This past week, Vanity Fair published a story on California politics in which Nancy Pelosi weighed in on the state’s homelessness crisis. Though the state has poured a number of resources into housing the homeless population, especially during the pandemic, there are “a lot of people who don’t want to come off the street,” Pelosi said. “It’s drugs and mental health. If we don’t get the mentally ill off the street, we’re never going to solve the homeless problem.” Pelosi, to her credit, has pushed for more affordable housing in the state, but her statement reflects a frustrating feature of homelessness discourse: an emphasis on drug abuse and mental illness, rather than a lack of housing, as the source of the problem. Many people talk about California’s homeless community as a monolith, ye...
