There is an episode of the "you're wrong about" podcast, that discusses homelessness. In that episode there are several discussion about several projects in California around homelessness. Those projects provided housing. The studies based on those projects showed that overall the cost was less that not having some housing and services. The podcast goes into more details, but as I remember this was because
* It removes much of the medical and police cost
* If people who are struggling don't have a roof over their head, it makes it incredibly hard for them to get a job. Having some stability meant that many could pick them selves up and get a job and so forth.
The end of the episode points out even though the programs were a success by most metrics - including being cheaper overall to tax payers - they were shut down.
The idea that homeless people need homes to be able to advance further seems to trigger some people — after all, most of us pay for our housing, so why should they get it for free?
What people don’t consider is that when “we”, the people with houses, don’t spend our dollars housing homeless people, we pay sooner or later in other ways whether we want to or not when society around us partly disintegrates and additional effects start stacking up: substance abuse, violent crime, healthcare costs etc.
The way 'housing first' has been implemented in SF is terrible. It is operated as a lottery helping a very tiny percentage of the homeless with a house/apt worth $1mil+. Those numbers will never solve the problem.
If I saw a reasonable housing first program where it actually provides cost-efficient housing for all that need it, I'd be a strong proponent.
The current system is not that, it's incredibly unfair, a tax-payer funded lottery in which residents provide accolades to homeless advocacy groups in return for inclusion on lists that make them more likely to win a spot in the residences. Huge amounts of tax-payer money is siphoned off into these non-profits throughout the process.
It's unfortunate that some of the smallest, most expensive, most mismanaged and ideological 7x7 mile real estate in the US is being used as the dumpster for humans in need of serious medical attention and societal support.
SF can barely build a public toilet without it turning into a taxpayer trough feeding frenzy, so expecting it to be the Mecca of the homeless, the addicted and the downtrodden is comedic at best, and tragic at worst. Even if someone were to get back on their feet from addiction, SF is the last place where they would want to try to live, given the astronomical cost of everything, unless they're going to suddenly become senior ML engineers who can afford a downpayment on a $1M 500sqft cockroach shoebox.
Most people with regular jobs can't afford to live in SF... think school teachers driving in every morning from Sacramento, and that's without fighting every day against a crippling meth addiction.
There's practically infinite room in Bakersfield, Stockton, Lancaster, Fresno, housing is more affordable, the local governance more amenable, the cost of living night and day, but nobody in policy will ever be able to pull that off, so we'll be stuck with the current status quo that nobody is happy with.
There are a lot of public employees and contractors who would have no way to live in the bay area if it wasn't for the $300 million a year homeless budget for a few thousand homeless. They need those homeless to provide justification for their good government jobs, which is why they cater to them so heavily by allowing them to sleep anywhere, ignoring most crimes they commit and providing them with a safe place to buy and take drugs.
All that has to happen is tax revenue has to fall and the spending will decrease and the homeless will go to some other place where they can live a better drugs and camping lifestyle. Having lived for some time a few years ago in the Tenderloin, the idea that the homeless in S.F are normal people who have fallen on hard times is a complete simulated reality that has almost nothing to do with the actual situation.
SF is the solve everything with more money city because more money is always to the benefit of people working government jobs. For another example, look at the 1 billion dollar per mile recent subway extension, for example. That 1 billion went to somebody and employed a lot of people.
Even Scott Weiner mentioned in the interview with Ezra Klein in April that he would have not been able to live in SF if he hadn't gotten lucky and found a 500sqft place 15 years ago. You know something is off when your state senator can't even afford to live in his own district.
This is the case across most of the US. It’s also why our senators are wealthy people taking “bribes” and kickbacks, friendly business deals or benefiting from insider trading. Feinstein, Pelosi are good local examples.
They should pay top government officials multi-million dollar salaries like they do in Singapore. Then they could attract top talent to those jobs and they wouldn't have to engage in all these questionable side hustles.
You would have to find someone who has so much money that anything extra wouldn't matter. Those people do not exist and the richer high paying job it is the more it will attract the wrong type. Put Musk in one of those jobs and he will use influence to increase his wealth.
Estimated by allfamousbirthday.com? Pardon me if I am a little skeptical.
And nobody said he doesn’t live in the district. He moved to SF as a lawyer, then became Deputy City Attorney, then was elected to Board of Supervisors, then elected to state senate. His quote about not being able to afford to live in SF is most likely to point out that rent control in SF keeps qualifying rents affordable while market-rate rents are extremely unaffordable.
Or their (meth) RVs or vans. Those are surprisingly common, but they tend to go to cities that don’t enforce parking limits for unhoused (LA, SF, Seattle)…
It’s not, 70% of unhoused people in SF started out housed in SF (source: every homeless count for the last decade, and my tenure as editor-in-chief of SF’s Street Sheet). People are unhoused here because housing is unaffordable. This is not complicated.
We already have a (very successful, uncontroversial) program that provides free bus tickets to unhoused people who came from elsewhere and have a support system wherever they came from. That leaves the other 70%.
Leading question: suppose someone moved to SF, started out homeless, moved to supportive housing for a few months, and got kicked out and became homeless again. Are they counted in that oft-cited "70% of homeless people are SF natives!" figure?
ETA some additional numbers[0]:
Of that [71]%, the top six places they were housed before their most recent loss of housing:
With Friends/Relative (31%)
Home Owned or Rented by Self or Partner (21%)
Subsidized Housing or Permanent Supportive Housing (11%)
Hotel/motel (9%)
Jail or Prison (8%)
Hospital or Treatment Facility (4%)
So only 21% of that 71% actually rented their own place. Granted, the "with friends/relatives" can cover some situations where I'd agree they count as originating from SF, but also covers things like people moving here and crashing with a friend for a week before being kicked out.
Note also that any homeless who has become housed at any point of their homelessness (including jail, hospitalization, supportive housing) would then persist in the "has been housed in SF before" stat.
FWIW, I upvoted; but I agree this is an ongoing problem on HN and really any place that allows people to downvote based on how they feel.
You can state all the facts you want and some people downvote because they simply didn't like it; others downvote because your replied topic was about a downvote (against policy) and those same problematic people who downvoted may also have multiple accounts and/or be doing this to promote a certain propagandist narrative. There's really no way to combat it or tell given the site design.
Ultimately its a bridge too far and violates free speech by de-amplifying what you said (because it goes invisible once it goes under a certain vote, greyed out at 0, hidden -1, delisted/invisible -2) but that's mainly just my opinion that the vast majority of people (or more accurately bots) here don't hold. Its why I think most current social media should be outlawed (as its currently designed).
It interferes with communications which are an important signal over public discourse for our representatives to take action. They stop being responsive and representing when they can't receive meaning from their constituency because its an intentionally jammed/noisy channel and they so far have failed to take any action to remedy that jamming, which can have grave historical consequences.
When there's no effective representation, the rule of law eventually breaks down.
It's down voted because it's a figure that people who follow the discussion closely know is misleading. The context it's usually used in (including here) suggests homelessness is because people were gainfully employed and renting in SF before being kicked because of greedy landlords, but that's a small minority of people actually included in the figure. It also includes anyone who's ever crashed on a friend's couch for a month, been jailed, hospitalized, or rented a motel room in SF.
Those people still deserve empathy, but they're a very different group than those who once were productive and housed in SF and then ended up on the streets because of a bout of bad luck.
> The context it's usually used in (including here) suggests homelessness is because people were gainfully employed and renting in SF before being kicked because of greedy landlords
No, that isn’t the context here. When I wrote this here, and when I put this figure on a Muni bus ad for Street Sheet’s ad campaign in 2015, I was responding to the often-repeated false assertion that SF is “a dumping ground” for unhoused people, that people “come here to be homeless”, that “other cities send their homeless here”, etc etc etc.
Claiming that “housed in San Francisco before becoming unhoused” should only include “productive” people who were paying their own rent with their name on the lease is moving the goal posts by an entire football field.
Cities are full of poor people. They ought to be — cities are great places to find opportunities to get out of poverty. And lots of people, self included, show up in cities with no money or plan, and crash on couches, in hotel rooms, in their cars, etc, until they land on their feet.
San Francisco has always been a place where people have done this. We didn’t have large-scale homelessness here until the second half of the 80s, after federal public housing was gutted and especially after the Loma Prieta quake wiped out a lot of affordable housing.
If cities don’t make room for poor people, those people will end up on the street. People try to make this more complicated than it is, but every serious study on this lands in the same place, every time — just provide housing.
> And lots of people, self included, show up in cities with no money or plan, and crash on couches, in hotel rooms, in their cars, etc, until they land on their feet.
Sure. But the approach to dealing with that subset of people should be different than the approach for the subset who were once employed and renting in San Francisco and then ended up homeless through a health emergency, job loss, or eviction. The latter group has shown the ability to sustain themselves in SF in the past, while the former hasn't. And, morally, the place of original residence is responsible for them, not the taxpayers of San Francisco.
If nothing else, people with longstanding ties to the community and economy should get preference for services compared those who didn't. And homelessness advocates get this: the entire point of conflating them is to increase sympathy for the people who just turn up.
> And, morally, the place of original residence is responsible for them, not the taxpayers of San Francisco. If nothing else, people with longstanding ties to the community and economy should get preference for services
I believe you would find that this is illegal. Shapiro (Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618 (1969)) and its progeny address this issue on point.
(I feel obliged to mention I believe your number because of your expertise, simply because of the number of people in this thread who failed to say that).
> But the approach to dealing with that subset of people should be different than the approach for the subset who were once employed and renting in San Francisco and then ended up homeless through a health emergency, job loss, or eviction.
How do you even begin to discriminate on that? The USA lacks a residency system like other countries.
I agree with your point, but it’s not possible to implement here, which is why the non profits continue the conflation.
For San Francisco in particular, if you work in San Francisco, you pay a local income tax of ~0.4%. Make having paid that (say, $50 paid by either you or the person you're married to) or having attended an SFUSD school as qualifiers for assistance.
That covers the large majority of homeless that SF should target for help and are all easily accessible to the city government, with no documentation required by the applicant. You can imagine corner cases (attended a private school, lived in SF but worked outside it) but it'd be an improvement over the status quo. Even many of the corner cases could be captured with additional documentation that would require a bit more effort on the applicant's side.
> But the approach to dealing with that subset of people should be different than the approach for the subset who were once employed and renting in San Francisco and then ended up homeless through a health emergency, job loss, or eviction. The latter group has shown the ability to sustain themselves in SF in the past, while the former hasn't. And, morally, the place of original residence is responsible for them, not the taxpayers of San Francisco.
This is how the system already works. The Homeward Bound program provides free bus tickets to people who have a support system elsewhere. That still leaves a substantial population of people who do not have any other support system, or whose support system is in San Francisco.
> If nothing else, people with longstanding ties to the community and economy should get preference for services compared those who didn't.
This is how the provision of services currently works. The problem is not prioritization, the problem is a lack of available housing for even your narrowly-defined “deserving” unhoused people. And arguing about a few percent being moved into a different category of eligibility does nothing to fix the underlying problem.
> That still leaves a substantial population of people who do not have any other support system, or whose support system is in San Francisco.
It's not San Francisco's responsibility to pick up the slack for places that don't take care of their homeless. Declaring that it is doesn't make it so, and both creates perverse incentives (for other places to shirk on their responsibilities) and makes it impossible for San Francisco to fulfill its own responsibilities.
Also, I don't think I used the word "deserving," despite your quotes. They deserve help, but San Francisco is not obligated to be the provider of services for the entire country. Once we do manage to build successful programs for the homeless who originate here, then we can talk about whether it makes sense to build aid systems and SF housing for people from other communities.
As it stands, we fail all the homeless in San Francisco. It's silly to think we can tackle homelessness nationwide before we even can get a handle on those who come from here.
mbgerring, I agree with you in almost the entirety of what you've said both here and in some of your responses.
There are a lot of false assertions made, often with no consequence for doing so, which is an ongoing problem; and worse a lot of these people actually believe what they say is true despite well researched facts showing to the contrary. Its disheartening that so many people are completely irrational when it comes to discourse on these things.
As for the lack of housing, to me its clearly not a money problem. Also, in other areas they do hotel vouchers instead of actually creating affordable housing; and while programs may limit it to no more than 30 days, there are loopholes which allow a revolving door between multiple hotels accepting vouchers. I would guess this is where most of the money is going, and this doesn't do the same thing as providing permanent housing first.
Additionally, the vouchers themselves are often traded, for drugs and other things and the areas where these are accepted, quickly become crime-ridden because the dealers follow the vulnerable populations; its one of the reasons some areas refuse to add additional local transit resources. They simply don't want to deal with it; or they deal with it in a way that makes it someone elses problem (like what happened in Santa Ana).
Everyone seems to have an opinion on what needs to be done, but none that I've seen have actually followed through on what the rigorous studies have shown. There always seems to be some loophole, corruption, backroom deal, etc for business to capitalize on homeless services without actually improving the situation in any way while draining resources meant to help people get back on their feet.
You did not provide any documentation. Whenever documentation is provided that supposedly proves this, is highly misleading. Like this one in which they've somehow managed to define everyone as an SF resident (see footnote) https://i.redd.it/omvx0d36ng1b1.jpg.
I am not serious, completely. But you called it a dumpster for the underclass (not judging either way).
But it points to an irony when you’re there, going to a meeting at the Transamerica pyramid or walking past the headquarters of Salesforce, or having a michelin starred meal, then walking down the street and a guy in an alley has a knife.
(Yeah, personal experience. I wasn’t very scared. Probably because I just had michelin starred wine pairings…)
When demand on resources exceeds available resources and/or current plans are not moving the ball, management must act. Moving homeless to lesser cost places is in scope. The poster above is right. While getting stable is a huge win, it's silly to think they can then continue to live in sf
They are not entitled nor are tax payers obligated to insure they have parity with people who can afford to live and work in SF.
And I buy the argument providing homes is humane and cost efficient compared to options. Any treatment medical or mental in the US is stupid expensive. But I think/hope DBT which is effective mental side is not the most expensive
The "toilet" controversy was the set-aside maximum cost for a sheltered, multi-year maintenance project that involved road construction. It wasn't just a toilet seat like people keep repeating.
SF's attempts at "fixing" housing always amount to this lottery system.
Rent control: A random windfall for whatever tenant snags these coveted apartments when someone dies in a 3 bedroom apartment they haven't needed in 30 years but "can't afford" to downsize from since they have been paying $650 since 1989. Also the illegal subletters who are numerous and shameless, from personal experience.
Low-income housing minimums: A random windfall for a few lucky lottery winners, while everyone else from indigent to middle-class has to struggle because the developers need to build only luxury housing to make up for eating the cost of the low income housing.
And then this housing first thing is more of the same.
> siphoned off into these non-profits
Indeed. The homeless-industrial complex of nonprofits in SF is huge, but popular since it is a jobs program for all the people with social science bachelors and masters degrees, and no marketable skills.
The problem is that eventually you need walls or forced relocation. We have evidence that people are already willing to live in SF with no shelter, and without changing fundamental ways America works, you can’t force them to leave and not come back (maybe a city can get a restraining order protecting itself? No idea).
Force cannot be used but offers of food, shelter, and care elsewhere can and must be offered. In general, only the very rich can afford to live in the most central, desirable locations because the costs of everything are so damn high. It's only fair that most people who aren't insanely rich (like me) should find somewhere they can afford to live or where society can afford to help them. Trying to linger in SF Presidio or Manhattan is well above almost everyone's means.
> Rent control: A random windfall for whatever tenant snags these coveted apartments when someone dies in a 3 bedroom apartment they haven't needed in 30 years but "can't afford" to downsize from since they have been paying $650 since 1989. Also the illegal subletters who are numerous and shameless, from personal experience.
This is a misrepresentation of SF rent control. Rent increases for pre-1979 apartments are only capped if the same tenant lives there continuously -- when the apartment lease turns over, the rent can be raised to market rates.
That being said, there are some people that abuse the system by keeping a lease for a place they haven't lived in for 20 years and subletting it, sometimes for a profit, but there aren't apartments where the rent is permanently capped at 80s levels like you're suggesting.
Smart landlords will fight adding a cotenant, but tenants can always claim discrimination which is an uphill battle for the landlord especially in SF where juries are notoriously anti-landlord.
The standard leases used for rent-controlled apartments are very explicit about this, so unless a landlord used a non-standard lease, or didn't use a lease, this isn't a real problem. You don't have to be a smart landlord, you just have to not be a stupid one.
There's no issues around discrimination for this, and it's not an uphill battle. Replacement tenants are not co-tenants, and do not have rent control protection if the original tenants move out. Landlords cannot reject replacement tenants in most cases, but they have no requirements on accepting replacements as co-tenants. Replacement tenants are added as sub-letters of the original tenant.
I was a real estate agent who worked in property management, and I've also lived in rent controlled apartments in SF. You're absolutely wrong here.
You say $1mil+ house and most people think we are putting up a select one or two homeless guys in mansions.
1 million dollars in San Francisco real estate is a one room (maybe two room if it's in extra bad shape) hovel.
And that's the real problem. San Francisco is not a place for the poor to try to raise their lives to middle class. It's a place for middle class to struggle to stay above water. The homeless in sf need to be given decent places to live in a place where land costs something normal. That place does not currently exist in or near San Francisco, but can be reached by an hour or two bus ride.
They would then cry that it's not their problem once outside SF jurisdiction. Thus perpetuating the same issue elsewhere.
CA should have taken the 17B and invested it the lowest-cost-of-living regions in the US to build out communities + housing with full wrap-around services for different purposes (homelessness, mental-health, vets, etc) and focus on therapy/recovery.
It seems spending 17B in CA would just get you a hotdog and bicycle these days.
You have a skewed sense of the middle class. Assume it costs $50,000 a year to live in a million dollar house (which seems on the low end of reasonable.) The median tax-home pay for a household in San Fransisco is $84,500. So you think most people are spending 60% of their take-home pay on housing?
Also, the median value for an owner-occupied house in SF is 1.15MM. So half the people live in something less than that.
> Also, the median value for an owner-occupied house in SF is 1.15MM. So half the people live in something less than that.
This contradicts your earlier statement. If the median owner-occupied house 1.15M, that means more than half of homeowners are living in houses worth $1M or more. Clearly that includes middle class people, since it's more than half of the people.
Also, note that it doesn't take much money to live in a $1M house if you bought it a while back.
No, because homeowners are not a representative sample of the population. If I slap you down in the middle of Beverly Hills, I could say that on average you're a millionaire, but that doesn't exactly tell the whole story.
It includes _some_ middle class people. Fewer and fewer as property taxes raise and the value of their home rises. Sure, they'll have a bunch of cash once they sell it, but not everyone wants to move away from where they were born just because there's a bunch of overpaid tech bros now living next to you.
Assuming you bought a whole back and have $1m equity, You could sell your $1.15m house and take 4% a year or $40k from that for doing nothing. You just need to live in a sensible location and let SF die.
Who is giving you 4%? Subtract taxes and you've traded a nice city for a life of poverty because chances are finding a new job at a similiar salary is almost impossible.
> You just need to live in a sensible location and let SF die.
Please let SF die so I can buy some affordable real estate there. Thanks!
Seriously though. SF’s problem is that it is too crowded. If people left, then it would be less crowded, an equilibrium would be reached eventually (if you believe we aren’t at one already).
Resettlement somewhere cheaper is the sensible thing to do. Unfortunately, this requires relocation and doesn't scale. This is something the federal government should pay for and coordinate.
Housing costs in SF are too high to house them in situ. Gotta bus them somewhere else cheap and start there. Why would you ever try to keep them in the city, it makes literally no sense?!
Around year 2009-2010, I worked in public sector in Helsinki in the real estate department. I worked the phone handling tenants calling and needing repairs. A large portion of the tenants were people from the homeless program. At the time I did not know this program was unusual.
My understanding of how it worked was that if you were functional enough and willing, you could walk into a certain building and they'd get you an apartment very quickly, although not sure if on the spot (I didn't work that part, just repairs part). I sometimes moved big bundles of keys for newly vacated or repaired apartments from the real estate building to the social workers in the homeless building they can then give out to new tenants.
I've now lived San Francisco for 5+ years and Helsinki basically does not have homeless people compared to what I've seen here.
I wondered a lot why California seems to be failing at the homeless problem. I see at least one comment here in threads that is saying that homeless are drug addicts and should be forced to go into rehab as a condition to give a home. While I was working for Helsinki I rarely heard anyone suggest the people being given homes needed to pay that back somehow, it was seen as obvious that the main problem is not having a home and the other problems can be dealt with later, and it's inhumane to make demands.
I don't know if "housing first" would actually work in California. Housing is super expensive, and I think California also has a lot more homeless than Finland ever did.
The ex-homeless tenants tended to need more repairs and care. I remember some funny/weird stories like we had a woman who could not use the toilet in her apartment because it was bright green and that caused her panic attacks. And some other tenant who painted literally everything (ceilings, windows, cabinets, furnite, floors, etc.) black.
> I wondered a lot why California seems to be failing at the homeless problem.
My take on it (after living in SF for many years):
1. Many homeless people do have mental illnesses and/or drug addiction problems (for some, this is the result of their homelessness, for others it's in part the cause). California is very much against involuntarily putting people in psychiatric hospitals or drug treatment programs. This is largely due to backlash over abuses from decades ago, where people were put into horrible conditions in mental institutions.
2. I think a housing-first program would absolutely work, but it's politically infeasible. Most people would seemingly prefer to have homeless people all over the streets and sidewalks when the alternative is to give them free housing, because it's "not fair" to the people who've worked to pay for their own housing.
3. The option of busing/flying homeless people out of a high-cost city like SF and into a lower-cost region where their needs can be met is also politically fraught. There are (voluntary) programs that help homeless people travel to a place where they have family who can help them, though I don't think it's used as a solution as often as it could be. But the idea of forcibly moving homeless people to a random place or places where they have no connection or support network is considered inhumane and a violation of rights.
I think #2 would be more acceptable to people if #3 could be used more, since presumably people could be housed in a location where housing is much cheaper. As much as I'm not super comfortable with the idea of just forcibly moving people to a different location, I think it overall can be better for the people involved, if it's done well. But that's the trick: can we actually ensure that the people relocated elsewhere will have their needs met, and will end up in clean, well-maintained housing?
Beyond that, I think we need to get over our aversion toward requiring people to go into (and stay in) psychiatric care or drug rehab. This shouldn't be a requirement for receiving housing; it should happen concurrently with being housed, though a live-in rehab program is probably appropriate for many people, at least to start. But I think refusing treatment should just not be an option.
And as a public health issue, and just an issue of keeping our spaces a nice, clean, safe place for everyone to live, ultimately I think we should make homelessness illegal, as long as we can provide a good alternative for every single person in that situation.
> Many homeless people do have mental illnesses and/or drug addiction problems (for some, this is the result of their homelessness, for others it's in part the cause). California is very much against involuntarily putting people in psychiatric hospitals or drug treatment programs. This largely due to backlash over abuses from decades ago, where people were put into horrible conditions in mental institutions.
This. I am old enough to remember those bad old days. We have simply replaced one form of inhumanity with another. There are people who need our compassion and help. We should give it to them. We also need to protect against abuse of and/or by the system. Why is this so hard to accomplish?
I would assume it is because providing compassion would win over protecting taxpayer from abuse everytime. Providing compassion is taxpayer money. Preventing abuse is self motivated. Also If giver is 100% compassionate no one would dare complain even if they are against it. If 1 abuser is denied due to abuse the whole govt will get blamed for not being compassionate enough without rock solid lawyer/political level proof
RE #2, the main political issue in SF at the moment is that the homeless advocacy non profits want permanent supportive housing as the only solution, they advocate against shelters temporary group and sober housing, and they also advocate against any compulsory programs. To them, the housing provided must be good enough that the meth addicts willingly chose housing over street life. This isn’t workable.
I think #3 could possibly work _if_ it was in conjunction with being housing-first. If SF had an agreement with another city with available housing, I think busing people there _if and only if they have a home ready_ could be a really reasonable solution.
No need to deal with the high housing prices of the bay area, and you're ensuring the person has a place to live when they get to where they're going. Definitely don't do this involuntarily, but I imagine many people (once such a program proves itself) would voluntarily sign up.
--
Random miscellaneous comment- I found it really challenging to get a part time job around where I lived without a car. One of the interview questions was typically "how will you get to work" and I could see a change in the interviewer's demeanor when I responded that I would walk or have someone drive me. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to get a job without a permanent address on top of that.
I wonder if there are areas/towns that could use additional sources of revenue/jobs that larger cities could help subsidize with homeless relocation services and funding.
> I think California also has a lot more homeless than Finland ever did.
Finland had a massive homelessness problem after WW2. Many homes were destroyed in the war, and many people from lost territories had to be resettled. Most working age men were veterans, and mental issues were common.
The problem persisted even after the "deserving" homeless had been housed due to popular attitudes. Vagrancy laws were still in force, making homelessness effectively a crime if you didn't behave. It wasn't until the 80s that the society started seeing homelessness as a problem that should be solved.
Its hard because the drug dealers follow where the vulnerable populations go. Crime increases because the drugs increase as the populations shift locations.
Finland also has a very robust social safety network unlike California/US. Homelessness is usually a symptom of something else. Addiction, mental health issues, financial crisis of some sort, etc. Most of these are escapeable given the right support. But once you pile them all on with no escape - well then you have market street.
If you don’t fix any of the other issues then you just end up throwing money in a bottomless pit on housing
It takes a huge effort to sober up and it is almost never a voluntary action.
Having experienced drug addiction, even with a strong support system of relatives and friends rallying around you with love but also holding you accountable for your recovery and dragging your arse to therapy three times a week, making sure you stick to the program and take your medications, with all that it is still very hard to get out, particularly if you are on stuff like heroin and meth.
I just don't see how the homelessness problem in the US will ever be solved just by wishful thinking that by giving people a home, meals, clothes and clean needles they will by themselves get well and leave the streets.
It will never happen that way, and the right solution, which is forced rehab and medications, is ironically seen as inhumane.
That’s a solution to drug addiction. Homelessness is not coterminous with drug addiction. You can be a drug addict with a home quite easily. It’s hard to be homeless and not use drugs or drink. You have numerous incentives to use and almost no incentives not to.
Take a stroll down the streets of SF or Portland and try to tell me it’s not an issue of drug addiction. There are already shelters in these cities for people in dire financial straits that aren’t addicts; the problem is they (and the rest of us) have to share these and other public spaces with deranged meth addicts. That’s what makes the current system untenable.
Most drug addicts lose their housing after some time, so housed drug addicts are temporary and in the way to being homeless. Addicts don’t work reliably enough to pay monthly expenses. They also steal and vandalize from people offering them housing, so again, very temporary until they wear out their welcome.
Many incentives are physical in nature. Can't afford food? Drugs and alcohol will make you forget you're hungry. It's more comfortable to sleep on the cold/hard ground if you're so high you can't feel anything at all.
You would be surprised what sort of drugs these people are using. They aren't paying for cocaine. They spend all day begging for pocket change to scrounge up $10 for some crap meth-like drugs who's sole purpose it to make you not feel anything. For the 4-8 hours after they take the drugs, they can forget everything they hate about their life and maybe fall asleep.
Realistically, strangers are quite happy to buy food for homeless people if they ask. So then the incentive is to get money to for "entertainment" and relaxation in form of drug use.
It's very hard to work around human nature and the whole "why am I paying rent like a sucker when the drug addicts on the street are getting free apartments?"
I also think that people who point out that a huge percentage of the people on the street are on drugs, so the drugs are the problem are not entirely correct either. The drug use is a symptom that also exacerbates the problem. One of the big contributing factors to California's homelessness problem is that wages have not kept up with rents, and it is not even close. If you're working two full time minimum wage jobs in SF you won't be able to afford an apartment, and that's a fundamental problem. Either bring rents down or wages up, neither of which are popular with the people who have political power.
This idea that the "homeless problem in SF" is primarily a problem of "people being unable to afford homes in SF" is just laughable.
All you need to do is walk down almost any street in San Francisco and take a secondary glance at the homeless people you see, and its obvious that "can't afford a home" is just one of their many problems. Most of these people couldn't hold a job because they're addicted to really hardcore drugs (you might even get an opportunity to watch them smoke or inject some during this secondary glance), and often severely mentally ill. "Homeless" is to a great extent besides the point, this is a mental illness / drug addiction problem.
Even if you could find a solid place for $800/mo in SF, these people wouldn't be in it because the vast majority of them are unfit for employment. If that was really the issue then we could solve all this by just sending them to Omaha.
You're right that people who have several physical or mental health issues would be hard to help, in any system.
But the number one cause of homelessness isn't addiction; it's poverty.
And for that matter, the overwhelming majority of people who are substance-addicted don't become homeless. Lots of the people you work with are addicted to something.
There are so many steps before people literally have to sleep on the streets. They stay out of sight. You surely have noticed all the camper vans on some streets in SF. I'd bet that for every person actually on the street there are 10 who are effectively homeless but managing it in a way you can't see. Living at their place of work or study, living in a vehicle, couch-surfing, illegal sublets, and things I'm happy to never have to imagine.
The article the OP posted details many stories of people who are competent to hold down a job, even multiple jobs, but cannot find anywhere to live.
Those are the homeless that attack the elderly. Those are the homeless that shit on the street. Those are the homeless that lie naked sprawled across the sidewalk or at the end of a BART escalator.
Whatever the cause, these homeless do have mental health and substance abuse issues, often are voluntarily homeless (and will resist help.) They're not all of the homeless problem, but they are a major part of it.
Getting rid of hard drug dealers would solve a large part of the issue. Making it illegal to be on hard drugs (and enforcing it) would be as well.
But I'm just going to say: I've lived in San Francisco. I currently live in Vancouver, not far from the epicentre of unhoused and addicted people.
Vancouver has many of the same problems and for the same reasons.
I have never, not once, feared for my safety around poor or addicted homeless people in Vancouver. Nor did I even feel like they hated me, specifically. I remember walking out of a doorway in Gastown where there was a woman smoking a crack pipe, and she was very apologetic and moved her stuff. It seemed oddly Canadian to me, even at the time.
In San Francisco I often felt sheer rage from unhoused people, or even just poor people. Acting out aggressively at the slightest provocation. Screaming for apparently no reason.
If you've lived your whole life in America it may be hard to imagine that these things aren't universal. But they aren't. If you think about it there really isn't any reason why being poor has to be the same as being dangerous.
I have no evidence as to exactly what the difference is. I think maybe Canadian policies are a little more generous and a little more available. Canadians were just as racist, but maybe American chattel slavery really went over the top in causing such social rifts. I don't really know.
The difference is that Europeans an Canadians are willing to bribe their homeless people to stay in line. It is called coasian bargaining and welfare payments are the only widespread application of it that has had any semblance of success.
Friend, every person gets benefits from the state. Be thankful that all the help you got was education, policing, infrastructure, community wealth, tax policies that favor asset owners, indirect subsidies, or privatized profits from public research. Or policies that would be obvious redistribution if Russia had done them in 1950 but because America does it it’s capitalism. If you look at where America’s defense spending goes it is rather obviously an employment and welfare program with a side hustle of war profiteering and global power projection. Closer to home, there would be no Stanford or Silicon Valley without massive, sustained defense spending in the Cold War.
Bribed? You seem to think that the homeless actively use their immiseration as some kind of protection racket. Maybe there are social services and non-profits that we can legitimately criticize for that (see OP’s article) but the people themselves? Really?
Alternately, we could say the Americans have decided to make the lives of poor and addicted people as bad as can be achieved without actually killing up them. Perhaps they serve a vital function as an example to others about what can happen.
And this is the dividing line on this issue of homeless, how people identify the problem and the motivation for the fix.
Some people want to fix homeless because of empathy while others want to fix it because of selfishness. Your comment reveals that you are in the latter group. You don't actually want to get homeless people into homes because you empathize with how horrible their lives must be without one. You just want to the minority of homeless people who are a nuisance to stop bothering you and people you actually do empathize with. All those other homeless people who aren't attacking the elderly or shitting on the street can keep on living the same invisible life of suffering because their suffering is not actually a problem in your eyes.
Who says we can't help both groups? Why is my position (that we should help the "noisy" homeless) incompatible with the position that we should not help the "silent" homeless? Where did I even imply one was a higher priority than the other?
And what the hell, how is caring about elderly people being attacked "selfish"?
Fixing part of the problem is a good thing. Different strategies might solve different parts of the problem. Objecting to progress isn't helpful and isn't compassionate, it's the way we got our current harm-maximization policies.
My counter to the dismissal of the problem of "nuisance homelessness" was to insist that they're a problem. But argument aside, it sounds like we're agreed policy-wise: let's aggressively fix the problem of violent law-breaking lifestyle-choice homelessness with all the obvious tools we've been neglecting to use, and with the money and peace of mind freed up by their absence (carried out in tandem, no doubt you'll want to accuse me of favouritism for law-abiding seniors again...) turn our efforts to the more difficult issue of the invisible law-abiding down-on-their-luck homeless.
The invisible homeless seem like the people that most likely can be helped, and the ones I feel more empathy and respect for. The visible ones that trash public places and make them unsafe, I want them dealt with so that the problem is fixed for everyone else. If that means involuntary commitment because they refuse drug treatment or being relocated to some sort of housing facility, so be it. I don't think people should be allowed to trash parks, camp on sidewalks or use walking paths for bathrooms and doing drugs, all of which should be illegal.
But when people say "homeless" that's who they mean. Not saying that you are wrong about there being 10x as many people living in camper vans or whatever, but that's just not who anybody means when they talk about homeless people.
Also not saying that it isn't a problem which should be solved, because it absolutely is. But if you did solve it, and you told people that homelessness was down by 90%, they would look at you like you were crazy, because it's only the other 10% they were complaining about in the first place.
You overestimate how much talent it takes to live indoors. Living in a house and being a drunk or junky is actually much more common than being a homeless drunk or junky. Drugs and alcohol do not magically deprive one of the ability to live indoors. Have you ever heard of a crack house? Totally possible to be a housed druggie.
Similarly most mentally ill people are able to muster the ability to sleep indoors.
Let’s agree that nothing about drug addiction or mental illness precludes living indoors.
The increase in homelessness seems as though it corresponds almost exactly to California’s housing crisis and unaffordable rents. Heroin has been around for a long time. It cannot be the explanation for a sudden increase in homelessness. Mental illness is a constant more or less, so it cannot be the explanation either.
What changed over the past decade, and especially changed in the past few years? Housing prices and rents.
I’d love to hear other explanations for the rapid increase of homelessness in California this past decade or two. It cannot be attributed solely to drugs or mental illness.
You are, presumably unintentionally, using a blanket descriptor "mentally ill" and "drug addicted" to describe an extremely wide spectrum of expressions.
"Serious Mental Illness" definitionally requires substantial interference with or limiting of one or more major life activities (including maintaining a safe house, and maintaining employment).
You are conflating people's common use of the term "mental illness" - yes, we can agree that most people with say, seasonal depression, can hold down a job and maintain a house. This is not what San Francisco's visible homeless "mental illness" is referring to. They are suffering from Serious Mental Illness.
No, we cannot agree that most folks with Serious Mental Illness are able to muster the ability to sleep indoors, definitionally.
Again, "drug addiction." There is an appreciable difference between the character of the drug, and the addiction - aka "Chronic Substance Abuse."
That is, once again, I do not agree that someone with open meth sores on their face is going to hold down any sort of a job and/or be able to muster a safe home environment.
Next, you ask what has changed in the past few years? Then conclude only two things have changed in 10 years - "housing prices and rents."
While there may be a correlation, possibly even a causation, this is still an oversimplification of the problem. There are other cities, even in the US that have seen an increase in housing prices and not the corresponding inhumane treatment of both the housed, and unhoused in SF particularly.
I wonder if anything else has changed in SF in 10 years that makes it uniquely inhumane to the homeless, and also disproportionately affecting the entire character of the city? Could it be policies? Complete lawlessness and availability/encouragement/facilitation of new drugs and drug addiction?
There are at least two obvious problems that are unique to the West Coast, perhaps namely SF, 1) an overall increase in homelessness caused by certainly a multitude of factors that include much more than "rent," such as the bifurcation of particularly the SF labor market and the educational/cognitive barriers to "information technology work" versus the alternatives. That is to say, the problem isn't necessarily inherently that rents went up, the corollary is true that pay didn't go up for those experiencing homeless who were happily housed and paying rent before. Ought they move? Ought we relocate them? Ought we pay, say, fast food workers similar to MAMAA developers? It seems you suggest affordable government project housing? And 2) policy that makes it such that those who do suffer from Serious Mental Illness/Chronic Substance Abuse (by some counts, the majority of those experiencing homelessness) that does everything it possibly can to ensure they maximally suffer, while having the greatest possible negative impact to the bystanders, often other people experiencing homelessness, but also the housed, and business owners. That is to say, SF policies it as absolutely easy as possible to stay addicted, and as difficult as possible to overcome the addiction, while simultaneously pretending severe mental illness is not a thing (i.e. you [paraphrasing for emphasis] "most mentally ill people can maintain a house and a job".)
It seems our conceptualization "homelessness" is corrupted by inadequate, and inconsistent use of nomenclature.
Both things can be true at the same time. Drugs are a significant issue in the homeless community, but providing housing and hope can do wonders for many of the homeless out there. When they feel like garbage, because society doesn’t care about them and treats them like they are, it’s impossible to consider a life with hope. If you’ve never been in that place, it’s very hard to understand.
But this “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality most people have is ludicrous; it simply isn’t that easy, when you have either mental health problems, or, quite simply, no hope.
> It's very hard to work around human nature and the whole "why am I paying rent like a sucker when the drug addicts on the street are getting free apartments?"
Easy fix: Give them a free apartment, too. Let them see what it's like. If they do better there than paying rent or mortgage, great. But I bet they won't last more than a day or two before turning that key back in. They think a free apartment is some great thing to have, as if their neighbors won't be all the people they didn't want to be around in the first place.
Have you seen the living conditions that people in SF are willing to put up with for cheap rent? Living out of their car, renting a closet, an attic, a couch in a living room. And that's not just baristas, it's well paid tech employees as well.
An endless amount of people would live in a 400sqft apartment with ex-homeless neighbours if it meant saving 2k on rent every month.
I like the idea, but I don't know if a place like SF has the capacity to test that experiment with, even if they did some lottery system for it.
I'm sure established families wouldn't actually go through with that plan, but they are also older and more likely to vote against those programs. the youth would take the most advantage of it and may even put up with it due to alternatives for housing being 2K/month into their college loans and the idea that it's a temporary discomfort. And we all know that the 18-29 demographic doesn't turnover nearly as much as that 50+ bracket.
While I agree with housing first and you, I think at the same time your quote is mischaracterizing the opposite point of view, which I've seen from close. The more appropriate quote would be:
"Why am I paying rent for myself and rent for the drug addict on the corner (through taxes) while I cannot afford to pay for my son's college/medicine/whatever?"
Living in a country with virtually no drug use (besides heavily abuse of alcohol ofc) it feels that while drugs are not the main problem for many, they are for some, and definitely make other problems worse.
0.2% is not "among the lowest in the world", or at least among OECD countries. Many countries have the rates way below 0.1% And not just rich countries, Brazil for example has 0.05%
That table you linked only measures rates of 34 countries. You realize there are ~200 countries on the planet right?
It’s just objectively true that the US enjoys much higher living standards than the rest of the world…even if Brazil’s homelessness rate in 2015 is 0.1% smaller than the US 2020 figure…
Well, if you want to compare US to countries like Ethiopia or Sudan then you are lowering the bar significantly. OECD is an organization of relatively rich, developed countries, which seems like a proper crowd the US should compare itself to :)
My point was that the US really shouldn't be bragging about their homelessness rate.
> US enjoys much higher living standards than the rest of the world
Tell that to 20 millions Americans living in trailer parks.
> Brazil’s homelessness rate in 2015 is 0.1% smaller than the US 2020 figure
Not sure how you count that. For me it's 0.18% vs 0.05%, so US rate is over three times or 260% higher (or conversly Brazil's homelessness rate is 73% lower). I can't do anything about 2015 vs 2020, that's the latest data available for this report, I guess.
I'm not sure if you're American or not, but in my country we're being torn apart by a mob of people who feast on outrage. I come from a family of Vietnamese immigrants, who's lives were ravaged by war and political persecution. I know what the world is like and it's fucking terrible.
I'm not trying to "brag" about the US homelessness rate. I'm trying to point out that things are honestly pretty good here. You can get educated, find work, and build a beautiful life for your family. The median household income here is like 6-7x the global median. Despite the recent political polarization, our government is the oldest and most stable in the world.
To me, 0.18% is a reasonable rate and the long term trend is undeniably downwards. I hope you levy these same criticisms against the likes of Germany, France, Sweden, etc... because they all have higher rates according to your chart.
If we don't stop this silly conflict fueled by internal anti-American sentiment, our country may implode.
See my response to this upthread[0]. Moving requires time and money, which many people in this situation don't have to spare. In a way they are locked into their current location, because even though it's already financially precarious, the simple act of trying to find a new location and a new job could easily tip them into deep financial trouble.
What I haven't understood is: why don't people move away if they're doing min wage jobs in a place where they are clearly incapable of delivering any quality of life?
Bring labor supply down and suddenly the market has to pay more. This seems to be simple oversupply in a saturated market.
Moving itself is expensive. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you don't have the time or money to even travel to another location to look for better housing and a better job, let alone the time or money required to actually effect a move.
Consider that for many people in this situation, missing a few days of work to look for a new place to live might mean getting fired. Even if they don't get fired, the lost wages for missing those days of work could put them behind on their bills or make it difficult to buy food.
And even if they are able to spend time to find a new place to live without putting their finances in jeopardy, remember that they also have to find a new job in the new location, and doing that without further financial hardship could be difficult.
There are also other considerations: someone barely able to afford living in SF or NYC might not have a car, and walk or take transit to work and to do errands. Living in a lower-cost area might mean needing a car to do things like buy groceries or get to work. If you already can't save money, how are you going to afford a car before you move to the new area?
Many of us here can afford to take weeks or months off to take a break between jobs. Sometimes it's hard to understand that many people can barely take sick days without risking financial ruin.
Not to mention that it might also involve moving away from what little support system that you do have, the cousin that provides child care while you work your second shift janitor job, for instance.
This is huge. No matter how desperate you are, it’s highly likely you’ve established some relationships. You know which of the homeless around you you can trust to watch your things. You know what business owners are more tolerant of a nap.
Let me reply to this - your ancestors can and did come to a new life. Moving from SF to Nebraska is not a new start. You still carry your credit score, loans, run-ins with the law and all the baggage with you. 18th century lifestyle was much more focused on physical work and as long as you were able to, you can find a job. Now, it is much more complex. Without a car, you are screwed in Nebraska. If you have a kid (or more), then you have to build up a brand new support system. The world has changed.
I think the real argument here is that it wasn't just some Joe Schmoe making the move. But the people we're talking about here are below Joe.
Moving may be easier in that it doesn't have a high risk of death, but much harder in actually surviving at your destination. You don't just grab a plot of land and start building your own house these days. America did that hundreds of years ago and charges for it now. How are you paying a security deposit in another state on minimum wage, let alone the travel and job seeking?
Typically charity. That's my one of my other comments suggested that the person moving should reach out to churches in their preferred destination. It may help them meet new people and start a network, including landing a low skill job they can utilize to make rent while they search for a better one.
How many jobs can you walk into in Nebraska and start working with no id. The nature of work has changed. Travel options are much more plentiful but those low skilled jobs aside from farming have been outsourced
I get all those points, truly, but at the same time find it hard to belive that a dedicated person couldn't scrape together enough money for at least a plane ticket or bus ride out of town. They could prematurely contact a church in a destination city to see if the church had any charitable funds to spare them for temporary housing as they look to find work.
I think these days we forget that the gov was never meant to provide a social net. The mechanism for that is charity. It's much harder nowadays with disconnected communities, but reaching out for help often works.
I myself spent years with belongings only as burdensome as I could carry (at worst case) or pack into my sedan. It made moving from one place to another easy, and I could always rent a cheap hotel to live in since I wasn't burdened by possessions.
> I think these days we forget that the gov was never meant to provide a social net.
It absolutely was. Government has grown into this leviathan we have today, and the world's drastically more complicated since the days of living in huts in villages but the underlying principal is we take care of our own.
The purpose of the (US) government was and is to provide for the general welfare of its citizens; that's one of the two justifications given in the constitution for its ability to levy taxes.
Welfare is right there in the founding document, and a safety net is part of that.
Categorically, definitionally, and historically wrong.
What you are you are referring to is the following: “ Article I, Section 8, Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States…”
First, “welfare” here means “the state of well being.”
Second, it is tied to the “United States” as a whole - not any given individual, especially because the Supreme Court has ruled the government has no duty to protect its citizens from harm (Deshaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, 1989; and The Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 2005).
Thus, if the Supreme Court has established that the government has no obligation to protect citizens from harm, it has no obligations to economically provide for citizens either. That’s called “charity” and it’s what churches have typically done by collecting revenue (tithing) from its congregants.
20th century governmental usurpation of charity by rebranding it as “welfare” is a distinctly modern concept, that also happens to be constitutional, insofar that the government collecting taxes to distribute benefits on a needs basis does not violate the Constitution, which is entirely different than being enumerated in the document itself, which you erroneously conflated.
If such a constitution was written as you suggest, then it would have been outdated and torn up long ago. It would have been too rigid to stand the test of time. Also HN supports at least one emoji (囧).
There are several theories in designing constitutions. Many countries just give up and rely on common law instead. The more rigid constitutions tend to be ignored or the countries fall off into chaos, so America is somewhat successful in its implementation of constitutional law.
Chinese jiong should be the only emoji allowed on HN, since it is a valid Chinese character, but then so is a swastika (in both directions, non-nazi Buddhist meanings of course).
About 2.5 million people living close to the official poverty line left California for other states from 2005 through 2015, while 1.7 million people at that income level moved in from other states – for a net loss of 800,000.
My personal example or experience: I would love to live in SF or in Alameda county. My employer statewide pays same salary to everybody with same title, with SF county (not Alameda) getting extra $260 per month, whereas rental differece is like $1000 for studio in non-Alameda & $2500 in SF.
Many of my colleagues can still afford to live in SF because they have their parent's homes or something in that area, and thus pay no rent, or have way lower expenses in housing.
Because if you’ve ever been working poor you know that your support network is hugely important. Grandma can watch the kids, Pablo knows how to keep that old car of yours running cheap, Henry has some house repair know-how, and so forth. Leaving your entire family and friends to settle elsewhere; it’s hard. It’s scary. And if you’re poor, it’s almost certainly one-way for at least some years.
> It's very hard to work around human nature and the whole "why am I paying rent like a sucker when the drug addicts on the street are getting free apartments?"
A lot of people seems to accept tax cuts for billionaires much higher than anything spend on the poor. It is all about framing and repetition.
Humans like to help other humans. The problem is that there is a push towards selfishness from the people that has the most and profits more out of it.
It's less about "why won't you help these people" and more about "what have you done with the $100k I paid you last year, when will you be satisfied?"
The only defense is electing people that stop the bleed and force the government to prioritize what they spend on. Talk amongst yourselves and decide if building a new park or helping homeless people is more important.
There are many unselfish people who don’t like to throw good money after bad, who think that the current solutions are so ineffective that even if the entire wealth of every billionaire went towards homelessness the needle would barely move.
The US federal government spends a trillion dollars a year on social programs (likely more when you include the states) - and some work exceptionally well, and others not so much.
And much of it is effectively subsidizing Walmart and friends anyway.
Are there any good studies into the most prevalent causes of homelessness? I'd be especially interested that are trying to tease apart cause and effect, without the study author trying to prove out their own preconceptions.
Years ago, I took a class on Homelessness and Public Policy. I've spent time homeless and read a lot, etc.
There is a lack of affordable housing in all US states.
It's extremely hard to live without a car in the US and cars are a huge expense, plus our car-centric culture means lack of a car is a barrier to employment, both practically and because people are reluctant to hire you.
Medical expenses can be a factor in the US. Universal health coverage could help.
There's no one cause and the oft cited "addiction and mental health" is largely prejudice. In a nutshell, you wind up homeless when you have too many problems and not enough resources to handle them and the US doesn't provide a robust social safety net.
> There is a lack of affordable housing in all US states.
Is it a lack of affordable housing or is it a lack of wage growth compared to cost of living?
Personally, I've started to think it's the latter, because it explains why upper middle class non-millionaires are also getting pinched. They too often rely on income rather than capital gains.
Does one not solve the other though? If it does, that seems to make them mutually exclusive.
My personal conspiracy theory, and I admit it's a conspiracy theory, is that corporate land owners are the ones centering popular conversation and data around affordable housing rather than wage growth. It opens doors for rental assistance, a multitude of rental-based density expansions, and other programs that put more money in their pockets rather than expanding the money income-based people make and keep via ownership.
I'm not a land owner. I'm someone with an incomplete BS with a concentration in Housing who also spent years homeless.
In the 1950s, the average new home was 1200 sq.ft. Post 2000, it was over 2400 sq.ft. and held on average one less household member. We've also torn down a million single room occupancy units in recent decades.
Apologies, I wasn't implicating you. Landowner could've been better expressed as corporate landowners. They're the ones that own the most residential real estate in large cities, which are generally the only places having this problem.
My house was built in the 1950s at around 1200sq ft. It's since expanded to over 2000, mainly from finishing a basement and expanding the top level. I'd be curious to see the data you base that on, because the people I bought it from passed this down generation to generation and had their entire family living in it. The house I grew up in has a similar story.
Another anecdote is that about half of the 1950s homes on my block were bulldozed and replaced with single units that have largely gone vacant. My cities issue is that we have plenty of housing, but even the bottom line single units are too expensive compared to wages because permitting and building costs are through the metaphorical roof.
I'm pretty sure the stats on 1950s housing vs. post 2000 housing were federal stats, but I don't have a citation handy. I've been talking about housing issues a lot of years.
You're probably right. When I was in the Bay I met a lot of people who would've lived in single unit housing who split mansions and single family homes with other people.
In Texas I don't remember seeing much if any SROs. I've only seen them in abundance since I've lived in Portland.
Wage growth is exploding in some areas (ours primarily) and not others, which contributes massively to the Baumol effect.
Land owners aren't really incentivized that much to talk about affordable housing. Housing developers would like to fix the problem by building market-rate housing - as supply goes up, demand begins to be satiated and prices can come down over time. All the while, developers make more money.
But building dense and inexpensive housing is often blocked by leftist-type politicians for being unsuitable for living, and NIMBYs of all sorts of political spectrum block it on wholly different grounds.
More housing = affordable housing. Not subsidized housing, not regulated housing. Just more of it will help America.
Apologies to you too, I should've said corporate landowners. I think that mostly puts us in agreement, though I don't think developers are the problem. It's property managers seeking to maximize profit that are more the problem there.
> More housing = affordable housing. Not subsidized housing, not regulated housing. Just more of it will help America.
Last caveat that I'd add to this is also more diverse housing street by street. Having space for single family homes alongside dense housing isn't just a good vibe, I think it also incentivizes a normalization of value. Combine that with shopping/retail and I think you can build some pretty equitable places with shorter commutes.
Very difficult to tease out the definition of various terms in studies and they are mostly trying to play to their anticipated audience.
This is evident, for example, if you look closely into the studies saying stuff like "most homeless people in the Bay became homeless in the Bay area", etc.
Nah. I'm more pissed off that my tens of thousands of dollars per year in property taxes don't help a damn bit. I'm more than happy to have people have "free" housing when they need it. Unfortunately SF does not spend or govern responsibly or in the interest of its citizens.
I think the biggest thing these programs fail to take into account is that a significant portion of San Francisco's homeless population is not from San Francisco. I've met kids on Haight Street who said they'd rather be homeless in SF than in an apartment in Cleveland. Are you housing all the homeless people who migrated to SF, and then keep housing all the new people who show up?
The other problems are the severely mentally ill and hardcore drug addicts, who tend to get kicked out of any free housing that gets provided to them.
In all fairness, homeless on Haight (and GG Park to a lesser extent) is a pretty specific category of people and I’d not extrapolate any statistics just from them.
It’s a subculture that attracts some people. The weather in California alone attracts people, especially transients, from places like Cleveland as well
In Finland, it is housing first with a live in social worker. Also, for many, they never get a job or anything like that (their mental illness or substance abuse problems are never cured), it’s just that it is cheaper for the Finnish government to house these people than not.
Solving the housing problem at a municipal, county or state level doesn't make any sense, without adding internal passport controls and internal visas. Housing is a national problem that needs to be handled by the federal.
I have no problem using my Federal taxes to house the homeless. But I can't stand when my city tries to house people using my property taxes. It doesn't make any sense, they have no control over the inputs. It's creating an incentive at the national level to relocate to my city/county/state.
They don't get it for free in Finland - your link says it is important that they are tenants, have a contract, and pay rent(possibly with housing assistance).
Homelessness can be caused by a variety and combination of factors. Plain bad luck, drug addiction, mental illness, etc, and Finland may have a different distribution of causes of homelessness than, say, San Francisco. It's possible that housing first works for the plain bad luck types, but will just enable the drug addiction types.
I like the idea, but I don't think a homeless person should be entitled to free housing in one of the most expensive real estate areas of the world. Why work full time at mcdonalds to pay rent when you could just be a drug addict with a free house? Maybe we could create free housing communities where real estate is a bit cheaper.
This idea of worrying about who gets what for free before actually solving the problem, is a major blocker in solving the homelessness problem. And not only do the homeless suffer for it, the people who have work or homes in the area suffer for the lack of pragmatism about it.
Let’s also recognize that if you are a home owner and especially if you also have a mortgage, you are already benefiting from massive government subsidies and “handouts”. An enormously valuable one is the exemption for capital gains taxes on primary residences. Or the ability to deduct mortgage interest and property taxes from your taxable income. The list is long and represents huge sums of money.
The amount of tax revenue forgone by the government for the capital gains exemption alone surely dwarfs the money it would take to provide affordable housing for many people. To salt the wound further, these benefits turn home ownership into a lucrative investment vehicle that drives up prices, worsening the crisis!
If you offer free housing, there will be millions claiming they are homeless to take advantage. Just look at the PPP loans that were taken advantage of during the pandemic to get an idea how far people will go to get a bit of free cash.
You can, right now, go buy a mobile home in pretty much anywhere you want for around $40-50k. Why aren't more people buying mobile homes if the housing market is such a problem? The answer to that question is the solution to the thing you think will be an issue.
I agree with you, I just feel like if I were working a minimum wage job busting my ass to pay rent to my landlord, I’d be deeply offended that you can be rewarded free housing essentially for being addicted to drugs.
I think culturally we need to get our heads on straight. There’s no reason for someone who is capable of work to be feeling offended that a sick person gets something they can earn. I’m not angry disabled people can get income just for being disabled: being disabled sucks ass! Similarly I wouldn’t envy a homeless/addicted person: being homeless rots your brain and being addicted is like being enslaved. I’m a free man and I’m happy with that. Yes I must work for my housing but I guarantee my quality of life is better than someone whose addiction drive them out onto the streets.
You seem really intent in your comments on this post to conflate drug addiction and homelessness, which are overlapping but definitely separate issues.
Also, there are housing assistance programs for everyone who makes less than a certain amount of money, and I think everyone who advocates for more housing for the homeless would agree with more affordable housing in general. Mostly people who work in this space agree that housing costs are the primary driver of homelessness.
you would be working the same minimum wage job and busting the same ass to pay the same rent to the same landlord, regardless of whether someone else got housed for free. this is indeed a very real problem, but the problem is that people are forced into long hours at (insufficient) minimum wage jobs in order to get unaffordably priced housing. you should be resenting the people higher up the chain who have created these conditions, not the people lower down who might be getting something for free.
again, the amount of their taxes that would go to providing free housing to people with nothing is so infinitesimal as to be unnoticeable, especially compared to the portion that goes into handouts to billionaires. and yet somehow it is the poor people who get resented.
and the ironic thing is that housing-first measures would likely end up saving taxpayers money, but the awful fear of someone undeserving getting something counts for more.
Why would you imagine that free housing would be something to envy over regular rentals? Minimal housing, possibly surrounded by other at-risk people working through serious issues seems like not something to envy.
> This idea of worrying about who gets what for free before actually solving the problem, is a major blocker in solving the homelessness problem.
For me, it’s not about “getting something for free” so much as it is about being efficient or inefficient.
Housing people in San Francisco instead of cheaper locations is like solving the carlessness problem by only buying teslas instead of hondas.
And then complaining that you don’t have enough money to buy everyone Teslas.
The plan is dumb. It won’t work. It’s stupid to fund such a plan. It’s not “never give free stuff to people” and “don’t give expensive stuff to people when cheap stuff does just as well, and especially if by doing so you incentivize more people to come and ask.”
I don’t think they want to solve the problem. I think they want to generate funds for consultants and NGOs that pay lots of people.
This gets to one of the core issues. The homelessness issue, as well as mental health issues, are all left to counties in the US. This leads to bussing the homeless and it's not even clear if the cause for the homelessness is in the area the homelessness is felt. I might become homeless in New York and get on a bus to San Francisco because the weather is nicer and I hear they are nicer to homeless there. This would be much more effectively tackled at a state or better federal level. At least handling this on a state level is a hard requirement to do what you propose and create the housing where it's cheap, not where it's costly because it's nice or there are lots of jobs there for high-earners.
All that said, the federal government in the US of course would also face all kind of pushback and obstacles in part due to the way it's set up.
There was a survey (San Fransisco Homeless Count and Survey, 2022) which says 71% of the homeless in San Fransisco were living in San Fransisco at the time they became homeless, 24% were in another California county, and only 4% were out of state. But generally it makes sense that if a single county adopted housing first at a large scale these numbers might change. Additionally, the primary cause of homelessness is the severe housing shortage and the high cost of housing. So homes for the homeless should not be implemented in only cheap areas, but the expensive areas with the highest homelessness rates. This should be combined with a large increase in general housing production in these areas to mitigate the cause of the homelessness in the first place.
Most of the homeless don't want to live somewhere cheap. They'd prefer to be homeless somewhere expensive. Unless you can force them to stay in the rural housing this plan won't work.
I want this person off of the streets for completely selfish reasons to myself.
Recovery program or not, they are going to have to live somewhere. If it's not a publicly funded home then it's going to be a tent in a public park that I am paying taxes for.
Without a recovery program, some people will still just spend their day smashing car windows to get money for drugs, then go home to their free apartment
It might still be worth it regardless, but keep that in mind
There is a way around this dilemma that solves everyone’s problems. People who go around smashing windows etc. are arrested and thrown in jail. If they repeatedly offend, they receive longer and longer sentences, perhaps at some state penitentiary in a more cost effective location. If they are addicted to drugs, they are enrolled in mandatory treatment programs while in prison. This person is hence housed and separated from civil society, with much less incentive to cheat the system.
This even solves the other problem that you haven’t brought up: the person who sleeps on the street smashing windows all day is likely to wreck the free apartment you end up giving them, too.
I mean, there's more complexities here insofar as it seems the prisons need to be run a lot better than they currently seem to be run, and we need to get better about prosecuting petty crimes.
Since we currently aren't doing those things, people are searching for alternate solutions, but there don't seem to be any that show much promise (though I'm sure people can cite a study that "proves" I'm wrong and can explain why the $17B spent by California doesn't count as counterevidence, even though a lot of that money was spent on "housing first" friendly policies)
We've done that for a long time and it doesn't change the outcome. You either pay exorbitant rates for them to sit in jail or you pay exhorbitant collective insurance rates. Worse off cities will usually incentivize those people to stay out of certain areas and in other areas, which also causes equity issues.
We're better off actually helping people. Getting to the root of what's wrong and what threshold we declare someone needs help and of what type is what we're trying to figure out.
I mean SF or LA aren't the only cities with homeless problems. My home city Seattle has them, New York has them, Austin has them. For decades leading up to the 2010s we were convicting and throwing every homeless person we could in jail, but the problem is that it just becomes a revolving door. Either you accept that an entire class of people need to be jailed for life for the crime of being homeless, or you try and fix the revolving door.
Some cities have tried and failed, others haven't tried and also failed. Trying to solve a national problem on a state level is almost always bound to be a failure because the problem has to do with things that occurred 10-20 years ago with Purdue Pharma starting off the whole opioid epidemic. We're just now seeing the height of the problem they kicked off.
The other 'unspoken truth' about this issue is that people in the rust belt and such have just as many problems with drugs and crime. The difference is that they have homes and these issues aren't visible until someone dies from suicide or an OD.
> I mean SF or LA aren't the only cities with homeless problems. My home city Seattle has them…
I mentioned SF and LA because TFA is about California. You can ask my question about any city though: for every 1000 broken car windows, how many convictions (or even arrests) are there? I know that number is extremely low in Seattle as well.
> Either you accept that an entire class of people need to be jailed for life for the crime of being homeless, or you try and fix the revolving door.
It’s not for the crime of being homeless, it’s for the actual crimes they’re committing. What you’re doing here is you’re setting up the homeless as some sort of protected class that’s allowed to victimize the rest of us with impunity. That’s been the cornerstone of policy in cities like Seattle for years and that’s why those cities have the biggest problem.
> Trying to solve a national problem on a state level is almost always bound to be a failure
It’s definitely going to be a failure if you make your city one of the best places in the country to be homeless and commit crimes.
> You can ask my question about any city though: for every 1000 broken car windows, how many convictions (or even arrests) are there? I know that number is extremely low in Seattle as well.
There's two reasons this type of crime occurs: gang activity and homelessness. People turning to gangs represents a crisis in opportunity. Things like hate groups, gangs, etc do not generally occur in places where peoples needs are met and when opportunity to change your circumstances if desired are bountiful.
> That’s been the cornerstone of policy in cities like Seattle for years and that’s why those cities have the biggest problem.
The problem is actually both. Progressive policies fail because progressives are allergic to enforcement, conservative policies fail because conservatives are allergic to addressing underlying causes. It's a tale as old as time.
If you want to improve things you need to address underlying causes like the housing and opportunity crisis. Enforcement can be used in a way that changes their circumstances rather than putting them in a box. You need both.
Conservative policies can succeed if there is a progressive city just across Lake Washington. Why smash windows in a place where the police will harass you if you can be in a place where they don’t? Well, it works locally at least.
I see how treating underlying causes would help, but people are mobile, so doing it with local resources is never going to be a winner. So conservative solutions will show more effect locally than progressive ones, unfortunately, and local voters want to see improvement, not futility.
The other problem is that we are still conflating a drug crisis with a homeless crisis, the people busting your car window and stealing your Amazon packages are more likely in the former category even if they might be in the latter.
I agree, having broader agreement on how tackle these issues is key. We don't do that well right now and I suspect that strongly correlates to rivaling political parties in an age of divisiveness that cannot work together to formulate a cohesive plan.
I'll say this again, as I stated in another comment, there are different reasons for homelessness. Some people are just in a bad rut and need a stable place to go while they sort their lives out. This is the minimum order of difficulty; build damn shelters, and resource centers, and these folks will get help first.
The larger component of homelessness has mental health or drug issues and far more overlap with gang activity root causes. It's worth trying to solve those together and taking an approach that instead of demonizing them for their choices/mistakes seeks to help them set their lives on a more stable path.
Mental health related homelessness requires access to healthcare that can fund whatever they need to be on and courts that can recognize this is the case.
It is true that there are different causes to homelessness, totally agree. But the person pilfering packages, looking for things in cars, or shoplifting at target, is not going to be your typical economic homeless case, their is already a selection beyond being homeless going on at that point.
> far more overlap with gang activity root causes
I have no idea why you are talking about gang activities in retaliation to homelessness, since we have plenty of homelessness in Seattle and virtually no gang activity. I'm guessing that is more of a Californian thing?
> It's worth trying to solve those together and taking an approach that instead of demonizing them for their choices/mistakes seeks to help them set their lives on a more stable path.
We really need to do both? The choices definitely need to be demonized, lest our kids think they are OK choices. My greatest fear would be my kid somehow makes these bad choices in the future because our schools taught him that these people were just victims of society rather than victims also of their choices.
> Mental health related homelessness requires access to healthcare that can fund whatever they need to be on and courts that can recognize this is the case.
We've found this to be problematic because cases will be misdiagnosed as mental health problems when they are really severe substance abuse problems (or the patient will say they don't have a substance abuse problem given the stigma associated with it), to predictable ineffectiveness.
> I'm guessing that is more of a Californian thing?
I live in Portland, but yes, it is more of a Portland thing. The visible things that create opposition to our homelessness policies are:
- Store looting, which is mostly driven by a scheme developed by gangs. Gangs are often enlisting the homeless to carry out these stunts.
- Open air drug use, which requires drugs facilitated by gangs
- Property crime, which is either done by gangs or is incentivized by gang-related activity
"Organized crime" is probably a better term than "gang" here. Gangs are generally recruiting in places where opportunity is low and costs are averagely above peoples means. My point is that there's some overlap with homelessness and we'd benefit by looking at them equally empathetically.
> We really need to do both? The choices definitely need to be demonized, lest our kids think they are OK choices. My greatest fear would be my kid somehow makes these bad choices in the future because our schools taught him that these people were just victims of society rather than victims also of their choices.
What you've said here and what I've said are slightly different. Holding people accountable is important, yes. If they are unwilling to change their ways they should be held accountable. At the same time, when someone struggling with drugs or mental health says, "I want help" there's a short window of time where that help can be transformational. Once they've chosen to right their life, and demonstrated it, we need to provide them capacity to move on, which is where we fall short these days. If you've been convicted of a felony, regardless of whether you're homeless at the time or not, then it'll be difficult if not impossible for the person to gain and maintain meaningful employment that pays their bills in a capitalist society. This situation can put people right back into the cycle of drug use, homelessness, a mental health crisis, or all of the above. Mainly, what I'm saying is when someone has demonstrated reform we need to stop punishing them at some point.
> We've found this to be problematic because cases will be misdiagnosed as mental health problems when they are really severe substance abuse problems (or the patient will say they don't have a substance abuse problem given the stigma associated with it), to predictable ineffectiveness.
I wouldn't call it problematic, I'd call it frustrating, because typically it's both. Again, addressing one problem ends up persisting both problems. I blame this, again, on policy that doesn't understand the systems it's up against.
Oh, ya, there is definitely some organized crime mixed into it, and the fences for stolen goods need to be dealt with. But frankly, it doesn't require a lot of organization when the police are being so lack on their enforcement (mostly because they are understaffed, not because they are lazy or anything). Anyone can do property crime, and there are lots of avenues to convert booty into some cash.
> Mainly, what I'm saying is when someone has demonstrated reform we need to stop punishing them at some point.
Sure, but we aren't asking for that anymore. Its like...ok treatment, but if you don't take it, you still get to walk, so why bother? Jail isn't in the cards anymore unless you at least bash someone's head in, and even then its questionable. Also, our system now seems to be based on financial disincentives (e.g. you get your car towed if you park illegally) and that really doesn't matter to someone who has nothing to lose (e.g. the towing companies won't go near certain vehicles because they know they are never getting paid). We need to do everything possible, maybe throw most of our resources at, people getting to a point that they have nothing to do lose (e.g. make sure felons after jail/prison have a way forward that they don't want to lose).
Let’s set aside the gang question for a bit and stick to homelessness. Homelessness isn’t the root cause of the crimes committed by homeless people. The “invisible homeless” who sleep on a buddy’s couch, sometimes even have jobs, and never smash car windows or anything like that are a silent majority of homeless people.
Instead, for the criminal minority of homeless people, the root cause of their homelessness isn’t a housing shortage or a lack of opportunity; it’s extreme untreated drug addiction or mental illness. This is also the root cause of their criminal behavior. If you try to give those people housing, they will just end up destroying it. These are not functional human beings acting rationally.
If you want to address the root cause here, you’re going to need to involuntarily commit these people to drug rehab or psychiatric treatment. Enforcement and addressing underlying causes go hand in hand here: if you arrest drug-addicted or mentally ill people for the crimes they commit, you already have them in state custody and you can just transfer them into involuntary commitment. We need to build and staff the facilities to do that, but that’s the solution.
Sure, I don't think you and I are saying anything different. Progressive cities must have a plan for enforcement at the same time as having a plan for treatment.
People that are homeless and just need a place to live because they don't make much money are one story, and that does need an alternative but common approach to homeless that are committing crimes. They will all need housing at some point in that flow chart.
I mention gangs because homeless folks with mental health issues and drug addiction commit similar crimes for similar reasons as gangs. I disagree that a "minority" of homeless people commit crime. I live in SouthEast Portland and I watch these folks chop up bicycles, steal property and food, and do drugs openly in parks and on the side walk. That also invites gang activity into an area because the homeless become vectors for more drug use and territory expansion. Ignoring the interconnectedness of these things is a giant mistake, as well as the similarity in their underlying causes.
> People that are homeless and just need a place to live because they don't make much money are one story, and that does need an alternative but common approach to homeless that are committing crimes. They will all need housing at some point in that flow chart.
But at that point you’re talking about housing people who are leaving state custody. It’s not really a common approach because on the one side you’re talking about how you release people from prison or involuntary commitment and on the other side you’re talking about helping peaceable but impoverished people get housing.
> I disagree that a "minority" of homeless people commit crime. I live in SouthEast Portland and I watch these folks chop up bicycles, steal property and food, and do drugs openly in parks and on the side walk.
You wouldn’t see the ones who sleep on a buddy’s couch and mind their own business though.
Homeless activists like to cite a lot of statistics about how the majority of homeless people just can’t afford housing and aren’t mentally ill drug addicts. What they’re missing is that the actual social problem people care about is the crime and public disorder.
> I mention gangs because homeless folks with mental health issues and drug addiction commit similar crimes for similar reasons as gangs.
I’m not sure I agree with that. But it turns out that I think there’s a very similar solution to gangs as there is to homeless criminals though: lock them all up. That seems to be working in El Salvador.
This hypothetical person will either smash windows and go to an apartment, or smash windows and go sleep somewhere in public. If they are already at the point of smashing windows, then there’s some element of desperation or misanthropy that makes me prefer that they spend their night somewhere private.
Anyway if we’re designing hypothetical people, we can come up with sympathetic ones too, so it seems like a wash policy-wise.
Don’t be a tool. A heroin addict’s motivation to acquire heroin is infinitely greater than a heroin addict’s motivation for anything else in the world.
What is the link between “make sure they sleep on the street” and “prevent them from breaking windows?”
It isn’t a matter of whether or not I’m a tool. The proposed solution is just unrelated to the problem.
As you say, if someone really wants heroin, they’ll get heroin. So, making their life miserable won’t stop them from getting it. What do we gain as a society from making sure they shoot up and sleep in public?
Isn’t it a moral hazard? The nice thing about living in Ballard is I can point out to my kid what happens when you do fent, at least. If there are no consequences for behavior, what’s the disincentive for not doing it? “We will coddle you while you OD on fent” doesn’t sound appealing to me.
I had to do some reordering hopefully it is OK. I think all I’ve done is group your ideas together, rather than change anything you said.
> Isn’t it a moral hazard? […] If there are no consequences for behavior, what’s the disincentive for not doing it?
There are still lots of downsides to becoming a heroin addict so I think letting them get out of the public eye is fine.
> The nice thing about living in Ballard is I can point out to my kid what happens when you do fent, at least.
It is your responsibility to parent your kid I guess, but I’d be wary of this sort of thing. What if you accidentally show off a corpse to your kid? That could be pretty traumatic, right? Also, is it really a good lesson, that it is OK to talk about people like that? They are people, not objects of derision.
> “We will coddle you while you OD on fent” doesn’t sound appealing to me.
This is one of those things, right? It is often the case that the right policy decisions don’t fit in with our personal moral inner monologue. It is what it is.
There are plenty of disincentives to doing drugs, but they are pretty abstract compared to seeing the guy in front of you splashed out on a bench. It makes it real. Lots of my behavior in life was doing things that my parents didn’t do, basically using anti examples rather than pro examples. The lack of much of a social safety net in the states means that making good decisions is even more important than it would be other countries.
If we consider countries like China, where there really isn’t much net at all, drug addicts are rare because they can’t survive very long, and that creates a feedback loop against being a drug addict.
We don’t have corpses in Ballard, just a lot of fent addicts who hang near the park. They get free food at the church next door, and there was an encampment at the park for about two years that we had to walk by often.
> This is one of those things, right? It is often the case that the right policy decisions don’t fit in with our personal moral inner monologue. It is what it is.
Your comment specifically asked what good could it do, it didn’t specify moral inner monologue correctness:
> What do we gain as a society from making sure they shoot up and sleep in public?
for some reason many people have stopped caring about the notion of societal trust and cohesion—even the idea of valuing it as something to be desired and strived for. it's an odd kind of defeatist nihilism, and I've seen it spread year after year.
these are the same people who will scoff when you suggest that stealing from Walmarts or Targets or whatever is wrong. they'll tell you, "dude, shrinkage is a thing, they build the cost of stolen or damaged goods into their budgets. and, anyway, why do you care so much about massive corporations' bottom lines, anyway?" obviously I don't, but I sure do care about living in a place where brazen broad-daylight theft is rare, and not something you see every time you go to the store!
I think you're on the same page with the person you're responding to.
@shepardrtc said people who get free housing should work for it, and @legitster is saying that it is in the taxpayer's self-interest to spend some taxes housing the unhoused. I took that to mean that a work requirement is secondary to getting them off the street in the first place.
I agree that we should be providing drug recovery mechanisms and promoting a work ethic in people who are long-term houseless, but our options seem to be (leave them on the streets, parks and front lawns of our cities), (put them in prison), or (put them in publicly funded housing ala halfway houses).
First one seems like none of us want it (unless you live in the suburbs and have fled the problem). Second one is too far, and even with good healthcare services, involuntary commitment should only happen for the severely ill. That leaves the third.
It’s a luxury belief as well, people of wealth don’t need to care about public spaces as much, they have plenty of other options. It hurts the poor the most.
Ok, call it handouts. But if you just care about the budget, providing housing is the cheapest way to solve the problem. Will some people "take advantage" of this arrangement? Sure. Does it matter that much?
But why does it matter, if the alternative is objectively worse for everyone concerned, even the taxpayer funding this "free" housing that some might abuse?
It's a perverse incentive. When people figure out the loophole, people who don't need the help will fill up all the allotted space, because who doesn't want free rent?
Fortunately San Francisco has had decades of social workers "dealing with the actual issues" and "solving the problem". To put it mildly, they didn't solve the issues.
This is a lot better than social workers "helping" people on the street with "treatment".
Most homeless people are just normal people who dont have a home. They can pick up garbage or dig ditches or plant trees at the very least. Plenty of menial labor that needs to be done.
1. send them to extremely cheap housing in bumfuck
2. jail
3. let them be homeless if thats what they want
Imo most of the people who think this way are addicts or mentally ill and should be involuntarily committed, so my preferred option is
4. Rebuild the asylums and commit people(with heavy oversight) who are completely incapable of caring for themselves. Although this option is similar to 2
Sounds pretty illiberal to me. Lately (due to the whole pandemic/vaccine controversies), I've begun to wonder what drugs the state can force individuals to take or not take, and increasingly it seems that individual freedom is the rule in the US at least.
Prison is a concept that has existed since the dawn of society. Maybe you disagree with criminalizing homelessness, that's certainly understandable and perhaps a bit illiberal, but it's certainly not unprecedented. And anyway, what I'm calling for is mandatory community service for the homeless, and then imprisonment/commitment/send them to kansas when they refuse to do it, not just criminalizing homelessness.
But if your question is if I believe in absolute freedoms, I absolutely do not. You are not free to harass people on the street. Not free to monopolize public parks. Certainly not free to be violent.
Our constitution requires due process before you can force anyone to do anything. You also can't ban people from public land, because it is public. Imagine if the government created a massive park and only allowed rich people to use it. That's technically the same thing, except you are the rich people (relatively).
Seems like a bit of a burn on Kansas; some people live there voluntarily.
I wonder who it is you imagine will administer this involuntary servitude program? Does it particularly matter if the work is done to some standard or other? Do you imagine the state of California is competent to manage this system?
The state already runs community service programs. They can be expanded to handle the people living in the housing we built.
I'm not sure how giving someone a home and money for essentials is involuntary servitude. If these people don't want to do the service they can get a different job. I just realize that a lot of the homeless have what it takes to be successful, they just need structure and a little help.
I suppose I missed your option 3 which basically seems to be our current status quo. But government run make-work programs just seem like a non-starter in the modern US.
Who cares about someone slapping arbitrary labels of "liberal" or "illiberal" on things? Ultimately we need to find something that actually works, and treats people with compassion. It seems like the big focus is on the second half of that, completely ignoring the first.
The label you are looking for is “duly convicted party,” per the 13th Amendment:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Read a bit about Diogenes if you think this is a recent question. But I do wonder, what do you think members of society should be required to contribute to that society?
shitting literally anywhere but the dead center of the street or sidewalk shows a non-zero amount of caring about how one conducts oneself as part of a society. when one stoops to the level of shitting in the middle of where everyone walks (I visited SF in 2016, and from what I understand, it has not gotten any better since), one implicitly displays a complete and utter disregard for his fellow man. shitting in any bush or patch of grass is a step up from that. even pooping in a bag (I was going to say "free grocery bag" but I suppose they don't have those in SF anymore, do they?) and leaving it in a gutter is better than depositing your feces right in the middle of a public thoroughfare!
if I woke up tomorrow on the streets of SF, homeless, without a penny to my name, and in dire immediate need of taking a dump, I would do it literally anywhere that could even be slightly considered "out of the way of other people," and it would never even cross my mind to even consider dropping a fat steamy deuce right where everyone can step in it.
when you take a shit in the middle of a crosswalk or sidewalk, you're implicitly displaying your total rejection of even the most baseline expected behavior of the society you physically reside within. this is completely obvious to anyone who has never immersed themselves in one of these decaying societies to the point where they become numb to it.
No one said they were going to be free. First of all, they'd be getting a home. Second, yes they should be paid something so they can afford food and other essentials. The point is to help them recover. Just throwing housing or money at them and saying good luck, do whatever you want, isn't going to work. With sponsored work, they can look for better jobs and tell their prospective employers that they've been working for a year or two with no issues at the state/federal job. That would go a long way.
Unless you can cite the source that they actually received that $17B it sure seems like you're looking to punish people for being poor rather than to fix the system which creates the environment and situations that lead to these outcomes. That's not going to work. It never has worked and it never will.
There was a recent study that, like everything else with the homelessness problem, Housing First is most successful in places where housing is not ridiculously expensive to find, so the costs of implementation are low and housing units to place people in actually exist.
The exact same things that burden the private housing sector in the US (excessive land cost, overly restrictive zoning, neighbors suing and constantly throwing roadblocks) also restrict the public housing sector, since the public dollar goes less far, and the public sector has to comply with the exact same laws.
The other hesitation with “housing first” is that it’s associated with housing projects, aka ghettos. I’ve seen The Wire (2002-2008). Is what they’re going to build for the homeless going to be like that? Is it going to be where my kids play? Is it going to be where I walk my dog at night?
It’s called NIMBYism in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
I grew up benefiting from housing projects in Brooklyn, the son of immigrants who came here with no money.
Was it amazing? No. But it wasn’t The Wire either, and one of the only reasons I was able to have any hope and eventual success is that my family had a roof over our heads.
The Bay Area is about the same population as Finland. And it has a higher gdp per capita than Finland.
I agree that we are working with more “technical debt” than Finland is, and copy-pasting exact policy won’t work. But strategically I don’t see a major difference.
The Bay Area doesn't control immigration and cannot set its own monetary policy. Some problems need to be solved at the Federal level, but the Bay Area does not set Federal policy.
Population #s and GDP mean very little, and thinking we can move the needle on our favorite issues by looking at these needles is the source of a lot of problems. People think you can just spend more and more money on problems and fix them. There are things money cannot buy. And often, the processes behind the accumulation of the money are what contributed to the problem in the first place.
As an example of just one contributing factor, population churn has an extremely negative impact across nearly the whole spectrum of social issues. What is the population churn in SF vs Finland?
What people do consider is that it's extraordinarily unfair for many people who struggle with housing costs -- imagine what eg SF-area rents do to a cook or cleaner earning even $50k annually -- if we're going to provide that for free to junkies.
Until there aren't large segments of SF who work very hard and are housing insecure anyway, it's just going to be politically impossible to provide homeless free housing.
Why do the unhoused have to be housed in high cost SF? The nice thing about doing this as a country is that they can place people not in their highest cost cities.
They relocated to where they are though. A lot, or even most of the people living on the streets of SF are not from SF, or even California for the matter.
They aren't "tech bros" down on their luck either... they're not failed entrepreneurs, or folks who just couldn't afford one too many rent payments.
They're people who chose to be there for many reasons, including the friendly environment that tolerates their lifestyle.
I'm open to giving someone free housing if they aren't on drugs. I just can't wrap my head around why we should reward people with free housing for being drug addicts.
I have lots of sympathy for the drug-free homeless community. I think the drug addicted should be put in treatment programs or charged for possession of these drugs so that they can be treated in prison. I'm angry that we allow people to smoke fentanyl out in the open in SF. It's bad for everyone including those who are addicted.
> I'm open to giving someone free housing if they aren't on drugs
Sobriety is not a condition of housing. Many housed people drink and do drugs and don't get kicked out of their apartments for it. Why should we apply a harsher standard to our most vulnerable population?
You’re welcome to do whatever you want at your own expense.
If you can’t function to a degree where society needs to clothe you, feed you and house you; it should come with strings attached. Resources are finite and “the vulnerable population” isn’t entitled to everyone’s else labor.
My point is simply that policy should be based on what is effective and humane. Keeping people housed only based on the contingency of their sobriety is neither. Under no circumstances is it better for someone to be unhoused than housed. Housing should be a human right, full stop.
The thing is: How do we encourage or enforce good behavior? At what point do we insist that an individual try not to be a burden, and to try to be a decent participant in society? That could be as little as "don't be a public nuisance and help around the housing complex once or twice a week".
If there is no standard for behavior or "giving back" to earn one's keep, bad actors will bring everyone down.
The assumption is that drugs perpetuate the illness/uselessness of the homeless. If you have a home and can manage to afford it on your own, you get the privilege of drug consumption (within the law). If it is causing you to be unhoused or unhinged and the rest of the community is putting money into you having a place to sleep, it seems reasonable to impose some standards of behavior.
The drugs I'm talking about are illegal. Is it common to be a fentanyl addict that pays rent? Maybe but I doubt it. As a society we should do more to stop the opiod crisis. Why do we tolerate people smoking fentanyl on the bart or on our public sidewalks?
Because they're paying for it? If society is paying for your housing you need to follow societies rules. Giving addicts free housing isn't humane. It's enabling their addiction.
A lot of homeless people, perhaps the majority, use drugs as a consequence of not having a place to live.
Think about it, it's obviously much easier to use escapist drugs when you live on the streets. Not only do you want to escape, you are also surrounded by drugs and other misery.
You are thinking about it the opposite way. In reality, you can't get people to stop using drugs while keeping them on the streets.
I think there needs to be some kind of sobriety requirement. Maybe put them through rehab, and then give them housing after they leave rehab.
I saw this tweet from the Y combinator ceo that says 25% of those in a permanent housing program in SF died. (I assume of overdose). Getting people housed shouldn’t be the priority, the priority is getting them drug free. https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1659972231328583680?s=20
Just giving the homeless a moldy and bug infested tiny room without any additional help isn't going to help much. It's "housing first", not "housing only".
I don't think you understand addiction and rehab, frankly. Getting people to stop using drugs is quite easy, just keep them away from it for a while. You can send anyone to prison or rehab, and they'll stop using drugs for a while.
The hard part is getting people from restarting to use drugs once you let them free, and you can't even hope to do that successfully unless they are motivated themselves, which they won't be if they live on the street.
Do you know how effective rehab is for people who don’t go voluntarily?
The unfortunate reality of drug addiction is that even for people who want out it’s very hard. For people who don’t, it’s quite a lot harder. If there was a magic pill that cured addiction I think we might make different policy choices, but given that there isn’t I don’t see how your plan can really work.
There aren’t any good solutions to this problem. IMO we should enforce existing laws around the possession of illegal substances. These drugs are a total drain on society. What message are we sending when we allow people to smoke fentanyl on the bart with no consequences?
If they possess illegal drugs, why not prosecute them and put them in the prison system? It’s bad to have people smoking fentanyl on the sidewalks as if it’s a normal part of society.
It's not a housing problem, it's a drug and mental health problem. Many of the unhoused people you see could stay in shelters but don't--often the areas near shelters have the most camps near them. They simply don't want to follow any rules and now conditions are so accommodating that being outside in good weather is better than staying in a shelter with a curfew.
Why are all the lofty examples from countries that are hostile to refugees/immigrants like Scandinavian countries.
Would love to hear examples of great public welfare/healthcare programs from countries that accepts 6 million refugees / year like USA. In my head these are two opposing goals but curious to know if there are counterexamples.
The US accepted 22,645 refugees in 2022. Since 1990 the U.S. has accepted, on average, roughly 75,000 per year.
In 2021, the US accepted 11,411 refugees (approx. 1 refugee per 28,900 citizens), and Finland accepted 1,282 refugees (approx. 1 refugee per 4,300 citizens).
2.76 border crossings in 2022 . I know there might be dups in this number but there are also crossings that are unaccounted for. There are also 1 million visa overstays/yr. This is on top of 1 million legal immigrants.
Rough math is 3 million just for refugees ( ppl who cross the border apply for refugee status). All this not event accounting for hundreds thousands of work visas, millions of ppl living in usa in legal immigration queues, birthright tourism ect ect.
But I think no one really has any idea what the actual number is.
There are some housing near my house that was simply repurposed motels. Seems to work, I don't notice any people just hanging around. Seems to work better than the standard homeless shelters we have here, that are pretty restrictive and they force the homeless to leave during the day and return at night.
> What people don’t consider is that when “we”, the people with houses, don’t spend our dollars housing homeless people, we pay sooner or later in other ways whether we want to or not when society around us partly disintegrates and additional effects start stacking up: substance abuse, violent crime, healthcare costs etc.
There's a different way to look at it as well. I don't so much pay for housing as I pay for my choice of housing. If I couldn't afford housing I'd just get whatever was deemed enough for me, the system would essentially make the choice. What i pay for is the privilege of choosing something that I want, instead of what's convenient for the system.
I think it’s harder for people to see it that way when there’s means testing. Also when you’re at the just-better-than free tier, but paying full price.
I think that’s the nice thing about UBI. It’s a little different to rail against u employed people getting $1,000 a month when you’re also getting $1,000 a month.
UBI won't answer the problem of RENT. The rent will always rise to pickup the new headroom until there is no longer headroom. All the profit will go to the rent seekers who leave nothing for anyone to get ahead.
There are a lot of social programs. So many, in fact, it seems like an increasing number of people find it better to live off those than pursue traditional methods of earning income to support themselves.
Among my extended in-laws, there are several groups gaming the welfare system, scamming family, and doing whatever they can to live on the dole and they become downright sinister when something threatens their benefits. They have no interest in becoming productive citizens. To the best of my knowledge, they are only parasites, provide no value to society or family, and their offspring are following in their footsteps.
I’d be more than happy to cut people like that off, but how so without potentially harming those in need who want to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. Is it reasonable to expect adults to attempt to, minimally, live a life with neutral utility?
Helsinki is vastly different from San Francisco in many ways, which makes the comparison difficult. One obvious difference is the provision of universal healthcare in a coordinated and multidisciplinary approach, in order to care for the varying and often complex needs many homeless people require. Housing First is the merely the first step from which all other care follows. Unless San Francisco and society is prepared to provide something closer to what is delivered in Helsinki as a whole, then they may as well be pissing in the wind.
It doesn’t trigger me. But the idea that you can give them housing without judgement or constraints is absurd. Drug use is bad and is the overwhelming cause of their problems. The ones who succeed with this approach are also the ones not abusing drugs.
In addition, I’m not convinced you need to buy them housing in the worlds most expensive region—and one that’s deeply permissive about drug use and theft.
> society around us partly disintegrates and additional effects start stacking up: substance abuse, violent crime, healthcare costs etc.
Sure, if the alternative is “do nothing.” But if you committed the mentally ill who are endangering themselves and others to mental institutions (not jail) then 90% of these problems go away.
You cannot have a welfare state and a liberal immigration policy.
Sure, if you do nice things for poor people their lives improve, and so does society, not only because we are kinder, but also because their problems don't become problems for unrelated people.
But, if you do nice things for poor people as a government and open the door we have the objective truth that there are billions of poor people in the world who would love to be taken care of too. You will attract them and, like the Tragedy of the Commons, everyone will be poorer and less happy.
Before anyone says "this isn't the right topic" I must point out that the population of the US has doubled since the 1950's, but the infrastructure has not. The rise in population is immigration, not native. There is a cost of immigration that is borne by the local population outside of the government for immigration if the housing stock does not keep pace with population, and if immigration is used to attack prevailing wages. What happens is that housing costs increase and income goes down, i.e. the native population gets poorer.
Canada has a more comprehensive welfare state than the US and a higher percentage of the population are immigrants than in the US. So there may at some point be a required tradeoff but the US isn't there yet.
What Canada doesn't have is a "homelessness-industrial complex" of NGOs and nonprofits that soak up billions of dollars in public money without actually providing significant housing for homeless people: instead, the government just does it.
Canada has exceptional control of its borders thanks to a big USA absorbing low-skill labor shocks. The Canadian immigration system is based on points, which also means that they can easily control what kind of immigrants that are able to move here.
Lastly, Canada has a worse housing crisis than the US right now and its healthcare system woes are well documented. I question your claim of Canada's welfare state stability and its housing affordability.
That being said:
> Canada doesn't have is a "homelessness-industrial complex" of NGOs and nonprofits
It's based on points, but certain groups like refugees and family of immigrants take high priority.
Compared to previous years. The 2022–2024 Immigration
Levels Plan continues to build on the 2021–2023 Immigration Levels Plan with higher admissions targets to address pandemic related shortfalls. As outlined in the 2022–2024 Immigration Levels Plan, Canada aims to welcome from 360,000 to 445,000 new permanent residents in 2022, from 380,000 to 465,000 in 2023, and 390,000 to 475,000 in 2024. The 2022–2024 Immigration Levels Plan includes targets that build on the ambitious targets set in previous years. In 2022–23, it is anticipated that as border restrictions gradually ease and travel levels regain momentum, clients residing overseas will increasingly be able to land in Canada and be processed, which will support efforts to meet the objectives of the 2022–2024 Immigration Levels Plan. Furthermore, the Department’s efforts to reduce overall inventories of applications, including paper-based permanent resident inventories, as well as further digitization of services, will contribute to achieving the ambitious levels targets set out in the 2022–2024 Immigration Levels Plan. The Department will continue to monitor immigration levels and work with other federal departments and agencies to continue protecting the health and safety of Canadians as newcomers are welcomed to Canada.
I'd agree about border control with a caveat: the real issue isn't entrance control (that's not really even noise in the overall picture) but the fact that the US doesn't track exits except for certain classes of non tourist visas.
Canada can tell you right now who entered on a tourist visa and hasn't left; the US lacks that ability because we refuse to implement universal exit controls.
Housing prices in Canada are ridiculously high now and locals cannot afford to get into the housing market in major cities.
Canada has started to ban outside investors from buying homes in certain areas[0].
Canada is also experiencing record high inflation[1].
Low skilled immigrants require major government assistance. The government will simply print money to handle their housing and services as needed. Trudeau is not popular, and most Canadians are not happy with the direction of the government, but if you're a poor immigrant it's an amazing deal if you can get there.
The housing prices have little to do with immigration and everything to do with nimbyism, bad zoning practices, and indirectly, wealth inequality (which ends up being pressure for a capital biased landlord nimbyism in real estate)
>Canada has a more comprehensive welfare state than the US and a higher percentage of the population are immigrants than in the US
Canada is a joke of a country and basically a vassal state of the United States, they couldn't even shoot down a balloon over their own territory without US F-22's from Alaska.
Talking about them and how they spend their money/the outcomes they get is like discussing the "rich" 35 year old who has a nice car and big TV living with his parents (no rent, food, healthcare costs etc)
You can't ignore these realities and then pretend that the current state of Canada is replicable in other places, as if it was solely the result of policy.
Canada is more on a “pull” system with immigration. They pick and choose who and how many they want.
Regardless, when he says you cant have both he clearly means its not sustainable. Not that its literally impossible to hold both positions at some moment in time.
Sure, but let's make sure we can feed and house everyone, and most importantly that oppressed populations in the US are not backstabbed with the needs of new immigrants taking precedent. It is not ethical to ask African Americans and others to wait more generations for justice.
It's a spectrum of people who face housing insecurity due to economic circumstances, to people who resist/actively shun societal contacts that help us all function (often fueled by serious substance addictions.) While the solutions that have been embraced by San Fransisco's current electorate (free cash/housing/no rules) could make sense for the former, that doesn't mean it's a good solution for the latter. And unfortunately it's the latter side of the spectrum that exerts hugely outsized impact in terms of both resources spent and negative draw on the rest of society.
So yeah... more housing would be great, but affordability shouldn't be used as societal gaslighting to excuse the current mess we have in San Francisco. Until the city finds the resolve to enforce some minimum standards of accountability, the problem will only get worse, and the rest of us will just vote with our feet.
I can tell you about the experience with "housing first" approaches in Chicago and some of the hidden subtleties that make us all have a bit of dunning-kruger here.
There are a few hotspots in Chicago that have resulted in "encampments" in major pedestrian thoroughfares.
In some of these, every single resident has been offered housing in exchange for leaving. Most of them refused housing.
Why? Because the one condition of getting housing was to join a drug counseling program.
There is an entire line of thought that goes something like "what? why are you putting conditions to housing? That's not housing first! What do you care if they go to drug counseling? That's you being a puritan! Be more compassionate!"
It turns out there's a very good reason why you want people that get off the street to get drug counseling before they move into an apartment...because if you don't, a large percent of them will die.
They will drug or drink themselves to death in an apartment with nobody around to save them (where do you think those cost savings your podcasts reference come from? fewer ambulance trips!). Almost every dangerous thing a person can do on the street, they can do worse in an apartment. Think, for example, of a couple living on the street in which one partner is physically abusive. Now imagine them in private.
So a measure that at first glance seems stupid, counterproductive, and inhumane, like conditioning housing, is actually the compassion maximizing measure, even though it may seem like the opposite.
This isn't to say that "housing first" is wrong...merely that it's not actually as simple as one would think.
A lot of full-on junkies will essentially trade their public housing apartments to dealers who use it as as safe spot to deal out crack/heroin. The dealers don't operate our of their own house for safety so they hire junkies and use their places as distribution centers in exchange for 'free' drugs, while still letting them sleep in their bedrooms.
Then the apartments eventually turn into crack dens. Eventually the door gets kicked in by police and the dealers find another person willing to exchange free drugs to let them use their place. Plus the junkies going in/out of jail and their apartment gets used when they aren't there.
This sort of thing puts a ton of pressure on the normal families trying to live in those apartment buildings. A small group can definitely ruin entire floors of those apartments.
Just the fact that you can have a safe place to store your belongings and sleep in peace is a huge improvement. A fridge to store food so it doesn't spoil and a place to cook food.
No need to sleep with one eye open hugging your boots and bag so that nobody steals them in the shelter's open housing.
I am skeptical of podcasts which reach a conclusion that is always within the overton window of the era. "This incredibly complex question has a solution that perfectly fits within the moral-mores of this decade." It is the John Oliver phenomenon, that starts with a pre-determined conclusion and then exclusively looks at evidence supporting the pre-determined conclusion.
In SF you're either a local or a transplant. A person who gets evicted, is by definition financially insecure. A local when evicted, can always move back in with family/friend unless their community disowns them. A transplant in a low-income job, has no reason to continue living in SF if they moved here for work. They can always move back.
SF's homeless crisis (last 20 years) is entirely due to a rise in homeless people with mental illness & substance abuse. [1] The key issue is drugs. 100%. Housing is the 2nd most important issue, no doubt. But, any blindly adopted housing first policy from a place without the same drug issues will fail, and will fail miserably.
If you're that interested in the question, why not give the podcast a fair listen and check their arguments directly ?
It's not some over the top over produced podcast like Last Week Tonight, and they're transparent about their sources and their opinion. The point of the show is to engage with verifiable information.
What all, and I mean all of those measures miss, often even intentionally, is that homelessness is a symptom, not the problem.
People like throwing money at homelessness because it is a subconscious absolution for their own guilt in causing it by being part of a machine that defrauds the mass of humans through money printing, i.e., fraud, that sees the value of someone’s labor diluted in order to provide ever more worthless currency to the decadent neo-aristocratic class that is also heavily represented in this forum, including myself.
Want to end homelessness? I know you don’t, but if you did, because that would mean you wouldn’t have all the money you have that was pilfered from others through deception and fraud. But if you did, then we would stop the massing theft through fraud that is money printing, aka inflation, aka fraud; selling one thing, delivering something of lesser value, dilution, theft by deception.
Then our benevolent government wouldn’t have to spend any money, because the value of labor for the homeless would allow them to have dignity that our class steals and robs them of, regardless of the government alms we throw them. Even the government money is not even our own money, but overwhelmingly also yet more of other peoples money that was stolen and defrauded through debt, taxes, and money printing.
We are all no different than Escobar that was relatively generous with his money to keep the vile enterprise going on the backs of people’s suffering.
Yes, I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about people who do not actually want to solve a problem, they just want to feel good about themselves.
The episode focuses on Utah’s housing first program, not California. They also bring up that it wasn’t a panacea and in practice it took more time than expected before the cost to the public went down.
> overall the cost was less that not having some housing and services
This is always the justification for socialist-style programs. It makes for a great red herring, but it's always misleading. What it ignores (willfully or not) is that if you start to incentivize homelessness, you're going to suddenly find yourself with a lot more homeless than you used to have. Your studies assume a stable population of homeless, but, as we've seen with these programs, putting them in place just invites more homeless.
Which seems to be true. Right now chasing homeless people from place to place is the subsidized action, and they sure seem to get more and more funds to do it.
No, because this formulation assumes we're starting with a fixed number of homeless people whose lives we're only making better. This is erroneous on two grounds: 1) it's not obvious that it makes their lives better in the long run, if it means they're less motivated to personally improve; 2) but second, and more important, the number of people who "need" these services is not fixed and policy can create more of them.
Tragedy of the commons comes from a lack of regulation. Put all the regulation you want, but make sure to guarantee your people live by a humane standard.
If San Francisco is handing out free homes to all who come, how would that not be a tragedy of the commons situation? “Everyone can come to SF to live by a humane standard” will never work.
Ok, I totally agree with that. We will never be able to solve the “how can anyone who wants to live in SF do so humanely” problem but we have a shot of doing it in a region with limited immigration (or humane is applied to legal residents only), like Singapore or Finland.
I’m all for housing and support to help people get back on their feet. I just don’t understand why that housing has to be in SF/Oakland.
It is a crazy dense and expensive area. There are cities that would gladly take in low skill workers who are subsidized by the government. Do they offer them transfers and housing in other cities?
They give you hundreds a month in cash grants (some make $1k a month in SF) and require you to make NO alterations to your lifestyle.
I was amazed when living in SF how many of the homeless are not locals. Not even Californians! I myself lived on the streets for a number of years and have dealt with addiction issues. It is absolutely insane how we’ve stopped treating homeless people as humans with potential and aspirations and assume that all they can be is a vacuum for drugs and cash. There’s no other conclusion to reach about how policy makers truly think about this class of people with the way the incentives of these “support” programs are structured.
>It is absolutely insane how we’ve stopped treating homeless people as humans with potential and aspirations and assume that all they can be is a vacuum for drugs and cash.
Vancouver has the same approach- warmest place in Canada.
When I suggested active intervention (eg. force detox), the activists would accuse me of treating homeless people as sub-humans, that I am being cruel and inhumane and a monster, and that we should give them (the users and the NGOs) money and safe-supply drug and leave them alone on the street.
There's a pervasive belief that homeless people in various comfortable climes are migrants from harsher locales, but when you do the research you apparently tend to find that they're overwhelmingly people who had stable living situations in those comfortable locations, and became homeless there: they aren't "imported". So the "warmest place in Canada" thing is unlikely to be meaningful, unless there's some reason a comfortable climate makes housing less stable.
>In the City of Vancouver’s 2019 homeless count, based on those who responded, 16% (156 people) of the homeless reported they were from an area elsewhere in Metro Vancouver, while 31% (299 people) were from another area of BC, and 44% (435 people) from another area of Canada.
If you go to the actual report[1] instead of whatever this site is, you'll see that question (3.9) was asking where they lived before they moved to Vancouver, not before they became homeless or whatever that site is attempting to imply.
If you scroll down slightly (3.11) you'll see 81% of respondents had a home in Vancouver before they became homeless, which is the data to match the claim ("overwhelmingly people who had stable living situations in those comfortable locations, and became homeless there").
So they moved to Vancouver, had a home for a year, then become homeless. The news article did not claim that the homeless respondents were homeless before they moved; simply that they are not local to Vancouver.
If you become homeless after 6 months of moving, you weren't financially stable to begin with.
EDIT: It's a moot point anymore. The fact is, they are in Vancouver and are homeless. We should help them regardless of where they came from.
The majority of small towns in northern BC have been gradually depopulating for decades, due to economic pressures similar to those in the Rust Belt of the US. (And plus, it's just damn cold up there, so it's hard to be homeless if you do end up homeless.) Their populations have to be going somewhere.
Yes, homeless people don't actually sit on the streets of e.g. Quebec City, begging until they can fund a trip to Vancouver, with the aim of living on the streets here instead.
But people are often in some kind of unstable living situation wherever they are, and find out about some job offer, or housing offer, in Vancouver, that lures them to come here for a chance at a more stable living situation. But after coming here (and spending what little capital they have to do so), their job offer falls through, or it was just a seasonal job, or a job with very tenuous stability (e.g. in construction); or the housing they found was a sublet in a rent-stabilized building, but the building owner then figured out how to work around this by "rennovicting" all the tenants so they could jack up the rents; etc.
I live in the East Hastings area. I speak to the people wandering the streets pretty often. I get the impression that many of these folks had a "stable living situation" for a year or two after coming to Vancouver. But this stability was an illusion. They didn't have the earning power to support themselves long-term in Vancouver's high-cost-of-living environment.
These folks are used to smaller low-cost-of-living towns, and just want to escape a failing small town with no economic opportunity; but they don't tend to have job skills that are highly-valued in dense urban areas (e.g. doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc.) These people can still move — but not to high-cost-of-living Vancouver. (Even the highly-employable "service class" of Vancouver, can't afford to live in Vancouver; they have to commute in from quite far away.) Rather, these folks would be much better off moving to another small-ish, lower-cost-of-living, but non-failing town in BC. Prince George, Vernon, Mission, etc.
Prince George as non-failing? Have you been there? I've never seen so many zombified homeless junkies wandering aimlessly than I have in Prince George. Not in Vancouver, San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle. Not in any other city. Prince George is horrific. Honestly the worst town or city I've ever had the displeasure of visiting. All of the 'normal' people inside businesses had thousand yard stares, shell shocked, and asked why I would even visit their town.
>these folks would be much better off moving to another small-ish, lower-cost-of-living, but non-failing town in BC. Prince George, Vernon, Mission, etc.
That's an interesting idea, but the smaller BC towns also have their own homeless issues. I don't think their municipal gov would be open to the province providing relocation resources to these people.
Also East Hastings draws vulnerable in, and has an iron clad grasp on them. These people might not want to move due to friends/nearby support non-profit/substances.
Finally, some of them have drug addictions after they move to Vancouver. There should be resources to help them exit first.
The small towns in BC don’t have their homeless issues, because without services, you either die or are in a bus to Vancouver. A common route for homeless people in Montana is to wind up in Spokane first and then Seattle later, since you can’t really survive in MT at all without a job, and while Spokane used to provide a bunch of flop houses (my grandfather owned one), those are gone now and it is too cold to live unsheltered there in the winter. Cities do pick up much of a national problem because of the social resources they can provide, and accordingly only national solutions have a chance of working.
Can you point me to any of that research? If I'm wrong I'd like to update my belief.
Admittedly, my belief has only weak evidence:
- San Francisco pays homeless people more than most other places, and has relatively weak enforcement of laws related to camping, drugs and petty crime
- Anecdotes about people on the street being interviewed, and admitting that they lied about being from SF, in order to qualify for benefits
- Hearing some accents that don't sound (to me) like they're from around here
"Seventy-one percent of those surveyed reported living in San Francisco, 24% in other California counties and 4% outside California.
Of those with a prior residence in the city, 17% said they had lived in San Francisco for less than one year, while 35% said they had been in the city for 10 or more years. The remaining 52% of those respondents said they lived in the city between one and 10 years before becoming homeless."
At least in san francisco it seems its people who lived in SF before becoming homeless that are in the majority.
- The folks at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, which commissioned the survey, depend on those numbers being high in order to justify their budgets and salaries.
- The people actually collecting the information mostly work for city-funded non-profits, who also depend on those numbers being high for their income. (see page 56 of the report, under "Enumeration Team Recruitment and Training".)
2. The numbers are self-reported, and we know there are $ incentives to never admit you're not from here.
> - The folks at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, which commissioned the survey, depend on those numbers being high in order to justify their budgets and salaries.
I'm not sure I understand this argument. If, say, it came out that 100% of the local homeless population became homeless elsewhere and were bussed to California, how would that reduce the demand for a department tasked with addressing the problem of homelessness?
If, say, it came out that 100% of the local homeless population became homeless elsewhere and were bussed to California
If this were the case, I suspect proposed solutions would shift away from building and maintaining shelters and Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH), and more toward helping people return home. The latter would require much less than the $600MM+ the DPHSH spends each year.
Do you have any data that is based on some combination of things that are good indications of someone making San Francisco their permanent home, e.g.
- tax filings/returns (W-2 and 1040)
- utility bill payments
- high school graduation (or even enrollment) records
- rent receipts or rental contracts
I'm not saying all of those are required. But if the data come from a biased source (like one whose existence or funding is threatened if the data say these folks are all from out of town), then it's hard to accept it when absolutely no historical records are used to back it up.
> Can you point me to any of that research? If I'm wrong I'd like to update my belief
I'm curious why you feel the need to update your beliefs if you're wrong if this is your standard for evidence. Shouldn't you not have a belief in the first place?
> At least in san francisco it seems its people who lived in SF before becoming homeless that are in the majority.
This is bog-standard mis-reporting of statistics, and I would encourage you to download and read the original homeless census report.
A person who had home in SF for 1 month and then lived unhoused in SF for 10 years is counted among those "long term" SF residents who became homeless. They're not really from SF, even if they technically become homeless while living in SF.
It's a bit more complex than that. At the surface, it's true - only 15% of homeless people in Seattle lived out of county before becoming homeless. But a deeper look shows as many as 30% more never really could afford housing - they had marginal housing situations, living with a friend, relative, or romantic partner without paying a proportionate share for their prior living situation.
This is part of the discrepancy - one side shoves the 15% number at everybody while the other side shoves at 45% number at everybody - we can't agree on what we're measuring.
Vancouver isn't just the warmest place, it's also the most expensive. There definitely have been cases of other parts of the country paying for a bus ticket out to the coast, just like they did to homeless people in Vancouver, sending them to Victoria during the Winter Olympics.
Victoria, Nanaimo etc. also have significant homeless issues, and I fully support out of province homeless people moving to Vancouver for whatever reason they might have. Freedom of movement is important to democracy.
But just as Oakland/LA/SF and California are passing the bucks, the federal and provincial government are pretending they are deaf and expect the local BC municipals to handle the national homeless crisis. This is simply not possible.
I used to live in Nanaimo as a kid (Go McGirr!). The city's economy was royally fucked in the 2000s. There were no jobs other than Provincial services like VIHA or the one paper mill that I think ended up shutting down. Hells Angels were also always a thing back there, and there was a reservation nearby which had some persistent social issues. I still have family there who ended up making a killing in construction thanks to Chinese money and idk if Nanimo will ever get better.
Harmac ended up being bought by the people who actually operated the mill from an American company that went bankrupt, and has been running well since 2008.
Oh! That's cool to hear! I went back to Nanaimo a couple years ago and it does seem much less grimy/blue collar than it was when I was a kid, but it does still seem to have that sense of PNW rust belt malaise to a certain extent.
I definitely see less homeless people in places that go to -40 in the winter. Now I don't know why, maybe they still exist but are less visible. Perhaps the threat of homelessness is a lot scarier when it is cold outside. Maybe homeless people in those climates move. I don't know, but anecdotally it does seem like there are much fewer homeless people in cold places.
But you have to have some form of shelter to survive -40, which means that nature itself forces something (or you just die).
(Note the homeless veterans, that's just an absolute embarrassment to the country as a whole; something major should be done like just re-activating them and providing housing).
There’s people on this forum who are homeless and quite popular. This person got quite angry when I asked about force detox. They said they didn’t want to have stipulations put on sober housing and would rather be homeless. My comment was greeted with hostility from many people.
Active interventions is one thing, forced detox is another. This involves restricting someone's freedom of movement, subjecting them to a very unpleasant experience, and then dropping them back off in the same community with a massive drug craving and a lower tolerance.
> Evidence does not, on the whole, suggest improved outcomes related to compulsory treatment approaches, with some studies suggesting potential harms. Given the potential for human rights abuses within compulsory treatment settings, non-compulsory treatment modalities should be prioritized by policymakers seeking to reduce drug-related harms.
Note that this systematic review looked at compulsory treatment methods besides just detox, but none of the results were that impressive.
Detox doesn't really work if they don't want it.
The active intervention w/r to homelessness would be to actually house these people. Lots of these people are using drugs to cope with other problems, without dealing with the other issues what are the chances of detox actually being worthwhile?
If you give housing to mentally unstable people, they are just going to trash the place. Vancouver has been building and rebuilding support housing because the units get trashed and literally ripped apart after a week.
Vancouver is doing a lot more for homeless people than SF/LA and it is still not working.
> If you give housing to mentally unstable people, they are just going to trash the place.
This is underreported to a criminal degree.
Want to solve the homeless problem? Adopt one. Let one live in your home. You'll quickly come to find how even the most sympathetic cases ended up on the street in the first place.
We couldn't keep a roof over the head of a schizophrenic family member, and there are no grants or stipends available to renovate your own home to the security standards of a mental hospital. Unlike problematic foster children, there is no state agency that pretends to have your back in this endeavor. Meanwhile you're cohabitating with someone regularly insulting, screaming at, assaulting, battering, and occasionally molesting your family members, which does wonders for their mental health. Normally your entire family has to be incarcerated in state prison to share this sort of experience-- the mentally-ill adhere to the Rules of Society about as well as the criminal population. So in failing to solve one problem, you create five more.
Even more fun in California, since they become tenants of yours after something retarded like 14 days and the savvy ones will shake you down when you try to [unlawfully] evict them.
This isn't a problem we can currently solve. It's hard not to criminalize the mentally-ill when their behavior is indistinguishable from that of actual criminals. The only difference seems to be "they can't help it," which is the same argument that has been made to excuse criminal behavior itself. It's not an excuse to coddle either group.
The local political / NGO class are corrupt and in bed with the local construction companies. They all live in the same nice gated neighborhoods, go to the same clubs and schools, intermarry each other, etc. And so they all profit from this cycle of developing land on the taxpayers dime then letting it get trashed by the homeless. All the while the homeless continue to terrorize the general public, providing the impetus to keep this grift going.
The general public gets terrorized by the homeless and vote for any politician that offers a solution. The politicians offer 'solutions' that only enrich themselves and their NGO/developer friends (more money for more housing!), while not actually addressing the problem of homeless terrorizing the general public. The homeless just keep doing what they do, enabled by the politicians who seek to keep them locked into their destructive lifestyles while pretending to help. The homeless are given de facto permission to continue harassing regular people in the street, vandalizing and stealing from shops, wander through working class neighborhoods screaming in the middle of the night, etc.) They are permitted to do all of this because it keeps the pressure on the general public to vote for the corrupt politicians who profit from it.
The only way to break this cycle is to clue the public into the dynamic, but most people who figure it out will move away for greener pastures, instead of sticking around and trying to reform local politics.
That has been tried before. We stopped doing it because of how horrible it was. The homeless are better off than in the institutions of old.
I don't know if modern institutions could be better. However we know they failed in the past. If you want to propose them again, you need to provide some proof that they new ones will be better than the old.
Maybe we need to do Australia again, but instead of for debtors it's for drug rehab. Just make sure the entire island we pick is drug-free. (Yes, there are obvious issues with this and it's likely incompatible with our current view of what a "free society" is).
Because I don't feel any shame out of what seems like the necessary thing to do. But maybe you can show me the commandment from on high where I should feel shame. Or better yet than shaming, you could provide an alternative that works.
Both of these approaches would work for some people, but neither works for everyone -- it's a very complicated and dynamic problem that has many causes, and many symptoms that are often mistaken for causes.
Forcing people to detox is a grave violation of their right to body autonomy. In general people tend to react very badly when their body autonomy is violated: the results are trauma, CPTSD, suicide. I suggest we try other solutions first, starting from a place of compassion, empathy and scientifically tested medical advice.
Like detox centers, which exist to minimize trauma, suicide, and CPTSD.
> Forcing people to detox is a grave violation of their right to body autonomy.
Giving an addict a steady supply of money often just kills them (like my sister). I consider that some sort of violation. As is, letting addicts do drugs might sort itself out [1]. I imagine 2022-2023 numbers will be very very depressing.
How is giving people money unconditionally not treating them as “humans with potential and aspirations”?
I’m not entirely sure what your point is. Are you saying that adding more rules and conditions and whatnot is better?
I don’t have a well-formed opinion here myself, just that most people arguing for treating benefit recipients humanely argue for fewer rules, not more. So I’d like to understand your point better.
> How is giving people money unconditionally not treating them as “humans with potential and aspirations”?
If access to money is not their actual impediment then you may be making their situation worse.
> I’m not entirely sure what your point is. Are you saying that adding more rules and conditions and whatnot is better?
You are drowning. I throw $1000 at you. Are you saying I should have done more?
> argue for fewer rules
Judging by living in the middle of this policy. The number of homeless has increased and the number of open air drug markets, prostitution, and suicides have increased with them. There is a concerted _lack_ of enforcement of rules. The homeless purchase RVs from scrap yards, move them onto the sides of streets, and live in them.
Zoning and parking laws are ignored. Noise laws are ignored. Drug laws are ignored. There is zero effort to serve this population and get them out of the literal gutter. Pets are a massive problem. Children are living in the middle of this. And our response is just.. "here's $1000 and a legal carte blanche for anything short of murder."
One of the most under appreciated aspects of this is that the current policies actually hurt the homeless people who are stuck in a poverty trap and want to get out. They have to live daily with an ever increasing number of people who are allowed to engage in dangerous and uncivil behaviour. There are parents and children on the streets who want nothing more than to get off them - but until that happens, their quality of life has been made considerably worse by the policies presently in place.
"Zoning and parking laws are ignored. Noise laws are ignored. Drug laws are ignored. There is zero effort to serve this population and get them out of the literal gutter. Pets are a massive problem. Children are living in the middle of this. "
How do you pay to enforce all of this?
Do jails have adequate space?
Are there enough judges, courtrooms, and public defender's to handle this efficiently?
Where should the children go?
"It's not working"
What are your suggestions for aiding people to be able to afford rent and sustaining themselves?
> How do you pay to enforce all of this? Do jails have adequate space?
Well if you cant enforce it and jails don’t have adequate space shouldn’t you put more resources to those things? Or do you not actually think it should be enforced nor should people be put in jail?
I don't think this is a fair response. Throwing a conditional means-tested $1000 to a drowning man wouldn't save them either. You are grouping in different policies and treating them as if you have to accept a package deal or nothing. The binary choice is a false illusion.
I'd be happy to argue about the value of means-testing. However people who are in favor of means testing can rarely point to a study validating the effectiveness of it, because the reality of means-testing is that it:
a) Increases administration costs, making it rarely cost efficient
b) Increases barriers to access, leaving people who need help behind
c) Tends to create poverty traps and weird distorting incentives.
I'd also be happy to look at data in terms of what services the unhoused need most, and what is the most helpful in terms of ending long-term homelessness and reducing the impact on society as a whole. This is a separate discussion.
In reality though, I think most people on both sides think of it on a local scale, and therefore are struggling to actually come up with solutions that will fundamentally solve the issue. Communities have generally gone with one of two solutions to these issues:
1) Making it difficult for those who are unhoused.
2) Trying to improve the situation of those who are unhoused.
The first approach doesn't actually solve the problem, it just shifts it to other locations. At its worst you see it with cities and towns busing their homeless to other places, but you see it expressed most frequently with the criminalization of homelessness. If this was the approach everywhere we would quickly enter an arms race of who could make things worse, and you would almost certainly see the problem nationally become worse.
On the other hand, you have communities trying to improve the lives of unhoused folks, which is really just a bandaid on the core issue.
The root of the problem is the cost of housing, and unfortunately this is an area which California has struggled to solve. However, this is completely orthogonal to how you treat your homeless populations. You can treat the homeless with dignity AND lower housing costs at the same time.
>> You are drowning. I throw $1000 at you. Are you saying I should have done more?
> You are drowning. I will jump in and help you get to safety only after you have taken a blood and piss test. Are you saying I should have done more?
I think his point was that if someone's drowning, you throw them a life preserver or jump in and save them. You don't throw them $1000, because that's not the solution to the problem they're actually having. It's not like the water will spit them out if you pay it.
And if your problem is addiction, $1000 might just make your problem worse. That $1000 might as well be considered a pile of drugs or booze.
When I was growing up I was friends with a kid whose Dad actually worked trying to help homeless people in a very cold climate. IIRC, one time they had a program to give out subzero rated sleeping bags, but stopped once they realized they were just getting pawned.
I'm with ya. My point is that his metaphor illustrates how even a helpful for the problem solution might not be helpful given the stipulations he's putting on the help.
But a homeless person can easily take a drug test.
The real analogy would be that you have to consent to the would-be savior to verify you are actually drowning. Im not sure anyone drowing would think “no thanks ill take my chances”.
I’m not at all against unconditional cash grants. I work for a non-profit that does just that.
What I am against is a totally unstructured program where they hand cash out knowing that 90% of it goes into an open air drug market that they make no attempt to shut down or control.
I’m not arguing for work requirements or time limits. People who are legitimately struggling will fall through the cracks. But I don’t think it is insane or inhumane to require people to work with supportive assistance and be put on a pathway to supportive housing.
I don't really understand the point you are making. "I'm not arguing for work requirements... But I don't think its insane to require people to work." So, you are in favor of work requirements then?
This article has an extremely click bait headline; it's entirely about one encampment and not at all about what the $17B is being spent on or any other aspect of the homelessness problem.
Nevertheless, one thing pointed out in this article is that some of the homeless do have jobs, so the issue of work requirements is not simple. And I think you need some evidence for your suggestion that anyone is being handed cash and spending 90% of it on drugs.
He said "I don’t think it is insane or inhumane to require people to work with supportive assistance", meaning to have the people engage with supportive assistance. Not "get a job before we help you" but "talk to the counselor while we're helping you"
The parent seems to be saying that they are not sure whether work requirements are necessary for a support program to succeed, but that the requirements do not appear to be unreasonable or obviously counter-productive.
Why did you cut off the sentence? What I said had nothing to do with employment requirements but about the need for supportive services to enable unhoused persons to achieve the next steps in their path to stability.
If the money is just going back to the drug dealers I would think that would just exacerbate the problem and make it even worse, as it just encourages drug dealers and producers to make and sell more.
There definitely needs to be case workers or someone involved to help provide these people a path to recovery.
Giving addicts drug money instead of providing for their needs is the peak of inhumanity.
Not sure what you think a drug addicts needs are, because usually at the top of the list is "drugs".
There other services provided en-masse for homeless people with addiction problems but you can't force them to take advantage of them.
The "free-money" isn't about treating the root cause of the recipients addiction the hope is to address a symptom and prevent people with addiction problems from committing crimes to fuel their habits.
Maybe money isn't the right thing - it may reduce crime, but won't fix issues. But there's plenty of successful programs where they give drugs or substitutes to prevent withdrawal to addicts for free, no questions asked, no judgment. Or places to safely use, where privacy, health care and clean needles are available.
But the subject isn't addicts, it's homeless people. Not all homeless people are addicts, and not all addicts are homeless.
Drug-addicts is something you interpret. It is specified that they are homeless.
Doing this conflation is the worst kind of anti-ethical you can be. Just like assuming other things about whole groups of people.
For this debate, I can really recommend Rutger Bregman and his books. One of his important points about poverty is that people are that: Poor. And that is their problem.
My problem when I was homeless wasn’t that I was poor. My problem was that I would never be able to manage assets properly until I get my mental house in order and started prioritizing things properly.
There are plenty of homeless people who are in a poverty trap, as you describe, but I think it oversimplifies the situation to argue the arrow of causality only goes one direction for all homeless people.
Bregman I am referring is Dutch, I am Danish. Two countries where you'd have to look really hard to find homeless people.
I think over-complication is the issue in the states, which in turn makes a lot of these grants go to heads thinking about the issues rather than the actual issues.
I also think it is important to attribute issues where they are due: Mental issues is not a housing problem, it is a health care issue. Not being able to manage money is not a housing problem, it is a primary school problem. Etc.
With all respect for your previous life, it does sound like you needed some quality health care more than a parental system that handed out food stamps (in fear that the money otherwise would have gone to drugs).
I agree completely with your third paragraph; I also agree regarding the Dutch (my partner lives in Amsterdam) and Danish programmes and their successes. Apologies if my reply misunderstood your initial post, as I feel we’re actually in agreement here.
I can see that you're not in California, so I feel like I should reiterate that drugs are a massive problem among our homeless population here. It is something that needs consideration when trying to help them. The main problem with just giving people $1,000/mo is that it is nowhere near enough to get off the street, but more than enough to continue fueling a drug problem.
That, and part of the problem seems to be that when people say "get them off the streets" the hidden statement is "but keep them in SF"
SF is a ridiculously expensive city that people from across the US consider (who have homes even) consider themselves priced out of.
It seems mind boggling that people think everyone deserves a home in SF itself, instead of relocation to, say, a new suburb constructed a couple hours away (where housing is cheaper!).
Constructing that suburb would create jobs. The infrastructure needed to maintain it would create jobs. And even if it remains a net cash drain, it'll still likely be cheaper than 17B a year while giving people actual homes with opportunities to work their way up and out
> It seems mind boggling that people think everyone deserves a home in SF itself, instead of relocation to, say, a new suburb constructed a couple hours away (where housing is cheaper!).
The problem is that many homeless people would genuinely rather live on the streets or in shelters in the city proper where they have easy access to the things they want, versus having a house provided elsewhere.
They want housing near their preferred begging spots and their dealers, basically.
That lends itself to other solutions though, if there's the political will to implement them.
To take an unpopular example: Iran
Iran provides food and shelter to all it's citizens, making sure everyone has their minimum needs met. They've combined this with strict laws against begging. If they see anyone begging on the street someone will come up to them and ask "Why are you begging? Do you have some basic need that's still unmet?"
Outcomes will range from:
- Helping them with that need (if it's legitimate)
- Directing them to getting some kind of job if they merely want more income (even if it's selling trivial knick knacks on the street)
- Presumably there's penalties for repeat offenders
None of this is true. Iran has extreme poverty, people have bare access to food these days and there's a massive amount of child beggars in the street. People are selling body parts to get access to food.
I have lived in San Fransisco an commuted through Tenderloin.
I am not opposing that they are statistically related. But it is not OK to assume that people are drug addicts when they tell that they are homeless. That is normal human decency.
The majority of homeless people are homeless for economic reasons, like loss of income, cost of living increases, or lack of affordable housing, or changes in co-living situations caused by break-ups/divorce/abuse/loss of partner's income/etc.
Families are the fastest growing homeless demographic.
And that group is hurt the most by having to share the streets with people whose uncivil and dangerous behaviour puts their life and well being in danger.
Treating unhoused persons as a homogenous population is probably the original sin of modern American homeless policy.
> Treating unhoused persons as a homogenous population is probably the original sin of modern American homeless policy
It gives you some useful tricks, though. E.g. if somebody complains about the chronically homeless addicts assaulting people downtown? Why, you just point out that X% of "the homeless" are actually just regular non-addicted people temporarily down on their luck, who just need a free hotel room for a couple weeks.
It's unfortunate. Most of the conversation here is about addicts and the mentally ill and how hard they are to help. Probably because they are the most visible.
We should have separate programs for each, one with more resources. It is much easier to help someone without a substance abuse problem get back on their feet, so let’s pick the lowest fruit first? It also provides some incentive to not get addicted to drugs, knowing that society is going to not try as hard to save you (this is already true, it just isn’t codified anywhere).
But ya, most people won’t notice, since they didn’t notice these people before.
Because they are not going to spend it on things that's going to help them improve skills and finding jobs, they'll stuck as homeless forever.
Like when world bank lend money to country that are bankrupted, they ask them to take the money for reform and try to improve their economy, same should happen here.
People addicted to heroin don't achieve their potential or their aspirations. The compassionate thing to do for drug addicts is to help them stop being addicted to drugs, not give them an apartment where they can do drugs without bothering anybody. Parent commenter is saying the state is doing mostly the latter and little of the former.
Demographics of homeless populations is one of those things that is pretty hard to determine conclusively without some serious invasion of privacy and/or violation of rights.
Take in consideration that homeless folks are under no obligation to tell the truth when surveyed or questioned and are generally aware that "migration of homeless into certain areas" is a hot-button issue (these folks are homeless, not stupid)... and we have a recipe for the demographics of homeless populations in these 'desirable' areas being misreported and the percent of out-of-region homeless being under-reported as a rule.
Homeless folks definitely migrate to places that are more tolerant of homelessness and are all around "better" places to be homeless. SF, LA, Seattle, etc. are good places to be homeless. Boulder, CO is a good place to be homeless; they even put folks up in hotels in the winter for free when it is too cold outside.
Some people moved to these regions before being homeless, but they moved here for easy access to drugs and the overall drug climate (often not arrested or prosecuted for possession of hard drugs and pot is legal). This is sort of 'pre-homelessness'... their drug addiction was practically guaranteeing they would become homeless eventually.
BTW: Governments paying to bus their homeless people somewhere else so "it's not their problem" should be illegal unless tacitly agreement upon by the two regional/municipal governments. This practice is disgusting.
I didn’t state any numbers. I don’t know. All I have is anecdotes from myself and others who work in this space.
That said, you don’t think even 1 in 9 people being out of staters puts pressure on programs? That as more people see how you can migrate and live far more easily than in Midwestern/East Coast cities, that those numbers won’t increase? That there isn’t a negative psychic impact to homeless people who are actually trying to get out of the system having to live around many others who are content to collect their scrip?
I’m skeptical the number is that low but even if it is, I don’t think it is the non-issue you think it is. I think it reveals quite a lot about the preferences of the homeless who both originate from within, and outside, California.
> I don’t think it is the non-issue you think it is.
Those words, phrases, and thoughts were never shared by the user. This is you inventing a person in your head, and you are arguing with that imaginary person.
It is more powerful. Data is often meaningless without interpretation, missing many dimensions, easily and often manipulated, funded by unknown desires and forces, and generally unreliable. Outside of the hardest of sciences it’s worse than worthless.
Meanwhile a single sharp person who lives in a city and interacts with the right intersection of people will tell you closer to the truth than even the better quality studies or media outlets. To think otherwise is imo foolish.
You're right it's much better to rely on information that is expected to be meaningless, has zero dimensions, is guaranteed to be biased, has no backing, and is scientifically proven to be unreliable.
If your trust for first hand accounts from people you trust is meaningless, I feel sorry for you. And if you aren’t able to intuit their biases based on your history with them and take that into account, more so.
That you seemingly missed the caveat that I mentioned about “hard sciences” also not a good sign.
Even supposing that is true, which seems very unlikely, it is clearly untrue of the SF homeless population in general and of the East Bay homeless population.
OK, I don't go to the Mission much. What I was trying to say was that putting that anecdote out there risks being a bit misleading, since obviously the vast majority of homeless people on Market St / Tenderloin, and in the East Bay, are not Mexican immigrants, illegal or otherwise. Unless you concede that point, readers of this thread are going to conclude that it is you that is trying to shoehorn reality into a form that you find palatable. If you genuinely think that the majority of homeless people in SF / East Bay are illegal immigrants, then I don't know which adjective to choose -- deranged, deluded, absurd?
They are implying that illegal immigration is relevant to the grotesque problem with hundreds of drug-addicted, mentally ill Americans living in squalor in SF in a way that makes America look like a third-world country. That sort of shameless and self-serving lying has become very familiar in recent years due to political trends in the USA but we do not want it on HN.
If I recall correctly, this source was criticized because their measurement for being "out of state" was that you haven't been in CA for 2 years or so. So if someone had come in 2+ years ago for the CA homeless benefits then they would be considered not out of state.
I say supposedly because it doesn't mention how they got that information. If they used county records, it's a very different trust paradigm than if they just asked.
The Dept. of Homeless Services doesn't track this? It is done in NYC, and it was a major bone of contention that the high level of service was effectively magnetizing the city for homeless in other parts of the country to come here, or for cities even to bus them here. The law is a little vague on the matter, but the prevailing belief by the NYC administration is that anyone who can make it to the agency's doorstop and claim homelessness is entitled to emergency shelter up to 6 months, with no residency check (let alone U.S. citizenship), and there is no clear regulation preventing renewal. Even before the current foreign migrant crisis, about 10-15% of the shelter population came from outside NYC as their most recent stated prior address.
By the agency's own numbers, only 72% of SF's homeless population "became homeless while living in SF."
Additionally, among those 72% who "became homeless while living in SF", only 35% have lived in SF for more than 10 years at the time of the census (the agency only has buckets for 0-1, 1-10 and 10+ years, and does not collect the amount of time the person lived in SF before becoming homeless).
So, although they may have technically "become homeless while living in SF", 65% are not really "from SF" in any meaningful way (they lived in SF for less than 10 years since they first got here, including time while homeless). Those 65% aren't kids: Only 2% of SF's homeless are under 18, and more than half of homeless were over the age of 25 when they first became homeless.
When you multiply it out (0.35*0.72), you end up with an upper bound of just 25% of the homeless population is really "from SF" (as in, became homeless while here and have been here >10 years).
It's probably even lower when you consider that the current episode of homelessness is their first for only 23% (so while they may have "become homeless" while in SF, many have been homeless elsewhere before and thus only marginally housed when arriving).
> Only 17% reported being in SF for less than a year, what are you talking about?
Oh, looks like you forgot to add the 28% who were already experiencing homelessness when they arrived in SF. I’m sure that’s just an honest mistake.
> ahahaha oh okay you are insane.
So you believe that a homeless person who has lived in SF for 13 months, total, at the time they were surveyed is “from SF”? I’m not the one who created the reporting buckets.
I’m happy to change my mind given new data, but a person who has lived in a city for 1-10 years is not “from” that city. Maybe you should ask SF’s homeless census to report in more gradual buckets.
The Dept. of Homeless Services doesn't track this?
Previous discussions on HN suggest that the official stats are misleading and, for example, will count one as "local" if their last official street address was time in a local prison.
The statistic thrown around is something like “About 70 percent of people who are homeless became homeless while living in the Bay Area.” I’m not sure how to interpret this. I cant find the question they actually asked or how they collected people to survey.
This is not surprising at all. Currently it’s all about affirmation and validation and being your true authentic self. Suggesting alterations to lifestyles implies that some lifestyles might be inferior to others. Would this implication end at drug use or could it be extended to other areas of life as well? When you extrapolate this a bit further you could quickly get yourself labeled closed-minded and a bigot. Therefore just throwing cash non-judgmentally at these problems and hoping the issues go away is the only path forward for many.. alternatives would be too uncomfortable to stomach.
There's also simply no good solution for people with mental health issues. People who need help aren't scooped up & put somewhere for treatment. They're left on the street.
There are a lot of people making money in the current system. It's pretty obvious that just giving money to people trapped in a cycle of addiction is not going to break that cycle.
They need treatment and in many cases it might need to be compelled to break the cycle. This then needs to be followed with integration programs (and jobs, schooling) that do not happen in the same area where they spent their time addicted.
On the other hand, $1K a month in SF won't even get you a bed in a shared room. I mean that literally - I just checked apartments.com and there's exactly one listing out of 5,400 right now that's under $1000 and open to non-students.
You can absolutely find a bedroom for 1000/m, but you're going to have to interact with people.
Check how long those apartments have been listed for, some of them have been listed for a year. If it's an actual competitive price it will get rented immediately.
There are shared housing groups on facebook that will reflect the situation more accurately.
They don’t need a bed or a room. You can camp quite comfortably throughout the city all year long thanks to the mild weather.
It’s a very different situation than being homeless in cities with more typical seasonal weather patterns; I nearly lost a number of toes due to frostbite when I was homeless in Saint Louis during a major blizzard. San Francisco’s climate and permissive camping policies help absolve a lot of the housing related issues that are involved with being homeless.
> San Francisco’s climate and permissive camping policies help absolve a lot of the housing related issues that are involved with being homeless.
Of course they don't. Living out of a tent on a street makes it extremely hard to get your life onto target for rejoining the economically healthy portion of society. I'm sure you know that. I don't know what you were trying to say.
Where do you get the idea apartments.com is a source that can inform you about the market price of shared housing?
As a long-time participant in the bay area rental housing market, $1000 is enough to rent a bedroom in many homes, but how would such a listing get onto apartments.com?
If you’re paying more than $1000 to share a bedroom, you’re getting ripped off.
Your comment does not provide any concrete example. Even if what you say is true, access is a real issue. You think homeless people would know how to find those $1000 options if a random person cannot find them via a simple search?
Of course, most people would prefer to room with family or friends (especially if we’re talking about multiple people in the same room). That’s not an SF issue, it’s human nature. So a lot of roommate groups are going to be formed through word-of-mouth, or smaller community group chats/boards.
> They give you hundreds a month in cash grants (some make $1k a month in SF) and require you to make NO alterations to your lifestyle.
If you look up the amount spent per homeless person by SF on homelessness, you'll wonder how it is possible that they're giving away ONLY $1000 per month.
Having lived/spent time in a few places with varying homeless problems and approaches to homelessness, I find it fucking depressing every time I read about how badly - and inefficiently - the US handles it.
Probably because I see alarming parallels with my own country.
Billions going where, exactly? If the problems growing, and you are just sinking billions into it without making any measurable impact, where the fuck is the money going?
Like looking at the supposed cost of building housing, it seems glaringly obvious that the taxpayers being fucked by someone. We also have this issue in Ireland, what with one hospital being billions over budget, years behind schedule, etc. never mind housing.
Zoning and planning issues can be dealt with trivially by the state almost anywhere, they just aren’t fucked doing so (we have this issue in Ireland).
There’s no easy fix for homelessness, shelters are at best putting a band aid on a severed limb. The only real solution is large scale construction of mixed use housing - some social, some affordable, some private. And that’s a whole clusterfuck that seems unachievable for political reasons globally, with the exception of some of the Nordic social democracies.
The Greater Boston Food Bank CEO cleared a $500K salary this year, for a job that's largely remote because the area is too dangerous for the non-profit white collar workers. Do you think she wants "food insecurity" to be solved?
You've compared 2 positions that command a high salary. The average American only made 60K in 2022. You could argue that the CEO faces a higher cost of living, but to the average voter, this salary is obscene.
The average American does not run an organisation that delivered food for 90 million meals to residents of the greater Boston area last year.
> to the average voter, this salary is obscene
Any salary above minimum wage will seem obscene to the average voter if they're already inclined to dislike the person making the salary. But if you told them what that salary entails, and what Fortune 500 companies pay execs with similar responsibilities, they probably wouldn't think it so crazy.
There are two ways to look at: (a) pay them more, and get the best results and less corruption (b) pay them less, and get the worst results with more corruption. In the states, politicians get paid, but they make through 'corruption' through revolving door, sinecure jobs for friends and family members, campaign contributions. In Singapore, politicians are paid better than the private sector, thereby reducing the corruption.
That’s feeding 81k people a day. A huge job, for sure, but that’s the equivalent of a reasonably large town. Something has already gone wrong upstream if that many people cannot acquire food via their own means.
> If the problems growing, and you are just sinking billions into it without making any measurable impact, where the fuck is the money going?
A lot of these programs are hard to stop paying into once you start. Say you are a political leader and you try to solve homelessness by pouring $X per year into some new program. 5 years later it's clear the program is not effective. However, if you axe the program, good luck getting re-elected since you've now made it very easy for your opponent to lambaste you ("Hundreds of society's most vulnerable brace themselves as Governor X seeks to axe homeless program").
This is the fundamental reason why democracies often face challenges. For instance, let's consider a country like India, where a significant portion of the population isn't financially well-off. As a result, there is an expectation for government assistance and benefits during each election cycle. Consequently, politicians who promise freebies or welfare programs tend to have a higher likelihood of being elected. This pattern is not unique to India; it can be observed in various other places as well. Even in the United States, which prides itself on its democratic system, the influence of this phenomenon is evident
The government should help people and make their lives better. People should expect this, both as citizens and as tax payers. The government doesn’t just get free money from the people without being expected to offer something in return.
"Zoning and planning issues can be dealt with trivially by the state almost anywhere, they just aren’t fucked doing so (we have this issue in Ireland)."
This seems to not reflect reality in the US. There is strong local resistance to construction especially if it's for poor people or worse homeless, leading to tight zoning and rejection of projects during the byzantine approval process. If the government tries to build something, the EPA (environmental protection act) also allows anyone to request that a environmental impact study needs to take place. The study can take about a year and there are no teeth, other than causing delay and cost through the study. Nothing needs to change based on the findings, it's just another way to drag things out and increase cost on projects someone doesn't like.
Honestly, social housing isn't my preferred solution. My solution is radical upzoning; removal of minimum unit-sizes; drastically simplify the approval/permit process and remove all local hearings etc. from the process, if it fits the regulations, you can build it; forced rehab for addicts; institutionalize mentally ill who cannot take care of themselves (this is the hardest part, I am least certain about).
Disagree on 'minimum unit sizes', at least where I live 0-bedroom loft-only units are already small enough!
I do agree with other ideas that promote more flexible application of possibly small units.
Ideas such as 'fire proof' (no flammable materials in building construction) buildings with relaxed regulations about access to egress, so that stupid middle hallway can be removed.
Very agree with an easier and known approval if checking the boxes process. Local hearings banned, environmental impacts should be part of the zoning for a given plot; fit 'within the lines' and no re-assessment.
Minimum unit sizes necessarily increase the price of housing and lower supply - there's no free lunch. Small apartments suck, sure, but you have to ask yourself whether it's a good idea to ban them and thus force everyone to pay more. Personally, I don't think small apartments have enough negative externalities to justify such regulation.
You don't seem to have countered any aspect of my argument, so I'll rephrase it for enhanced clarity.
Current laws about minimum sizes (WRT size alone) already sufficiently allow small sizes (as far as interior size of the unit is concerned).
Commonly it is __other_laws__ such as access to two fire escapes which cause larger sizes than some might desire. An example addressed in my reply's following lines 'Fireproof Buildings' which some localities allow to relax such rules.
We don’t know where you’re based, so it’s difficult to respond to your precise argument.
But your argument sure sounds like we shouldn’t allow the permitting of SROs or boarding houses anymore, which is what parent is arguing for.
Forcing everyone to have a kitchenette and their own bathroom sounds like the sort of thing we want to “preserve everyone’s dignity”, but mostly it forces people on the edge out of housing altogether.
So I probably disagree with you that your current zoning is small enough.
I may have misunderstood your earlier comment as a claim that minimum size laws are beneficial and should be maintained.
If I understand correctly now, your argument is that minimum size laws are not currently a bottleneck for building denser apartments? If so that’s a valid point wrt what changes should be prioritized, but I think it’s fine to point out that minimum sizes also need to go.
Any smaller than present and the bottlenecks become dominated by other factors. Commonly things such as: access to at least two emergency egress stairwells, a requirement for at least one window, the physics of being able to reach the entry door at all.
As a counter example, hotel rooms are usually required to have a restroom but not a kitchen area. Yet they're often even larger than studio apartments. This is because the other safety, engineering, and other-units factors enforce requirements that make smaller units pointless. They might even create security management issues in the common space between units.
If what you're really seeking is cheaper ways of housing more people, then generalizing the question and changing the variables being optimized (other than size, which most places, particularly in other countries, already do great jobs on).
Offhand, the 'wave a magic wand and fix the rules' solution just limited to this problem space might include something similar to. Fireproof (no flammable materials in the building construction, build in furnishings etc) buildings only require 1 fire-shelter level egress path. 'better' elevators (less shafts / density; might go to a Wanka-vator / turbolift like loop system). Eliminate window requirements in favor of two independent paths to sources of fresh air / shelter in place points.
With the above, the sort of smaller unit hacks that others (but not I) desire might include commons facilities for coffin-hotel things like a gym/pool lockerroom and shower, a common kitchen, etc. However my experience with shared amenities (E.G. rooftop BBQ grills) is that they suffer the Tragedy of the Commons. There's always going to be at least one person in a group that uses things improperly, or leaves cleanup to others, etc. In the case of shared lockerrooms that aren't rigorously cleaned this will also lead to communicable disease transmission.
> The only real solution is large scale construction of mixed use housing - some social, some affordable, some private.
It's a LOT more than making affordable housing available. Most homeless where I am have severe mental health problems, drug addictions, or both. Some are also homeless in large part because of criminal records. Many many difficult social problems to fix before it's just a matter of affordability.
My best friend from high school is homeless right now despite my efforts to help him. My best friend from grade school was homeless in my town for a few years(I wasn't aware at first to help). My wife was a social worker. I've had many interactions, albeit brief, with homeless in my city. I'm not exactly ignorant and I'm not sure the fellow from your article isn't an activist with an agenda. I'm also skeptical of the data gathered on the problem. It's probably not very good because in most cities they can't even get an accurate census/count of homeless.
In today's climate in media and academia I'll take extensive personal experience and common sense over "data" and "studies" every time when it comes to societal and political issues. And they have nobody else but themselves to blame.
Noah Smith is no activist. He was a professor of finance and a journalist for the Associated Press, Bloomberg, and other reputable outlets. He now writes a very successful Substack.
> Most homeless where I am have severe mental health problems, drug addictions, or both
If drug addicts don't have to pay rent, then they do drug addict stuff within the premises of their house. It doesn't solve the mental health crisis, but it does solve tents in public areas.
Secondly, it controls for for gateway drug scenarios. Eventually, a large percent chronically homeless & mentally ill people turn into addicts. But, if they have a roof over they shoulders, they aren't pushed into that life as hard as if they were living in a tent.
A house is a house, if you want to burn it down, burn it down.
We can't give houses to 100 meth heads who're about to kill themselves, because 1 of them might actually kill themselves via immolation is a hard argument to defend.
That’s just not borne out by any evidence. It’s likely you don’t interact (or don’t knowingly interact) with a large portion of homeless people who aren’t drawing attention to themselves.
Yeah the low drama homeless people that would be easiest to help don't make the headlines. They're quietly struggling, working some minimum wage job while living in a camper somewhere.
And yet the high drama people that make the headlines are used as an argument to not build affordable homes at all.
The hard to house with an array of overlapping severe challenges will always be hard to house, but we can't let that small minority be any sort of barrier to helping the broader amount of people that are easier to help that are nonetheless struggling to find anywhere they can afford to live.
> Billions going where, exactly? If the problems growing, and you are just sinking billions into it without making any measurable impact, where the fuck is the money going?
Well, that’s simple. Most of the money goes to politically well connected non-profits with missions around alleviating homelessness. The problem is that if you alleviate homelessness, the money goes away and everybody at that non-profit loses their jobs. I’m not specifically accusing anyone of corruption, but the incentives aren’t good.
The funny thing is, you don't even need corruption. Every single one person in those GONGOs could be genuinely willing to help the homeless. The problem is, if their financing is detached from whether their strategies are successful - and even smart and honest people have great capacity for self-delusion, which is only enhanced when the mission is morally laudable - then the money could be wasted as thoroughly as if they were corrupt.
>The problem is that if you alleviate homelessness, the money goes away
That actually isn't what happens at all though. When we handle this at the state level, spending on homelessness just makes that state more attractive to the homeless in other states and exacerbates the problem.
In a way, the US "handles" it very efficiently, but only in terms of spending the money and funnel them to the related interest group, but not in terms of solving the homeless problem.
Nah, it’s caused by mental illness and drug addiction. Short of rounding them up and forcing them to get help, there’s actually nothing we can do to get these people off the street.
It's certainly an element, but that's largely washing your hands and victim blaming. There's a direct correlation between housing costs and homelessness rates.
From the reporting I’ve seen, the vast majority of folks on Skid Row or on the street in SF are heavy addicts. And they refuse shelters because then they couldn’t use.
From a census of homeless people in LA county a few years back[1]:
15% of LA's homeless population has substance abuse problems. Only 12% of these people are in shelters.
25% have serious mental illnesses. 20% of these people are in shelters.
Overall 33% of homeless people are in shelters.
So you are partially right that drug use and mental health issues can make sheltering some people more difficult. But you are very wrong that people with either of these issues make up a majority of all homeless people. It is just classic confirmation bias in that people with these issues are the most visibly homeless. The people who are living in their car or a shelter and simply can't afford a home aren't easily identifiable as homeless when you walk past them on the street. This can also be seen in the previously linked data as only 28% of LA's homeless population qualifies as chronically homeless.
Basically you are only able to see a small portion of the problem and are assuming that is the whole problem when in actuality homelessness is roughly 4x worse.
2. Therefore, the homelessness is caused by drug addiction.
Not exactly sound reasoning. Plenty of people with mental illness and drug addiction still manage to pay rent.
No one disputes the rates of addiction and mental illness among the homeless. California has neither the highest rates for drug addiction/overdoses nor the highest rates of mental illness, yet it has the highest rate of homelessness.
There is no correlation between rates of mental illness and rates of homelessness. There is no correlation between drug addiction rates and homelessness. There is a strong Correlation between rents and homelessness.
Why? Being mentally ill and a drug addict doesn't automatically make you homeless in an area where rent for a room is $400/month.
> Dry shelters are arguably a massive part of the problem.
As someone who has housed and lived close to addicts, to put it plainly: this is a naive, academic view. Dry shelter are "a massive part of the problem"? Absolutely incorrect, and harmfully ignorant if implemented at societal scale.
As someone who provided food and shelter to an addict in my own home, guaranteeing these things does nothing to increase the willingness to quit heroin. Material deprivation may cause you to seek drugs, but remedying deprivation does not lead to recovery. In fact, I honestly believe offering it unconditionally hampers it.
If your understanding of the scientific evidence is that it supports "dry shelters are harmful and their existence exacerbates heroin addiction," then I think that's a good argument in favor of the inclusion of anecdotes on this topic.
If your understanding of the scientific method and critical inquiry amounts to "if you have some belief I don't like then anecdotes are useful" then you need to level up your understanding of the scientific method and critical inquiry.
>Cities also have higher costs of living because they are densely populated
Isn't population density supposed to introduce efficiencies that would lead to lowering costs? I think, that's the usual argument against suburban sprawl.
Nah it's caused by poor family cultures that lead to mental illness and drug addiction. Short of rounding up families and forcing them to be responsible for their children, teens, and young adults, there's actually nothing we can do to get these people off the street.
You know it's funny. A lot of people look at the US and turn up their noses at our "poor infrastructure". Just a couple of months ago I watched a very tropey discussion take place on the lack of a robust US rail system. In another discussion, the lack of a robust US healthcare system.
All the armchair pundits come out to point to other countries as leaders in these areas, but when it comes to homelessness, I see a lot less of it pointing to places like Japan, Singapore and the APAC region, where homelessness is a cultural stigma placed not just on the individual but on the family. Family name and culture mean something. Generational safety nets are present because the family cares for the individual simply because they share a common genealogy. Families will go very far to avoid allowing a member of their heritage to become a vagabond.
Weird to me how this part is left out of the conversation. Perhaps this is a consequence of our indulgence in unrestricted libertarian individualism.
I'm glad you brought up Singapore, since they can actually force people with mental health or addiction issues into shelters. Imprisoning people for being mentally ill or addicts is a viable to solution to homeless and it clearly works for Singapore, however this will never happen in the West. For better or worse, individual liberty is sacred in our cultural tradition, and it will never be politically palatable to force people into shelters.
Forcing people into treatment was our standard approach to this problem for decades and it worked very well. We need to bring it back.
There should be zero people doing meth on the street; if you see one it should be a single phone call to have the cops pick that person up and send them to the secured treatment facility on the edge of town.
Yet too many people think it's better to just let people do meth on the street, despite the problems it causes for everyone, and the huge amount of money wasted not solving the problem of the chronically homeless.
My point is that our drunkenness on individualism has led to a low view of the family. If you have a low view of family then you're primed to inevitably become ambivalent at best, cynical at worst, to your own kin.
The vast majority of people who are homeless don't suffer from mental illness or drug addiction. The most visible do, but not most of them. And of those, a bunch didn't suffer from drug addiction when they become homeless.
I don't know, the article mentions people who work two jobs having to live in an RV because they can't afford rent. As an external observer, it seems to me that in some parts of the US, inequality is so bad that homelessness is eating the working class. In Europe or Australia[1], the lady working two jobs or the war veteran taking $1200/month in social security would definitely not be homeless. Would they live in government housing, in a sketchy part of town? Sure. But how can you even compare that to being homeless...
[1] Australia, though, is currently in the middle of a rental crisis and becoming much worse.
The visible homeless—the vagrants you see in tent cities under the freeway or harassing pedestrians—are more likely to have drug addictions or other mental illnesses. And the more mentally ill they are, the more visible they become since they end up committing crimes and making a nuisance of themselves. If you’re mainly concerned about the externalities of homelessness—e.g. needles and human feces on the street, crime, harassment, etc—then you’d be well served addressing this problem in particular.
If you define “homeless” by people not having consistent housing, there is a much larger population of those people. Maybe they’re sleeping on a buddy’s couch, or they find a kind stranger to take them in, or they get by via stealth camping. On the margin, expanding public housing or making housing more affordable would help these people. But it wouldn’t do much about the more visible and troublesome ones.
What is this help anyway? Can you magically fix someone who was fucked in the ass by foster parents as a child or someone who was born with schizophrenia?
Some people fall through the cracks. My mother was a therapist and she used to tell me tragic stories about her clients.
If I had lived those lives I'd be out there smoking crack too.
Only the visible homeless problem. There are plenty of homeless you don’t notice because they aren’t raving like a lunatic without a shirt on. We have two separate problems, but they are sadly often conflated.
That really isn’t true either. Homelessness doesn’t cause drug abuse, there is plenty of drug abuse among the housed, it isn’t weird that some of them eventually lose their support network. There are definitely economic homeless in Seattle, they just aren’t as visible as the fent addicts.
Absolutely there's plenty of addiction problems, toxic drug problems and mental illness problems in my city, but the numbers don't lie and we have lost thousands on thousands of the most affordable rental housing stock over the last few decades even as population grew.
If we had actually gained affordable housing stock as population increased, or at least kept pace, we would be in a different situation. No doubt we would still have issues of a small amount of people having issues with mental illness, but we would be dramatically more capable of helping them than we are now with the incredibly scarce level of apartments we have now.
Not very many. Even if you could build a home for $400k and it only cost $100k in maintenance / utilities / upkeep for the next 10 years, that's still only 34k homes.
It's not even a lack of homes--its a lack of access to existing homes. There are already ~16 million vacant homes in the USA, a tiny fraction of which could house the homeless if there were political will.
We all can say homelessness is a problem, but if you ask these people hoarding vacant homes if they'd be willing to house a homeless person on their property, or if you ask a politician whether they are willing to nationalize those properties to provide homes, suddenly their response will be "Uhh... Ohh... Hrrmm... I guess it's not that big a problem." The rubber is not hitting the road.
The vast majority of those homes are either being actively fixed/waiting for a tenant to move in or are in bumfuck where no one wants to live. If you can convince the homeless on the west coast to move to the vacant places in kansas congratulations, you just won California's governor election. The reality is that there are not nearly enough homes where people want to be. Until you can force the homeless to go to less desirable areas the homes there arent helpful.
When I was homeless, I was placed on a waiting list and sent to "my" freight elevator/park bench to count the days.
My number came up and I was called into an office. I was verbally introduced to a program that would take control of my finances and then send me wherever they had something available. Some of the cities mentioned might as well have been Kansas.
I said no thanks, I'll stay on the streets. I waited for a longer time and another program opened up. They didn't take control of my finances and they allowed me to choose exactly where I wanted to apply for a lease.
That was 20 years ago, and I have lived happily ever after.
The vast majority of those "vacant" homes are either very temporarily up for sale or rent, dilapidated, or in need of a lot of repairs. There are not 16 million habitable units sitting empty year after year.
> Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes.
That is absolutely not true. Not even close.
Mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse are major factors. Dozens of studies show this. I've seen numbers as high as 76% having substance abuse and severe mental illness.
One study from 2017 says 80% mental illness, 88% drug abuse and 59% alcohol addiction. There are studies with lower numbers. In most, if not all, of these, the government entities who publish them will typically change the definition of "homeless" to artificially reduce the numbers and make themselves look good. There are two ways to fix homelessness: You make them disappear (put them in a building, creative counting, etc.), or actually address the real root causes --which nobody is doing or even talking about.
Saying the issue is lack of homes implies these people could actually pay for a place to stay. They cannot. They are sick and/or addicted to something. They likely cannot work or earn even the legally minimum wage without a massive intervention to get them back to functional status.
In a free society we do not have the legal means to round-up sick people, get them cleaned-up, help them, rebuild them as necessary and then put them back in circulation. We just don't have that legal power. People do as they wish and there's very little society can really do to help them.
Throwing them into a buildings merely (and conveniently) hides the real problems: Mental illness and addiction.
> Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their ability to pay?
That solves absolutely nothing. I refer you to the $17B we spent in CA on this problem.
The fundamental issues are mental health and addiction.
All you achieve is making the problem invisible so everyone can feel like they did something. When, in reality, the root causes are not addressed at all.
It is critical to understand that our laws DO NOT ALLOW US to force anyone to do anything. Meaning, if a mentally ill or addicted person says "I am not going anywhere" and "I refuse treatment" we CANNOT force them.
The root causes, for the most part, are mental illness and addition. We cannot be effective helping these people because --by law-- we cannot effectively arrest and force them to accept help of any kind.
In a lot of cases you have addicts who are 100% out of their mind and you are trying to reason with them to accept help. Good luck.
A member of my family and a couple of good friends are professionals deeply involved with the treatment side of this issue. What they tell me is exactly what I have conveyed here.
If we could force people into a solid 12 to 24 month program we could eliminate most of the problem in 5 to 10 years. We can't. Because we have laws that protect citizens from being detained and incarcerated unless they commit a crime. Mental health and addiction are not crimes.
In other words, that path is impossible.
How, then, do they propose this be solved?
Conceptually simple. Politically...well, our politicians are fucking incompetent morons.
You have to clamp down hard on the illicit drugs that are destroying so many lives. Shit like cocaine and heroin should not exist on our streets. Fentanyl-laced pills should not be able to pour through our border like candy (quite literally, google it). Etc.
For some unexplained reason we are willing to burn $17B in just one state of this country to pretend we are helping people and virtue-signal and, at the same time, we refuse to put real money and effort into real actions that would almost make this problem disappear.
Simple math: If none of the drugs a huge portion of these people take were to be available for, say, six months, most of them would gladly get detox help and come out of it a year later with a very different perspective in life. You have to stop the drugs. Things like safe injection spaces are horrible ideas. What you want is free detox centers and a complete clamp-down on drug availability. Then you get results.
I was just in Singapore. Before I could fly there I had to sign a document that had a warning in big, bold, all upper-case letters that read: The penalty for bringing illicit drugs into Singapore is death.
Even if you think the root cause is always mental health or addiction (which is reductive victim blaming but I digress), what do you think is more likely to help someone recover: having them live on the streets feeling like worthless shit, or providing them the stability of a home?
The war on drugs has been an abject failure. Escalating it to killing people seems utterly barbaric. Legalizing, regulating, decriminalizing, and focusing on rehabilitation and harm reduction is the best course we have.
Sorry, you don't know what you are talking about. There's report after report, from highly trusted sources such as Stanford, showing that up to 80% of the issue is mental health and 50% of those afflicted are addicted to drugs, with another 50% alcohol.
The ONLY way to improve this is to stop the flow of drugs. And then, yes, we probably need to rethink some of our laws so we can have the ability to force people into programs to help them.
Housing addicts and alcoholics or those with serious mental health issues does not fix anything at all. All you've accomplished it to make them invisible to society. Good job. They are still fucked.
It's like lots of other issues, people love to jump on a moral high ground that sounds great. Feels good, right? It helps nobody at all. Just like safe places for addicts to inject themselves and free needles, etc. Somehow the term "moronic" isn't enough to describe these ideas.
Talk to mental health professionals who actually work with the homeless --as I have, because we have many in our social group-- and you might just learn your ideas are not aligned with reality at all. Not even close.
> Sorry, you don’t know what you are talking about.
Yes, I do.
> There’s report after report, from highly trusted sources such as Stanford, showing that up to 80% of the issue is mental health and 50% of those afflicted are addicted to drugs, with another 50% alcohol.
Yes, there is lots of evidence that homelessness, addiction, and mental health issues are deeply intertwined (there’s a lot less clarity on root causation, and the evidence on solutions leans very heavily in favor of housing as key, but all of them needing to be addressed together. I wasn’t dismissing mental health and addiction as important areas to address, I was mocking the reductive, dismissive claim that spending money on housing and still having the problem proves that that is an incorrect place to invest; you could say the same thing just as much about mental health and addiction, because very large chunks of money have been spent on those things and…the problem persists. But, of course, that’s because the logic is bunk, and its just as stupid applied to housing as it is to behavioral health.
Spending money or how much is spent, as a metric, is meaningless. Ridiculous, really.
What matters are effective measures.
What also matters is what is attainable with the legal framework we have, not some fantasy land where you just put people in rooms for free and the problem is fixes.
Of course you have to house people who can't fend for themselves. Of course you have to feed them. Of course you have to treat them. Of course you have to provide training and counseling so they can rejoin society, get a job and have a life.
Of course.
Of course.
Of course!
And yet, the problem isn't housing. Do they need a place to live that isn't the streets? Duh! Of course. However, above all, what they need is effective treatment and training. Without that, no amount of free housing fixes the problem.
Years ago I had an employee who would occasionally not come to work for a few days here and there. We never knew what was goin on. He was a good guy. We dealt with it as best we could.
Three months later the police knock on our door. He was found dead behind a 7-Eleven in the neighborhood. Turns out he was an alcoholic. It also turns out he would go into a drinking spree with almost every paycheck he got from us. He was deeply addicted to alcohol and nobody had a clue.
Well, I later met his brother. He told me his family had been trying to help him for decades. Nothing they could do about it at all. Once again, the laws I refer to. We cannot force people into treatment of any kind. Or, for that matter, housing. This guy was in his early 40's. He made good money doing construction work. He had housing. He had a car. He did not lack resources at all. And yet he was found dead by the trashcans behind a 7-Eleven.
The root cause is mental health, drugs and addiction.
The problem is we lack the legal tools to be able to interdict and help people under the grip of these afflictions.
Therefore, the only potential solution is some form of severe clamp-down on drugs and alcohol as well as coming up with an intelligent way to deal with mental health issues.
These are very difficult problems to solve. Some more than others.
We can definitely be extremely effective against illicit drugs. Violently effective. That would help a lot of people. Yet, for some reason, politicians don't seem interested in doing a thing about it.
Alcohol is tough. We can't ban it. Not sure how you keep alcoholics from alcohol. Again, the legal framework just isn't there for this. I don't know. Also, I don't drink alcohol. Never developed a taste for it. So, I don't really understand the appeal.
some of the inaction is truly disconcerting. We are being invaded by all kinds of fentanyl-laced products through the southern border, and our government is doing nothing to shut this down in a decisive manner. I mean, literally shit disguised as candy is coming through in industrial amounts:
The problem isn't money. Or how much of it we might spend. It is not making the right decisions and not going after root causes of problems. The root causes are nowhere near to housing. Housing is a necessary tool for rehabilitation, of course. However, nothing will be solved unless the root causes are addressed with serious effectiveness first, or simultaneously.
I will remind you that my reply was to this statement (not made by you):
> Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes
> Spending money or how much is spent, as a metric, is meaningless. Ridiculous, really.
I agree, that's why I’ve been mocking you for setting it up as a metric (and for misrepresenting the facts when you did so.)
> What also matters is what is attainable with the legal framework we have,
While I disagree with a lot of your rant, this is definitely true.
> Therefore, the only potential solution is some form of severe clamp-down on drugs and alcohol
We've tried, in both cases; neither is effectively attainable within anything like the legal framework we have, and even trying has massive adverse effects in other areas.
The solution is adequate housing (both quantitatively and with distributive support) [0] + much better health, especially behavioral health (which encompasses both what is usually known as mental health and substance use disorder prevention and treatment) support.
> The root causes are nowhere near to housing
The root causes are complex, but housing absolutely is one of them, and often preceds manifestation or significant deepening of health (behavioral and physical health) problems that make housing alone and inadequate solution for that individual. Adequate housing is not only necessary for other interventions for the currently homeless, it is an even more important preventive measure to reduce the rate at which people become homeless.
[0] And most of what has been seriously tried in CA is too little, too late on distributive support. Rather than actually achieving quantitatively adequate housing, though there are long-term measures toward adequacy finally beginning to exert some force.
It's going to the administrators of the homeless industrial complex. It's the same problem we're seeing with colleges where the number of administrators has dramatically grown year over year.
Managerial bloat. The more money we give, the more they grow.
My partner and I recently returned from a road trip through Cali and were absolutely shocked by the societal issues in San Francisco.
You’d be walking down a built up high street which would, all of a sudden, turn into a tented area full of people with terrible mental health and drug problems.
It seemed to us that the big issue is a lack of any medical care which exasperates the underlying issues brought about by homelessness. We were terribly saddened by what we saw.
I couldn’t even begin to fathom how you would fix such a complex problem without the involvement and empathy of the whole country.
Even if you figured out a solution to the local issue it would only last so long as people would (rightly so) travel in from other states/cities due to a lack of working solution where they are from originally. And then you would end up back at square 1 when your local solution’s resources have been depleted.
One homeless man I spoke to told me that he ventured to San Francisco in order to get HIV medication as he was unable to get it in his home state, for whatever reason.
That alone highlighted the need for a nationwide plan which would align all state governments. Without a federally mandated baseline of care for these people I feel as though this type of issue will persist.
And I think that the keyword in all of this is _people_. We often forget that that is what they are. They had hopes, they had dreams, they have just been forgotten and are now labelled as a ‘problem’ opposed to a ‘person’.
> As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians.
> “This is a local crisis and a homegrown problem,” said Peter Lynn, the executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the agency that conducts the largest homeless census count in the country.
> L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years.
CA considers you a resident for tax purposes if you live in the state for a year but in homeless studies they consider you a resident if you live here for more than 10 years.
Edit: Reply to paisawalla
May I point out the post I replied to had no data. If you have data that addresses the two points you made, please post them. It is always easy to nitpick data when you have none.
2) fails to distinguish between temporary hardship homelessness and that resulting of addiction/illness
Should not be relied upon. For the first, there is an obvious incentive towards exaggerating one's stay in state, and no counter-incentive whatsoever. For the latter, these are two separate problems which need drastically different solutions.
Besides what the other person said, given that California is in fact, the most populous state, it seems obvious to me that what I said can be true while the majority of homeless in the state still originate from the state...
I mean if you really want to be blunt and honest about it, the reason we have a worse problem is because ......
Drugs, mental illness, and sometimes just bad decision making skills. The US has a LOT of drugs, and you can look at our education system at large and make up your own conclusion about our decision making ability as a whole.
I volunteered with homeless and the facts are out there. Honestly the experience left me jaded. On the bright side, almost all people who become homeless only remain so for like 2 weeks. These are the majority of people who are just down on hard times and they seek out and utilize charity and social services to get back on their feet.
Then... you have the "homeless" that everyone means, like the stories you hear from SF. Half of these folks are mentally ill. The other half are basically just incapable or uninterested in making good decisions due to past circumstances. Because we live in a civilized society, it would be unconstitutional to force mentally ill people into mandatory mental health treatment. Also, people don't want to jail the guy who has been arrested dozens of times and beat a couple grandmas. The solution seems to be to allow open air drug markets and removal of police presence all around the Civic Center and downtown areas.
> Drugs, mental illness, and sometimes just bad decision making skills.
Any explanation which comes down to personal decisions has to account for the fact that many other developed countries have avoided the same dystopian hell of inequality as the Bay Area and likely have similar distributions of behavior. Are people in California just more prone to using drugs, being mentally ill and making bad decisions? No. In civilized places, if you mess up a little (or even a lot) the consequence should not be to sleep on the street. It’s a moral failing at a societal level.
so you skipped over the part where I said that almost everyone who becomes homeless is off the street within two weeks?
The people who continue sleeping on the street are the other group I mentioned. and yes they come to CA from other states because the laws here are loose and weather is nice every single day.
Refusing to stay in a shelter because drugs aren’t allowed. Instead of helping people wean off hard drugs, SF allows open air drug markets run by gangs. The “homeless” issue will always exist this way.
Most people in SF aren’t from California, let alone counting the unhoused population. America has freedom of movement, you just need a bus ticket, no hukou or residency permit needed.
> Billions going where, exactly? If the problems growing, and you are just sinking billions into it without making any measurable impact, where the fuck is the money going?
Towards more homelessness. They are subsidizing it. Literally paying people money to be homeless.
It's ultimately a government jobs program, just like almost all government programs. If it employs people, it's good, regardless of whether it accomplishes the stated outcome.
What's crazy is that we decide to spend on homelessness in such inefficient ways.
A "housing first" strategy would be more humane, and pretty affordable compared to what we're currently doing. This article says $3.7B for an estimated 115k homeless population which yields around $32k per person per year, or $2700 per person per month, and that's only state money. In SF it may be more like $57k/yr, or $4750/mo. At those rates, we could be renting people market rate 1BD apartments for less than we're spending on inefficient/ineffective services or safe sleeping sites. Cities could be buying up the over-built condos and actually putting people in them.
Yes, drug addiction and mental health issues are important factors, but these are easier for people to get under control if they have the safety and stability of a home. Getting and holding down a job is also easier when you have a safe place to live.
Why don't we do this? I think it comes down to (a) corruption, where organizations that provide 'services' have good relationships with people in government and (b) "fairness" concerns, where a working person paying out the nose for half of an apartment doesn't want their tax dollars to give anyone an apartment for free. On that second point, I understand the frustration, but if the alternative is spending _more_ tax dollars for someone to camp on the sidewalk and make my neighborhood feel unsafe and unclean, then I would rather put them into homes.
We are doing exactly what you propose. Many communities have "housing first" homeless strategies. Some people do in fact get off the street.
But we also have some "service resistant" homeless populations that do not want to live in your rule-based housing, they want to live without those rules even if it means living on the street.
SF gets described as 'housing first', but it certainly does not act like it. In SF, we actually have unspent funds from our 2018 "Prop C" ballot initiative which dedicated funding to specific categories, the largest of which was for permanent housing. I.e. there has been money available for 5 years for permanent housing, but the city is not willing to buy available units -- it will only consider developing new projects, which get stuck in planning hell, and have extremely high per-unit costs. The city is not willing to rent vacant market-rate units, even when large numbers are available, including in rent-stabilized buildings, where it could have long-term predictable rents. When rents dropped sharply during the pandemic, we did not put people into empty, cheap apartments. Instead, we payed $5k/month per tent in parking lot safe sleeping sites.
Mayor Breed is also trying to take funds which are set aside for permanent housing and use them for shelter beds and prevention services.
Funding exists to put more people into actual housing basically immediately, but the city instead pursues more shelter beds and ever larger contracts with Urban Alchemy.
Most of the $5k/tent was in the services required for a high-needs population. As someone who has been impacted by a building set on fire by a meth addicted neighbor, simply placing high needs homeless people who often have serious mental health or drug abuse issues, in apartments isn't the end of the story. In many cases, it makes the lives of other residents of the building worse, as evidenced by the issues (including high rate of nuisance evictions) plaguing SROs in SF.
Santa Clara County tried a random assignment housing first experiment in 2021 where homeless people given apartments died at roughly the same rates from drug overdose, etc. than homeless people who didn't receive housing.
For these reasons and more, it makes a lot of sense to not acquire one-off units in existing buildings for PSH, and Prop C set asides for PSH instead of shelter or whatever the city deemed most useful for homeless people is kind of downstream of nonprofit politics and not a statement about voter mandates or what's best for homeless people.
You seem to be conflating drug use with homelessness. Lots of unhoused people are not on drugs and lots (the vast, vast majority) of drug users have homes.
70% of San Francisco’s homeless population self reports as struggling with drug abuse or mental illness in the Point in Time count. It’s not a conflation; it’s reality. That’s also why the tent camps cost $5k a month to staff security, medical workers, etc.
If they found that out using a street poll, then they probably missed a lot of homeless who don’t appear homeless, are higher functioning, maybe they are crashing in their car and taking showers at a gym.
We know little about this problem, and most of our information depends on unreliable self reporting.
You provided no link to a methodology. But if it’s like other point in time surveys, it is only looking at people on the street or using services, and are well known for selection bias.
You have provided no evidence either and your claims are vague and not derived from any named study. In any case, PIT as operated by SF HSH can be found here, which certainly you could have reached with a simple Google search of the terms I used: https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/research-and-reports/pit-hic/.
In addition, people who are not legible to PIT methodology are certainly not rolled up into state level statistics upon which this claim of failure and the article rest, so in many ways their existence is not relevant to my point or this discussion.
> In addition, people who are not legible to PIT methodology are certainly not rolled up into state level statistics upon which this claim of failure and the article rest, so in many ways their existence is not relevant to my point or this discussion.
OK, I agree that PIT just counts what it counts. But then that means any homeless that aren’t counted by PIT aren’t relevant. It’s just bad data that we can’t really work with.
I’m going to be honest: I can’t find a single way the criticisms of PIT you’ve linked relate to the conversation at all. We are discussing why the $5k/mo SF spent on tent villages is incommensurable to studio rents. Even if it were the case that PIT overrepresented people with mental health or drug abuse issues, it’s still true that the 10k or so homeless individuals counted by it had a 70% rate of reporting those problems. Which means housing them is not a matter of simply paying rent.
I'm glad they aren't just buying up existing housing stock. We have a housing shortage, and subsidizing demand will just further send prices up for everyone else. Net new housing, even if more expensive, will do far more good overall.
I'm all for net new housing. And I think we should green-light new residential projects faster. But telling currently homeless people to _wait_ for new projects to be planned and built, when there's already a glut of vacant condos struggling to sell seems cruel. I'm not saying the city needs to bid aggressively -- but when the market slows down, why not get a deal?
That second part is a seriously hard problem to deal with because we got rid of institutionalization except in some (very expensive and rare) situations. So we're effectively requiring the prison system to handle things, and only when it becomes too much of a big problem.
I suspect we need something like actual government-owned and managed slums - basically jails you can leave at any time. It would be much worse than "normal housing" but it has to be better than a tent under a bridge.
We got rid of institutionalization for very good reason. Many of them outright abused the people under their care. Cleaning up the system is hard. Many of the homeless have mental issues such that they cannot figure out how to report abuse even if it would be listened to, and of course institutions have easy means to ensure you can't report things. (or you can report, but the person doing the abuse investigates and finds nothing wrong)
We had problems with abuse in many institutions (schools, churches, nursing homes) but we didn't get rid of all those.
It would cost, but you can externally monitor and correct institutions if you have entirely separate people doing it.
Or - livestream everything and let the public monitor it. (Obviously this can't be done for various reasons, but we now have the technology to literally record it all.)
Everyone deserves safe housing, living among raving maniacs is not safe, ergo we need to house dangerous people like that separately. Ideally in a way that helps them the most.
Right, which means it seems wrong to incarcerate them in a mental facility against their will. I'm assuming very few would willingly be incarcerated.
Maybe there's a way to house them in some kind of voluntary mental facility only for non-dangerous mentally ill people. They can come and go during the day. But at least they have a roof over their heads, someone to look after them, provide clean clothes, etc.
Feels like someone must have already tried this and none of the mentally ill homeless were interested.
My position is: if you're a danger to yourself and society you should be coerced into receiving treatment (either in a prison or mental institution) if you are not you should receive housing and non-coercive treatment options through a publicly funded healthcare system.
This seems weirdly controversial though. Seems like people vehemently opposed one or the other half of the solution and we get the terrible situation we have now.
If the alternative is you're causing problems for the public like creating unsanitary and unsafe conditions, then yes. If you don't do those things like the invisible homeless, then no of course not. Which isn't to say there shouldn't be help for those homeless people getting back to having a home, but that's a different matter. If you really prefer being a vagrant, don't trash or block public places and nobody will care.
On this note, LA has hundreds of shelter beds the remain empty every night because they're located in "sober" facilities (meaning that the facilities do not allow alcohol or drug use) and the putative residents would rather be able to drink and use drugs than to have shelter.
I live in a midsize city outside of California that has 3 shelters downtown. 1 shelter dropped the sober requirement trying to house those people. They had to reinstate the rules within 24h because 2 employees had been assaulted, and a serious fight had broken out that required hospital care for both people involved. It is sad state of affairs.
There's a "missing middle" that we cannot provide in our current society. Nobody can provide "flop houses" where drugs and alcohol use are ignored unless you're harming someone, so there's nothing between sleeping rough under the bridge and being sober in a shelter.
The liability alone would prevent any non-government agency from doing it, and even the government is scared.
The problem with flop houses that don’t have drug and alcohol restrictions is that the other residents suffer and things fall apart quickly. These aren’t people with great self control. Even homeless with drug and alcohol abuse problems will stay away from these places because they are too dangerous.
It won’t be cheap (likely with security and other support staff you’re looking at one or to staff per “homeless”) but at some point something has to be done, or the status quo continues forever.
That is what the current tiny home movement is for: you don’t have to room with crazy next door, and if you are crazy and burn it down, they are basically disposable.
That’s what I’m thinking - imagine very tiny one room concrete houses on tiny little lots, maybe 10x10 on a 20x20 lot? No idea the numbers, but that’s bigger than a jail cell and they’re damn near indestructible.
Opioid substitution therapy has a long track record of effectiveness, but when treating homeless addicts we all too often insist they go through withdrawal, to nobody's benefit. Not all homeless are addicts, but an individual suffering opioid addiction has very different behavior from someone who isn't, and that requires particular attention. Opioids have the worst relapse rate of all addictive drugs.
Stimulant withdrawal on the other hand is generally less severe, and acute stimulant intoxication is more likely to cause serious behavioral problems than with opioids (or methadone). Cocaine has a surprisingly low relapse rate, once sobriety is maintained for a few months.
Alcohol is a little more difficult, because it not only has a dangerous withdrawal syndrome but it also causes aggressive or impulsive behavior. Treating withdrawal is imperative; substitution is difficult, since other anxiolytics can produce the same impulse control problems. Access to alcohol is pervasive, as well, and we would like to avoid constant monitoring.
When we see only the possibilities of permissiveness or restriction and not active and detailed intervention, we are not playing with a full deck. As another commenter mentioned, simply allowing shelter residents to use drugs creates risks to other residents and staff. But we should be as accommodating as reasonably achievable.
another aspect here is that we're not just talking about users. in the areas I frequent in SF the homeless population has dropped a lot in the last year - except for the cooks and the dealers. they aren't giving up their only income stream.
It's more than this though. Families can't stay together, belongings get stolen, safety can be an issue, you can't bring your pets, etc. There are a lot of reasons those kinds of shelter can't work for some people.
Then figure out what rules can and cannot work. I listened to a podcast were a vet's fucking service dog disallowed him from getting into rehab. A service dog!
Service animals are medical equipment my dude. It would be as immoral as claiming someone can only go to rehab if they give up their insulin or their wheelchair.
You probably still won't get it, but replace "dog" with "kid" or "friend" and say that sentence again. That might give you a sense of how attached a lot of people are to their dogs.
What is the fraction of people that could have housing and are choosing not to receive it, and the fraction that would accept housing but has not been offered it?
25% died (overdose on drugs), and 21% returned to the streets. We need to recognize that drug addicts don't make rational decisions for themselves. We shouldn't leave them on the streets to do drugs, we shouldn't give them free housing to do drugs, we should put them in rehab. If they don't want to go to rehab, charge them with possession of illegal substances and put them in a prison rehab system. This type of life crippling drug addiction shouldn't be tolerated.
I recognize that not all homeless are drug addicts, they should be supported in a much different way than we support drug addicts.
Rehab might be one of the least effective solutions of all [0]. If it's inpatient then you are paying for housing anyway, but without any of the benefits of stability that would allow someone to use it as a springboard to get a job.
The rehab is just the first step of a successful housing first solution. The homeless should not be given homes until they are sobor. Once the rehab is complete they get housing as long as they stay sobor. If they can't they get imprisoned.
Housing First is clearly the best strategy to solve homelessness, but it should not be confused with Housing Only, which the article has plenty of examples of.
Using a mismanaged Housing First program to argue against Housing First is also borderline absurd, I agree with you there.
I'm quoting a tweet from the president of Y Combinator. I'm not against giving people housing, but I think there needs to be a sobriety requirement. Why would putting someone in a house cure them of their addiction? Put them through rehab, then give them a house when they leave rehab.
Treating a symptom instead of the cause is stupid, especially if the symptom (drug use) will likely return as soon as they return to the streets after rehab/prison.
> They use drugs because they live on the streets.
Have you ever used drugs? Drugs are fun. Until they aren't anymore, then they cause problems, like becoming homeless. That drugs are mostly just a symptom of homelessness is such a weird assertion that keeps getting tossed around.
This person likes doing drugs and has no intention to quit: https://archive.ph/wnTq6 But she'll happily take all the free stuff you want to give her. I'm not saying this is every homeless person. But let's not pretend like it's none of them either, and create policies accordingly.
I'm all for housing first. But there needs to be a filter imo to pick only the people with an actual chance of success (which so far turns out to be a pretty low % in LA's program, but still great for those people and I'm all for it).
Also there has to be some consideration for the working/lower class people who live in these neighborhoods. If the people making the policies and those making loftiest arguments online actually had to live amidst all the chaos, I think we'd see a very different approach.
A lot of them uses drugs because they are mentally ill, and this is their way to cope with it. People that aren't dangerous to anybody but themselves would not get treated involuntarily, and they would not follow voluntary treatments because drugs are easier. Living on the streets is a consequence too - it's hard to hold a job while being mentally ill addict, it's hard to pay rent while having no job, and it's hard to follow any rules framework which would be in place for a housing solution while being all the above.
I'm not arguing that the homeless should only receive housing, I'm saying that any other help you give them likely won't help unless you provide housing.
And that help should include mental healthcare and a support structure.
The social culture in our society (and especially in circles that would be implementing the support structure) leans heavily towards "it's not your fault, you are magnificent, you do you, there's no consequences whatsoever whatever you do". This approach is not going to work for the vast majority of these cases. There would be consequences, but since the "support" people will refuse to be the bad guys and implement the consequences, the consequences will come in the form of these programs turning into disastrous nightmares - just as various "housing hotels" turned into disastrous filthy drug-filled rat-infested nightmares. Throwing billions at the problem might provide a nice income to a number of GONGO staff and make them feel excellent because "they are doing something", but otherwise will not do much.
Parent didn’t suggest returning them to the streets after rehab. They said give them free housing after rehab.
That being said, addiction is not easily cured with or without free housing, if the substance of addiction is easily available nearby (alcohol, drugs, casinos) without additional support systems.
Look up the Skid Row Housing Trust's collapse for a detailed look at why housing first is doomed to failure.
In a nutshell: homelessness is a symptom, not a cause, and housing doesn't address the reasons that individuals are homeless. The SRHT focused on housing first, but now has hundreds of unoccupiable units that were damaged by drug-addicted and mentally-ill individuals and rendered inhospitable (and this ultimately led to the SRHT's financial collapse).
For the 90+% of homeless that are homeless due to mental illness or drug abuse, treatment first is the only viable solution, but we're not legally allowed to force someone into treatment until and unless they're an immediate physical danger to themselves or others.
There are homeless and there are homeless; the vast majority of homeless are transiently homeless - "homeless for six weeks or fewer; 40 percent have a job".
It's the "chronic homelessness" that is hard to fight, and those have a large percentage of mental illness and drug abuse. Those have to be handled differently and delicately because anything that is heavy handed will likely catch up others in the net.
The Skid Row Housing Trust situation does sound bleak, but insofar as "housing first" is meant to provide a safe and stable environment that can enable other kinds of life improvements, I dunno that the housing they were providing fits the bill.
> its portfolio is heavily weighted with early 20th century hotels with tiny living spaces, communal bathrooms and kitchens
> Residents complain that lax security allows intruders to have easy access to the building and that one resident disrupts the entire building.
> While giving a tour of the building to a Times reporter, a tenant pushed open the disruptive man’s door
> Residents of the Hart alleged they frequently had to use buckets in their rooms as toilets.
> Los Angeles County departments of health services and mental health warned the trust of habitability and safety issues that were causing clients to decline housing in its buildings
Suppose you live in one of these, and every time you go to the bathroom or the kitchen, you feel unsafe (anyone could be in the building), or are going to encounter various triggers (how much harder is it to get clean if there's drug use still all around you?), and are still subject to a lot of stress, disruption and uncertainty caused by your living situation. It seems like this organization was ambitious in the number of people it could house, but took real compromises in the quality of that housing. And it depended on very high occupancy to be financially even close to viable.
I used to be a public defender in the LA area, and I used to work with LAHSA.
My 90+% number refers to the chronic homeless, not the temporary homeless for whom financial issues or fleeing domestic violence are the primary causes of their short-term homelessness.
It really seems like we ought to be forcibly funneling everyone either into a shelter or into a jail[0]/rehab-diversion. Persons incompatible with housing should be arrested, tried, and sent to jail or diverted to a rehab-type program for violating the laws that make them incompatible. Not so much a "housing first" policy as a 'housing mandatory' policy, coupled with enforcement of laws against things like property damage and illegal drug use.
[0]For illegally camping, if nothing else. This of course would require adequate production of shelter beds for legal and ethical reasons.
Simply giving the homeless, a lot of them addicted and with mental health original, a $4700/month home or the money directly does not help them.
Without being presumptive, it irks me to see internet experts barge it with their own theories and expertise, rather than the people who have studied and dedicated themselves for decades.
> Without being presumptive, it irks me to see internet experts barge it with their own theories and expertise, rather than the people who have studied and dedicated themselves for decades.
I will also defer to experts who do not have a financial stake in the game. My understanding is that "housing first" has a lot of expert proponents. My frustration is that even when housing can be acquired for less than the cost of clearly inferior services (again, $5k/mo per tent in SF parking-lot safe sleeping sites), we refuse to do it. I have not heard any expert on homelessness argue that safe sleeping sites were a "good" solution. I do know that we paid a lot for them.
Edit: Unlike the sibling poster I am saying it give it to them directly.
I guarantee you it if you set the average homeless person up with a nice apartment and just gave them the change from
that $4700 in a real bank account no strings attached in perpetuity the problem would get sorted real quick. Oh no they do drugs?! like the heaviest drug users I've ever met aren't white collar.
Even better offer them that same $4700 deal but pay to relocate them to the midwest and they'll be able to afford all but the penthouse luxury apartments, pay all their bills and expenses, and still put $2k in savings/discretionary spending every month.
Like we're talking about spending an amount of money that would be life changing to the average american household per capita and pretending that somehow it wouldn't change lives. Sure there's gonna be exceptions but buy some sandwiches and forties shoot the shit with some homeless folks sometime. They're mostly normal-ass people who've been traumatized by homelessness and stuck.
In a world where I become one of those rich people that can't spend money fast enough to not get richer that's 100% gonna be my lifetime project. Wonder if Bezos is looking for a new wife.
Definitely giving them $4700/month no strings attached will solve the problem quickly. I get it, white collar people are the heaviest drug users, but the fent will kill them in the street in a couple of months. That’s just $10,400 spent, which is much better than where we are now. It is, however, a very dark solution, and not humane at all.
Look, I get what you're saying but there's very little alternative. Putting strings on the aid makes it not do the one thing it needs to do which is provide unwavering stability and a sustainable alternative to their previous way of living.
If you want to force people into rehab because their addiction is going to kill them then do that. That's an independent problem from
being homeless.
We can't be like addiction is a disease and "just get clean your ability to have food and shelter depends on it" at the same time.
Edit: Also good fucking lord I can't even imagine a worse way to do permanent housing. You disperse them into regular neighborhoods like any other renter. Whoever thought packing them together was a good idea is insane.
The bit about white collar drug users isn't some snipe about executives doing too much cocaine, but that white collar drug users aren't dropping dead like flies on vinegar.
IMO The issue is that anytime more money becomes available, CA government/bureaucracy sucks it up. Lots of state jobs created to run these programs that ultimately do little good. Seems more like middle class jobs program than actually attempting to solve the problem.
"... or $4750/mo. At those rates, we could be renting people market rate 1BD apartments"
A common misconception - but money is not housing. There are no extra 1BD units available. We could use this money to outbid other people to put the current homeless in those places, displacing others and somewhat increasing overall rent prices (and/or waiting lists). But I don't think that's what you intend.
In the end, if we want more people to have housing, then we have to allow more housing to be built. It's not (just) a money problem.
Utah has been doing a housing first program for about 20 years. It has definitely helped a lot of people, but it hasn't really solved the problem either.
(I'm not saying the strategy is flawed - maybe it is, maybe Utah is doing it wrong, maybe you need housing first plus a bunch of other things - who knows).
I think on this issues it’s conservatives that make a solution untenable.
Conservatives are going to be against giving out living space. So that kills any housing first policies.
The alternative has to be something that a politician can sponsor and be confident that in a few years when they are up for re-election that there won’t be any obvious fraud or abuse. Eg. If their policy is found to have housed a crack den then their political ambitions likely get killed.
This has the consequence that checks and balances and overhead has to be put in place. So we get a solution that is less cost effective with worse outcomes.
My wish is for government to come out and say we accept 10% fraud out of this program if we can house Y number of people. But yeh that won’t happen either because their political opponents will distort that 10% and say the government purposely threw that money away.
> My wish is for government to come out and say we accept 10% fraud out of this program if we can house Y number of people. But yeh that won’t happen either because their political opponents will distort that 10% and say the government purposely threw that money away.
For that to happen, can we first quantify how much fraud is happening now?
California has a democrat governor, a democrat Lieutenant governor, a state senate that's 80% democrat and a state house that's 75% democrat, and democrat mayors in all major cities.
I'm in Los Angeles and it's mostly by business and real estate interests.
Republicans, like Rick Caruso, run as Democrats because that's how you get elected here. It's a meaningless label.
They'll do culture war signaling like support for pride month to their Twitter feed but when it comes to actual policy, for instance, the "defunding" of the LAPD which just last month included 780 more police, a new helicopter ... https://knock-la.com/lapd-budget-2023-increase/ an increase of $118,000,000, it's a different story.
On homelessness, actual leftists advocate for strong regulation on housing costs, bans on speculation, criminalization of landlords who do illegal evictions, seizing of idle real estate for redistributive housing, things like that.
You may disagree, but that's what the actual left position is. It's not buying new helicopters for the cops or giving them 100 million to do encampment sweeps where they throw away medication and wheelchairs and then classify it as "homeless abatement".
The policy, in practice, is increased money for police, shelters without storage or mail services, encampment sweeps, and a blind eye to landlord and market forces. In a Venn diagram with most conservative approaches, it's a pretty significant crossover.
I've long suspected with a bit of repackaging, many of the Republican voters could be sold on a pretty socialist platform and, counterintuitively, more of them than on the Democrat side.
Morality, fiscal responsibility, small government, local control, you can paint policies like a city chartering its own bank, community banking, cooperative retail, housing trusts etc with the same brush. You can even package say, free college in terms of competition, industry, and nationalism. Call it something like "America winning" or "Competitive Edge" instead of "free college". Instead of being a student, you're "serving your county". It's an easy parlay. I'm surprised I don't see it more.
I'm guessing the people attempting that gambit don't get the millions needed to run the campaigns.
The assumption that people oppose these socialist ideas because of branding and not because of the empirical evidence that they don't work is an humble take.
Empirical studies show the opposite unless you want to swallow fabrications and lies by the likes of the AEI or the heritage foundation. They only exist to manufacture bullshit.
They need their own journals and publications because the sponsored content they call research can't stand up to academic scrutiny. They'll flip flop on their "conclusions" all the time because different people pay their bills.
They start from an ideological position, which is based on who is paying them, and then work backwards using reactionary arguments, misrepresenting statistics and sometimes just straight up fraud
I can't emphasize this enough. Think tanks are private propaganda factories and that's literally it. They're peddlers of agenda and ideology who are not concerned with reality.
Calling it "the other side" is a false dichotomy. There's certainly advocacy groups like Sea Shepherd but they don't wear cloaks of subterfuge to try to distance themselves from their structure and purpose like say, the heartland institute which among other things, was, at the time secretly, funded by Philip Morris to deny that smoking had health impacts.
That's a different class of spin. But sure, the Brookings institution is mostly neoliberal radical centrist, fine.
Well then I guess the other side operates on social media/etc and pushes ideas like we should give up our public spaces to homeless encampments and police aren't necessary. Or things like rent control, all of which do not work, ever. I don't think the reason "leftist" policies fail to gain traction is because of think tanks; the ideas are just bad and reek of armchair socialism/virtue signaling.
But still, blaming the issue on conservatives when they make up such a small portion of the state is an odd tactic. Perhaps it could be that some of your proposed "left" positions are just... not popular (or don't work, like rent control or defunding the police).
On the other than, CA has the most government rules for housing and "leftist" policies in that regard and it has been nothing but an unmitigated disaster.
The Democratic party, especially at the local and state level, is almost always dominated by conservatives. Every election with low turnout skews conservative, and local elections frequently have <10% turnout.
"State lawmakers also approved SB107, a bill designed to protect out-of-state transgender children and their families from civil and criminal penalties when seeking gender-affirming care."[0] The bill passed the assembly with 60 ayes and 19 nays. It passed the senate with 30 ayes and 9 nays.[1]
They also passed anti-firearm legislation to allow private citizens to sue gunmakers.[0] It passed with 52 ayes/21 nays in the assembly and 26 ayes/9 nays in the senate.
So California democrats toe the party line and vote with progressives on wedge issues. In what sense are they conservative?
In the sense that they do not railroad cities and completely invalidate density-based zoning whose only historical basis is the exclusion of minorities from white neighborhoods.
> Conservatives are going to be against giving out living space
To play the devil's advocate to my sibling commentators: if you equate "conservative" politics and NIMBY politics, this claim could certainly hold some substance. (The argument: NIMBY = conservative in the sense that they oppose change.)
Also, just off the cuff I'm going to bet the overhead/fraud rate is more
like 50% than 10%. Basis: think of the overhead regular companies budget, about 30% of salary.
> I think on this issues it’s conservatives that make a solution untenable.
> Conservatives are going to be against giving out living space. So that kills any housing first policies.
I'm trying to figure out the basis for your argument... surely you aren't suggesting that places like California want to do this but can't seem to overcome the conservative opposition in the state legislature, right? :)
Conservatives and Progressives alike (but not all of either) block new housing from being built.
With no data to back it up, I suspect it's really older folks who don't want the housing to be built. And I think the psychology of it might be preserving things the way the are or used to be. I'd be interested to see some data that supports/refutes this speculation.
It is mentioned in the article about a woman working full time, yet still unable to afford rent.
I think a big steps towards resolving homelessness should go in addressing the housing market; which in California is really really bad. This isn't just "build more homes" (which is already an extremely difficult task in the state given the zoning laws) but comprehensive housing policies. Take a look at the way Austria has controlled rent prices (though californians might not like the fact that around 70% of housing in austria is limited or non profit).
Also, this is a US-wide problem. California just has the best weather and open doors. But I doubt it's going to get better, wealth inequality does nothing but increase in the US. We'll see, but this looks to me more of a symptom than a sickness in itself.
High level, statistically speaking, there's a lot of evidence that homelessness correlates with housing prices. What's remarkable is how mad people get about the pretty self-explanatory notion that as a thing increases in costs, fewer people can afford it. They want to blame drugs or mental health or something. And while those do play a part for many people, the price of housing is what looms over it all:
Spending money to try and do something about homelessness at the same time the housing market is like a big factory that produces more homelessness via rising prices... I won't say it's useless, because it does help some people, but it's a losing fight. The housing market is bigger than the amount of assistance that can be brought to bear.
>They want to blame drugs or mental health or something.
Because the actual solutions involve taking a scythe to property prices and rents and thats the last thing investors want.
They, and the media outlets they own, would prefer to see people dying on the street than that, but theyre not comfortable admitting it.
Hence drugs, mental health crisis, yadda yadda anything except real solutions - 20ccs of rent control stat, taxing the hell out of their fattened up property portfolios and an exercise regimen of Singapore style social housing construction.
False. I want more units. There is a demand and I want to meet that demand for money. I want to buy land that people can't afford and subdivide it to make it available to them. Win win.
Single family home owners are the people who oppose density with their entire being. I hear them cry about traffic, parking, their view, noise, about their neighborhood's character. That regime is the problem.
If it is profitable I will build housing all day long. If you cap rents and require unprofitable units to be built, I can't build as much. Then you are left competing for the finite supply of single family homes. Good luck!
My property has rent control. Two 600 dollar a month units. Unprofitable. No way to get those to market so I Ellis act the whole thing. Good work rent control, you just made a 4 unit building into a single family home.
Now there are some more regulations that disincentivize rebuilding by requiring unprofitable units or restoring the previous rental level. Great, let's delay building +10 units for a decade.
These controls are so hair brained and only make the situation worse. You don't need social housing, you just need to get out of the way of the market.
The fastest rate of home building was in New York during the 1950s. The strictest rent controls were in New York in the 1950s.
The slowest is today when rent controls are weakest.
It's not that it doesn't have an effect, but it is small and is absolutely overwhelmed by the lowering of property taxes. When property taxes are low, even the shittiest units making the most inefficient use of land like yours can tick over making a small profit and this eats land which would otherwise be used to build denser housing.
Lowered property taxes also kicked property values sky high which in turn led to the NIMBY revolution. This also inhibited home building in a massive, massive way.
In order to fix the housing crisis landlords who use land inefficiently to start losing money in a big way. That way they will finally dump their properties and the land can be redeveloped efficiently.
They must be subjected to market discipline otherwise the housing market will never be fixed. The velvet glove treatment of their rent entitlements is entirely unsustainable.
How are landlords your target for inefficiency when (complete guess) 50%+ of land is being used for single family homes?
My property is going from 4 units to a personal residence due to rent control. It is unprofitable. It is not being developed further despite that being my initial plan because those restrictions would carry over to the new units (SB 8). You will never convince me these programs are good. They are literally taking housing off the market.
This is zoned for 14 units. I will sit on it for 10 years due to SB 8. Great policy to prevent housing development.
Austria doesn't have a coordinated federal housing policy either, it's mostly just Vienna that aggressively builds city- or NPO-owned housing (and even there it's "only" about 40-45%¹).
And one important aspect of Vienna's housing policy is that these housing units are generally fairly nice, and offered to everyone at cheap prices, to avoid ghettoisation and have upper middle class families with doctorates live next door to long-term unemployed. I'm not sure how well that'd go with American sensibilities.
There's multiple issues and there's no easy fix, but here's some points from a laypersons' point of view.
Construction of new houses (up to modern standards) has not kept up with population growth. Population growth has been higher than birth rate due to migration; I wouldn't be surprised if in 10, 50, 100 years, historians will look back on this period and call it a mass migration event due to climate change, war, economic whatnots, etc.
The market / the economic powers that be overcorrected after the 2008 crash, causing interest rates to be really low for a long time. This caused both high end investors and relative laypeople to invest, amongst other things in housing. Some people were able to buy a second, third, whatever house and rent it out, and with private rent, the amount they can charge was pretty much unlimited. That removed houses from the market, and made it so people couldn't afford to buy a house or build up any kind of posessions - if you own a house, the building is yours to keep, and the mortgage payments pay off the loan, if you rent it, that money is just gone, you don't build up anything.
Minimum wage hasn't gone up, wages have not kept up, and employers have been getting away with tightening the thumbscrews on their staff for a long time now. With that in mind, minimum wage is a patch; if people are paid minimum wage, their employer would pay them less if they were legally allowed to.
Inflation. That won't get better, with energy crises, climate change causing crop failures, etc etc etc. Speaking of climate change, it will cause both water shortages (also due to overconsumption, e.g. through irrigation) and consequent mass migrations; people can't live where there's no water.
There's probably a lot more, but you get the idea. Shit sucks and there's no quick fix.
Seems like just a simple supply issue. These complex zoning regulations have made it cost prohibitive for developers to make any margins unless they focus on high-end condo's or apartments. The zoning envelopes need to be re-worked so that builders aren't having to live on razor thin margins.
The most frustrating part of that is the absurd number of people who see the obvious problem of wildly expensive and tightly constrained housing supply, complain about it being impossible to buy a home, and then actively refuse to even allow for the possibility that cities may have been under-building for some time.
Well you can only vote either Republican or Democrat, should you become a single issue voter? What if neither of the parties is really proposing strong housing regulation anyway.
Like, who are people actually supposed to vote for that will solve this issue?
This mostly isn't a Republican versus Democrat issue. Most housing development decisions are made at the county and city level, and those races are usually either non-partisan, or effectively single party. You can just show up at a campaign event and ask the candidate for their positions on housing issues.
Also, the "build more homes" makes a big assumption about _where_ the homes should be built.
There are already small towns across the US where homes are ridiculously cheap because no one wants to move there, and in fact people are moving out.
If you were to spread the homeless out around towns such as those (or create a new small town a couple hours away from a big city) you'd end up with a lot of supply.
Now, would the homeless be willing to move to such a place to get a home? The ones who really want to pull themselves up probably would.
Don’t think building more homes in SF would help with homeless problems. The thing about SF and CA in general is that it is one of the most desirable places to live in the entire world.
I don't care anymore. Bus them out to the desert. Set up camp there. Provide food and busses into town for those with interviews and jobs. I really don't care, just get them out of the damn cities. I've seen too many people shit in the bushes or just peeing up against a building. Building tent cities on the beach and enjoyable areas, etc. I. Don't. Care. Get rid of them. I left California for this reason and housing costs.
This. I have small children, and all the local parks are completely unsafe and unusable because of the homeless population.
The parks should belong to families/the broader public, instead they’re dumping grounds for violent drug abusers and the mentally unwell.
I despise paying taxes to the corrupt government that allows this. I hate that so many people are seemingly just “oh well, what can we do?” About all this. There is a LOT we can do, we don’t have to live this way. We don’t have to put up with any of this.
There is a pretty big range of solutions between shanty towns and concentration camps in the desert. When you become homeless you are effectively excluded from polite society and it is pretty hard to climb out of. You have states and municipalities trying to tinker at the edges but as many other people have pointed out, with freedom of movement the localities that are completely disinterested at solving the any of the causes will just move their problems onto those that do. How would you like it if you were forcibly bussed out into a desert concentration camp, away from your support networks and people you know? How much would you care about polite society if you fell into the hole and now everyone just comes and spits on your face like this a little more each day?
Am I a part of the society you are talking about? Or are only homeless people a part of it? I and hundreds of thousands of other residents of my city want to live in a clean and safe city. Is that completely irrelevant?
Where did I say anything like that? In any case, if you're shipping these homeless people out somewhere else, aren't you just making this someone else's problem but at least you don't have to look at it anymore?
I am not advocating for shipping anyone off to anywhere (it wouldn't be effective). However, the prevalent opinion that we just need to throw more money on this problem, or just silently suffer in the name of compassion is/will make things worse.
> The parks should belong to families/the broader public, instead they’re dumping grounds for violent drug abusers and the mentally unwell.
It turns out that when you construct a society in which a "cost of living" is a normal concept, people without money are largely excluded from said society. You've excluded them from malls, shopping centers, museums, restaurants, streets, government buildings, and anywhere else you can. They can't get educated, they can't train themselves, they can't get access to healthcare, because we've all decided that those services are only available to those with money. Now they find themselves in the parks, because it's the only place they're allowed to legally exist. But I guess that's not enough, because you and the parent poster would prefer to "concentrate" them in desert "camps" as your "final solution" to homelessness. Really amazing to see the masks off here.
I'm there too. I'm blown away by all the "housing first" advocates here, as though that hasn't been the message for the last fifteen years and many, many billions of dollars. IT. DOESN'T. WORK. Yes, if in a magical land you held the number of homeless steady and efficiently built housing, you could solve homelessness. But that's not what happens. Not only are the government institutions in charge of building that housing hopelessly corrupt, but the more you build, the more you recruit.
We offer many, many hands to those who are down on their luck and need help. I personally donate to several every year. For those willing, there's a publicly-funded escalator to a better life. But the ones who used to shit on my sidewalk, throw beer cans in my flower beds, and graffiti everything in site (I've since moved out of the city) aren't interested in taking the escalator. They don't care about anyone. They only care about their next fix. They need to be involuntarily incarcerated. If they won't participate in the usual programs, then ship them to the desert. I just don't care anymore.
Not him, but it would likely be my own fault and weakness if I end up like that and people have every right to ridicule me for acting ridiculous. That is, pooping on the streets and leaving needles everywhere.
People turn to pooping on the streets and shooting up in the middle of the street because they have nowhere else to go. Getting hoisted out of rock-bottom is extremely difficult, and the longer you slip through the cracks of any kind of support the more cemented you get there. If society is kicking the ladder out from under you like this then respectability is the last thing on your mind. Being shipped off to a desert concentration camp is really the icing on the cake here.
The ("progressive") opinion that you express is ultimately de-humanizing. You take away all agency from people and treat them as mindless victims.
It's all the society's fault, awlays someone else do blame. People who poop on the street can't find any other place (perhaps, a bush?), people who throw needles on the street have no other place to take drugs (perhaps, the supervised drug injection site where they get the drugs?).
Empathy must come with responsibility and not with a patronizing de-humanizing pseudo-compassion. Which is, of course, just enablement under a different name.
This talk about not pooping on the street and not shooting up in the street is not really solving the material issues of homeless people. How does pooping in a bush or going to a supervised drug injection site get you out of abject poverty?
How is it not a structural problem when homelessness is a growing epidemic? Do you think that if every homeless person took a little more personal responsibility this issue would be fixed already?
> Do you think that if every homeless person took a little more personal responsibility this issue would be fixed already?
Yes. A little more personal responsibility leads to taking more and more personal responsibility. I dislike talking about homeless people as a homogenous group, but the visibly/street homeless need to take more responsibility for their life in order to improve it. There are many resources available that can make their journey out of homelessness faster.
Important to remember that every one of us are just a few accidents away from being ejected from society too. I try to catch myself when I'm looking down my nose at the bum who make a mess of my recycling because there is another richer person looking down their nose at me!
I don’t think I’m a few accidents away from what I see people doing every morning in the east village. I’ve been in four should-have-died accidents, when are you expecting me to abandon society? It’s a silly fantasy to pretend the average white collar is a few bad missteps away from the chronic detachment you see from these folks. We must live in very different worlds, my friend.
I really hope you never have to experience it, because it is a very nasty rug pull. No, it's not a silly fantasy, it's a deadly reality. As long as you produce value, you can enjoy momentary security. But take away anyone piece of your capacity to produce money: maybe your hands to type, or your brain to think- and all that security rapidly comes undone. Maybe you're lucky enough to have a rich family to fall back on or you live in a country with a generous welfare. But barring that, you absolutely will find yourself out on the street given the right circumstances.
Well, it is normal to have such feelings when people are harassed by those people. Yesterday, in Texas while I was harassed by kids. They used all the slurs and it was so bizarre to me. In California, I can't imagine the situation.
It only takes few people to ruin experience for all people.
I hope you never end up in a situation where people decide not only to leave you in pool of your own urine on the sidewalk, but to feel righteous about their activism to make sure you're left there.
Agreed, get them out of functional society. I’m sick of the Quaker quasi religious Progressives who think they can cure everything. It’s like dude, these are broken fucked up people. Get them out of society and try and rehab whatever ones still have something left. Just get them out.
We used to have asylums. Maybe it’s time to bring these back and house these people in them with whatever medication can sedate them. Not saying bring back the lobotomy but maybe we institutionalize people that are obviously crazy?!
The number of homeless people in California grew about 50% between 2014 and 2022. The state, which accounts for 12% of the U.S. population, has about half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless, an estimated 115,000 people
More stats: It has a quarter of all homeless and a high percentage of the chronically homeless who likely skew those stats pretty badly.
My opinion: This is a national issue and California is just the presenting problem. I think California is essentially our dumping ground for homeless people from across the nation and California can't solve it alone.
Edit: In case it needs to be said again, the primary root cause is a nationwide shortage of appropriate housing options.
That’s about what happens in Canada, Vancouver gets the homeless fromt he entire country, sometimes bussed, but mostly because the climate is hospitable all year round
There's probably some truth to the idea that other places have exported their homelessness problems to San Francisco, but I think you're overblowing it here. Homelessness is a really complicated problem that I doubt has simple causes and solutions.
I do however agree that this is a national issue. I think places like New York and Boston are likely to see significantly worse homelessness themselves over the next decade.
> My opinion: This is a national issue and California is just the presenting problem. I think California is essentially our dumping ground for homeless people from across the nation and California can't solve it alone.
The ad is good at pulling heart strings and getting people riled up (see comments here) but does not do any actual reporting. How did California spend the money? Were there leaky buckets? How does California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the population? Are people being bussed in, making this a federal problem? Who's responsible? Don't just tell me the governor, there's people Newsom appointed. Don't just get me riled up, tell me what's actually going on so that I can inform myself of how to fix this. Don't just say this is a problem and point a singular finger talking about large sums of money, break it down. Tell me why homeless decreased in SF and Orange but increased in LA, San Jose, Oakland, and San Diego[0]. Tell me why it skyrocketed since 2016, starting with Brown and then accelerated under Newsom[1]. Tell me what FL is doing to solve their issues that NY and CA aren't.
Do some investigation. Distill expert information to me. Be a news article, not a political ad.
How does California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the population?
It doesn't. It has 25 percent of the nation’s homeless. It has 50 percent of the unsheltered homeless -- i.e. people camped outside.
It has so many unsheltered homeless in part because parts of the state are temperate and dry. Much of the time, it's not a hardship to sleep outside in some parts of California.
Define nice weather.
If we are talking winters with temperatures consistently over 0C (32F), little to no snow, seattle and portland are great for winter.
Nice weather for homeless people basically means not strong shelter required to survive, unlike the midwest and east coast which consistently freeze in winter.
I found this chart[1] and I do wonder how Oregon and Washington have such a high unsheltered population; I'm not familiar with the PNW, are parts of the states mild? The rest of that chart is pretty much in line with how I perceive winters to be.
The PNW has interesting geography: the Cascades run North/South right near the Western shore, and they catch most of the rain that the Pacific hurls at the area.
West of the mountains, it's temperate and damp. The Olympic peninsula is technically a rainforest, but the populous areas tend to get a lot of drizzle rather than heavy rain. Snow is rare at low elevations, even in winter.
East of the mountains, it's temperate and arid. Lots of power generation and agriculture on former tribal lands.
In the mountains, large national forests which allow dispersed camping.
It's not always "mild", but wherever you end up, it's usually not inhospitable. The summers have gotten much worse lately though, Seattle was a city where nobody felt the need for air conditioners as recently as 10-20 years ago. Now they sell out in the first heat wave of the summers, and new apartment buildings are starting to include them.
I'm not first-hand familiar with Oregon, but some parts of Washington have moderate temps. Coastal Washington gets a lot of rain but rarely freezes and -- anecdotally -- at least one city in Coastal Washington has vastly worse rates of homelessness on a per capita basis than some of the cities infamous for it, like Seattle and SF. And, yes, they are mostly camped outside, not in shelters.
Which city? I was in Spokane recently (obviously not the coastal city you are speaking about) and was surprised by how full of homeless people downtown was.
West coast winters are very mild, and there is very little humidity. We had a few days that got below freezing last year, most days were over 40.
If you need to live in a tent, or a broken RV with no AC or heat, would you rather live in Chicago (super cold), Houston (super hot and humid) or Sacrament to Portland (super mild year round, low humidity)
The coastal Pacific Northwest where most people live has mild weather all year, better than many parts of California. It rarely freezes in winter and rarely gets hot enough that you need an air conditioner in summer. Contrary to reputation, it has relatively few days of meaningful precipitation, especially in cities like Seattle that sit in a rain shadow.
If you are going to live unsheltered in the US, the cities in the PNW are definitely among the better locales to do so in terms of amenable weather.
Portland OR - cold and wet winters (occasionally the temps drop low enough that the rain becomes snow and/or ice). Hot and dry summers. Very dry summers. Not a lick of rain. Spring and Fall are a mix between the two. Gradually the rains taper off in the spring. Gradually the rains pick up in the fall.
West of the Cascades, it's mild. To the east of them the climate is decidedly less mild, though, so I'd be interested to see how the numbers would compare between the two regions.
Add to that California's very high cost of living and tight/expensive housing market which making it very easy to fall from employment and housing to homelessness, coupled with the country-wide massive drop in home ownership, skyrocketing housing costs, near total stagnation of wages for lower classes, and unprecedented concentration of wealth.
I don't know why anyone is shocked that the US homeless population is skyrocketing. The powers that be seem hellbent on solidifying a peasant class.
Right now the housing market is being snapped up at lightning pace by corporations; it may not be long before it's nearly impossible to own a house outright that your family doesn't already own, but even keeping a house within a family might soon be very difficult as well....with the only option being to rent from a giant housing corporation.
I live in SoCal, and in the 20ish years I've lived here, it's gone from "Reasonable rent, but you can only afford to buy if you're a professional who's saved up for several years" to "Horribly expensive rent and you can only afford to buy if you are independently wealthy" I bought during the transition to this state, and made (on paper at least) almost as much money on housing appreciation in the past 10 years as I did from my software-developer job. It should be obvious that houses can't go up an average of 6-figures per year indefinitely. If I had rented for about 5 years longer, I would have been priced out.
The two things are fairly tightly connected. If ordinary citizens can't buy house, how does some other citizen (not corporation) buy one and offer it for rent to you?
There are a lot of individuals who buy investment properties. I have friends who use this as their primary retirement vehicle and own a bunch of rental properties. They are just successful small-business owners and the properties are their private property, unrelated to the business. From last time I saw statistics on this, most rental units were still owned by small landlords.
Sadly, I think the problem is much simpler: corruption. Given that California is essentially governed by a single party, it is subject to corruption and inefficiency.
Lets take just example from this week: an announcement was made stating that the construction of a tiny house costs $1,600 per square foot [1].
All I can say is this: somebody is pocketing this money. I don't know who, how, or why. Regardless, it's clear that this money is going to someone, and that someone is not homeless.
This is my fear for the country as well as the republicans are (in my opinion you can disagree) at the very least partially going crazy. We desperately need at least two parties working for a good government. California needs more checks and balances, and so does the country.
I 100% agree. If you want to run for office here is San Francisco you need to be democrat. Which means that you need to be very nice to people which you know they are not good.
> Given that California is essentially governed by a single party
Not really, no - unless you mean in the sense that the Republicans and Democrats are controlled opposition for one another, in which case sure, but that's true nationwide.
> All I can say is this: somebody is pocketing this money. I don't know who, how, or why.
Who: landowners.
How: by artificially capping property taxes and pushing the burden onto the working class via income and sales taxes, and then using rent to capture money that should be going to said working class via wages and welfare.
Why: because they have a vested interest in doing so, and have the political influence to make it happen.
Solution: abolish sales/income tax, replace with 100% land value tax, disburse surplus as UBI. Would solve the vast majority of California's socioeconomic problems pretty much overnight.
LVT probably wouldn't be enough to fund the government at this point, and it's regressive. Throw in some 0% base rate progressive income taxes, pigouvian taxes, maybe a small vat and you're on the right track.
> LVT probably wouldn't be enough to fund the government at this point
The government could and should be pared down considerably if that's the case.
> and it's regressive
It's the literal opposite of regressive, especially when paired with UBI. The tax burden rests entirely on landowners, who already skew toward wealth; ownership of land value correlates strongly with net worth (and is indeed typically a major component of said net worth).
Meanwhile:
> VAT
That's just a fancy sales tax, with all the regression that entails. Bear in mind that the working class is spending a much greater proportion of its wealth on the very goods VAT taxes than the ownership class - which means VAT has in turn a disproportionate impact on the working class v. the ownership class.
With LVT, it's the other way around: the vast majority of people who actually work for a living either don't own any land value at all (and therefore ain't subject to LVT) or own sufficiently little land value for their tax burden to be less under LVT-as-single-tax than it would be under a system funded by income and sales taxes.
Yes, but the vast majority of that equity is in the house itself, not in the land underneath it. On top of that, land in the suburbs is not as valuable as, say, land in Downtown (which is a big part of why the house itself is most of the value of a typical home).
> Most wealthy do not have their wealth in land.
Maybe not directly, but indirectly the vast majority of their wealth boils down to land. Every skyscraper, every warehouse, every factory, every mall, all those consume large swaths of typically-valuable land. In short:
> LVT would mostly fall on middle class homeowners, not the wealthy.
It would mostly fall on whomever owns the most land value - and that is overwhelmingly massive corporations and rich people. A middle class homeowner owns a tiny amount of land value in comparison - certainly far below their equal share, and therein lies the rub: 100% LVT disbursed directly, evenly, and entirely as UBI serves as a self-balancing system:
- If you own less land value than your equal share, you're paid for it
- If you own more land value than your equal share, you pay for it
That's purely theoretical (it's kind of the spherical frictionless cow of Georgist economics), but it should nonetheless illustrate that homeowners will in the vast majority of cases come out vastly ahead under LVT+UBI. Put simply: unless you own a single-family home in Downtown SF, replacing as many taxes as possible with LVT and getting back any surplus as UBI is in your best financial interest.
Well, responsibility is what you get when you're in charge. It's axiomatically correct even if it isn't necessarily helpful (in the sense that there's no guarantee that a counterfactual republican California would have done any better).
We need viable political choices with incentives to compete on something other than alienating voters who would be expected to vote for the other side for accountability (which mostly means we need proportional representation.)
That is not the same as needing the opposing party in America’s duopolistic system.
Dig into the data all you want. If you dig deep enough, you'll most likely find what you're looking for...
Anything political like this is going to have competing "sources of truth" which are largely funded by Super PACs and essentially just arms of political parties.
Either party can "show you the data" now to come to whatever conclusion they want.
This is a useful gambit to game all the people who claim to want to be "data-driven".
Sometimes, it's useful to zoom out to a 1000 foot view and simply observe that something is clearly broken, and the current solution does not appear to be making it less broken.
Maybe this is something everyone can agree on - but, that won't be very helpful - as there's unlikely any changing solution that both parties will agree on.
I'll simply note - at the 1000 foot view - there are 115,000 homeless people, and $17B was spent on them.
That's $147k per person. And all that happened is the problem got worse at MUCH faster rates than it did in almost every other state in the US, nearly all of which are spending much less on the problem.
It's the job of the reporter to figure something resembling reality out from the competing sources of truth. Who is reporting what figures, and what is their background? Where do they meet? Why are they divergent in specific places-- what is their sampling methods, etc?
I've already heard 10000000 times the 1000 foot view. No one has told me the specific appointed people, the percentages of the total they've been distributed, and where those peoples' public records are for their own municipal budgeting.
Why does it matter? Whoever the appointed people are you can’t fire them. Your only lever is to fire the elected politicians that are currently manifestly doing a poor job.
You can still have reporting that digs into things, perhaps not detailed sob stories about particular homeless, but do the digging and track why they're homeless, what they have done (and what has been done to them), look at program projections and program results, and so on. Compare cities to Houston [1]. Are the homeless in CA the same as the homeless a year ago? Five years ago? Obviously, since the numbers have gone up, some aren't, but there's tons of data (and governments are probably already tracking major portions of it).
Simplistic articles that go "money in, homeless out" don't help inform, which more and more seems intentional, because everything is political.
17 billion divided by 250,000 would be 68,000 condos (rough numbers). There are obvious problems with "give every homeless person a condo" but the numbers are huge and something's not working.
> I’ll simply note - at the 1000 foot view - there are 115,000 homeless people, and $17B was spent on them.
Wrong.
The $17B spent on homelessness spent over several years on the problem of homelessness was not (even in a loose sense) divided across the set of people currently homeless, or a set the same size. It was spent on the set of people who were homeless or at risk of homelessness at some point during the period of expenditures, which is a much larger number.
The problem is that some groups have no problem taking facts and distorting them into untruths.
We truly are living in an age of alternate facts.
I’ve read papers put out by research groups that were easy to debunk. Most people won’t go to that effort and will take the glossy material and legitimate sounding author as being truthful when in fact every conclusion made in the report is a lie.
My family and I were having a chaotic political argument about the policies of a school district 2,000 miles away when I realized we need to focus. We either need to talk about a specific event or general ideas about what should happen. It's very easy to alternate back and forth. If we're talking about specifics, let's look up and read the actual policy of the school district. If we're talking in general, then stop referring to one school district 2,000 miles away as evidence that it's a wide spread trend, and let's see if we can agree, in general, on the way things should be in the abstract.
Which brings me to my point, and my advice. Focus on feelings and abstract beliefs first. Don't talk about (e.g.) the specific spending bill, talk about whether military defense or caring for the poor is more important from a personal and moral perspective. Make it a small conversation, leave the paid-for "facts" out of it. What do you and I believe? Can we find common ground? After we find some common ground on a small scale, maybe we can talk about a larger scale. Maybe then we can look at the facts.
I was beat up by that black woman Ramona Cayce. I was washing dishes, and she stole the dish soap. What followed was a black woman hitting me, while people egged her on, and then I was blamed. She is a drug addict, as are almost all the residents, including T, the person who started ALL the fires, and P, who tried to control as much as the crime as possible, and G, who stole 3 cars a night. You want facts? I was there. No one, least of all the New York Times gives a shit about the facts.
I think there are alternate facts. Both left and right have sources of information and narratives as to what is helping this country and what is harming it.
Alternative facts are like alternative religions. Alternative orientations and life goals
They are, among other things, ideologies in the sense that they take experiences and narrativize them. It's important, and I think you get this already, is that the symptom of our time is that there's no getting outside of ideology. We can draw from Zizek for example, that the idea that we can be outside of ideology as blinding ourselves to whichever ideology we are using. That's sort of the final step and the bridge between post-modernism towards meta-modernism.
You’ve correctly identified the issues with media today. Rage inducing articles are easier to read and get more views. As soon as you introduce facts then very quickly it becomes a nuanced debate on the issue which is far less interesting because and worth less revenue.
We really need some kind of regulations to disincentivize companies from producing drivel and more incentives for well researched material.
I don’t know what those regulations would look like. But without them we are drowning in material that does society more harm than good.
Back when Mizzou had their J-school's something-centennial celebration and a bunch of editors and such descended on the school for the celebration, they had a panel where people could ask them questions. I asked them, given that journalism's job is to be the journal of the community, why does the business model instead align on advertising?
The unanimous answer from the panel was that people wouldn't pay for journalism.
Now, you can take this one of two (or more) ways:
1. Journalism as widely practiced in the present environment isn't worth paying for, so of course people won't pay for it.
2. Even if journalism was "objectively" worth paying for (lemme hand wave that judgement for the sake of argument), maybe people still wouldn't value it to the extent they were willing to pay what it would cost to produce.
And we can drill into #2 even deeper: in practice, some kinds of reporting are already funded entirely by its audience. For example, Janes has made a business for decades of compiling open-source intelligence about military hardware. That's a kind of reporting, and provably one that some audience is willing to pay for.
Other kinds of reporting though may be valued differently. One of my professors won a Pulitzer prize for a story on AIDS in the Midwest. This is probably not something you can build an industry around reporting on, especially not in the way she went about it, but clearly some people felt it was worthwhile reporting.
So now we get back to the question of how we incentivize "good" reporting, which arguably the above two are examples of, but in different ways. One is basically industry reporting which seems like largely a solved problem from a financial feasibility perspective.
The other angle is less of a solved problem as far as I know, but I can see two paths to try with it: culture grants (common for certain kinds of projects in some Nordic countries - not as sure about the US) and crowdfunding. In either case, it will probably look substantially different from how we think of journalism today.
I think #2 is a huge problem. It costs money to do real journalism, because that money pays for time, moving reporters hither and yon, bribes, lunches, whatever. Deep investigation costs. It doesn't cost money to copy that journalism, once produced. It's text. Maybe some pictures.
As ever, people gravitate to "free," so you're stuck with people reading journalism made by one group but copied to several other places. The race to the bottom begins. There's a signpost up ahead -- your next stop, the Kardashians. Gossip is cheap.
We've seen this in software. We remember the relentless flogging of "Just make it open and somehow it'll pay for itself!" Fans. Freemium models. Whatever.
Culture grants would be quite difficult, as any journalist may be tempted to bite the hand that feeds. Recall The Beeb and how they fed Jimmy Savile for so long. Now he's dead and they can report on it, but Johnny Rotten got in hot water for even hinting at the topic while he was alive.
Or, hear me out, make similar comments as mine and use your economic leverage. We've been trying to push for regulations and stuff for decades, it hasn't been working. I'm not saying stop, I'm saying that the strategy needs to be rethought.
Here's what I suggest. When you see it, call it out. Doesn't matter if it is WSJ, CNN, Fox, your uncle at Thanksgiving, or whatever. Call out ads masquerading as news. Don't engage with them directly. Don't take a political stance. Reinforce the idea that you don't know shit about what's going on and not nearly enough to formulate a meaningful opinion (opinions always exist but opinions aren't always meaningful or helpful). Be HARDLINE apolitical in this respect. You can have politics about things that you know about, anything less is tribalism.
You're not going to directly topple the structures overnight nor are you going to be able to march into the president's office. But you are a meme, you are a virus. If you infect just two others, the virus spreads. And it spreads fast. This is the power you have at the individual level. You are part of a deeply connected web that people are trying to convince you is worthless. But we're all 6 degrees of freedom, or less, from one another and that's how contagions spread so fast, especially in the modern world. This is how you hit them from the market side. This isn't boycotting in the traditional sense, but it isn't dissimilar. Regulations won't happen without strong public support and MAJOR pressure on politicians, who have consistently shown they do not respect our opinions: because we don't hold them accountable. This is all connected.
Be the meme/virus. Be apolitical. Stop any tribalism. Call out ads. Be a pain, even to your friends, and force themselves to censor themselves around you. Don't force them to have no opinions, just don't let them be tribal and lazy. Force them to have nuance. Either they will have nuance, or they censor. Both are effective.
Real data is not fashionable anymore to report. Same in health care and education. Tell me where all the f...ing money goes and why it's going up all the time. Don't single out one bad player but provide a full breakdown. That's what journalists should be doing.
The chronically homeless I encounter in SF are primarily (not all) 1. Addicted to drugs 2. Suffering from psychiatric issues. No amount of affordable housing is going to fix that. No amount of training, educational assistance, universal income etc will fix that. They are not in any condition to work or hold a job or do personal health maintenance. Give them shelter and they wonder off.
Affordable housing is affecting the middle class rather severely in that larger portions of the middle class incomes are being spent on housing. These are people that are not homeless. These are people often in trades or hourly labor. Some will become homeless with any disruption of income. Fl has done some things to help with that. "...in recent years Florida communities have embraced evidence-based best practices such as Housing First, collaborative case management, and rapid rehousing."{1}
Mathematically speaking there is no reason why CA cannot have %50 of the homeless. CA could have %100 of the homeless if no other states have homeless. It is not related to CA population relative to the rest of the country.
The problem IMHO is that results matter more than good intentions. Many of CAs programs mean well but are either not executed well or simply do not work. The proponents continue to promote them and receive money for them despite their inability to get results. That is were all the money goes.
Part of it is the routine stuff around activist-abolitionist DAs, lack of housing, NIMBY-ism, weather, decriminalization of drugs, etc. The review Shellenberger's comprehensive book on west-coast homelessness is nice level-headed take [3]
But one major cause is the rise of potent p2p meth & fentanyl in the populace. [1][2]
So not only are the homeless un-shelter-able (shelters require residents to be clean), but the nature of drugs lead to irreversible mental health issues and irreversible (ie. chronic) homelessness.
California has a housing crisis and there is no political will to fix it. Not wanting low cost housing in your neighborhood is something that unites people very strongly across the political spectrum.
The implication that there is a Boogeyman political system that doesn't want to house the homeless in their neighborhood is suspect and laughter inducing. Politicians need the will of the people to persist.
It is the PEOPLE that reside in these communities that consistently vote down measures for building ANY housing in their neighborhood to inflate their real estate holdings. Housing homeless is an far reaching extension of that.
- Good climate: Absolutely. It's much tougher being homeless in the winter in Chicago than it is in California.
- Legal weed: There's legal weed all over the country and the homeless aren't known for buying weed from legal shops are they lol. No 'open air drug market weed' for me, sir, I'm going to the Shambhala Healing Center, says the man strung out on fenty. [1] Missouri and Illinois have legal recreational weed and some of the lowest rates of per capita homelessness [2] so you can pretty much strike this theory off your list.
- Open air drug markets: again, drugs may be visible here, but you can buy drugs in any city in this country. Opioids are the real problem, fentanyl in particular, and if you look at this map of opioid deaths by state you'll see the real crisis isn't in California but in West Virginia, which has 4X the deaths per capita. [3]
- Soft on crime prosecutors: it does have these.
- Liberal population that wants to provide for them: does it?
Honestly if the maps say anything to me, it's that all of the US' homelessness is along the west coast where the weather's nice. I think that might be the entire story.
Not you, haha, I meant if weed is the only thing a police officer can find then it feels like a false pretense for arrest. I liked your response tbh, I didn’t catch what you mentioned initially.
Homelessness isn't just caused by someone not having a home. There is a massive overlap of mental illness and substance abuse/addiction.
Just giving a homeless person a house will not solve the underlying problems that caused them to be homeless in the first place. There needs to be movement on multiple fronts - mental health, physical health, rehab, job training, personal finance, etc.
If the solution was easy, someone would have done it. The uncomfortable truth is when you have someone who is addicted to heroin or fentanyl or meth who isn't really participating in society like everyone else..sometimes there's not much you can do for them. Overcoming addiction is incredibly challenging even for people with means and support systems. Without those, sadly the numbers are abysmal.
There's a compelling argument [0] that the biggest driver of homelessness is a shortage of housing. Mental illness and addiction can lead to homelessness, but homelessness can also lead to mental illness and addition. There are lots of places suffering severely from the fentanyl crisis, but where homelessness is less of a problem.
The solution may be simple, but it's not easy. (And it's not the entire solution either) Building large quantities of housing is a difficult problem, especially in California.
15% of the homeless in SF have a traumatic brain injury. That statistic means almost 1 in 5 right off the top need long term medical care. "Mere housing" won't do jack for those people.
Even more have mental health issues. Some have physical health issues. The number of homeless who are perfectly healthy and just need housing is vanishingly small--those homeless are generally hiding from someone and won't want to be part of a tracked program.
We know what needs to be done: long term healthcare that needs lots of money.
We know what happened in the past: those facilities were horror shows because of underfunding.
We know what the "solutions" were in the past: shut the facility down and throw those people out onto the streets and let the prision system deal with them.
The starting point for solving homelessness is universal healthcare. Nothing less. Without universal healthcare, everything else to "solve" homelessness is just rearranging the deck chairs.
If it was just a matter of house prices, why isn't California's homelessness solved by cheaper homes in Fresno or other parts of the state? I can't help but feel there's more to it than cheaper housing.
Strangely that's not what Finland[0] has found to be the case. By using a housing first approach they've been able to severely decrease the number of homeless people.
You are absolutely correct that other interdictions are needed as well.
I think the fallacy you're making is assuming all homeless have the same problems. There are definitely some homeless or near-homeless people where having a safe place to sleep, shower, and store their belongings will allow them to hold a job long enough to get back on their feet. There are others that need serious rehab. There are others that need mental health counseling. There are others that will never be able to care for themselves and need to be put in a care home.
So really there is no one-size-fits all solution. Individual treatment is needed, and early intervention always has the best outcomes.
The majority of people on the internet want housing to be affordable.
The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to city council meetings want housing to be an investment that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins.
(Caveat: California's state legislature is slowly clamping down. Regions which aren't submitting realistic plans to meet their projected housing needs are getting their zoning privileges taken away, which will help. However, this is like trying to empty a swimming pool with a teaspoon when it comes to the supply and demand mismatch that exists today.)
> The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to city council meetings want housing to be an investment that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins.
It isn't purely financial. After all, the most expensive land is in areas with higher population density. You want cheap housing? Go out to where nobody else lives. Tons of it available. Doubling the population of Phoenix would increase people's property values a bunch - look at the land owners in the Bay Area over the last 50 years. Developers don't build shit because they think it's gonna make their property worth less.
So, no, what people who don't want upzoning don't want is change. Change in traffic, change in privacy, change in noise, etc.
That's actually a much harder problem. If it was purely financial it would be easier to buy people out. But it isn't, which - at the extreme end - is how you get the tiny houses next to big skyscrapers and such.
> These are also great fig leaf talking points when your real reason to oppose new development is financial, but you don't want to sound greedy.
You could make the exact opposite claim that "my property values!!" is the fig leaf around "I don't want [certain people] to have the chance to move near me."
And that one agrees with the numbers of how property values go up with city growth and development, not down. Would the property values in Malibu be lower or higher if LA had taken Detroit's path?
> Everyone wants that solution. [Just building more houses]
I'm not sure I completely agree with that.
Suppose you wanted to build the maximum amount of free housing as quickly as possible. What would you do?
You'd pick someplace rural (where land is cheap, and there are fewer people to raise objections), buy a bunch of land and just build the homes (and services needed by the people who would live in them). You would then invite anyone who needed shelter to come live there for free.
But if you actually try to do that, "homeless advocates" will say all sorts of mean things about you and block the project. So I would argue that not everyone wants the solution of just building enough homes for everyone.
They want homes built in specific places, and those specific places happen to be highly desirable and very expensive places to build acquire land and build homes.
A year ago, there was a study about Denver spending anywhere from 42K to 102K per homeless individual. If I remember correctly, that was only a partial amount because they couldn't get all of the financial information. I think we all need to ask how much of this money actually reaches the intended population and how much is administrative overhead. It never pays to fix a problem. If the issue is an impossible scenario, the cash spigot is always running.
Yes, well spotted. The US on average likely has enough housing. It's certain specific areas do not have sufficient housing. If you live somewhere with high land prices, property values, etc, the low wage jobs in the area still need to be filled and those people still need somewhere to live.
can you point to an example where they built homes and the infrastructure to support those homes where people blocked the project for reasons other than 'not in my neighborhood, or 'not with my tax dollars', but more of what you seem to imply "It's not good enough?"
They do. The problem is drug addiction. If you give drug addicts free houses, eventually the word gets out, and then even more drug addicts move to your state. Eventually you find yourself like California - spending an immense amount of money of an immense number of drug addicts mixed in with a few people who are down on their luck.
It's a lot of money but there's also a lot of people and a lot of costs in order to build.
Setting aside that you can have both vacant residential properties and homelessness, let's say the government decides to just build a bunch of units and force people to live in them:
Where do you put them?
For lots of the cities in CA you'd be looking at a million bucks or more for the lots of land alone in order to build like 4+ or 6+ multi-unit buildings. But let's be generous and call it a million (some property is already controlled by cities and such, after all).
So you're gonna have to settle for less than 17,000 buildings, since that's the land cost alone for 17B.
But ok, 115,000 unsheltered homeless in California, you can build denser. Too dense of just bottom-of-the-economic-ladder housing is going to lead to a lot of problems though, look at the history of housing projects. Let's do a 20 person per building one to try to get the costs down: 5750 buildings. Applying that same "million dollar lot" means we're at 5.75B for the land, now we need to construct 5750 buildings for 11.25B, about 2 million for construction per project... that's gonna be tough without getting more contractors into the market and driving down the costs of construction too in those cities. Cause otherwise having a bunch of new construction projects is gonna drive up the cost of construction, not down, unless you expand the supply.
And the more you try to push the density the more opposition you run into from both people who live and work nearby the sites and advocates wanting better housing. The latter is a problem IMO but it's not like getting rid of it would make the former go away immediately.
And you still need a large agency of operations around trying to find people in those units jobs so that you can get them out of the units before other people need them, etc.
Hell, why not just give about 100K to each of the unsheltered and spend the rest on relocation assistance to cheaper parts of the country? Sure, you could just try to bus people to cheaper areas without this, but that's gonna result in some deaths to do worse weather, fewer local resources and people to live off of, etc, so... it's unclear to me that even the cities in red states that love to make fun of CA homelessness would pull the trigger at that scale if they actually had to. There are a lot of problems they don't have to face because they don't have the scale of demand for land or the hospitable climate.
I mean, the elephant in the room is that we easily build enough housing for 115k people for much less than $17B if we simply allowed it to be built outside an existing city in the Central Valley. There's plenty of relatively cheap land to build mid-density housing and all the services the population would need (hospitals, substance abuse assistance, public safety, etc).
It would be like having two new cities the size of Merced.
I think the tricky thing with that scenario is doing this in a way that isn't just a fancy name for forced imprisonment, now that we're not only saying "you have to get off the street" but also shipping people to this new mega-complex.
It's not just an image problem either: let's say you kick the substances, get over some of the trauma from your time on the street, and want to get back into the world. Are the only local jobs "administration for the complex"? Is there no way to try to do something beyond that without having to travel a couple hundred miles and lose the support network and any social connections you'd made?
San Francisco put the homeless in vacant hotel rooms during the pandemic. They destroyed the hotel rooms. The two main problems facing the homeless are substance abuse followed by mental health.
I think this is a misleading description of the situation.
Yes, people were indoors in hotels, but in some cases the way these SIP hotels were run was bordering on extra-judicial solitary confinement.
> many of the the nearly 600 unhoused individuals in the Project Roomkey program were forced to remain confined in isolation. People were not allowed to leave the hotel unless they had a medical appointment or were being transported by a provider. They could not go for walks, exercise outdoors or do any of the things that health officials told the public to do for their mental health.
> “People started entering the motels in April and they were quarantined all the way through October,” Garrow continued. “People were having mental health breakdowns. People told me they were having suicidal thoughts.”
I don't think the program failed. It did get a significant number of people off the streets, and most were able to exit to long term housing, according to the city.
Do you have a different source that refutes or denies the claim that at least some people in the SIP hotel system were in an extended quarantine? I actually think it's understandable in context that they would be concerned about people coming and going early in the pandemic, when the whole point of the program was to reduce spread. However, I also think it's understandable that this would exacerbate mental health outcomes. But perhaps then the SIP hotels are not a good indicator of how actual housing first policies would play out.
Also, I've seen some numbers quoted about the dollar cost of property damage at some hotels. I had not seen any claim about the proportion of rooms that had property damage, or how the extent of damage was verified. You're portraying it as if all the rooms were wrecked and I wonder whether hotel owners are perhaps also rounding up.
You think it's reasonable to think they imprisoned people in hotel rooms? You are also willing to take some "advocates" word for it? How about you provide evidence it did happen. It certainly did not. And what does that mean the majority were able to exit into long term housing? Having a bunched of wrecked property and then moving people to new property to destroy is not a success.
I think you are equating the fact that most elected officials in CA are Democratic to this being a political hit piece. With that logic, is anything negative about our largely Democrat body of officials off limits?
> California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the population? Are people being bussed in,
Yes. States are known to literally ship out their homeless problem to other states and also do so figuratively by criminalization and persecution to drive the homeless out.
If you are less aggressive at those things, or provide better services, the net flow of homeless people is going to be in to your state, all other things being equal.
This isn’t, of course, the whole of the problem. Housing supply issues and income inequality issues produced by the fact that California has some very successful industries that reward a narrow set of people very well also play a big role, and these are self-inflicted policy problems [0] (both not adequately increasing housing supply, and not leveraging narrow prosperity better for the general good.)
[0] Not simple policy problems to resolve, the housing one for political reasons, the improving distribution without killing the prosperity you are trying to improve the distribution of one is actually tricky in policy.
I'm not sure you can make such a bold claim. If California is spending money on homelessness, then all things being equal, it will attract more homeless people than if it didn't spend money on homelessness. Some percentage of these homeless will come from other states. For any two states there is going to be migration of homeless between the 2, and the attractiveness of the state is very much effected by the amount of spending for homelessness. So California could very much be net importing homeless from many of the other states that choose not to spend on homelessness (thus offloading their homelessness problem).
I actually think this a fundamental problem with homelessness, any locality that chooses to affect change, may actually see numbers that make the problem look worse, when in reality they are helping to improve things globally. Worse, is it's all a collective action problem where each player can benefit by not spending on the problem. So there is constant pressure to do nothing with the problem. I wish I had solution to these kinds of problems, they're the type of thing that requires governments to tackle, but it quickly becomes political, and I'm not sure it gets any easier there either.
Homeless people aren't stupid and they aren't immobile house plants, they respond to incentives like everyone else. If you want to live on the street and do drugs and be crazy the best place to do that is CA because the weather is great and they largely don't enforce vagrancy, shoplifting, and drug laws and they spend billions of dollars subsidizing homelessness (free needles etc etc etc).
>>> "any locality that chooses to affect[sic] change, may actually see numbers that make the problem look worse, when in reality they are helping to improve things globally"
I think the people who think they are positively effecting change are usually actually making things worse. There's a difference between making it easier to be homeless (ie the CA way) and making it easier to not be homeless (ie a way that might work).
I certainly agree that how you spend money could just encourage people to become homeless, I’d hoped to convey that idea by talking about percentage increases in the homeless population, since not every new homeless is going to be a transplant. I wish there were better guides as to what spending actually helps. I suspect soup kitchens are a general positive good, but they may only make it easier to be homeless by allieviating some of the pain. I personally think access to housing should be a basic constitutional right, but I’m also weary of things like projects and tenements which may purpetuate more problems than they help.
But I think we agree that this is not an easy issue.
Unrelated, I thought I was using affect correctly, but seeing sic in your quote and spending a few minutes googling, I still don’t know if effect was more correct than affect :/
In the absence of data, this is pure conspiracy. And considering the obvious issue of California being one of the most expensive places to live on the continent, it seems like quite a stretch.
There is an important phrase in economics, “all other things being equal”. That phrase covers the idea that if you chose another state that was equally expensive as california, and was equavalent in every other aspect, then this one difference would have this expected effect. You are correct that I don’t have emperical evidence to cite, and it would be a very very difficult experiment to run on a state level. But economists definitely try to run these kinds of experiments trying to find as similar as possible locals to try to answer the kinds of questions as “do changes in spending attract things that the money are spent on?”.
Now, I consider what I said to be self evident, but I certainly accept that my line of reasoning may be flawed, and it is possible that spending on homelessness does not increase incentives that attract homelessness. I’m extrapolating from the belief that spending money on business attracts business, but that may also be incorrect as popular as that idea is.
As others have pointed out, the problem has many sources. Other states/cities busing their homeless to California has historically been at least a minor contributor. California won a suit against the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, for specifically the practice of closing a psychiatric hospital, placing its freshly unhoused patients on Greyhound buses to Sacramento or San Francisco with one-way tickets, and giving the patients instructions to "call 911" when they arrive. [1]. 24 persons were documented and cared for by San Francisco specifically, but allegedly Nevada's largest mental health hospital did this with approximately 500 people.
There is no one cause. Anyone who says there is, is wrong.
CA has many problems. Houses are expensive, and that makes it impossible for poor people to buy a house. This is something that CA can fix over time, and those who are only homeless because they cannot afford a place to live are low hanging fruit. They only need to build a lot of housing (reforming zoning for example)
There are also people who are homeless because of some other problem. Mental issues, drug addiction, and other such things. they are harder to deal with - I'm not sure what can be done about it: I've seen a lot of proposals, but people proposing them tend to be overly optimistic about the ability of their ideas to work without downsides.
There are more issues as well, but those are the big ones, and you cannot treat them the same.
Even if it is caused by other states, is it valid to complain about that? What is the solution to that? Borders between states (while having no borders between countries)?
> As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians.
> “This is a local crisis and a homegrown problem,” said Peter Lynn, the executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the agency that conducts the largest homeless census count in the country.
> L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years.
CA considers you a resident for tax purposes if you live in the state for a year but in homeless studies they consider you a resident if you live here for more than 10 years. Really shows the bias.
If the problem is exacerbated by active policy or indirect action/non-action, then as a collection of people/states it is the burden of every state to shoulder it. And the federal government is just that, the collective power of all states combined.
Exactly. The logistics may not be simple (i.e. actually getting the federal government's support) but the logic should be obvious: piecemeal support results in the ones that are doing the most to help get "penalized" with more people seeking help.
So, lets imagine that the problem is being caused by other states sending their homeless over. Well, in the US you can't stop that, at least by direct migration, you might be able to stop particular organizations like city governments from doing so. But in a general sense there is freedom of movement.
The problem comes with that, the better you're at solving homelessness the more people will get sent there, and even more homeless will want to come there even if they are not sent. Suddenly Texas, for example would see California spending billions on the problem... Texas would have no motivation of spending billions to solve the problem themselves, in fact in terms of getting rid of the appearance of a homeless problem it would be more beneficial for them to be draconian on homelessness. This would push individuals to migrate to the promise land of California.
California would see is homeless costs increase dramatically and would be incentivized to stop (increasing?) funding on the problem themselves. Moloch wins. More people suffer. Yay humanity.
What you describe is what happens in Canada.
Most homeless in Canada end up in Vancouver, because of weather and assistance offered. The other provinces, with the 6 months freezing winter, not as much assistance, and I think a bit of enforcement, causes the homeless to end up at Vancouver.
If it is caused by other states, that would indicate the problem is not uniquely California related, making the likely necessary solutions to be federal.
If it is not caused by other states, that would indicate that the problem is something happening in California, and maybe a state level solution is best.
You have to start the solution in the right place to have any hope of addressing the root cause.
It’s a warm climate with large cities which provide sufficient incentive for people to choose to be homeless over other avenues of living
Homeless people obviously want to live somewhere like Cali over Canada for the winter. California also provides massive welfare to homeless. They also have a very open arms policy to illegals who are often poor and homeless
These aren’t exhaustive reasons why, but it’s a core part of it. California politicians seem to be unwilling to address complicated social problems head on and instead virtue signal and allow these problems to grow and fester
I’m not going to provide you with sources. It’s too politicized of a subject. If you don’t want to accept it for being this way i’ve learned not to argue. But at the very least if people really can’t see why this problem exists as it does, here an entry
You think people choose to be fucked up?
And what's the solution here, shoot the homeless?
Guess what you're in a never ending war. Every day new crazy people are born or made by our wonderful society, poverty keeps spreading (where's my replicators!).
> Tell me what FL is doing to solve their issues ...
Wait, what?
Why do you believe that FL's homeless crisis isn't expanding an a huge scale? Because it absolutely is. Floridians with government jobs and money in the bank are becoming homeless for the first time.
ref: Lived next to a huge FL homeless community for 10 years. Ex is frequently homeless. Me and my 5 sons barely escaped homelessness ourselves in 2021 (with long established jobs and savings).
A really good and fair story about the problems, including problems with government, law enforcement, neighbors and the unhoused themselves is "City of Tents"
Texas and Oklahoma openly bus their homeless to L.A. Rick Perry (former governor of Texas) openly bragged about it during his presidential campaign.
An LAT series of articles on homeless populations in Hollywood found that more than 60% of Hollywood's homeless, and more than 80% of the drug-abusing homeless, were not L.A. or even SoCal locals, and had come to L.A. from out-of-state. More than half of the homeless came from the Southwest, with the majority coming from Texas.
Even LAHSA's own survey of the homeless reveals that most of the homeless in L.A. weren't local to L.A. prior to becoming homeless in L.A. (However, because LAHSA's funding is based in part on the number of homeless, they characterize anyone that has been in L.A. for over a year as local, even if that individual has never had an actual residence in L.A. and was homeless upon arrival.)
L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years. Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless.
I don’t know how relevant this story is to the question of whether people who are homeless in California are from California.
In any case, the claim was made that the LAHSA data showed something which I found no evidence of, and in fact found that it showed something quite different. Lots of other data also suggest that a large majority of homeless do not come from other places.
If someone wants to share other data about this issue I’m happy to read it.
When even the LAT is calling out LAHSA's numbers, you know that they can't be trusted...
That being said, LAHSA's numbers combines both the chronic homeless and the temporary homeless. The chronic homeless in LA are mostly not local (and this is what the LAT found when they did their own investigation); the temporary homeless are almost all local (and are mostly due to financial issues or domestic violence), which is what leads to the disparity in numbers.
There's also a strong correlation between homeless people and parking garage density.
Housing prices are high where there are people. People are homeless where there are people. It comes with the territory. Throw in amazing weather and states bussing their homeless to CA and it becomes a very attractive proposition for someone without a home.
If there was a correlation then sending the homeless to Arkansas would solve the problem, but it wouldn't. They'd just be homeless in the woods.
Population density and price don't directly correlate. I'm sure you can think of some expensive low density areas.
Shipping people to lower cost of living locations can be a fix, especially if they have family nearby. It's very hard to afford some locations without a high pay job.
There are always more homeless people in the city than in tiny rural towns, because the homeless people in the tiny rural towns move toward the city or get chased out.
It's also true that there are numbers of people in those far rural communities that would end up quite homeless if you forced them into the city. Imagine someone on social security living in a dilapidated trailer on some worthless piece of land.
And also homeless people, even the mentally ill and drug addicted are not stupid. They will go where they get the least hassle and the most benefit. And it's widely known that California is the place to be.
The the tiny rural towns take care of their own. There are no homeless because everyone knows "joe" is messed up, and so they ignore him living in an otherwise abandoned house (they are around) thus making "Joe" not homeless, and plant a larger garden so he can harvest something. They won't allow someone new move in, but Joe grew up there and so they let him continue to live there. In the city you can't know everyone and so it is much easier to ignore the homeless in a way that doesn't help the homeless.
I don't completely agree. From talking with them, a fair number of the homeless in SF are from Lake County and the Central Valley. Went to a shitty school with no job prospects. started on crank. ended up in SF because this is a place where a methhead can enjoy their lifestyle and get by.
My priors are that if the WSJ is making obviously BS headlines in the format "California spent <big number> on something. It failed" then California is likely half-heartedly doing the right thing and should do more of it.
And is likely saving money compared with whatever the WSJ is pushing as an alternative.
LA resident since 2015. I have a proposed solution that no one ever seems to bring up on here but I would love to know the HN response to this:
If a big essential part of the American Dream is home ownership, and we are short on homes, why do we allow corporations to own them all? How about we have a middle ground or cap on size of corporate entity and # of units or something?
Some of the argument seems to be stuck on free housing for everyone, and everyone else seems fine allowing faceless corporations to own everything and turn us all into renters.
I know I’m leaving out plenty of specifics of how this would work. But the basic concept is same - people (not companies) should own housing. Let me know your thoughts.
My first ever HN comment so hopefully this is seen.
Large corporations don't actually own many homes. It is true that they started buying them during covid, but that is mostly because they realized they are extremely good investments due zoning making it hard to build them. In order for housing to be affordable it can't be an investment. It needs to maintain its real value over time, meaning the wage to price ratio remains constant. If housing wasn't a good investment it wouldn't be owned by corporations. So I'd say your idea is on the right track, but just misses the last step which is just make housing affordable by allowing it to be built.
I hear you on homes but housing overall - apartments included should not be owned by corporations for investment purposes imho.
Rough stats I’ve seen are 25% of homes are now owned by institutional investors. And 44% of CA residents are renters. Having a quarter of the inventory taken off the market means the prices are going to go up.
Land is expensive. We can build more. We can also stop allowing those who have more than enough already continue to apply downward pressure.
I'd been of the impression that corporate home ownership is mostly surging in places like the South and Sun Belt, where housing prices themselves are surging. Housing prices in California have been pretty stagnant since Covid, at least compared to much of the rest of the country. California real estate isn't actually a great investment for these companies right now.
Right. Price to rent ratios in California means that when you buy the only thing you get is a bet on real estate. New landlords are cash flow negative by wide margins.
Wild speculation with no fundamentals isn't attractive to big firms.
> I hear you on homes but housing overall - apartments included should not be owned by corporations for investment purposes imho.
A single apartment building (or complex) might have around a hundred tenants and a handful of employees. That's a large enough operation that it's straight up irresponsible not to set up an LLC or corporation for it.
Moreover, it's irrelevant. Demand vastly overshadows supply, hence the insane prices. That's it. There isn't remotely enough of a basic human need. Everything else is window dressing until we address that fundamental, econ. 101 problem.
The mortgage tax deduction is basically dead for most of us since Trump’s tax reform that raised the standard deduction way above what most people would get from tax deductible interest. At least until 2025, unless something changes.
So a lot of corporate-owned housing is only in that state transitionally. If a corporate developer builds a condo building or a suburban subdivision, they own all those homes because they built them, but their intent is to sell those homes and divest themselves from it entirely. When a bank forecloses on a home, they’re in the same situation.
What’s left when you account for all of that is apartment buildings. Individual people can own apartment buildings, but only if they’re significantly wealthy, and even then they’ll want to outsource the actual management of the building. Theoretically you can convert apartment buildings to condo buildings, but there are still a lot of people who want to rent rather than buy at any particular point in time so it might not make sense to do that.
Furthermore, I don’t think theres any corporate conspiracy to turn us all into renters in the first place.
I don’t get into a lot of conspiracy theory scenarios. I also don’t think it’s even much of a conspiracy - when the recession hits and people can’t afford housing they default on mortgages. Corporations buy them and turn back into renters. I’ve seen stats that say that happened to 5% of the population during the last 10-15 years.
Large corporations do not buy much real estate. Look how many homes Black Rock owns versus the total housing stock. Many people incorporate to limit liability. It is also very cheap to spin up new corporations. So there is nothing stopping a person from being part of unlimited corporations that own your capped number of homes.
The real issue is lack of supply and your enemy there are single family home owners. They do not want density near them.
The people and corporations who subdivide their land up for renters are generally very happy to build more units because they like money. Your proposal, if it worked, would make the situation worse.
Are people homeless because they could afford rent, but rather be homeless if they cannot buy? Further, if the rental market was saturated, it wouldn't pay off anymore to buy rental units. If the demand for rental is just there because there is nothing to buy, it's a clear indicator that there just isn't enough housing (in the desired places). Ultimately the answer will always remain that we need to build more housing. We haven't built enough in decades and it will take a long time to catch up, especially if we don't start on it. We need to relax zoning, remove minimum unit sizes and make it quick and predictable to get approval for new construction. Right now, many of the neighborhoods we love so much would be illegal to build today.
Well one problem is once corporations get involved is money starts flowing to influence Politicians to do the Corps bidding. So, I wouldn't say it's neutral.
I've decided most homeless social programs are a trap. By locating these programs in the centers of the highest cost of living cities, we can't reasonably expect them to succeed, assuming success is actually getting people housed and back on their feet. We need to encourage people to move some place they have a chance in hell of getting out of poverty.
Centering these programs in rich city centers is a failed policy and needs to be scrapped.
In some cases, these are indirect corporate subsidies. After all, who will work in low-paying jobs in SF, if they have to live far far away?
Where could people move that would give them more opportunities? Rural areas often lack the social resources to support people in more precarious situations, and big cities is where the opportunities are.
Interesting idea, but do homeless folks actually end up working for corporations? They have a hard enough time getting any job in the first place (and remaining presentable enough for their job if they do get one)
Luckily a San Franciscan figured it all out over one hundred years ago:
> THE GREAT PROBLEM IS SOLVED. We are able to explain social phenomena that have appalled philanthropists and perplexed statesmen all over the civilized world. We have found the reason why wages constantly tend to a minimum, giving but a bare living, despite increase in productive power:
> As productive power increases, rent tends to increase even more — constantly forcing down wages.
> Advancing civilization tends to increase the power of human labor to satisfy human desires. We should be able to eliminate poverty. But workers cannot reap these benefits because they are intercepted. Land is necessary to labor. When it has been reduced to private ownership, the increased productivity of labor only increases rent. Thus, all the advantages of progress go to those who own land. Wages do not increase — wages cannot increase. The more labor produces, the more it must pay for the opportunity to make anything at all.
There is already an incentive to build densely and provide more housing, developers already want to do this because they make more money by doing so. They are literally not allowed to build anything other than single family homes though, the local homeowners actually control what is allowed to be built.
That is to say: the people who have an incentive to keep housing supply low are the ones deciding what is allowed to be constructed in their town.
If I go buy a piece of land in Cupertino and I want to build an apartment complex, I have to go apply for permits and get approval from the city of Cupertino zoning board. The people on that board are all people who live in Cupertino that own single family homes, they have a strong incentive to deny my application if I am building my apartment complex anywhere near their neighborhood.
Basically every single city in California has zoning laws that prohibit you from building anything other than suburban single family homes in most of the town.
You can fix the housing crisis by passing a law that limits the power of the zoning board to deny permits for these types of housing.
Take a look at the Cupertino zoning map: https://map.gridics.com/us/ca/cupertino#11.93/37.31591/-122....
if you click layers -> planning -> zoning you can see an overlay of the zoning for the whole city. The light beige color is "single family" zoned, meaning that nobody is allowed to build anything other than low-density homes. Notice how _most_ of the city is designated "single family". This is the cause of the entire problem. Nobody is allowed to build anything more dense than the single family homes that are already there.
Not-so-coincidentally, Cupertino is one of the most expensive places to live in the US.
Look at Houston, TX. They have no zoning laws (it's not perfect they still have deed restrictions which sometimes act similarly to zoning laws), and it is a massive city. The median house price is ~340k, something that most normal people can afford. There is a clear correlation between reduced zoning restrictions and lower housing costs.
Houston has a higher single-family detached-home ratio than the Bay Area [1]. It's not that Houston's lack of zoning laws lets more people build the missing middle that is lacking in the Bay Area; it's that the geography of Texas allows growth-by-sprawl in a way that is lacking in the Bay Area, which has to grow by densification.
When I visited Houston, the lack of sane urban planning was immediately evident. It is insanity to have a neighborhood of single-family detached housing literally across the street from 20-story towers adjacent to the transit line--that's exactly what Houston has.
It's really insane. Just remove everything that distorts the market. Restrictive zoning limits competition for a piece of land. Rent control distorts prices. Affordable units make building unprofitable. Get rid of that and housing will be so abundant.
If the problem is zoning that’s blocking density then why is the density of Cupertino (5,300/sq mile) almost double that of Houston (3000/sq mile)?
Houston is the example of why cities need zoning regs. No one wants to buy a home and have a high rise erected next to them.
Cheap housing comes from cheap land and cheap labor. Cupertino had neither of these and will continue to be expensive as long as there are companies paying high salaries in the area. It doesn’t matter if you allow high density housing if it costs $3M/single family home to acquire the land.
The Houston method created massive urban sprawl and created mostly single family homes. Review boards that help shape a city provide a balance can go a longer way to a better city. The Cupertino example shows what happens when you don't need industry and everyone works elsewhere.
There's a difference between an LVT and a property tax. LVT is just on the footprint, the unimproved land, vs. a standard property tax (what Prop 13 more or less freezes) which includes the value of the buildings on it.
George was pretty big on the idea that you only can only ethically tax natural assets taken away from the community--e.g., collect ongoing ground rent in exchange for the right to deed a chunk of land and prevent others from using it--and that those funds should then be redistributed to the community as compensation for their loss. He didn't think we should discourage success by taxing labor, trade, and improvements that don't come from nature.
I agree Prop 13 has been horrible for a lot of reasons. But even without it we wouldn't have anything like a Georgist LVT--we'd just have a lot more rent-taking by the state on improvements, on top of all those other disincentives he didn't like, and likely still with no citizen's dividend/UBI to show for it. Home prices might not be quite so damned wacky, though, if we didn't put such a huge disincentive on turnover.
Yes you're right. Undoing Prop 13 wouldn't mean instant Land Value Tax. But Ill still maintain that Prop 13 is pretty close to a polar opposite of Land Value Taxation
Another way of addressing the problem (in terms of the framing above) is to make land unnecessary to labor. Universal work from anywhere would substantially reduce the ability to extract rent because it would increase competition among a much larger group of landowners. Why do you think all the landowners are so eager for the peons to RTO?
This demonstrates that the government will intervene in industries that have too much pricing power, right? Since the people demand help from their political representatives?
The gist of it is that LVT fundamentally makes no sense because land is fundamentally worthless, and so taxing based on the value of the land would simply result in either extremely low taxes that would require a meaningful decrease in state spending, or would result in mis-allocation of resources to less than efficient locations purely on a reduced tax rate, or would result in vast swaths of land being negative value since the profits that could be generated in them would not cover the tax.
Furthermore, LVT doesn't fix the underlying problem, which is that the state mismanages the earnings it receives.
I’m not the poster you replied to, but for starters, the problem is not that we don’t have enough money. The whole article is about how CA spent $17B and got so little for it.
So how is having even more state money via LVT going to do anything? We’re just funneling this money into whatever black hole it’s going into
Prop 13 distorts incentives. It's why we have private country clubs in the middle of Los Angeles, dilapidated shacks on Google's global HQ, and surface parking lots in San Francisco proper.
It's also why California has the highest impact fees in the nation by a wide margin.
We should end Prop 13 and make it budget neutral by ending our other taxes. But even if we repealed Prop 13 and then set the money on fire it'd be a win for housing.
SF and similar CA cities have set up a program that encourages people to move there because it makes being “homeless” an actual possible lifestyle choice. Even an enjoyable one.
Hmm. I wonder if you could say "if someone becomes homeless in your locality, your locality has failed them". And then rate localities/states by their net loss of citizens that have fallen "outside society". Then begin incentivizing communities to fix these problems. There's only so much a local community can do with limited funds, but while I'm sure the majority of homeless in California are Californian... I would love other states to take ownership of citizens they export/extrude. :s
I agree. From my research, Portugal’s drug assistance programmes for the homeless are quite effective.
For those in more of a poverty trap situation, Finland has done quite a good job finding the right set of policies for their country to bring levels down so far that most Americans would consider them to have “solved” homelessness.[1]
The Feds may not be “to blame”. But it’s hard to see how individual states can solve this problem.
Any program by any state that helps the homeless in a country where you legally cannot create state level borders (and with the homeless you can’t establish residency by definition) would immediately draw homeless people across the country, especially since the homeless strategy in many states is to pay for one way bus tickets to a different state, and quickly overwhelm and undermine what could otherwise have been a successful program.
Any successful program must be funded and implemented at the Federal level.
Yes. States aren’t powerless to implement mental health requirements and programmes though. It is a cop-out to suggest that states and cities don’t use the full breadth of their legislative powers because the federal government made a bad policy decision over 4 decades ago.
Let me just quality a bit further: homelessness is a failure of the neoliberal ideology (land free markets/privatization never worked, from the enclosures [1] to modern times, see Georgism for a solution [2]) and further a failure of the metaphysics of meritocracy based in desert-people's belief "by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground", which simply isn't the case today, and it certainly won't be the case in a few decades when all the jobs will be gone forever, hopefully.
If we're going to put the SF homeless problem on "neoliberal ideology", we should also give "neoliberal ideology" (e.g. free markets/trade/globalization) credit for lifting almost a billion people out of poverty in developing nations (mainly China, India) in the 00s.
For India, yes, the MGNREGA [1] is very "neoliberal", we all know how neoliberals care about social security, social equity, guaranteed wage employment, environment protection, women empowerment, and so on.
For China: "When the poverty headcount dropped below 10 percent of the rural
population, targeted poverty alleviation and social protection systems started playing a more important role." [2], how neoliberal of them.
Meanwhile, "more than 800 million Amazon trees felled in six years to meet beef demand" [3], who needs oxygen anyway.
Not sure how much of a downtrend, seems rather stable [1]. There are also 0 countries that implement Georgist policies and most of the countries in the world are directly neoliberal or neoliberal-bent, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia [2], and friends included.
Perhaps I am not correct, but what do you think will happen in a few years when we will have a 100 GB neural model able to drive any car in any environment, effectively obliterating 200+ million jobs worldwide? Fairly certain, if we keep the same policies and the same belief-system, homelessness will trend rather high.
Ah, the Georgism fans. Thinking that every single problem in the world can be solved via a land value tax.
It is actually one of the few groups I've found that are worse than the socialist class reductionists, who think that every problem exists "because capitalism".
Yes, a land value tax can be a useful policy. But it simply has little relevance to the topic of people who are homeless because of mental issues.
And you bringing up georgism demonstrates a lack of engagement on the issue, and instead an attempt to shoe horn in your favorite ideology into any possible issue.
"Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by land ownership, natural monopolies, pollution rights, and control of the commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g. intellectual property)" [1]. From a Georgist standpoint today's land is data. Do you have $30 million or more to be considered an ultra-high-net-worth individual [2]? If yes, congratulations, we are indeed enemies. If not, don't kid yourself, you are just as much hoi polloi as a homeless person. Do you even own a factory or you just embody bonded consciousness as a hobby [3]?
I just can't wait for the full consequences of automated statistics-based decision-making to develop into realtime embedded robotics, giving rise to the $100 trillion company, evaporating hundreds of millions of jobs, burning down the world as it is, but at least silencing these squeaky, visionless voices: fiat lucrum, et pereat mundus.
I literally gave you a Wikipedia list of other concerns, "natural monopolies, pollution rights, and control of the commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g. intellectual property)", the Georgist word land abstracts away, telling you the land of today is data, and the land of tomorrow will be neural models. Complex issues often have solutions in other places; houselessness will indeed not be solved by putting some people in some houses.
55% of homeless were not mentally ill in January 2015 in "the most extensive survey ever undertaken" [1]. Not having a singular worldview is one query away.
> houselessness will indeed not be solved by putting some people in some houses.
Thats my point though. That someone's buzzword ideology or singular solution isn't particularly relevant to this discussion, and that Georgists are the worst of the bunch.
Its actually the only group worse than the internet socialists who just blame "capitalism" for everything.
And georgism is actually worse in that it takes a single topic, that of "land" and just attempts to shoehorn that one concept into everything.
> the Georgist word land abstracts away
Oh thats exactly my point! They take one single word, from an ideology of that was outdated even 100 years ago, and pretend like it applies to every single problem.
What if, instead of that, not everything has to do with "land"? Maybe, different problems are solved by different things and we don't have to stress the definition of the word "land" to apply to literally every single problem.
But my point is "complex issues often have solutions in other places".
You just hate operator overloading, I understand. Hope you don't write much C++.
I do have a tendency to overload solutions, since there are so many problems. For instance, just to give you something more to kick, I believe all democratic issues would be solved by three changes in the electoral process:
(i) no political nominations, instead have a population-wide lottery, arbitrarily selecting 10 or so people as contenders [1]; (the principle behind: power should belong to those who do not want it)
(ii) to be able to vote "No", invalidating all the candidates, if majority vote, reducing the mandate duration, if not; (the principle behind: you are not free if you cannot say "No")
(iii) tie the mandate duration to the voter turnout: if only 60% vote, you get 60% of the duration of the mandate, not 100%. (the principle behind: politicians are better if they are changed often)
People could be paid to move or otherwise offered lots of benefits and best quality of life opportunities to do so. And paying people to move would be much cheaper than the amount of money we spend now on the problem to overpay for stuff in expensive cities.
The actual reason why we don't do this easy solution, is because home prices arent the sole cause of homelessness.
Simply doing the voluntary, cheap, and easy solution of giving people the voluntary choice to live in a much higher quality home in a low cost of living area simply wouldn't solve the issue.
Enclosure worked perfectly well as it consolidated productive land in the hands of the powerful without the attached commoners that they were at least notionally responsible for. I cannot think of a greater disenfrachisement in the Western world other than chattel slavery.
Enclosure directly lead to absolutely massively increased agricultural production. Literally doubled the amount of food available. It was one of the most effective public policies of all time.
Sure. Common Chinese factory workers live in 6-12 people dormitory. Homeless people get evicted from the capital city. Major city have rule in place to prevent non local people buying property,
Let’s do that.
Certain areas are inherently easier to be homeless in, regardless of local programs.
Try sleeping outside for a year in Phoenix or in Minneapolis. Try getting resources in a sprawling suburb without access to a car. It seems clear that SF, with its dense, walkable layout, access to public transit, and year round moderate climate, would be vastly preferable to most areas of the US.
Yes, I agree. Despite Houston being one of the top cities in the US for homelessness, they have a slightly lower rate of homelessness than the US average.
However, their homelessness rate is higher than the Texas average.
Because certain areas of the country have better services for homeless people, because certain areas are livable/hospitable year-round, because some places bus homeless people to other areas? Probably mostly the first 2 reasons but the third doesn't help.
Why? Is it illegal to discriminate based on place of birth?
It seems like it'd be politically palatable to allow places to run homeless programs that are only available to locals. There isn't a downside for anyone.
How will you define a local? What happens if someone lives in a town for 10 years then loses their home. What if theyre not a local but they are a minor? Or if they are an immigrant?
Quite serious. It isn't like free movement stops people from implementing a local plan against homelessness.
> How will you define a local? What happens if someone lives in a town for 10 years then loses their home. What if theyre not a local but they are a minor? Or if they are an immigrant?
I'm not sure what point you're wanting to make here, but yes. If a group of locals wants to solve homelessness in their area they will need to decide on answers to those questions. Frankly they aren't hard questions. Born in a geographic area or owned a home for 5+ years, yes, no, yes if they owned a home locally.
How do define who gets to be a citizen for a federal response to homelessness? It faces exactly the same problems. America can't afford to provide welfare for all of Asia.
First, homeless people tend to be much less likely to have the wherewithal to prove residency, either due to substance problems, difficulty navigating bureaucracy, or just not having the money to chase down paperwork or a safe place to store it. So hurdles like "being local", essentially whatever it means, could prove to be a huge barrier to uptake of your programs.
Second, "solving homelessness" for just one subset of homeless people may not actually provide the benefit you hope for. You might still have tent cities, RV encampments, people using drugs outdoors, etc. Now the people doing that are from just past city limits and entitled to no support.
Obviously there's going to be some abuse of this system (by the homeless), but overall I think this is really cool, and I fail to see how this makes bank for any of the orchestraters involved.
Cities that deal with high levels of homelessness are usually places that are deemed unaffordable anyways by the common American. Also if the place is warm, has easy access to drugs, and generous help with minimal requirements of the beneficiary to receive that aid. I awknowledge there will always be individuals who would rather have awful living standards than assume any responsibilities, but for those people who actually want to forge a better life for themselves, who fell through the cracks and are homeless perhaps to poor decisions but otherwise want to stand back up, this is awesome.
The article you labelled "SF -> ??" Specifically said it was tranporting them to family or friends who know that person, ie. someone who would have individual concern for them to get them back on their feet.
> “We consider a person being removed from the street and reunited with a stable, loving family as the best possible outcome,” Hussey said. “This is not shifting the homeless problem to other cities. This is a person being removed from the street and being helped by the people who love them the most — their families.”
"NV -> CA" ironically goes against your statement, because the article is saying that Nevada stopped sending people to SF. Also they were trying to replicate what SF was doing, sending them to families, but in the worst possible way that was guaranteed to fail, because they sent them to a location without contacting any family or even seeing if any lived where they were putting them.
> Homeless patients are no longer bused to other areas and state officials want to move forward
"NY -> Hawaii" is similar to the "SF -> ??" one because despite the title, they were sending them nationwide, not just Hawaii. Their approach was the most easily abused, because they paid for a year's worth of livelihood. However, for people who have real intentions to improve their lives, this provides great hope in that dream because they get a fresh start, and in a place that is not impossibly expensive to live in and guaranteeing future impoverishment.
Regarding "WY -> UT", SLC, where they are being taken to in UT, is one of the few places where they focus on rehab rather than perpetual homelessness, and basically all homelessness programs are focused on addiction recovery, and acquisition of a job. It is illegal to beg there, or to give money to homeless, because the only possible way to be homeless there is by refusing rehabilitation. I have no proof of these comments of SLC, as this perspective is based on what I've heard from others, so it could be wrong, but I've heard nothing to the contrary. So I am again optimistic for this approach from Wyoming, although I think it'd be better if they just adopted the same system instead of overloading another states rehabs.
The last article you posted has no relevancy to the topic, as it discusses migrants and the border issue, not homelessness, so I will skip it.
> has about half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless
How many are from California and how many were given a bus pass to California by a government content to move the homeless around or on their own accord made their way to California as it has some of the best services?
How many are the same homeless people and how many are new homeless people who have replaced the old homeless people, making it appear that no progress has been made, but in reality there may just be greater need?
From the many hundreds of homeless people I’ve met in SF, there’s been a massive increase of out-of-state movement. That said, they seem to mostly come of their own volition - they realize the combination of the nice weather and massive resources available means they have a pretty maintainable lifestyle.
There are a lot of things you can take from it, but one overarching opinion is that "housing first" gets in the way of helping those who are down on their luck and find themselves hopefully-temporarily without a home (as opposed to those who cannot or will not work to change their situation).
It makes the case you need multiple approaches to deal with the vastly different homeless situations.
California state officials have managed to spend $17B on it, I'd say the homelessness problem is working just fine for them. It sounds cynical, but this is what "managing," a problem in government means - extracting value from it. If you want less homelessness, you need fewer people benefiting from it. It's that simple. Government isn't about solving problems, it's about managing them to the benefit of the constituents who vote them back in.
Homelessness is encouraged by California policies that are essentially accelerationist, where they create the problem and exacerbate it to get the money and power to solve it, and then they've got something to manage indefinitely to keep getting those things. This is why you have a border crisis, and why your neighbourhoods have tent cities. Outside the cadre of people who think they will make up the central committee, few actually want unlimted centralized governments and policies when life is good and peaceful, so agitaing to make things much, much worse is how you get popular support to seize control and entrench your people. It's not a conspiracy, it's just strategy, and most people can't face that because they don't know what power is like, or understand what it means when they say it is the highest good. Homelessness is the symptom of a much deeper and more malignant social cancer, imo.
I know a lot of this discussion focuses on the Bay Area, but I live in central LA and the situation is totally out of control here as well. Needles, human feces, trash everywhere, people sleeping in front of storefronts.
Walking around parts of LA at night feels like you're in a neo-noir dystopian film. It's literally ghastly.
Society refusing to draw a link between the homelessness/addition crisis in the States and the pharmaceutical companies becoming drug dealers/pushers of opioids that flooded the country is honestly shocking.
Hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans became opioid addicts because they were prescribed unnecessary pills by their own doctors, and became hooked (the risks of opioids have been known for what, thousands of years?). We have barely given the pharma industry a slap on the wrist for the harm they've caused and the direct link between the two crises is never drawn in the public sphere.
2. The housing has to be slightly worse than the lowest quality housing available on the market. (Think SROs or dormitory style).
3. You have to make access to some of the housing unconditional.
This was the solution in most cities until large bipartisan pushes in the late 90s sought to end "projects" and "slums".
I totally understand trying to make efforts to also solve drug and crime related problems. Or even get people into nice houses or jobs. But it seems like all for all of the money we are refusing to spend on actual homes, we may as well move the drugs and crime indoors and off the streets.
One aspect of real estate investing is the utility of being able to control local property values.
Investors looking to build generational wealth, with deep pockets, are able to drive down property values of seemingly entire cities, buy up land at a low cost, then change policies and turn low value land back into high value land.
There are many ways to do this sort of real estate market manipulation, most of which rely on controlling levers of power in various levels of government.
Do you think that behavior is, or should be, considered by us as plausible, probable, real, illegal, irrational, or immoral? Do you think that it's conspiracy theory?
Personally, I look at real estate market manipulation as standard fare. Of course it happens everywhere. Politicians love to direct public funding towards public works and infrastructure in areas owned by them and their friends (and voter bases). They do this legally. When too obvious and well documented, politicians using public institutions for self enrichment might be unpopular among voters (unless these same voters also benefit). I'm not angry about this, I think the system works extremely well.
But, I protest against vulnerable people being weaponized for real estate investors' needs. It has happened to a greater or lesser extent. The extent to which that has occurred is extremely difficult to pin down or prove.
This is what conspiracy theory does. Without too much worry about proof, take irrational behavior and patterns and construct a framework to try to explain. Does it make sense?
I find it hard to drive through the Tenderloin without thinking “there is no fix for this”. Once someone has been homeless and into drugs for long enough, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to get them to fix their lives (if possible at all) for a good portion of them.
Beyond some massive investment in housing and recovery, it’s just going to continue not working. Prevention is the solution, we have to prevent it at all costs and do our best to ease the suffering of those who are stuck there now.
Unfortunately I think we’ll continue with half measures and the problem will remain unsolved.
To my mind this is an example of a failing in the federation system in the USA.
First off, I hope we can agree that the homelessness problem in the US is not normal and not something a developed wealthy country should have (just so we are all on the same page).
The problem I see is that no state can unilaterally fix the housing problem because if they do, the unhoused from the other states are incentivized to move to the "fixed" state, overwhelming their resources and efforts. And yet, homelessness seems to be left to the states to solve.
Homelessness is absolutely normal sadly. You cannot eliminate all homelessness. It’s currently <0.2% of the population. Never before in the history of humanity have we enjoyed such high living standards.
Scott Alexander reviewed the book "San Fransicko" by Michael Shellenberger and as part of the review analyzed the top reasons for people to become homeless. [1]
Some takeaways from the review:
- Number one predictor for homelessness are the housing prices.
- 30% of the homeless in SF are from outside the city
That's a widely misunderstood statistic. The Point in Time survey asks homeless people about the location of their shelter when they last became homeless. For example, a homeless person from outside SF who spent a night in county jail or on a friend's couch in a Tenderloin SRO unit would count as "became homeless in San Francisco" for the purpose of the survey.
Moved from Ventura/Santa Barbara to Palm Beach FL, due to the alot of shortcomings that California has faced. Witnessing several overdoses outside my condo near the beach was the final straw for me. Too heavy to be around. I still miss the contrast of the beach and mountains, but since after the Pandemic, things just didn't feel the same in California. I hope things can turn around in but it seems like there are issues that stem from the highest offices of government and go beyond the issue of homelessness.
Palm Beach is pretty cool, West Palm Beach/Jupiter area reminds me a lot of Santa Barbara. West Palm Beach to Miami is about the same distance from Ventura to LA. You get a lot of the benefits of Miami without being directly in the madness. A lot of young professionals working in Finance and Tech in Miami are moving to West Palm because of the new BrightLine train that goes from downtown WPB to downtown Miami.
I haven't really got out much and explored due to crazy workload, but want to start attending meet ups here and meet some people my age. A lot of the problems that I had with California, don't really exist, at least to the same degree, out here. It's pretty comfy.
You don't even need any sort of novel new technology. We could build housing out of wood just like we have for hundreds of years.
The main problem is that new housing is largely banned as established wealth that already have detached homes vote for politicians that promise to not allow any new homes near them.
I've heard it called the homelessness industrial complex, that was from some City Journal article someone posted to HN some years back that introduced me to that publication. It was a shocking thing to contemplate but yah with that sum of money what exactly do we have to show for it?
This same nonsense logic would apply to the police, firemen and nurses too. Are the firemen out there discouraging sprinkler systems because they want to keep their jobs?
Even if we were looking at this from an utterly cynical, purely financial viewpoint, the people paid to help the homeless are effectively property managers and they benefit from housing the homeless, not letting them sleep on the street.
that's an interesting point, I think for those professions theres sufficient quantity of a baseline demand that they don't need to artificially create demand. However it's not unprecedented, there was a crazy story a friend shared with me like 2 years ago I think. Something from this François Bonivard, Geneva Chronicles in the 1500s that details this doctor trying to contaminate his town to secure future plague patients. I tried to find the primary source but all I could locate was this odd website that happened to hit some of the text my friend emailed me https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=11047763. The original French text is in the archive however https://archive.org/details/leschroniquesde00bonigoog
A more modern example I recently stumbled across maybe 2 weeks ago was this crime story of this wicked nurse working in the ICU who was thrashing patients on his floor with air embolisms. The reason, the guy wanted to prolong the patients stay to ensure more overtime hours https://youtu.be/dgWcplHgAjU?t=645. Absolutely unbelievable.
All those other professions have preventative value. It is wholly desirable for cities to run homeless shelters - the incentives are rightly aligned to make it temporary to keep down costs. Involving private outfits as contractors, just as with private prisons, skews the incentives terribly. (I also have nothing against private healthcare, security, or fire houses as a luxury spend for those who want it.)
This is an interesting concept I’d like to hear more of with this so called preventative value. Is this to say in their absence bigger troubles would show up so having their services prevents worse outcomes from sneaking up on us or something?
More or less. Otherwise you can get easily stuck arguing that any profession that fixes problems is untrustable for fabricating problems. E.g., doctors deliberately give us bad advice to keep us sick or overdiagnose so that they have more patients. (Okay, maybe chiropractors do this - hah!) But I think it's fairly safe to argue that employees of a system like nurses or cops - who are payed a salary regardless of how many "customers" they go through - are very different than the owners of private hospitals, prisons, or shelter operators whose profit incentives are directly aligned with funneling more people into the system, not at preventing or fixing anything.
yah, and I can see this being true of any effort to remove something negative from society. What do you do next when satisfactorily eliminate it and how do you test when that negative thing has not sufficiently retreated for a given effort. How do you differentiate spinning wheels when someone doesn't want to advance and is intentionally idling burning the hours and when the problem is just downright difficult.
With that level of money, you could hire lots of smart people to generate lots of ideas to solve the problem.
You could hire people to investigate the problem and provide data. And then you could use that money to implement small scale (locality level) experiments to see what works. And still have billions left over.
For some reason, the whole concept of "Do more of what works, and less of what doesn't" seems lost on the people involved.
Half the dysfunction with political efforts to ameliorate homelessness is the toxicity of touching a difficult issue. Homelessness is beyond any one term or individual to solve. Certainly you cannot cure the addictions, disabilities or madness of these unfortunate people overnight. The only solution people would actually like is if the homeless were to disappear.
These are either mentally I'll people or people who refuse to maintain the minimum amount of civility required by modern humanity.
They should either be forcefully institutionalised or forcefully removed with imprisonment for repeat offence.
Public streets are public property, this is no law that allows this sort of lunacy. Everywhere else these ... are atleast thrown away to some dark corner under a bridge or street.
In a way we don't disagree. I think citizens would be quite happy with a solution which makes the homeless invisible by sequestering them. Its probably also the best for the health of these people. But remember how we got here. Reagan shut down the asylums because they were expensive, messy and "inhumane". 20 years after reinstitutionalizing we will lament the cost of sedation and imprisonment.
California spent $4 billion a year on homelessness. Thats roughly $35,000 per homeless person (115,000).
IMO it shouldn't even that much to institutionalise/imprison/forcefully remove these people but even if it did cost as much or more, it would still be worth it.
Imagine what would clean safe streets do for these cities, it would create such a huge rebound!
> I can solve it in under a year... forcefully institutionalised or forcefully removed with imprisonment for repeat offence.
Yes, if you criminalize homelessness and imprison all the homeless in hospitals and prisons, I think you've technically solved homelessness. Your problem though is that to do so, you've gone full fascist, so now there's a new problem.
There is a huge difference between being homeless and choosing to camp on a public street in metropolitan areas.
Its not only illegal, its immoral. If they aren't mentally ill, you forcefully remove them to the outskirts of the city. If they still keep coming back then you imprison them.
If you think this is fascist, then you are dangerously loosening the definition of fascism. You must see how playing with these words like this is extremely dangerous? Does "the boy you cried wolf" ring a bell?
If you think forcibly concentrating groups of undesirables into camps isn’t a hallmark of fascism, I have to introduce you to the 20th century.
> If they aren't mentally ill
And what happens when the people making the decisions on whether or not someone is mentally ill are religious conservatives who believe homosexuality and transgenderism is a mental illness?
Are you aware that religious conservatives often call leftism a mental disorder? They call wokeism a “mind virus”.
Maybe you think you have a good idea here with your homeless concentration camps, but all I see is a back door to prosecution and persecution for people you just don’t like to see. Today that’s the homeless, and when they’re gone you’ll move on to the next group. First they came for the socialists…
Aren’t you just describing the modern prison system? I believe the fascism comes from doing it to non-criminals, or communism if you count china’s re-education camps. Also, the British invented concentration camps during the Boer war.
Work camps were a thing in the USA during the Great Depression. Supposedly a good thing, but I guess it depends on perspective.
Sure, but other prison systems that are more humane also concentrate people in locations.
Imagine America with a humane prison system that actually rehabilitated people rather than just grind them out at the end of their sentence. Then, we could send people with drug problems, or shop lifting or arson problems, to prison, and it would be a good thing for them rather than a bad thing. That might work.
And right now, there is a lot of crime going on in the drug addicted side of the homeless problem, we know prison is pointless so don’t even bother prosecuting these days unless it’s severe. However, it means that if we had the above, no other pretense would really be needed (crime -> enforced rehab).
This is all fantasy of course, because we have nothing like that in place. But it would be a good place to start (fix the correctional system).
Right, exactly. We concentrate people on what they do, not who they are. It’s harder to abuse the system that way (although it is abused still).
Right now the system is such that we try to be as specific as possible as to what is punishable by imprisonment and for how long, and the system results in imprisonment only if a jury is convinced beyond a reasonable doubt about the guilt of a defendant.
We can’t apply this same system to mental illness, for the reasons I stated in my other post. You see how it’s working in Florida; you tell everyone that you want to protect the children, write some vague laws to “protect” them, and then you use them to wage an ideological war against your political enemies, leveraging the vagueness of the laws you’ve passed. That’s the legal mechanism by which fascism works to corrupt democracy.
You see a lot of people eager to leverage the criminal system to get rid of homeless people by criminalizing homelessness on streets. This doesn’t work for them though, because it just drives homeless people into parks. That’s when you see the “well, let’s just ship them to the desert anyway” kind of ideas pop up. But there’s no legal mechanism to do so, I which is where the fascism comes in. “We will just label them as ‘undesireable’… I mean ‘mentally ill’ and that should be enough justification.”
I’m wondering how many of the people proposing such concentration camps are themselves diagnosed with a mental illness, and whether or not the absence of such a diagnosis may make them more likely to suggest such an idea.
Ya, if someone is on the street mentally ill, or even abusing drugs as a user, but not doing crime, there is no moral reason to force them into rehab. Frankly, that isn’t really common for the visible homeless in our area (the ones that we notice because they are walking around without a shirt on with a bunch of Amazon packages in their cart, that isn’t counting the homeless we don’t notice because they aren’t doing crazy things). The crime is pretty bad ATM, which is wearing out a lot of empathy, so even Seattle will be back in a tough on crime cycle in an election or two, not that it will do much good.
Criminalization of homeless on the streets is effective in eliminating the problem locally if a more permissive jurisdiction is nearby: eg you can’t lay down on a bench in Bellevue WA without swat coming out to talk to you, and so it’s easier to just go across the lake to Seattle where you can pitch a tent in a public park and maybe the police will get around to evicting you a few months later. No need to fund special buses, people will get to where they can live on their own.
Sending people from expensive places to live to cheap places to live is a good idea in theory, if it were just about affordability. The problem is that they’ve completely mis-identified the crisis, that people came to the rich cities because the rich cities had the tax base (and sympathetic voter base) to support services for them. Rather than talk about shipping people around, however, it might be time to introduce an internal residency system (give up on allowing free movement if we are going to insist on using local resources to solve these problems).
Forget the fact that its whats the most liberal countries do, what else do you propose?
Whats draconian is the current state of affairs. Letting these people rot and devolve further whilst ravaging our cities, nobody wins here.
These people need help and those who don't need help are knowingly causing public harm. Public harm as in harming the public in the public spaces where the public pays ungodly amounts of taxes to keep them safe.
And the resolution has been terrible. Politicians (and voters) pick a position. They act on it, or don't. But, nothing is ever planned executed at a scale where it is expected to solve or make a visible dent in the problem as a whole.
So maybe your "position" is "housing first." It's popular, backed by academia, and it goes ahead.
At this point, resource efficiency, overall scale of impact and such don't matter. The action is "housing first" or it's "community centred" or "drug-free," "Jesus saves" or whatever... and that's enough. Ideology>efficacy when you don't expect to get anywhere anyway.
These big, ideologically charged, "toxic" issues are such that no one expects to "solve" them. So, they act at the operational level spending whatever resources they have without real strategics. Strategy becomes replaced with abstractions.
first sane response - yes its a generational to multi generational problem. We are dealing with the outcome of decisions made long ago. There are now two issues: (1) all the currently homeless (2) the people in the pipeline to be homeless. The people homeless now require a completely different solution than the "pipeline" of people we need to help stay out of homelessness.
Unfortunately, politics is too short sighted to ever solve an issue that will truly take a decade+ of good policy to fix. And, as you mentioned, tackling the now problem is almost too toxic to touch, politically. Rock and a hard place.
Hasty generalization: The title of the article, "California Spent $17 Billion on Homelessness. It’s Not Working," makes a general conclusion about the effectiveness of the spending based solely on the fact that the problem of homelessness still persists.
False cause: The article implies a false cause fallacy by suggesting that the fire at the Wood Street encampment was the primary cause that forced a decision to clear the camp, oversimplifying the issue by ignoring other factors.
False dilemma: The article presents a false dilemma by portraying the situation as a binary choice between offering limited shelter beds or allowing individuals to continue living in unsafe circumstances, neglecting potential alternative solutions.
Appeal to emotion: The article utilizes emotional language and personal stories to evoke sympathy and support for the individuals living in the Wood Street camp, appealing to the reader's emotions rather than presenting logical arguments.
Where is the money going, I wonder? The article alludes to it, but I wish they would have gone farther in following the money; I suspect a lot of the spending goes to overtime for police on enforcement actions, as opposed to any long term solutions.
As far as I can tell, California has spent exactly $0 on homes for the homeless, and therefore has spent exactly $0 trying to solve homelessness. California has spent $17b on theater to make people feel better about doing nothing for the homeless.
Shelters are not homes. If you don't have privacy, a right to who is allowed into the space, the ability to store your possessions, to have pets, etc., you're homeless, and having an indoor bed to sleep on doesn't solve that. HN people who have never experienced housing insecurity in their lives will wax poetic about how many homeless turn down help because they turn down shelters, but this is a totally wrong, ignorant, and compassionless take. Homeless people turn down shelters because for many homeless, shelters aren't help--they're worse than sleeping on the street. Shelters are at best a mild alleviation of suffering for those homeless for whom the tradeoffs of living in a shelter are worth it.
The solution to homelessness is not mental health services: mental health services are totally ineffective when one is suffering the ongoing trauma of homelessness. Mental health services are a much needed measure to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place, but they're utterly ineffective in getting people who are homeless into homes.
The solution to homelessness is homes. Period.
The fact is, if we gave homes to the homeless, it would drive down the prices of housing, and that would hurt the pocketbooks of people with power and money. That's why no money is being invested into solving homelessness. Until we as a society stop blindingly trusting rich people to be benevolent, this problem (and any other problem which rich people benefit from) will not be solved.
A more comprehensive system is needed. You get a place to stay and a living wage, even for doing absolutely nothing.
Because otherwise, how are you going to recover?
The second part that I think is really important is that we should look at this large country and do these things in places where there is space.
Once can easily imagine a stretch of land north of Palmdale, CA where we can build hundreds of cheap houses connected to a couple of warehouses where we can treat people and where we can provide some sort of busywork for them. And yes, we'd be overpaying them. That's fine.
But I think it's unreasonable for Los Angeles to try and get housing in this overheated market. It doesn't make sense, you're paying so much for so little.
I'm mostly on board with what you're saying, but I'm not sure why the busywork component is necessary.
If the concern is that they'll be bored if unoccupied, there are other activities that are more therapeutic.
If the concern is that they won't be able to build self-esteem without a sense of purpose, then having them do purposeless work is just trying to "trick" them into feeling self-esteem, and most people won't be fooled.
I suspect the underlying thing here is a fundamental problem in our society, which is that we believe people only have worth if they can provide some sort of tangible resources or service through work, and that's fundamentally wrong. First off, the richest and most valued people in our society don't work and aren't providing value, they just profit off of other people's work. And looking at the arc of technological progress, there has been less and less need for human labor--at some point human labor will be unnecessary as the machines are able to operate themselves. At that point, I hope we aren't forcing everyone to perform busy work so we can justify letting those who own the machines live in lavish excess while everyone else lives in squalor; I'd hope we would all benefit from technology and be able to live lives of leisure.
> shelters are not homes
> Solution to homelessness is not mental health services
> Solution to homelessness is homes. Period. The fact is if we gave home to the homeless...
I do not understand this, and how this is even practical. Ok so we should stop spend on shelters, mental health services and should focus on giving homes.
How does that work in reality? Does the city/state buy property and give it to people without homes? We obviously do not have unlimited resources so the state buys x homes and comes up with a criteria of which homeless people get the free home. What duration dow e provide the free home for? Who pays for maintainence of the home/appliances etc. Now, if I am working hard and making minimum wage and struggling to make rent, would that not set wrong incentives to just set myself up to the criteria to get a free home? What about the people who do not qualify, Wil they still be homeless? If I get a free home, what's my incentive to work towards a life where I work harder to earn more to disqualify myself from free housing? Also where should these homes be? Should they all be in urban areas like SF or perhaps in smaller cities/towns where the homes are cheaper? Which neighborhoods should these homes be in?
I don't know what the solution to homelessness is, but this doesn't seem like a viable solution.
> I do not understand this, and how this is even practical. Ok so we should stop spend on shelters, mental health services and should focus on giving homes.
I didn't say we should stop spending on those things, I said that spending money on those things does not solve homelessness.
> We obviously do not have unlimited resources so the state buys x homes and comes up with a criteria of which homeless people get the free home.
Notably, in places where this has been tried, the effectiveness of giving people homes is such that it's cheaper to give them homes than to do what we're doing.
> What duration dow e provide the free home for? Who pays for maintainence of the home/appliances etc.
If your criticism is that I didn't draft a detailed legislation in a Hacker News post: that's the normal way that people write Hacker News posts. These are obviously not unanswerable questions as you are presenting them to be, but there would need to be some work to figure out what good answers are. Obviously.
> Now, if I am working hard and making minimum wage and struggling to make rent, would that not set wrong incentives to just set myself up to the criteria to get a free home?
Surely you could come up with a solution to this problem if you were trying to solve it instead of argue against helping homeless people.
A higher minimum wage, perhaps? Better aid for people in lower income brackets?
> What about the people who do not qualify, Wil they still be homeless?
Bro, your moral compass is broken. This isn't difficult--you're just making up absurd problems. If a person is homeless and they don't qualify, the qualifications are wrong. That's obvious, and the only reason it's not obvious to you is that your goals are about maintaining a fundamentally broken system rather than creating a society that actually cares for its citizens.
> If I get a free home, what's my incentive to work towards a life where I work harder to earn more to disqualify myself from free housing?
Given we demonstrably have billionaires "working" for money far beyond the ability to spend the money they make, I'm not sure why you suddenly think that greed stops at "I have a place to live" when it's convenient for your argument.
> How does that work in reality?
How does what we're doing work in reality? (It doesn't).
Interesting points. Are there more effective programs elsewhere that build more hospitable/restorative spaces? Put another way, are there organizations doing "the right thing" based on the most current research?
Having lived and worked near a lot of homeless people it's fascinated me for years but aside from volunteering a few times have not delved too deeply into the issue.
Anecdotally, much of the "disturbance" created by the homeless seems to stem from a small number of individuals that many would describe as "too far gone." Is that a fair take and is there an effective solution to that?
What is a reasonable estimate for the percentage of homeless that more or less prefer living peacefully on the street as long as they can get by? Is this a segment to be specifically facilitated, are there efforts to do so?
You didn't go into depth enough about why shelters are bad. They're not even a mild alleviation to living on the street, they're actually worse. There are homeless criminals who go to shelters just to steal from other homeless. Many homeless become addicted in shelters. We spent $17b making the lives of the homeless worse.
In thinking more about this, I'm starting to feel like developing solutions specifically for the most mentally ill/unstable individuals is important.
1) They're a danger to everyone including other homeless.
2) They have an outsize impact on people's frustration with and perception of homeless people. Walking down the street and worrying about being accosted by the guy yelling at himself is a powerfully bad experience. Walking by a couple guys in tents or sleeping bags may not be everyone's cup of tea but it's not going to emotionally scar anyone.
3) This segment is the hardest for us to confront on a human level, we want to believe in rehabilitation, that we can help, so the resources (shelters/homes) are designed for the most capable of homeless, kind of ignoring the elephant in the room.
4) Have there been mental health hospitals made specifically for the homeless? It seems that the most mentally ill of them basically need intensive care to even have a shot at some degree of rehabilitation.* Unlike a shelter with services this would be involuntary and they would not be able to leave until meeting some criteria. May be a little draconian but it beats constant interactions with police and going in and out of jail.
5) A lot of the "regular" homeless people I encounter don't really seem that interested in working their way towards a job and a house. They seem fairly content with their lifestyle. With the most viscerally troubling aspect of homelessness being mitigated, maybe we can push more toward normalization: sanction the tent city, provide some light services/development, give them a bit of dignity and the peace of mind of not being a criminal. Seems a lot cheaper and more effective than building shelters or houses and relocating etc. People would probably hang out/sleep in the street/sidewalk less, and those that do could be ushered to the acceptable area instead of the farcical "you can't be here...or anywhere, technically, but just move somewhere else for now."
Does this make any sense? Has stuff like this been tried?
* In general I think this is one of the big issues with homelessness - a lot of them need care more than anything else. As in someone literally holding their hand every day, preventing them from regressing to their habits, and (with infinite patience) constantly reassuring and rebuilding their psyche, until their brain is sufficiently rewired (a timespan measured in years). The problem is that the number of people that could use this kind of care is far greater the number of people that are willing/able to provide it, but developing programs around that could be an effective use of the funding.
No, it doesn't make sense, and yes, most of this has been tried.
1. The vast majority aren't. The few that are, aren't going to be fixed by mental health services, because as I said, mental health services are totally ineffective when someone is experiencing the ongoing trauma of being homeless. And the fact that you said "including other homeless" doesn't fix the fact that your #1 concern is that homeless people are dangerous, not that homeless people are suffering.
2. Again, your concern is that someone will be traumatized by hearing someone talk to them in a way that they don't like, rather than that someone will be traumatized by being homeless?
3. Everyone knows that homeless people are mentally ill and is happy to talk about it: that's not the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is that they are mentally ill because we as a society are unwilling to give them the only help that is effective: homes.
4. The results of forcibly imprisoning people are predictably bad. I'm not aware of any forcible treatment programs for the homeless, but this has never worked for anything else and I'm not sure why you'd think it would work for this. It again sounds a lot more like you're trying to help people who are scared of homeless people, rather than help homeless people.
Why on earth would you think this would work? What, you imprison someone for 6 months or a year and force them to act "normal" in a situation that's not normal, then throw them back on the street and somehow they'll be able to cope with being homeless long enough to pull themselves up by their bootstraps?
5. Alternative hypothesis: the homeless people you encounter aren't interested in the help you're offering because the help you're offering is of the flavor you've proposed in this post, i.e., not help.
* You seem absurdly confident that homeless people don't need what literally everyone else by definition has: a home. Why? What habit do you think you'll be able to build in them that will overcome lack of privacy or inability to keep their possessions safe?
Why are the funds even a concern here when we have people so rich that one of them could literally build homes for every homeless person in the US and still be in the top 10 richest people in the world? We have enough resources to house the homeless right now, but we will never have enough resources to satisfy rich people's greed.
1. I know most aren't. Part of what I'm getting at is having different strategies for different segments of the homeless population with different needs. This idea would target that small number of the most...disruptive? of them (I'm really trying to use terminology that isn't offensive or dismissive, maybe you can help me out?), in a way that would be beneficial to everyone. I know that there is very little chance for most of them to be fixed. It's a bit like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest where many of them become lifers. But I truly believe this is better for everyone than having them just out on the street because there's no program or solution catered to them.
I'm not sure what you mean w.r.t the "including other homeless" comment. What I'm trying to say is that this small but highly visible population creates problems for the rest. I work next to a dining room and food pantry, and the majority of people that use those services and inhabit the area do so in a generally civil fashion. I would assume that they don't appreciate the few that cause a ruckus any more than anyone else, probably less even, for drawing unwanted attention and making things harder for them.
2. I'm just talking about solutions. The reality is that a lot of people are scared of and angry about homeless people, and develop a callous "just get them out of my neighborhood" attitude. My thought is that this is driven more by extreme encounters with the small number of outliers than truly having a problem with someone just trying to find a place to sleep.
"Talking to them in a way they don't like" is a huge understatement indicative the denial I was talking about where we don't want to confront the fact that there are some seriously damaged individuals. Almost daily I hear someone violently screaming deranged things and they're usually talking to themselves although actual altercations do happen as well. The other day a woman was blocking the road and taking her shirt off. When I lived in the Tenderloin on many days there was a guy outside a bahn mi shop that loudly said "HI. HI. HI." all day. Yes these people are badly traumatized and it's awful but is it really more humane to just leave them there traumatizing everyone else (again, including other homeless people) than to collect them and move them to a care facility? It was perhaps a mistake to call them dangerous, they're mostly not going to attack you or anything, but they exhibit erratic behavior like running out into a busy street.
3. The elephant in the room is that neither shelters nor homes are going to provide relief to the worst off. There are different types of homeless people with different needs, there is no one-size-fits-all.
4. I mean, we do have prisons, and while there is much to debate about whether we are using them properly, do you accept that it is a valid concept and some people should be jailed? Or would you abolish them altogether (honest question, I can see arguments for the latter)? What about people being committed to psyche wards? It's basically that. Again, the idea is not to just round up anyone on the street as the primary solution to homelessness, but to target the few individuals that have virtually no hope of benefitting from other solutions. The status quo here is that police come by and do their thing, either leaving without changing anything or pointlessly taking them to jail for a few days.
I imagine it would work similarly to every other type of rehab facility. What you described seems pretty accurate. Do all alcoholics, criminals, or schizophrenics come out of rehab magically completely fixed? No. Fixing people is hard, sometimes nigh impossible. Does that mean we should just not try? Just leave them on the street instead? Or build them a nice house and move them into it and hope it all works out?
5. I think homes should be made available to them. I just think there are other strategies that could be effective as well. You're laser focused on the one true and only solution that's perfect for every homeless person, simply place them in a home, boom, problem solved. I think there are a lot of people that would benefit from homeless encampments being made legal and more integrated with city services so they don't feel like criminals that can be fucked with at any moment. Maybe some lockers get installed. There are ways to help them out that don't require big capital projects and the challenge of displacing them and getting it to stick. Some of them do actually have a sense of community and home in an encampment even if it's not perfect.
6. The funds are a concern because the article was about a large amount of funds essentially being squandered, leading to the question of how they might be better used.
The structures built on land usually depreciate over time. It’s the land value that appreciates. So building new stock would still increase demand for land which would increase prices everywhere.
Existing structures targeting lower density and higher cost per square foot could be repurposed and optimized for affordability. Even policy changes regarding what new projects are permissible would go a long way.
Are you making the argument that it's an economic/geographic impossibility to house more people for less money rather than an issue of political/social will?
I’m not saying it’s impossible to house the homeless. The OC was saying that the homeless is not housed because building houses for the homeless would lower real estate prices. I was just pointing out that it’s likely the opposite would happen: real estate prices would go up. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.
Think about it like this: housing the homeless is a subsidy. Subsidies increase demand.
what if we gathered up the unhorsed population and actually moved them into consolidated areas where they can get the help they need? Triage them, medical and dental care, and tougher cases can get isolated from less tough ones.
Not all I housed situations are created equal but by not acknowledging that we need some kind of strong intervention is part of the disservice.
Of course, overhauling zoning laws and the permitting process will help with supply. If we could take away some ability for local communities to reduce their ability to have vanity zoning laws it would go a long way.
If you spend [big scary number] on a thing and it "doesn't work", absent some real analysis that just as much means you under spent as that you may have over spent.
It's like pointing at construction cranes in a rapidly growing city and saying, "look none of this new housing is working because rents keep going up!"
California and so many other regions have real unaddressed homelessness issues that have long, long been utterly ignored. It's more likely that we're insufficiently addressing the real scope of the issue.
Ironically, in my opinion, this comment here is the meta-level crux of it all. No matter how much money they throw at it, no matter how badly it fails, the proponents will always just double down and say that if only they spend more money next year, this time it would fix it. A year later when now there's even more homelessness, it's not because their policies failed, of course it's because they didn't tax you hard enough, and if only they had X amount of money this time they'd fix it. It's a never ending cycle.
But on the other side, the same accusation, people will reflexively and cynically throw up their hands and say "see it's not working" and give up, offering no real better solutions themselves other than they don't want to spend money.
If people point to clear, concrete, distinct problems that's one thing. But gesturing vaguely at "boy lots of money being spent here" that's another.
Living near the heart of an ongoing unresolved homelessness crisis my entire life the driving force I've seen, despite all the money being spent is 1) largely an insufficient status quo approach and 2) no actual better ideas from those opposed.
So in fact both sides are doing badly.
Regarding point 1 in my jurisdiction, despite all the money being spent, all the ribbons being cut on performative new social housing projects, you can add up the numbers of units and find that over the decades there's actually constantly net loss of housing, as whatever occasionally new is created is dominated by the old affordable units being destroyed.
Despite this clear and provable net loss in affordable housing and an ensuing obvious expected rise in homelessness, critics point out that we spent too much money on homelessness, offering no better solutions themselves but simply to spend less money. Of course if less money was spent, if less homes were created, the net loss of units would be even more extreme, and the amount of visible street homelessness would only increase further.
These [scary big number] amounts of spending sound like waste but more likely that they're just barely enough to band aid the wounds and prevent utter disaster.
All these detailed, complicated arguments. Why is homelessness not the same level of problem in the UK? Maybe think about that then consider why it's such an issue in the US.
Because homelessness is a symptom of a whole bunch of different root causes, and treating symptoms without treating root causes can be a massive waste of time and money
So they spent 17 billion over the last 4 year on about 115k+ people or about 140-150k usd per person per year. Yeah there is some serious grifting going on.
the key to solving homelessness is not affordable housing, regulation or vast amounts of spending or even UBI. The answer is UBL ==> Universal basic Land. It's the idea that every person should have some means of having some land and being allowed to build on it. maybe not in downtown, maybe not any specific area, but at least somewhere. you can't just tell people to whole up in a homeless shelter. I found out that the life expectency of the average homeless person is in their 40s, Yikes! there should be someplace for everyone on this planet. give people some land, or let them buy it for a relatively reasonable amount and don't charge them rent (property taxes), at least for up to a certain value (say the first 50K or 100k). Once you have land, and freedom to build on it, you can build your home or have a construction company do it for you, in a way that's cost effective.
Even the native american indians and countless others in the global south with far less income per capita had/have homes. It shouldn't be so hard: the problem is land use policy and regulations.
the land can be almost anywhere. the point is that people shouldn't forced onto tiny reservations. Land should be abundant enough to allow the cost to be low enough for everyone to easily afford, as well as it's rent (property taxes).
Same thing with the argument "instead of spending $44B on a cesspool, that money could've ended world hunger".
The reality of poverty, homelessness, hunger, etc, is so much more complex than how much money is put into solving it, that promoting "monetary investment" as a solution for any of these problems is disingenous at best, and downright corrupt at worst.
My disagreement with "housing first" is that the state should provide housing indirectly by building regular housing and bringing home prices down along with price regulation and redeveloping urban areas with apartments and condos.
I.e.: the housing market is thr problem in cali, not people being homeless (that is just one symptom).
They do. But the people on the street would have trouble affording rent anywhere in the nation. SF has a very mild climate, and lots of social services, so it’s relatively better than other places to live outside. Like, why be homeless in low rent Houston when you can easily hop a bus to LA, SF, or Seattle?
Yes, but for the vast majority that don't want to remain homeless, even if you give them free housing and they find jobs, they still can't afford an apartment in california. Are they supposed to move back to "houston" and find another job? No way! So how can they escape homelessness? Some might hustle their way into actually affording a place in cali but that takes a lot of will power and overcoming a lot of things that can have them back on the streets.
Meanwhile, there are many people in cali that get free housing but are stuck as meth addicts or something because why not? And a lot of people born in cali also lose their housing status. If it was realistic to get housing by simply finding a job and working hard, free housing can be made to work, but that isn't reality unless you make six figures. Look at rental ads in LA, I was shocked to see what is the price of an expensive apartment in most other cities, in LA that gets you a bed, not even a room, just a bed.
We’ve been relying on supply and demand economic signals to decide who gets to live where they want. I don’t see a huge problem with that, there are plenty of de-populating areas in the Deep South and Midwest that could use more people.
You want to live housed in LA? Then pay the living in LA tax. At least you can crash with your parents if you are local. But the greyhound bus terminal has tons of people just showing up everyday who think they can make it but haven’t thought things through very well.
Houston has plenty of jobs and a bit cheaper rent. But many unhoused are unable to afford housing anywhere so it’s not useful to talk about just moving them to where rents are cheaper. They also lose the social services that rich cities can afford via their tax base. You would have to be deft to not move to California (or another rich city with mild weather) if you were homeless, I totally would do it so can empathize at least.
We need universal basic income. We just introduced AI that will take millions of people's jobs. We must reframe how we view humans now. We're no longer work mules. AI can do it. So now, if we want humanity to remain a species on Earth, we have to take proactive measures to ensure humans can live. It's time.
You actually end up spending less money, actually.
When basic physiological needs are covered (e.g., food, water, housing, clothing, healthcare)[1], turns out both petty and violent crime decreases. This means physical and psychological safety increases. As safety increases, ability to develop interpersonal relationships increases, self-esteem increases, and as a whole society thrives. People, less focused on survival only, are able to function in the world with stability.
This is the same with supporting preventative medicine. When you advocate and support infrastructure for handling medical care in proactive ways (e.g., preventative care), turns out people's health concerns are mitigated much earlier. In many cases health issues don't manifest into cost-heavy medical solutions, requirement for pharmaceuticals decreases, and happiness, well-being, and morality rate increases.
So yea. Universal Basic Income and Universal Healthcare are now considered crucial to human survival.
And it wont work until California can stop what is called 'The Greyhound Express'. That's what some people in other states call the practice that some states have - offering their homeless a one way ticket to California or jail. They export their problem to California, and they criticize California for it.
As someone who lived in Southern California for a long time I can assure you they never spent $17B on homelessness. The last time I was in San Diego they were actually shutting down homeless shelters because of the lack of funding. I would love to see someone track down the $17B.
Government spend X on problem, it doesn’t work and actually gets worse. In other news, water is wet. More at all.
Disclaimer: this doesn’t apply to when government is trying to kill people outright. Government is extremely efficient at killing people on purpose, and not much else.
It has long been time to bring back the asylum system. Many of these people need to be removed from society and committed so they can be helped. Pharmaceuticals alone are not enough and doesn’t work.
Bring back mental institutions to house and help these people and others.
The problem with giving homeless people free housing is that you remove the incentive to work your tail off to pay your rent and not get evicted. Then more people fall onto the cushy safety net, and the costs of maintaining that net go up.
The top result I found said this equates to about $100k a person which is just the cost of care likely, even private prisons cost similar if not more and that’s probably more efficient as it’s somewhat controlled
It's spent on scam charities that waste their resources handing out $75 boxes of syringes to junkies. You might as well set the money on fire--it would be less destructive than how the money is being spent now.
Surprisingly no one talks about how much of that money is corruption and siphoned off. There is little awareness in US about how non-profits organizations can be used for corruption and money laundering.
Provide housing for those who are willing to take it, and for anyone who refuses help, classify them as having a mental illness so they can be taken to a facility to get the help they need.
An expense chart showing how that $17B was spent would be interesting to everyone reading the article. It would also keep the government accountable to the people on how their taxes are spent.
Everyone already knows that the more money California spends on homeless, the more of them will come to California.
It's a service. The state/city that provides the best service for homeless people - that's where I will try to go if I don't have a home.
Politicians don't seem to understand this. Or maybe they do, but they do the wrong thing in order to drum up politically correct votes.
Take San Francisco. It spends $400m on homeless each year. With $400m, you can probably just buy a small apartment in Idaho for every single one of them. Problem solved. Are you homeless? Make your way to San Francisco. The tax payers in the city will buy you a home in Idaho - no questions asked.
> Martin cited a study from May 2018 by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which found 75 percent of the people on the street in Los Angeles County had a home in that same county before they lost it. It also showed that 65 percent of the unsheltered homeless had lived in that county for at least 20 years. Only 13 percent were from out of state.
Those stats are outdated and generally somewhat dubious—what was the methodology here? Nonetheless, it is clear CA generates a lot of homeless. The linked study from 2018 claimed 52,765 homeless in LA county, while the count by the same group performed in 2022 tallied 69,144. Either there's a been a massive influx of people on the streets or their methodology is improving. Perhaps both. Pretty wild to think about.
> With $400m, you can probably just buy a small apartment in Idaho for every single one of them. Problem solved.
The problem is that people become homeless due to a number of reasons that include addiction, mental illness, trauma, loss of work, etc. It’s not going to be solved by JUST providing them an apartment. At least not for everyone.
As someone who ended up homeless despite not fitting the typical profile - and has volunteered hundreds (possibly thousands) of hours in the space - you dramatically overstate the case for involuntary homelessness.
There couldn’t be a more significant difference between the homeless populations in places like SF and in other cities in the US with more sensible policies. There’s massively more people in California who are there because they’re voluntarily opting into a lifestyle where all of their capital expenditures are provided by taxpayers and they don’t have to do anything to maintain them other than to remain homeless. Many of these people may seem insane due to their drug use but their mental issues are a result, not a cause; they’re still rational actors responding to a perverse set of incentives.
The left's idea or "doing something about it" is making the problem worse not better. It would be better to do nothing than actively facilitate and incentivize homelessness and drug addiction with cash payments.
> The left's idea or "doing something about it" is making the problem worse not better. It would be better to do nothing than actively facilitate and incentivize homelessness and drug addiction with cash payments.
It at least keeps people alive. The problem is that the causes of homelessness are not addressed at all - there is nowhere near enough affordable housing stock.
> Yes, and that's not going to change, so alternative solutions are required.
And which ones, bar building housing, should that be?
Locking them up for the crime of not being able to afford a home (or being judged too unworthy of credit by three ultra-large black box corporations) is inhumane and costs the government way more than just giving them outright cash.
Locking them up in mental wards has the same issues and there's a reason involuntary commitment fell out of favour - it's ripe for abuse.
And driving them off via whatever measures just shifts the problem elsewhere.
> Locking them up for the crime of not being able to afford a home
But we should lock them up for the crime of doing crime: dealing drugs, drunk and disorderly, assault, robbery, theft etc.
> and costs the government way more than just giving them outright cash.
The cut-price solution is clearly no solution at all.
> Locking them up in mental wards has the same issues and there's a reason involuntary commitment fell out of favour - it's ripe for abuse.
These people meed help, and a drug-free environment is a place they can receive that help.
> And driving them off via whatever measures just shifts the problem elsewhere.
There are other places where some of these people (the ones without crippling mental health issues) stand a far better chance of building a stable life for themselves
Seriously mentally ill and addicted should be involuntarily committed. I know that's a big decision and will lead to abuse but the alternative of just having them roam the streets is worse. The "temporarily homeless" as I like to call them, those who want to be productive but have fallen on hard times, deserve access to affordable housing. The government can build huge amounts of tiny apartments to give these people, it worked in Chicago until they recently gave up and converted those units.
That's right. That's the hell hole San Francisco created. The city officials thought the tech tax money would never run out. Let's do extremely expensive feel-good, politically correct stuff to make people think we have a good heart.
This ignores the fact that many of the homeless have other problems than just a lack of a roof over their heads. Drug addiction and untreated mental health issues are common (and overlap); domestic violence is another (related) cause for some of the homeless. Many of these issues don't go away by throwing houses at the problem.
Anyhow the main problem with the Idaho idea, beyond the politics/optics: what about getting the homeless into jobs? I don't think Idaho is overflowing with those, and I expect some of the homeless will be better off of employed.
The logical (and operative) end of this thought process is "make them miserable and they'll leave."
Some/many politicians do implement these kinds of policies, but you'll rarely hear the quite part out loud.
Nasty problems breed dishonesty. Humane homeless policies increases homelessness, and the visibility of homelessness... especially if homeless migration is prevalent.
The inhumane homelessness reduction policy is "abuse homeless people, then some will go away" No one wants to admit the other side of whatever coin they like. C'est la politique.
Does that free apartment in Idaho also come with food, drug treatment, social services, and at least the remote possibility of actually getting a job, all in Idaho?
It’s time for a Universal Basic Income. On the West Coast we’ll actually save money if we give poor people cash instead of wasting it on elaborate schemes.
It's working just fine. The point of spending the $17B is not to help homeless people. The point is to pay well-connected groups of people to say they are doing something to address homelessness. This sounds good when printed in the media, and is as good a reason as any to give those interests large sums of money. These interests are some combination of government departments, NGOs, and private companies. It comes full-circle, because these interests often are able to coordinate large voting blocks to keep the wheel turning.
Individual states cannot address most social issues, this is a known issue. This is why 101 issues like education and healthcare REQUIRE federal action.
Of course it doesn't work. Homelessness is caused almost entirely by cultural factors that are getting worse. Therefore, homelessness has been and will continue to get worse.
Stop comparing the United States to small European States. The dynamics of low population largely homogeneous States and a completely multicultural State with over three hundred million people are not comparable. The problem and its solutions can not be and will not be the same.
You can get high on fentanyl ~$1 USD ... there is no stopping a sedative crisis at these prices. It's effectively a reverse Opium War consuming lives and our communities.
These two accounts have provided a gripping POV of this utter humanitarian crisis in SF:
That's not new tho. The 'romantic' idea of travelling to the us always comes with the ugly taste of open poorness, public drug consumptions and general inhumane behaviour to their homeless and sick.
It's not only SF or Cali that has this image at this point. It's kinda hard to overlook when this simply does not exist where you are from.
I've seen street interviews on Youtube or maybe Twitter where they come up to tourists and ask them how they're enjoying their trip and catch any feedback. Sad replies.
Homelessness, in the volume it exists, is largely a result of social/cultural decay in my estimation.
It's the result of degradation of family and community and other important social structures.
On one hand we have made housing something like a Ponzi scheme so that some may realize profit without effort. Nothing is free. When someone gets without producing someone else loses. Housing isn't the only example of this either. Much of our economic reality is one make-money-at-the expense-of-the-other-guy-while-giving-as-little-as-possible scheme after another.
But also we have embraced "liberation ideology" largely starting in the 1960's. Yes, our former culture was oppressive, stiff and judgmental. Women stayed home and cooked. Get divorced, and everyone will give you the stink eye around town, so I hope he doesn't beat you too badly when drunk. Gays stayed in the closet. The mentally ill were forcibly confined and abused. "Bums" got beat up by the local sheriff and dropped outside the town limits instead of being given free needles and a pass to shoplift. Church ladies gossiped and judged and it was a very hard time being "different". Hope you belong to the right secret men's organization because that's how you get in with local banker and judge and get a start on the good job ladder.
But also people helped one another. Encouraged one another (even if it was through judgement and social pressure and occasionally violence). There was a greater sense of community. People at that time were culturally closer to the era when they had to band to together to travel to and settle a new land and build towns.
Now it's I have a credit card so I'll do what I want and move where I want and this place I live isn't a community and I don't talk to my neighbors anyway and one city is another really and everything is anonymous and transactional and no one goes to church anymore. Sexual freedom without regard to consequences (especially the resulting children and lack of long term relationships). Drug use is fine, it's a personal choice, and besides I'm dealing with so much inner pain and trauma and no pain should ever be. In fact the doctor may just give you something to numb you and shut you up altogether so you can keep being a good cog and not a squeaky wheel.
So, we are seeing the results of all this. What we had before wasn't good, but this isn't either.
I don't know what the answer is. I believe people should do what they want. I do what I want personally. Just observing and noting what I think the root cause might be.
Maybe our real culture in America hasn't developed yet but I can't believe it's ultimately sterile communities where people don't look out for their neighbors and people shooting up drugs on streets with a few rich hiding behind gated communities and controlling law makers. But maybe it is, maybe that is what we are about as a society. I like to think not.
Sorry for the rant, but this I believe is the root cause and until we solve it (somehow) the problem remains.
> These are uncivilised people (by definition), a lot of it is mental illness and the rest is refusal be a civilised human.
Spoken from a position of priviledge and perceived moral superiority. Where do you live, and how much do you earn? Have you ever considered what it would be like if you couldn't afford where you live, no matter how much you earn?
Cost of living has gone up but wages haven't. Minimum wage hasn't been adjusted in years, while rent & housing multiplied thanks to unfettered capitalism. I was lucky in that I managed to buy a house in 2017, but since then the prices have gone up and I would no longer be able to afford the house I live in were it to go on the market, despite my wage having gone up 50% or thereabouts.
It's a trite comment, but seriously, check your priviledge. A nontrivial percentage of the visitors of this website are homeless, couch surfing, live in a car, or pay more for a roof over their heads than they can actually afford.
I grew up around poor people. I remember watching my cousin cry to my aunt for money to buy pens/pencils whilst my aunt knew she didn't have the money nor did her husband working 12 hours on a pineapple plantation.
I have another uncle who threw away 15 years of his life being a truck driver in the deserts of Saudi Arabia just so that his son and daughter could get a decent education. Meanwhile his wife (my aunt) raised two kids alone, whilst herding goats, chickens and managing a rubber planation.
Don't talk to me about privilege. These people are scum. Low lifes. Not only do they have access to handouts (especially in europe), they have access to an infinite amount of jobs.
How do you think tens of thousand of UNSKILLED people cross the border illegally with no money, work low skilled jobs and make enough money not only to sustain themselves but also to send money back.
You have no idea how privileged and uninformed you are. All these stories I told is because of communism. We are from one of the most blessed regions in the world, rivaling california and florida in beauty but communism ruined my state. Now everybody above 90 IQ is forced to be flee the country.
Everybody I know including myself are expats. Nobody wants to leave but they have no choice, there is no future here. So yeh I would have unfettered capitalism over your delusional childish theories of good vs bad.
Side Note: price increased are due to inflation caused by the expansion of the money supply. Guess what expands the money supply? Also in central banking system, this expansion is done through the banking system creating massive bubbles and extreme money concentrations.
So where is that 5% on your bell curve in Rio De Janeiro? Or most of Europe? Or most parts of Asia?
Why is the 5% of people in the world who according to you are uncivilized concentrated in the U.S.?
Because homelessness of the sort that you see in the US simply doesn’t exist in most countries in the world. Both countries that are as rich or significantly poorer than the US.
This is not caused by some unprecedented economic crash or poverty crises. As I've said in the OP, "this is an epidemic of uninformed tolerance and apathy ravaging an entire nation."
These are either addicts, mentally ill or uncivilised people. Every society from the most liberal ones to the most tyrannical ones have set up laws and institutions to deal with them.
You forcefully institutionalise the mentally ill. You provide an option of voluntary treatment to addict or forced. You forcefully remove the uncivilised people.
I personally have stronger beliefs when it comes to what to do with these peoples but that will get me banned (its a little biblical).
What I'm talking about here is the humane/liberal option. The alternative is to let them rot and devolve further whilst ravaging our cities, nobody wins.
u can give every homeless person one billion dollars each, and 99% of them will squander it on drugs. Homelessness is a not a problem, its a symptom of a bigger problem. It's usually the result of years of bad choices and drug abuse turning into permanent mental disability. Giving them all the money in the world is not going to fix the bad choices that result in their situation.
