What is the endgame with homelessness?

The homelessness crisis has been getting worse for a long time, but it feels like it is hitting a new level. We all know that homelessnesss in cities like New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles is worse than ever. Homelessness is up 67% in Sacramento county over the last couple of years. But even in Chicago it’s gotten so bad that their airport has become a place where homeless people set up camp to try to get out of the cold. I’ve never seen that before. It feels like a new level. I could keep listing statistics for a while, but you get the point.

How is our society responding to this? New York City is leading the way in targeting the homeless with tickets, sometimes for hundreds of dollars. New York is also beginning to round up homeless people and commit them to mental hospitals against their will. There are also laws being passed across the country making it a crime to sleep on state property (meaning in public).

Some states, like California, are also building more housing, but the homeless problem keeps getting worse. Again, none of this is new, but it does seem to be accelerating. More and more homeless people are occupying visible space in cities, and it can’t be ignored for too much longer. So what will happen? Where is this going? What is the endgame?

The first thing to note about all this is that there is plenty of available housing for every homeless person in America. One estimate puts the number of vacant homes at 16 million. That is obviously more than enough for all the homeless in the country! Then there are the empty office buildings (not to mention empty shopping malls) across the country, which could be converted into housing units. There is 998 million square feet of vacant office space in this country. Again, I could keep going on like this, but I think you get the idea.

Of course, the easy fix of matching homeless people with the literally millions of housing units is never going to happen. It certainly could—nothing is stopping the federal government from creating a program, like FDR did during the New Deal, to address the crisis of poverty. But it is not going to happen, because nobody makes money from putting homeless people into houses. Nothing happens in America unless there’s a way to make money off it.

This isn’t news either. But what is new is that our collective ability to ignore the human misery that capitalism produces is coming to an end. Human detritus is piling up more and more, and the normal flow of business and routines is increasingly being disrupted, or at least made unpleasant. That is only going to continue, and we know that nothing will be done to actually help the homeless. They are just going to keep piling up in plain sight, and making the bourgeoisie upset.

It seems pretty clear what will happen—as more homeless people end up in public places, and nothing is done to get them any help, they will be eliminated. Just as a matter of pure logic—more homeless combined with zero interest in solving the problem in a positive way, leaves the option of removing them. Is it really that hard to imagine massive camps where all the homeless people will end up? It’s only a matter of time. I’m sure there are even corporations that provide these kinds of services that will stand to make a huge profit. What other endgame is there? Even if this isn’t what anyone truly wants, it is all that will be able to logically happen, if the current trends of rising homelessness and indifference stay the same. The only thing that defines the homeless problem is that people with homes just want them out of sight. Just get them away. That’s it. And that only leads to one solution.