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Why does it always seem like the more the left spends on housing the “unhoused,” the worse the situation gets?

New York City is now spending about $81,700 per homeless person per year, yet the numbers continue to rise. So, it begs the question: Where is the money going?

According to Fox News:

New York City has more than tripled spending on unsheltered homelessness since 2019, shelling out nearly $368 million even as the number of people living on the streets continued to rise, according to a state comptroller’s report.

The city’s own numbers show the unsheltered population grew from 3,588 in fiscal year 2019 to 4,504 in fiscal year 2025, a 26% increase from pre-pandemic levels. Over that same period, spending on services for the unsheltered jumped 262%, from $102 million to nearly $368 million.

That works out to roughly $81,700 per unsheltered person in FY 2025 — slightly more than the city’s median household income, though the comparison is only a broad benchmark since public spending and household earnings are not directly comparable.

If you thought there was no way the city could be any worse than Los Angeles, you thought wrong.

Los Angeles, the city with the next-largest homeless population, has about 71,000 homeless people, roughly half of New York City’s 2024 total, and about 70% of them are unsheltered. In New York City, by contrast, nearly 97% of the homeless population is in shelters.

Common sense would tell you that whatever the city is doing with that money, it is not working. Clearly, though, sense is not so common among New York City officials.

This would not be as infuriating if the City put at least a dent in the problem, but it is only growing. How much of this cash is actually going towards fixing the problem, and how much is going into the pockets of NGOs?

According to the Heritage Foundation, homelessness is just a symptom of the problem. The “Housing First” approach does not help anyone, as the issue is not a lack of housing. The organization claims that “Treatment-first approaches are more successful at improving the well-being of homeless people by reducing drug use and increasing employment stability.”

The organization also added that housing programs often have no barriers to entry. Subsequently, this “means providing permanent housing without any conditions, such as meeting sobriety requirements, participating in drug treatment, engaging in mental health counseling, or participating in job training.”

In other words, you can still get free housing if you continue using crack. And if the problem is the crack and not a lack of housing, it would seem obvious that housing crack heads does not do much to fix the alleged “housing” problem.

You don't have to be a genius to understand that rewarding this behavior does society no favors, especially the ones the left pretends to help.

So, while many New Yorkers struggle to make ends meet in one of the most expensive cities in the world, the government is filling the pockets of NGOs through bogus “housing first” programs, which makes the problem 10 times worse.

Again, it would be one thing if the city were actually helping these people and solving the problem, but it is not, as it enables bad behavior while emboldening organizations that do nothing to make anyone better off. This, combined with the fact that the city is considering raising property taxes because it failed to balance the budget, proves just how incompetent city officials truly are. Rather than clean up their act, they want you to throw more money at failed policies that are destroying a great city. To call this pure insanity would be an understatement.

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