Homeless explosion on West Coast pushing cities to the brink
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Of course there are sad cases of people unable to find jobs who are otherwise 'normal', but these cases are in the minority. Many people unable to find jobs or hold down jobs beyond the most menial sort have mental illness that prevents them from doing so.
> “Most homeless people I know aren’t homeless because they’re addicts,” said Tammy Stephen, 54, who lives at a homeless encampment in Seattle. “Most people are homeless because they can’t afford a place to live.”
It's only true in the trivial, unhelpful sense of "if we got housing costs down to $10/month or free, then all the people there could afford a place." But when we talk about housing costs in general and policy around it, we mean something like getting rents down from $3000/month to $1000/month (from vast expansion of building), not some artificial number that no amount of expansion would (scalably) get.
And I don't think you can really take one homeless person living at an encampment, making a self-serving statement, as a source.
Do you have grad school experience? An $1800 grad stipend will help you understand the difference a few hundred bucks make.
I understand the difference that a few hundred bucks makes to a grad student. I don’t think those are the same people that become homeless in significant numbers and that’s why I’m objecting to the narrative: the person that just needs housing prices a few hundred bucks less is not the person going homeless. Those are different problems.
It's harder than it looks, apparently, because millions of low earners -- i.e. almost all of them -- manage to avoid this outcome. I feel like poor people are discussed in the abstract by people who have never actually been poor. Homelessness is still not a normal outcome. Mentally and physically able people are not routinely homeless.
You can try to reason through this from first principles, I guess. That's a fun thing to do on a nerd message board. But I'm telling you that this is not what happens in actual practice.
When you talk about poor people in the abstract, it's easy to contrive scenarios in which somebody loses their job at the gas station and is forced into homelessness. But in actual real life, that's rarely how it plays out.
If it wasn't for my mom, he would definitely be homeless. These situations are not contrived.
Furthermore, what if the problem is mental or physical disability? That's not a valid concern of yours? Maybe the homeless population is spiking because of medical costs. What if you have a medical condition that requires medication or you lose your mind? You lose your job, you lose your medication? I honestly feel you're either a troll, or you're just... obtuse?
For the record, I actually have been poor. My family was one shocking expense away from homelessness for much of my life. Luckily we hung in there by a thread. Clearly our country is full of folks like you who think that anyone who's homeless is a useless and easily discarded piece of trash.
We're a wealthy enough country to give assistance to anyone who needs it. There's no reason we shouldn't.
Moving to a different city is hard. The older they get the harder it is. Most people can’t do it.
When I was six we moved to the easiest place to move to: early 90s greater Toronto Area. No crime. Lots of jobs. Lots of good will from the natives. It was tough.
The Central Valley is ravaged by unique social issues. To dismiss the issues because it’s cheap to live there is insane.
> “I’ve got economically zero unemployment in my city, and I’ve got thousands of homeless people that actually are working and just can’t afford housing,” said Seattle City Councilman Mike O’Brien. “There’s nowhere for these folks to move to. Every time we open up a new place, it fills up.”
I realize I'm going for the ad hominem here, but I get the impression that you were so eager to start victim blaming that you haven't even taken the time to read the article before commenting on it.
And if you can get that far, then perhaps you can see that the homelessness problem being described in this article goes well beyond the two causes you're trying to reduce the whole thing to?
She presumably has other options given her education, unlike other psychologically disabled people who have no other option but to live on the street. Of course pathological stubbornness could be a disability.
It certainly doesn't absolve us of having to build much more, but at least it's a short term solution.
The few months I lived in Cali I had a well paying job, and it still took me a month to find a place to stay.
Reasons I was refused rent included:
- I didn’t have too much work experience (grad school doesn’t count as a job)
- I had a girlfriend, who lived in the East coast, and would visit me frequently
- I didn’t have a green card (I had OPT)
- I worked for a start up, and the landlord didn’t like renting to startups folks
Finally I got a condo in real bad shape for 1400/mo.
You might object that 1400 is not that bad, but I was 1.5 hours north of LA.
What is with this entitlement to live anywhere we want for any price we want?
The aphorism I've heard is that "People become homeless for all sorts of reasons. People stay homeless for just one: mental illness."
Note that it's not contradictory for a majority of the homeless (by the numbers) to have jobs and be homeless for reasons beyond their control, and yet for you (as someone who works with the homeless community) to see a majority of them as suffering from mental illness or drug use. This would happen if there's a large margin of people living on the edge: they're making it work one month, then they lose their job or their rent goes up and they're homeless, then they get another job or find a cheaper place and they're no longer homeless. From your perspective as a provider of services, these are transient folks who come in once and then you never see them again, and you wouldn't remember them. From the statistics on homelessness, they could very well make up a much larger fraction of the homeless than the chronic mental illness & drug abuse cases, particularly in times of great economic change like now.
The counter example is in the article is one of a couple who receive $1500 a month and can't find a residence? You're argument is this is an anomaly?
I don't understand the mental gymnastics some people have to go through in order to convince themselves the problem in articles is not the problem. It happened in the Susan Fowler thread too.
There is also increasingly more evidence that drug use is more attributed to escapism or a learned behavior of happier times and should be treated as a societal issue and mental illness seems to be a catch all for all the societal ills we don't want to deal with. I'd probably be addicted to drugs and have mental illness too if I had to shit in a bucket everyday in my shit filled RV.
If they are receiving government assistance and not working, then the tie to the particular city isn't strong from a "needing to be there". There are communities in California where one can find two bedroom houses/apartments for $900/mo or less. Rooms, studios, etc. may be even cheaper. It may not be desirable to move to some of those communities, but there are options along the west coast that are affordable to the above situation.
Every day people make decisions of whether or not they can afford to live in a location and if not, move to where they can. A community I am quite familiar with have able bodied homeless people that prefer to live in said community and remain homeless. People working in the homeless services insist we need affordable housing for these people, it's never about whether or not affordable housing is available in other areas.
The area of drug use, mental illness and others is way more complicated. As adults, there is no way to involuntary commit someone to get them help, they will have to want to get help in order to change. It is a huge issue and outside my knowledge-base of how to best handle it.
Maybe we should be increasing the efficiency of the existing housing inventory. Second homes, timeshares, empty neighborhoods (...Las Vegas...), AirBNB properties show pretty clearly that there's an excess, or at least strange market incentives.
Although that's coming from memory and I can't source it...
Reducing financing, or a land value (Georgian) tax should address both points.
It just seems like we've completely given up, and I'm not sure if that's something that has been politically ordained or if we just aren't interested in trying again.
The best way to build public housing would be to make it a part of the gentrification process. Build where the revenue from property taxes is increasing, and in proportion to the development for more affluent housing.
Some municipalities get a lame approximation to this by requiring that developers build housing for poor people in exchange for regulatory variances, but it just isn't the same.
But the short explanation is that the US is overwhelmingly run by rich people, and the rich people in the US hate to see poor people get something at or below cost without them sweating on it first, because they believe that welfare dollars are overwhelmingly coming out of their pockets, and they earned them by their hard work. They may be delusional, but they still get elected to fill the public offices.
Wrenching the general populace above bottom-barrel poverty was done on the back of twentieth-century prosperity (ie: progressive taxation) but there is no such progressive taxation scheme for property tax (ie: property taxes are exceedingly complicated and many deductions are available). It is only prudent that other (new and exotic) means of wealth redistribution are attempted.
An idea that has crossed my mind before is: how expensive would it be to provide the homeless the very bare minimum of survival i.e. food, shelter, most basic healthcare, even free alcohol? Why don't we just accept that some people are going to fall through the cracks and save ourselves the delusion that we are going to be able to get them off drugs/reintroduce them to employment etc., and take care of their needs in the simplest and cheapest way possible?
The current economy is pretty good at casting aside those it deems economically worthless. Is it really so tricky to just accept this and pay to look after them?
[1] https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...
1: https://secure.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-are-one-...
We live in a reality where resources still require effort and capital to extract from the environment. A society can only support so many through welfare before it collapses.
The subject is a little more nuanced than watching people die out of some kind of jealousy.
I'm not speaking from an ivory tower either, like many UBI supporters seem to do. I grew up with friends who were addicts. Ive known people who died of overdose. Plenty of kids are more than happy to throw away their lives smoking weed and shooting up, especially if they're getting their shit for free.
For the record, I support responsible drug use. But UBI is not the answer for the problems in our society, because it will hurt many if not most of the people it should protect.
Ibogaine.
The US classifies all hallucinogens and psychedelics at Schedule I, so obviously no researcher that values their academic career can study the use of psychedelics for the purpose of curing addiction. But anecdotal reports suggest that a heroin addict may be cured of opioid addiction by using kratom to alleviate the physical symptoms of withdrawal, and ibogaine to "reset the brain" to no longer desire heroin.
Politically, people would prefer to believe that rehab centers actually work. Using illegal drugs classified as "the worst, most dangerous drugs in existence" to cure addictions to other illegal drugs with a lesser classification may be perceived as... a bit hypocritical.
UBI would instead need to give everyone above the drinking age something like a monthly ration of 2 ounces cannabis, 2 psychedelic doses of a regionally appropriate entheogen, and 750 mL neutral grain spirits, all from local production facilities. If they want more, or better quality stuff, they'll just have to spend their pocket money on it, or get a QA job in the industry.
Also, giving the actual drugs out can influence the market, such that people may be encouraged to use drugs that are more socially manageable--in contrast to opioids. Honestly, I'd rather hand out free weed than free alcohol, but you just know the agricultural lobby will heavily influence the composition of the UBI goods ration. If they can make your fuel 10% ethanol, they can certainly convince the government to distribute some of that distilled corn alcohol for human consumption.
You also pick really weird amounts. A casual drinker can kill a fifth in a weekend without really disrupting their life, while they range in price from ~$5 (after taxes!) to $25 (Smirnoff is $14 here).
Almost no one would use 2 ounces of marijuana in a few days and it has a street price in the hundreds of dollars.
750 mL works out to about 17 shots of 1.5 oz. each, but I also figured it would probably taste like it was made from stale tortilla chips in most of the US, and would therefore mostly go into mixers, averaging 4 drinks per week. The people who really enjoy their alcohol would be springing for commercial vodka, and there would also be plenty of people who would be getting that ration and not drinking all of it. Many drinkers would probably be relying on a beer or wine ration, but I don't really consider those to be "drugs" below a certain %abv, and UBI beer would probably be around 2.5%abv, with the wine around 4%abv. The beer would taste like a business handshake between Bud and Miller, and the wine like Welch's made out with Manischewitz on their friend's couch.
And for the peyote buttons, mushrooms, DMT or whatever, I thought two trips in a month might have been pushing it, especially for people that were still trying to have normal jobs with their UBI. Good for two of your four weekends, with maybe a couple sketchy Mondays when the machine elves follow you to work.
UBI, an employer of last resort capable of enforcing a minimum living wage, specific support for those who cannot manage their own affairs or be addressed solely through additional money, and a land tax to put a cap on housing appreciation and costs, as well as to spur denser development. Oh, and jettisoning anti-density zoning and building codes.
I'm not sure that's sufficient, but I think it covers a broader set of issues than approaches of the past 40-50 years have managed.
People don't want to do that. But one day we may be able to effectively make the argument that we are paying to look after them one way or the other, and we are currently looking after them with the most expensive possible resources, e.g. first responders, penitentiary, etc.
If the argument can be made effectively I think we can get there, but that's the key. You can get people to vote against their ethics & beliefs, but only if you really prove to them that even if it's counterintuitive, you're saving them money.
Here, "homelessness", "homeless crisis", and "housing crisis". Emerging during the 1980s.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=homelessness%2...
Almost as if comparing NYC 100 years ago to modern Seattle is total nonsense.
Are you really comparing housing standards for the poor today vs 100 years ago? Unless your solution is to throw all poor people in filthy slums like its 1902 I don't see the point of your comment.
Yes, the root problem is population growth. Yes, any organism will continue to reproduce until the population size is constrained by sufficient 'poverty.' The difference is that we are running out of land / unable to keep up with building shelters, rather than running out of food as was common for the rest of history.
Does this mean there are not solutions we should try to enact? E.g. less restrictive zoning? No, of course we should be fighting the problem and realizing there are things we can do in the short term. But, until we get into space and are able to create resources/shelter at an exponential rate faster than potential population explosion, this is not a problem that one "solves" -- only delays/pacifies.
The problem seems to be a sort of network effect in real life. People want to live in cities where there are opportunities. Where are there opportunities? Where lots of people want to live. It'd be an interesting experiment to see a planned city where a large number of individuals/companies agreed, before it was build, to reside there. Bypassing the network effect and ideally make it an instantly desirable location to live. If such an experiment were a success it would create an instantly replicable model that could vastly improve the state of the economy and the country as a whole. But the up front cost of an experiment like this would make something like colonizing Mars seem like the cheap option, even if the costs could be recouped in a fairly short period of time.
Past Tense is an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. It was filmed going on 25 years ago - in 1993. It told a story of increasing disparity eventually culminating in "Sanctuary Districts" starting in the early 2020s as a means of providing 'sanctuary' for the unemployed, mentally ill, and those otherwise unable to make it in society -- and the dystopia that followed. Everything down to the timeline and location (the story focused on San Francisco) is again just quite prescient.
It's just a story, but one to keep in mind when deciding how to try to deal with problems like this. The ideas of Sanctuary Cities are incredibly appealing, and it's for that reason that I think we're highly likely to play out this story to its natural conclusion. It offers no alternative, and it's entirely possible that there is none. But it's certainly a thought provoking episode tying together all the issues we're facing today, while considering how good intentions can go very wrong.
[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/st... (the episode itself is far more on point than this article - and is only provided for those who cannot access the episode)