They come across as the entitled ones.

One of them pilfered a Manteca Walmart shopping cart early Thursday afternoon.

And he certainly wasn’t low-profile about it.

Oblivious to traffic as well as red lights, he pushed the cart into the Main Street and Mission Ridge/Industrial Park Drive intersection.

It effectively stopped all vehicle movements.

Then, after reaching the southern side of the intersection, he turned and started walking between two lanes of moving traffic heading west.

Nonchalant. Entitled.

Giving credit where credit is due, motorists didn’t react angrily.

They either stopped or gave him wide berth during his illegal foray down the middle of the travel lanes.

None of this is new to anyone in Manteca or in California, for that matter.

A number of homeless transverse streets like entitled zombies operating on the premise people will make way for them or — worse yet — see them at night as they walk in darkness down travel lanes instead of using sidewalks.

Some would view the previous as uncaring.

Some might say making such an observation lacks empathy.

And some might say it does nothing to address the problem.

Bingo.

It’s because, like it or not, it is the new norm.

The homeless are becoming background noise to a degree.

People are running out of outrage because of the homeless or because the problem exists.

Want to know why?

There are 24 billion reasons why.

That represents the dollar amount California has spent combating homelessness since 2018.

There are 185,000 unhoused homeless in California,

That is $129,729 per unhoused homeless individual.

To put that in perspective, the average household income in Manteca is $117,000. And that supports an average of 3.1 people

Tons of articles have been written about how the homeless are losing hope based on the progress not being made.

Few, though, are written about everyone else who isn’t homeless losing patience.

It shouldn’t bother them, right?

After all, they are housed.

Everyone, however, is paying for the “solution”.

A “solution” that is working about as effectively as crushing rocks to provide drinking water.

It’s time to face the obvious.

What little is working is a pittance compared to what is needed and the amount  being spent.

Money that could be spent on a long list of societal needs.

California, the experts say, is 2.5 million housing units short.

That means even if the $24 billion spent in the last seven years was done so to rent a basic studio apartment for each and every unhoused individual in California it couldn’t be done as there is not enough housing.

Depending upon the survey, between 25 and 40  percent of the unhoused have serious addiction issues.

Now consider this:  The National Center  for Drug Abuse statistics indicated 60 million Americans in a year use illegal drugs with 25.4 percent of them having use disorder which is a nice way of saying an addiction.

Depending upon the survey, between 20 and 25 percent of the homeless suffer from serious mental health concerns.

Johns Hopkins Medicine estimates 1 in 4 Americans age 18 and older suffer from a diagnoseable mental disorder in a given year. And 9.5 percent of all adults in a given year are experiencing a serious mental disorder such as major depression, bipolar disorder or dysthymia.

Taking the research at face value, that means roughly three times as many people that are unhoused suffer from illness or addiction as opposed to those that are housed.

That brings us to the three leading causes of being homeless almost universally agreed upon by experts. They are — in descending order —  lack of affordable housing, employment and mental illness.

And what is the biggest force blocking affordable housing, employment and mental illness from being addressed?

It’s government policy.

More precisely, it is state and federal government policy.

Governor Newsom, like clockwork, lashes out every few months at cities for not doing enough despite money being sent their way  from Sacramento.

Now he wants them to send the whack-a-mole game of tearing down encampments — which we should be doing — into overdrive.

Large homeless encampments in major California cities isn’t good optics for the state’s governor especially if he wants to load up the moving van and head to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 2028.

But increases homeless encampment enforcement really won’t solve much.

It wasn’t local government that allowed the California Environmental Quality Act to be weaponized to fight housing and to add years to the approval process.

It wasn’t local government that keeps adding substantially to the upfront cost of housing whether it is requiring it to include solar energy systems, eventually not be able to use less expensive natural gas, or other standards rooted in environmental considerations.

It’s not local government — except for those that have their own minimum wage laws exceeding the state’s — that are prompting a move toward automation to replace low-skill jobs through continually raising the minimum wage.

Yes, a household can’t support itself on one 40-hour minimum wage job assuming they are still available for that many hours given employers try to avoid mandated fulltime benefits. But there was a time when they were plentiful enough that a household could count on multiple minimum wage jobs to make ends make.

And it isn’t the local government that makes the laws covering how those with serious mental illness issues can be addressed even when they are homeless and wandering the streets.

Manteca’s leaders back in November 2022 wanted to have modulars placed at the emergency homeless shelter location at 555 Industrial Park Drive by Christmas of that year so the unhoused would have dormitories to allow them not to have to sleep on the streets in inclement weather.

The state and federal environmental laws required a full-blown study including whether the site was a threat to airport operations or would disturb an archeological site of statewide importance.

The dorms didn’t get in place until April of 2024 thanks to the bureaucracy, and accompanying red tape, created in Sacramento and Washington.

That isn’t the result of local incompetency.

It is the result of the never-ending web of regulations and hoops the state and federal government creates that impedes solutions from taking place more so than the NIMBYism that Newsom often huffs and puffs about.

Common sense and the concept of middle ground solutions to the homeless quagmire required to make reasonable progress are not part of the DNA of the state and federal government.

The worst part, after blowing the bigger part of $24 billion neither Sacramento or Washington concedes they are a big part of the problem.

This column is the opinion of editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Bulletin or 209 Multimedia. He can be reached at [email protected]