I think this is the first article I've read to use the term "visible homelessness". For many people who live in Seattle, the world "homeless" really means visibly homeless, but for many political activists, the word includes people in shelters or living in the cars or otherwise keeping a low profile while not having a permanent address. I'm no expert but I strongly suspect that the best ways to help the visibly homeless and the not-visibly-homeless are pretty different. But activists are more than willing to conflate the two cases. This particularly arises in the case of affordable housing. Housing may indeed be the primary problem for the not-visibly-homeless. It seems pretty likely though (just based on observation) that the biggest problems for the visibly homeless are mental illness and substance abuse.
I think we'd be better served by not talking past each other and instead make it clear which kind of homeless problem we're talking about at any particular time.
The evidence shows that housing-first policies applied to the worst cases (chronically homeless single people with addiction) is effective and lowers costs, in fact more so than for easier clients (families who have become homeless more recently). However popular outrage culture insists on targeting folks who have addiction with sweeps and incarceration instead, even though the law-and-order response is more expensive and less humane. It seems our urge to punish defeats our willingness to tolerate less retributive evidence-based approaches. Source: https://www.npr.org/2019/05/17/724462179/episode-913-countin...
It isn’t housing first, I’ve never agreed with that name for their approach, it is disingenuous at best. The policies, as described in any “housing first” policies I’ve encountered, are more reasonably described as “supportive housing first”.
If you place a chronically homeless, bi-polar, heroin addict into an apartment they will not get better, they will continue their previous life until they’ve broken their lease and are evicted; none of the “housing first” programs aimed at the “visibly homeless” we’re talking about do this, they provide housing along with a robust support system to get these people medical and mental healthcare as well as addiction recovery. It is a good model but I’ve too frequently seen them mischaracterized as just providing free rent, that isn’t what they do and that would fail. They are essentially just a reimagined mental health institute with far more freedom for the patients.
A lot of those people who are the worst offenders, routinely bouncing from the hospital, to the jail, to the streets, have problems that aren't solved by a house. They need a group-home that isn't jail but is capable of saying, "no, you aren't fit to go into public yet until you can meet these criteria." A lot of these people need others to make decisions for them, when to take medications, when to bathe, how to navigate the bureaucracy, etc. God knows it would save a lot of money and keep them off the streets. I feel like for a lot of people they'd find community and purpose in life, eventually solving the problem that created their circumstances to begin with. Jail doesn't work, the streets doesn't work, leniency doesn't work, just handing someone a house isn't realistic. We have to try something else.
You are describing institutionalization. Mandatory institutionalization is ripe for abuse, and voluntary institutionalization doesn't work when it's intended use is to serve people whose defining characteristics is inability to mak good choices consistently.
I am for the "housing first" approach, but there is a clear moral hazard when you provide free housing to the lowest rung, and then say that the minimum cost of housing for the next group is like 1.5k/bedroom/month.
It's important to note that "moral hazard", while not quite a term of art, has a specific meaning in economics that isn't associated with ethics or morality.
The quick google definitions: "a lack of incentive to guard against risk where one is protected from its consequences"
He's using it correctly here though: the risk is that if you provide housing to the lowest rung while making the next group down pay $1.5K/bedroom/month, some of the next group down will decide that they would rather become part of the "lowest rung" group rather than pay the money. It's like the phenomena of people committing petty crimes so that they can get a warm bed and food in jail.
Your example illustrates to me why moral hazard isn't the best title for this. We should provide free housing to people in need so they don't do things like commit a crime to go to jail.
The moral hazard is for those renting: the free housing is equivalent to an insurance payout.
A renter can do risky things (like lose their job) because they are protected from the consequences of not being able to pay the rent. They get housed anyway.
This is what’s keeping me living at home with my parents. I tried to move out a few years ago, found an apartment that was $1,100 a month and plenty of parking.
6 months after moving in, after having multiple bad experiences with tenants, I realized I moved in to a “subsidized housing” apartment. There was lots of parking available because 90% of the tenants weren’t allowed to drive.
It hurts to work all day to pay for stuff, only to come home to half your neighbors lazing about drunk and stoned getting a free ride. It fucking sucks, I could never escape the thought that I could just quit my job and smoke weed all day and live pretty much the same as I was.
If I wanted to live in a condo, which doesn’t have subsidized housing, I’d have to pay rents upwards of $2,200. So I moved back in with my folks until I can buy something.
>>It hurts to work all day to pay for stuff, only to come home to half your neighbors lazing about drunk and stoned getting a free ride. It fucking sucks, I could never escape the thought that I could just quit my job and smoke weed all day and live pretty much the same as I was.
I know people who work back breaking low-income jobs and get very angry seeing people on government assistance sitting around all day getting high with their friends.
I think the position of the homeless activists: of giving people with no life skills and no discipline, and who habitually abuse drugs, no-strings-attached taxpayer aid, is totally immoral and irresponsible. It's the worse example of short-sighted unthinking compassion and/or virtue-signalling.
At the very least, drug addicts who've lost the ability to support themselves should be committed to a drug rehab center. In the past the lost souls were also enrolled in work houses. Those on public aid doing some work should be another minimum requirement for any welfare system. The nature of the work can be targeted to their intellectual and physical capabilities, but they should be required to do some kind of work if they're going to receive public support.
Anyway, demanding accountability from welfare recipients is not going to win you any elections - people would rather elect someone with compassion and a terrible plan for governance than elect someone with a logically coherent governance plan who might not have compassion - so the problem will just get worse.
The desire to quit can be shaped by the incentives society creates. If using drugs and partying with fellow drug-using friends means continually being committed to three month stints in rehab, it might encourage that party to get out of that lifestyle.
Also, some people may decide to quit once they've been forced to stop doing drugs for a few months, because it results in lessened chemical dependency, and some time for the parts of their brain damaged from the drug-use to recover, which helps increase self-control.
We forcibly prevent children from engaging in self-destructive behaviour, because sometimes they need someone who knows better to control them, until they mature and do know better. Just because someone turns 18, doesn't always mean this stops applying. In the case of someone habitually using hard drugs, I think a strong argument can be made that it still applies because they lack the maturity and self-control to make these decisions for themselves.
> It hurts to work all day to pay for stuff, only to come home to half your neighbors lazing about drunk and stoned getting a free ride.
I hear this all the time - yet I don't see many people particularly keen on dropping out, and getting onto the free ride bus.
One of the problems with that free ride bus is that it doesn't go to great places. It didn't sound like you were looking forward to the prospect of living in subsidized housing for the rest of your life very much.
> yet I don't see many people particularly keen on dropping out
Just open your eyes. Look around Seattle, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or San Diego or any other city with mild weather, lenient law enforcement, and generous welfare benefits. The number of homeless and housed "drop outs" is astonishing.
If you think 'dropping out' and living a homeless life is in any way preferable to the alternatives, I'd recommend spending a few days panhandling, and a few nights in a homeless shelter.
I have a feeling that you'll change your tune pretty quick after that. You'll quickly realize how dehumanizing it is to be in that position.
Disregarding the factual issues there, what about the moral hazard of not doing so and turning people into Safe Seattle members who literally advocate shooting them or driving them into the forest and leaving them there?
Honestly the housing first is a bad idea for the visibly homeless. Might work Ok for the invisible homelessness but the property damage costs can easily be factors lager than even the rent cost.
I think you should seriously reconsider your position.
There is a chronic inebriate apartment building downtown Seattle that makes no moral judgements about "stopping drinking" etc that LOWERS COSTS (with studies to back it up) for the community.
People with problems get a permanent address. Ambulance and police calls drop as they aren't chasing these guys all over town.
Think again.
MAYBE your position is more about being judgemental about their moral state then actually whats good for them and the rest of us.
EDIT -
Just to be clear. If someone is too far gone (and many of these guys are) then we need to start funding involutanry commitment beds.
Might be marginally effective but at what cost. If it costs more a year to house one of the chronically homeless than incarcerate then then I’d go with the cheaper option. The money is better used to help the invisible homeless after that point
In Rhode Island they actually prosecute addicts and mentally ill who commit crimes, and offer them the alternative of drug and rehab courts that entail mandatory internment in decent facilities and rehabilitation. They emerge with no record, and no debt to be paid. Many going through the process say it saved their life.
The same drug courts and facilities exist on the west coast, but they are underutilized because there is no incentive. No criminal or civil justice funnel. People are just set loose.
Intervention helps those who are beyond helping themselves. A free place with no strings attached does not do nearly as much to help those who truly need help.
Frontline did a piece on that approach and it was a retrospective on how it had gone wrong in notable cases. Not stating an opinion here, but highlighting that even sympathetic coverage thinks the approach is a mixed bag in practice.
> was a retrospective on how it had gone wrong in notable cases.
> highlighting that even sympathetic coverage thinks the approach is a mixed bag in practice.
You mean "how a statistically non-significant number of cases lead to the usual results in our modern outrage culture"?
You will always have cases where it doesn't work. That's why statistics are important. But statistics don't sell, what sells is "SEE, WE GAVE THIS GUY FREE HOUSING AND HE DID THIS HORRIBLE THING"
I believe the homeless (and everyone else), should be prosecuted in full for crimes they commit.
I think there are two types of homeless - those who are sane and normal but down on their luck - once they get a job and support they can be contributing members of society. These individuals need all the support we can give them.
The second type of homeless, sometimes referred to as homeless by choice, those individuals who are drug addicted or mentally unstable to the point they can't even keep it together to get a government check need to be handled differently. I think we should have some form of long term holds for these people until they truly show they can survive and flourish without it.
Cities are becoming overrun with the second type of homeless. These people are generally filthy, spread disease, commit various crimes of opportunity even including assault and murder and rape, and abuse drugs and alcohol until they die.
I suggest we categorize the second type of homeless by issue involved and severity and have mandatory facilities to either help them recover or simply hold them long term. Categories could include various levels of drug addiction rehab, mental health, etc.
The evidence shows that housing-first policies applied to the worst cases (chronically homeless single people with addiction) is effective and lowers costs
I would like to dispute that. This WaPo [1] article paints a far less rosy picture.
Addiction is a symptom of mental illness (and in all likelihood may be genetic). Look at the rates of smoking among people with schizophrenia [2], they're much higher than the general population, and the usual purported causes fall flat.
> A dose-dependent relationship was found between smoking and protection from schizophrenia. This is really interesting.
The study found smoking protects against schizophrenia. The blog author skewers later science for completely misrepresenting this study in their review.
Nicotine is sort of similar to niacin/niacinamide (vitamin b3), which is probably why it protects against schizophrenia. I recommended niacinamide to a young woman who’d just quit smoking, “again”. She says the vitamin is great, is still taking it 1.5 years later and recommends it to all her coworkers who want to quit smoking.
Addressing the causes of that being a high-cost housing market, or even just walking through the though exercise of why it is that and what might change the situation, is recommended.
Sure, but the structural issues that Seattle (and many other municipalities) have with ensuring conditions to allow sufficient construction to meet housing demand don't have much to do with visible homelessness stemming from mental health issues.
City centres are where service provisioning tends to be most efficient. Providing services there does seem to make sense. And if the homeless / housing-insecure population is so large as to skew overall real estate markets ... maybe you have a bigger problem?
I have lived in Seattle since 1995. It is now a shi-shi techtropolis fully of 300k+ tech bros, of which I am an aged version. There is zero reason for tech (and god I hate hate this term) should be clustered in a locale. It is absurd, my locality has never played into anything I have done. It isn't like someone opened the yellow pages and looked for a data gravity consultant.
How about for one year, we all put our incomes into a pot and split it 1/population of america. Just for funsies.
There is zero reason tech should be clustered in a locale
Presumably because the end-product (and some intermediates) are ephemeral and can be transmitted losslessly long distances in little time at low cost?
Perversely: that's just what leads to greater rather than less concentration in industries. Especially where there's a great deal ofhumam interaction and collaboration required.
Since the end-products are ephemeral, they can be distributed to any point on Earth. But clustering of creation activities, returns to scale, even a small component of ancillary support services and infrastructure, and even small gains to round-trip interaction rates, reliability, or flexibility, favour concentration over decentralisation and mean that any one locale which gains an edge over others sees path-dependencies and positive feedback encouraging yet higher growth. Only when frictions develop (say: high costs of housing), or regional differentiators (language, cultural, regulatory regimes, say), do you see a formation of alternate hubs.
Zipf's law / power functions still strongly favour the formation of small numbers of such hubs.
Film, banking, and publishing have very similar tendencies.
It makes zero sense to set dollars on fire by housing people in one of the highest cost of living markets in the world.
I'm not a strong proponent of the Housing First model, but the reality is that it's generally cheaper to house people than to pick up the tab for medical care et al for homeless individuals. Medical bills for the homeless population tend to cost far more than just covering their rent.
What rubs me wrong about your argument is the capitalist nature of it. Access to resources and infrastructure shouldn't be limited to the extremely wealthy. A city should offer housing to everyone at every rung of the ladder because it takes a team to make it work.
This approach, known as Communism, has been tried many times. Turns out that although 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need' sounds nice, wealth actually doesn't come from a fixed pie we get to cut up via politics. We actually need to let people keep what they create, or they won't bother creating and everyone starves.
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. All these battles have been fought a million times on the internet and nothing new ever comes of such discussions.
How you got from "offer public housing" to "abolish private property" is a mental path I'd like to explore. I really mean it. Because it seems that a lot of people seem to mix up welfare state with communism and I'm trying to understand why.
Many people seem to have setup a false choice between the two. Some people, especially politicians, benefit from the false dichotomy.
I would hope that intellectually honest people can see there is large design space for the role of government. Choosing from these options — what is better and worse — depends on individual values and collective responsibilities.
There's a disconnect here. Individuals experiencing homelessness have already chosen to do so somewhere expensive. Generally they have reasons for this that they find compelling. How would you propose to convince them to relocate to this hypothetical cheap homelessness-warehousing center elsewhere?
I have compelling reasons to choose to live in a penthouse suite in Manhattan. It has a beautiful view. Gorgeous amenities. Private parking. Really, it's the best. However, I can't afford to, so the way society persuades me not to live there is that they kick me out, since I didn't pay for the place and don't have any claim to it. This does not seem entirely unreasonable to me.
I get your point: it seems like a moral good in America for people to have some inalienable (i.e. "not required to pay for") right to have some control over where they live. But it makes zero sense to have a black and white rule that everyone has a right to live anywhere they want. Do I have a right to take up residence inside your living room? Your home? Your porch? A public school's playground? The middle of an interstate? A public park? I think the reasonable answers to all of those are "no".
The US is geographically sorting itself by wealth. You used to have pricy neighborhoods but any given city generally had some amount of property available across a range of income levels. With the transition to a service economy, this is less true over time. Now entire cities are becoming uniformly expensive.
The reality is that I no longer think it's tenable to say that someone has a right to live in Manhattan regardless of their income level. The way things are going, it's probably going to be the case that the entire city limits of SF, Seattle, and NYC will go that way.
Does it suck? Yes. Can it be solved at the city level? I don't think so.
There may well be a limited supply of penthouse apartments in specific neighbourhoods.
But the general housing crisis reflects a reality in which basic housing needs for a large portion of the population are either entirely unmet, or are intrinsically perilous, with risk of housing loss at any time high.
Your colourful hypo entirely fails to address that point.
I recommend again On the Media's excellent series on housing, "Scarlet E":
It's acknowledged that there's a housing crisis. There's also an opioid crisis, and a crisis in care for the mentally ill.
I don't think OP would challenge any of that, but he's addressing a much more specific point: if we're to provide housing to people who cannot house themselves, and in particular, the growing number of people with apparent mental or addiction issues living on the streets of downtown city centers, is there an obligation to give them housing in that city center, or even in the city limits?
> is there an obligation to give them housing in that city center, or even in the city limits?
Obligation? No. A good idea? Yes. Support services are in cities, especially centers. Half of this comment page is full with "housing alone doesn't help, we need support structures for the people" - doesn't mix well with the "hey, let's just put all the undesirables on a bus and give them housing in the middle of nowhere".
Why do support services need to be located in a city? What support services cannot be offered outside of a city?
The reality is that many of the visible homeless living in the city center are addicts, and they congregate in city centers, in part, because of cheap and easy access to drugs and like-minded people. In places like the Tenderloin in San Francisco, open drug use is everywhere you look now, and the city turns a blind eye to it.
Claiming that people need to remain in this environment to recover is extremely misguided.
Lower cost? That doesn't seem likely in a city like San Francisco, where the cost of real-estate, construction, labor is sky high and the housing supply is extremely limited.
Helping more people? In that sense, efficiency is meaningless if it's not efficacious. And all evidence suggests that social services in places like San Francisco and Seattle are not working well, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spend each year.
As we've also seen, housing addicts in neighborhoods where open drug use and drug dealing is tolerated is not efficient. Yet that's exactly what happens in the Tenderloin today.
Indeed. If our goal us to help these folks become productive members of society (and then start paying taxes, etc.), then alienating them and housing them possibly too far away from their families, their children's schools, and suitable job opportunities seems like a bad way to achieve that.
I certainly understand where you're going with this. It would seem to be most cost effective to put the housing somewhere where land and buildings are less expensive.
I think this can be problematic for several reasons:
It feels like just pushing the problem to other places/other people. If there's the right commitments and programs in place, maybe it can work. But where in the bay area is going to be happy to host a SF sponsored housing for homeless facility? And will it be less expensive enough to justify?
If people have some connections to service providers or family or social connections, moving them far enough away to save costs is going to make it really hard to keep those up.
I don't think any convincing would be necessary if the help were simply cut off in high cost of living areas and only available in lower cost areas.
This will probably not happen any time soon because it's politically incorrect to effectively admit homeless people don't deserve to live in high cost of living areas, but it would certainly be more effective in helping people materially. Not to mention, people in lower cost, yet populated, areas probably don't want them there either and will fight to prevent this from happening (NIMBY).
Only about 15% of homeless in Seattle are "visible". Roughly 50% are sheltered, and of the unsheltered many live in vehicle [0] (though the numbers in this article don't quite add up).
I fully agree with you though, a lot of people's frustration with the homeless comes from a vocal minority of problematic unsheltered people with serious mental health issues and/or addiction problems. If these people were committed to mental health facilities I think everybody would be better off.
More to the point, a criminal minority. It's mostly lawbreaking that makes this minority visible: assault, robbery, theft, dumping waste, etc.
> If these people were committed to mental health facilities I think everybody would be better off.
I agree and in particular, even the invisible majority. Talk to anyone who knows anything about the homeless problem and they'll tell you that homeless people are very frequently victims of crimes themselves. They don't have the shelter or resources to protect themselves, so they are easy picking for criminals.
So getting this small number of actively harmful homeless people off the street — remediating them or not — will help improve the quality of life and safety of an even larger number of other homeless people.
This has been done before and has a very dark history. Deeming someone criminal and in need of remediation has been an integral part of some very grim historical events.
I’m pretty sure I know what you’re arguing for, but how does one avoid it becoming a system whereby undesirables are vanished? Is there somewhere that has a humane and fair system?
It's not a "grim historical event" to observe when people commit crimes and then throw them in prison for the specific crimes they have committed after a fair trial. That's approximately what would happen if you or I went around brazenly violating the law.
I think one aspect of this that is worthy of concern is institutionalization. A lot of our problems these days are a consequence of deinstitutionalization, but prior to deinstitutionalization there were a lot of hidden abusive practices in the institutions themselves. I'm not sure where exactly the pendulum should come to rest on that issue.
There's also the consequences of putting violent or unstable homeless people in with the general prison population. Which is what pushed them into mental facilities in the first place, who had people better trained to deal with mental illness.
Both of those solutions have downsides and as the NPR story mentioned a lot of those mental health institutions were shut down in the 1980s.
Having beat cops and other locals or street people deal with the problem is also non ideal.
So its going to be lessers of evils and attempting to minimize the evil as much as possible.
What kind of crime though? I think that's a part of it as well. Possession of a little bit of heroin? Camping somewhere not allowed to do so? Trespassing?
I feel like the alternate proposal just says, don't put them in jail for small amounts of time after every small crime, instead preemptively give them a permanent home to stay out of trouble from. In a way, it's a kind of jail, but one where you hope they stay in forever, and go to even before any crime is committed. Would the cost of that be any more then the cost that is currently going to the jail system?
Keep in mind I think the assumption here is that when it comes to mental illness or drug addiction, jail does not work as a deterrent, because the illness or addiction will cause repeat offense no matter the consequence to them. It assumes they can't help themselves but eventually commit a crime again. That's part of the challenge.
it's a 'grim historical event' because America's history of law enforcement has been very much in favor of detaining and criminalizing minorities. One needs to only look at Marijuana statistics to see why.
The problem Seattle is running up against is that they're trying to solve what is effectively a national problem at a local level and failing. The way to solve the issues with the homeless and mentally ill is by having stronger safety nets and healthcare, but that's a longer term solution when people really just want them out of sight, which means tossing them in jail.
Where they come out on the streets and keep doing the exact same thing they were locked up for. Because our criminal justice system doesn't do anything for reform or reducing recidivism.
It’s a national problem that becomes a local problem to the localities that are the most accommodating. At the moment that includes Seattle. People show up here because they get repeatedly arrested in other places, where their solution to the problem is giving away bus tickets to places like Seattle.
> how does one avoid it becoming a system whereby undesirables are vanished?
I think the simple answer is to limit to people who have actually demonstrably committed crimes, which is exactly what this article is about.
I'm not suggesting that someone talking themselves on a street corner should be locked up forever. I'm saying that if you've got someone who already has a record assaulting people, you put that person in jail. Even if it's not to their benefit, it is a benefit to their would-be future victims.
Of course, ideally, we'll remediate them too using the mental health facilities (which need more funding and better laws). I'm not saying I prefer using prison. But it's better than letting known violent people hurt others people.
A wild tiger is not an evil animal that deserves to be locked up. It's done nothing wrong and as an animal is not legally considered responsibile for its actions. But that doesn't mean you'd just let one roam the streets even after it's mauled a couple of people.
Which obviously would never veer into "there was some crime .. it probably was this guy over there" "We have no real proof" "Yeah, but who needs that? Let's spin a few tales for the jury/judge, his look does the rest of the job." .. never happened before, won't happen this time.
If your policy is prone to abuse you better have a few ideas how to make sure this abuse won't happen. People don't want homeless people in their vicinity, so the abuse of any such system without extreme high safeguards is more or less guaranteed. And if you install safeguards you are back at square one: Someone will slip through, bad things happens, articles get written, people cry that safeguards should be lowered .. and so on, and so on. It's not an easy problem. Even if you agree that the basic idea is good.
I think I see your point but the slippery slope goes both ways.
Right now a certain class of criminals operate with impunity in Seattle. Our laws are not perfect and I even acknowledge the bias in drug prosecution but the solution to those problems is changing the laws, not ignoring them.
Contrary to popular belief we do in fact have a functional judiciary and legislature in this country.
> But activists are more than willing to conflate the two cases.
I work in philanthropy and this is absolutely the case.
To most donors and laypeople, a person is homeless if they sleep outdoors, in a car, or in a shelter.
But to people who work in this space, a person staying with friends or extended family members can also be considered homeless. This greatly increases the amount of people considered homeless in their reporting.
That is definitely the case in my community. We are not a big city, and we have essentially zero visible homelessness. But the stats for my kids' elementary school says we actually have a fair number of homeless kids. Turns out that's because they are living somewhere that does not qualify as their own home. They still have a place to eat & sleep.
It sounds like the reason here is that unlike your home staying somewhere else has a pretty high chance of not being permanent. It's probably a good idea to not state "we have zero homelessness" and a month later people run around "How can there be all these people on the streets?! You said we have no homelessness!"
> But to people who work in this space, a person staying with friends or extended family members can also be considered homeless. This greatly increases the amount of people considered homeless in their reporting.
Well of course, they've made their career in this. If people are no longer homeless under the common definition of the term, these people would be without a job, so they have to do marketing work to change the goal posts to justify their existence.
> that the biggest problems for the visibly homeless are mental illness and substance abuse.
I think there's some reasonable evidence that housing first approaches are extremely helpful in addressing both mental illness and substance abuse.
Housing creates an opportunity for both stability and routine, which are incredibly important for getting help and treatment for mental illness and substance abuse.
I don't think the evidence is 100% conclusive yet, but I don't think a housing first approach can absolutely be helpful for both populations (but for different reasons!).
I do think it makes sense to think about both of these populations, because they definitely don't have the all of the same needs. Pretty much everyone needs shelter and at least a small place to safety store items.
In San Francisco some groups use the term visible homeless as well. I think it is a good start in categorization because there is so much cognitive dissonance between seeing a thing, not understanding what is already being done about a thing, and conflating a dozen other issues as one thing.
This is very important! A few years ago I was reading about UC Berkeley grad students who were homeless. They slept in their office on campus. When people talk about homelessness, usually their talking about being visibly homeless without knowing it.
That's not homelessness; that's simple, rational economic behavior. I would have done that in college, too, had that option been available to me, and I would hardly call myself "homeless".
Is a student living in a dorm "homeless", now, too?
What I'd like to know is what has caused (what feels like) the massive increase in our cities of the "visible homeless"? Has there been a policy change, or some other nationwide change that has caused more people to become homeless? What is really going on?
I mean, there's always been both visible and "hidden" homeless people in cities - but over about the past 5 years (and it honestly feels like it increased dramatically after Trump became POTUS - but that has to be my imagination) it has gotten to the point where there are mass groups of such people, living in camps, roaming the streets, and some of them have committed crimes - either to pay for more drugs, food, maybe shelter, or just (maybe) in the hopes of being arrested and given a roof over their head.
Prior to that, I recall there being a few homeless here and there around my neighborhood and city (Phoenix, in my case), but like I said, this has seemed to change drastically.
I have heard rumors (and that's all I know them to be at best) of certain communities in California (typical culprits to the rumors seem to be wealthier areas of the State) paying for buses to transport their homeless to other cities outside California. It seems outlandish, and just another "blame California" excuse the conservatives here would use - but I honestly don't know what the truth is. It might be outlandish, but completely implausible?
One reason some homeless people seem to be more brazen is that they are not being policed as heavily, since people have realized how much of a waste of money it is to throw homeless people in jail for minor crimes. So the people who would be bouncing around in/out of jail are spending more time on the streets. And the same nonenforcement policies also enable homeless people to live in encampments that are not immediately shut down
Note, I don't think the solution is necessarily to reverse these policies. But this is one explanation for why homelessness seems much more visible now than it used to be.
There are other factors increasing homelessness in general, namely substance abuse and increasing housing costs. If you have a poor support network and are living paycheck to paycheck (like most Americans actually do), you are one incident at work + eviction away from homelessness. Substance abuse and untreated mental illness make these worse.
Also there are some pernicious cycles that are hard to avoid with homelessness. Namely that homeless people, as you mention, tend to congregate in large wealthy cities that have lots of services for the homeless. These cities tend to have very high rents so it makes getting out of homelessness more difficult as long as they stay in the city.
> I have heard rumors (and that's all I know them to be at best) of certain communities in California (typical culprits to the rumors seem to be wealthier areas of the State) paying for buses to transport their homeless to other cities outside California. It seems outlandish, and just another "blame California" excuse the conservatives here would use - but I honestly don't know what the truth is. It might be outlandish, but completely implausible?
In California, you will hear people complaining about every community in the South-West paying for buses to transport their homeless into California.
This has occasionally happened, but in a very sporadic way.
So, I think that, for the most part, both the Californians, and the non-Californians who believe this are wrong.
One part of the puzzle: anti-camping laws have been found unconstitutional when the homeless cannot find shelter [1]. Therefore, police are sometimes powerless against tent cities.
Many years ago, while living in Fairfield, CA and trying to get education appropriate to becoming an urban planner, I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU. More recently, I spent several years homeless.
A very big issue in the US is housing policy which has steadily shrunk the availability of basic housing, such as SROs and Missing Middle housing.
While we need some emergency services for the homeless population, I'm really not for actively growing more homeless services as our primary approach to trying to resolve this. We need to fix what's wrong with society that's causing people to land in the street. Housing is a big part of that.
A few blog posts by me:
Why I'm not for "we need more homeless services!" as our primary approach:
Have you been to SF or LA or Seattle? The crisis we are experiencing isn't because rents are too high. That's a separate crisis affecting a different set of people. The crisis this article is discussing, the really really bad homelessness problem, comes in two forms: drug addiction and mental illness. These people could not stay in an apartment if it cost $50 a month. Their problems are far, far worse than poverty.
The groups 'homeless due to housing affordability' and 'homeless due to mental health or drug problems'
As housing prices rise, there are people with mental health or drug issues who are largely stable who lose their housing and then become unstable. There are government organizations and nonprofits that can now provide less units of housing to the same people because their money doesn't go as far. There are people who are just at the edge of stability and whom their local community is stabalizing and for whom moving to new affordable housing destabilizes. There are halfway houses that seeing too many needful people turn out problematic people they might've otherwise tolerated because they can bring in less problematic people who equally need help.
Sure, some number of such people surely exist, but do we have a particular reason to believe that it's actually a significant number? On these sorts of major issues of policy a couple hundred people here and there are a rounding error. There's no end of controversy about the various methods of counting what percent of homeless people in high cost of living areas are "non-native"; everyone running such studies has an agenda, but the impression I've gotten is that there is consensus that it's upwards of 50%. It seems implausible that a significant number of people have been driven from a stable life to mental illness wracked visible homelessness by the skyrocketing cost of housing in a small number of major cities.
>Sure, some number of such people surely exist, but do we have a particular reason to believe that it's actually a significant number
I would say, because places with affordable housing have far less homelessness. And while correlation is not causation the correlation is very compelling right now.
I can't say how many homeless people are mentally ill but stable people who lost their housing but I will say this. Every mentally ill person that experiences bouts of psychosis and whom doesn't have a strong support network is one missed dose, one lost job, one episode away from homelessness.
Places with affordable housing is a synonym for rural areas without government services (or drug dealers).
The best place to be homeless is Seattle or SF because drug use and dealing is legal (or at least not enforced), and there are plenty of shelters/other support services. Thats why Portland puts homeless people on buses to Seattle.
Based on the polling it seems likely the rule of law will be reestablished in Seattle after the next council election, so it will be an interesting way to see if affordable housing was the true cause of the issue.
> Places with affordable housing is a synonym for rural areas without government services (or drug dealers).
I may be misreading this, but it sounds like you're saying rural areas don't have drug dealers? If so, that's patently false. Rural substance abuse rates are generally within 5% of urban abuse rates. They certainly aren't picking up that meth from the local grocery story.
It may not. Just because these people disappear does not mean we fixed the cause. It may simply be that they are housed out of sight in jail or prison.
Also there are many cities that don't have housing affordability crises so no I'm not talking exclusively about rural areas.
Doing everything you think and get told you "should" do to succeed and life coming apart at the seams anyway is crazy making.
Poor nutrition because you have can't make ends meet after paying your ridiculous student loans that were supposed to propel you to a better life takes its toll.
Etc ad nauseum.
We've created a society that chews people up and spits them out. Then we act like it's a personal problem when they crack under the pressure.
I hear you but as an immigrant, I can’t relate. Maybe immigrants are grittier and scrappy, but when the going gets tough, we get out of Dodge and go anywhere else where we can not just survive but thrive.
Oh my goodness! America is huge and you don’t need to apply for a visa to go to another state. And you are free to move around anywhere and enjoy certain fundamental benefits that is available to all. When I first came to this country 22 years ago, I first lost my shit and then my mind when I found out that libraries are free! And anyone can checkout handfuls of books. I remember paying a monthly fee for a library card in India and can get only two books at a time. Standing in line outside American embassy and British council after school because you can’t fins Time magazine or Nat Geo elsewhere because they were expensive publication. Non vernaculars were not widely available. The Russian consulate had second Saturday chess matches and my mother would take me by bus and if I had a good play, I would get treated with ice cream. I rented a computer for a month when I found out what TCP/IP was and then had to get a phone connection for which the deposit was as much as our monthly rent.
I would hazard a guess that most immigrants would call the above problems mentioned as an uniquely first world complaint. Poverty, lack of opportunities..poor nutrition? It’s all crazy sounding to most of us. I remember when I studied for my college exams under candle light because the power grid in my Indian city was unreliable. And it’s not like I am quoting a Monty Python skit.
I won’t even get started about nutrition. It would literally sound like a MP skit. Student loans? My mother went into personal debt to put me through school and college. And she was a single mother. I can’t wrap my mind around what I see here in America. It is entirely unrelatable. It’s like..the country is a gazelle that has never been taught survival skills to be alive in the wild. And then...boom!!.. life happens.
I hear you but I want to let you know that for majority of people in the world, this would sound utterly bizarre and they’d gladly swap places with you.
My mother is an immigrant and this has helped me sidestep a lot of the pitfalls that are currently a significant burden for far too many Americans.
The fact that some people can manage to make things work for them here in no way changes the fact that the system has substantial issues that are in urgent need of remedy.
US housing policies have to change such that we can fix our housing supply issues. In a nutshell, the size of new housing has more than doubled since the 1950s and we have largely zoned out of existence the kind of housing that makes it feasible to live without a car or for single people with entry level jobs to have a place of their own without roommates.
We also need to fix our healthcare system which is an excessive cost burden on far too many Americans.
The first one though is about property rights. You cannot let govt legislate private property rights. It’s the corner stone of this nation’s founding.
There is housing supply in other parts of the country. Urban planning ought to be local governance that should be decided by the local tax payers. At least in CA, it’s regional governance where policy is decided by Sacramento and zoning for million dollar properties works well because of increased property tax.
They are not going to make a lot on affordable housing as taxes collected have to spent on new schools and new infrastructure and new community services etc.
Most of it goes to unfounded public sector pension liabilities.
Govt spending is a Ponzi scheme. But they spend a pittance of it in services.
The best way to deal with housing supply is build where there were no homes before. Not change zoning. The zoning laws have been auctioned off to builders because the state knows that’s where their $$ will come from.. unaffordablity is also a function of this.
I am speaking of California and one county here.
For example:
[..]Property tax revenues in Alameda County are due to hit a whopping milestone, and Fremont is part of the story. Newly elected Alameda County Assessor Phong La released the 2019-2020 local Assessment Roll on Wednesday, which showed that the gross value of all taxable property in Alameda County is a record $321.5 billion— a $21.4 billion or 7.13 percent increase above last year's roll.
Of the 14 cities and unincorporated areas within Alameda County, the City of Oakland remains the highest assessment jurisdiction with a total assessed value of $68.8 billion. The City of Fremont continues to have the second highest assessed value of $55.4 billion. Out in the Tri-Valley, the City of Dublin received the highest percentage increase in assessed value from the prior year at 10.3 percent.
The annual roll reflects assessments of more than 518,600 taxable properties.
La credited the record-breaking roll to a recovering economy and increasing real estate values. Other factors included the 2 percent mandatory inflation index being applied to all properties' assessed values that were not affected by assessment declines in prior years, according to La. This factor added $5.6 billion. Sales/transfers of real estate also added $11.3 billion and new construction activity added $2.5 billion.
Additionally, many companies in Alameda County have flourished, becoming a key factor in the growth in the assessment roll, as business property assessments have increased by $1.1 billion, according to La.
Since 2014, the assessment roll has increased 35 percent or $73 billion. Revenue generated by the assessment roll supports schools, public safety, parks, roads, and other essential services, La said.
[..]
Your seeming assumption that I want the federal government to dictate what gets built is in error. I mostly want them to stop dictating what gets built.
The Federal government plays a significant role in deciding what kind of housing can be readily financed. This plays a really substantial role in what actually gets built.
They've done this since shortly after WW2. It's a de facto stranglehold on the housing market.
There are also substantial tax breaks etc that influence the housing market.
2. Can I have a reference re how the federal govt dictates what gets built?
3. Tax breaks are another story and I don’t know how this affects homelessness or affordable housing. References will be helpful to understand your perspective
The federal government has myriad housing programs. It's not hard to look them up. FDA. Freddie Mac. Etc.
They generally provide assistance for purchasing or improving single family detached housing. There is much less support for other types of housing.
When Americans try to build innovative housing, such as co-housing, they can't find financing for it. This means forms of housing used to provide affordable housing in Europe can only be built in America by groups of wealthy individuals who can afford to self finance. It's also generally harder to build condos and the like because of the lack of financing support generally in the country for anything other than single family detached housing.
Tax breaks intended to make housing more affordable in the big city aren't actually designed to do that. That's not really the outcome you get.
Instead, they are designed in a way that actively encourages people to buy larger homes. This contributes to the size inflation of single family homes and deepens the divide between the have and the have nots. Those who can afford a house at all buy bigger homes, helping to further crowd out those who are poor.
In the 1950s, the average new home was 1200 sqft and housed about 3.5 people. Today, the average new home is around 2500 sqft and houses about 2.5 people, or about one less person.
We are having few children on average, but our houses are larger than ever. We have destroyed about a million SROs and have largely zoned out of existence a variety of smaller home styles currently being called Missing Middle housing.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are publicly traded companies that deal with secondary mortgages.
The HUD does have multi family housing loans, rural loans, affordable housing loans and even loans for farm labourer dwellings.
A loan depends on the ability of the borrower to pay it back. Everywhere, land has appreciating value and the dwelling itself is a depreciating asset. It is obvious why because land is limited and we can’t create new land. Also given that the population growth is exponential, the value of land keeps rising and hence the cost of housing.
There arent tons of financing programs for co housing and group homes because lenders like to select only borrowers who have collateral that can be resold. The reason is that Americans don’t want Co housing or group homes. If there is a demand and trend of qualified borrowers who can build and hold and increase assured re sale value, there is no reason why there wouldn’t be loans for it.
Remember ..for a lender..to back a loan for a co housing project, he has to see a viability to sell it to more than one competitor. And there just isn’t demand because low housing stock and housing affordability is an uniquely tier 1 city problem. Middle America and most economically depressed parts of the country still have lots of land.
It comes back to density. I have looked at this every way possible. Although I can’t claim to have worked on this issue, my mother worked thirty years in the affordable housing sector. I spent most of my after school hours doing homework at her place of work in meeting rooms while listening in... Favoring high density at the cost of stressed infrastructure is desirable only in the United States. No one else who have lived in high density cities around the world will get it.
That’s because there is a difference between crowded and high density. Former is cramming a lot of people with fixed or diminishing resources. The latter is densely packing more people while allocating resources and infrastructure equitably to everyone to optimize sustainability indices. America doesn’t understand high density sustainability.
Property is the most desirable form of investment because as I mentioned before we can’t create more land. We can create more living space by building vertical etc but again, more land is more vertical value and this still operates on scarcity principle. The outcome would be housing unaffordablility.
Living with room mates is rather common in most parts of the world. One can’t modify a financial instrument like a mortgage to manipulate value of an appreciating immovable non replicating asset like land.
It’s an interesting problem, but it’s not a financial problem. It’s a cultural one.
The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), known as Freddie Mac, is a public government-sponsored enterprise (GSE)
On September 7, 2008, Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) director James B. Lockhart III announced he had put Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under the conservatorship of the FHFA (see Federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). The action has been described as "one of the most sweeping government interventions in private financial markets in decades".
A government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) is a type of financial services corporation created by the United States Congress. Their intended function is to enhance the flow of credit to targeted sectors of the economy
The desired effect of the GSEs is to enhance the availability and reduce the cost of credit to the targeted borrowing sectors primarily by reducing the risk of capital losses to investors
Well known GSEs are the Federal National Mortgage Association, or Fannie Mae, and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, or Freddie Mac.
Fannie Mae was founded in 1938. Freddie Mac was founded in 1970. Freddie Mac ranks 38 on the Fortune 500, which means it's quite powerful.
One can’t modify a financial instrument like a mortgage to manipulate value of an appreciating immovable non replicating asset like land
Home mortgages aren't really for land per se. They are mostly for fostering the development of specific kinds of buildings on that land. We absolutely routinely "manipulate" what kinds of development we wish to actively encourage. We very often do that via various financial instruments, such as tax breaks, grants and loan guarantee programs.
All mortgages are about ability to repay and it’s not for land because one still needs a building structure. Having said that, value of building is minimal compared to value of land.
Example: an acre in Detroit is significantly less than an acre in the Bay Area. The cost of the building is somewhat the same..maybe a little higher due to labour cost differences. But Home Depot stocks the same things across the country.
The manipulation happens at state level to ‘manipulate’ how much tax levies can be extracted from properties. That’s why higher value properties are preferable. And people who can afford to pay millions of dollars for a dwelling are generally the kind of people who would not like to live in a co housing situation.
This is an affordability issue. The affordability issue is also partly because people insist upon living in areas where they cannot afford to live. It is as simple as that. With remote work and soon to come automation, low wages jobs are simply not going to be necessary. And if they are like manual or menial labour, it will be built into the larger landscape. An example of this is Singapore. Singapore is a city-state where housing is very clearly segregated by wealth. And in the wealthier parts of town, it is mandatory to build in a room for live in help.
So there is no such thing as a need for affordable housing in the tony part of Singapore. It’s a system that works. Home prices rival or exceed Bay Area prices in parts of high density Singapore, but every single home beyond a certain price range must have a room and bathroom for live in help. In America, we are very allergic and sensitive to segregation of any kind because of the rather nasty history. In most other countries, it is not and in higher density cities, it works and things move on smoothly because the system in place gives more important to resource allocation and quality of life than social justice. But in a way, there is no greater social justice than providing a safety net and reasonable quality of life for everyone. In Singapore, for example..there are no homeless people on the street or the economically vulnerable struggling to be sheltered. But housing is wealth segregated. And it works.
Other problems in America: technology is not democratized and there is no public transport network. Technology is not cutting edge. Not consumer technology but tech for living. (Example: how we deal with our trash and garbage. Compared to Sweden or Norway or Singapore is just embarrassing). This country runs on job and employment stats. There is sprawl. Which is bad and unsustainable. But the solution is not high density. The real solution is low to medium density that is well networked with other low to medium density. For this we need a good transportation network. The interference of federal, local and regional governance into each other’s territories make a mess of everything and nearly impossible to get anything done. (California’s High speed rail disaster is a great example). Big Gov fails if it gets too complicated. Small self sustainable communities networked with each other and having autonomy over their governance is the way to go. The future is not nations, but city states.
Given that you a. dismissed the idea that Freddie Mac is a federal program and b. completely ignored the rebuttal of that erroneous assertion to blather on about your world view and insist you are right and I am wrong anyway, I don't see any constructive value in continuing this discussion further.
FWIW, I found your points interesting, and I agree that all mortgages are about the ability to repay. Wasn't that at the root of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis?
And ability to repay, in my understanding= Capital, Capacity, Credit history, Collateral
That theory is hard to square with the dramatic rise over the past 10-20 years. I remember when folks were alarmed at Nickelsville popping up. Now that's way under the noise floor.
> That theory is hard to square with the dramatic rise over the past 10-20 years.
How so? That exactly lines up with the timeframe of the opioid crisis.
Anecdotally, a large fraction of the RVs I see in my neighborhood are surrounded by needle caps and bike parts. The odds of those being drug-free cycling afficionados seem slim to me.
This is something I wish I understood better too. Someone has to end up buying the parts for some reason other than drugs for it not to be a closed system. I read this article a while back:
It points out a shady bike shop and Craigslist sellers, but not much beyond that.
I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the economy doesn't function. Thieves sell bikes to others who think they'll be able to resell them or trade them for drugs, eventually find out they can't and trash them.
On the other hand, I've seen RVs with dozens of bike frames leaning against them. I assume they wouldn't work at that scale if it wasn't worth it.
Once, thieves stole an entire bike rack outside my apartment. Another time, a thief stripped my bike, leaving their old components disgorged on the spot.
In the 90s, my city offered distinctive and solid bicycles for anyone's use. Painted the same, ugly chartreuse; I wasn't the only one hoping local demand would plummet for cheap, dubiously acquired bicycles. It was willfully naive, but harmless to consider that maybe thieves stole bikes because they didn't have a bike of their own. So, the reliable background level of theft surely must drop if we simply devalued them as a commodity and instead demonstrated them as a spontaneously shared mechanism of public transportation. Because we imagined an underground economy of bicycles, where the bicycle was a scarce resource and also a mode of transportation, was like the horse to the plains Indians.
But it wasn't like that. However distinctive and labeled, the city free bike program bled inventory. Once, less than a year into the program, I was riding by a nice house with it's garage door open. It was packed with city bikes. Before the program, everyone who wanted their own bike already had one. And the few bad actors were gorging themselves on this public good. Police everywhere are notorious for deprioritizing stolen bikes. So, when a rumor spread that the police had accidentally stumbled upon a box van, en route to the West Coast, filled with bottom-tier, weather-beaten, ugly chartreuse rehabbed cruisers, no one was surprised. In the 80s, police in Miami found six freighters taking stolen bikes to Haiti.
I disagree with this, I think high cost of living has a lot to do with people's inability to take care of themselves. Drugs aren't necessarily the avenue people take to become homeless, but when you do become homeless your peers become people who generally do use drugs.
How much do you think rent needs to be so that the homeless can find housing? Because I can guarantee you that I've probably could find a place for that price, even in the bay area. In my experience, as someone who has spent some years in the bay area and who has always had under market rent, housing is quite cheap, most people just don't want it.
It's not the American ideal of a completely private, individual house/apartment. Living with roommates is seen as subpar or not a good choice for an adult.
I see what you mean. I've been moving quite a bit last few years, and the biggest factor that's prevented me from moving into a shared living spaces is my physical belongings. It's difficult moving a small apartment worth of items into an already established home. Or otherwise, establish a place and find renters with a complimentary set of belongings. I suppose practicing minimalism would get facilitate this.
Well if you want stuff, you have to pay to have it. We falsely think that acquiring things is a one-time cost. While true that owning something typically has a lower total cost of ownership, the relationship is not as cut and dry as often made out. For most people, renting certain things that they currently own would be a better use of resources.
Agreed. Incentives are not aligned. It seems the unnamed "War on Homelessness" has just created an industry not actually interested in solving the problem.
Quit calling this a US issue. It’s more of a West Coast issue than anything else. There are plenty of cities with sane building codes that have a lot of “basic” housing.
I live in Seattle but I'm currently in LA. Here in Santa Monica its out of control. I just went to Starbucks and a homeless person was harassing everyone in the line, very threatening -- and the security won't do anything about it. We can't do anything about it or we'd be the one cracked down on.
I was in another coffee shop and a homeless was behind my chair with a lighter trying to light my hair on fire. My wife was harassed in the same coffee shop two days later.
I can't see how this isn't impacting tourism. Even when I went to Hawaii, Waikiki was filled with homeless taking over all the public benches.
> Wilson, who prosecutors say suffers from mental illness, had already been arrested three times since September 2018 for assaulting total strangers, all of those cases were handled by Seattle Municipal Court.
> The Seattle Municipal Court judge made the decision to dismiss all of the assault charges stemming from these recent arrests.
Why are these people not put in mental institutions (they would be here) instead of possibly jail? That is where they belong: jail and other punishment is not going to help anyone long term.
Strange you can lock people up in prisons but not give them help they need... I understand why it would be illegal but jails are far worse for people with mental illness and it won’t work as a deterrent for them either; they come out worse than going in if they survive. So that should be forbidden too then.
I'll happily give my views as a tourist. I've just come back from a CA road-trip and the homelessness I saw was absolutely devastating.
For some background, I'm from London. We have homeless here, but it's different. I've very very rarely ever seen someone who is homeless here that also has any immediately obvious mental health issues (of course, just my experience). I try to interact with them as much as I can, I live in central and I can't fathom how dehumanising of an experience it must be being ignored by thousands of people a day. So a quick chat and an offer to buy food and that's about it. All in all they are usually pleasant people and quite polite. Now London is also different in the states in that - at least in my peer group (16-25) - almost no-one carries cash. At all. Chip & Pin and contactless all the way.
But the states was something else. The first city I was in was San Fransisco. I had so many expectations of this city, but the sheer scale of homelessness and the sheer amount of people who didn't care because it wasn't their problem was absolutely mind bending. Something that is seared into my memories is that of a young man who must've been around my age who in the most polite way and with the most destroyed look on his face asked if I could "possibly spare any change." Just the tone he said it with and the look on his face genuinely gave me tears in my eyes as I walked with my girlfriend. I could only say I was sorry that I didn't carry cash on me, but he didn't even wait for a response as I assume he almost always gets ignored. We saw homeless tents all along the street our hotel was on (Eddy Street) and they were literally shooting up heroin, in view of everyone, a couple of steps away from the entrance.
Almost every other city we went to was the same. LA though was next level. I can't remember the exact areas but it was near union station/the jewellery district - but my goodness we literally walked down a different street and the difference was night and day. Needles on the floor, a geezer walking past throwing a bloody tube on the street, so many boarded up shops with signs that looked maybe a few years old. Absolutely insane! It was even more surreal seeing "luxury flats" overlooking those streets, it felt like some kind of jest.
The last time I'd seen poverty (not just homelessness, poverty) like that was when I was growing up in Tangiers. Honestly I feel so much for the homeless over there because I have no idea how you're supposed to get out of it. At least here we have some safety nets with social housing and benefits (although there are definite cracks where people slip through). I really hope things get better somehow - it was painful seeing how little passers by seemed to care (I assume they are desensitised and have struggles of their own). We spoke to so many Uber drivers about it and they would just blame the homeless - "It's all their own fault. They can get help if they want to."
To understand why people appear to not care you have to imagine seeing that grinding human despair twice a day, every day, on your way to and home from work. The only way to deal with it is to ignore it, because it's so horrible. Then you have to imagine occasionally (or regularly) being accosted or physically assaulted by some fraction of the homeless population, and you can see how people become hardened to it. The visible homeless problem, as it's described here, is almost entirely caused by mental illness and drug addiction; usually both. People ignore it because they literally can not do anything about it as an individual. The worst cases you see on the street have intractable problems no amount of money can solve. The only way to end the homelessness epidemic in coastal cities is to rebuild the mental health care system, and allow limited involuntary committal.
My Brother lived in Seattle and had severe psychosis for several years. Cutting holes in the walls to find the hidden cameras, refusing to eat because the food was poisoned, etc. The rest of the family lives out of state and no amount of begging the police and social workers would get him into a stable environment. I was told that there were only 80 beds available for in-patient mental health services in all of King County. Multiple episodes of self-harm and threatened suicide had no effect whatsoever on the treatment options available. He would go into a meeting with a case worker raving about gang stalking and CIA assassins, with words carved in his arms, and they would just tell him to come back in a week for a check in. A person in this state does not believe that there is anything wrong with them, and will not seek or accept help. The only way we were able to get him treatment was to physically fly out there and force him to leave for Illinois where some family members live. Now, imagine a person in that condition who has no one that is willing or able to intervene, and you can see how complicated this problem is.
I live in SF and though I can back-up your experiences I do want to point out that tourists often get an above average exposure to homelessness in this city for the following reasons:
1) The tourist hotspots of Downtown and Civic Center have a disproportionate amount of homeless due to their proximity to homeless services in the Tenderloin as well as begging opportunities around large corporate conferences. This is in contrast to North Beach, the Outter Sunset, Golden Gate Park, and many other areas (I'm not saying there are NO homeless in the latter areas just that IMO it is an entirely different experience). I wish tourists would get outside the basic areas more, but that is largely SF's fault because without a car it can be difficult.
2) Tourists usually choose below average accommodations in terms of cost, which usually takes them directly to the Tenderloin. This makes sense because hotel costs in Downtown are insane and geared towards corporate travelers.
3) European tourists are much more capable of taking public transit and as such spend more time around major transit hubs (like Bart at Civic Center) which is known as one of the worst stations in the Bay Area.
None of these points make what you experienced ok or acceptable. But it highlights IMO the most important issue that so many people are running around with only partial context and heavy biases towards the issues.
You care, but the sclerotic government(s) and their poltical power blocks that are an absolute time waste to deal with make you realize you can't do shit and you ignore it to keep your sanity.
You might say that all government is sclerotic, but the ones in california & SF are extra sclerotic compared to others around the world.
Look at prop 13, $500k 'environmental reviews' for a $5k mural on a wall, how an HSR project is super expensive compared to the rest of the world and will probably fail, how the sf city council denies anything that would make building housing better, a fucking buslane on geary can't get made or a 1.5 mile subway takes 20 years and on and on it goes. And california is an incredibly wealth economy on top of it that can easily afford this stuff compared to other countries.
Also there is a dynamic in places like LA or the bay area, where many newcomers are on visas or green cards, are a significant % of the population and can't vote on issues as a result, skewing the political power base.
Love to see numbers on this. At least in the Bay Area, you have long time residents leaving and being replaced by foreign workers. Combine that with natural population growth and I think it shows that the issue is complex. Yes, people are leaving California.
People leave every state. How is that news ? The long time propaganda and perception has been that California has had a net population loss. But that is a myth, because domestic folks are being replaced by higher paid foreign workers. Even domestically, the people going out have a median wage of 50k, and those coming in have a median wage of $100k
I remember visiting London in 2013 and the homeless problem in London then was much worse than LA. Things have switched now I think. One difference though is that homeless in london can't live outside through the winter, whereas winter in LA is quite pleasant.
Now what if you saw the same guy there, for 5+ years. Everyday he wants you to give him money with a different scheme/story. Everytime some gullible tourist gives him money you see him immediately walk into the nearest 7-11 to buy lottery tickets or alcohol. At this point you realize his job is actually to beg professionally. That is why it seems like nobody cares when you go to these cities with large 'visible homeless' because every local has seen these same people in the exact same spots for years running the same scams.
I lived in SM City for a few years and I'll echo this poster. The bums were pretty bad, last time I went back, they had gotten worse somehow. Maybe it's that the traffic has gotten worse too and that bleeds into the bums as well.
Though there are MANY good reasons that the homeless population is the way that it is, the fact remains that the bums on the street are horrific for everyone. It is very very hard to find compassion for the homeless after you get doused in pee, again, by the lunatics. For real.
I've had run ins with people like this. What worked for me in the past, was speaking sternly to them.
Once a place I worked, a homeless guy was running towards the building with a chair, ready to smash the window with it.
I stopped him, just by yelling "no, stop" and then when he asked if I wanted to fight him, I just said "no, but I'm going to call the police if you don't leave." he left.
The key is to establish dominance: you are telling them to stop, not asking.
The criminal justice system should not handle these cases. I don't consider acts done by mentally ill people criminal. I have personal experience with this.
My sister is bipolar and schizophrenic. For 30 years she was a little quirky, but mostly normal. She worked at a private equity firm in New York, got married, had a great life. Something changed around age 30. She started acting strange. We initially thought it was just her normal quirkyness, but then things started to escalate. She wouldn't stop talking about Prince Harry. She said she wanted to marry him. We laughed it off.
Then she started talking about secret messages she was receiving from Prince Harry. She believed she had been chosen as the princess and that ISIS was trying to kill her to prevent Prince Harry from marrying her. She had all this proof (hidden messages in the news, Instagram posts of bananas, crazy stuff). She was convince that the government had put chips in our brains and were controlling us. We realized that she needed help, but she refused to believe she had a mental illness. There was absolutely nothing we could do BEFORE she committed a crime. We knew it would happen, we knew it was only a matter of time, but the criminal justice system would not do anything.
Finally, on Christmas day, she went on a rampage at my grandmas house and destroyed a bunch of property. (We found a journal entry later where she said she was sad because Santa Clause didn't come and pick her up and take her to the North Pole like he was supposed to so she lost it.) We got lucky that it was only property. She was put in jail for 24 hours and then let out on the street at midnight without us knowing. She assaulted a police officer the next day. She thought he was ISIS trying to kill her.
FINALLY, the criminal justice system did something. We had to hire lawyers to plead with the judge to force her on to medication. We had stacks of tweets, facebook messages, emails, etc that showed she was clearly delusional. They finally agreed.
She is on meds now and has regular checkins with her parole officer to ensure she stays on them. She is back to being a little quirky, but has no more delusions. She has a job again and is happy.
We are lucky. It could have ended up a lot worse. The current system for helping the mentally ill is totally broken.
> The current system for helping the mentally ill is totally broken.
It is. But it's possible for it to be broken in the opposite direction, too - mom's getting a little funny in old age, mom has lots of assets, kids get her declared mentally incompetent to get their hands on her assets without having to wait for her to die first. Or a hundred variants on that theme - using declarations of mental illness as a tool to control or remove people that you have no right to control or remove.
The current system is broken. But be careful and cautious with proposed fixes.
>I don't consider acts done by mentally ill people criminal
I do.
The harm is being done and the crime is being committed regardless of motivation, mental state, or ignorance of the law. Semantics can be argued all day, but the end result is a harm on society.
The issue is the criminal justice system will just throw them behind bars and do nothing else. Prison is basically "We don't know what else to do with you so we'll throw you in here and hope you get better by the time you come out, but not actually do anything to make you better... also you will probably be raped and beaten while in there."
If criminal justice was actually about getting people the help they need rather than doing time, that'd be totally different.
The issue is prison is about "doing time".
If someone doesn't want to "get better" then that is the thing you treat.
I didn't watch the video mostly because I don't know what it contains and I have kids around.
Making the assumption that it's about people who want to be homeless, honestly that's fine. There's nothing inherently wrong about being homeless if that's what you want. The problem is people causing public health issues because they defecate in public areas, tear apart trash bins, or cause other issues like attacking other people... none of which is acceptable to society.
These people may not want to be part of society, but they are living where society exists.
If you have a chance to watch the video, I'd recommend it (it's about 1h, as a heads up). It is certainly mature themed, so may not be suitable for younger viewers, but it is a news station-produced segment/doc (KOMO in Seattle), so is not wildly inappropriate, and I found it to be a fascinating and hard look at a real problem. (In fact, the first thing I did when I saw this thread was ctrl+F "yout" to find out if anyone had already posted it).
The video explores the visibly-homeless issue in Seattle, as well as a program to address the problem that was implemented in Rhode Island (specifically, enforcement + long-term treatment). I found it worth the watch.
I get where you are coming from, but mental state is an element of just about every criminal law I can think of. You need to prove both that someone committed an act and had a certain "mens rea." That doesn't mean you can't commit a crime if you're on drugs or have other mental issues, but it's a relevant factor.
> You need to prove both that someone committed an act and had a certain "mens rea."
Only sometimes, and only for some crimes. It really is rather complicated. Legal philosophy recognizes that the primary purpose of punishments for crime is to deter people from committing crimes, and it therefore doesn't make sense to punish people who are too mentally ill to understand (a) what they were doing, or (b) that it was wrong, or (c) that they would be punished, or (d) what 'punishment' even is.
But legal philosophy is not a wasteland of common sense, and it's also recognized that one of the purposes of punishment for crimes is to prevent recurrence by making it impossible. The legal authority of the state to indefinitely imprison people who are dangerous to others through no fault of their own is well established.
The current system in California / some other states are broken.
From personal experience, in Illinois, someone can receive hospital care involuntarily if the doctors deem that they would deteriorate without intervention / become dangerous to others.
One look at the differences in law between the two is illustrative:
In CA -
To qualify for mandated treatment in a hospital or other inpatient facility, the person must be:
- dangerous to self/others; or
- unable to provide for basic personal needs for food, clothing, or shelter.
in IL:
- be a reasonable expectation of danger to self/others
- be unable to provide for basic physical needs so as to guard against serious harm without the assistance of others, OR
- refuse or not adhere to treatment, unable to understand need for treatment, and, if not treated, reasonably expected to suffer mental or emotional deterioration and become dangerous and/or unable to provide for basic physical needs
Your sister conceivably wouldn't have reached that state because once she reached the stage in paragraph 3, if you brought her to a hospital in IL, a evaluation would've determined that she should be involuntarily hospitalized, and she would've received medication.
I know a schizophrenic woman who was committed to involuntary psychiatric hold in California in just about every decade from the 1960s through 1990s, each time she had psychotic breaks. These would be some number of weeks before transitioning to periodic out-patient care.
To my knowledge, she was never really aggressive, violent, nor into self-harm. She was only a risk to herself or her children due to impaired decision making. Her encounters with law enforcement would be things like running a red light while in a delusional panic or because she called to report imaginary prowlers. I think her family and doctor were instrumental in getting her committed when she resisted treatment and her condition regressed. It's possible that her first encounters in the 1960s happened when the system was more willing to declare someone unfit, and then her existing history made it easier to repeat the process in later decades. It takes someone to track and pursue, rather than just expecting some random public servant to recognize the need based on one transient encounter with the case.
But, it was also her family that kept her going outside the brief psychiatric holds. This supportive environment is what seems to be most lacking in modern society, but also is the least feasible for the state itself to provide. I don't see how you can expect much better than the kind of institutional living that has been dismantled. How many patients have to share one doctor, nurse, or orderly?
And, from what I know of this woman, even her successful case took a huge toll on those family members who provided ongoing support. Where can the state find caregivers to provide similar effort for all the less fortunate patients who do not have the supporting family or friends?
The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the public. When mentally ill people present a danger to the public then the criminal justice system should be involved.
I have no personal experience with mental illness, but judging by your story it seems that part of the problem was your sister's lack of willingness to seek help. Most health insurance plans cover some kind of mental health services, but the afflicted person must actively seek out such help. Compare this with a broken leg: if I stepped wrong off the curb and broke my leg, I'd be in in pain and clearly unable to walk. I would call 911 and have them pick me up, take me to a hospital, patch me up, etc. The system to make all of that happen is there.
It would appear that mentally ill individuals are unable to seek help. Is it not the case that psychiatrists and mental hospitals exist and are covered by health insurance? It seems unfair to point the finger only at the system without acknowledging that helpers can't help without explicit consent on the part of the person being helped, or without some legal means by which they can be coerced to accept help.
> I have no personal experience with mental illness, but judging by your story it seems that part of the problem was your sister's lack of willingness to seek help.
That's kind of the problem though. You can't just blame someone who is mentally ill for not seeking help. In the UK, for example, you can be sectioned.
"The Mental Health Act says when you can be taken to hospital, kept there, and treated against your wishes. This can only happen if you have a mental disorder that puts you, or others, at risk.
You should only be detained under the Mental Health Act if there are no other ways to keep you, or others, safe."
The law says nearly the exact same thing in California (and I'd guess most of the US). Is there a substantial difference in the way it's applied in practice in the UK?
In England the most commonly used bits of the mental health act are Section 2 (28 day hold for assessment and treatment), Section 3 (6 month hold for treatment) and Section 136 ( a police officer can take someone from a public place to a place of safety for a 24 hour hold for assessment). There are also forensic sections of the act and there are community treatment orders.
Section 2 and 3 require two doctors and an approved mental health professional (AMHP). One of the doctors has to be specially trained in using the MHA. The other doctor should be someone who knows the patient. The AMHP is usually a social worker who knows the mental health act law and is there to protect the rights of the patient.
There are legal requirements placed on the patient's local MH Trust. One of these is that when that patient's nearest relative tell the trust about concerns and asks for an assessment under the act then the trust must consider that request.
A person detained under the act is provided with an advocate from an independent advocacy service. This is free legal advice. If they feel they are being unjustly detained they can go to tribunal to get the section overturned. And that process is also open to relatives too.
There are no fears that your loved one will be shot and killed if you involve the police.
I don't know anything about the US law, but it seems somewhat complex and expensive. There are laws at the state level, and at the county level. Some states say that the harm to self or others must be "imminent" which is a pretty high barrier to meet. Most states allow a forced treatment in the community option, but California requires the counties to adopt that law. So for California where you live decides whether your family can ask the courts to force you to take medication in the community.
When someone has an illness that affects their brain you're saying they should both be aware of the illness and then seek help for the illness? They should use the logic and reasoning capabilities of said brain, with an illness, to achieve this.
Think about what you're saying. Really think about it. Your broken leg comparison completely misses the mark. How about this scenario?
You are walking and step into the street. You are hit by a bus but survive. You have massive head trauma. At this point nobody else should administer care without first speaking with you and having you acknowledge that you need care. You need to then respond in a coherent manner that explicitly allows you to be cared for before anyone is legally allowed to help you. How do you think that is going to work out for you?
> I have no personal experience with mental illness, but judging by your story it seems that part of the problem was your sister's lack of willingness to seek help.
Would you be willing to take serious anti-psychotic medication, with significant side effects, if you were 100% certain you were perfectly sane?
I for one am currently 100% certain that I'm perfectly sane, but that's just my opinion, which, on balance, is worth about as much as the opinion of the homeless guy on Broadway who yells at passersby all day long. I'm sure he also thinks he's perfectly sane. Both such opinions are extremely subjective. In fact, I'd brand as psychotic anyone possessing enough audacity to diagnose me with mental illness. How dare they suggest that I've lost my marbles?
So, to answer your question: no, I'm not willing to take drugs, because I'm 100% certain that I'm perfectly sane.
IMHO this is what makes the mental health conversation so difficult: we don't all seem to share a consistent worldview in the best of times, let alone when one's mental faculties are impacted by illness. How can we find neutral cognitive ground where a mentally ill person can be brought up to speed with the Objectively So?
I suspect that the level of trust and compassion required to do this can only materialize in a family setting. I also find it ironic that the absence of a solid familial fabric is surely a significant contributor to mental illness to begin with.
> I suspect that the level of trust and compassion required to do this can only materialize in a family setting. I also find it ironic that the absence of a solid familial fabric is surely a significant contributor to mental illness to begin with.
Hard to imagine a familial fabric more solid than the Kennedy dynasty, and yet...
Anosognosia[0] is a typical aspect of many mental illnesses. If they knew the delusions weren't real, they wouldn't really be delusions.
There is a fundamental hard problem here that many people who think there are easy solutions ignore: how do we as a society fairly determine who can have their autonomy taken from them? Where do we draw the line between personal responsibility, mental illness, and willful criminal intent?
In the past, the line was drawn too far towards the state and family and there were innumerable horror stories of "difficult" women being lobotomized and locked up in sanitoria for life because their family didn't want to deal with their rebellious ways.
The deinstitutionalization movement swung the pendulum the other way and said, basically, you're completely responsible for yourself all the way up until you commit an actual crime. Because criminality is now the line, it means the police end up dealing with the mentally ill more than they should.
The right point is somewhere between these, but drawing it fairly is hard and we don't have great social structures to support it. (In particular, how does society allow the medical infrastructure decide who should have autonomy in a country that doesn't even provide any right to medical access in the first place?)
> without explicit consent on the part of the person being helped
But that's part of the brokenness of the system being complained about.
We need to be careful about compulsory treatment and detention without trial, but other countries manage it without it being catastrophic - at least not as catastrophic as leaving people addicted to drugs, mentally ill, and living on the street.
Seattlites are desperate to conflate the housing "crisis" with homelessness, but I'm not convinced the person yelling at the sky and swinging a drain pipe at people in his alley narrowly missed his $5000 mortgage payment. It's unfortunate that people with less means have to live further outside the city and spend more of their commuting, but I don't it's unreasonable to assume that people will make decisions on their own behalf to stay housed rather than just live on the streets if rent is becoming too expensive.
It's plenty cheap in Renton. I think it's unreasonable to put a homeless shelter in the middle of downtown Seattle knowing that they're working with a limited budget and that paying a premium on the lot will result in less beds.
There are two issues with this, and they both go to the heart of why developing these services is so difficult:
1) Seattle residents have chosen to tax ourselves to pay for social services. By and large, a taxing jurisdiction can't put services outside its jurisdiction, so Seattle can't levy a tax and then use it to buy space in Renton. Yet, Seattle is more or less the only jurisdiction in King County willing to tax ourselves to pay for these services. The Eastside for damn sure isn't, at least not for services to people who aren't sympathetic groups, and would rather simply arrest people for vagrancy and haul them off to the King County jail (which is, per state law, in the county seat, thus Seattle) and then conveniently be somewhere else when the person bonds out of jail and walks onto Seattle's streets.
Arguably the South King cities don't have the tax base to help shoulder the load, Renton being one of the few that does, but that then gets into people not being willing to vote for those taxes because, frankly, they don't want to. So you have a situation where only Seattle is spending the lion's share of the money but Seattle can't spend it outside of Seattle, land is expensive virtually everywhere in Seattle, and King County's government has shown precious little impulse to try to handle the problem at the county level. To say nothing of Washington State's almost-total abdication of responsibility.
And then,
2) People get incredibly vocal about homeless shelters and other services for them. Just try putting a new shelter in Wallingford. Hell, just try putting one in Bellevue's Eastgate, like they've been trying to do for a decade. The lawsuits alone are just now starting to wrap up and the vocal minority, realizing they've run out of court-based options, are running candidates who sit on a platform of "yes it is needed but not here" and have no answer for "but where?" because that's not the point.
I'm sure the good people of Renton would be vocally opposed to your idea to "export Seattle's homeless problem" to Renton. Thus, the only areas that wind up with shelters and other public services are the ones who either lack political clout--like Pioneer Square and the ID--or are where those services have always been...like Pioneer Square and the ID.
Bellevue actually kicks money back to Seattle for homeless shelters, along with running their own (but near east gate, not a great locale).
Yes, Bellevue cops aren’t as soft as Seattle cops (they send riot squad out if some guy is sleeping on a park bench), but it is still a liberal area.
Renton on the other hand...is basically a giant strip mall, homeless people wouldn’t find much their even if they did setup shelters. And they already have a lot of questionable characters in what passes for their downtown area (I’ve taken the 565 a few times between Bellevue and the airport through Renton).
I agree, spending tax money collected from one area to spend in another is a problem, but that's not to say that there's no place in Seattle proper that isn't cheap enough.
To the second point, there will always be NIMBYism, and to be honest the expensive parts of Seattle will fight it a lot less than the cheap places, but I don't think that directly rebuts the point.
This is a really simple problem that for some reason Americans just can't get their heads around.
We have eliminated virtually every government intervention besides police power. We have also seen our social institutions significantly divest their social contributions.
Therefore the criminal justice system has become the catch all. It is expected to handle the mentally ill, the homeless, the drug addicted, problematic families, neighborhood disputes and more.
Every now and then, we see the consequences of that divestiture and it shocks us. We see people who only really need mentorship, medical care or friendship being treated like hardened criminals and we see how that treatment corrupts these people with otherwise fairly socially benign failings.
So we pull back on the leash of the criminal justice system. These people begin to rejoin our society but with no assets, no standing, little to no mental healthcare. And unsurprisingly this influx of invested citizens gets people's attention. And regardless of whether crime genuinely increases these people are newly visible and easy to associate with any anecdote of crime and violence.
So people predictably turn against them and against the pull back. But to fix this problem you have to do two things Americans are loath to do. You must tax and spend money to build institutions that are not police. And you must give those institutions some power to intervene sometimes against the will of those they are intervening with. And I have no illusions. Involuntary commitment to mental health care and drug treatment and community involvement are often ugly but Americans make it clear over and over that even though vagrants and homeless are generally not a problem that much affects those other than the vagrants and homeless themselves we will never collectively tolerate their presence.
The options seem to be building institutions to specialize in the assistance and care of these people or continue to use one monolithic system and continue this cycle.
I would add that besides the police we outsource a lot of this stuff to public transportation workers and librarians. All night subways operate as mobile shelters, especially in winters and libraries are frequently the only place a homeless person can stay during the day without getting kicked out or interacting with the police. Unfortunately we don't really prepare transportation/library workers with the resources to deal with them most of the time.
Agreed 100%. And forget even having a place to be. Just finding a place to answer the call of nature is a problem. America, where if you don't have money, it's a crime to piss anywhere but in your pants.
I think you're missing that most of the homeless presence is in specific areas, like downtown, where there are not many free restrooms.
Private businesses see a lot of abuse of their restrooms — from people using them and not paying for anything, but also because they make good places to do drugs, and it's common for homeless to overstay their welcome and/or damage the facilities. As a result, many businesses put locks on them and require that paying customers ask for a code.
There are a few publicly provided restrooms, but they tend to be few, far between, and in pretty sorry disrepair. In SF for example, you can find restrooms in parks and libraries, but they're often a mess. There are some single use restrooms on the street that were designed to provide autonomous self-cleaning public facilities, but because of abuse, nowadays they're mostly either out-of-order or have a full-time worker to babysit them (also, there's not many of them, and there throughput is very low).
> And you must give those institutions some power to intervene sometimes against the will of those they are intervening with. And I have no illusions. Involuntary commitment to mental health care and drug treatment and community involvement are often ugly but Americans make it clear over and over that even though vagrants and homeless are generally not a problem that much affects those other than the vagrants and homeless themselves we will never collectively tolerate their presence.
It might be worth reviewing why Americans turned so harshly against involuntary commitment to mental health care institutions. It was a parade of horrors that made Abu Ghraib look like Disney World. Convincing people that we'll get it right, reliably, at massive scale this time around is something of a daunting task.
Oh I 100% agree. We deinstitutionalized for good reason. I will say two things however. Medical ethics and legal protections have come a long way since then. You wouldn't see doctors straight up experimenting on people at least not with legal sanction and the state now has an obligation to provide people attorneys. So using your own lawyer to get aunt Elsa committed while she just at the mercy of the system wouldn't be so easy.
But I would hope that with knowing what we do now about mental illness we would have many layers of intervention before we get to that level.
Imagine if theirs a kid getting into trouble regularly at school because of their mental health status. Rather than wait until that turns into a violent episode that gets the kid in jail or committed the court could assign that kid a mentor. Someone they have to spend 10 hours a week with and who they can call on for anything. That can change the trajectory of a kid's life. We know this because the number one difference between people with mental illness that succeed and those that fail is whether they have a support network.
Court mandated mentoring, support networks and counselling before, not after a major incident are all relatively low touch interventions that would be hugely beneficial. And we do some of this now. It just mostly comes after the criminal justice system has already begun to see the person as a criminal because it usually follows a significant crime.
Of course this cuta against the American psyche. We want to have 100% all our rights with no government intervention until we've proved we shouldn't. Then the government should have radical powers to shape our lives.
But maybe if we could come to see government more like the way doctors see medical treatment. The more unobtrusive it is the more we should allow. And the more intrusive it is, the more we should be nervous of its application.
> Medical ethics and legal protections have come a long way since then. You wouldn't see doctors straight up experimenting on people at least not with legal sanction and the state now has an obligation to provide people attorneys. So using your own lawyer to get aunt Elsa committed while she just at the mercy of the system wouldn't be so easy.
I completely disagree as a person who suffered involuntary treatment for 2 months and was drugged against my will for a psychological disease I didn't suffer. I'm a transgender woman that was going to university getting bullied constantly. One day it turned into an incident where the bullies fabricated a story to campus police and where my account of the situation wasn't listened to. Anyhow, I ended up with a psychiatrist that didn't ever treat gender dysphoria but believed it just has to be schizophrenia. They billed my insurance provider $58k USD. Needless to say, I also don't pass as a woman because of the religious abuse in that community and with unaccepting parents. I've never been able to save 58k to pay for surgeries unrighteously classified as cosmetic towards the illness gender dysphoria. Anyway, I tried to find legal representation for the wrongs and nobody in any civil rights institution for victims would help.
It might be worth considering that when the problem is "How do we help the mentally ill and destitute among us?" and the answer is "Fundamentally reformulate how Americans relate to their government", some might see a measure of disconnection between the two. Certainly it's a big ask that offers little in the way of obvious gradual steps.
In the past families would look after their own disabled members. Of course this is easier in large non-nuclear families. But maybe something like more like community centers in every town rather than imposing "Insane Asylums" run by scary officials would help?
To be clear, by institutions I don't mean monolithic asylums. I mean institutions in a broad sense. The way the fire department is an institution. I mean something much more akin to networks of social and the community centers you mention.
While I generally agree with your points, I think that its a little strange to sum this up as a "really simple problem" and then declare the solution to be building institutions to specializer in the assistance and care of people with a wide variety of issues.
The diagnosis is simple. We have a cycle of sympathizing and then cracking down on marginalized people and it stems from having a one size fits all approach to social problems.
The solution of course is terribly complex. It stresses some of the most difficult questions of Western social philosophy. Such as how much should we respect the individual will vs. the collective need? And what is our obligation to the needy? And how much power over others should we place in the system or delegate to people?
It's not a simple problem, as many of the posts in this thread indicate. If it were simple, it would be easy to solve. But there's a lot of factors at play. One of them is that the United States is big, really big. If you've never visited, you'll be amazed at how big it really is. And it's a lot more atomized than it used to be 30 years ago. Add to that the fact that rural areas are drying up, and more and more people are moving to urban centres.
Another is zoning and NIMBYism. Others here have explained this in detail far better than I could. But to put it simply, most of the public services that homeless and mentally ill people depend on are located in urban areas. When people say things like, "there's plenty of cheap housing in ____" they don't understand that no matter how much oversupply of affordable housing there is in that place, these people can't live there because they don't drive, there's no public transportation, and there's no clinics there.
This was the most frustrating thing for me reading this, how the issue has become artificially dichotomized. There's obvious solutions that don't involve criminalizing but also recognize mental illness as such. It's almost a made-up problem in the sense that there's an obvious type of solution that seems to be ignored in public discussions.
Seattle and King County judges have been bringing social services to the court house, to better serve their clients. Our courts see the consequences of our inadequate safety net first hand.
While innovative, these reforms are far from ideal or adequate. But the judges feel they have no other choice than to try to fill the void.
A housing network or authority is one of the first institutions we should build up. Housing first is probably one of the best thing we can do to fix this.
And yes such an institution would be totally hamstrung if we don't address costs through zoning and permit reform.
The criminal justice system only handles these things because there's laws on the books saying they can. Busybodies have managed to convince politicians to criminalize basically everything.
The reason people keep looking to law enforcement to solve these problems is because they can. Take away that and institutions (government or otherwise) will eventually spring up to solve the problem. Visible homelessness running rampant in the time it takes for that to happen is simply the penalty communities will have to suffer for being so economically dysfunctional as to have the problem in the first place. This is the phase some west coast cities are in now and of course there's some backlash and people who want to go back to strict law enforcement.
As long as someone acting on behalf of the government can tell a homeless person to move along from a public space the problem will not go away. It will just move to the next street over for a few hours then come back when it gets kicked out of there too. These people need either better options that are so much better they take advantage of them (i.e.) better shelters or to be institutionalized against their will and I don't think the latter is compatible with our values.
I agree. A lot of this problem stems from the deiinstitutionalization of American life in the middle of the century. Which generally was a right minded and compassionately motivated thing to do. And I agree that cities which see this as a real problem should begin building the proper administrations and institutions to deal with this. But usually when cities begin to see this as a problem, they don't do that. They revert to using the only tool they have at the ready. And they bring the hammer down harder than they ever did before any relaxation of its use.
> A lot of this problem stems from the deiinstitutionalization of American life in the middle of the century.
This was true thirty years ago, but is much less true today. The fraction of people that have serious mental illness is relatively constant, but the number of visible homeless people on the street has risen dramatically. What you're seeing today is a fraction of mentally ill people and then a larger fraction of drug addicted people stemming from the opioid crisis.
It's not the 80s anymore and that person screaming to no one on the street corner is more likely to be in meth psychosis than schizophrenic.
I don't think the two groups are so easily distinguished. And I think you underestimate the effect of housing pressure on people already on the margin.
Yes, I agree housing prices also affect a large number of people, but I think those are mostly the invisible homeless — ones who can scrape by couch surfing, living out of their car, etc. What I'm referring to are the visible homeless — the ones on the street harrassing people, dumping trashing, etc. I think most of those today are there because of drug addiction, with a smaller fraction because of mental illness. (And, of course, illness and addiction often overlap too.)
The reason I point these out is because I think the different groups need different solutions. Affordable housing isn't going to do anything good for something in the middle of meth psychosis. They'll just trash the place which is a complete waste of funding.
Don't confuse the two. Breaking down a working system that was evil without creating a replacement, without gradual transition, can (and did) result in a more evil system.
They were motivated by compassion but not right minded.
I work in downtown Seattle and the people I see affected by the aggressive homeless folks are those who don't know who they are- people visiting or new to downtown. I know which homeless folks are dangerous from experience and which ones are just panhandling. I've personally been spit at, spit on, attacked with a 2x2x18 piece of wood, and had a brick thrown at me (with surprising force), charged at, sexually assaulted (physically), the list goes on.
I've observed the end result of panhandling in various situations: there are the "my family needs help" folks who beg with kids in strollers and at the end of the day get back into their cars in the Target parking lot; there are the folks crying on the street begging for any money to get food, but don't want food directly even if you've already bought it for them with no strings attached; there are also the rare case of someone who was just mugged now trying to get on the bus.
The end result is any compassion I had has been slowly whittled away. Actively avoiding human shit or fresh vomit every morning on the sidewalks and keeping an eye out for needles everywhere (watch where you sit on the bus) really just leaves you tired and unsympathetic.
Pro Tips: avoid 3rd & Pine / Pike, avoid all of 2nd Ave. in general; avoid parks and downtown after dark; do not touch the needles unless you have to (bus seats); do not go into tall grassy or ground obscured areas as there may be needles; avoid the park beaches as they are toilets for the homeless early in the morning (4-6am).
> Actively avoiding human shit or fresh vomit every morning on the sidewalks and keeping an eye out for needles everywhere (watch where you sit on the bus) really just leaves you tired and unsympathetic.
In addition to the dump dodging and vomit avoidance, you have to keep an eye on every shifty character in Starbucks or on the street to make sure you aren't going to be another victim of an intentional or inadvertent stabbing. Its getting to the point that for the safety of myself and my loved ones I would recommend commuting by vehicle and make walking around the city the exception rather than the norm.
I think also knowing which streets to avoid entirely are good too. Each street has its own vibe and always has. 3rd and pike was bad way back in 2000's in ways that are similar to now. The ambient level of visibly homeless, and more importantly those in actively crisis has gone way up IMO--and you can't really avoid that.
Be interesting and depresisng to make map for people to use like that but I am not sure how it wouldn't devolve into fearmongering like nextdoor does.
I feel bad for the occasional wide eyed family from the burbs I see walking streets even I wouldn't dare tread on from my car or lyft.
The problem is that 3rd is where all the downtown bus stops are. If you commute by transit, it's almost impossible to ignore. Your only option is to rush to the next block and hope nothing goes wrong.
ya there is always some scary characters around McStabbys/StabDonalds at 3rd and Pine. I have trouble following the logic when a company decides to plop a corporate office down in the middle of the Seattle sketch corridor. Witnessed a straight up drug deal go down as people with corporate lanyards walked past.
Hey, I used to work there in the 90s, it’s always been like that. We had off duty cops staffing the place along with a frequently used banned list. And this was when it was two stories, I think it must be easier these days given that they smartly got rid of the second floor dining area.
Worked at an office on 2nd and Pine for a few years - every summer, if you opened the windows, you’d get a steady wafting of crack pipe smoke coming in the building. You could tell if any cops were nearby because people outside would be singing or whistling as a warning call. Good times.
The “how” is that places like this (Seattle, SF, Vancouver BC) have very good municipal support for the homeless, and have pretty good welfare laws at the state level, and have climates that won’t kill you if you sit outside all day. So homeless people from everywhere else in the country gravitate to these places.
These cities don’t have a municipal homeless problem; they’re sacrificial goats for entire nations’ homeless problems.
This is largely a myth. It's hard to get exact numbers, but from a recent Seattle Times research project...:
"To sum it up: There are homeless people who migrate — somewhere around 15 to 20 percent of all homeless people — but there aren’t many who migrate far beyond their home state and region. While research hasn’t definitively answered the question of how many homeless people migrate [here from outside Washington State] just to get help, we know that in King County, 3 percent said they did."
I would argue that this does happen in SF specifically. Being a magnet for people with no leg to stand on (whether because of a lack of resources, prejudice, etc.) is San Francisco's whole thing, and has been since the 60s. They wrote songs about it!
But okay, in the case of Seattle and Vancouver, maybe the arrivals are not from the opposite side of the country, but there still is a constant influx of people from the region. There are huge native communities in both Washington state and British Columbia, and they're falling apart in about the same way as the rust belt. There's no support system in those small towns with enough resources to help the people who are worst-off, so they have to leave and go somewhere else.
Look closely at the questions those surveys are asking. "Where were you living at the time you most recently became homeless" isn't the right question as there are temporary housing options (crashing with a friend, living in a vehicle) under which many do not consider themselves homeless.
From your own link, only 25% were born / grew up in King county.
Haven't checked your link, but I know several of the recurring studies for Seattle area ask "where was your last residence" or something. If you dig deeper, a lot of the "locals" are "local" because their last residence was the King County Jail.
Bingo. Though they try to convince us otherwise, that the homeless are all from Seattle, and when asked where they lived previously, they mostly say Pioneer Square....
If you don't mind, I'd be curious to hear your take on the controversy around whether the west-coast homelessness problem is aggravated by people moving there from other places with colder climates and less 'support'. I'd also be curious to hear what you think about the degree to which the worst of this is a drug abuse problem vs. something else.
Studies show that most homeless are "locals," but some percentage do travel to more desirable areas, plus some towns and other institutions will just give a homeless person a one way ticket to get rid of them.
However, I'm skeptical of the usefulness and accuracy of the official data we have on the homeless.
Homeless lives are lived largely in secret. They may have no address and no phone.
This is a vulnerable population and the system does not serve them well. I imagine even a lot of self-reported data is unreliable because vulnerable people will lie at times to protect themselves.
In the US, a lot of homeless data is based on the annual Point In Time count which occurs in late January. I recently tripped across an article that explicitly stated it occurs at that time because it's the coldest part of the year and homeless individuals do their best to seek shelter, if only temporarily.
So it seems to me that this count is likely an undercount and it's an undercount entirely on purpose.
I participated in planning meetings for the local Point in Time Count last year. I've also seen anonymous questions online from people participating who had concerns about various populations being overlooked by the count, such as post-hurricane victims still living in hotels after their house was destroyed.
I traveled to the West Coast while homeless. I intentionally returned to California because the West Coast is better for my health. I then spent about 5.5 years homeless in California before leaving the state to get back into housing someplace cheaper.
California is exporting poor people to other states and has been for years. If you are a waitress or trucker or similar, you will be better off elsewhere.
But homeless people can end up stuck in place in California. The weather in large parts of California make it fairly tolerable to sleep outside. This can become a recipe for long term homelessness.
Data does suggest that California has more homeless who are unsheltered and more chronic, long term homelessness than most places. Off the top of my head, I think California has 8% of the US population and an estimated 25% of our homeless.
So either California is incredibly broken or it's a de facto dumping ground for the nation's homeless. I suspect there's some truth to both interpretations.
Re drugs:
I think generally think drug abuse is usually a symptom of other problems. I'm not someone who believes in the Twelve Step model of addiction. Research and first-hand experience with users suggests that's not an accurate model.
The history of Alcoholics Anonymous is that it began with a few hardcore alcoholics whose alcoholism was literally killing them and they still could not stop, so they gave it up to God and that worked. Now, every college student who goes on a bender is at risk of being called an alcoholic and sent to AA. Reality: Older people typically drink less than younger people with absolutely no outside intervention whatsoever.
Given that general mental framework, I see our national drug crisis as a statement that there is something very wrong with our overall social fabric. If you fix that, then the drug crisis will die down.
It will never go away entirely. There will always be people trying to drown some of their sorrows for one reason or another. But the levels we are seeing speaks to something rotten at the heart of our society.
Generally speaking, I think we need single payer national healthcare and we need to fix our housing supply issues. Those two things would go a long way towards restoring a healthy social fabric to the US.
> So it seems to me that this count is likely an undercount and it's an undercount entirely on purpose.
I would think it's easier and more accurate to count people in shelters than outdoors. Shelters presumably already keep track of usage, while it would take a small army of people to count homeless outdoors.
That's a reasonable point, but the reality is that a lot of people actively avoid the shelter system. (Including me.) So some people seeking shelter will be visiting a relative or staying in a hotel temporarily, not handily corralled like penned animals in the shelter system so they can be conveniently counted by the powers that be.
It's a myth that homeless people are all entirely penniless. Many of them have income, they just don't have enough income to support a middle class lifestyle.
Homeless individuals may have alimony, social security, disability, a retirement check or similar income. They may also work.
When housing is expensive enough, it's possible to have a full-time job and be unable to cover rent. Homeless individuals often have various personal challenges that make roommates even less desirable than average, and there are plenty of roommate from hell stories even without such issues.
My last two years on the street, I managed to go to a hotel periodically. Towards the end, this was about once a month.
When the drought in California finally broke with record-breaking deadly storms, I got up, saw my usual "safe from the storm campsite" was probably under 6 to 10 feet of water, and decided to take out a Payday loan to seek shelter in a hotel for three nights. This was, "coincidentally," late January.
You know, the part of the year when these counts get done.
The support is great, as I understand it anyway, unless you are addicted to drugs.
The places for the homeless to go to do not accept people with drugs, which seems reasonable but then you create this situation with lots of addicts on the streets not getting the help they really need.
Clearly the support is fucking terrible if you still have large homeless populations of mentally ill people defecating in the street and committing criminal offences.
We are saying essentially the same thing, just that what's there isn't all bad, just not good enough and ignores a group of people because we've decided that we don't like people who are on drugs.
Which places? Unfortunately in the US we have decent homelessness support, but we have extremely poor or non-existent mental health support which is what this problem really is
Because being homeless does not mean that you are suffering from mental issues. It's also much harder to address the real problem of not addressing mental health, when you lump it all into the same category of homelessness.
I know it first hand because I used to be homeless (but not "visible homeless") at one point.
> Because being homeless does not mean that you are suffering from mental issues.
A relevant part of them do, or we wouldn't have this discussion. That all sounds like "we have good help systems for some homeless" at most, which then somehow gets generalized into "we have good help systems for homeless" when this obviously isn't the case for a part of them.
If you are homeless but able to contribute to the economy if you weren't homeless the programs are very good. If even after getting off the streets, you still require additional help, the support available to you is significantly less good.
Put another way, if it was likely you could get yourself out of the homeless situation there's plenty of support in place for you. If you require help, there's little that is in place.
So, whether the support is good depends almost entirely on what type of homeless you are. It can be good for some while being abysmal for others.
The support is pretty good in Vancouver, but there's two big compounding problems.
1 - drugs, which is a massive complication modifier
2 - capacity, which is stressed a LOT by other areas of the country. For example, other provinces have a policy of buying one-way bus tickets to Vancouver for any homeless person who asks (or is slyly convinced to leave). Vancouver can't do anything to stop it, for good reason - freedom of movement within the country is a guaranteed legal right.
Also non returnable warrants, you get pinched for something in another province like theft or drug crimes in Alberta or elsewhere, flee to another province like BC to avoid jail and police don't want to pay to send you back. Then you end up a homeless criminal in the downtown eastside of Vancouver.
Not really the types of people cannot be normally housed. You would need to build specialized housing made out of cleanable and indestructible material. Regular housing would just be damaged at extreme cost to the taxpayers
Nbd, at least they won't die of exposure. In any case, many people are "dirty" outside, but when they have stable conditions miraculously get somewhat better.
Housing has rules which disqualifies many. Drug use, loud noise, bothering neighbors. When you are housed, your neighbors don't move (and you don't often either). This can be a high barrier for some, unfortunately.
I didn't mean "good" in any absolute sense, but rather in comparison to other places in the country. Homeless people are coming to these places to get something they can't get where they are. Maybe it's still not enough, but it's enough that they want it.
Also, where I live, at least (Vancouver BC), there is a huge amount of free public housing, constantly being built. There are far fewer visibly-homeless people here now than there were even a few years ago. (Drifters who hang around out on the street during the day because they have nothing better to do, yes; people who wander through alleys every night because they take drugs instead of sleeping at night, sure; but people who just want to sleep, but are forced to do so on the street? Not often seen, any more.)
As far as I can tell, in this city, the only people who are still visibly homeless, are people who either are 1. recent-enough arrivals that they haven't bothered to find a shelter, let alone gone through the public-housing application process; or 2. they're people who prefer being homeless. (There is an interesting local phenomenon of aboriginal people taking over the unceded land of one of the city's parks as a pseudo-reservation—translating to "tent city.")
> How do people living in a place like that not look inwards and wonder at what turn they committed a colossal fuckup that got them where they are now?
Drugs. It's pretty hard to get yourself out of a bad situation when literally the mechanism in your brain that rewards smart behavior has been taken over by heroin and meth.
Ultimately, we do what our brains chemically reward us for doing. If heroin feels better than getting off the street and living a decent life then being a homeless drug user is the best achievement you can have. Heroin is fucked up.
I'm with you, because I've walked to work right through 3rd and pike/pine and 2nd for ~5 years now every day and, yeah, it's not ideal, but I also don't live out this post-societal collapse fantasy in my head every time I see a needle or crazy person.
Huh, I also work in downtown Seattle but have never experienced any of this. I very rarely see shit/vomit, have never seen a needle on a bus, have never been spit at or attacked.
I've worked in downtown Seattle for the last 10 years, and frequently use the bus system. (caveat: I'm a white male, so generally in less danger, and may be more oblivious):
* I've seen a few brawls (~5) in all that time; generally (all?) swiftly broken up by police
* Haven't experienced weapons (or items used as them), whatsoever
* I've seen (a handful of) needles in that time, but never on busses
* Lots of panhandling, people yelling things, etc.
* 2nd/3rd around Pike/Pike is _definitely_ sketchy, and will make you feel uncomfortable walking around there; but it's also where I work atm: so I frequently am in that area, and haven't encountered much.
My wife (who is from Oregon) and I were seriously thinking of moving to Seattle a few years ago. We flew over to go to a few job interviews and see friends. She was attacked by an aggressive (luckily slow) drunk person within 12 hours of being back. I love the city, and would love to move there, but she gave it a hard veto after that experience.
I have coworkers who are lucky in this regard. Their particular situation affords them the opportunity to live in Magnolia and takes the commuter buses which are always packed with people in the morning and evenings; these are typically commuter buses which don't run during the rest of the regular bus active times. Plenty of lunch walks and 1-on-1 walks around the city and nothing unfortunate has every happened to them, though they have seen the occasional needle and poop trail. Most of downtown is fine, the gradation of sadness increases as you walk towards Pioneer Square. The often under walked areas are the real areas of concern.
When working by the viaduct and Ferry Terminal our build slept a large number of people in the evenings on the sidewalk. One instance in particular stands out- someone had taken a shit into a 7/11 tall plastic cup, and I can only assume mixed it with some liquid adhesive, then flung the shit into a huge splatter against the sidewalk under the metal stairs down from the walking bridge. It stayed for quite a while, as the incentive to clean it up had passed- the building was being emptied to be demolished and security and other services had been stopped. But don't think this was a lone incident, as the back of the building would resemble the trope of the underside of a desk with boogers, except someone (or some group of people) were throwing shit (literally) against the back of the building.
> Huh, I also work in downtown Seattle but have never experienced any of this.
You are fortunate and very lucky in this respect. But I would encourage you to stay situationally aware because the city is getting more dangerous and shit-filled.
I’m glad to hear that, and I genuinely hope it stays that way.
I have been, twice in the last years. Spit on and punched at (the attacker was frail and tweaking, disturbing and menacing but physically unable to hit hard). Other good friends have gotten black eyes and so forth. This is in sf which has a more severe problem (though it is serious in Seattle).
This is to say nothing about day to day issues. Last time my wife ride Bart, a man got on and ranted angrily about “bitches”, though to nobody in general. In this case people just avoid eve contact.
Same. I read things like this all the time here and on reddit and shrug every time. Homeless problem in Seattle is certainly worse than the midwestern suburb I transplanted from but come on, statistics are at play here; it’s definitely going to be worse than the suburbs by virtue of their being more people.
To add another data point: I've lived in capitol hill for 22 years. I know zero people who have been attacked by homeless people. That's not to say that Seattle's homelessness problem isn't grave, but I suspect that there's a sampling bias in this comment thread.
Yes, we actually can. People like to talk about Prohibition as being a failure, but Prohibition actually resulted in a substantially lower rate of liver cirrhosis. People drank less and suffered less as a result. I'm not saying we need prohibition, but the idea that making drugs illegal doesn't work is absolutely ridiculous.
Yes, if we ignore all the other effects (e.g.: financing of organized crime, bringing people in contact with said organized crime) then sure, the prohibition was a sounding success. If we include all of these it doesn't look so great anymore.
One other pro-tip from my time in Seattle: Don't walk under the protected wooding scaffolding they put over sidewalks adjacent to construction after dark. At best you'll be literally stepping over multiple people on the ground - at worst you'll be threatened with nowhere to run.
I was downtown waiting for my bus the other day and a burly unwashed man wearing nothing but pants hanging down to his ass crack walks up and starts getting in the face of a young woman standing next to me. I told him to take a hike. A few days later, three people get stabbed downtown at 10am.
I worked at 3rd and Pine McDonald’s as a college student in the mid 90s (while commuting from the Ave to boot). It’s always been like this (as far as I can remember in the late 70s), but way worse these days.
I was recently trying to convince my wife that we should live in Seattle rather than downtown Bellevue, but for the kid it’s still a no go.
I lived on 2nd and Pike for 2 years, walking to work at Marion every day along the 2nd. It was nothing like this for me - no dangerous incidents, no needles. Agree on panhandlers tho.
I actually quite enjoyed it - the waterfront, fresh produce at the market, my favorite cafes. What drove me away was noise and air pollution.
> there are the "my family needs help" folks who beg with kids in strollers and at the end of the day get back into their cars in the Target parking lot
Someone can own a car and still be in desperate need of help.
I always check their shoes so far every one of them had good expensive footwear. The last one I saw the lady had a shiny pair of brooks similar to mine that go for -100 a pair.
It’s likely got something to do with incentives, money earned panhandleing is at least the same as minimum wage probably better, then no taxes and it’s all cash so doesn’t count against government benefits so you can double/triple dip.
there are the folks crying on the street begging for any money to get food, but don't want food directly even if you've already bought it for them with no strings attached
Most homeless people have serious health problems. Dietary restrictions are the norm for people with serious health problems.
No, you aren't doing a diabetic or someone with life-threatening allergies a favor to act like they should eat whatever the hell a random stranger bought them because "beggars can't be choosers."
Plus, you know, people have preferences. Acting like you should stop having food preferences because you are dirt poor is straight up classism of the worst kind.
Nope, not buying this excuse. They don't want food directly because they want cash to go buy other crap.
Hey look, I get it, being homeless sucks, but the situation the OP is describing is not working. Seattle, SF & LA have all become shit cities because of the way the govt handles homelessness. They enable not assist.
My experience interacting with homeless people agrees with DoreenMichelle. "They" are not all the same, many of "them" would tell you some food they'd be grateful for if you'd only ask what they like. I would imagine, even if you're hungry or just feeling horrible, that it's too humiliating to simply accept whatever random food a passing stranger offers you.
They may also want cash to go spend on "other crap."
But I'm kind of a subject matter expert here. This is not an excuse. This is reality.
I spent nearly six years homeless. I have very serious health problems. When people gave me food instead of cash, a lot of it went directly into a trash can because I am literally better off going hungry than eating certain things and my dietary restrictions are quite numerous.
I think we'd be better served by not talking past each other and instead make it clear which kind of homeless problem we're talking about at any particular time.