untreated mental illness

Skid Row in Los Angeles stands as a stark example of what happens when ideology overrides reality. Spanning roughly fifty blocks, it is one of the most concentrated homeless zones in the United States, filled with people trapped in addiction and untreated, severe mental illness, often marked by psychosis — a loss of contact with reality. For years, Los Angeles has wrapped its homelessness policies in the language of empathy and housing justice. But Skid Row reveals a harsher truth. What exists there is not simply poverty. It is a concentration of addiction, untreated mental illness, disorder, and human collapse in one of America’s most visible zones of urban breakdown. Los Angeles has embraced Housing First, a model that places Read More ›

In Seattle, the number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness is on track to double in just the next three years. Robert Marbut appeared on KIRO Newsradio’s John Curley Show to discuss the policies that have exacerbated the crisis and the solutions available to the city and county. Discovery Institute released a report last November detailing our policy recommendations for the city of Seattle to curb their homelessness crisis.

The federal government is hoping you, the public, won’t notice that homelessness in America reached an all-time high last year. That was the impression given by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) when it quietly released the 2024 annual homelessness report on the Friday between Christmas, Hannukah, and New Year’s. Nationwide, 771,480 people were experiencing homelessness in 2024, an 18 percent increase from the year before and the highest number on record. The HUD administration attributes this record-setting number to a lack of affordable housing, systemic racism, and rising inflation. Impossible to hide, the report also highlights the strain caused by a surge in migrants and asylum seekers: “new arrivals” made up 13,600 of Chicago’s sheltered population and Read More ›

Washington, D.C. — Homelessness reached the highest number on record nationwide in 2024 according to a report the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released on December 27 in a likely attempt to avoid public attention. Dr. Robert Marbut, Discovery Institute Senior Fellow and former Federal Homelessness Czar, says, “HUD spent over 3.16 billion on homelessness in 2024 and continues to attribute rising homelessness to unavailable housing and systemic racism, while ignoring the fentanyl epidemic and untreated mental illness.” According to the national Point-In-Time count report, homelessness increased by 18.1% since 2023 to the highest number on record. Of the 771,840 people experiencing homelessness, 274,224 are unsheltered. The data reveals a 32.9% increase in people experiencing homelessness from 2020 Read More ›