The homeless population has risen to an all-time high, forcing the de Blasio administration to house desperate families in decrepit tenements red-flagged by the city’s own inspectors as hazardous. Since he arrived at City Hall pledging to turn things around, Mayor de Blasio has struggled to confront a long-intractable problem that has only gotten worse.

By mid-December, the homeless census reached a record 59,068 — nearly the population of Utica, city records show. The Coalition for the Homeless says it peaked even higher at 60,352.
— New York Daily News, 2/1/15

Hopefully, some of you have noticed the pattern where the liberal media very seldom highlights the homeless tragedy during Democrat administrations, but Republican presidents are always asked what they plan on doing about it.

Unfortunately the homeless issue is one that can’t be solved on a major level, thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union but you’d never hear all the facts if you left it to liberal propaganda.

More than a third of this country’s homeless population have severe mental health issues, including schizophrenia and manic depression. At least one in every six inmates in America have been diagnosed with serious mental health conditions.

The gutting of public mental health services began with Reagan, first in California where he closed state-funded mental health facilities. As president he cut aid for federally-funded community-run mental health programs. The result: thousands of more homeless people in California and nationwide and a spike in the prison population.
— The Nation, 12/1/07

Richard Kim is either ignorant, or a liar perpetuating a liberal myth that was actually (yet again) a story of liberal condescension run horribly amok with a disastrous “consequence” that negatively affects the homeless and all they come in contact with to this day.

An unforeseen consequence of this “deinstitutionalization” was that “the shift from state to local services was unexpectedly accompanied by a sharp increase in the population of the mentally ill within California’s criminal justice system,” with more than 30,000 seriously mentally ill prisoners housed in state prisons, effectively “making California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) the de facto mental health treatment provider in the state.”

The irony is that civil liberties advocates who fought against the involuntary confinement of the mentally ill contributed to their entry into the criminal justice system. “It should be noted that LPS [the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act] was signed by Governor Reagan in California but only after pressure from groups like the ACLU stepped in and sued on behalf of patients who were being involuntarily hospitalized.”
— California Civil Liberties Advocacy

While too many of the mentally ill wound up in jail, even more wound up on the streets with the inability to take care of themselves.

Ask a liberal what they plan on doing about the homeless tragedy and you’ll find out either just how little they know and how useless their remedies truly have been.