The problem is: the "science" is used only as a tool to buttress one's pre-defined notions.
Here in San Francisco, near the beginning of COVID, we put our homeless in hotel rooms. One resident per room, no shared bathrooms, etc. Plus, we gave them free food, free alcohol and free drugs (weed, IIRC). The idea was to satisfy all of their needs and not have them going outside. This lasted close to 2 years.
This was a fairly big sample: close to 3700 people. That is a statistically significant sample, given that SF's total homeless population is around 20K - 30K (including those in shelters).
So what happened with these people? How many of them cleaned up their acts and became productive members of society? This would be a fairly straightforward question to answer, right?
BUT! The Homeless Industry in SF has refused to do so! There were no studies done on this population and their outcomes. Whatever happened to these scientists? Why did they ignore this golden opportunity to study this situation? What we _do_ know is that the residents trashed the hotels and the City of SF is being sued by these hotels to the tune of 10s of millions of dollars.
I remember when all flights were grounded after 9/11, and scientists took the opportunity to study the impact of contrails on the night sky, visibility of celestial bodies, etc. Weirdly, no scientist considered it worthwhile to study these homeless people in their new housing.
> How many of them cleaned up their acts and became productive members of society?
It doesn’t sound like this was the purpose, it sounds like the purpose was to temporarily keep them off the street. So I’m not exactly shocked that it didn’t give a result it wasn’t designed to give.
Way to dodge the question. Sure, it wasn't the purpose, but it was the same situation!
If you're going to tell me that providing housing alone is enough for these people, then this is exactly that situation: they were provided free room and board (and *NOT* shared rooms, either). So where are the positive outcomes that "housing first" is supposed to bring?
> If you're going to tell me that providing housing alone is enough for these people
I’m sorry where did I say that. Don’t fucking accuse me of saying something I didn’t say. All I implied is that your expected result was likely not the expected result of the actual program.
> Weirdly, no scientist considered it worthwhile to study these homeless people in their new housing. Why did they ignore this golden opportunity to study this situation?
Scientists are a scarce resource and job offers need to compete for them. Those able to provide a workplace better than: "typing in your computer using an unmade bed as table in a trashed small hotel room filled with weed smoke and shared with drunk people that could or not have previous mental issues and could be violent or not" got all the talent.
Not really difficult to understand. Science is hard enough yet.
I think we have to separate caring for our fellow community members from and supporting people in being productive members of society. So many people are with stable homes because they weren’t able - for whatever reason — to be a productive member of society (and there are plenty of arguments about what productive means). We should still care for them.
This article is a good overview of the research about treatment-first vs housing-first approaches.
The last paragraph is pretty clear on the real difficulty:
>The major obstacles to resolving homelessness remain ideological. It is politically hard to sell the idea that people who take drugs or are disruptive should get free housing – even when the evidence shows that is actually what works.
My observation is that it's more politically contentious to decide where to put these free homes. We have a lot of them in the SF Bay Area (some legit, many not), and they all attract activity that "I don't love" having kids around.
I try to fight my internal NIMBYism, but clutter horde and verbal assaults are where I draw the line.
Iirc the Victorian government in Australia decided to buy individual apartments in high rises to put drug addicts in resulting in the buildings becoming so unsafe that the original occupants had to sell and move somewhere else. Turning them in to radical anti public housing activists so they don’t have to move and lose a load of money again.
Imagine saving up for ages to buy a nice 3 bedroom apt to move in with your family with and then a few years later your kids are being threatened by an unstable meth head in the elevator forcing you to move and lose most of your wealth in the process.
Yeah, the problem here is that leaving syringes on the floor, urinating in flower beds and talking shit is insufficient to arrest the person. But is sufficient to drive a lot of tenants away from the house.
The majority of effectively homeless in the US are working people. This means people who dont own or rent any kind of housing. They crash in other people's places, frequently going homeless for periods. This includes working families. Their size is estimated in millions.
The chronic homeless are people who dont even have any place to crash from time to time. People refer to these people as 'the homeless', without knowing that a lot of the above category also enters this category frequently over any given year. The chronic homeless category also includes working people due to the skyrocketing housing costs, especially in major metropolises like NY, SF etc. This segment's size is estimated in a range in between 500,000 to 3 million, depending on whose research and criteria you take.
Drug addicts are also in this category, and the existing economic establishment prefers to identify the homeless with them in order to thwart any reform that could cause an increase in their taxes or disturb the real estate sector.
...
So that's right - the problem is ideological. But maybe even before that, its economical - those who hoard the wealth dont want anyone to disturb them and their ever-increasing hoards of wealth with any pesky taxes...
This is one big root of the problem. There are very few resources that someone falling into homelessness can lean on, that are not their friends/family.
People who have that safety net can spend a few weeks or months crashing on couches until they get their housing situation sorted out. People who, for whatever reason, don't, are the ones trying to hold a job while living out of a car, and one bad encounter with the police can cause them to lose that job.
And once you fall into the same strata as the chronic homeless, it is almost impossible to crawl out of it.
If you want to reduce the number of chronic homeless give years from now, we need services for the temporary homeless, today. If you're getting kicked out of your apartment next Tuesday, and have nobody you can lean on, what you need is four walls and a roof so that you don't land on the street.
Neither section 8 housing, nor the current shelter system supply that. Especially if you're a man, or are queer, or, or, or...
As usual, the logic is backwards, tons of people who take drugs and are disruptive have housing, lack of housing make those things worse.
From the New York Times article on my hometown Houston trying to end homelessness with a housing first policy:
> But housing first involves a different logic: When you’re drowning, it doesn’t help if your rescuer insists you learn to swim before returning you to shore. You can address your issues once you’re on land. Or not. Either way, you join the wider population of people battling demons behind closed doors.
Because as soon as it happens, I will be first in the line with the question: okay, what should I do to get a free house? Do I need to consume drugs? Would weed do, or it has to be some heavier stuff?
I guarantee I could produce a program that would be acceptable to conservatives and provide free housing.
Note also that Utah, a very conservative state, solves homelessness in exactly this way.
It just might be that the housing would not be provided by funneling huge amounts of tax dollars to the rentier class, and might involve constructing more houses, and therefore would be opposed by the left.
Yes that’s exactly what I’m saying. More precisely, they’re for public housing only if they can capture a lot of the funds to enrich themselves and their supporters and friends.
See also the book “SanFranSicko” by Michael Schellenberger.
That... sounds like political propaganda. What is with so many comments the past few months trying to pin societal issues on the left/California/woke bogeyman?
Don't confuse "democrats" and "the left". The left has historically come to power by seeking land reform and has a history of redistributing their land, at times violently. Think the Soviet Union, the PRC, or looking further back, the Paris Commune, the extreme strands of the French Revolution, etc. Democrats, despite the rhetoric from some circles, is a firmly conservative party that most people who would self identify as leftists would disagree with a lot of their economic policy as implemented by Obama, Clinton, and Biden.
a couple generations of ostensibly left individuals got co -opted and hoodwinked into playing team politics, because they grew up in a time when the economy worked better in general and the effects of politics in general were more subtle.
Additionally, the two party system has effectively declawed the vox populi and made the barriers to change very, very large.
This means that until we're out of boomers (and a significant portion of Gen xers) the isn't going to be a possibility of the sort of critical mass necessary to make the systemic changes we need to reconnect the will of the people with the behavior of the government / media / business machine.
Although, if we make it that far, I'm sure the well organized entrenched upper class will have a whole new set of tricks to try. It's very difficult to properly organize against them.
> I have never met a left wing person who is pro landlord, is this some weird American spin on "the left"?
It's a variant of a straw man that right wing people sometimes use. Which makes sense given that OP is forming their perceptions of the left from a book subtitled "How Progressives Destroy Cities".
I'm fairly confident by "the left" they mean "wealthy California liberals", so basically, not the left. If you think that by virtue of being the most "left leaning" cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles must be left wing, it's not that far fetched. Unfortunately this idea is undermined by actually having lived in one of these cities.
Indeed. The 'Liberal' cities are socially liberal, but economically conservative, so they are full of initiatives like legalizing marijuana and mushrooms and rainbow-painted crosswalks and naked bike rides, while at the same time, pushing back hard on any economic solutions to housing.
(Conservative areas are generally both socially, and economically conservative. I know someone will mention Utah's housing first program, and I'll cut them off at the pass, by pointing out that subsequent governments have been severely under investing in it.)
I wonder what "economically conservative" means here. Usually I would expect someone economically conservative to be against government intervention and prefer market-oriented solutions to problems, but the people you're talking about tend to want the opposite.
Directly? No. But indirectly? Yes. The rampancy of NIMBY, PHIMBY, and "anti-gentrification" attitudes leads to decreased construction, increased housing prices, and the enrichment of (existing) landlords at the expense of tenants.
It's not, but I didn't say it was. Plus the reasons that "the left" opposes housing are generally quite different than the reasons "the right" opposes housing.
They didn't solve it by 90%, they lied with statistics, and compared exponential-growth forecasted counts with point-in time counts.
The reduction was closer to 60%, and in the past few years, they've stopped investing in the program. It's been a good thing, but without ongoing effort and investment it will regress back to the mean.
If you guarantee you could do this, then do it? Plenty of states the left has no actual say in governance (MS, AL, SC, FL, TX) right now- perfect time to prove it.
Socialism becomes a lot more palatable to majority populations as long as minority populations are kept to a minimum. With a reasonable expectation that the recipients of help look like you, helping starts to seem more like an obligation than an imposition.
The loss of the distinction between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor also caused many people who would’ve supported help to one of those to just throw their hands in the air and forget the whole thing.
That's what I'm talking about. The ability to hold back aid from the "undeserving" becomes a lot less important to people who live in relative homogeneity racially and culturally. Absolutely no surprise to me that Utah is relatively socialist internally while being on the extreme right externally.
> Absolutely no surprise to me that Utah is relatively socialist internally while being on the extreme right externally.
Utah is also heavily Mormon, which complicates things. Mormons have a lot of beliefs that sound fairly socialist when you describe them in practice, except that they believe the church should be the administrator of those policies.
Mormons also heavily oppose abortion, which makes them a nearly single-issue voting bloc, making Utah deep red in a purely partisan sense.
If somehow abortion were a non-issue - like, overnight, everyone somehow magically forgot abortion even existed - it's not hard to imagine Mormons being one of the least conservative Christian denominations.
(Yes, I'm aware that other Christians don't consider the LDS to be Christians, but that's beside the point)
Mormon conservatism encompasses a lot more than just abortion. Discrimination by gender and orientation are still doctrine, and to some extent so is discrimination by race.
A lot of hardline religious sects superficially look like socialism if you only examine their in-groups and entirely ignore their out-groups. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is no exception.
> Socialism becomes a lot more palatable to majority populations as long as minority populations are kept to a minimum.
You're getting downvoted, but you're broadly correct. There's a lot of research showing how more homogeneously white populations are more likely to support leftist or socialist policies (policies, not affiliation) than people of the same demographics who live in more heterogeneous places.
How does that concept reconcile with Mississippi having a low homelessness rate and providing housing at a high rate for those that need it despite a non-homogenous population?
The key according to this article is the cost of housing, not implied racism.
I have numerous conervative family members, acquaintances, and friends. That comment proves one knows one's adversary remarkably well.
Historical and contemporary conservative approaches to homelessness tend to fixate on criminalization and enforcement: more cops to break up camps, more pretenses to jail homeless persons, more opportunities for the prison-industrial complex to get its cheap labor. "Jail the beggars, jail the addicts, jail the crazies." Today, a century ago, a millennium ago... the dynamics between the rich and poor are basically unchanged; all that's changed, at most, is how the rich get selected.
Are you saying that jailing the homeless wouldn't be popular with conservatives? I'm quite sure it actually is (although they prefer running them out of town because that's even cheaper.)
Portland, cited in the article, announced it's beginning yet another sweep of homeless encampments yesterday. At the press conference announcing it, the mayor - who's been ordering sweeps his entire tenure - admits they don't and haven't ever helped the people being swept.
He's also still pushing his plan to establish city-run outdoor camps for homeless people, and to criminalize rejecting those city-run camps when swept - but the city-run camps' locations haven't even been announced, much less started.
From a NIMBY perspective, a city-run homeless camp sounds even worse than a normal homeless camp. At least in the latter case you can hope that the city will get rid of the camp soon, but if the camp is made by the city itself then what hope can you have?
So I think this plan of his will never be implemented. Politically, talking about it makes more sense than actually implementing it.
Don't these permanent "homeless camps" already exist though? When I was in Portland last January I saw a large grouping of what I can only describe as very-tiny homes - essentially glorified shacks on rollers and stilts - which were obviously city-sanctioned homeless encampments next to a bypass.
The camps that last the longest seem to be the ones furthest from neighborhoods where rich people might complain about it. Near or under highways is a "good" place for the camps since highways are noisy/stinky and properties next to highways generally aren't very desirable. Homeless camps in nicer neighborhoods might last for a few weeks/months but seem a lot less permanent than those under highways.
> Near or under highways is a “good” place for the camps since highways are noisy/stinky and properties next to highways generally aren’t very desirable.
Under highways, particularly, also have the political advantage of reduced visibility.
As a bonus (for the people who don’t want the homeless around), these locations (near and under highways) are also extremely unhealthy, particularly for people with respiratory conditions (and staying in them is a good way to develop such conditions in the first place), so it helps reduce the population served.
Nope. Those were unenforced camps. The mayor is proposing reserving city-owned or -leased property, setting up on-site services, and requiring swept homeless people to move to those city-run outdoor camps or single-night shelters or be charged.
The liability alone that Wheeler's proposing is incredible. It'll cost tens of millions to set up (by his estimate) and there'll be lawsuits against the city within days, guaranteed. Nobody will be helped, hundreds will be harmed, and people who aren't chronically homeless will wind up in jail. The camps won't have enough capacity, so nothing fundamentally changes on the ground. Nobody wins.
Actually there is a huge amount of local support for these camps politically. Both in issue polling [1] and in terms of which candidates won election to city council, etc.
Part of this has to do with the fact that there have been persistent homeless camps directly in some of the richest neighborhoods, and the city is proposing that the sanctioned camps won't be in residential neighborhoods.[2] If they happen, it will more likely be in a parking lot on the edges of the city or in industrial/commercial zones. Combine the site selection criteria and the obvious advantages of having a centralized set of camps with waste collection, fire code enforcement, and 24/7 onsite security, and it's no-brainer to most people. The real barrier is the question of where the money comes from and who will be in charge, because Portland has an extremely dysfunctional, fractured local government where funding for homeless services is run by an office jointly administered by the city and the county.
The difference is that in practice, impromptu camps are often set up in city centers and dense residential neighborhoods. Officially sanctioned sites can be farther removed from those areas.
There's a Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode about government run homelessness camps on the US West Coast in 2024. I see we're working on making this happen.
This doesn't seem to address that if you are the nicest place to move to as homeless, more will move there, perpetuating the need for the chosen solution. I'm all for helping people, but if it's not sustainable, it will eventually screw everyone, not just the previously homeless.
> This doesn’t seem to address that if you are the nicest place to move to as homeless, more will move there, perpetuating the need for the chosen solution.
That mitigates its effectiveness as a local solution, but that problem is in turn mitigated when you move it up to wider regions (and particularly when you move it up to jurisdictions with some form of border control.)
Probably because people are free to migrate anywhere within a country's borders, so cities with lots of social services get overrun with a disproportionate amount of people wanting to use them. These sorts of policies need to be implemented at a nation-wide level for them to be truly effective.
"Thing that fails in the small scale needs to be implemented on an even bigger scale" is a hard sell. How do you convince a state that thinks California is a hell hole that they should implement Californian policies in their own state? This doesn't seem possible to me.
If there can be a politically practical solution at all, I think it must be one that can be demonstrated to work in the small scale.
> How do you convince a state that thinks California is a hell hole that they should implement Californian policies in their own state? This doesn't seem possible to me.
First step would be to identify the specific things that make California a hellhole v. the things California gets right.
If I put myself on a starvation diet and still starve to death, it doesn't follow that the solution to hunger is to eat even less. Obviously, the solution to homelessness is homes.
If you implement them nation-wide the only result would be people coming from abroad to enjoy housing-first social services. Unless you are saying the first step towards solving homelessness is the prevention of illegal entry and the mass expulsion of illegal immigrants.
I get the impression there's a fair chunk of America that feels that way about any sort of government-provided assistance (though more accurately I guess it's "assistance is fine as long as it's to people I approve of).
By all means, use data to make your case for effective solutions.
Do not for a second forget that it’ll happen person by messy person and that this is not only inevitable, but good.
Convincing NIMBYs of this is, well, a shitton of work.
So three men from the recovery house next door help him to his feet, walk him to the halfway house and put him in the shower. They wash his clothes and shoes and give him their things to wear while he waits. They give him coffee and dinner, and they give him respect. I talked to these other men later, and even though they had very little sobriety, they did not cast this other guy off for not being well enough to be there. Somehow this broken guy was treated like one of them, because they could see that he was one of them. No one was pretending he wasn't covered with shit, but there was a real sense of kinship.
[…]
I was just totally amazed by what I had seen. And I had a little shred of hope. I couldn't have put it into words, but until that meeting, I had thought that I would recover with men and women like myself; which is to say, overeducated, fun to be with and housebroken. And that this would happen quickly and efficiently. But I was wrong.
I wish this article were more specific on what "housing first" means. My understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) is that homeless shelters across the country have empty beds, and that these are not considered housing.
When the article describes an alternative of providing the homeless "housing," what does this housing look like? What aspects of housing are provided that are not generally provided at homeless shelters? Is it privacy, security of belongings, a place to stay during the day, quietness during the night, or other factors that are most substantially different from what is currently available?
Basically something that resembles a home aka apartment.
'Shelters' are not close to that. They are places to 'kind of sleep' and that's usually it.
It's not a 'home' if you have to share a room with 40 other smelly people and you have to be out by morning. There is a lot of theft, violence, many homeless find it much more peacable to sleep rough than in a shelter.
Many people are so messed up and many incorrigably irresponsible so this program won't work (the flats will immediately turn into repulsively dirty crack houses), but for many it's foundational to be able to sleep and 'be' somewhere that's warm, protected from the elements, where you're not going to be accosted, stolen from.
Just imagine trying to 'get a job' when you live in a tent. Our society is not very capable of handling that. Forget the physical duress of it - it's the psychological aspect. If you are in bum like conditions, surrounded by other bums, crackheads, thieves, it's really hard to fathom yourself as a 'good coffee server'.
Give people a flat with decent neighbours, a community etc and that's the bedrock from which everything else is founded, including their own identity.
All of that said, Finland is not California, and they are light years apart.
I can 100% see it working in Helsinki and not in Cali at all. For one thing, there would be 20 million people lined up for 'free housing' in Cali. They don't have the same kinds of communities to integrate people into, weaker family and cultural structures. Much, much worse violence etc..
But 'housing first' is an important insight to consider because when you think about it it makes sense.
> But 'housing first' is an important insight to consider because when you think about it it makes sense.
And it's a good goal, too. I mean, to achieve that, you'd have to aggressively build apartments, because it's not like we have 50% of flats being empty and people ending up on the street because nobody will take the government's money and rent out apartments. Once you do that appropriately, some of the pressure will be lowered. You'll still end up with some people landing on the streets, but you'll have fewer, because rents are more affordable and especially smaller apartments are being built. Fewer people, smaller problem.
Unfortunately, that might also be why we're not doing it everywhere. For all I can tell, most local governments don't want new housing.
Shelters are not homes and are no intended to be. They are a bed to sleep in if you don't have one that night and can comply with all of their many, many rules.
I'd be for this but if after giving them a place THEN the laws were actually applied and they were not allowed to do drugs in public spaces and other anti-social behavior. However, a lot of the folks in San Francisco who appear homeless actually have some hotel or unit the city has provided and they just hang out in public all day and cause problems.
When hundreds of millions of Chinese move to cities looking for jobs, how do they solve the housing problem. Turns out those low-paying jobs mostly offering dormitory to attract workers. There are several article talking about Foxconn worker life conditions, but providing dormitories is better than not.
I wouldn't take that article as the absolute truth. It's true that homeless people are not generally the best caretakers of themselves, but SROs are also gross because of landlord neglect. The article seems to suggest that some people are too obnoxious to be housed, but it wants to hide that conclusion from its readers. A real comprehensive solution to homelessness also needs to deal with the "difficult" people in a useful and humane way. It also needs to be realistic, so we cannot just make peoples' lives worse and hope that punishment causes them to behave more usefully.
If I were solving the problem, I would do it something like this:
- A place to sleep needs to be provided for everyone, regardless of mental health or drug usage or general intolerableness.
- Housing for the homeless should be grouped into small places with a few units each that are well spread out.
- Housing should be guaranteed for at least the month, so you are not waiting in line every single day.
- There should be a quota per city and per census tract of required homeless housing, including the richest parts of the city. If your neighborhood meets the budget, then they can sweep for tents and there are consistent cleaning services. Otherwise it is open camping.
- Some of the housing should be allocated as drug free, with regular drug testing for residents who choose these sites. Ditto for alcohol free. Ditto for more restrictive quiet hours. In non-drug-free housing, your still forbidden from open drug usage in common spaces, but no testing. We should balance each restriction according to demand.
- We need solutions for handling mental health problems. That can include levels of conservatorship, such as having your door locked for the night but being allowed to leave during the day. We need lawyer or social worker representation, so that people are not restricted unnecessarily.
- We should aim for individual rooms and bathrooms. If that's not economically feasible, then application criteria should exist for better sleeping locations, including how long you've been a resident in the city and disability status.
Local politicians are in bed with developers. The scheme is politicians giving public money to developers (their family/friends) for housing, which the tenants promptly destroy, justifying the acquisition of new properties. The politicians are incentivized to provide inadequate services/screening to ensure that the housing is destroyed. The whole thing is designed to fail because it's a grift.
How do you deal with an apartment complex and it’s surrounding neighborhoods full of (previously)homeless people? The Realistate market isn’t gonna allow it to devalue their property, hence you get these NIMBY campaigns
I always thought the best idea would be to randomly sprinkle in these housing units throughout the community instead and of having them all together in one complex. For example, each new development should have a percentage of units allocated to homeless programs, and which actual specific units should be chosen at random to prevent developers building small/horrible/clustered together units for the program.
Since homeless people are homeless because they can’t afford a place, a solution is to prevent more homelessness by allowing people that are about to be homeless seek govt subsidies for rent.
Homelessness increasing while the cost of housing has skyrocketed. Solution is more affordable housing?
No, you don’t say.
It’ll never happen though. We look at housing as an investment from a cultural perspective in the USA. This has been a brilliant plan by the capitalist landlords to further concentrate their holdings and become more fiendishly rich.
But hey - your house goes up in value even though your kids will never get to own their own home. Maybe when you die - but oh wait you probably did a reverse mortgage because you didn’t save enough for retirement. Whoops. Too bad junior - no house for you!
This has been a brilliant plan by the capitalist landlords to further concentrate their holdings and become more fiendishly rich.
It's not the capitalist landlords pointing guns at people who are trying to build more housing.
But your point is basically right. Both parties and a large majority of the public believe that housing should be "a good investment", which is equivalent to the position that it should become increasingly unaffordable for the average person.
A friend of mine runs homeless shelters for those that society finds truly deplorable. Sex offenders, ex convicts, and people who for some reason I can't understand are excluded from our emergency mental health system.
His facilities have a cost of care that is 25% of what the state has paid in the past. They have intensive rehabilitation programs, and serve the communities in multiple cities remarkably well.
His work is under fire from all sides. The Democrats don't like him because of the color of his skin, because he is a Christian (though his facilities aren't), and because he has privatized to some degree a system that was previously union work. The Republicans don't like him because they see these people as deserving life in jail (or a worse fate), and his work as "socialism" (because he's housing the homeless).
He exists in a really precarious position - by properly balancing his political detractors, he is "allowed" to service the community.
A lot of them don't even want homes. They just want to be able to use drugs and hang out wherever they feel like. There are plenty of interviews on YouTube/Instagram/TikTok with homeless people saying exactly this.
Personally I'm holding out until 2024 so the Bell Riots can give us the utopia we've all been promised.
Sigh.
I'm not too worried. You'll all be standing out in the breadline with me soon enough. Keep building robots that automate your jobs out of existence. I find it amusing.
I tried to help a homeless friend who was an alcoholic, but landlords really don't tolerate urinating on the floor, breaking keys off in locks, and not paying bills.
One of the linked studies shows that it's ultimately cost-effective, though:
"participants had... median costs of $4066 per person per month... Median monthly costs decreased to $1492 and $958 after 6 and 12 months in housing, respectively" [1]
The implication is that there are risks (eventual damages) incurred by being a first-mover. Re: Anaheim's attempt to curb the homeless by the river. What's more, is that it is not a panacea nor does it eliminate drug use. The risk is an ongoing cost and current housing is not tooled to tolerate it. How is this best addressed?
I expect that housing will be bifurcated, much like it is in England. The Blocks (made of cinderblock and stone to minimize the inevitable fires) and what we currently think of as traditional wood-and-stucco housing.
"Curing" people with a problem like that is not as simple as putting a roof over their heads. The cat can take a pill, but the alcoholic needs a life redirection, and that takes social infrastructure. If you put yourself on the hook by providing said roof, their problems become yours. At that point, you need to ask yourself if you have the time, energy, patience, and most importantly, compassion.
Huh, almost as if the solution is collective rather than hyper-individualist action, and it requires the resources of a community to pay the upfront costs in order to see the long term payoff.
Here in San Francisco, near the beginning of COVID, we put our homeless in hotel rooms. One resident per room, no shared bathrooms, etc. Plus, we gave them free food, free alcohol and free drugs (weed, IIRC). The idea was to satisfy all of their needs and not have them going outside. This lasted close to 2 years.
This was a fairly big sample: close to 3700 people. That is a statistically significant sample, given that SF's total homeless population is around 20K - 30K (including those in shelters).
So what happened with these people? How many of them cleaned up their acts and became productive members of society? This would be a fairly straightforward question to answer, right?
BUT! The Homeless Industry in SF has refused to do so! There were no studies done on this population and their outcomes. Whatever happened to these scientists? Why did they ignore this golden opportunity to study this situation? What we _do_ know is that the residents trashed the hotels and the City of SF is being sued by these hotels to the tune of 10s of millions of dollars.
I remember when all flights were grounded after 9/11, and scientists took the opportunity to study the impact of contrails on the night sky, visibility of celestial bodies, etc. Weirdly, no scientist considered it worthwhile to study these homeless people in their new housing.