This is not a result of prohibitive housing prices or anything like that. Through my work in the homeless community I've seen and heard first hand that chronic homelessness is almost always a result of mental illness and/or drug use. Those two problems have always existed, but opiate abuse is much worse now than it has ever been.
Of course there are sad cases of people unable to find jobs who are otherwise 'normal', but these cases are in the minority. Many people unable to find jobs or hold down jobs beyond the most menial sort have mental illness that prevents them from doing so.
>This is not a result of prohibitive housing prices or anything like that
The counter example is in the article is one of a couple who receive $1500 a month and can't find a residence? You're argument is this is an anomaly?
I don't understand the mental gymnastics some people have to go through in order to convince themselves the problem in articles is not the problem. It happened in the Susan Fowler thread too.
There is also increasingly more evidence that drug use is more attributed to escapism or a learned behavior of happier times and should be treated as a societal issue and mental illness seems to be a catch all for all the societal ills we don't want to deal with. I'd probably be addicted to drugs and have mental illness too if I had to shit in a bucket everyday in my shit filled RV.
"receive $1500 a month and can't find a residence"
If they are receiving government assistance and not working, then the tie to the particular city isn't strong from a "needing to be there". There are communities in California where one can find two bedroom houses/apartments for $900/mo or less. Rooms, studios, etc. may be even cheaper. It may not be desirable to move to some of those communities, but there are options along the west coast that are affordable to the above situation.
Every day people make decisions of whether or not they can afford to live in a location and if not, move to where they can. A community I am quite familiar with have able bodied homeless people that prefer to live in said community and remain homeless. People working in the homeless services insist we need affordable housing for these people, it's never about whether or not affordable housing is available in other areas.
The area of drug use, mental illness and others is way more complicated. As adults, there is no way to involuntary commit someone to get them help, they will have to want to get help in order to change. It is a huge issue and outside my knowledge-base of how to best handle it.
Why should anyone value your opinion on this? The person you responded to cited personal experience in working with the homeless. I have a reason to give weight to their opinion.
They weren’t exactly sharing an opinion. They called to the claims of the article that contradict the other’s experience. They mentioned—admittedly un-cited—recent evidence that also contradicts the other’s claims of anecdotal experience.
That may be the case where you've done your work, but it's directly at odds with some of the information that's being presented in this article. For example:
> “I’ve got economically zero unemployment in my city, and I’ve got thousands of homeless people that actually are working and just can’t afford housing,” said Seattle City Councilman Mike O’Brien. “There’s nowhere for these folks to move to. Every time we open up a new place, it fills up.”
But, why don't they do what's done in China: Rent a room and share it with someone. Even if the cheapest rooms cost 1000$ a month, that would be 500$ per person, if there's 2 people per room. In the army, you share a bunk with nearly a dozen.
It certainly doesn't absolve us of having to build much more, but at least it's a short term solution.
What jobs are they working? How many jobs have they had in the past year? I can only speak to my own experience with the homeless I've come in contact with. Most are mentally ill or are struggling with drug addiction. Sure some of them have jobs, but jobs of the street sweeping, sign holding sort that can't afford them even the most meager housing.
Well, going back to the article, one of the examples they give is a university lecturer. Her income is over twice the current Federal Poverty Level, and she lives out of her car.
I realize I'm going for the ad hominem here, but I get the impression that you were so eager to start victim blaming that you haven't even taken the time to read the article before commenting on it.
I actually did read the article. The article mentions one or two examples of mentally typical people who are homeless. Ok. I've dealt with many many more than that who are most certainly not University lecturers.
But you could perhaps at least see the problem in a university lecturer not being able to afford to maintain a basic standard of living in the community where she teaches, right?
And if you can get that far, then perhaps you can see that the homelessness problem being described in this article goes well beyond the two causes you're trying to reduce the whole thing to?
I don't have much sympathy for the lecturer because it's probably safe to bet she has made a conscious decision to maintain her homeless lifestyle. I find it very hard to believe that someone with a PhD could not find extra work, or do something else entirely, to afford an apartment.
She presumably has other options given her education, unlike other psychologically disabled people who have no other option but to live on the street. Of course pathological stubbornness could be a disability.
The article has a quote that says exactly the opposite, btw.
> “Most homeless people I know aren’t homeless because they’re addicts,” said Tammy Stephen, 54, who lives at a homeless encampment in Seattle. “Most people are homeless because they can’t afford a place to live.”
That is extremely implausible. What fraction of them would be able to put together the $1000/month (in the scenario of extreme home buildout)?
It's only true in the trivial, unhelpful sense of "if we got housing costs down to $10/month or free, then all the people there could afford a place." But when we talk about housing costs in general and policy around it, we mean something like getting rents down from $3000/month to $1000/month (from vast expansion of building), not some artificial number that no amount of expansion would (scalably) get.
And I don't think you can really take one homeless person living at an encampment, making a self-serving statement, as a source.
I read the part of it that was cited as the definitive refutation of all evidence of mental illness driving homelessness and explained why a single self serving source isn’t good enough.
I understand the difference that a few hundred bucks makes to a grad student. I don’t think those are the same people that become homeless in significant numbers and that’s why I’m objecting to the narrative: the person that just needs housing prices a few hundred bucks less is not the person going homeless. Those are different problems.
Does that jibe with your intuition? Do you think if you made minimum wage (or some other very low wage) that you'd be homeless? Or do you think you'd find a way to live in a cheaper city? And if you don't think it would happen to you, then why do you think it's happening to other mentally normal, physically capable people?
If you have zero savings, and you lose your job, and you run out of money to pay rent, eventually get evicted, you will be homeless. It's really not a hard equation to understand. Once you're out on the streets, getting off them is very difficult. You need an address, and a phone number and a shower in order to apply for jobs. If you've been evicted before, landlords will be wary of you. You need support to get back on your feet, and this article is talking exactly about that: there is not enough support for the masses of homeless folks these days.
It's harder than it looks, apparently, because millions of low earners -- i.e. almost all of them -- manage to avoid this outcome. I feel like poor people are discussed in the abstract by people who have never actually been poor. Homelessness is still not a normal outcome. Mentally and physically able people are not routinely homeless.
You can try to reason through this from first principles, I guess. That's a fun thing to do on a nerd message board. But I'm telling you that this is not what happens in actual practice.
Really? My brother is helpless. He searches for any menial job he can find, and there aren't ANY. When he does get a job, it is paying far below the amount needed to pay for housing.
If it wasn't for my mom, he would definitely be homeless. These situations are not contrived.
Furthermore, what if the problem is mental or physical disability? That's not a valid concern of yours? Maybe the homeless population is spiking because of medical costs. What if you have a medical condition that requires medication or you lose your mind? You lose your job, you lose your medication? I honestly feel you're either a troll, or you're just... obtuse?
For the record, I actually have been poor. My family was one shocking expense away from homelessness for much of my life. Luckily we hung in there by a thread. Clearly our country is full of folks like you who think that anyone who's homeless is a useless and easily discarded piece of trash.
Keep in mind there are thousands of low income earners throughout the country that only afford their housing because of low-income subsidized housing programs. These programs are income-based to set monthly cost at an affordable level - sometimes only a couple hundred dollars per month. These people would not be able to afford housing even in low-cost cities without assistance. In areas where these programs are not available or not in sufficient numbers, homeless situations can easily arise.
Sure, and SSI/disability benefits play an enormous role here, too. But that actually bolsters my point, which is that homelessness isn't a routine outcome in the United States. A lot has to go wrong before you get there.
When you talk about poor people in the abstract, it's easy to contrive scenarios in which somebody loses their job at the gas station and is forced into homelessness. But in actual real life, that's rarely how it plays out.
Moving from San Francisco to New York is hard. Moving from San Francisco to a low-cost portion of the Central Valley is less hard (and an actual practical thing that lots of low earners probably do before they become homeless).
No. Moving from SF to NYC is not easier than moving to the Central Valley. The difficulties are different.
When I was six we moved to the easiest place to move to: early 90s greater Toronto Area. No crime. Lots of jobs. Lots of good will from the natives. It was tough.
The Central Valley is ravaged by unique social issues. To dismiss the issues because it’s cheap to live there is insane.
It would be interesting to get stats on homeless churn - the proportion of the homeless people who were homeless 3 months ago, or who will be homeless in 3 months - and then qualitative data on who those people are and why they're homeless.
The aphorism I've heard is that "People become homeless for all sorts of reasons. People stay homeless for just one: mental illness."
Note that it's not contradictory for a majority of the homeless (by the numbers) to have jobs and be homeless for reasons beyond their control, and yet for you (as someone who works with the homeless community) to see a majority of them as suffering from mental illness or drug use. This would happen if there's a large margin of people living on the edge: they're making it work one month, then they lose their job or their rent goes up and they're homeless, then they get another job or find a cheaper place and they're no longer homeless. From your perspective as a provider of services, these are transient folks who come in once and then you never see them again, and you wouldn't remember them. From the statistics on homelessness, they could very well make up a much larger fraction of the homeless than the chronic mental illness & drug abuse cases, particularly in times of great economic change like now.
I agree that mental health plays a huge role, but housing prices impact the healthy and sick, and if you're living on SSDI it can be hard to find a place to live in any city on the west coast. Section 8 waiting lists are miles long and the majority of new housing development is in the "luxury" segment. My dad had to leave Portland because he was living on social security and could no longer afford to live here and also eat.
Are you in the north east, if so then you're probably right because in the north east winter is so cold that being homeless is rarely a 'rational' choice, but on the west coast where things are a little milder the the calculus is different.
The cost of housing cannot go below the cost of servicing the debt required to construct the housing, otherwise that capital will flow elsewhere to find returns and no housing will be built. Realistic solutions will focus on ways to lower the cost to bring units to market and finding new low-cost sources of capital to fund it.
Maybe we should be increasing the efficiency of the existing housing inventory. Second homes, timeshares, empty neighborhoods (...Las Vegas...), AirBNB properties show pretty clearly that there's an excess, or at least strange market incentives.
That's not entirely true. LA had a semi-successful program to build housing that ultimately decreased the cost of _other_ expenses like shelters and jail. The program ran into problems for exactly the reason you stated, even though it was a net _reduction_ in social service expense for the people in the trial. So basically the equation is (cost of building housing per person) - (charged rent) + (mental health/ other support) <= (prison + hospital + shelter + existing homeless support services)
Although that's coming from memory and I can't source it...
Because as it turns out, the way public housing was being built concentrated all the poverty in the city into a tiny area, which drew the predators out of the woodwork, drove away investment, and made the housing development nigh-unlivable. Additionally, the architecture has often been hostile to the residents, and the city neglected maintenance.
The best way to build public housing would be to make it a part of the gentrification process. Build where the revenue from property taxes is increasing, and in proportion to the development for more affluent housing.
Some municipalities get a lame approximation to this by requiring that developers build housing for poor people in exchange for regulatory variances, but it just isn't the same.
But the short explanation is that the US is overwhelmingly run by rich people, and the rich people in the US hate to see poor people get something at or below cost without them sweating on it first, because they believe that welfare dollars are overwhelmingly coming out of their pockets, and they earned them by their hard work. They may be delusional, but they still get elected to fill the public offices.
Rich property owners (or those looking to become rich from high-value property) would counter with concerns about their property value being destroyed, but personally I am satisfied with this as it is an indirect means of progressive taxation.
Wrenching the general populace above bottom-barrel poverty was done on the back of twentieth-century prosperity (ie: progressive taxation) but there is no such progressive taxation scheme for property tax (ie: property taxes are exceedingly complicated and many deductions are available). It is only prudent that other (new and exotic) means of wealth redistribution are attempted.
I understand that it's difficult to do correctly, but it has been done correctly in the past, on a few occasions (e.g. the scattered-site developments in Yonkers, NY).
It just seems like we've completely given up, and I'm not sure if that's something that has been politically ordained or if we just aren't interested in trying again.
Perhaps a little inland from the coast, but I was in Palm Springs 10 years ago, and then again this year and was struck by what seemed like a general deterioration in the town, as well as the number of homeless people - I don't remember seeing a single homeless person on my first trip. Very sad to see. These intertwined economic/social problems seem to be the most difficult to solve, or is it just lack of willingness to do something about it by elites or society as a whole?
An idea that has crossed my mind before is: how expensive would it be to provide the homeless the very bare minimum of survival i.e. food, shelter, most basic healthcare, even free alcohol? Why don't we just accept that some people are going to fall through the cracks and save ourselves the delusion that we are going to be able to get them off drugs/reintroduce them to employment etc., and take care of their needs in the simplest and cheapest way possible?
The current economy is pretty good at casting aside those it deems economically worthless. Is it really so tricky to just accept this and pay to look after them?
You're not alone in thinking that. It works[1], and it's cheaper than the current revolving door of policies and support systems. The problem seems to be that people have a strong negative reaction to "undeserving others" getting things "for free".
Arguments on both sides here are about what people "like to do" - with hyperbole in both directions. But the fundamental problem is with what people actually do - and given the scale of the problem, and apparent lack of solution, it doesn't seem unfair to say that not enough is being done. Quite a large chunk of the non-homeless population in the US is living in a relatively precarious situation[1], which leaves them both practically unable to help and presumably also afraid of ending up on the street themselves. Hence it's not unreasonable to expect the response to come from governments, like Utah's did.
Maybe some of us prefer not deincentivizing work and creating an even larger subpopulation which is entirely dependent on government and won't be employable for generations?
We live in a reality where resources still require effort and capital to extract from the environment. A society can only support so many through welfare before it collapses.
The subject is a little more nuanced than watching people die out of some kind of jealousy.
Me included - which is why I would provide the bare minimum, and would provide it directly as services rather than dish out benefits for people to spend in the economy. One of the most depressing things on TV here in the UK is a genre of poor people documentary porn which show benefits recipients who commonly have a Sky TV subscription, massive flat screens TVs, latest consoles and phones, plenty of money for ciggies and booze etc, and that appear deeply averse to work but are not so averse to intellectual effort that they aren't able to understand the intricate details of the benefits system necessary to keep their benefits flowing in. Unfortunately I think the only way to discourage this dependency culture is to make working aspirational - and how do we do that? Attitude change yes, but I would argue also making life on benefits less attractive, whilst still remaining humane.
I always thought that experiment was in some senses actually kind of damning. On the one hand it's a success, 91% reduction in chronic homelessness, that's good. On the other hand, how was it not a 100% reduction!? I think it really does validate some of the reservations & criticisms. 9% of the homeless population remained homeless even when everything was provided. That is striking.
This is the idea behind basic income. Basic income eschews the oversight of traditional welfare programs so people are free to spend their money on food and drugs with less pressure to pick one over the other
I'm thinking the solution needs to be multi-pronged:
UBI, an employer of last resort capable of enforcing a minimum living wage, specific support for those who cannot manage their own affairs or be addressed solely through additional money, and a land tax to put a cap on housing appreciation and costs, as well as to spur denser development. Oh, and jettisoning anti-density zoning and building codes.
I'm not sure that's sufficient, but I think it covers a broader set of issues than approaches of the past 40-50 years have managed.
Right, the solution is to give addicts more money to buy drugs. I suppose that'll solve the problem when they inevitably OD and we can stop wasting our money on them.
I'm not speaking from an ivory tower either, like many UBI supporters seem to do. I grew up with friends who were addicts. Ive known people who died of overdose. Plenty of kids are more than happy to throw away their lives smoking weed and shooting up, especially if they're getting their shit for free.
For the record, I support responsible drug use. But UBI is not the answer for the problems in our society, because it will hurt many if not most of the people it should protect.
Giving addicts money to buy drugs will simply push up the price of drugs.
UBI would instead need to give everyone above the drinking age something like a monthly ration of 2 ounces cannabis, 2 psychedelic doses of a regionally appropriate entheogen, and 750 mL neutral grain spirits, all from local production facilities. If they want more, or better quality stuff, they'll just have to spend their pocket money on it, or get a QA job in the industry.
Also, giving the actual drugs out can influence the market, such that people may be encouraged to use drugs that are more socially manageable--in contrast to opioids. Honestly, I'd rather hand out free weed than free alcohol, but you just know the agricultural lobby will heavily influence the composition of the UBI goods ration. If they can make your fuel 10% ethanol, they can certainly convince the government to distribute some of that distilled corn alcohol for human consumption.
I think maybe the thing to do would be to give away treatment.
You also pick really weird amounts. A casual drinker can kill a fifth in a weekend without really disrupting their life, while they range in price from ~$5 (after taxes!) to $25 (Smirnoff is $14 here).
Almost no one would use 2 ounces of marijuana in a few days and it has a street price in the hundreds of dollars.
I reasoned that someone might use 1/4 ounce in a month. But I also thought that the stuff the government would pass out would probably be grown in less than ideal conditions, and inattentively processed, making the ration weak, with lots of stems and seeds. So you would have to give out 8x as much (and thereby also encourage recipients to learn how to do organic extractions). I didn't give much consideration to the cost, because they don't call it "weed" for nothing, and much of the current expense is due to prohibition.
750 mL works out to about 17 shots of 1.5 oz. each, but I also figured it would probably taste like it was made from stale tortilla chips in most of the US, and would therefore mostly go into mixers, averaging 4 drinks per week. The people who really enjoy their alcohol would be springing for commercial vodka, and there would also be plenty of people who would be getting that ration and not drinking all of it. Many drinkers would probably be relying on a beer or wine ration, but I don't really consider those to be "drugs" below a certain %abv, and UBI beer would probably be around 2.5%abv, with the wine around 4%abv. The beer would taste like a business handshake between Bud and Miller, and the wine like Welch's made out with Manischewitz on their friend's couch.
And for the peyote buttons, mushrooms, DMT or whatever, I thought two trips in a month might have been pushing it, especially for people that were still trying to have normal jobs with their UBI. Good for two of your four weekends, with maybe a couple sketchy Mondays when the machine elves follow you to work.
I don't see why we couldn't directly provide pure pharmaceutical grade narcotics to addicts for them to consume in safety, as part of a compulsory programme to attempt to cure the addiction. Eventually I hope we will come up with a drug to reset the brain, but in the meantime I wish we could have an outbreak of maturity and recognise and treat the addiction in a sensible way, rather than contiuining with the obviously failed war on drugs and all the bad things that flow from it. Imagine if we destroyed a massive part of global organised crime's income at stroke.
The US classifies all hallucinogens and psychedelics at Schedule I, so obviously no researcher that values their academic career can study the use of psychedelics for the purpose of curing addiction. But anecdotal reports suggest that a heroin addict may be cured of opioid addiction by using kratom to alleviate the physical symptoms of withdrawal, and ibogaine to "reset the brain" to no longer desire heroin.
Politically, people would prefer to believe that rehab centers actually work. Using illegal drugs classified as "the worst, most dangerous drugs in existence" to cure addictions to other illegal drugs with a lesser classification may be perceived as... a bit hypocritical.
Is it really so tricky to just accept this and pay to look after them?
People don't want to do that. But one day we may be able to effectively make the argument that we are paying to look after them one way or the other, and we are currently looking after them with the most expensive possible resources, e.g. first responders, penitentiary, etc.
If the argument can be made effectively I think we can get there, but that's the key. You can get people to vote against their ethics & beliefs, but only if you really prove to them that even if it's counterintuitive, you're saving them money.
This is the result of population growth. Even if housing is built specifically for poorer and lower income individuals, middle class families looking for housing will inevitably trickle in causing demand and prices to rise naturally. Once again poor individuals will be on the street. The same cycle keeps occurring in cities across America. Properties designed for the poor end up getting bought by middle and upper class individuals, seen this in Washington D.C. and New york firsthand. Other than full blown capping prices that can be charged for rent, I don't see a long term solution.
Weird how New York City housed millions of poor immigrants at the turn of the century but we can't support natural population growth and urbanization today.
> Weird how New York City housed millions of poor immigrants at the turn of the century
Are you really comparing housing standards for the poor today vs 100 years ago? Unless your solution is to throw all poor people in filthy slums like its 1902 I don't see the point of your comment.
Weird how you haven't considered population density, or housing safety regulations, or the state of the economy, or the average productivity of immigrants looking for a better life at the turn of the century compared to the homeless in modern cities...
Almost as if comparing NYC 100 years ago to modern Seattle is total nonsense.
I made a similar point on a different article about housing prices in Seattle, and just like you, I was down-voted into oblivion for apparently challenging whatever preconceived notions people have.
Yes, the root problem is population growth. Yes, any organism will continue to reproduce until the population size is constrained by sufficient 'poverty.' The difference is that we are running out of land / unable to keep up with building shelters, rather than running out of food as was common for the rest of history.
Does this mean there are not solutions we should try to enact? E.g. less restrictive zoning? No, of course we should be fighting the problem and realizing there are things we can do in the short term. But, until we get into space and are able to create resources/shelter at an exponential rate faster than potential population explosion, this is not a problem that one "solves" -- only delays/pacifies.
We're not really running out of land or resources, or even getting remotely close to it. Divide the US by acreage and there are more than 7 acres of land per person. Even after taking out farmland, national parks, etc there's still an enormous amount of good land for each person in this country. Consider that a place like San Francisco has a population density pushing 19,000 / square mile. That's, in terms of availability, an extra ~133k acres of land per square mile of San Francisco. China, for contrast, has a population of nearly 1.4 billion in a smaller land area than the US. And the vast majority of their country is also completely empty.
The problem seems to be a sort of network effect in real life. People want to live in cities where there are opportunities. Where are there opportunities? Where lots of people want to live. It'd be an interesting experiment to see a planned city where a large number of individuals/companies agreed, before it was build, to reside there. Bypassing the network effect and ideally make it an instantly desirable location to live. If such an experiment were a success it would create an instantly replicable model that could vastly improve the state of the economy and the country as a whole. But the up front cost of an experiment like this would make something like colonizing Mars seem like the cheap option, even if the costs could be recouped in a fairly short period of time.
Something I find amazingly prescient here is Past Tense [1].
Past Tense is an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. It was filmed going on 25 years ago - in 1993. It told a story of increasing disparity eventually culminating in "Sanctuary Districts" starting in the early 2020s as a means of providing 'sanctuary' for the unemployed, mentally ill, and those otherwise unable to make it in society -- and the dystopia that followed. Everything down to the timeline and location (the story focused on San Francisco) is again just quite prescient.
It's just a story, but one to keep in mind when deciding how to try to deal with problems like this. The ideas of Sanctuary Cities are incredibly appealing, and it's for that reason that I think we're highly likely to play out this story to its natural conclusion. It offers no alternative, and it's entirely possible that there is none. But it's certainly a thought provoking episode tying together all the issues we're facing today, while considering how good intentions can go very wrong.
Of course there are sad cases of people unable to find jobs who are otherwise 'normal', but these cases are in the minority. Many people unable to find jobs or hold down jobs beyond the most menial sort have mental illness that prevents them from doing so.