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WATCH: Ben Carson: Letting Homeless Do Whatever They Want To Do Is Not Compassionate. Help Them.

   DailyWire.com
U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson arrives at a Roosevelt Room event at the White House February 6, 2019 in Washington, DC.
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

On Monday, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson appeared on Fox News with host David Webb to speak about homelessness. Carson stated of the homeless, “Some people say it’s compassionate just to let them do anything they want to do. That’s not compassionate at all.  What’s compassionate is helping people who cannot take care of themselves manage. And If we can get them into the right setting so they’re getting proper medications and counseling, many of them become quite functional at that point.”

Carson noted that if California is excluded from the number of homeless people in the United States and one takes an average of the number of homeless people around the nation, homeless is dropping.

Webb remarked, “Let’s talk about resources here; you talk about state and local governments and the resources being applied. Governor Newsom of California has applied over a billion dollars to this issue. Money doesn’t solve the problem. So how do we reconcile money and resources?”

Carson answered, “In science we like to look at the facts; we like to look at the evidence. That’s what I would strongly recommend in this case. Look at other states; we have 50 laboratories, 50 states that do things in various ways. Let’s look at the ones that are highly successful.”

Carson continued:

Look at Texas and how much their homelessness has gone down over the last year and over the last five to seven years. Significant decreases because the policies don’t encourage people to sleep on the streets. They encourage people to go to the places where they can get the kind of help that will get them into the right situation. And then I have to look at the way people treat people who are mentally ill. Some people say it’s compassionate just to let them do anything they want to do. That’s not compassionate at all. What’s compassionate is helping people who cannot take care of themselves manage. And If we can get them into the right setting so they’re getting proper medications and counseling, many of them become quite functional at that point.

Webb said, “Secretary Carson, what’s the correlation between the politics of this, that is a component here as we look at the number of states; there’s also weather and the homeless. You would think that typically in the warmer states this is where they would all be, but in your recent HUD report on the homelessness, the facts actually lead us in a different direction.”

Carson replied, “That is correct; some of the states with the lowest amount of homelessness are quite warm states like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia. So that is not the case. What happens is a lot of times the policies are problematic.”

Carson went on:

Now people don’t mean to do bad things; don’t get me wrong. You know, housing first, for instance; it’s meant to be a good thing; just get people off the street, don’t have any requirements of them and you’ve done your job. But I think it should be housing first, second and third. Housing second: you figure why they’re on the street in the first place, and housing third, you fix it. That’s where the real compassion in. The places that are just applying housing first are the ones who’ve resulted over the last five years in a decrement and transitional housing beds of 77,078. At the same time, the unsheltered homeless number has gone up by 35,000. Do the math.

We have the right policies; we may have the number of beds that we need to take care of them, but when you exclude that number of transitional beds, you create a much bigger problem. This is not just necessarily a Democrat problem; there are Republicans also who have been, let’s just say, taken in by the “Housing First” strategy and not really analyzed the complete program and what the outcome is. And you have to really be able to look at all those facts; look at at the data. Then make your decisions on that; not on ideology; that is the key to fixing this problem.

Video below:

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