If you live in or have visited one of America’s major cities in the last five to seven years, it’s likely you have seen one of America’s biggest shames: the terrible homeless crisis.

It is gripping our country and tearing apart many of our cities during a time of record-low unemployment and economic prosperity.

California — a state where the GDP would make it the fifth-largest economy in the world and taxes are sky-high — has four of the five cities with the highest homeless rates in America, according to a report just released by the Council of Economic Advisers.

How can this be?

The reasons are many, but it’s clear that the primary contributing factors are mental health, a lack of safe shelters, drug addiction and inadequate guidance from state and local governments.

In other words, bureaucracies are failing our most vulnerable at their time of greatest need.

Often when big government fails, the heroes of the private sector step up. That’s exactly what happened in New York last week.

Covenant House, a 47-year-old privately funded agency that provides housing and supportive services to youth facing homelessness, quietly announced that it will build a new, more extensive facility on its current Manhattan site.

The $128 million campaign was spearheaded by a $10 million donation from Strauss Zelnick and wife Wendy Belzberg. Zelnick runs ZMC Zelnick Media Capital and is also the CEO of Take Two Interactive, the gaming company.

We can do much better as a nation.

The solution has to start with the people, and the answers lie in empathy, education and efficient use of capital — like the Covenant House model.