Housing and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation: Thoughts and Questions

Housing and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (full series)
Pharmaceuticals and Propositions | Housing the Homeless?
The Ideology of Homelessness | Thoughts and Questions

Thoughts and Questions

Proposition 34 was a referendum on the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s activism. While the details of its implementation will play out over the coming months, the bottom line is this: Using vast proceeds from a federal drug program, the foundation spent over $100 million in ostensibly charitable dollars to bankroll three futile (and distinctly political) ballot measures pushing rent control. California voters decided that they’d had enough, and that they’d prefer that health care charities focus on providing health care. For those concerned about the role the charitable sector currently plays in our politics, this is an entirely understandable and welcome outcome.

On top of that, there is a general economic consensus that rent control makes the very problem that the foundation says it is trying to solve even worse, especially in the long run. America does indeed need more affordable housing—and a lot of it—particularly in the expensive coastal urban centers where homelessness is most acute. The question is how to get there? Some on the left such as Weinstein and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation broadly see the answer in stricter government constraints: restrictions on rent, restrictions on new developments, etc. The real solution, of course, is to do exactly the opposite: remove these (and other) regulatory impediments so that the market is free to build according to housing demand.

Putting aside Proposition 34 and the public policy questions precipitating it, the foundation’s vast spending on rent control ballot measures also carries an opportunity cost. For instance, could that money have helped fund needed social services for the residents of its low-income housing projects? Homelessness is a complex issue with multiple contributing causes, and the charitable sector certainly should be trying to find innovative and effective ways to house the unhoused—especially when the local government’s efforts are an unaccountable disaster. This is the very purpose of civil society. That said, mental illness and substance abuse are the dual elephants in the room. Any approach to homelessness (whether under the Housing First banner or otherwise) that does not incorporate service interventions for those who need them would seem to be setting itself—and more importantly, the people it is trying to help—up for failure.

The rhetoric of some prominent national homelessness advocacy groups tends to speak of the issue as a systemic societal harm inflicted upon the unhoused, generally with private-sector capitalism as the chief villain. This is consistent with the worldview of a left-progressive activist, but it minimizes the individual personal struggles that are (by all indications) significant contributing factors to the very problem these groups are trying to solve. Acknowledging this disconnect is not about assigning blame or “stigma” for someone’s homelessness, it’s about understanding the best way to help.