Americans spend billions of dollars to combat homelessness, through donations and taxpayer funding, but the “Homeless Industrial Complex” uses this money for political activism that actually demonizes the policies more likely to solve the crisis, according to a new report.
“Fringe groups in the Homeless Industrial Complex like to characterize homelessness as a symptom of societal injustices, such as systemic racism, police violence, or capitalism,” Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, which released the report, told The Daily Signal in a statement Tuesday. “Anyone who disagrees with their tried-and-not-true policy recommendations is called uncompassionate or greedy.”
The report, “Infiltrated: The Ideological Capture of Homelessness Advocacy,” focuses on the 759 organizations that filed amicus briefs in the Supreme Court case Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024), arguing that laws against camping on the sidewalk violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.” The Supreme Court disagreed, but the nonprofit support for this claim illustrates how organizations founded to help solve the homelessness crisis engage in activism that arguably exacerbates it.
The Capital Research Center report finds that the nonprofits collectively have $9.1 billion in total revenues and received at least $2.9 billion in government grants (32% of their revenues), according to IRS filings.
Attacking Trump and Conservatives
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-wing nonprofit that puts mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” alongside the Ku Klux Klan and has an endowment of more than $700 million, was the second-largest nonprofit to sign an amicus brief in the Grants Pass case.
The SPLC’s involvement “illustrates the disconnect between those charities that provide genuine services to the needy, and those that use their resources to advance a left-wing ideological agenda,” Walter said.
“When President [Donald] Trump signed a series of commonsensical executive orders in 2025 to protect public safety and address the root causes of homelessness, the SPLC and other allied groups accused him of human rights violations,” he noted.
Trump’s order “Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets” notes that America hit a grim milestone when 274,224 people lived on the streets on a single night in January 2024, and that most of the homeless “are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both.” His order directs the federal government to enforce bans on open illicit drug use and on urban camping and shifting the homeless into “long-term institutional settings for humane treatment.”
In response, SPLC Deputy Legal Director Kirsten Anderson accused Trump of “resurrecting unlawful and outdated approaches to housing that are rooted in racist stereotypes and bias against people with disabilities.”
The Homeless Industrial Complex
The SPLC may have been the second-wealthiest group to sign an amicus brief in the Grants Pass case, but it was far from alone.
The Capital Research Center report delves into a vast network of “nonprofits sustained with taxpayer dollars” that “often double as litigants and lobbyists, opposing enforcement measures that many communities see as essential to restoring public order.”
While many of these nonprofits, such as the Chief Seattle Club, began as service providers, helping to find housing for the homeless, many now engage in “high visibility advocacy,” as well.
They advocate for “housing first,” the idea that housing programs should accept people regardless of their drug use status; “harm reduction,” the idea that housing programs cannot prevent drug use and therefore should normalize it; or “housing justice,” the amalgamation of left-wing activist causes on race, transgender ideology, and other issues with housing.
Some organizations, such as the Western Regional Advocacy Project, frame policing itself as “a structural enemy of housing justice,” the report notes.
Radical Ties
The report also notes that the Homeless Industrial Complex has ties to groups that celebrated the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks, along with connections to the Black Lives Matter movement and Antifa anarchists.
Alicia Garza, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, was elected as board chair of Right to the City Alliance in 2021, for example. In 2023, the alliance posted on Instagram, “From Palestine to Mexico, all borders and militarized violence have got to go!”
The Sunrise Movement, which helped organize the “No Kings” proteststhis month, integrates universal access to housing into its Green New Deal proposal and endorsed the “Stop Cop City” movement that included riots in Atlanta.
“Our research shows that some radical elements of the Homeless Industrial Complex care more about rhetoric than results,” Walter told The Daily Signal. He criticized policies that “ignore or even encourage the homeless population to continue the abuse of drugs and alcohol.”
“The result is a self-serving cycle that wastes government funding, alienates potential allies in the fight against homelessness, and leaves vulnerable people without the direct services they need,” he explained.
That’s how nonprofits with billions in revenue and receiving billions in tax dollars end up fighting at the Supreme Court for the idea that laws to clean the streets may violate the Constitution.
“Bad actors in the Homeless Industrial Complex appear to be spending taxpayer dollars on everything but real solutions to America’s homelessness crisis,” Walter told The Daily Signal. “The Homeless Industrial Complex treats homeless people as pawns in ideological wars. They deserve better.”
The Daily Signal reached out to the SPLC, the Chief Seattle Club, the Western Regional Advocacy Project, the Right to the City Alliance, and the Sunrise Movement for comment.
This article originally appeared at The Daily Signal.
Political activism needs to end. It is an abomination of the First Amendment.
This is true! The people that run these programs have one desire and that’s to use other people’s money for their political activism. They don’t give a damn about the homeless.