In ten years, incidence of chronic homelessness in Utah went from 1,932 to 178.
Solving 91% of homelessness is a fantastic achievement, even if the remaining 9% needs further work.
The reduction was closer to 60%, and in the past few years, they've stopped investing in the program. It's been a good thing, but without ongoing effort and investment it will regress back to the mean.
See also the book “SanFranSicko” by Michael Schellenberger.
Additionally, the two party system has effectively declawed the vox populi and made the barriers to change very, very large.
This means that until we're out of boomers (and a significant portion of Gen xers) the isn't going to be a possibility of the sort of critical mass necessary to make the systemic changes we need to reconnect the will of the people with the behavior of the government / media / business machine.
Although, if we make it that far, I'm sure the well organized entrenched upper class will have a whole new set of tricks to try. It's very difficult to properly organize against them.
It's a variant of a straw man that right wing people sometimes use. Which makes sense given that OP is forming their perceptions of the left from a book subtitled "How Progressives Destroy Cities".
(Conservative areas are generally both socially, and economically conservative. I know someone will mention Utah's housing first program, and I'll cut them off at the pass, by pointing out that subsequent governments have been severely under investing in it.)
That's trivial; prison. (Ignoring the part where prisons now charge prisoners rent...)
Finding a solution everybody can agree on is much harder than finding a solution only one side or the other can agree with.
This comment proves you don't know your adversary, which is a dangerous situation to be in.
Historical and contemporary conservative approaches to homelessness tend to fixate on criminalization and enforcement: more cops to break up camps, more pretenses to jail homeless persons, more opportunities for the prison-industrial complex to get its cheap labor. "Jail the beggars, jail the addicts, jail the crazies." Today, a century ago, a millennium ago... the dynamics between the rich and poor are basically unchanged; all that's changed, at most, is how the rich get selected.
Utah is also heavily Mormon, which complicates things. Mormons have a lot of beliefs that sound fairly socialist when you describe them in practice, except that they believe the church should be the administrator of those policies.
Mormons also heavily oppose abortion, which makes them a nearly single-issue voting bloc, making Utah deep red in a purely partisan sense.
If somehow abortion were a non-issue - like, overnight, everyone somehow magically forgot abortion even existed - it's not hard to imagine Mormons being one of the least conservative Christian denominations.
(Yes, I'm aware that other Christians don't consider the LDS to be Christians, but that's beside the point)
A lot of hardline religious sects superficially look like socialism if you only examine their in-groups and entirely ignore their out-groups. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is no exception.
You're getting downvoted, but you're broadly correct. There's a lot of research showing how more homogeneously white populations are more likely to support leftist or socialist policies (policies, not affiliation) than people of the same demographics who live in more heterogeneous places.
The key according to this article is the cost of housing, not implied racism.
https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/12/being-poor-alone-do...
Note also that Utah, a very conservative state, solves homelessness in exactly this way.
It just might be that the housing would not be provided by funneling huge amounts of tax dollars to the rentier class, and might involve constructing more houses, and therefore would be opposed by the left.