Orange County Rescue Mission

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 November 1, 2021, at Humanize, a podcast hosted by Wesley J. Smith at Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism.] In this episode of Humanize, Wesley J. Smith speaks with Jim Palmer, the president of the Orange County Rescue Mission about the many causes and potential cures of America’s seemingly intractable homeless crisis. It is a crucial, if disturbing, conversation that touches upon the most existential needs of people and our mutual responsibilities to each other. Homelessness has reached crisis proportions in which even our most prosperous cities — such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle — witness thousands of people living in squalid tent encampments lining streets that provide scant Read More ›

To understand why Springs Rescue Mission was so interesting to me, you should know something about the other three Christian homeless missions I have stayed at recently. Knowledgeable people call them model programs. That’s true, but each is different. The Orange County Rescue Mission (OCRM) in California is a beautiful place with an intensive, every-hour-occupied program in which individuals can advance over eighteen months or so from heavily regimented “freshman year” to a freer “senior year.” It’s perfect for men and women who are young enough and physically/mentally able enough to work again in the outside world. Eden Village in Springfield, Missouri is a beautiful strip of brightly-painted tiny houses in which beaten-down older people, some mentally disabled, can live Read More ›