Homelessness Is Not a "Blue City" Problem

Big coastal cities have issues but this propaganda is spreading nationally and there's a big problem with it.

My previous article comparing Berkeley and Cambridge’s zoning reforms is now free.

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A center-left think tank went viral for concluding in the aftermath of the 2024 election that Democrats “need to own the failures of Democratic governance in large cities”. Although the think tank doesn’t specify these governance issues, this is part of a larger and now very strong narrative that refers to homelessness and the impacts of encampments on local communities in Democratic areas. This has been a common post-2024 election autopsy from pundits mostly based out of the coasts: that Democratic-run cities with high homelessness and encampments are radicalizing housed citizens into voting against Democrats.

The empirical evidence is weak. There’s sufficient evidence that progressive, left-wing candidates performed worse than moderate, liberal candidates in federal elections. But Trump won mostly from less educated voters whose news sources are heavily social media based. The Trump vote didn’t dominate as severely in the places where issues like unsheltered homelessness are most acute.

In the Oakland Metropolitan area where I reside, Trump’s vote share had weak-to-very moderate correlation with our most prolific encampments. It may explain some small urban variance among non-white, non-degree holding areas of Oakland (note the relatively high 25% Trump support around the very Latino and Asian Fruitvale-San Antonio area; area contains a massive encampment) but these were still strongly blue areas in the 2024 election. It could be a correlation problem as areas with heavy encampments also tend to be more crime-heavy areas which may be the primary factor.

Legend: White 0% Trump share. Crimson 100% Trump share. Third image is map of encampments in Alameda County per county PIT count 2024.Source: Alameda County election results. Mapped by Darrell Owens.

However, an anti-encampment and pro-police backlash did happen. Numerous towns throughout California have elected explicitly anti-homeless councilmembers. Fremont’s new city council is going as extreme as charging people who aid homeless residents with a crime. Antioch, a majority Black and Hispanic lower-middle class city, threw out its progressive, police-critical council and restored the White, conservative, center-right old guard in a shock election. San Francisco threw out London Breed, perceived in some quarters to be too progressive on homelessness and drug issues, and voted for a center-left candidate who ran a tad to her right. This has continued into 2025 with the elections to represent the will of the state Democratic Party resulting in center-left candidates beating out further left competitors.

But are cities run by Republicans better run than the Democratic ones, which is the implication of a lot of this “bad blue city” rhetoric? A lot of tech folks during the pandemic thought so and fled San Francisco for Miami. A popular argument of Republicans aired regularly on Fox News is that their areas don’t resemble the Skid Rows of the coasts. Conservative influencers have made ultra-viral YouTube videos filming big city homeless encampments overlayed with commentary decrying these places as the fault of Democrats or the far left.

A lot of right wingers got mad at me when I noted how there aren’t any Republican cities because U.S. conservatism is fundamentally about being opposed and scared of strangers and public services. But I stick by my snark because after a week of looking around, there are very few Republican-majority cities of major economic notoriety — and I think that’s worth reflecting on.

The only examples of a solid red city where both the Mayor and city council are majority or even half Republican, or a mostly Trump-voting urban county, are Oklahoma City; Fort Worth, Texas (Tarrant County); and recently added Miami, Florida. Even the core areas of Fort Worth are Democratic-voting, and Fort Worth is more of a suburb than a city.

You can tell the difference between super-Democratic places like San Francisco in majority Democratic California versus super-Republican Oklahoma City in all-red Oklahoma, but everything else is shades of blue cities surrounded by Republican rural counties or purple suburbs. Urban America in nearly every state in the U.S. is Democratic territory, whose blue counties account for 70% of U.S. economic growth.

Something I’m imploring liberal writers to be conscious about is not falling for Republican framing on important issues. Liberals tend to be introspective to a self-defeating extent. The issues of San Francisco, Los Angeles, D.C., Seattle, and New York City are coastal city problems, not “Democratic problems.” Nearly all American major or notable cities are Democratic. I’m not sure why we’re glamorizing Republican-run areas implicitly either: red America is de-populating en-masse and most of the population growth Texas steals from California is to Democratic cities or purple suburbs. For some weird reason it's considered punching down for Democrats to ever shine spotlights on the low human developmental indices of Republican areas and states.

The problem with Democratic, coastal cities is that they’re usually popular and rich with jobs, and the local governments are bad if not antagonistic at accommodating the millions of people who want to move there. Which, in part, explains this map:

Taken from r/dataisbeautiful by user “USA FACTS”. Image shows concentration of homelessness in the United States based on 2023 data. I verified the PIT counts against this graphic.

It’s incontrovertible that blue states on the coasts have more homeless residents than red states and blue states inland. Most homeless people were formerly housed within the region they lost their housing in, which affirms that Democratic housing markets are at fault. However, there are clear exceptions: Virginia, Minnesota, and Illinois are blue states (yes, V.A. has a Republican governor, but so did California in the 2000s). New Mexico is on the lower end of homelessness. Is this about Democrats or is this about being close to the coast?

Everyone knows that Houston’s homeless reduction program has been among the nation’s most successful, but it’s often unstated which political party saw that program through. The Housing First program, which dropped homelessness by 63% during the 2010s, was initiated and funded by Houston mayors Annise Parker and the late Sylvester Turner — both liberal Democrats. It continues to reduce homelessness at rates California has not matched because it’s organized by one organization and one director at Harris County, and Houston’s aggressive suburban sprawl and urban infill production levels have moderated growing home prices. Both Houston and Harris County are majority Democratic-run, which means the cities with the worst and best homelessness issues are both Democratic.

The Democrats in Houston are way more top-down on public programs by having one director overseeing Housing First and all the nonprofits and governments coordinating beneath them. Back in the Bay Area, Alameda County (Oakland) is mostly a mess of numerous jurisdictions contradicting each other. Oakland and Berkeley is transitioning homeless people into motels with state and local dollars, while the city of Fremont and other suburbs is kicking them out to Oakland and Berkeley. There is a similar situation in San Francisco with neighboring counties evicting homeless residents to their city (and S.F. evicts them to Oakland as well).

Taxpayers in progressive jurisdictions begin to get frustrated that unsheltered homelessness persists despite millions in subsidies and get suckered into thinking Housing First is ineffective. Now, California Governor Gavin Newsom is admonishing California cities for not evicting encampments fast enough, while putting no blame on jurisdictions evicting their homeless to progressive areas. Nor is he pushing for state laws to force cities and counties to collaborate on homelessness reduction and prevention programs.

But are Republican parts of the nation better at resolving homelessness? The non-urban areas whose homeless are the most unsheltered (i.e., encampments) are overwhelmingly Republican jurisdictions.

The highest rates of unsheltered homeless from the Point-In-Time 2023 homeless count broken down by urban, suburban and rural areas.

Tehama County, California, is MAGA territory and has 304 people living in unsheltered encampments. Southeast Tennessee is entirely Republican, yet it saw its mostly unsheltered homeless population spike from 200 to over 1,700 since COVID-19. Hendry, Hardee, and Highlands counties are all super-majority Republican counties. There are Democratic rural counties such as the Black Belt in the Deep South or Hispanic-heavy counties in New Mexico, yet they aren’t on top of the rural list. Shouldn’t they be if encampments is a Democratic problem?

My friend suggested Oklahoma City as an example of a urban Republican city, and its homeless count is 1,400 (31% unsheltered) out of 700,000. Compared to Democrat-run Harris County/ Houston, which has 3,270 homeless people (38% unsheltered) for a total population of 4.8 million, Houston is obviously better. Nor is it impressive compared to Democrat-run Minneapolis. Hennepin County of 1.2 million had 3,312 homeless people with only 469 or 14% unsheltered. That’s the whole county, twice the size of the OKC, with the same unsheltered homeless population.

A positive for Republicans might be Miami-Dade County, which used to be purple and has gone dramatically Republican in recent years. Miami-Dade county has a relatively (by U.S. standards) low homeless population of 3,700 (26% unsheltered), and Miami itself has 534 unsheltered homeless for a city of 455,000. Miami-Dade used to have 6,000 - 10,000 homeless residents in the 1990s, resembling California today until they funded low-income housing and vouchers for the chronically homeless. A tax and program which was levied and executed primarily by Miami Democrats.

There are many flaws with using the Point-In-Time counts, especially because the larger the geography, the more unreliable the counts. Nor does it consider people living in very substandard conditions to be homeless. But it’s the best we got.

I don’t see evidence that Democratic cities have a worse homelessness crisis because they’re Democratic. Most unhoused people live in expensive urban areas and most urban areas are Democratic. But if you filter out urban areas, the places with the worst non-urban homelessness are mostly in Republican states or Republican counties. The exception is Maine, which is a uniquely wealthy rural liberal area.

Here’s the leaders of the worst homelessness in the U.S. with the urban areas removed. (Note the unsheltered percentages are not multiplied by 100).

Republican areas lead rural homelessness while fairly urbanized Democratic suburbs of New England the Pacific Coast lead on suburban homelessness.

Liberal and centrist writers often focus on the problems of homelessness and housing shortages in left-wing parts of the country, but it’s because that’s where they live. They don’t live in Republican areas, and they’re unaware of the extreme poverty, lower quality of life, poor housing stock, and relatively high rural homelessness. And when those tech leaders fled San Francisco for Miami during the pandemic, they mostly moved back to California in a couple years because of the upsides of local Democratic governance: good schools, public services that exist, and tolerant environments that foster them. That’s why blue states, as problematic as they get, are top states in the United States human development index. The big issue with Democratic states on the coasts and New England is that they are the highest resourced and livable, yet unaffordable to millions who could use those resources.

The main reason Housing First doesn’t dent homelessness on the coasts like it did in Miami, Houston, Minneapolis, etc., is that coastal housing costs are tremendously expensive. Every dollar spent on vouchers for homeless will go magnitudes further in Houston than in San Francisco because S.F.’s real estate is expensive for even middle-class people. The sad truth is that California could’ve gotten a lot of chronically homeless people housed if the state had adopted Housing First and had these subsidies available in 2009 - 2011, when the tent encampments had gotten severe and real estate was relatively cheaper.

California didn’t adopt a statewide Housing First approach until 2016, which, by then was too late. Because of the state’s severe housing shortage, home prices and rents well exceeded income growth. Thanks to local hostility towards development and the Trump Administration’s pointless tariffs against lumber and home construction material, development costs for low-income housing in California now exceed well over $1 million per home.

It’s worth emphasizing the local restrictions because Los Angeles did accidentally start building an impressive amount of middle-class and low-income housing by simply mandating that new homes be approved in 60 days. Los Angeles eliminated that executive directive when it proved too successful at rapidly building housing in suburban neighborhoods. And that’s a major problem for coastal communities, no doubt.

Housing and development attitudes are mostly a byproduct of local culture, not political parties. Austin, Texas is one of the most progressive cities in the United States, yet it’s dropped rents 22% with an apartment building boom. Austin doesn’t have an anti-development culture because it's a young city. San Francisco and New York City, well-developed places by the 1970s, were the epicenter of the anti-growth movement due to the more disruptive nature of urban redevelopment, and it’s nonpartisan in local politics.

Above all, what I don’t understand is why there’s zero blame on the federal government for the homeless crisis. Democratic areas, especially the coastal cities, pay disproportionate amounts in federal taxes, yet Congress has not used those funds to create housing in their communities. High-income nations throughout Europe that have reduced homelessness have done so mostly through federal or national programs. Only in the United States is there this weird hyperfocus on municipalities and state governments to solve national issues like chronic homeless. The thousands of dollars I sent to D.C. last month will go more to rural areas in the form of infrastructure and agricultural subsidies than it will for vouchers and public housing in my backyard.

We should have zero qualms about coastal governments' culpability in exacerbating homelessness. But this obsession about “blue city governance” and the complete absence of critiques about Republican local governance is a narrative victory for the right. Especially when coming from national Democratic think-tanks who should be trying to return Democratic taxpayers their money in the form of public services. Democrats are too willing to embrace criticisms about themselves rapid fired by Republican media.

Republican-run local government has many issues and not just on homelessness but schooling, infrastructure, and public services. The Substack writers, tech philanthropists, and news pundits don’t live there, so they don’t care. Okay, fine. But no matter how many times Fox News plays B-roll of California encampments with “Blue Cities” chyrons (which they never do of encampments in Jacksonville, Florida), it is propaganda. It doesn’t just hurt the reputation of the Democratic Party, it hurts the millions of poorly housed and thousands of homeless folks in Republican areas who are basically ignored. Red or Blue — they’re Americans who need help, too.

The problem is not Blue Cities. The problem is that the federal government hates cities, takes their tax dollars (70% our of national G.D.P, blue counties earn) and doesn’t provide housing for the homeless or pensions for the thousands of elderly folks who become homeless. Something the U.S. government had done in the past and counties like Denmark do now, which is why the Danes don’t have an encampment problem. Coastal cities must build more housing, but don’t conflate those issues for a uniform red shift across America that coincides more with media consumption, not the quality of local governments.

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