LAs Skid Row a painful monument to failure of Housing First policy
Skid Row in Los Angeles stands as a stark example of what happens when ideology overrides reality. Spanning roughly fifty blocks, it is one of the most concentrated homeless zones in the United States, filled with people trapped in addiction and untreated, severe mental illness, often marked by psychosis — a loss of contact with reality.For years, Los Angeles has wrapped its homelessness policies in the language of empathy and housing justice.But Skid Row reveals a harsher truth.What exists there is not simply poverty.
It is a concentration of addiction, untreated mental illness, disorder, and human collapse in one of America’s most visible zones of urban breakdown.Los Angeles has embraced Housing First, a model that places people in permanent housing without requiring sobriety, treatment, or stability first.The goal was to remove barriers to shelter.
But housing alone is not enough for people in the depths of addiction or severe mental illness.Without structure, expectations, or consequences, Housing First too often becomes a system that manages dysfunction instead of confronting it.
A key is not treatment.A voucher is not recovery.
An apartment is not a cure for psychosis.I saw this firsthand when I accompanied Jonathan Choe of Discovery Institute to interview “Egg God,” a tenant who became infamous for posting videos of himself destroying his apartment.He mocked local authorities because he knew how difficult it would be to evict him.
That was not just an outrageous episode.It was a glimpse of a system too weak to demand change and too ideological to admit when it is failing.Jonathan and I documented what too many officials and advocates prefer to explain away.The danger is immediate.
Meth and crack are common, and unlike fentanyl, stimulants often fuel paranoia, volatility, and sudden violence.Add severe, untreated mental illness, compress it into a relatively small area, and the result is chaos.
Many people carry knives, pipes, or other mak...