Marvin Olasky

California Governor Gavin Newsom regularly repeats his mantra: “Shelter solves sleep; housing solves homelessness.” Hmm. From 2022 to 2025, I wrote weekly columns about homelessness and gained insight by living for three weeks in shelters. Based on that I can say: In general, it is not true that housing solves homelessness.

Maybe it solves homelessness for people who are not addicts, alcoholics, mentally ill, or victims of abusive childhoods, but most homeless people are in one or more of those four categories. Maybe housing solves homelessness if the rest of us don’t like to see homeless people: Get them out of sight and they can be out of mind.

Invisibility benefits those who have homes. Unseen homeless folks don’t ask us for money, so we are free from giving what often goes to buy drugs or alcohol, or from not giving and feeling heartless. But for those who are out of their minds for various reasons, housing does not solve homelessness.

Augustine 1,600 years ago famously said regarding God, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” The earthbound equivalent is “Our bodies are restless until they reside in a home.” For many, though, walls and a roof alone do not make a home.

Instead, hiding away addicts or alcoholics inside an apartment leaves many apart from everything except a needle or a bottle. Hiding away the severely mentally ill leaves them apart from everything except walking nightmares. People who are desperately ill need to be together with someone who can offer compassionate help.

That’s one reason a chart used at the Orange County Rescue Mission (OCRM) in Tustin, California, impressed me. It’s one of the places I lived at for a few days in 2023 and in January 2026 to gain some street-level understanding of these issues. Instead of using one marker to assess progress in coming out of homelessness—a signed apartment lease, say—OCRM evaluates a more holistic list of ten, including: “spiritual … sobriety/substance abuse (if applicable) … mental health … shelter/housing … social/family relationships … income and employment … physical health, food, and nutrition.” (This quotation and those that follow are from the OCRM “Outcome Assessments,” and I’ve seen that actions back up those words.)

[The following is a podcast episode originally published April 28, 2025, at Humanize, a podcast hosted by Wesley J. Smith at Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism.] Homelessness has become a crisis in the United States. We live in the richest country in the world, and yet one can drive down main thoroughfares of our most prosperous cities and be confronted with tent encampments lining streets, squalor, open-air drug markets, and destitute people begging. The crisis is multifaceted as it is seemingly intractable. What is the role of mental illness? What about drug addiction? Is the rising cost of housing part of the problem, and if so, what can be done about it? What protections does society owe these vulnerable Read More ›

After writing weekly for three years, this is column #156 and my last in Fix Homelessness. Three conclusions: That’s based on what I’ve seen up close. More important is what God says, since this world and our lives are His invention. Chapter two of Genesis shows that God works: “On the seventh day God finished his work that he had done.” Adam goes to work right away: “God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” Life becomes hard after one very bad day in the garden, which ends with God declaring that Adam and Eve in their labor will have pain, sweat, and encounters with thorns and thistles. Nevertheless, we Read More ›

“Morning by morning new mercies I see.” That line from the hymn written in the 1920s, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” summarizes not only the Christian life but the way some beaten-down humans suffering homelessness come to believe that God can change their lives — or at least they can improve their own lives by moving from cereal (morning by morning) to bacon and eggs. “Bird by bird, buddy.” In the 1990s, Annie Lamott wrote Bird by Bird, a book about becoming a writer. The title comes from the time her ten-year-old brother fought frustration while trying to finish a report on birds that he’d struggled over for three months. “My father sat down beside him, put his arm around my Read More ›

Several readers have asked me what I’ve learned from interviewing homeless people during my stays in shelters. Hmm. One book about health care costs features this title: “Never Pay the First Bill.” I’ve encountered exceptions, but if we hope to be both compassionate and constructive, our rule should be, “Never Accept the First Explanation.” I tried to stay at shelters for at least four days. In Missouri, 32-year-old Mirenda (that’s her real name, and she specified that the fourth letter is an “e”) said on day one that she was homeless because of the foster care system. That system was clearly a problem for her, as it is for many kids bounced from house to house. Eight different placements is Read More ›

As I prepare to bring this series of weekly columns to a close after three years, I think back to 1989 when I started to research three centuries of American poverty-fighters. I wrote about them in a 1992 book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, that became the historical basis for the “compassionate conservatism” popularized by Texas Governor George W. Bush, whom I informally advised (and still like). The project fizzled during his presidency, ground down by Washington politics but also by some internal realities. Regarding help for those sunk into long-term homelessness, two of my notions proved inadequate. First, in promoting “compassionate conservatism” I emphasized the literal meaning of “com-passion”: with suffering. My goal was for the homed, particularly Christians, Read More ›

Bob Coté, the homeless man turned homeless shelter pioneer whom I wrote about last month, used to say, “Work works.” By that he meant not only that work brings in money but also that it brings purpose and community. Paul the apostle also spoke about helping others: Do something useful with your hands, he wrote in Ephesians 4:28. Paul’s injunction to church members was strong: “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ…we give you this rule: ‘If man will not work, he shall not eat.’ We hear that some among you are idle. They are not busy; they are busybodies. Such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the bread they Read More ›

Sticking a homeless person into an apartment without requiring anything from him is a bad idea not only because idle hands often turn to drugs, alcohol, or other mischief. It’s also a bad idea because not requiring work that a person can do is treating him as sub-human. Here it’s important to understand the biblical concept of labor, both before and after the traumatic events in the Garden of Eden. If work were something that had to be done only because of man’s sin and fall from grace, then we would be right to treat it as something to be endured only until “Miller time” arrives — but Genesis 2:15 (pre-fall) tells how “The Lord God took the man and Read More ›

Today is Good Friday. Nearly two thousand years ago it seemed a very bad Friday. Jesus, as the Apostles Creed puts it, “was crucified, died, and was buried.” God turned bad into good, as He regularly does. Romans 5:8 in the New Testament declares, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Christians are supposed to get used to bad/good Fridays. Communist-turned-Christian Whittaker Chambers wrote, “a man can scarcely call himself a Christian for whom the crucifixion is not a daily suffering.” The idea of “suffering with” homeless people and others in danger (the literal meaning of compassion) is central in Christianity because it was central in the life of Christ. Read More ›

Next month I’ll lay out my upcoming book on homelessness, but the book will only make sense if you understand the process of Step 13 and Springs Rescue Mission that I’ve laid out in this first quarter of the year — so here’s part of an interview I did with Bob Coté 16 years ago. Olasky: Does the step-by-step process to moving upstairs and getting a better room really work? Coté: They want to get up there. I have 12 full-time employees, but really I have 52, because I have 40 people with a year or even two years of residence and they take ownership of Step 13. They’ll say, “Hey, we don’t write on the walls here,” and the Read More ›