Numerous organizations have latched onto the homelessness crisis in the United States to advocate for “Marxist, anti-capitalist, or anti-American ideologies,” according to a report published last week by conservative watchdog, Capital Research Center (CRC).
In the 113-page dossier, CRC identifies multiple groups that are part of “extremist ideological movements advocating” for certain policies to address homelessness. The report refers to this network of leftist groups as the “Homelessness Industrial Complex,” which helps shape policies that are “counterproductive” and fail to address the root problems of the homelessness crisis.
“Many of the groups over time have moved away from a focus on directly serving people who suffer to advocacy, which is to say political fighting,” CRC President Scott Walter told The Daily Wire, adding, “Some groups have gotten seriously radical.”
The report, which CRC put together in cooperation with the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank, combs through numerous organizations and highlights how they have pushed some of the most extreme leftist talking points. The report also analyzes the financial data of leftist networks and identifies how they have spent billions of dollars in their supposed effort to address homelessness, while the crisis has only spiraled further out of control.
Researchers with CRC looked into dozens of nonprofits that signed onto a Supreme Court amicus brief in last year’s Grants Pass v. Johnson case, opposing arrests and fines for homeless individuals who violated city ordinances. In that list of organizations, researchers found many groups that don’t focus solely on addressing homelessness, but also push radical leftism on other issues.
The National Harm Reduction Coalition, for example, supported defunding the police and told drug abusers that “no one knows what’s best for you better than you. Whatever drugs you use, we want you to be safe and healthy.” In 2022, the National Harm Reduction Coalition received 73% of its $12.8 million funding from government grants.
San Francisco Rising, another leftist organization that signed onto the Grants Pass v. Johnson amicus brief, is open about its political activism, calling itself an “electoral alliance” working “to build political power with working-class communities of color.”
The Center for Constitutional Rights filed another brief for the Grants Pass v. Johnson case, urging the court to oppose the city’s efforts to enforce the law against homeless individuals. The Center for Constitutional Rights defended Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, arguing that “Palestinian resistance fighters” had the right to “carry out attacks on military targets.”
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The Western Regional Advocacy Project, another nonprofit highlighted by CRC, espouses anti-capitalist rhetoric and has made calls to “Abolish Police.” The group’s executive director, Paul Boden, wrote an article in early 2025 arguing that the Trump administration is instituting “neoliberal fascism” in America.
“The essence of extreme radicalism is fury that America is a horrible place, and for those people, they want to exploit the homeless because they can point to the homeless as supposed evidence that the country is horrible,” Walter said. “If that is what you’re doing, you don’t want there to be fewer homeless people. You want their suffering as vivid and as widespread as possible. And if they were in an institution that was helping them with their mental or their substance abuse, instead of being out on the streets, that’s not very good for your PR campaign.”
Other far-Left groups that are involved in housing and homelessness advocacy have openly pushed Marxism. The Autonomous Tenants Union Network says that it fights “for a world without landlords and without rent” and then adds that it wants to “end capitalism itself.”
Stomp Out Slumlords, a D.C.-based member of the Autonomous Tenants Union Network, wrote in 2023, “We’re not going to get to communism without moving people to talk to their neighbors first, and more importantly, doing it ourselves. Here in DC, exercising tenant purchase rights or pushing for rent freezes aren’t going to immediately decommodify housing, true. But these are the small-scale sites of disruption from which we can build working-class power into something much bigger.”
The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who has written extensively about America’s homelessness issue, said in the foreword to CRC’s report, “The rhetoric of ‘housing is a human right’ and ‘abolish homelessness’ is seductive, but it functions as a smokescreen.”
“Behind it lies a set of interests dedicated to dismantling enforcement, expanding bureaucracies, and keeping streams of funding flowing into activism rather than into effective service delivery to those in desperate need,” Rufo added.
The Trump administration has sought to address the homelessness crisis by focusing on law enforcement and rehabilitation. President Donald Trump also signed an executive order in July that aims to move “homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment” to “restore public order” and to redirect federal funds toward “Effective Methods of Addressing Homelessness.”
“Surrendering our cities and citizens to disorder and fear is neither compassionate to the homeless nor other citizens,” the order stated. “My Administration will take a new approach focused on protecting public safety.”
The Trump administration has faced backlash from leftist groups over its move to clean up homeless encampments. The Southern Poverty Law Center is another group that has inserted itself in the homelessness debate while advocating for leftist ideologies. The SPLC has frequently been slammed for smearing conservatives. CRC found that the SPLC often “engages in homelessness policy by submitting amicus filings that oppose enforcement.”
After Trump signed his July executive order, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) argued that the order “promotes unlawful and out-of-date approaches that are rooted in anti-Black racism and bias against people with disabilities.”
Walter said that rooting out the “Homelessness Industrial Complex” in the United States remains a “huge challenge” that “will take years.”
“It will take years because there’s so much money and inertia behind the current bad industrial complex on this,” Walter added. “So much of this is state and local, not federal. The federal money is often funding bad state and local things, so it’s not like the feds have no role or no leverage, But if Portland and Seattle and San Francisco and Los Angeles want to continue to be foolish and hurtful, it will not be easy to change because they are the tip of the spear for dealing with this.”
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