CNN anchor and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria said Friday that the most severe homelessness problems in the United States are concentrated in Democratic-run cities in Democratic-run states, pointing to New York and Los Angeles as examples while contrasting them with Houston, Dallas and Miami.
Speaking on HBO’s “Real Time,” Zakaria said, “Let me say something that’s going to get me into trouble, which is, if you look at where you have the most acute homelessness problems, they are blue cities in blue states, to a large extent.”
He argued that the issue isn’t a lack of spending. “The right tends to be very stingy about the money that it would take to solve these problems. But that’s not New York City, that’s not L.A. We’re spending crazy amounts of money on it,” he said, adding that in his view there’s “this other side to it,” which he described as “overprivileging the rights of the homeless over the rights of the other 99.5%.”
Zakaria said the pattern isn’t uniform across the country. “Miami does not have the kind of homelessness problem that New York has. Houston doesn’t, Dallas doesn’t,” he said. He attributed part of the difference to housing construction. “Part of it is that those places are much better at building stuff. One of the problems in a place like New York or in California is we just can’t build housing, of any kind, right? Affordable, homeless, whatever it is, and people don’t want it.”
He called it a “tragedy” that the problem is severe in some cities but not others, saying “it is happening in some cities, it is not happening in all cities.”
Author Anand Giridharadas pushed back, suggesting homeless people don’t remain in places that treat them poorly. Zakaria said that argument didn’t seem entirely fair to him, though he acknowledged he didn’t know enough to say so with certainty. He returned to his main point: that the capacity, or lack of it, to build housing is a central part of the problem.
