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Comment by curtis | Hacker News Reader

I think this is the first article I've read to use the term "visible homelessness". For many people who live in Seattle, the world "homeless" really means visibly homeless, but for many political activists, the word includes people in shelters or living in the cars or otherwise keeping a low profile while not having a permanent address. I'm no expert but I strongly suspect that the best ways to help the visibly homeless and the not-visibly-homeless are pretty different. But activists are more than willing to conflate the two cases. This particularly arises in the case of affordable housing. Housing may indeed be the primary problem for the not-visibly-homeless. It seems pretty likely though (just based on observation) that the biggest problems for the visibly homeless are mental illness and substance abuse.

I think we'd be better served by not talking past each other and instead make it clear which kind of homeless problem we're talking about at any particular time.

View on HN

The evidence shows that housing-first policies applied to the worst cases (chronically homeless single people with addiction) is effective and lowers costs, in fact more so than for easier clients (families who have become homeless more recently). However popular outrage culture insists on targeting folks who have addiction with sweeps and incarceration instead, even though the law-and-order response is more expensive and less humane. It seems our urge to punish defeats our willingness to tolerate less retributive evidence-based approaches. Source: https://www.npr.org/2019/05/17/724462179/episode-913-countin...

I am for the "housing first" approach, but there is a clear moral hazard when you provide free housing to the lowest rung, and then say that the minimum cost of housing for the next group is like 1.5k/bedroom/month.

It's important to note that "moral hazard", while not quite a term of art, has a specific meaning in economics that isn't associated with ethics or morality.

The quick google definitions: "a lack of incentive to guard against risk where one is protected from its consequences"

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

He's using it correctly here though: the risk is that if you provide housing to the lowest rung while making the next group down pay $1.5K/bedroom/month, some of the next group down will decide that they would rather become part of the "lowest rung" group rather than pay the money. It's like the phenomena of people committing petty crimes so that they can get a warm bed and food in jail.

Your example illustrates to me why moral hazard isn't the best title for this. We should provide free housing to people in need so they don't do things like commit a crime to go to jail.

You mean like all those millionaires who decide to become thousandaires so they don't pay more taxes? Give me a break.

First, that is a terrible analogy.

If I'm interpreting the ops statement correctly, this is more analogous to a system where post-tax income decreases with rising income instead.

The moral hazard is for those renting: the free housing is equivalent to an insurance payout.

A renter can do risky things (like lose their job) because they are protected from the consequences of not being able to pay the rent. They get housed anyway.

Being able to take risks can be seen as a good thing, too. It may help class mobility.

Disregarding the factual issues there, what about the moral hazard of not doing so and turning people into Safe Seattle members who literally advocate shooting them or driving them into the forest and leaving them there?

Honestly the housing first is a bad idea for the visibly homeless. Might work Ok for the invisible homelessness but the property damage costs can easily be factors lager than even the rent cost.

Citation needed.

I think you should seriously reconsider your position.

There is a chronic inebriate apartment building downtown Seattle that makes no moral judgements about "stopping drinking" etc that LOWERS COSTS (with studies to back it up) for the community.

People with problems get a permanent address. Ambulance and police calls drop as they aren't chasing these guys all over town.

Think again.

MAYBE your position is more about being judgemental about their moral state then actually whats good for them and the rest of us.

EDIT -

Just to be clear. If someone is too far gone (and many of these guys are) then we need to start funding involutanry commitment beds.

Might be marginally effective but at what cost. If it costs more a year to house one of the chronically homeless than incarcerate then then I’d go with the cheaper option. The money is better used to help the invisible homeless after that point

Wealthy part of the richest country in the world cannot home it's citizens because NIMBY property prices?

This is what’s keeping me living at home with my parents. I tried to move out a few years ago, found an apartment that was $1,100 a month and plenty of parking.

6 months after moving in, after having multiple bad experiences with tenants, I realized I moved in to a “subsidized housing” apartment. There was lots of parking available because 90% of the tenants weren’t allowed to drive.

It hurts to work all day to pay for stuff, only to come home to half your neighbors lazing about drunk and stoned getting a free ride. It fucking sucks, I could never escape the thought that I could just quit my job and smoke weed all day and live pretty much the same as I was.

If I wanted to live in a condo, which doesn’t have subsidized housing, I’d have to pay rents upwards of $2,200. So I moved back in with my folks until I can buy something.

Good luck. Hope you get there soon.

> It hurts to work all day to pay for stuff, only to come home to half your neighbors lazing about drunk and stoned getting a free ride.

I hear this all the time - yet I don't see many people particularly keen on dropping out, and getting onto the free ride bus.

One of the problems with that free ride bus is that it doesn't go to great places. It didn't sound like you were looking forward to the prospect of living in subsidized housing for the rest of your life very much.

  I don't see many people particularly
  keen on dropping out, and getting
  onto the free ride bus.

I don't either - but maybe those people just don't hang out on Hacker News.

> yet I don't see many people particularly keen on dropping out

Just open your eyes. Look around Seattle, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or San Diego or any other city with mild weather, lenient law enforcement, and generous welfare benefits. The number of homeless and housed "drop outs" is astonishing.

It's not. It only looks like a large number because they are all crammed into a small public space and not hidden inside condos and houses.

We have more of an epidemic of rich people squatting in hundreds of miles of waterfront property and ruining shoreline access for the public.

Wrong.

Alameda County, 43% increase in homeless population in two years.

San Francisco, 17% increase.

Orange County, 42% increase.

Kern County, 50% increase.

In Seattle/King County, 28% increase in the chronically homeless population from 2017 to 2018.

If you think 'dropping out' and living a homeless life is in any way preferable to the alternatives, I'd recommend spending a few days panhandling, and a few nights in a homeless shelter.

I have a feeling that you'll change your tune pretty quick after that. You'll quickly realize how dehumanizing it is to be in that position.

> I don't see many people particularly keen on dropping out, and getting onto the free ride bus.

This isn't a plan of action that someone is likely going to advertise.

Why didn't you?

>>It hurts to work all day to pay for stuff, only to come home to half your neighbors lazing about drunk and stoned getting a free ride. It fucking sucks, I could never escape the thought that I could just quit my job and smoke weed all day and live pretty much the same as I was.

I know people who work back breaking low-income jobs and get very angry seeing people on government assistance sitting around all day getting high with their friends.

I think the position of the homeless activists: of giving people with no life skills and no discipline, and who habitually abuse drugs, no-strings-attached taxpayer aid, is totally immoral and irresponsible. It's the worse example of short-sighted unthinking compassion and/or virtue-signalling.

At the very least, drug addicts who've lost the ability to support themselves should be committed to a drug rehab center. In the past the lost souls were also enrolled in work houses. Those on public aid doing some work should be another minimum requirement for any welfare system. The nature of the work can be targeted to their intellectual and physical capabilities, but they should be required to do some kind of work if they're going to receive public support.

Anyway, demanding accountability from welfare recipients is not going to win you any elections - people would rather elect someone with compassion and a terrible plan for governance than elect someone with a logically coherent governance plan who might not have compassion - so the problem will just get worse.

> At the very least, drug addicts who've lost the ability to support themselves should be committed to a drug rehab center.

Absent a desire to quit, rehab can't work. At that point, it's just a private prison with wallpaper.

The desire to quit can be shaped by the incentives society creates. If using drugs and partying with fellow drug-using friends means continually being committed to three month stints in rehab, it might encourage that party to get out of that lifestyle.

Also, some people may decide to quit once they've been forced to stop doing drugs for a few months, because it results in lessened chemical dependency, and some time for the parts of their brain damaged from the drug-use to recover, which helps increase self-control.

We forcibly prevent children from engaging in self-destructive behaviour, because sometimes they need someone who knows better to control them, until they mature and do know better. Just because someone turns 18, doesn't always mean this stops applying. In the case of someone habitually using hard drugs, I think a strong argument can be made that it still applies because they lack the maturity and self-control to make these decisions for themselves.

I could support the housing first policy if it were somewhere where the cost of living is dirt cheap.

It makes zero sense to set dollars on fire by housing people in one of the highest cost of living markets in the world.

There's a disconnect here. Individuals experiencing homelessness have already chosen to do so somewhere expensive. Generally they have reasons for this that they find compelling. How would you propose to convince them to relocate to this hypothetical cheap homelessness-warehousing center elsewhere?

I don't think any convincing would be necessary if the help were simply cut off in high cost of living areas and only available in lower cost areas.

This will probably not happen any time soon because it's politically incorrect to effectively admit homeless people don't deserve to live in high cost of living areas, but it would certainly be more effective in helping people materially. Not to mention, people in lower cost, yet populated, areas probably don't want them there either and will fight to prevent this from happening (NIMBY).

The hypocrisy! NIMBY is precisely the name for this entire thread of self-pitying heartless belly aching.

I have compelling reasons to choose to live in a penthouse suite in Manhattan. It has a beautiful view. Gorgeous amenities. Private parking. Really, it's the best. However, I can't afford to, so the way society persuades me not to live there is that they kick me out, since I didn't pay for the place and don't have any claim to it. This does not seem entirely unreasonable to me.

I get your point: it seems like a moral good in America for people to have some inalienable (i.e. "not required to pay for") right to have some control over where they live. But it makes zero sense to have a black and white rule that everyone has a right to live anywhere they want. Do I have a right to take up residence inside your living room? Your home? Your porch? A public school's playground? The middle of an interstate? A public park? I think the reasonable answers to all of those are "no".

The US is geographically sorting itself by wealth. You used to have pricy neighborhoods but any given city generally had some amount of property available across a range of income levels. With the transition to a service economy, this is less true over time. Now entire cities are becoming uniformly expensive.

The reality is that I no longer think it's tenable to say that someone has a right to live in Manhattan regardless of their income level. The way things are going, it's probably going to be the case that the entire city limits of SF, Seattle, and NYC will go that way.

Does it suck? Yes. Can it be solved at the city level? I don't think so.

There may well be a limited supply of penthouse apartments in specific neighbourhoods.

But the general housing crisis reflects a reality in which basic housing needs for a large portion of the population are either entirely unmet, or are intrinsically perilous, with risk of housing loss at any time high.

Your colourful hypo entirely fails to address that point.

I recommend again On the Media's excellent series on housing, "Scarlet E":

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/scarlet-e-unmasking...

It's acknowledged that there's a housing crisis. There's also an opioid crisis, and a crisis in care for the mentally ill.

I don't think OP would challenge any of that, but he's addressing a much more specific point: if we're to provide housing to people who cannot house themselves, and in particular, the growing number of people with apparent mental or addiction issues living on the streets of downtown city centers, is there an obligation to give them housing in that city center, or even in the city limits?

I certainly understand where you're going with this. It would seem to be most cost effective to put the housing somewhere where land and buildings are less expensive.

I think this can be problematic for several reasons:

It feels like just pushing the problem to other places/other people. If there's the right commitments and programs in place, maybe it can work. But where in the bay area is going to be happy to host a SF sponsored housing for homeless facility? And will it be less expensive enough to justify?

If people have some connections to service providers or family or social connections, moving them far enough away to save costs is going to make it really hard to keep those up.

> is there an obligation to give them housing in that city center, or even in the city limits?

Obligation? No. A good idea? Yes. Support services are in cities, especially centers. Half of this comment page is full with "housing alone doesn't help, we need support structures for the people" - doesn't mix well with the "hey, let's just put all the undesirables on a bus and give them housing in the middle of nowhere".

Indeed. If our goal us to help these folks become productive members of society (and then start paying taxes, etc.), then alienating them and housing them possibly too far away from their families, their children's schools, and suitable job opportunities seems like a bad way to achieve that.

Why do support services need to be located in a city? What support services cannot be offered outside of a city?

The reality is that many of the visible homeless living in the city center are addicts, and they congregate in city centers, in part, because of cheap and easy access to drugs and like-minded people. In places like the Tenderloin in San Francisco, open drug use is everywhere you look now, and the city turns a blind eye to it.

Claiming that people need to remain in this environment to recover is extremely misguided.

Density === efficiency

Efficient in what sense?

Lower cost? That doesn't seem likely in a city like San Francisco, where the cost of real-estate, construction, labor is sky high and the housing supply is extremely limited.

Helping more people? In that sense, efficiency is meaningless if it's not efficacious. And all evidence suggests that social services in places like San Francisco and Seattle are not working well, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spend each year.

As we've also seen, housing addicts in neighborhoods where open drug use and drug dealing is tolerated is not efficient. Yet that's exactly what happens in the Tenderloin today.

It's almost too stupid to be believed.

Ultimately, yes. The fixed costs may be lower elsewhere, but so too is the served population, hence, per-person costs.

There's no way around this save by exclusion zones and forced concentration camps or prisons, each of which have their own exhorbitant externalities.

Again, per person costs don't matter if they are unsuccessful. And concentration camps? I'm not sure you know what a concentration camp is.

Addressing the causes of that being a high-cost housing market, or even just walking through the though exercise of why it is that and what might change the situation, is recommended.

Sure, but the structural issues that Seattle (and many other municipalities) have with ensuring conditions to allow sufficient construction to meet housing demand don't have much to do with visible homelessness stemming from mental health issues.

I have lived in Seattle since 1995. It is now a shi-shi techtropolis fully of 300k+ tech bros, of which I am an aged version. There is zero reason for tech (and god I hate hate this term) should be clustered in a locale. It is absurd, my locality has never played into anything I have done. It isn't like someone opened the yellow pages and looked for a data gravity consultant.

How about for one year, we all put our incomes into a pot and split it 1/population of america. Just for funsies.

There is zero reason tech should be clustered in a locale

Presumably because the end-product (and some intermediates) are ephemeral and can be transmitted losslessly long distances in little time at low cost?

Perversely: that's just what leads to greater rather than less concentration in industries. Especially where there's a great deal ofhumam interaction and collaboration required.

Since the end-products are ephemeral, they can be distributed to any point on Earth. But clustering of creation activities, returns to scale, even a small component of ancillary support services and infrastructure, and even small gains to round-trip interaction rates, reliability, or flexibility, favour concentration over decentralisation and mean that any one locale which gains an edge over others sees path-dependencies and positive feedback encouraging yet higher growth. Only when frictions develop (say: high costs of housing), or regional differentiators (language, cultural, regulatory regimes, say), do you see a formation of alternate hubs.

Zipf's law / power functions still strongly favour the formation of small numbers of such hubs.

Film, banking, and publishing have very similar tendencies.

City centres are where service provisioning tends to be most efficient. Providing services there does seem to make sense. And if the homeless / housing-insecure population is so large as to skew overall real estate markets ... maybe you have a bigger problem?

What rubs me wrong about your argument is the capitalist nature of it. Access to resources and infrastructure shouldn't be limited to the extremely wealthy. A city should offer housing to everyone at every rung of the ladder because it takes a team to make it work.

This approach, known as Communism, has been tried many times. Turns out that although 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need' sounds nice, wealth actually doesn't come from a fixed pie we get to cut up via politics. We actually need to let people keep what they create, or they won't bother creating and everyone starves.

How you got from "offer public housing" to "abolish private property" is a mental path I'd like to explore. I really mean it. Because it seems that a lot of people seem to mix up welfare state with communism and I'm trying to understand why.

Many people seem to have setup a false choice between the two. Some people, especially politicians, benefit from the false dichotomy.

I would hope that intellectually honest people can see there is large design space for the role of government. Choosing from these options — what is better and worse — depends on individual values and collective responsibilities.

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. All these battles have been fought a million times on the internet and nothing new ever comes of such discussions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It makes zero sense to set dollars on fire by housing people in one of the highest cost of living markets in the world.

I'm not a strong proponent of the Housing First model, but the reality is that it's generally cheaper to house people than to pick up the tab for medical care et al for homeless individuals. Medical bills for the homeless population tend to cost far more than just covering their rent.

Two supporting articles found via a quick google:

https://www.governing.com/topics/health-human-services/gov-h...

https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/hospitals-invest-...

Frontline did a piece on that approach and it was a retrospective on how it had gone wrong in notable cases. Not stating an opinion here, but highlighting that even sympathetic coverage thinks the approach is a mixed bag in practice.

> was a retrospective on how it had gone wrong in notable cases.

> highlighting that even sympathetic coverage thinks the approach is a mixed bag in practice.

You mean "how a statistically non-significant number of cases lead to the usual results in our modern outrage culture"? You will always have cases where it doesn't work. That's why statistics are important. But statistics don't sell, what sells is "SEE, WE GAVE THIS GUY FREE HOUSING AND HE DID THIS HORRIBLE THING"

I believe the homeless (and everyone else), should be prosecuted in full for crimes they commit.

I think there are two types of homeless - those who are sane and normal but down on their luck - once they get a job and support they can be contributing members of society. These individuals need all the support we can give them.

The second type of homeless, sometimes referred to as homeless by choice, those individuals who are drug addicted or mentally unstable to the point they can't even keep it together to get a government check need to be handled differently. I think we should have some form of long term holds for these people until they truly show they can survive and flourish without it.

Cities are becoming overrun with the second type of homeless. These people are generally filthy, spread disease, commit various crimes of opportunity even including assault and murder and rape, and abuse drugs and alcohol until they die.

I suggest we categorize the second type of homeless by issue involved and severity and have mandatory facilities to either help them recover or simply hold them long term. Categories could include various levels of drug addiction rehab, mental health, etc.

A lot of those people who are the worst offenders, routinely bouncing from the hospital, to the jail, to the streets, have problems that aren't solved by a house. They need a group-home that isn't jail but is capable of saying, "no, you aren't fit to go into public yet until you can meet these criteria." A lot of these people need others to make decisions for them, when to take medications, when to bathe, how to navigate the bureaucracy, etc. God knows it would save a lot of money and keep them off the streets. I feel like for a lot of people they'd find community and purpose in life, eventually solving the problem that created their circumstances to begin with. Jail doesn't work, the streets doesn't work, leniency doesn't work, just handing someone a house isn't realistic. We have to try something else.

You are describing institutionalization. Mandatory institutionalization is ripe for abuse, and voluntary institutionalization doesn't work when it's intended use is to serve people whose defining characteristics is inability to mak good choices consistently.

It isn’t housing first, I’ve never agreed with that name for their approach, it is disingenuous at best. The policies, as described in any “housing first” policies I’ve encountered, are more reasonably described as “supportive housing first”.

If you place a chronically homeless, bi-polar, heroin addict into an apartment they will not get better, they will continue their previous life until they’ve broken their lease and are evicted; none of the “housing first” programs aimed at the “visibly homeless” we’re talking about do this, they provide housing along with a robust support system to get these people medical and mental healthcare as well as addiction recovery. It is a good model but I’ve too frequently seen them mischaracterized as just providing free rent, that isn’t what they do and that would fail. They are essentially just a reimagined mental health institute with far more freedom for the patients.

The evidence shows that housing-first policies applied to the worst cases (chronically homeless single people with addiction) is effective and lowers costs

I would like to dispute that. This WaPo [1] article paints a far less rosy picture.

Addiction is a symptom of mental illness (and in all likelihood may be genetic). Look at the rates of smoking among people with schizophrenia [2], they're much higher than the general population, and the usual purported causes fall flat.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-housed-t...

[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/11/schizophrenia-no-smoki...

I really like your link [2]:

> A dose-dependent relationship was found between smoking and protection from schizophrenia. This is really interesting.

The study found smoking protects against schizophrenia. The blog author skewers later science for completely misrepresenting this study in their review.

Nicotine is sort of similar to niacin/niacinamide (vitamin b3), which is probably why it protects against schizophrenia. I recommended niacinamide to a young woman who’d just quit smoking, “again”. She says the vitamin is great, is still taking it 1.5 years later and recommends it to all her coworkers who want to quit smoking.

And it calmed down some of her “personalities”.

In Rhode Island they actually prosecute addicts and mentally ill who commit crimes, and offer them the alternative of drug and rehab courts that entail mandatory internment in decent facilities and rehabilitation. They emerge with no record, and no debt to be paid. Many going through the process say it saved their life.

The same drug courts and facilities exist on the west coast, but they are underutilized because there is no incentive. No criminal or civil justice funnel. People are just set loose.

Intervention helps those who are beyond helping themselves. A free place with no strings attached does not do nearly as much to help those who truly need help.

Only about 15% of homeless in Seattle are "visible". Roughly 50% are sheltered, and of the unsheltered many live in vehicle [0] (though the numbers in this article don't quite add up).

I fully agree with you though, a lot of people's frustration with the homeless comes from a vocal minority of problematic unsheltered people with serious mental health issues and/or addiction problems. If these people were committed to mental health facilities I think everybody would be better off.

[0] https://mynorthwest.com/1402025/homeless-seattle-king-county...?

> a vocal minority

More to the point, a criminal minority. It's mostly lawbreaking that makes this minority visible: assault, robbery, theft, dumping waste, etc.

> If these people were committed to mental health facilities I think everybody would be better off.

I agree and in particular, even the invisible majority. Talk to anyone who knows anything about the homeless problem and they'll tell you that homeless people are very frequently victims of crimes themselves. They don't have the shelter or resources to protect themselves, so they are easy picking for criminals.

So getting this small number of actively harmful homeless people off the street — remediating them or not — will help improve the quality of life and safety of an even larger number of other homeless people.

This has been done before and has a very dark history. Deeming someone criminal and in need of remediation has been an integral part of some very grim historical events. I’m pretty sure I know what you’re arguing for, but how does one avoid it becoming a system whereby undesirables are vanished? Is there somewhere that has a humane and fair system?

exactly the point I wanted to make. I think there's a huge distinction between voluntary and involuntary as well.

I think I see your point but the slippery slope goes both ways.

Right now a certain class of criminals operate with impunity in Seattle. Our laws are not perfect and I even acknowledge the bias in drug prosecution but the solution to those problems is changing the laws, not ignoring them.

Contrary to popular belief we do in fact have a functional judiciary and legislature in this country.

> I even acknowledge the bias in drug prosecution but the solution to those problems is changing the laws, not ignoring them.

Ignoring laws is one tool for changing them.

It's not a "grim historical event" to observe when people commit crimes and then throw them in prison for the specific crimes they have committed after a fair trial. That's approximately what would happen if you or I went around brazenly violating the law.

I think one aspect of this that is worthy of concern is institutionalization. A lot of our problems these days are a consequence of deinstitutionalization, but prior to deinstitutionalization there were a lot of hidden abusive practices in the institutions themselves. I'm not sure where exactly the pendulum should come to rest on that issue.

There's also the consequences of putting violent or unstable homeless people in with the general prison population. Which is what pushed them into mental facilities in the first place, who had people better trained to deal with mental illness.

Both of those solutions have downsides and as the NPR story mentioned a lot of those mental health institutions were shut down in the 1980s.

Having beat cops and other locals or street people deal with the problem is also non ideal.

So its going to be lessers of evils and attempting to minimize the evil as much as possible.

it's a 'grim historical event' because America's history of law enforcement has been very much in favor of detaining and criminalizing minorities. One needs to only look at Marijuana statistics to see why.

The problem Seattle is running up against is that they're trying to solve what is effectively a national problem at a local level and failing. The way to solve the issues with the homeless and mentally ill is by having stronger safety nets and healthcare, but that's a longer term solution when people really just want them out of sight, which means tossing them in jail.

Where they come out on the streets and keep doing the exact same thing they were locked up for. Because our criminal justice system doesn't do anything for reform or reducing recidivism.

It’s a national problem that becomes a local problem to the localities that are the most accommodating. At the moment that includes Seattle. People show up here because they get repeatedly arrested in other places, where their solution to the problem is giving away bus tickets to places like Seattle.

What kind of crime though? I think that's a part of it as well. Possession of a little bit of heroin? Camping somewhere not allowed to do so? Trespassing?

I feel like the alternate proposal just says, don't put them in jail for small amounts of time after every small crime, instead preemptively give them a permanent home to stay out of trouble from. In a way, it's a kind of jail, but one where you hope they stay in forever, and go to even before any crime is committed. Would the cost of that be any more then the cost that is currently going to the jail system?

Keep in mind I think the assumption here is that when it comes to mental illness or drug addiction, jail does not work as a deterrent, because the illness or addiction will cause repeat offense no matter the consequence to them. It assumes they can't help themselves but eventually commit a crime again. That's part of the challenge.

It's not "deeming" them criminal if they literally commit crimes.

> how does one avoid it becoming a system whereby undesirables are vanished?

I think the simple answer is to limit to people who have actually demonstrably committed crimes, which is exactly what this article is about.

I'm not suggesting that someone talking themselves on a street corner should be locked up forever. I'm saying that if you've got someone who already has a record assaulting people, you put that person in jail. Even if it's not to their benefit, it is a benefit to their would-be future victims.

Of course, ideally, we'll remediate them too using the mental health facilities (which need more funding and better laws). I'm not saying I prefer using prison. But it's better than letting known violent people hurt others people.

A wild tiger is not an evil animal that deserves to be locked up. It's done nothing wrong and as an animal is not legally considered responsibile for its actions. But that doesn't mean you'd just let one roam the streets even after it's mauled a couple of people.

> actually demonstrably committed crimes

Which obviously would never veer into "there was some crime .. it probably was this guy over there" "We have no real proof" "Yeah, but who needs that? Let's spin a few tales for the jury/judge, his look does the rest of the job." .. never happened before, won't happen this time.

If your policy is prone to abuse you better have a few ideas how to make sure this abuse won't happen. People don't want homeless people in their vicinity, so the abuse of any such system without extreme high safeguards is more or less guaranteed. And if you install safeguards you are back at square one: Someone will slip through, bad things happens, articles get written, people cry that safeguards should be lowered .. and so on, and so on. It's not an easy problem. Even if you agree that the basic idea is good.

> But activists are more than willing to conflate the two cases.

I work in philanthropy and this is absolutely the case.

To most donors and laypeople, a person is homeless if they sleep outdoors, in a car, or in a shelter.

But to people who work in this space, a person staying with friends or extended family members can also be considered homeless. This greatly increases the amount of people considered homeless in their reporting.

That is definitely the case in my community. We are not a big city, and we have essentially zero visible homelessness. But the stats for my kids' elementary school says we actually have a fair number of homeless kids. Turns out that's because they are living somewhere that does not qualify as their own home. They still have a place to eat & sleep.

It sounds like the reason here is that unlike your home staying somewhere else has a pretty high chance of not being permanent. It's probably a good idea to not state "we have zero homelessness" and a month later people run around "How can there be all these people on the streets?! You said we have no homelessness!"

> But to people who work in this space, a person staying with friends or extended family members can also be considered homeless. This greatly increases the amount of people considered homeless in their reporting.

Well of course, they've made their career in this. If people are no longer homeless under the common definition of the term, these people would be without a job, so they have to do marketing work to change the goal posts to justify their existence.

> that the biggest problems for the visibly homeless are mental illness and substance abuse.

I think there's some reasonable evidence that housing first approaches are extremely helpful in addressing both mental illness and substance abuse.

Housing creates an opportunity for both stability and routine, which are incredibly important for getting help and treatment for mental illness and substance abuse.

I don't think the evidence is 100% conclusive yet, but I don't think a housing first approach can absolutely be helpful for both populations (but for different reasons!).

I do think it makes sense to think about both of these populations, because they definitely don't have the all of the same needs. Pretty much everyone needs shelter and at least a small place to safety store items.

In San Francisco some groups use the term visible homeless as well. I think it is a good start in categorization because there is so much cognitive dissonance between seeing a thing, not understanding what is already being done about a thing, and conflating a dozen other issues as one thing.

I hadn't thought of it in exactly those terms but this really strikes a chord. I'll definitely be using more specific language from now on.

This is very important! A few years ago I was reading about UC Berkeley grad students who were homeless. They slept in their office on campus. When people talk about homelessness, usually their talking about being visibly homeless without knowing it.

  They slept in their office on campus.

That's not homelessness; that's simple, rational economic behavior. I would have done that in college, too, had that option been available to me, and I would hardly call myself "homeless".

Is a student living in a dorm "homeless", now, too?

Do you have any basis for your swipe against activists?

It's hard to trust your judgment when you freely admit to being ignorant of even the basic terminology of the field of study.

What I'd like to know is what has caused (what feels like) the massive increase in our cities of the "visible homeless"? Has there been a policy change, or some other nationwide change that has caused more people to become homeless? What is really going on?

I mean, there's always been both visible and "hidden" homeless people in cities - but over about the past 5 years (and it honestly feels like it increased dramatically after Trump became POTUS - but that has to be my imagination) it has gotten to the point where there are mass groups of such people, living in camps, roaming the streets, and some of them have committed crimes - either to pay for more drugs, food, maybe shelter, or just (maybe) in the hopes of being arrested and given a roof over their head.

Prior to that, I recall there being a few homeless here and there around my neighborhood and city (Phoenix, in my case), but like I said, this has seemed to change drastically.

I have heard rumors (and that's all I know them to be at best) of certain communities in California (typical culprits to the rumors seem to be wealthier areas of the State) paying for buses to transport their homeless to other cities outside California. It seems outlandish, and just another "blame California" excuse the conservatives here would use - but I honestly don't know what the truth is. It might be outlandish, but completely implausible?

> I have heard rumors (and that's all I know them to be at best) of certain communities in California (typical culprits to the rumors seem to be wealthier areas of the State) paying for buses to transport their homeless to other cities outside California. It seems outlandish, and just another "blame California" excuse the conservatives here would use - but I honestly don't know what the truth is. It might be outlandish, but completely implausible?

In California, you will hear people complaining about every community in the South-West paying for buses to transport their homeless into California.

This has occasionally happened, but in a very sporadic way.

So, I think that, for the most part, both the Californians, and the non-Californians who believe this are wrong.

One reason some homeless people seem to be more brazen is that they are not being policed as heavily, since people have realized how much of a waste of money it is to throw homeless people in jail for minor crimes. So the people who would be bouncing around in/out of jail are spending more time on the streets. And the same nonenforcement policies also enable homeless people to live in encampments that are not immediately shut down

Note, I don't think the solution is necessarily to reverse these policies. But this is one explanation for why homelessness seems much more visible now than it used to be.

There are other factors increasing homelessness in general, namely substance abuse and increasing housing costs. If you have a poor support network and are living paycheck to paycheck (like most Americans actually do), you are one incident at work + eviction away from homelessness. Substance abuse and untreated mental illness make these worse.

Also there are some pernicious cycles that are hard to avoid with homelessness. Namely that homeless people, as you mention, tend to congregate in large wealthy cities that have lots of services for the homeless. These cities tend to have very high rents so it makes getting out of homelessness more difficult as long as they stay in the city.

One part of the puzzle: anti-camping laws have been found unconstitutional when the homeless cannot find shelter [1]. Therefore, police are sometimes powerless against tent cities.

[1] https://www.curbed.com/2019/4/5/18296772/homeless-lawsuit-bo...

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