The Daily Signal - Solving the Homelessness Problem in San Francisco

Episode Date: July 9, 2022

In this Saturday edition of the Daily Signal Podcast, Mary Theroux discusses her work of trying to improve the plight of the homeless in San Francisco with methods that attempt to heal the problems in their lives that have led them to such a condition. She notes that the Housing First policy approach that treats the homeless as if they just need housing doesn't work. Theroux observes "this one size fits all policy that the federal government is imposing, does not address the underlying issues. So people may get into housing, but they're still traumatized, they may still be addicted, they may still be suffering for mental illness. And so they'll likely fall out of housing. They're not prepared to live independently. Plus they may be living in an apartment complex with other people who have very serious problems, and it turns out to be a very unpleasant place to live. So they'll leave as the streets are better." We're going to need better solutions and this conversation highlights many of those. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to this special Saturday edition of the Daily Signal podcast. I'm Richard Reich, director of the Simon Center for American Studies. Today we're talking with Mary Thoreau, executive director of the Independent Institute, about a new documentary she directed called Beyond Homeless. Hello, this is Richard Reinch, and welcome to this Saturday edition of the Daily Signal podcast. Today I'm talking with Mary Thoreau about a new documentary she helped produce entitled Beyond homeless, finding hope. Mary Thoreau is chairman of the board of directors and chief executive officer of the Independent Institute. She is also managing director of Lightning Ventures LP,

San Francisco Bay Investment firm and vice president of the CSLewis Society. And she is also heavily involved with the Salvation Army in California. She has extensive business experience and writing experience and was formerly the president and the CEO of San Francisco. Grocery Express. Mary, thank you so much for coming out of the program. Thank you so much for inviting me. So, Mary, this documentary, Beyond Homeless, Finding Hope, focuses heavily on the homeless situation in San Francisco. There's been a lot of national press coverage of this problem in San Francisco from a

lot of different angles. I've read about it. I think, you know, people have read about different aspects of, you know, why there's a homeless situation, why it's so extensive, and also a lot of the fallout and negative externalities for the city of San Francisco. You've been in the Bay Area since the mid-1970s. How did you get interested in this problem? Well, I first got involved because of my involvement with the Salvation Army. I've been, I'm a former chair and I've been on the board of the San Francisco Salvation Army for, oh, I don't know,

about 25 years. And about four years ago, we did a strategic planning session. to look at where we could have a differentiated impact in the city and obviously honed in on homelessness as an area in which we thought we could have a very positive and large impact. We formed a little task force to work on it. We meet weekly and go through planning to redevelop the Salvation Army's properties to have residential long-term transformational. programming to take people from the street to achieve their full potentials. And as a researcher, I was tasked by the task force to provide some background information

on the causes of homelessness and, importantly, what seemed to be the better approaches and the worst approaches. And the more I looked into it, the less sense it made. San Francisco and California's spending on homelessness is gigantic and growing. Current city spending is estimated at $1.2 billion a year, and yet homelessness is exploding by double digits annually. San Francisco is sort of ground zero for homelessness, as you mentioned. If anybody's doing a story on homelessness, they just have to bring a camera crew to San Francisco going, they can virtually turn on their camera anywhere and capture the kinds of horrific images

that are in the documentary. So we figured if we could show how to impact a positively here, it could absolutely ripple across the country and hopefully transform the way that we approach homelessness across the country. When you came to the Bay Area in the mid-1970s, what did you see, what did you experience? How has the city changed, I mean, in many ways over the decades, but with regard to the homeless situation, did San Francisco become ground zero because local government, state government, incentivized it? When I came out here in the mid-70s, I just couldn't believe any place could be so beautiful and so full of optimism and hope and enterprise. I mean, it was just absolutely booming.

Everybody was coming into California. There was a lot of, there was a lot of sort of pride and native Californians, they'd tell you right away, oh, I'm a native Californian and so on, to differentiate themselves from all the, all of us who were coming in from all over the country. So it's been very shocking to watch the decline. And I, as you know, did I have had a business in San Francisco delivering groceries across the city in the 80s. And it was, again, it was just such a vibrant time. The city was so beautiful. Just seemed like the possibility of were endless. The tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco has always been something of where the drug trade, the sex trade, and the people who sleep in the street have kind of been concentrated.

In the 80s and 90s, the Salvation Army operated an emergency overnight shelter there, as did other places. Glide Church, which was portrayed in... in pursuit of happiness, importantly, and others. And we're meeting the needs pretty well. It wasn't that big of a problem. The problem really started, and it's not just local. It really was a shift in federal policy, which has had an outsized impact on localities, outsized to the amount of dollars, federal dollars that are involved.

But starting under the W. Bush administration, then really taking charge under Obama, there was a huge shift in policy around homelessness from shelter and transitional housing to what's called permanent supportive housing or housing first. And the theory there was, and again, the nomenclature also changed. Suddenly people were called homeless, which it wasn't called that before. So the theory was, well, they're homeless, so if you give them a home, you've solved the problem. The problem with tackling it with a housing first or permanent supportive approach is it takes the government a very long time to build new housing, which is not affordable. And especially here in California, where it's almost impossible to build anything.

And even though it's the government who wants to build these developments, they get bogged down. And then they're also incredible expensive. They range from a low of $500,000 per unit, and one unit generally holds one person. Wow. Up to current developments that are running $900,000 per unit. So it's incredibly expensive. They take years, I mean, literally seven to eight years to come online. So there's not very much of it.

And meanwhile, the streets are the waiting room. There are no more shelters or very few shelters, transitional houses. transitional housing got a bad name, so has been largely abandoned. So that's really what's led to the explosion of homelessness here and increasingly across the country. It's driven by this very bad federal policy that needs to be revised. So is this coming through, HUD? Yes, yeah. Okay.

And the idea being if you build homes, that's a compassionate move and we'll remove them from the streets. But what do we know? I mean, I mean, help us understand who are the homeless? What are their, what's their lifestyle? What are things that are rendering them homeless? Well, that was probably the most eye-opening thing of making the documentary. Let me just back up. So independent institute decided to do a policy report on the issue as we found it to be so much more complex than is generally banted about. I mean, everybody's, a lot of people say, oh, it's just, a problem of housing, where other people say, oh, it's just a problem of addiction or mental illness or so on. And the more we looked into it, we realized, no, it's, yes, it is those things, but it's many other things as well. And importantly, we wanted to include in our policy report, which is forthcoming as a book, Beyond Homeless, Transformative Solutions for the Bay Area and Beyond. To include solutions. So that was a very important.

part of the project and then subsequently the documentary. We decided, well, you know, books and policy reports are very important. You need to have that authority with which to go forth and propose policy changes. But we also wanted the general public and the culture to understand who the homeless are and why people have become homeless and so on and felt that a short documentary was the best approach to that. And somehow or another, I ended up being the host of it and doing the on-the-ground research and interviews and learned so much. And basically what I learned is there are about as many reasons for becoming homeless as there are individuals who are experiencing homelessness. There are incredible stories. The stories I was told by people of really horrific childhoods,

Childhood trauma is a huge driver of homelessness. And I just came to the conclusion that, you know, there but for the grace of God, go I. I was fortunate to be loved and wanted. And so many people in our country are just suffering from not being loved, not being wanted, and growing up in violent and traumatic experiences. So that's a huge driver. And then childhood trauma also drives mental illness and, of course, addiction. There's also economic, certainly there are people who are suffering from economic stepbacks that become homeless, families and so on, and then there are veterans who also are similarly traumatized.

So there are a lot of reasons, and this one-size-fits-all policy that the federal government is imposing does not address the underlying issues. So people may get into housing, but they're still traumatized. these may still be addicted, they may still be suffering for mental illness. And so they'll likely fall out of housing. They're not prepared to live independently. Plus, they may be living in an apartment complex with other people who have very serious problems, and it turns out to be a very unpleasant place to live. So they'll leave as the streets are better.

The name Housing First and permanent supportive housing implies that they're going to provide services, you know, support, provide the kind of recovery and mental illness and life skills training and workforce development that is needed for people to get back on their feet, but the services are not provided. So it's just a vicious circle. Social workers call it a washing machine where people go between the streets and programs and housing and back into the streets. And it's just a spiraling crisis here in California. And increasingly across the country. In terms of, so we've talked about building homes, and that doesn't seem to work,

what are the other sort of major policy solutions that the city of San Francisco or other cities have thrown at this problem? And I asked us, you know, you focus on San Francisco in the documentary. Homelessness is obviously a rising concern in many large cities. I'm in Washington. It's, you know, being in the city pre-COVID versus post-COVID seems dramatically different. A lot of that is, you know, the homeless population seems to have swelled. It seems to be pervasive throughout the country.

What do you make of this growing problem? Well, nobody's doing anything to help people transform their lives. So as part of the project, again, we were looking for solutions. I went around the country and visited a lot of programs, and they're really wonderful programs almost everywhere. But generally speaking, they're helping, you know, 20 people or 100 people or, or, one segment of the population. And the only place I found in the whole country that's solving the problem on a community-wide basis at scale is San Antonio, Texas, which interestingly did the exact opposite of the rest of the country almost simultaneously with the shift in policy,

nationwide policy to Housing First. By a coincidence in 2005, 2006, an oil man in San Antonio saw a news program on homelessness in San Antonio. The week before, the mayor had given his state of the city address and had raised the growing specter of homelessness as a challenge to the community to help. So the day after the oil man saw the special report on homelessness, he called up the mayor whose election he had opposed. So it's kind of an interesting dynamic there and said, you know, are you serious about wanting

to do something about homelessness? And the mayor said, yes, I am. And so the oil man said, well, I want to help. So the mayor immediately appointed him chairman of a task force. And they brought in, you know, community activists, represented from the public sector, the nonprofit sector and so on. They spent two years studying programs around the country and coming with a strategic, well-designed,

total comprehensive approach called Haven for Hope that opened in 2010. And again, at a time when the rest of the country was going to housing first, San Antonio and Haven for Hope went to transformational residential programming with the service recovery, life skills training, workforce development, and so on, that address the root causes of homelessness, and the results have been stark.

Downtown San Antonio, who has seen a decline in its unsheltered homeless by 77 percent, at time that the city of San Francisco's numbers have gone up by 80 percent. County-wide, Barrett County, where San Antonio is located, has gone down by. 11% whereas the rest of the country has just exploded it. So it's a very stark, real-world contrast of two policies. I think the results speak for themselves. So one question I had watching the documentary about the San Antonio situation is, who funded that?

And what was the cost? And also, you know, the success, is it hard to replicate? Was it something about the community in San Antonio and leadership and, you know, moving outside of the, you know, federal state policy nexus that it's just it's hard to get people to think at that level? Yes. All of those are great points. So the campus of Haven for Hope cost $100 million when it was built in 2010. 60 million of it was raised privately to build the buildings. and the city bought the land for about $30, $35 million.

$100 million is kind of a flash in the pan for most communities these days and what's spent on homelessness. At any given time, they have 1,700 people on campus, and again, it's a total community solution. Yes, it did take civic leadership that's unique, and that's one of the challenges. we're facing here in San Francisco is looking for who can be our civic leaders who could lead an initiative such as this and have the political will. The biggest challenge is not the money. The biggest challenge is getting everybody to work together. And Haven brought every nonprofit in the city that works with the homeless into its orbit and they all work together. They didn't want to. as is natural.

They all feared that, oh, you know, if I become part of this overall thing, I'm going to lose my donors. I'm going to lose my autonomy and so on. There was a certain amount of pressure that was brought to bear. The oil man had been very philanthropic and he told his causes that they needed to be part of this. And then, of course, the city also said, who cities find a lot of non-reuthers. And they also said, look, you have to be a part of this. Ten years later, all of the agencies involved are singing its praise. They all are doing better than they were.

They're achieving their missions. They're thriving. They love it. Yeah. But here in San Francisco, we face, you know, the problem where in the documentary, as you may have noticed, everybody talks about how siloed the city is with the city not talking to nonprofits, nonprofits not talking to one another. and they just play whack-a-mole, they just throw, as I said, $1.2 billion around.

Apparently, they're funding up to 600 different nonprofits in the city. There's no coordination. There's no strategy. It's just let's throw more money over here. Let's throw more money over there. And the problem is the results speak for themselves. We have huge growing numbers of homelessness. And more importantly, it's just a tragic situation.

the conditions under which people are living either in the street or in the housing that the city is providing for them are third world or worse. You know, many people would say a progressive answer would be, and we've been talking about this, but just the, you know, the economy. And, of course, we've been saying, we've been talking about how building new homes doesn't do anything, but that there's something unjust about Americans, America's economy that leads to a homeless problem in situation. I was going to ask, and I'm sure you've thought about this, it seems that in San Francisco, maybe other cities, Seattle comes to mind with the pervasive homeless problem. Is there now sort of a public interest or a public choice problem that the bureaucracies are now funded by the government? the government bureaucracies have their own preferences and they're just sort of baked into this path for largely self-interested reasons and can't conceive a new way to think about this problem. And they're not going to be rewarded or incentivized for doing that either. Yeah, that's absolutely the case.

There are a lot of vested interests who have a lot to lose by changing their narrative. I think they're all well-meaning people. They think what they're doing is the right approach. It's almost a religion. Housing First is literally almost a religion. Under the Trump administration, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness

released a study called Beyond the Toolbox, which was expanding the toolbox, which was proposing, you know, adding other approaches to the housing first, adding transitional housing, adding shelter, adding recovery services, and so on. And the response by sort of the homeless vested interest was there was a five-minute video they released and literally about all they said was studies show that housing first helps everybody.

And studies don't show that housing first helps everybody. In fact, studies increasingly show the opposite. They show that people in Housing First die. at a higher rate than people who stay unhoused. And that for every person you house, you have multiple others who become unhoused and so on. But it's just this dogma. And all you do is repeat the mantra of housing first helps everybody.

The good news and the reason I'm optimistic is that that viewpoint is changing. A couple of years ago when we were really starting to have conversations around the redevelopment that the Salvation Army is planning in San Francisco to again offer transformational residential programming to help people achieve their full potential. You'd be in conversations with people from other agencies and talk about recovery and people would just gasp and think it was just dreadful

that you were thinking about taking adults and suggesting that they ought not be addicted. It's just that it's a civil right to use drugs, and adults have a choice to use drugs, and the harm reduction approach, which is what the status quo model is, is to make using drugs safer. So you give people clean needles. You give people information on how to smoke fentanyl safely. You pass out Narcan widely so that if somebody is overdosing, you can reverse their overdose. But recovery was a dirty word. Increasingly, recovery is in the conversations.

The other thing was that anything other than permanent supportive housing, if you talked about building shelter, or especially if you talked about building transitional or transformational housing, it was this, oh, no, we need permanent supportive housing, we need permanent supportive housing. We need permanent supportive housing. And increasingly, there's an openness to, well, that's not meeting the needs. And yes, maybe we ought to,

to be having shelters, tiny homes, transitional housing, and other. So I'm very optimistic about the fact that this has, this dialogue has opened up beyond the very narrow housing first harm reduction only. And again, I'm not saying housing first should be abandoned, but it should be used by, used for the people for whom it's appropriate. But a lot of people need a lot of services to ready them for being in. housing on their own. And we need to be providing those services. That sounds, as you say, recovery is now back in the conversation.

I mean, that just sounds insane to me. I know. I mean, I'm a hard-headed conservative. And so I think, yeah, of course. And we actually, it's because we believe in the dignity of the human person that we want them to recover. We don't want to watch them slow cook themselves to death on drugs. And we assume people have some elevators.

of choice. And with the right help, encouragement, you know, training, healing, they could turn away from that addiction. In the documentary, you have a really hard-hitting interview with Dr. Drew, Dr. Drew Penske, and he describes the addiction as I would like to kill myself, but if I kill myself, I can't get high on drugs. That's how intense it is. That's what you're, that's what you're dealing with. So when people talk, again, when you're talking to somebody, an advocate for people staying on being allowed to stay on drugs. Again, you're saying, well, adults make choices, but if you're addicted, you're not able to make a choice. Again, as you allude to the interview with Dr. Drew, you've become you're a slave to the drugs.

So you're not making a choice. Have you, I mean, when you think about, so this use drugs safely. and sort of like the methadone clinics or things like that. Has that been a pervasive part then of San Francisco's approach? And I assume in the other cities. Yeah, the problem is the methadone clinic is in the middle of the tenderloin. So you go in for your methadone. You come out and the sidewalk is lined with dealers, with fentanyl dealers.

So there you are, you know, trying to go through recovery. Wow. It's not very conducive to staying the course. Another question. You hear a common observation made, particularly after one of these mass shootings, so different from homeless, but also you hear it in conversation with the homeless problem. And that is the decision made in the 1960s called deinstitutionalization that mental hospitals themselves should be vastly reduced. It should be hard to commit people to hold them because of reasons of individual autonomy. And many will say, what if we increased bed space for mental hospitals?

Do you see that as part of a comprehensive solution? We absolutely need more mental health options in this country. So, yes, it's true. In 1963, JFK signed the Act to defund state, closed state mental hospitals. His own sister had been committed to one, and then he had an advisor who had spent a summer working in one. and admittedly, a lot of these state hospitals were not, were snake pits. They were not good places. And so it wasn't an entirely bad decision to close them down.

The problem is that no provision was made for the people who had been in them. So they were released into the community with no care and largely did become homeless. We continue now, you know, this is 50 years, almost 60 years, later, to not have facilities. I've talked to countless mothers whose adult children are mentally ill, and they can't get them care. And so their adult children are homeless in danger of dying, and their mothers can do nothing. There are no facilities for them. There's not, I talked to another person who works for the city of San Francisco as a psychiatrist that says caselet of 5,000 people. You know, it's just ridiculous.

And we need outpatient and inpatient facilities available. Europe certainly has let the way on this, and they've largely eliminated their street drug and insane asylum scenes, which we have here in the United States, and we need to do the same. Not everybody has to be, you know, we do have to be very careful about whether people are committed, it or not, you have to have extreme checks on committing people, but many people, given the chance, will gladly avail themselves of facilities that help them feel better. And for the very few that will need custodial care, again, we can develop good checks that there are constant

tests of, you know, is this person ready to live under their own recognizance and care? Yeah. I ask that question, too, just like my anecdotal experiences with the homeless population in different cities. I mean, what I see is just I see mental illness. Yeah. First and I know the addiction and other things are there, but I see mental illness just very evident when I'm walking around. I'm a child of, well, of the 60s and so on, and I certainly wouldn't advocate drug prohibition, but drugs have gotten so much more strong. The marijuana of the 1960s now is a very strong, almost hallucinogenic drug, and it causes psychosis, especially in young people. And that's what people don't understand. Oh, well, marijuana is legal, therefore, you know, it must be okay to use.

And it isn't. We need to have a strong educational campaign going on similar to what was done with cigarettes and so on to make people understand that just because it's legal doesn't mean it's safe. And it's certainly not safe for young people. It does put young people, especially into psychosis. And the other drugs, of course, do the same thing. So there's a very strong link between drug use and mental illness. And then again, there's a huge link between trauma and mental illness, whether it's childhood trauma or trauma as an adult, perhaps severe illness, and so on. So it's all wrapped up together, and it needs to be. So it's all wrapped up together, and it needs to be addressed strategically and effectively to solve them, to reverse this crisis.

In terms of the crisis, I mean, what is it like? What is a person, you know, working in downtown San Francisco experience? What you hear is it's just very evident and manifest, and there's really no getting around it if you're working in San Francisco or Seattle is another city that comes to mind. Yeah, again, it used to be very constrained to like the tenderling neighborhood. So a lot of people were willing to turn a blind eye to it because, well, you just don't get at the tenderline. But now, I mean, it's literally everywhere. It's in every neighborhood. And it's just sad.

It's tragic. You walk down the sidewalk and there might be somebody who's writhing naked under a sheet saying something like, please don't pour water on me. I'm just having totally mentally ill. Other people just walking around talking to themselves, screaming, welding knives. We have a lot of violence from people experiencing homelessness who are not of their right minds. There are needles everywhere. There's human waste everywhere. And, you know, in their defense, yeah, if you don't have people, places, facilities for people to use, then the street's the only option. and they say, well, what are we supposed to do? There's no place for us to be able to have our hygiene. San Francisco used to be widely acknowledged as the most beautiful, one of the, if not the most beautiful city in the world. And now it's just a total wreck.

And we've destroyed our tourism. But most importantly, we're abandoning thousands of human beings to lives you wouldn't wish on your dog. Yeah. And thinking about, I mean, just something that I wondered, I mean, this is San Francisco, Silicon Valley, tech companies, the innovation, the entrepreneurship. Do you see a connection or sort of a detachment or aloofness of California elites from a homeless problem? And the way they try and make a connection is to like the spending, the government spending, but an inability to actually do. deal with people or, you know, engage in the real work of helping people because of what that would require, you know, that sort of peer-to-peer interaction instead of focusing on a progressive egalitarian solution.

Yeah, unfortunately, a lot of the people in Silicon Valley, contrary to the sort of entrepreneurial ethos, carry with them the mainstream narrative that this is something that the government can and should be taken care of. We had a very bizarre episode here a few years ago where Mark Benioff, the billionaire founder of Salesforce, put his weight behind a ballot proposition called Prop C, which would tax his own industry, very rich tech companies in San Francisco, to raise an additional $300 million a year to address homelessness. So here's the billionaire backing a tax on himself. And meanwhile, the progressive mayor, London Breed, is out saying, no, no, don't do this. We're not accounting for the money we have well currently. And this will cost jobs that our city needs.

So it was like this looking glass world where the progressive mayor is saying, no, don't pass the tax. And the businessman is saying pass the tax. Well, unfortunately, it passed. And so now, yeah, there's another $300 million a year, and so far the results are not in. So it's a mixed-up narrative. Again, I think there's cracks starting to appear in that. And we're very hopeful that we can build some coalitions around adding very important aspects to our homelessness environment to effectively address the root causes and get people trans. formed.

I mean, I guess, and also, when we think about the housing first policy, so there's substantial federal dollars coming in to local, to the state and local budgets in California. I assume if they embrace that policy. The funny thing is, is it's not the majority of the funding, and it has an outsourced, outsized impact, but the state has embraced it fully and the city has embraced it fully. the Fed dollars really are not the biggest driver of it. It's more that this theory took hold and has been widely embraced. I mean, it sounds great.

Yes, people are homeless, so give them housing. But it's turned out not to work. Yeah, that sounds like it. I mean, just overall learning, I mean, you interviewed a gentleman from the Salvation Army. So how, I mean, I take. it that there's not a lot of discussion or learning on this problem, it seems, in terms of what nonprofits are doing that's successful and how that could be scaled. And you talk about the San Antonio approach, yet I didn't see you in the document or hear

you talk about other cities taking on the San Antonio approach. And it does make you wonder where the discussion and dialogue is happening about solutions. It's funny because literally scores of cities and delegations from across the country have toured Haven. Haven is very generous about welcoming people to visit and sharing with them everything they've learned over the past 12 years and doing everything they can to encourage others to replicate their model. And nobody so far has done it. And I think it's just, again, it's the vested interest cannot give up their power and their money. It really requires Haven for Hope is an independent 501C3. Yes, the city's involved. Yes, every nonprofit agency in the city is almost involved. The police,

the fire, EMS, the business community, they have a thousand volunteers on campus a month and so on. It's really a community-wide solution, and they all work together very effectively. And most places, I think, are as San Francisco. We're in these silos where we don't want to give up, our little fiefdoms. most of the nonprofits in San Francisco and other cities that are dealing with the homeless, they're doing so under government contracts. They do what the contract tells them to do. They take the approach that the contract is written of, even if people on the ground know

this is not the most effective way we could be helping the homeless, but it's what they can get money to do. And it's, you know, this government funding of nonprofits is really corrupted our philanthropic sector so much. And when you go to raise money, so we've decided here in San Francisco with the Salvation Army that we're probably going to have to fund this huge initiative privately, which I'm all for because I don't want us to do it the way we know is right versus the way that the government is funding.

But when you go to private funders and start talking to them, they want to know is the government involved. You know, why? I think competition is good. We need different models, and then we can see who's producing the better outcomes. Very few people. The government is certainly not measuring outcomes. When you ask the city of San Francisco what they're doing, they tell you about all their outputs.

Well, we have X people working on this. We're spending X dollars. We're handing out Y numbers of NARCAN and so on and so forth. It's nothing about what they're achieving. achieving. And we have to start measuring and rewarding those who actually do help people versus good intentions. These nonprofits being funded by the government, they would have no incentive to think hard about what they're doing, ask themselves if they're meeting any objectives, and retool

because that could actually cause them to lose the grant. Yeah. And again, they're not trying to be corrupted. It's just that, you know, slowly but surely that's what happens. Well, this is what we have funding for. This is the program we're doing. Let's concentrate on doing this program as well as we can. And you never step back and really think about it. Is this the best program we could be offering to produce the results that align with our mission?

And I have firsthand experience with this in the late 90s. The San Francisco Salvation Army lost all of its government funding. and we'd been doing a lot of programming under government contracts, including meals on wheels and an emergency shelter and a detox program and so on. And because of politics, all that funding went away. And I saw this is a great opportunity. Let's regroup, look at what we should be doing, and then go out to the community and attract the private support we need to do it.

And we were highly successful. We redid all of our programs to do them much, job in serving the community. But it's so easy when you're a nonprofit struggling to get funding, and there's the government saying, hey, we've got a 25 million grant, you want to apply for it? And it's just so easy for a development officer to go, hey, look, free money. Let's go get it. So it's a terrible, terrible problem.

And we really have to, this is beyond the purview of this conversation, I know, but it really disturbs me. Well, it affects so many areas throughout our civil society. As we close, thinking about the documentary beyond homeless, what is something you've learned and researching and putting this documentary together about homelessness that you want other people to know? The biggest thing I've learned is, again, it's an individual problem. People experiencing homelessness are individuals. They have individual stories. And they just, serve individual care. That is not being provided to them, and the fact that it's not being provided to them is the reason why we have exploding numbers of homelessness. We have a terrible problem

with families in this country. We are traumatizing children instead of nurturing them, and that's getting worse and worse as we pile on all of this ideological baggage instead of taking care of nurturing and loving children and making them know that life has purpose. and they can achieve things in life and they can overcome challenges. The second thing that's very important is that individuals are powerful in coming up with solutions. In San Antonio was literally this one businessman who sparked a movement and working with a mayor who, again, was not his political friend. They came together in common cause to resolve. their community's problem. And that's the very Tochvillean tradition that this country was built on,

and we need to restore that tradition of where we understand we don't have to relegate these problems to the government to solve, which they're not solving. We can come together and we can brainstorm and we can use our ingenuity to come up with solutions that work in our neighborhood, in our city. And that's what we're starting to do in San Francisco. We're having meetings with neighborhood groups, people in San Francisco who chose not to leave the city, as so many do it, are mad and they're energized and they want to get involved. And that's exactly what we need to have happen is get people involved, come together, use our brain power and our talents to solve these problems. Mary Thoreau, thank you so much for joining us and for this

documentary, Beyond Homeless, Finding Hope. We appreciate it so much. much. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this Saturday edition of the Daily Signal podcast. We will be back again Monday with a new edition. If you like this podcast, please rate us and vote us up wherever you listen to podcast. Thank you. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. The executive producers are Rob Blewey and Kay Trinko. Producers are Virginia Allen and Doug Blair. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. For more information, please visit DailySignal.com.