Usually, statistics can kill a good story, but every now and then, they actually tell the story. In the case of America’s homeless problem, statistics and dollar figures are critical to telling the story of the amount of failure and corruption tied to “fixing” this societal ill.
We’ll start with California. The state only started tracking the homeless in recent years. In 2017, it launched the California Homeless Data Integration System (HDIS), which aggregates data from local Homeless Management Information Systems (HMIS). Notice that before we even get started, the acronyms and the bureaucracy are already starting to pile up.
In 2020, according to the HDIS data, there were 249,000 homeless people in California. These are people who received some form of state-funded homeless services. By 2025, just five years later, the number of homeless people in the state jumped to 358,784, an increase of 109,784 people on state benefits. Percentage-wise, that’s off the charts at 44%. A 44% increase in five years.
In 2020, California taxpayers funded homeless programs to the tune of $1.2 billion. By 2025, that number jumped to $1.5 billion. This money was spent on a range of social services, including the Homeless Housing, Assistance, and Prevention (HHAP) program.
Doesn’t seem like there is much prevention going on.
It’s difficult to compare California’s data to other states, because each state has its own way of counting the homeless and tracking the usage of social services for the homeless. Still, in the state of New York, core state funding dedicated to the homeless totaled $2.5 billion to $3 billion in 2025. This includes shelter and service costs, but again, the state makes it difficult to determine precisely where all that money is going.
Texas has better data any way that you look at it. The numbers are better, and the transparency of the data is better. That state has just over 51,000 people who accessed homeless services in 2025. In terms of funding, Texas allocates a small fraction of what California and New York put out, not only in terms of total spending, but also in per-capita spending when you overlay this data against the number of homeless people. The Texas state budget is roughly $15-$25 million per year.
What this means is Texas spends roughly $490 per year on each homeless person who accesses services in that state. California spends about $4,180 per year on each homeless person who accesses state services. New York’s data is too fuzzy to make an apples-to-apples comparison here, and that’s an issue. Or, maybe a better way to say it is, that’s a symptom of a larger problem.
The amount of money flying around in the name of combatting homelessness is mind-boggling, often impossible to track, almost always spent with no accountability, and there is no real way to measure its effectiveness in actually solving the homelessness problem. Along the way, though, everyone gets a cut.
Kevin Dahlgren, a homeless advocate and activist, takes a boots-on-the-ground approach to trying to help the homeless. He has dubbed the problem here the “homeless industrial complex.”
The term conjures up memories of a massive problem President Dwight D. Eisenhower once identified in the “military-industrial complex.” When Eisenhower coined his term, he was talking about how certain forces within government and outside of government will constantly pursue war so as to feed the companies and industries that prosper from war, not peace.
Dahlgren’s homeless industrial complex makes a similar statement. There are too many people, nonprofits, NGOs, state agencies, and others who make far too much money in the name of combatting homelessness to expect that any of them would want to see an end to the problem. The goal of a homeless industrial complex is to grow and perpetuate the problem.
Dahlgren says he wants to end homelessness by empowering, not enabling, those on the streets.
“I have encountered the same homeless people during outreach visits, encampment sweeps, overdose reversals, hospital discharges, shelter referrals, nonprofit events, and police responses. Every agency involved can document that it did something. Someone made contact, completed an assessment, offered a referral, handed out a brochure, or entered the person’s name into a database. Then I return days, weeks, or months later, and the person is still on the same sidewalk. That is one of the biggest failures of the homelessness system: It rewards activity, not results,” Dahlgren wrote on his Substack blog recently.
When it comes to the biggest and most well-funded systems, it’s no accident that the homelessness program is growing, not improving. These systems tend to be in blue states and are overseen by Democrat administrations. That’s no accident, either.
Common sense indicates that these systems aren’t faulty. They are working as designed, which is to allow for the growth of the homeless, and even to incentivize it through certain state programs. The systems are often designed to make tracking spending and accountability nearly impossible, which opens the door to fraud, waste, and corruption.
🚨 Actor David Spade raising awareness that a bill was introduced in California to audit where the $20+ billion dollars in missing homeless money went, it passed but then Gavin Newsom VETOED the bill to block the investigation
— Stand Up For Truth 🇺🇸 (@StandUpForFact) May 5, 2026
Yes, this really happened. He blocked bills for an… pic.twitter.com/UoiDfZtzZS
In June 2026, the federal HUD program suspended funding to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) after identifying a broad range of serious problems that included LAHSA’s “false statements and its irresponsible actions and failures, including its lack of financial management, internal controls, and safeguards against conflicts of interest, which pose a threat to the public, HUD’s mission, and the stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”
Among the many serious issues identified, HUD reported, “In August 2023, LAHSA could not even determine whether it used funding to pay for empty hotel rooms, because it failed to record when individuals exited transitional motel housing.”
In 2025, LAHSA couldn’t even provide documentation to verify the very existence of 2,300 housing sites for which it was responsible.
This is a children’s playground in Oakland, California. Kamala Harris’ hometown
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) June 29, 2025
It is now completely overrun with a homeless encampment, trash and needles
This is what Gavin Newsom and Democrats have done to California you don’t see reported on the news pic.twitter.com/dPMXrLOPNB
In January of this year, the Los Angeles Times reported that one local man was arrested on charges of wire fraud on allegations that he fleeced the city’s homeless services bureaucracy for $23 million. The charges allege that he misappropriated funds from his Hyde Park-based program Abundant Blessings.
In March 2025, the Times reported that “an audit by the global consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal found that the city was unable to track exactly how much it spent on homeless programs and did not rigorously reconcile spending with services provided, making it impossible to judge how well the services worked or whether they were even provided.”
In California, fraud, corruption, and waste strictly in the homeless industrial complex are so pervasive that it could be its own full-time beat and keep a team of reporters very busy.
On matters like this, they say, “follow the money.” That's a good rule of thumb here. But the people who designed these systems did so precisely so you can't easily follow the money. These same people are working just as hard to keep that money flowing, and to do that, job number one is to make sure there is an endless supply of homeless to “serve.”
None of this is much of a secret, and it’s one of the big reasons why in Spencer Pratt started a movement in 2026 in L.A. that doesn’t appear to be going away. In fact, you could play this ad in any blue city in America right now, and it would resonate.
Communist LA Mayoral Frontrunner is NOT HAPPY After Her GOP Opponent Shows EXACTLY Where She Lives in This EPIC Campaign Ad (VIDEO)
— JulietteSchwartz (@Juliett59778255) May 6, 2026
They not like us pic.twitter.com/yeFsBcJDtj— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) April 29, 2026
PRATT: This is where Mayor Bass lives, you notice…
