Walk through downtown San Francisco or Los Angeles and you’ll navigate a shifting obstacle course of tents, human waste, and unstable individuals. Business districts that once thrived now see foot traffic evaporate as customers avoid entire blocks. Parents can’t take children to public parks. Elderly residents can’t use their own sidewalks. The social contract that public spaces belong to everyone has collapsed.
Between 2015 and 2022, Los Angeles County’s homeless population surged by 56% while Houston’s fell by 32%. Today, California houses 28% of America’s homeless population with just 12% of its residents. San Francisco’s homelessness rate is nearly 20 times higher than Houston’s.
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California has spent over $27 billion on homelessness in recent years. The difference is systems architecture. Houston and Dallas built something that works. California built something that doesn’t, then spent billions pretending otherwise.
This matters because instability breeds instability. When encampments persist for years, residents and business owners face constant uncertainty. When sweeps just move people two blocks over, when every neighborhood waits to see if it will host the next relocated camp, the crisis simply shifts location without resolution.
Texas Democrats proved there’s an alternative through disciplined systems that create stability by resolving homelessness at scale. They didn’t do this primarily to help homeless people, though that happened. They did it because sprawling street encampments make cities unlivable, and the only way to make them go away permanently is to house the people living in them.
What Texas Cities Actually Built
The success in Houston and Dallas came from building operational infrastructure to make encampments disappear permanently instead of temporarily.
Houston designated the Coalition for the Homeless as a “backbone” organization with real power: control over funding, management of a unified data system, and authority to enforce performance standards across over 100 partner agencies. Dallas did the same with Housing Forward, deliberately restructuring its governing board from one dominated by service providers to one controlled by major sector leaders from philanthropy, corporations, and county government. A board of service providers protects existing programs and funding streams. A board of resource-controllers thinks systemically and imposes strategic alignment.
This created what California lacks: a single entity in a city that can tell nonprofits what outcomes they must deliver, find the appropriate metics, and cut funding if they’re aren’t playing ball or refusing to do their job. One organization with the authority to impose order on what was previously chaos.
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