At the onset of this, I want to be very clear that I am not speaking about 100% of homeless situations. That should be obvious to any fair-minded person, but I want to make it abundantly apparent as to not get pigeonholed into the “uncompassionate.”

We need to get to the root of the vastly growing homelessness crisis. And the first step we need to take is to stop calling it a homelessness crisis.

When we use the term “homelessness crisis,” what we’re doing is allowing significant blame to be placed on insignificant variables that might cause homelessness. I want to point to an article I read in VICE the other day about a Phoenix tent city that is approaching 1,000 “residents.”

Sparknotes: VICE, through this lengthy piece, tries to draw attention to the rising cost of housing in the Phoenix market. As if that is a major contributing factor to the tent city. Spoiler alert: while that might be a small component, glossing over the ACTUAL issue only means that we’re never going to solve the problem.

Throughout that longish article, NOT ONCE did VICE mention drug use in any serious depth. If we’re being honest about the situation and talking about the REAL issue here:

We don’t have a homelessness crisis as much as we have a drug crisis.

If you’ve ever perused through any of these encampments, you’ll notice one consistent thing. There are ZERO people who fit the homeless person description the left loves to use:

“They had a medical bill that put them on the streets” or “they can’t afford to house because minimum wage isn’t high enough.”

NONE of the people you’ll run into in those encampments are “doing great” other than their problem with stable housing. No, they’re drug addicts who, in many cases, have chosen to live in the dangerous, disease-filled encampments.

Am I saying that there aren’t people who lose their homes due to a big medical bill? Absolutely not. But those people MIGHT make up 2% of the homeless population in this country. The OVERWHELMING majority of people in these ever-growing encampments are drug addicts, and it’s not fair to them or us that we refuse to recognize that.