The Street Is Not Mercy

Leaving people to languish on the street is dangerous and harmful, not ethical

Timothy Schmalz's "Homeless Jesus" at St. Mary's Catholic Church, downtown San Antonio. The figure is identifiable as Christ only by the wounds on the feet. The pose is a familiar sight in America—and San Antonio.

By the only standard that matters—outcomes—San Antonio has a better claim than nearly any big city in America to getting homelessness right. The downtown homeless count fell as much as 77 percent in the years after Haven for Hope opened in 2010. More than 300 American cities have sent delegations to study it, and California counties have even formed grassroots groups pushing to replicate it. When Las Vegas decided it wanted a comprehensive homeless campus of its own, it recruited Haven's CEO to move there and build one.

Per capita homelessness in Bexar County has risen 0.4 percent since 2014 despite a national increase of 10.7 percent over the same decade (and 15.3 percent in Travis County.) The fact is, San Antonio has the lowest street count of any major Texas city, and over two-thirds of our homeless population is indoors on a given night, despite its size. Last month, Haven released a 15-year review of the more than 50,000 people who have stayed on its campus since 2010, with good results. Roughly two-thirds came once, most for under 90 days, and more than 90 percent of them never returned to the system.

For the majority of people who fall into homelessness here, San Antonio has a machine that catches them once and lets them go home.

And yet, every December, a crowd gathers at Milam Park to read names for every person who died while homeless in San Antonio and Bexar County. Last December there were 270 names. The year before, more than 360 names were read. The year before that, 322.

And other numbers aren’t entirely a source of optimism. The January 2025 point-in-time count found 3,625 people homeless on a single night in Bexar County, which was the highest figure in a decade, up roughly 14 percent in two years. The number of people actually sleeping outside jumped 28 percent in a single year, from 888 to more than 1,100. On the night of the count San Antonio was 641 beds short of a bed for every person outside.

Haven’s own data tells us that the third of its clients who came back two or more times trend older and report significantly higher rates of disabling conditions: severe mental illness, addiction, and very often both at once. They are a minority of the homeless population and a rounding error against the city’s 1.5 million people, but they are also close to one hundred percent of what residents and visitors mean when they say San Antonio feels overrun with homeless.

But why are they still out there?

Somewhere over the past generation, American homelessness policy absorbed the premise that the man having a crisis in traffic is exercising a choice, and the respectful posture is to offer services and wait until he is “ready.” The premise, interestingly, has a version on each end of the spectrum. On one end, it’s their choice, we owe them nothing. On the other, it’s their choice, so we owe them deference. Both are a form of abandonment.

A 2018 study followed homeless adults for a decade and found death rates nearly ten times those of the general population, and roughly three times those of homeless people sleeping in shelters. Across the research, people experiencing homelessness die around age fifty, decades ahead of schedule. Every month spent “waiting for someone to be ready” is a month that the odds of death grow: an overdose, an assault, untreated wounds or illnesses, or even the August heat. For the chronically street homeless, non-intervention is a deadly trajectory.

This is the truth: it is dangerous and harmful, not ethical, to leave a person to languish “free” on the street.

California, of all places, is going in the opposite direction. San Francisco just posted a 22 percent drop in unsheltered homelessness over two years after instituting real accountability and expectations attached to its encampment response. Nearby, San Jose's decline in unsheltered homelessness accelerated once mandated shelter visits became part of its encampment code of conduct. Tom Wolf, a recovery advocate who was homeless himself, summarized the shift in City Journal: "accountability and recovery." For too long we have prioritized the latter over the former.

San Antonians have ranked homelessness a top-two issue in three consecutive city budget surveys. In 2023 it ranked first in nearly every council district. Downtown, the visible disorder registers wildly out of proportion to our actual numbers which are actually quite good for a large city, considering the problem.

This is because the perception is cemented in place one encounter at a time. Our aggregate numbers are the best in Texas, but nobody experiences a city in aggregate. People experience the homeless face to face, at street level, and that experience compounds and travels home with the tourists. What they perceive is a city that has decided to let a specific set of very sick people deteriorate in public. A city that visibly tolerates that will be assumed, not unreasonably, to tolerate other failures too.

Finishing the job means the street stops being one of the options. Not as punishment, but as the same principle we apply to every other human being in mortal danger from an illness. The chronic few are chronic for a reason, they have already refused our help. They are waiting on someone with the authority to stop taking no as a final answer. We need better tracking, more beds for our homeless, and probably countless other solutions, but the most impactful thing we can do is to decide to do the right thing and get our homeless off the street. The secondary infrastructure can and will follow.

San Antonio literally taught the country how to shelter people at scale. Other cities hired our people to copy what was built here. The final lesson requires surrendering a story we like telling about our own kindness. This December, they will light the candles at Milam Park again and read the names aloud. Fewer names must be the goal, and that follows getting people off the street.