Seattle’s Homeless Challenge
city-journal.org
city-journal.org
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/durkan-and-constan...
Hopefully this can be a good step forward in the right direction. As mentioned by other comments, there are much better resources for learning about homelessness in Seattle than an interview with a dropout Seattle City Council candidate who has a pretty clear political agenda.
Agreed that there are better ways to get informed but it's a politician's job to have a clear political agenda. Forgive me if I'm detecting the wrong tone but I'm becoming accustomed to hearing people say "political agenda" with the implication of some sinister plot.
With state and federal funding you could enact a program where the addicted people living on the streets rather than in shelters (who are the homeless people who cause most of the problems) are committed to involuntary sobriety programs, and then on completion provided with private housing (not a shelter, some 1bed public housing) and, as the article mentions, some low-skill job like picking up trash on the condition that they remain clean (kind of like a halfway house). You could also long term house the severely mentally ill who cannot live on their own in psychiatric facilities. That would cost a lot of money up front but could actually solve the problem long term.
Also note that even in Seattle over 2/3 of homeless people live in cars or shelters. Most homeless people aren’t the crazy people on the corner harassing you for drug money and camping in public parks, even though those are the most visible
https://old.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/7dijkx/homelessn...
Yes, it actually counted the assessed value of land and buildings as a per-year operational expense, as if the land was re-purchased, and the buildings re-erected, every year.
The real number is somewhere between it and $90 million (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/seattle-h...), depending heavily on how one amortizes capital assets (land, buildings) and allocates shared services. It’s nowhere near $1 billion/year though.
UPDATE: To learn more about homelessness in Seattle, here's some starting points:
1. McKinsey's "The Economics of Homelessness in Seattle and King County": https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-cities/... ("In total, we estimate a budget of $360 million to $410 million would be needed. This is about twice what the system invests today.")
2. Barbara Poppe's 2016 recommendations (https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/pathwayshome/B...) and 2018 Q&A (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/qa-two-ye...).
3. Survey of 1,056 homeless people: http://allhomekc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/FINALDRAFT-C.... Skip to page 23. I think pages 28, 30-31, 33-34, 43, 45, and 66 have the most information for the least time.
4. Seattle Times homelessness coverage (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/), which has an RSS feed (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/feed/).
Oh, so it's just sour grapes after he lost an election. I guess we can skip over this due to his agenda.
But wait...
> [...] I put my hat in the ring early and I got tremendous support from across the city, from a lot of people in neighborhoods who are fed up with some of the policy of failures that they're seeing every day. But I got a very quick education in how activists pressure groups work. And in a very short time period as my campaign was gaining some momentum, I started getting barraged by harassment, by threats.
> One individual from an activist group had posted hundreds of messages, threatening messages over the period of a few weeks. They had gone after my wife attempting to get her fired from her employer. She works at Microsoft. They had been posting white supremacists content to my family. And I'm a biracial family, interracial marriage. And [we] have mixed race kids. And then the final straw is they actually went after my kids, they started posting hateful messages to my eight year old son school, facebook page. And not only that, they let people know that they knew where I lived, and really just kind of engaged in a reign of terror. And I very regretfully withdrew from the race because it was a decision that I had to make for the best interest of my family.
> And I felt conflicted because I deeply want policy change. But the political environment, as you've seen with in Seattle, as you've seen with Andy knows, reporting for city journal down in Portland, is saturated with the threat of violence.
Yikes.
Now I'm not sure. Should we discount the side that quotes a bad number from the media, having missed the Reddit post disproving it? Or should we discount the side that harasses and threatens a candidate, his wife and his children until he retires from an election?
Maybe they cancel out. Anyway, I'd suggest reading the whole transcript after all, $1 billion or not. There's some interesting stuff in there.
No, you should skip over this because the number is obviously factually flawed. I can't link to the Puget Sound Business Journal infographic it's from because PSBJ uses a paywall. Regarding "having missed the Reddit post disproving it," as I wrote, it was widely discredited (including in Reddit comments). It's unlikely that anyone following the issue as closely as a city council candidate would have "missed" that.
I'm all for learning more about the problem. However, all 4 sources that I linked to are closer to primary sources for the information they provide, and 3 or 4 of the 4 are less biased.
1) the heroin/fentanyl epidemic
2) political choices or fiscal constraints as local spending on public healthcare/shelters/mental-wards/criminal-justice has not kept up with spiraling costs increases and population growth
3) the minimum rents in coastal cities exceeding the max SSID benefit ( ~$750/month) in the early 2010s
The sub causes of (3) are myriad but include; a decade of easy credit inflating property values, revival of American cities, local zoning/permitting strangling construction, and I guess the economic success of West coast technology companies (although this tax base keeps the government sector afloat particularly in California, so think the progressives protest a bit too much)
The east coast does not have as many problems with (2) because there is an effective "right to shelter" with subfreezing winter temps. Having enough shelter capacity helps prevent the short-term homeless from becoming "chronically homeless".
Looking at the Seattle skyline from my apartment, it's construction cranes as far as the eye can see.
A lot of construction is happening. It's not enough, though, because there's an absolute torrent of people into the area.
Mostly policing, sheltering and moving tent-emcampments around. Wasted money.
The cause (exacerbated by huge price increases) is home-less-ness. The cure is homes. Apart from showcase projects, no progress. Buy the property, build small homes, move people in.
So why doesn't it happen? Follow the money.
Developers Developers Developers Developers
He tends to be biased more towards criminalizing homelessness and institutionalizing them. I also noticed in this podcast he makes claims that are simply not backed up by evidence, specifically when he's talking about Canada and the safe injection sites.
This isn't to say that homelessness isn't a problem in Seattle, because it is. We're seeing similar issues happen to San Francisco as in Seattle due to rising rent and poor healthcare opportunities and there's unfortunately no easy solution.
It's gotten to the point that I don't trust these vague-links-to-white-nationalism accusations at all. They so rarely have any substance to them that they make me more suspicious of the person accusing than the person being accused.
Are you saying association with a partisan think tank is equally as damning as association with white nationalism?
It's an issue of morality. Being morally bankrupt should probably challenge somebody's credibility more than having stances on policy that some don't agree with.
How many degrees of separation from a white nationalist must one be in order to be moral?
We're all placing faith in something that determines what we call truth and what we call lies or ignorance.
[1] http://thefederalist.com/2017/03/10/will-steve-bannon-help-b...
[2] https://www.claremont.org/page/fellowships/lincoln-fellowshi...
[3] https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/23/trump-think-tank-r...
Who are you referring to here? It sounded like you were referring to either Bannon or Pack, but neither of them are on the list in your "[2]" link.
- Anyone can get a free bed/meal
- Anyone can get illegal drugs provided to them by a nurse for free. Nurse may give 5 min sobriety pep talk before administering.
- You have to piss clean before you can leave.
Seems like for $80k/person a year, we could clean up the streets, make the addicts much happier and safer, and perhaps even have some money left over. I'm sure it'd take a huge load off emergency services too - removing the economic needs of satisfying addiction seems like it could drastically reduce crime, why steal for a fix if you can get it for free?
While I like this one specifically, and think it has promise, what we really need to do is try 20 different ideas. Each should be a small randomized trial, with pre-registered outcome metrics.
Get all the conservatives, liberals, progressives, socialists in a room. Get them to agree on optimal outcomes (I actually don't think this is insane, as we often want the same thing). Then run a series of experiments, where each partisan leaning can propose an experiment.
Obviously, in real life with actual humans, this would never work. But I can dream...
It'd be great to, you know, not have the homeless problem. But when it's going to cost substantially more per person than the average person earns in a year, that just doesn't seem fair...
Again, it'd be great if everyone, you know, everyone could have a roof over their head. But how come if you work an average job you have to share an apartment with 2 other adults. And if you're poor and lucky, we just give you a brand new unit for free? And what about all the poor people that aren't lucky? They just get nothing, while someone else lives like a poor king.
There's got to be a better use for $600K...
I would hazard a guess that you support harm reduction strategies, those policies do not garner widespread support amongst the voting public. Further, even when it is, it is very easy for opponents to say, "Why are we giving drug addicts this money when school teachers haven't had a raise in five years and can't afford to live here?"
This. People will pitch their idea going into the experiment then torture the resulting data until it suggests that their proposal was the most effective.
* level of negative externalities due to homeless people in city X goes down by Y%
* number of short-term homeless people in city X goes down by Y%
* number of chronically homeless people in city X goes down by Y%
* number of homeless people in city X goes down by Y% of which no more than Z% may be due to decreased arrival rate or increased departure rate of homeless people
* number of homeless people in city X goes down by Y% without raising net tax burden in city X by more than Z%
* tax burden of homeless services primarily met by those who benefit financially from increased rents
* housing stock in city X increases by Y%
* median apartment rent in city X decreases by Y%
* average apartment rent in city X decreases by Y%
* apartment rent in city X keeps place with inflation
* Gini coefficient (income inequality) in city X decreases to at least Y
* unemployment rate in city X decreases to at least Y
* government refrains from conditioning benefits or services on acceptance of drug treatment
* government refrains from conditioning benefits or services on cessation of drug use
* government refrains from conditioning benefits or services on acceptance of mental health care
* government requires acceptance of drug treatment or mental health care as a condition of receiving services
* no increase in arrests for crimes often committed by homeless people
* substantial increase in arrests for crimes that significantly affect other people's property or quality of life
(this isn't even including broader-based changes to unemployment insurance, welfare, or health care systems)
That framework is really powerful in America and I've yet to see a narrative around harm reduction that resonates with most people, it just simply isn't attractive to spend tax money on needles and rent for drug addicts.
The only change I'd make to this is to let addicts out, and not completely disconnect them from society.
I by no means think this should be the only homeless solution, but for the subset of the homeless unwilling to stop using drugs, our currently policies literally leave them out in the cold.
This is the current trend in many progressive cities, and so far it's a massive failure. Perhaps it's not surprising that when you work to make addicts happier, you attract more addicts. You also wind up with an entire industry that spends hundreds of millions of tax dollars catering to the addicts, and which perversely needs addicts to remain addicted in order for the industry to survive. The situation only gets worse.
These policies put the addict's needs above those of the non-addicts, since most non-addicts do not want a neighborhood filled with junkies who moved in to get free services, free needles, and legal injection sites.
Common knowledge used to be that an addict needs to hit "rock bottom" before they will turn their life around. If this is true, by making addicts happier and more comfortable, you're not helping anybody.
>who typically do not want their neighborhood filled with addicts who have moved in to get free services, free needles, and safe spaces.
The lack of a policy for dealing with homeless addicts is a effectively just a policy of keeping them in the poorest neighborhoods. Ignoring them doesn't make them go away, we can do better.
No, becoming a drug addict will keep you in poorest neighborhoods. This is simple cause and effect. And why should drug addicts not live in poor neighborhoods? Why would you move the drug addicts out of poor neighborhoods, but not the non-addicts? You are suggesting policy that incentivizes addiction.
> This has not been attempted anywhere. What are you referring to?
If you don't live in San Francisco, I'd recommend checking out this recent video:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2018/12/14/san-francisco-opioi...
There are certain blocks of the city in the Tenderloin and SoMa where people are free to shoot up heroin in broad daylight. The city hands out 400,000 free needles to junkies every month. We spend $300 million a year on homeless programs with little oversight or accountability, and recently voted to double that to $600M+. And now they're proposing official safe injection sites in the middle of the city. Is this putting a dent in the addiction problem? No, the city is becoming a dystopian hellscape.
Concentrate the people creating the 'dystopian hellscape' so services can be provided to them more efficiently and cheaply. If they can't get clean, they can stay inside and get a daily lecture on why they should be sober before their fix.
I'm not saying that its "fair" that everyone else pays for this. I'm saying we're already paying more than this and it isn't working, so puritan notions that "Govt should never provide people with certain drugs" should be challenged if there is a strong economic benefit.
I'd imagine if there was free heroin and needles inside, not many people would continue buying H and discarding syringes on the street.
One idea I've heard of is requiring more needles to be handed in before fresh needles are handed out as a means of incentivizing neighborhood cleanup.
There are some newer treatments of drug addiction (e.g. wrt. opioids) that seem to hit a useful middle ground. They do more than simply letting the addict hit "rock bottom", e.g. they do mitigate the effects of physical dependence and withdrawal - but they seemingly do not replicate the "rewarding" and "addictive" effects of the drug. They're still rather controversial, precisely because nobody wants to inadvertently "enable" an opioid junkie in their destructive habit, but their use may be worthwhile here.
> Perhaps it's not surprising that when you work to make addicts happier, you attract more addicts.
> Common knowledge used to be that an addict needs to hit "rock bottom" before they will turn their life around.
Please cite your claims.
This is clearly unconstitutional, unless you have to be tried and convicted of a crime in order to enter, which I suspect would make it less attractive. Not to mention I think your view of what homeless people want/need is, uh, not exactly informed by a lot of experience in the streets.
A few stats on Seattle homelessness:
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/seattle-sta...
A few stats on California homelessness:
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/california-...
"Homes for the homeless" is always a bad idea. For one thing, it de facto helps entrench the problem, if only due to The Shirky Principle. For another, it fosters "creative" solutions that amount to designing something that would only appeal to you if you were currently sleeping in a dumpster.
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-shirky-...
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/homes-for-h...
I've done a lot of research over the years. I would like to see market rate housing solutions for people, not "homes for the homeless." I don't think we solve this by trying to "help the homeless" per se. That's just survival mode, basically. I think we solve it in part by adding more missing middle housing and replacing the million SROs that have been torn down in recent decades, plus creating a single payer medical system. The ACA was the only politically viable solution. It isn't actually a good solution. I don't have citations at my fingertips, but I've seen research linking housing instability and excessive medical bills.
Housing is typically the single biggest expense in a household budget. Transportation is typically the second biggest. Medical expenses in the US are a shockingly high percentage of GDP, on the order of a fifth of our economy.
Supplying walkable urban housing at the right price point and proper universal medical coverage wouldn't solve homelessness, but would make a big difference in the issue.
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-clear-c...
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-missing...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
So, as nutshell as possible, those are some of my thoughts on the problem space as someone who both had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy and spent several years homeless and got myself back into housing without going through some program. I continue to blog about it in some fashion or other, continue to communicate with currently homeless individuals and try to supply useful information to try to make some small difference.
I think it's in some way related to the explosion in cost of living, importation of tech workers getting paid ludicrous amounts of money, and, despite record-setting construction rates, inability to match housing supply with demand.
Also, consider that the housing climate in Seattle is highly different from SF. There is no proposition 9. There is no rent control. There is no 'lovely California weather attracting rough sleepers' and no mythical 'bus-fulls of homeless people being shipped in from other states.' And, yet, homelessness is skyrocketing.
Maybe rent control and prop 9 aren't solely to blame for out-of-control homelessness? Maybe people like me are the problem?
No they haven't recently from sources I have seen. Housing prices are falling [0] (admittedly might be due to rising interest rates) and rents fell earlier this year [1].
[0]: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ar...
[1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ar...
I bought a house in 2014, and it's definitely way up, despite a fall in the past couple months.
As is true of every asset class relative to the value of labor[1]
Indeed, barring extreme systemic changes, there are a couple of things that we can be absolutely certain of nation wide in 10 years: housing will be less affordable and there will be more homeless.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/23/how-much-housing-prices-have...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
At $80,000 a year, it's absurd that we are unable to use that money to actually finance housing.
What he says about it:
>about 80 percent of people who are on the streets, uh, struggle with lifetime drug and alcohol addiction and mental illness
Is a total non-sequitur. People that struggle with lifetime addiction and mental illness have those problems exacerbated by not having housing. Providing stable housing is the first step toward coping with that illness.
They're doing it in Canada, and the results validate this policy:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/world/canada/homeless-can...
>the cost of housing the homeless was far less than the cost of the emergency services needed by the homeless while they were living on the street.
>“The reduction in days in jail alone pays for the program,” said Jaime Rogers, a Medicine Hat housing official. She cited studies that said the average homeless person costs taxpayers 120,000 Canadian dollars a year, or $91,600, in services, while it costs just 18,000 Canadian dollars a year, or $13,740, to house someone and provide the necessary retention support.
Keep reading. He leads by highlighting flaws of the commonly proposed strategies for addressing homelessness but later goes back and proposes a solution tying several things together, including providing housing.
He essentially says 1) build housing, 2) enforce laws against low-level offenses associated with homelessness (e.g. littering, vandalism), 3) provide services for addiction and mental illness, 4) create a jobs program.