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New York City spent $81,700 per unsheltered homeless person in 2025. That's more than the median household income, and yet street homelessness rose 26% anyway.
If you've lived in NYC or a similar big U.S. city, you've become acquainted with the homeless. You develop these intimate but distant relationships with the ones who live near your apartment. You learn things about them like their favorite drugs and the way they smell. You give them names that you use with your roommates. I even knew where the homeless woman outside my apartment liked to take her shits because I saw her in the act a few times.
This is the texture of daily life in New York. It has been totally normalized to see people in terrible conditions every day and to completely ignore it.
You would think $81,700 might be enough to help someone achieve some basic quality of life. We can blame the nonprofits running away with the money or the politicians who benefit from the problem staying unsolved. But I'm convinced the bigger issue is that citizens in The West have been convinced that tolerance is a virtue.
New York City spent $81,700 per unsheltered homeless person in 2025. That's more than the median household income, and yet street homelessness rose 26% anyway.
If you've lived in NYC or a similar big U.S. city, you've become acquainted with the homeless. You develop these intimate but distant relationships with the ones who live near your apartment. You learn things about them like their favorite drugs and the way they smell. You give them names that you use with your roommates. I even knew where the homeless woman outside my apartment liked to take her shits because I saw her in the act a few times.
This is the texture of daily life in New York. It has been totally normalized to see people in terrible conditions every day and to completely ignore it.
You would think $81,700 might be enough to help someone achieve some basic quality of life. We can blame the nonprofits running away with the money or the politicians who benefit from the problem staying unsolved. But I'm convinced the bigger issue is that citizens in The West have been convinced that tolerance is a virtue.
Subscribe to WIBTAL
A blog of what I've been thinking about lately.
Share Dialog
It really is so crazy. Nearly the only thing you need to eradicate homelessness is more affordable homes. Why so many of the solutions don’t focus on that problem is beyond me!
"Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything." — G.K. Chesterton
Singapore is a counter-example to New York. Walk around there and homelessness is virtually invisible. They have laws that make begging illegal and give the state power to remove anyone found destitute in public.
Singapore takes a similar intolerant stance in other domains. For example, they employ the death penalty for drug trafficking. In a BBC interview from the 1990s, the British host pressed Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore Prime Minister) on how he could justify it. LKY didn't flinch: "If you enter Singapore with kilos of drugs, it will destroy thousands of families. When the daughter or son becomes an addict, you are killing that family every day for years and years. Against thousands of such deaths, one death is too kind."
LKY understood something the West has forgotten: softness toward the people destroying your city is cruelty to the people building it. You can't protect the good without being willing to confront the bad.
Unfortunately, rather than not tolerating it, NYC is incentivizing homelessness. They just signed a $1.9 billion contract to keep homeless in hotels. The NYC government has been doing this for years and it's obviously not working (see chart above).
I have lived in NYC for years before spending the past few months in Singapore. The contrast is hard to unsee. NYC has talent, money, & energy that are totally unique, but I feel like it's throwing it away with the call for tolerance above things like safety and cleanliness.
"Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything." — G.K. Chesterton
Singapore is a counter-example to New York. Walk around there and homelessness is virtually invisible. They have laws that make begging illegal and give the state power to remove anyone found destitute in public.
Singapore takes a similar intolerant stance in other domains. For example, they employ the death penalty for drug trafficking. In a BBC interview from the 1990s, the British host pressed Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore Prime Minister) on how he could justify it. LKY didn't flinch: "If you enter Singapore with kilos of drugs, it will destroy thousands of families. When the daughter or son becomes an addict, you are killing that family every day for years and years. Against thousands of such deaths, one death is too kind."
LKY understood something the West has forgotten: softness toward the people destroying your city is cruelty to the people building it. You can't protect the good without being willing to confront the bad.
Unfortunately, rather than not tolerating it, NYC is incentivizing homelessness. They just signed a $1.9 billion contract to keep homeless in hotels. The NYC government has been doing this for years and it's obviously not working (see chart above).
I have lived in NYC for years before spending the past few months in Singapore. The contrast is hard to unsee. NYC has talent, money, & energy that are totally unique, but I feel like it's throwing it away with the call for tolerance above things like safety and cleanliness.
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It really is so crazy. Nearly the only thing you need to eradicate homelessness is more affordable homes. Why so many of the solutions don’t focus on that problem is beyond me!