The Globe Interviews Michael Shellenberger: What Are The Real Causes of Homelessness?

Homelessness is a big problem in California, probably more so than in any other state. Californians make up about 10 percent of the U.S. population, but half of all unsheltered people in the U.S. live in California. Images of sprawling homeless encampments in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, which are dominated by Democrat politics, are commonplace on social media. Even legacy media, which is in the habit of making excuses for Democrat policies and politicians, has begun admitting that Democrat-led efforts to “combat homelessness” do not appear to be working.

Attempts by Nevada Democrats to “fix” homelessness have resulted in millions of dollars of spending, at the expense of seniors, veterans, and taxpayers.

The Las Vegas Democratic Socialists of America (LVDSA) supported and advocated for a Homeless Bill of Rights, and their comrades in the Nevada legislature submitted Senate Bill 142 to meet their demands.

State Democratic Senators Melanie Scheible, Edgar Flores, Skip Daly, Roberta Lange, Dallas Harris, and Fabian Doñate sponsored the legislation.

One of the most eloquent and persuasive critics of “progressive” attitudes toward homelessness has been Michael Shellenberger, a longtime resident of the Bay Area and the author of the 2021 book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, which asserts that rampant homelessness has less to do with “housing shortages” and more to do with widespread and untreated substance abuse. Mr. Shellenberger once identified with the progressive movement but has since become a critic of it more broadly, and he has written books, including Apocalypse Never, that challenge the claims of the contemporary environmentalist movement. Today, he writes about a variety of topics, primarily on Public, a site he founded.

In this exclusive interview with The Nevada Globe, Shellenberger discussed homelessness, the true causes of it, advice to lawmakers, and “woke bullshit.”

You seem passionate about a lot of subjects. You’ve written books about the environment and about urban decay. Lately, you’ve been writing about government censorship on Public. Are you some kind of polymath who is interested in many different things, or is there a unifying theme that binds your work?

You’re very nice. I’m not smart enough to be a polymath. But there is definitely a unifying theme throughout my work, and it’s the defense of humanity and civilization.

If you love humankind, you have to love civilization, and I think civilization is being undermined from within. It’s being undermined by elites, and in very specific ways on things like cheap energy, meritocracy, law and order, and free speech. Those things are foundational to civilization, and civilization is foundational to human wellbeing. So that’s the big question for me: why are the people who benefit the most from civilization doing the most to undermine it?

Some of your work is associated with California and the policies that haven’t worked there. Are you monitoring the ways in which other states are imitating California’s policies?

Yes. Unfortunately, California continues to lead the way in a lot of trends, including bad trends. It had led the way in positive trends, like higher education, but now it’s leading in some very negative trends, including enabling open-air drug use, enabling shoplifting, soft-on-crime policies, attacks on meritocracy, attacks on equal justice before the law… It’s happening through Soros funding for particular policy makers, including district attorneys and governors. It’s also happening through the culture—there is a slackening of the stoic values that turned out to be really important for maintaining civilization, like some sense of social norms. I’m very worried about it.

Editor’s note: Since the Democratic majority, led by Speaker Steve Yeager, passed Assembly Bill 236 in 2019, the Silver State has seen a 15 percent increase in property crimes and a staggering 39 percent increase in drug-store thefts on the Las Vegas Strip. At the time, Attorney General Aaron Ford was “intimately involved” and enthusiastically backed the bill that overhauled Nevada’s criminal justice system. The bill raised the threshold for felony theft from $650 worth of stolen goods to $1,200. In California, the threshold is $950.

Something that you’d read about with increasing frequency here in Vegas is the issue of homelessness. Many people are noticing the rise of it, and it’s prompting the usual debates about what causes it.

It’s driven by drug addiction and mental illness, and it always has been. The left has lied about that since the 1980s, attempting to conflate it with housing shortages. But people who are on the streets are there because they’ve lied, stolen, and cheated from family and friends. They quit their jobs because they’re addicted to drugs, unable to work, unable to pay the rent. That’s why they live on the street. If you can’t afford the rent because you lost your job, but you don’t have an underlying mental illness or drug problem, you go live with family and friends, or you get a cheaper apartment, or you move out of state, or you get Section 8 housing. You don’t go pitch a tent on the street. Those are open air drug scenes.

The lies that have been told about that fundamental reality have been most devastating for the addicts and the homeless, who are dying on the streets: 112,000 drug overdose and poisoning deaths last year, up from 20,000 in the year 2000. It’s the worst medical mistreatment scandal in human history, that so many people are dying from a totally preventable psychiatric disorder, substance use disorder. For me, it’s a moral crime—I have a hard time even writing and thinking about it, because I am so angry about it.

What would you say to Nevada lawmakers, and ordinary people everywhere, who have to deal with this issue?

Addiction is not that complicated—we’ve understood addiction for 150 years. People lose control over their behaviors. They have to be in mandated rehabilitation in order to get into recovery. Millions of people recover from addiction every year, but there’s a small percentage of people whose addiction is so bad that they have to have mandated care in order to get better. Otherwise, they’re going to end up dead on the streets.

You said that civilization is changing. We’re here at FreedomFest, talking about the importance of freedom in society. What do you make of the current appetite for freedom in this country?

It’s declining. If you go look at students in elite colleges, they think free speech is a right-wing thing.

Is it?

Of course not. If you read the history of free speech in the United States, it’s a history of the persecution of the left and socialists, mostly. So this idea that free speech is a right-wing value is completely ridiculous, historically. But, it doesn’t matter. We have to teach young people the benefits of free speech and the value of free speech. They weren’t taught that. They were taught all sorts of woke bullshit. And now we’re going to have to deprogram millions of Americans who have been brainwashed into thinking that freedom is somehow bad for humankind.

Any sign that things are looking up?

Yes. The culture is in a full-scale backlash against wokeism. Only a tiny percentage of people, like 15 or 20 percent of the population, really enjoys that woke bullshit. Most people hate it. So we just need to push back against it. And I think, in the process of doing that, we will reaffirm a basic commitment to human dignity, decency, and free speech.