The poverty in Laredo was so extensive that people in some parts of town actually lived in shacks. Yet, there was never a homelessness problem in Laredo. Yes, people lived in dilapidated housing, but at least they had a place to live.

Today, there is a gigantic homelessness problem in cities across America, but those cities have a much higher standard of living than Laredo had back in the 1950s and 1960s. How is it that Laredo had no homelessness, while many American cities today are besieged by homelessness?

The answer lies in government central planning and government economic intervention, specifically with respect to zoning laws and what also became known as urban renewal. Moreover, to a larger extent, the homelessness problem is rooted in the welfare-state way of life that America adopted in the twentieth century. Indeed, the homelessness problem is a testament to the failure of the "war on poverty" that underlies America's welfare-state way of life.

After the adoption of the Constitution, Americans lived without zoning — and, for that matter, socialism — for more than 125 years. Consider, for example, the American way of life in, say, 1890–1910: no income tax, IRS, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, minimum-wage laws, (few) economic regulations, immigration controls, drug laws, zoning laws, public (i.e., government) schooling systems, Federal Reserve, paper money, Pentagon, CIA, NSA, foreign military bases, foreign wars, foreign aid, state-sponsored assassinations, torture, indefinite detention, and mass secret surveillance. Needless to say, it was quite a different way of life than that to which Americans are accustomed to today.