnerable people:

What does a genuinely Christian understanding of the human person require of us—and where have we perhaps confused Christian moral teaching with a particular contemporary political ideology, one often deeply influenced—knowingly or not—by strains of cultural Marxism?

That’s the discussion I’m really interested in having with you.

The longer version is going to take me a little time. But that’s where I’m headed.

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