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“Everybody’s waiting to write my obituary.”
This is never a good thing for a candidate to be saying on Election Day.
But Nikki Haley, the candidate, was trying—pleading—to make a larger point to CNN’s Dana Bash as they sat on raised chairs in the middle of Chez Vachon, the landmark coffee shop and makeshift TV studio on the west side of Manchester, New Hampshire.
“We had 14 candidates,” Haley said, referring to the number of people who were seeking the Republican nomination a few months ago. “It’s now down to two”—Haley and Donald Trump. “That’s not an obituary; that’s somebody who’s a fighter.”
Fair enough. Haley was indeed still here and showing up, which is something to be proud of. She is the last woman standing between the former president and an unimpeded romp to the Republican nomination. This was Haley’s “closing argument” as she made her final rounds in New Hampshire yesterday, greeting volunteers at polling places, doing interviews, and hitting the tables at Chez Vachon. She would keep fighting and continue to flout the naysayers who have trailed her for her entire career. Underestimate me is the message printed on one of Haley’s favorite T-shirts. That’ll be fun.
Almost immediately after the polls closed, a few hours later, networks declared Trump the New Hampshire winner. His margin of victory over Haley, however, looked smaller than expected. “THIS RACE IS OVER,” Trump insisted in a text blasted out to his supporter list just after 8 p.m. Nope, Haley told her Election Night revelers in Concord, vowing to persist as the campaign moved to her home state of South Carolina. “New Hampshire is first in the nation. It’s not last in the nation,” she said in her speech. “This race is far from over.”
I spent much of December and early January watching Haley campaign for the job she quite clearly has been aspiring to for years. She proved to be disciplined and polished, good enough to outlast the battalion of male challengers arrayed alongside her—“the fellas,” as she has lately taken to calling her rivals, many of whom endorsed Trump as they fell away. She has claimed repeatedly to be part of a “two-person race” against Trump, despite finishing third in Iowa behind him and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
This felt like wishful thinking at times, but it is unquestionably true now and will present Haley with what’s been a recurring dilemma of her candidacy: How hard will she be willing to campaign against Trump? Will she be as noxious and ornery as the former president surely will be against her? Will she be willing to attack Trump and seize the ample vulnerabilities he provides, even if it risks his unrestrained ire?
Haley was hesitant to go after him when the field was more crowded. She offered only the mildest of critiques—that “chaos follows” Trump “rightly or wrongly” and that he was not “the right president” for these times (as he was before). But it was hardly a sure thing that Haley would deploy her best material against Trump—about his odd behavior and mental capacity and legal problems.
The final days of the New Hampshire campaign offered clues that she might now be willing to do so. She mentioned Trump’s age throughout the day yesterday (inflating it by three years, to 80) and brought up the perplexing sequence from Trump’s Friday-night rally, in which he seemed to suggest that Haley had been in charge of security at the Capitol on January 6 (he apparently had mistaken her for Nancy Pelosi).
Perhaps more notably, Haley conveyed that she was willing to draw out the race for as long as necessary. “Joe Biden isn’t going to get any younger or any better,” she said in her speech in Concord. “We’ll have all the time we need to beat Joe Biden.” This carried a sly message directed at Trump: He wasn’t getting any younger or better, either. And the longer the race continued, the more his court cases would advance, new facts would be revealed, and his behavior could spiral. Haley pointed out that voters in 20 states would be casting ballots in the next two months. There would be many more contests to enjoy, or stay alive for.
If nothing else, Haley would live to see another Election Day, in another state.
Primary days can give off an oddly freewheeling and punch-drunk vibe. Candidates, staffers, and volunteers have all done their work. Most of them are exhausted and often battling colds, hangovers, or other ailments. There is no more practice and preparation left to do.
“The hay is in the barn,” as old political hacks like to say. Or, at least one political hack said this—to me—but I forget who it was. I’ve also seen the maxim attributed to stir-crazy football coaches (before the big game) and distance runners (before a race). The basic idea is the same: There’s not much left to do, except find a way to pass hours and burn nervous energy.
Everything that remains tends to be improvisational and hardly strategic. Candidates rush around, trying to get supporters out to vote and, in Haley’s case, to convince them that the race is not over, despite all the polls showing Trump with a big lead.
“I don’t even want to talk about numbers, and I don’t think y’all should either,” Haley admonished Bash at Chez Vachon.
She then mentioned one number in particular: six.
That reflects the sum of votes that Haley received in Dixville Notch, the tiny village in the northern tip of the state that is known for tallying its votes just after midnight on the morning of the primary. “There were more than 10 journalists for every voter,” The New YorkTimes said in its report on the wee-hours scene, which it called “as much a press spectacle as it is a serious exercise in democracy.” (The same could be said about the New Hampshire primary in general, an exercise that features a relatively tiny number of voters whose views are comically amplified by media swarms.)
“All six came to us,” Haley reported of the Dixville Notch vote. “Not part, not one—all six.”
Haley was joined at Chez Vachon by New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, her biggest supporter and frequent traveling companion across the state in recent weeks. At one point, I asked Sununu, who was standing next to the kitchen door—nearly getting run over by waitresses carrying plates loaded with pancakes, bacon, and poutine drowned in brown gravy—whether he was worried that this might be the last New Hampshire primary as we know it. Some have predicted as much, given that the Democrats are no longer holding their first contest here. Was he feeling wistful at all, nostalgic maybe?
“Nah, we’re always in this. It never leaves us,” Sununu said. He added that the Democrats had “learned their lesson”—that they never should have messed with New Hampshire and tried to take away its rightful spot at the front of the primary parade.
Sununu has shown himself willing to question Trump’s age and mental fitness more directly than Haley had been until the past few days. “If he’s off the teleprompter, he can barely keep a cogent thought,” Sununu said of Trump in an interview with Fox News yesterday. “This guy is nearly 80 years old.”
“He’s 77,” the Fox host corrected him.
“That’s nearly 80,” Sununu maintained. “We’ll do math later.”
He has an obvious point about Trump, one that’s worth making. But this is a pet peeve of mine. Sununu and Haley often say that a Donald Trump–Joe Biden rematch would feature “two 80-year-olds.” Haley recently said that if Trump were convicted, and she were elected, she would likely pardon the former president. Why? Because it’s not in the country’s interest to have “an 80-year-old man sitting in jail,” she said.
It sounds like a minor thing, but if Haley is going to attack Trump (correctly) for lying, if she’s going to try to claim some moral high ground in this race, she herself should not be fudging the facts. There’s no need to anyway; at 52, she’s clearly younger than both him and Biden.
Since I figured the encounter at Chez Vachon might be the last time that I’d be so close to Haley—maybe ever—I decided to be one of those nuisance reporters and follow her out of the restaurant.
“How old is President Trump?” I asked her as she crossed Kelley Street. Haley ignored me.
“How old is President Trump?” I tried again. She kept walking. Someone else shouted a question that I didn’t hear.
“There’s a lot of energy, that’s what we’re seeing today,” Haley said in a rote tone, disappearing into a town car and motoring off to her next stop, and then more stops after that.
Donald Trump’s renewed pledge on social media and in campaign rallies to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act has put him on a collision course with a widening circle of Republican constituencies directly benefiting from the law.
In 2017, when Trump and congressional Republicans tried and failed to repeal the ACA, also known as Obamacare, they faced the core contradiction that many of the law’s principal beneficiaries were people and institutions that favored the GOP. That list included lower-middle-income workers without college degrees, older adults in the final years before retirement, and rural communities.
In the years since then, the number of people in each of those groups relying on the ACA has grown. More than 40 million Americans now receive health coverage through the law, about 50 percent more than the roughly 27 million the ACA covered during the repeal fight in 2017. In the intervening years, nine more states, most of them reliably Republican, have accepted the law’s federal funding to expand access to Medicaid for low-income working adults.
“Republicans came very close to repealing and replacing the ACA in 2017, but that may have been their best window before the law had fully taken hold and so many people have benefited from it,” Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a nonpartisan think tank that studies health-care issues, told me. “I think it gets harder and harder to repeal as more people benefit.”
Trump’s repeated declarations over the past several weeks that he intends to finally repeal the ACA if reelected surprised many Republicans. Few GOP leaders have talked about uprooting the law since the party’s last effort failed, during Trump’s first year as president. At that point, Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress. But whereas the House, with Trump’s enthusiastic support, narrowly voted to rescind the law, the Senate narrowly rejected repeal. Three GOP senators blocked the repeal effort by voting no—including the late Senator John McCain, who dramatically doomed the proposal by signaling thumbs-down on the Senate floor. (Trump mocked McCain while calling the ACA “a catastrophe” as he campaigned in Iowa last weekend.)
Republicans lost any further opportunity to repeal the law in the 2018 election when Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives. With the legislative route blocked, Trump instead pursued an array of regulatory and legal efforts to weaken the ACA during his final years in office. But since the 2017 vote, the GOP has never again held the unified control of the White House, the House, and the Senate required to launch a serious legislative repeal effort.
If Republicans did win unified control of Congress and the White House next November, most health-care experts I spoke with agreed that Trump would follow through on his promises to again target the ACA. Leslie Dach, the founder of Protect Our Care, a liberal group that supports the law, says that he takes Trump’s pledge to pursue repeal seriously, “because he is still trying to overturn the legacy of John McCain, and it’s one of the few things he lost. He doesn’t like to be a loser.”
Trump hasn’t specified his plan to replace the ACA. But whatever alternative Trump develops will inevitably face one of the main problems that confounded Republicans’ last attempt at repeal: Every plan they put forward raised costs and diminished access to care for core groups in their electoral coalition.
That was apparent in the contrast between how the ACA and the GOP alternatives treated the individual insurance market. The ACA created exchanges where the uninsured could buy coverage, provided them with subsidies to help them afford it, and changed the rules about what kind of policies insurers could sell them. Key among those changes were provisions that barred insurers from denying coverage to people with preexisting health conditions, required them to offer a broad package of essential health benefits in all policies, and prevented them from charging older consumers more than three times the premiums of younger people.
The common effect of all these and many other requirements was to require greater risk sharing in the insurance markets. The ACA made coverage in the individual insurance market more available and affordable for older and sicker consumers partly by requiring younger and healthier consumers to purchase more expensive and comprehensive plans than they might have bought before the law went into effect. That shift generated complaints from relatively younger and healthier consumers in the ACA’s early years as their premiums increased.
Every alternative that Republicans proposed during the Trump years sought to lower premiums by unraveling the ACA provisions that required more sharing of risks and costs. For instance, the House GOP plan allowed insurers to charge seniors five times as much as young people, reduced the number of guaranteed essential benefits, and allowed states to exempt insurers from the requirement to cover all applicants with preexisting health conditions.
One problem the GOP faced was that althoughthis approach might have lowered premiums for the young and healthy (albeit while leaving them with less comprehensive coverage), it would have significantly raised costs and reduced access for the old or sick. “A lot of ‘repeal and replace’ was putting more cost back on people with health-care problems,” Linda Blumberg, an institute fellow at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center, told me. The Rand Corporation calculated that for individuals with modest incomes, the House GOP plan would have cut premiums for the majority of those under age 45 while raising them for virtually everyone older than 45. The Congressional Budget Office, in its assessment of the House-passed GOP bill, projected that it would nearly double the number of people without health insurance by 2026, and that the greatest coverage losses would happen “among older people with lower income.”
As I wrote in 2017, the paradox was that the Republican plans would have hurt older working-age adults—a preponderantly GOP-leaning constituency—while lowering costs for younger generations that mostly vote Democratic. I called this inversion the “Trumpcare conundrum.”
Until the ACA, Medicaid was generally available only to adults earning less than the federal poverty level. But the law provided states with generous federal financing to expand coverage to low-income individuals earning up to 138 percent of the poverty level. Particularly in interior states, research showed that many of those low-income workers covered under the Medicaid expansion were white people without a college degree, the cornerstone of the modern Republican electoral coalition.
Another big beneficiary from the Medicaid expansion was rural communities, which have become more reliably Republican in the Trump years. Expanding access to Medicaid was especially important to rural places because studies have consistently found that more people in those areas than in metropolitan centers suffer from chronic health problems, while fewer obtain health insurance from their employer, and more lack insurance altogether.
The increased number of people covered under Medicaid gave rural hospitals a lifeline by reducing the amount of uncompensated care they needed to provide for patients lacking insurance. “When you go out to the rural areas, frankly most hospital executives, like other business people, they tend to be pretty conservative,” Timothy McBride, a co-director of the Center for Advancing Health Services, Policy & Economics Research at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. “And they don’t like government intervention. But I would go to see these people and they would say, ‘I’m for Medicaid expansion,’ because they had to deal with the uninsured.”
The Medicaid expansion also quickly became a crucial source of financing for addiction treatment in states ravaged through the 2010s by the opioid epidemic. Before the ACA, addiction treatment programs relied on “a little bit of block grant money here, a local voucher there, kind of out-of-pocket payments, and a little bit of spit and glue,” Brendan Saloner, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies addiction, told me. “Then Medicaid came along, and it provided a much more reliable and stable source of payment.”
Since the 2017 legislative battle, the ACA’s impact on all these fronts has only deepened. Biden and congressional Democrats both increased the federal subsidies to buy insurance on the Obamacare exchanges and expanded eligibility to families further into the middle class. Largely as a result, the number of people obtaining insurance through the exchanges soared from about 10 million then to more than 15 million as of this past December.
Similarly, a majority of the 31 states that had expanded Medicaid by 2017 were solidly Democratic-leaning. But the nine additional states that have broadened eligibility since then include seven that voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020.
That has not only increased the total number of low-income workers covered through the Medicaid expansion (from about 16 million then to well over 24 million now), but also broadened the red-state constituency for the ACA. McBride estimates that the federal government has annually pumped $2 billion into the health-care system in Missouri alone since voters there approved a Medicaid expansion in 2020. The federal Department of Health and Human Services recently calculated that the likelihood of rural hospitals closing was more than twice as high in the states that have refused to expand Medicaid than in those that have. Simultaneously, the amount of funding that Medicaid provides for the treatment of substance abuse has at least doubled since 2014, allowing it to serve nearly 5 million people, according to calculations by Tami Mark, a distinguished fellow in behavioral health at RTI International, a nonprofit independent research institute.
Even more fundamentally, Blumberg argues, the pandemic showed the ACA’s value as a safety net. Through either the exchanges or Medicaid, the law provided coverage to millions who lost their job, and insurance, during the crisis. “This law was critical in protecting us from unforeseen circumstances even beyond the value that people had seen in 2017,” she told me. “If we had not had that in place, we would have seen massive amounts of uninsurance and people who could not have accessed vaccines and could not have accessed medical care when they became sick.”
For all of these reasons and more, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the president of the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank, told me that he believes it’s a mistake for Trump and the GOP to seek repeal once again. Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, remains critical of the ACA, which he says has not done enough to improve the quality of coverage or control costs.
But, he points out, during the Trump years, Republicans succeeded in repealing some of the law’s elements that they disliked most, including the tax penalty on uninsured people who did not buy coverage. “I don’t think we should be happy with the current system,” Holtz-Eakin told me. “But it’s not fruitful to try to roll the clock back to 2010.”
Beyond the policy challenges of excising the ACA from the health-care system, the political landscape also appears less hospitable to a renewed repeal drive. In 2017, KFF polling found that the share of Americans who viewed the law favorably only slightly exceeded the share dubious of it; in the group’s most recent survey measuring attitudes toward the law, more than three-fifths of Americans expressed favorable views, while only slightly more than one-third viewed it negatively. Support for individual provisions in the law, such as the ban on denying coverage because of preexisting conditions or the requirement that insurers allow kids to stay on their parents’ plans through age 26, runs even higher in polls.
Yet even with all these obstacles, Trump’s promise to seek repeal again virtually ensures another round of the ACA war next year if Republicans win unified control of the federal government. By historical standards, that’s a remarkable, even unprecedented, prospect. Though Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP nominee, had opposed the creation of Medicare, for instance, no Republican presidential nominee ever proposed to repeal it after Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law in 1965.
If Trump wins the nomination, by contrast, it would mark the fourth consecutive time the GOP nominee has run on ending the ACA. (Among Trump’s main competitors, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has also promised to produce an alternative to the ACA, and Nikki Haley, who has spoken less definitively on the topic, might feel irresistible pressure to embrace repeal too.) Congressional Republicans may have been surprised that Trump committed them to charging up that hill again, but that doesn’t mean they would refuse his command to do so. “He wants to reverse a loss and take it off the books,” Dach told me. “And we’ve learned that that party follows him. It’s not like they are going to stand up against him, especially in the House. They will destroy the law if they can.”
When someone becomes homeless, the instinct is to ask what tragedy befell them. What bad choices did they make with drugs or alcohol? What prevented them from getting a higher-paying job? Why did they have more children than they could afford? Why didn’t they make rent? Identifying personal failures or specific tragedies helps those of us who have homes feel less precarious—if homelessness is about personal failure, it’s easier to dismiss as something that couldn’t happen to us, and harsh treatment is easier to rationalize toward those who experience it.
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But when you zoom out, determining individualized explanations for America’s homelessness crisis gets murky. Sure, individual choices play a role, but why are there so many more homeless people in California than Texas? Why are rates of homelessness so much higher in New York than West Virginia? To explain the interplay between structural and individual causes of homelessness, some who study this issue use the analogy of children playing musical chairs. As the game begins, the first kid to become chairless has a sprained ankle. The next few kids are too anxious to play the game effectively. The next few are smaller than the big kids. At the end, a fast, large, confident child sits grinning in the last available seat.
You can say that disability or lack of physical strength caused the individual kids to end up chairless. But in this scenario, chairlessness itself is an inevitability: The only reason anyone is without a chair is because there aren’t enough of them.
Now let’s apply the analogy to homelessness. Yes, examining who specifically becomes homeless can tell important stories of individual vulnerability created by disability or poverty, domestic violence or divorce. Yet when we have a dire shortage of affordable housing, it’s all but guaranteed that a certain number of people will become homeless. In musical chairs, enforced scarcity is self-evident. In real life, housing scarcity is more difficult to observe—but it’s the underlying cause of homelessness.
In their book, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, the University of Washington professor Gregg Colburn and the data scientist Clayton Page Aldern demonstrate that “the homelessness crisis in coastal cities cannot be explained by disproportionate levels of drug use, mental illness, or poverty.” Rather, the most relevant factors in the homelessness crisis are rent prices and vacancy rates.
Colburn and Aldern note that some urban areas with very high rates of poverty (Detroit, Miami-Dade County, Philadelphia) have among the lowest homelessness rates in the country, and some places with relatively low poverty rates (Santa Clara County, San Francisco, Boston) have relatively high rates of homelessness. The same pattern holds for unemployment rates: “Homelessness is abundant,” the authors write, “only in areas with robust labor markets and low rates of unemployment—booming coastal cities.”
Why is this so? Because these “superstar cities,” as economists call them, draw an abundance of knowledge workers. These highly paid workers require various services, which in turn create demand for an array of additional workers, including taxi drivers, lawyers and paralegals, doctors and nurses, and day-care staffers. These workers fuel an economic-growth machine—and they all need homes to live in. In a well-functioning market, rising demand for something just means that suppliers will make more of it. But housing markets have been broken by a policy agenda that seeks to reap the gains of a thriving regional economy while failing to build the infrastructure—housing—necessary to support the people who make that economy go. The results of these policies are rising housing prices and rents, and skyrocketing homelessness.
It’s not surprising that people wrongly believe the fundamental causes of the homelessness crisis are mental-health problems and drug addiction. Our most memorable encounters with homeless people tend to be with those for whom mental-health issues or drug abuse are evident; you may not notice the family crashing in a motel, but you will remember someone experiencing a mental-health crisis on the subway.
I want to be precise here. It is true that many people who become homeless are mentally ill. It is also true that becoming homeless exposes people to a range of traumatic experiences, which can create new problems that housing alone may not be able to solve. But the claim that drug abuse and mental illness are the fundamental causes of homelessness falls apart upon investigation. If mental-health issues or drug abuse were major drivers of homelessness, then places with higher rates of these problems would see higher rates of homelessness. They don’t. Utah, Alabama, Colorado, Kentucky, West Virginia, Vermont, Delaware, and Wisconsin have some of the highest rates of mental illness in the country, but relatively modest homelessness levels. What prevents at-risk people in these states from falling into homelessness at high rates is simple: They have more affordable-housing options.
With similar reasoning, we can reject the idea that climate explains varying rates of homelessness. If warm weather attracted homeless people in large numbers, Seattle; Portland, Oregon; New York City; and Boston would not have such high rates of homelessness and cities in southern states like Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi such low ones. (There is a connection between unsheltered homelessness and temperature, but it’s not clear which way the causal arrow goes: The East Coast and the Midwest have a lot more shelter capacity than the West Coast, which keeps homeless people more out of view.)
America has had populations of mentally ill, drug-addicted, poor, and unemployed people for the whole of its history, and Los Angeles has always been warmer than Duluth—and yet the homelessness crisis we see in American cities today dates only to the 1980s. What changed that caused homelessness to explode then? Again, it’s simple: lack of housing. The places people needed to move for good jobs stopped building the housing necessary to accommodate economic growth.
Homelessness is best understood as a “flow” problem, not a “stock” problem. Not that many Americans are chronically homeless—the problem, rather, is the millions of people who are precariously situated on the cliff of financial stability, people for whom a divorce, a lost job, a fight with a roommate, or a medical event can result in homelessness. According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, roughly 207 people get rehoused daily across the county—but 227 get pushed into homelessness. The crisis is driven by a constant flow of people losing their housing.
The homelessness crisis is most acute in places with very low vacancy rates, and where even “low income” housing is still very expensive. A study led by an economist at Zillow shows that when a growing number of people are forced to spend 30 percent or more of their income on rent, homelessness spikes.
Academics who study homelessness know this. So do policy wonks and advocacy groups. So do many elected officials. And polling shows that the general public recognizes that housing affordability plays a role in homelessness. Yet politicians and policy makers have generally failed to address the root cause of the crisis.
Few Republican-dominated states have had to deal with severe homelessness crises, mainly because superstar cities are concentrated in Democratic states. Some blame profligate welfare programs for blue-city homelessness, claiming that people are moving from other states to take advantage of coastal largesse. But the available evidence points in the opposite direction—in 2022, just 17 percent of homeless people reported that they’d lived in San Francisco for less than one year, according to city officials. Gregg Colburn and Clayton Aldern found essentially no relationship between places with more generous welfare programs and rates of homelessness. And abundantotherresearch indicates that social-welfare programs reduce homelessness. Consider, too, that some people move to superstar cities in search of gainful employment and then find themselves unable to keep up with the cost of living—not a phenomenon that can be blamed on welfare policies.
But liberalism is largely to blame for the homelessness crisis: A contradiction at the core of liberal ideology has precluded Democratic politicians, who run most of the cities where homelessness is most acute, from addressing the issue. Liberals have stated preferences that housing should be affordable, particularly for marginalized groups that have historically been shunted to the peripheries of the housing market. But local politicians seeking to protect the interests of incumbent homeowners spawned a web of regulations, laws, and norms that has made blocking the development of new housing pitifully simple.
This contradiction drives the ever more visible crisis. As the historian Jacob Anbinder has explained, in the ’70s and ’80s conservationists, architectural preservationists, homeowner groups, and left-wing organizations formed a loose coalition in opposition to development. Throughout this period, Anbinder writes, “the implementation of height limits, density restrictions, design review boards, mandatory community input, and other veto points in the development process” made it much harder to build housing. This coalition—whose central purpose is opposition to neighborhood change and the protection of home values—now dominates politics in high-growth areas across the country, and has made it easy for even small groups of objectors to prevent housing from being built. The result? The U.S. is now millions of homes short of what its population needs.
Los Angeles perfectly demonstrates the competing impulses within the left. In 2016, voters approved a $1.2 billion bond measure to subsidize the development of housing for homeless and at-risk residents over a span of 10 years. But during the first five years, roughly 10 percent of the housing units the program was meant to create were actually produced. In addition to financing problems, the biggest roadblock was small groups of objectors who didn’t want affordable housing in their communities.
Los Angeles isn’t alone. The Bay Area is notorious in this regard. In the spring of 2020, the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published an essay, “It’s Time to Build,” that excoriated policy makers’ deference to “the old, the entrenched.” Yet it turned out that Andreessen and his wife had vigorously opposed the building of a small number of multifamily units in the wealthy Bay Area town of Atherton, where they live.
The small-c conservative belief that people who already live in a community should have veto power over changes to it has wormed its way into liberal ideology. This pervasive localism is the key to understanding why officials who seem genuinely shaken by the homelessness crisis too rarely take serious action to address it.
The worst harms of the homelessness crisis fall on the people who find themselves without housing. But it’s not their suffering that risks becoming a major political problem for liberal politicians in blue areas: If you trawl through Facebook comments, Nextdoor posts, and tweets, or just talk with people who live in cities with large unsheltered populations, you see that homelessness tends to be viewed as a problem of disorder, of public safety, of quality of life. And voters are losing patience with their Democratic elected officials over it.
In a 2021 poll conducted in Los Angeles County, 94 percent of respondents said homelessness was a serious or very serious problem. (To put that near unanimity into perspective, just 75 percent said the same about traffic congestion—in Los Angeles!) When asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how unsafe “having homeless individuals in your neighborhood makes you feel,” 37 percent of people responded with a rating of 8 or higher, and another 19 percent gave a rating of 6 or 7. In Seattle, 71 percent of respondents to a recent poll said they wouldn’t feel safe visiting downtown Seattle at night, and 91 percent said that downtown won’t recover until homelessness and public safety are addressed. There are a lot of polls like this.
As the situation has deteriorated, particularly in areas where homelessness overruns public parks or public transit, policy makers’ failure to respond to the crisis has transformed what could have been an opportunity for reducing homelessness into yet another cycle of support for criminalizing it. In Austin, Texas, 57 percent of voters backed reinstating criminal penalties for homeless encampments; in the District of Columbia, 75 percent of respondents to a Washington Post poll said they supported shutting down “homeless tent encampments” even without firm assurances that those displaced would have somewhere to go. Poll data from Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles, among other places, reveal similarly punitive sentiments.
This voter exasperation spells trouble for politicians who take reducing homelessness seriously. Voters will tolerate disorder for only so long before they become amenable to reactionary candidates and measures, even in very progressive areas. In places with large unsheltered populations, numerous candidates have materialized to run against mainstream Democrats on platforms of solving the homelessness crisis and restoring public order.
By and large, the candidates challenging the failed Democratic governance of high-homelessness regions are not proposing policies that would substantially increase the production of affordable housing or provide rental assistance to those at the bottom end of the market. Instead, these candidates—both Republicans and law-and-order-focused Democrats—are concentrating on draconian treatment of people experiencing homelessness. Even in Oakland, California, a famously progressive city, one of the 2022 candidates for mayor premised his campaign entirely on eradicating homeless encampments and returning order to the streets—and managed to finish third in a large field.
During the 2022 Los Angeles mayoral race, neither the traditional Democratic candidate, Karen Bass, who won, nor her opponent, Rick Caruso, were willing to challenge the antidemocratic processes that have allowed small groups of people to block desperately needed housing. Caruso campaigned in part on empowering homeowners and honoring “their preferences more fully,” as Ezra Klein put it in The New York Times—which, if I can translate, means allowing residents to block new housing more easily. (After her victory, Bass nodded at the need to house more people in wealthier neighborhoods—a tepid commitment that reveals NIMBYism’s continuing hold on liberal politicians.)
“We’ve been digging ourselves into this situation for 40 years, and it’s likely going to take us 40 years to get out,” Eric Tars, the legal director at the National Homelessness Law Center, told me.
Building the amount of affordable housing necessary to stanch the daily flow of new people becoming homeless is not the project of a single election cycle, or even several. What can be done in the meantime is a hard question, and one that will require investment in temporary housing. Better models for homeless shelters arose out of necessity during the pandemic. Using hotel space as shelter allowed the unhoused to have their own rooms; this meant families could usually stay together (many shelters are gender-segregated, ban pets, and lack privacy). Houston’s success in combatting homelessness—down 62 percent since 2011—suggests that a focus on moving people into permanent supportive housing provides a road map to success. (Houston is less encumbered by the sorts of regulations that make building housing so difficult elsewhere.)
The political dangers to Democrats in those cities where the homelessness crisis is metastasizing into public disorder are clear. But Democratic inaction risks sparking a broader political revolt—especially as housing prices leave even many middle- and upper-middle-class renters outside the hallowed gates of homeownership. We should harbor no illusions that such a revolt will lead to humane policy change.
Simply making homelessness less visible has come to be what constitutes “success.” New York City consistently has the nation’s highest homelessness rate, but it’s not as much of an Election Day issue as it is on the West Coast. That’s because its displaced population is largely hidden in shelters. Yet since 2012, the number of households in shelters has grown by more than 30 percent—despite the city spending roughly $3 billion a year (as of 2021) trying to combat the problem. This is what policy failure looks like. At some point, someone’s going to have to own it.
This article appears in the January/February 2023 print edition with the headline “The Looming Revolt Over Homelessness.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
