Last weekend, our family made the five-hour road trip down I-40 from the mountains of eastern Tennessee to Nashville to watch country music legend Alan Jackson’s last live concert. We stayed at a fairly nice hotel within easy walking distance of both the city’s bustling downtown and Nissan Stadium, where the concert was held.

The night before the event, we decided to walk from the hotel to the downtown district for dinner and some live music. We went down a side road, under an underpass, across a bridge spanning the Cumberland River, and through a small park-like area that seemed to have been recently constructed before we reached the long line of glittering, music-filled restaurants and bars for which the city is famous.

You always expect a city to have sketchy areas, and this wasn’t one of them. But still, passing an abandoned lot on the side road and going under the underpass had my full attention. If any shady characters were to be encountered, they would be encountered here. But no, we saw nobody out of place either that night back and forth to downtown or the next night back and forth to the concert.

What we did see, however, were homeless vagrants, and a lot of them. Not so much in the sketchy areas where you might expect sketchy people to inhabit, but in the ‘nice’ areas, on the park benches, the concrete brick semicircle sitting areas, and stretched out in the middle of sidewalks seemingly oblivious to the rowdy crowds maneuvering around them. (RELATED: Homeless People On Skid Row Allegedly Bribed To Vote In LA Mayoral Race)

I’ll never forget walking my family through what was obviously meant to be a nice sitting area overlooking the river, but was now filled with at least half a dozen drug-addled, empty-eyed zombies sitting, lying, or shuffling along slowly on the road to nowhere. We came upon it as a part of a normal walk in a normal part of town, not realizing until it was too late to find another route that nothing about it was normal at all. While walking through, our fifteen-year-old daughter caught a whiff of human urine before the rest of us did and let out a disgusted shriek before catching herself. None of the zombies seemed to notice, or even looked at us. They just continued staring straight ahead, as if in a trance.

I had been to Nashville several times before, but I didn’t remember the number of homeless people being quite so overwhelming. Grok, ever so helpful, tells me their numbers have increased significantly according to a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)-mandated annual Point-in-Time (PIT) Count total, which provides a snapshot of the homeless population in a given area. Nashville’s total, which had been hovering in the 2,000s over the past several years, ballooned to over 4,000 at the end of 2025—4,000 people, a single city, and in a ‘red’ state no less. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Trump’s DC Crackdown Wipes Out Homeless Encampments)

There are many factors at play, obviously, particularly the unabated rise in drug addiction and mental health problems, along with Democratic city leaders who think building shelters, providing ‘services,’ and giving away drug needles will somehow help the situation instead of attracting more homeless like raccoons to a restaurant trash bin. But at the end of the day, hundreds of thousands of useless eaters (if that’s not what they are, what are they?) are allowed and even encouraged to live like feral animals in public spaces, while polite society is forced to hold their noses and conduct some modicum of business while trying to avoid stepping on some sleeping dude’s foot or, worse, literal sh*t in the streets.

It’s disgusting, yes, but the sad part is it’s entirely preventable. Not the leftist way, of course. “Just give them homes!” they’ll piously declare, as if handouts haven’t failed miserably everywhere they’ve been tried. No, all leftism has ever done is create more homelessness, not prevent it.

Now, you might counter by citing some hard-working person you know who lost their home or can’t afford a home through no fault of their own, and I would agree that people like that should be helped, especially in today’s economy. The working poor certainly deserve a hand up, as long as they’re working and drug-free. But we both know that’s not the majority of what we’re seeing out there, not by a long shot. In truth, the overwhelming majority of homelessness today can be traced to some combination of mental illness, drug addiction, and, well, just pure laziness. (RELATED: San Francisco Opens First-Ever Sober Homeless Shelter, And The Results Are Exactly What You’d Expect)

The solution is obvious, but still not politically viable, though the tides seem to be slowly shifting. Homeless people should not be allowed to live in public spaces. Period. Full stop. I own those spaces. You own those spaces. Did they ask you for permission to live there? I know they didn’t ask me.

Vagrancy laws used to be robust and heavily enforced, but lost much of their teeth after a key Supreme Court ruling in 1972 found most to be unconstitutional. However, a 2024 ruling in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson held that laws that regulate camping on public property do not violate the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment” imposed by the government. Predictably, the ACLU bemoans the fact that since the ruling “over 350 cities have passed bills criminalizing unhoused people,” but I consider it a huge step in the right direction. The first step in keeping the homeless off our streets is to pass laws that prevent them from being there in the first place.

So where should they live? Here is where cities and states could solve the problem with probably a fraction of the budget they’re spending now:

First, we need to open mental asylums and reintroduce forced admission for those deemed to be legitimately insane. Put in all the protections you want, but insane people don’t belong on the streets. They should be in asylums for their own safety as well as ours. This would, of course, require overturning existing laws against compelled treatment, a tall order in any Democrat-controlled area. So this would obviously have to be tested first in conservative strongholds. However, the beauty of federalism is the ability to test such things on a smaller scale and be judged by the results. I’m willing to bet that the quality of life made available without insane people walking around harassing and killing the rest of us will present a stark contrast to the urban hellscapes created by Democrats.

Second, we need to establish and/or bolster funding for rehabilitation facilities and force drug addicts to go and get treatment. Refusal to follow through on the program and stay clean after completion should be punished with at least several years in prison. Let’s stop pretending drug addiction is a victimless crime. It’s not, and it never has been. If they don’t want to get clean the easy way, the hard way will have to do. (RELATED: Trump Admin Calls ‘Housing First’ Approach Failure, Rolls Out Major Homelessness Reform)

Third, cities and/or states should establish some sort of workhouse system to provide both job training and even jobs for those who don’t have them. What kind of jobs, you ask? The possibilities are limitless, from rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure to picking up trash on the highway. (I can’t imagine robots doing any of THOSE things anytime soon!) In return, they get room and board, but they have to earn their keep. Nobody should have the right to live on the public dole without working. You might take offense at this, but this is where Dickensonian England had it right. We can make them clean, safe places, but they need to exist.

I am sick and tired of being sick and tired of these people living and sh*tting on our streets, and you probably are too. It’s going to take some harsh measures to deal with the problem, but it’s a problem that has a solution, if only we had the political will to implement it.