California’s homeless woes stem from the fact that most Democrats don’t want to clear homeless encampments. That includes Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

Bass and other Los Angeles Democrats oppose Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) order for cities and localities to clear homeless encampments. Bass said that she doesn’t think clearing homeless encampments “is ultimately a solution to homelessness.” Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Lindsey Horvath said “The criminalization of homelessness and poverty is dangerous.”

That is the attitude that pervades Los Angeles’s homeless response, and that is why Los Angeles (and the rest of California) has the worst homelessness crisis in the country. Homeless encampments themselves are bastions of criminal activity, including prostitution, violence, and, of course, drug crimes. They are also public safety hazards, whether it be the unsanitary conditions, the fires, or violence from drug-addicted vagrants against other people.

Clearing out homeless encampments is not the only solution to homelessness, but it is an important part of the process. After all, the tolerance of those encampments encourages more homelessness and discourages homeless people from moving into shelters, which typically have sobriety requirements that encampments do not. And it isn’t like homeless people shouldn’t have somewhere to go: Los Angeles ($950 million this year) and California ($24 billion since 2019) have spent unseemly amounts of money on homelessness.

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If that money hasn’t produced enough homeless shelter beds to offer to those at the soon-to-be-cleared encampments, that is just another indictment of the city and state Democrats that allowed this crisis to bloom in the first place.

Clearing homeless encampments is a necessity for functioning cities to help get homeless people out of homelessness and into shelters and future long-term housing. So long as Los Angeles fights to keep homeless encampments from being closed, the city will be unable to actually work toward ending its homelessness crisis. The price of “empathy” is the perpetuation of this problem that harms all residents of the city, whether they are homeless or not.