Leadership Quote by Linda Lingle

“We have come dangerously close” is the kind of warning that’s meant to jolt a complacent audience without indicting them outright. Linda Lingle, speaking as a politician, isn’t simply describing homelessness; she’s diagnosing a civic mood: resignation disguised as realism. The key word is “accepting.” It suggests that the most corrosive shift isn’t the rise in tents or shelter waitlists, but the quiet normalization of those facts - the way a crisis becomes scenery once it feels permanent.

The phrase “dangerously close” does double work. It casts fatalism as a threat in itself, a step away from policy failure and toward moral failure. In that framing, the enemy isn’t only budget constraints or housing supply; it’s the story a community tells itself to justify inaction: that homelessness is an intractable condition rather than a solvable outcome of choices. Lingle’s “we” is strategic, too. It spreads responsibility across voters, agencies, nonprofits, and elected officials, inviting collective buy-in while softening direct blame. That’s classic political rhetoric: unify the room, then ask it to move.

Contextually, this kind of line tends to surface when public patience is fraying - when visible homelessness collides with tourism, business pressure, or neighborhood anxiety, and leaders need to reassert the premise that government can still govern. The subtext is a plea for political permission: permission to spend, to build, to reform systems, to try interventions that will upset someone. By naming resignation as the real hazard, Lingle reframes hope not as sentiment, but as a prerequisite for policy.