Homelessness Is a Housing Problem
sightline.org
sightline.org
The most visible homeless people that are the jarring entropy in American cities are always going to be the low functioning indigent population with mental health and/or addiction issues.
These people have no choice but to be visible. They obviously can’t succeed in their current state. Where can someone go who has baseline mental health issues, has been low SES for their entire life, and has no real support network? When this type of person is in crisis a shelter isn’t going to be a safe convalescent house to get mental health treatment and stability/sobriety.
The US is woefully inadequate here. We let our lowest functioning and least supported (as in support network of family and friends) members of society walk the streets panhandling by day and sleeping in the dirt by night.
US cities need convalescent facilities and long term psychiatric facilities for the indigents who are mentally unable to tackle their own enormous critical problem and for the ones who are long term addicted and need strong support. (Long term alcohol use and amphetamine use lead to different kinds of psychosis. Wernicke/Korsakoff and amphetamine induced psychosis respectively. These people are not sound enough of mind to do this without long term facilities. We don’t have those in the US anymore. Unsupervised public housing is not the answer for these people. Perhaps for the less apparent higher functioning and invisible poor it is.
That group can be helped by public housing.
> The most visible homeless people that are the jarring entropy in American cities are always going to be the low functioning indigent population with mental health and/or addiction issues.
The most visible homeless are also a small minority of the people who deal with Homelessness in America - which is why they are addressing housing. California had a homeless population of 150,000 in 2021 [1], most whom were not living on the sidewalk & dealing with drug and/or psychiatric problems.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/homeless-po...
But I believe the public wants the visible homeless cared for in a more responsible way.
It's not that there are two types of homeless people, and people are one or the other. The "visible homeless" are a progression from the invisible, semi/temporarily homeless.
I've known people who started down the path of homelessness (and one who spent some time in that state and got out). Poverty in general, and housing instability are two causes of that transition.
If you can afford rent, afford basic comforts and stability, maintain health coverage and afford healthcare, you're not going to suddenly jump into sleeping under a highway and raving at pedestrians. There's a long journey to that state. We want to prevent that initial slide into temporary homelessness that precedes long-term homelessness, and all the issues that frequently arise with it.
When the ship is sinking, and someone says "we need to plug the hole", you don't respond with "No, bail harder!" Sure, bail harder, but the issue isn't that the people trying to plug the hole are missing the core issue.
Put differently, my thesis is that the public cares about people who need the most help, not because they feel they deserve that help the most. Instead I think its because those who need the most help are also the most visible. This primarily makes the public feel unsafe, and secondarily makes it harder to ignore the problem.
An effect of this is that the non-visible homeless are de-prioritized for help for reasons of PR. That does not necessarily mean these non-visible homeless deserve more priority, just that their current level of priority could only be right be 'accident'.
The system is slow and challenging to navigate and eventually (after several years) my mother was able to navigate the system to become a court appointed guardian.
On the other side, I have also been in government appointed committees that set housing policy and have had to listen to many “experts” explain that housing is the solution for homelessness and their suggestions is usually along the lines of “relax the codes and permitting process so builders can build more homes”. Needless to say, I’m somewhat sceptical of this argument but that is probably mostly due to my own bias.
Imho, I think our tax money should be going to social services and universal healthcare.
This an artefact of lobbying by the building industry who can absolutely rake in profits building luxury housing but are restricted in terms of where they can do it.
It will absolutely nothing for the supply of affordable housing unless luxury housing is taxed to death and building affordable housing is engineered to be profitable, but they'll fight that tooth and nail. Nobody exchanges 16% profit margins for 4% willingly.
It might even make things worse if the stripped regulations are about mandating % of affordable homes in new developments (which theyd fucking LOVE) and it will probably ensure quality goes down the tubes.
Only public housing will actually solve the supply issue. Singapore is the best model here.
So that leaves federal funding. Might as well use my taxes to provide funding for public housing projects.
It's not an exaggeration or even unfair to say that sociopathic wealthy lobbyists (like, e.g. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Foundation) are both causes of the current homeless crisis and seeking to exacerbate it.
If I look into this argument, am I going to find research supporting the idea that, counterintuitively, taking away public housing helps these problems? Or am I going to find real estate developers pushing a narrative to rationalize taking from the poor, selling to the rich, and making tons of money by doing so?
What's hiding under this rock? You're telling me it's butterflies, but I have a feeling it's actually centipedes.
I h4ppenedToo bump into someOF these folKs 0noccasion. N0ne of Them HAd a CLear view of thEir LiVes. Having to DepenD on some0ne for their living is 0neTHeeng, n0tHavin a CLeer V1eWOF THeiR L1Ves is quite AnooTHa.
I am SAD.
Most of this show is about the political fallout of this situation. Because a majority of the residents of the town did _not_ want any low income housing.
The show is fictional, but based on a real story and a real town where this happened.
90% of the country is public housing. It used to be third world and have a serious drug problem. It built proper public housing, is first world and it has no drug problem.
America is moving in the reverse direction and accelerating. The odd publicly funded methadone clinic wont stem the tide.
Private housing is good in theory but in practice it leads to ever rising rents, drug addicted homelessness and a parasitic coke addled landlord class taxing away 40% of a median income while doing the bare minimum in repairs.
This particular policy was stolen from Singaporean communists in the 1950s out of a kind of desperate pragmatism. Lee Kuan Yew didnt really want to do it but he wanted the commies to win even less. They airbrushed that part out later.
It was similar in America in the 50s. When the ruling classes were desperately afraid of communists you got social housing, medical care, subsidized education and the middle class thrived and could easily afford cars, homes and education.
No more though.
All that bollocks about individual freedom (freedom to pay more rent!) was used to drive you into poverty while a state that works on "spreading liberal values" with tanks decided to trash the 4th amendment because what American elites really thing is that too much freedom = terrorism.
It's all rather ironic.
In America, our extremely restrictive zoning is massively limiting what can be built. In most Californian cities it can cost over $500k just for planning approval and environmental review. That's before any building materials, cost of labor, hiring architects, etc. Simply to be allowed to building something.
This is not sustainable. The fact that it's easier and cheaper to build a new development on virgin, untouched land then to upzone a single family house into a duplex is tragic.
I agree that there is generally a lot of red tape around building things, and this is generally true of most developed nations. Your example of California is sort of the extreme for the US. There are vast areas of the US where zoning is not nearly as restrictive and permits are not nearly as expensive. In a lot of the US, converting from single family to duplex is not forbidden.
The real question is about population distribution. People choose to live in the restrictive areas. Maybe some don't have a choice because that's where the jobs are. It seems there is some self correcting market effect to this in that some companies are choosing not to stay in California with the high cost of living, taxes, and regulations. If there's really enough support, there's really nothing stopping like minded companies from forming their own city in a new area, or even reinvigorating the Appalachian cities that were once much larger than they currently are (Pittsburgh and Google are a slight example).
Just a point about Tokyo. The average dwelling is under 300 sqft. Perhaps the reason that housing is increasingly expensive in places like SF, or even the US in general, is that the housing size has drastically increased over time as has the preference for more amenities. Now I'll agree that the zoning/code tends to set a minimum size limit of about 600 sqft in many places, but even then, consumer choices make it a moot point since nobody want to buy a house that small (and people in many small NYC apartments complain about size too). So even if we change zoning/codes, we still have a culture problem that doesn't necessarily fit with Tokyo's system.
Rough sleepers may well have untreated addiction and mental illness problems - there's a reason they've exhausted the patience of their loved ones - but many people among the hidden homeless have simply been priced out of the housing market.
I'm all for increasing housing supply to drive down the cost of housing, but that's a completely different problem. That solution may drive down your metrics of "homelessness" but it's obvious that a different solution is necessary to address the "visible homeless".
“The Community First Village is the recognition that human beings need to be in relationship with each other, and that housing will never solve homelessness but community will,”
Does housing availability have an effect on homeless, sure. But addiction, mental health, and trauma, play a much more prevalent role.
I'm far from am expert in this topic, this just reflects my understanding. I'd love to hear a different point of view.
Without housing it is massively more difficult and time-consuming to perform basic maintenance acts like showering, shaving, defecating, or feeding yourself. Think of any camping trip you've gone on. It's easy to start slipping at your job and you're much more likely to be fired. But say you really hustle and actually keep your job, like many unhoused people.
Without a safe place to retreat to & relax, without a quiet place to sleep undisturbed by cars roaring by, you enter a spiral. Your mental health, already not great after years of stress associated with your marginal financial situation, decreases markedly and then drops off a cliff. You become deeply depressed or are unlucky enough to finally trigger more serious mental health disorders that have been lurking, waiting for the chance to rear their heads. It's very easy to stop showing up for your job here, but you still manage to put yourself together and drag yourself over there pretty well. Your coworkers start to complain about the way you smell. Your physical health begins to deteriorate.
At any stage of this process your plunge could have been arrested by a supportive family. And at any stage in this process your plunge could have been massively accelerated by the introduction of drug use. Once mental health starts to go, self-medicating seems more and more appealing. Few joys are left available to you. For most unhoused people, it's only a matter of time.
Once you are addicted to drugs all of the difficulties enumerated above are multiplied. It is extremely difficult to kick drugs in the best of times (how many of us know of some well-off family with a black sheep child who has been to family-funded rehab nearly double-digit times?) and now there is basically no incentive nor ability to do so. Mental health issues are also extremely difficult to heal. Many of us here have been depressed and understand how difficult it is to recover even in good economic circumstances.
The absolute best you can hope for upon escaping all of this is to return to a marginal low-wage high-rent existence doing its best to kick you back down the cycle.
The #1 takeaway here is that people like to talk about homeless people with mental health or drug addiction issues, and it is impossible not to admit the simple truth - their recovery is impossible without being given housing. A safe place to retreat, rest, and convalesce.
Not enough to read the article, I guess.
It’s true that the thing that causes people to become homeless is often a crisis of some kind - adiction or mental health, job loss, etc. What people in the comments here aren’t doing is modeling what happens in a place where housing is cheap vs housing is expensive. In a place where housing is cheap, addiction or mental health issues might mean you can keep living in your shitty apartment and making rent; life is less precarious. Mentally ill people talk to themselves in the comfort of their own home! Obviously there are people who are homeless even in low cost of living areas and they need support to find shelter, but if rich areas built enough housing to lower prices, some amount of the homelessness crisis would be solved “for free.”
Tale as old as time, California charters a hotel to house the homeless and it turns into a drug orgy smearing shit on the walls paradise.
Yeah yeah, the only difference between the aggressive homeless person screaming and smashing water bottles against plate glass store windows and me is that I have a roof over my head. Look around and give me a break with that nonsense.
I am sorry, but you are part of the problem because, whether realising or not, you are perpetuating the. toxic idea that you must be a highly productive, psycologically stable member or society before you 'deserve' a roof over your head.
I've lived in a poor country, we had plenty of alcoholics, drug addicts, wife beaters and other assorted assholes as neighbours, none of them were homeless becauae housing was cheap.
It also does not take a PHD in psycology to realise that if you take one of them, and make them live on the street for a few years, their condition will deteriorate.
The fact thay you have to prove that housing and housing-less are connected just shows how deep our collective head is up the arse of this new, late-stage-capitalist, neoliberal bullshit. I am not sure any CCP propaganda can be as effective.
The system is plain self destructive - half the population reports that they can't afford to have kids, and the #1 expence is housing. How are you gonna have evil capitalist paradise if all the wage slaves die out? Oh, wait, what do we care, the whole planet is gonna burn up regardless.
People call Chinese government evil, byt as least they have a plan that goes beyong the next quarterly report.
I don't think anyone (well some people) is against society extending a credit to help people get back on their feet, but the issue is that historically it just becomes net negative producers now being even more negative by virtue of having a living space paid for with little signs of improvement. The credit just gets written off as a compounding loss.
I suggest watching Soft White Underbelly on YT, he does tons of homeless interviews and outreach trying to get people back on their feet. The solution is definitely not "just throw houses and therapy at the problem"
I will accept this argument the day we finally remove net negative producers from society, like Wells Fargo, which comes up with new financial fraud every year, and gets away with it.
Or snake oil salesmen that sell supplements that don't even contain whats written on the package, polluters, Tabacco and other assorted merchants of addiction and death that are all net negative to society to make a tidy profit.
Additionally - if you commit murder, you get food and housing, but if you refuse to work, you starve to death?
What would it cost us to make sure everyone has access to basic food like rice, 0.3% of GDP?
If a homeless person trades their rice for money/drugs, do you propose giving them even more rice, or just letting them starve?
Also because eventually this mug's game will collapse and make us all miserable. We've already been forcing people back into offices just to prop up fantasy property values in city centers.
Sounds like the problem isn't as easy as "just get a better job bro".
Where in US junior-medium level software engineers make $35k/year? This is around median individual income, so should square put one in lower middle class or above.
Yeah, coz these people got into a vicious spiral of homelessness -> drugs -> crazy -> drugs -> crazy that played out over many years.
They're not a house a way from normalcy but a housing is still a prerequisite for them slowly returning to normalcy and to prevent others from joining their drug fueled nightmare.
It's absolutely not a coincidence that San Fran has the highest property prices and the craziest homeless.
Most things aren't monocausal. Drug addiction causes people to make bad choices that result in loss of employment and isolation from more stable friends and family. If that happens to you in a place where you and all your addict buddies can pile into a trailer on a plot of land nobody cares about, then you won't be homeless. If it happens to you in the middle of a high-COL city like San Francisco, then you might find yourself on the street.
Does that mean "high housing prices" put you on the street or was it the result of your addiction?
Surely it's both, in some sense.
1) people who have drug and mental issues
2) people (and families) who do not have drug and metal issues but just bad luck (lost job, released from jail and cannot find job, etc.)
3) people want be to transient (runaways, hanging out and traveling, etc.). Members of this group slowly become group one.
I have a strong opinion that there needs to 3 different solutions which should NOT be mixed (I.e., do not provide shared housing for the first group and second group).
It's a Captain Obvious class of article, hopefully the next one will explore the correlation between thirst and water deprivation
So it may be obvious but it still needs to be repeated and reinforced.
This is a question a lot like "does hiking the minimum wage cause unemployment?" in that a lot of private wealth hinges upon the public believing a plausible falsehood. Rigorous scientific study can offset that.
Confirming this folk theory with hard data and analysis will prove very useful in the ongoing policy battles.
(A lot of political hobbyists continue to mindlessly repeat value-based and morality tale stories, when simple economics explains quite a bit.)
> First, the people sleeping on the street only represent a subset of the total population of people experiencing homelessness. In the 2020 count, chronic homelessness (what policy makers call being homeless for at least a year and living with some kind of physical or mental disability, including mental illness, a chronic health condition, and substance use disorder) accounted for less than 30 percent of the homeless cases in King County, while the chronic unsheltered population made up less than 17 percent of total cases. Second, we know that mental health and drug use can be both a cause of homelessness and a consequence. The trauma associated with homelessness is significant; that drug use and mental illness might result from this experience is not surprising. Research confirms this relationship.
> Despite this complexity, the fundamental question remains: Does variation in rates of these individual risk factors like poverty explain variation in rates of homelessness witnessed across the country? In other words, do we have more homelessness in Seattle because we have more poor people or more drug users? Our research suggests the answer is no.
There follow some supporting graphs, etc.
> Individual risk factors help account for who in a given city might lose their housing at any given point in time, but housing markets—rents and vacancy rates—set the context in which those risk factors are expressed. Without looking at housing markets, you can’t explain why Seattle has a much higher rate of homelessness than Chicago, Minneapolis, or Dallas. The fundamental conclusion is that the consequences of individual vulnerabilities are far more severe in locations with less accommodating housing markets.
Nobody particularly minds if a bit of money is spent on mental health services or drug addiction therapy but money spent on new social housing in your area that uses your tax money to reduce the value of your home and potentially bring people you wouldnt want as neighbors?
Yeah, people arent keen on that. Even ordinary, caring "lefty" people hate that idea.
The 1% also dont want to put downward pressure on the value of their property portfolios with extra housing or upward pressure on wages and they own the media and think tanks so mental health/drugs cause homelessness rather than are caused by homelessness when they discuss it.
Or, it gets cast as a lack of personal responsibility for the right wing press.
Either way the only working solution is the least politically palatable, so cities run by people who care end up just building a methadone clinic or something because that's all you'll be allowed to do.
Then the right wing and liberal press will take a shit on them because what little they were able to do on a tiny budget didnt really solve anything.
For them to stop drinking.
They never do.
The results are (to me) quite counter-intuitive. For some drinkers, if you give them a rate-limited but ultimately unrestricted supply of booze, and tie access to it to good behaviour -- but not abstention -- they actually stabilize their intake and start slowly decreasing it over time. They tend to keep coming to the shelter (free booze!). Participants in wet shelters drink less than on the streets as they're rate-limited. Their health generally improves. Some eventually even wean themselves off this way. The cyclical nature of drug addiction when in poverty means complete chaos, withdrawal, then binging again. Just giving them booze interrupts that.
This ties into my pet hypothesis (not exactly revolutionary, I know) that homeless people, as well as drug addicts, quite rationally really, seek to avoid immediate chaos, disorientation, and pain. Drug withdrawal is chaos and pain (of a completely intolerable kind for some) and so is avoided, even at enormous longer-term cost.
(Similar results with stabilization, improved health and self-tapering have been seen with providing heroin addicts access to opiates, too. [2] The % that exit such programs sober who stay sober is higher than pretty much any other form of drug addiction treatment. Makes one wonder if we're going about addiction the wrong way.)
Tautology? That doesn't really help us fix it, or even understand it. You could give people housing, but that's not going to fix the underlying causes, and may not be the best help we can give some of the individuals. That could be inability to get or hold a job due to criminal history or mental health, jobs that don't pay enough to afford living expenses (more about market/job structure than simply raising minimum wage, although reforms around that can make sense), etc. Now for some segment of the homeless population, possibly a fairly large one, giving someone an address can help them get a job and get back on their feet - I'm thinking Norway's (or was it Sewden?) model, but other structural issues would have to be addressed to make that work, like how the "justice" and healthcare (substance abuse and mental health especially) system are structured as well as social conventions/stigmas related to them.
Then it gets easier for a lot of existing systems to help people who are capable of getting back into (cheaper) housing to do so.
And then we can focus on people who really need more care because we won’t be actively making things way worse the way we are with our housing policies now.
Most cities with high demand allow nothing more dense than houses on 2/3 or more of their land. It is easy to falsify your argument about personal preference because people are willing to pay much more per sqft for condos in the center than houses at the edge.
[1] no pun intended
import numpy as np
import statsmodels.api as sm
n = 1000
desired_R2 = 0.05
mu = 0
sigma_noise = 0.1
sigma = np.sqrt(sigma_noise*2*(desired_R2/(1-desired_R2)))
X = np.random.normal(mu, sigma, n)
noise = np.random.normal(0, sigma_noise, n)
y = X + noise
X = sm.add_constant(X)
model = sm.OLS(y, X).fit()
model.summary()
Random looking balls of data points don't have slopes. It is invalid to perform a linear fit on data that does not derive in large part from a linear generative process. And presenting a fit from a model that is facially absurd to apply is bad data science. Whether or not an informed reader would discount the absurd model fit is not material to whether it is appropriate to present such a fit.
They could have binned the data and plotted percentile bands. They could have used a non-parametric density estimator. There are lots of things they could have done to summarize the data and make some sense of the ball of points. But linear regression with slope error bars is not an appropriate choice. That it is easy to compute linear fits, and that it helped them make their point is not justification.
That is exactly what they are saying. This is from TFA:
> The graphics above demonstrate that variation in rates of homelessness cannot be explained by variation in rates of individual factors such as poverty and mental illness.
They are, in my words, saying "Look at this plot, the x-axis has no bearing on the y-axis. To give you a sense of how bad it is, we fit a line to it and it is exactly 0 useful." I don't know why you are focusing so hard on the plots without reading their words. You are in agreement with TFA. Now, for the plot with R^2 of 0.55, that clearly has some positive relationship to it.
As for your last paragraph, I disagree 100%. They are trying to find an explanatory variable, not "summarize the data". By showing all the points, it is evident there is no relationship. As you have continuously pointed this out, the plot achieved its goal. In my opinion, the line is a nice touch for statisticians to know that no illusions from scaling of the axes are playing tricks.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
All of a sudden, it stops being a mystery why "homelessness" is a perennial problem: because we're misusing the term "homeless" for two of the most intractable problems in the human world. Calling those people "the homeless" is like calling cancer patients "the hairless".
When I lived in a different place, I went on long walks. I started buying little care packages to give to those who were suffering out on the street. I gave an older woman a package and she was grateful and we had a nice exchange. The next time I tried, she almost attacked me. Think her primary problem is lack of a home? Lack of a home is just one symptom of her real problems.
1) Drug addiction (addicts and the mentally ill are no longer rational actors and it's cruel to treat them as such, stop paying them to sleep on the sidewalk)
2) Immigration (like it or not, pumping up demand weather they're paying for it or the government makes housing much more expensive for everyone.)
3) Cheap credit (Everyone knows how this works and worse still it directly effects the most disadvantaged while funneling their money to the wealthy.)
4) High cost of construction labor
5) Material supply chain issues (which is largely the same as the last two, it's all just inflation.)
6) Expensive regulation that adds to construction cost (zoning, building codes etc.)
Housing is part of it but not the only part. Some of these things could be easily fixed in ways that benefit everyone who lives here (housed or not.) No one in charge wants to though and you should be asking why.
0: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canadian-ho...
1: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...
But there's no helping the mentally ill or drug addicts with a house. You could gift them a mansion, and they'll find a hammer and tear up the walls either looking for demons hiding in the walls to kill, or trying to find wiring or metal scrap to sell for drugs.
I agree. (I'd change "only" to "mostly", but close enough.)
But I also recognize that people aren't born in whatever state they're in, and it seems apparent that getting into "down on your luck" homeless state is the first step into being part of the drug-addicted, mentally unstable homeless population.
Do you suppose those drug addicts were born addicted? Do you suppose no home owners are mentally ill? There has to be a path from largely functional, housed, and employed, to on the street, on drugs, and mentally unstable. Pretending such a path doesn't exist is comforting for those of us who haven't started down it, but it's certainly not going to give us an accurate understanding of the world.
Stop looking at a snapshot of people and look at the progression.
I think it's the opposite. Many drug addicts start off housed, either with family or on their own. As their addiction takes over their lives they lose their job and burn bridges with their family and eventually end up on the street. I've seen examples of families of addicts are loving and would house them in a minute if it wasn't for their addition and toxic behavior.