Zakaria: Blue Cities in Blue States Largely Have the Worst Homelessness Problems

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” CNN host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria said that the cities with “the most acute homelessness problems…are blue cities in blue states, to a large extent.”

Zakaria said, “Let me say something that’s going to get me into trouble, which is, if you look at where you have the most acute homelessness problems, they are blue cities in blue states, to a large extent. … And what you have is a situation where Anand is absolutely right that the right tends to be very stingy about the money that it would take to solve these problems. But that’s not New York City, that’s not L.A. We’re spending crazy amounts of money on it, but there is this other side to it, … which is the great, in my view, it’s sort of — it’s overprivileging the rights of the homeless over the rights of the other 99.5%.”

He added, “[W]hen you look at cities, it’s not happening in all cities. … Miami does not have the kind of homelessness problem that New York has. Houston doesn’t, Dallas doesn’t. Part of it is that those places are much better at building stuff. One of the problems in a place like New York or in California is we just can’t build housing, of any kind, right? Affordable, homeless, whatever it is, and people don’t want it. And so, part of the issue here, as I say, the tragedy is, it is happening in some cities, it is not happening in all cities.”

Author Anand Giridharadas responded that homeless people don’t stay in places that treat them poorly, which Zakaria said doesn’t seem fair to him, but he doesn’t know enough to say so definitively. Zakaria reiterated that part of the issue is the ability or inability to build.

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