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Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

I got stuck overnight in LA last year. Booked a hotel near the airport. Woke up early the next morning and walked a few blocks to a Starbucks.

An old homeless man wandered in, wearing filthy clothing but brand new white sneakers that someone had presumably donated. Speaking loudly to himself about something. Fished around in his jacket for a while and produced some kind of gift card, and ordered a coffee. Then walked to the corner of the store and took a piss on the floor.

An unsolvable problem for the most “progressive” state in the richest country in the world, apparently.

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We made it a problem when we stopped caring for our mentally ill. A State run asylum is not perfect but is orders of magnitude better than on your own on the street.

Pushing people out on the streets due to eye watering rents also literally drives people insane.

This is as much about tax policy and wealth inequality.

If rent wasnt super high, where would the person that happily rents an apartment for $4k a month actually live? Since his apartment wouldn't be available as someone paying $900 a month would still be in it.

We can just build more housing. Landlords and home owners in California are addicted to their continuously rising property values. To the point where there was a thing called a "California Refi" where people would just refinance their house once a year to take more cash out because the property value would have gone up another 50k.

Many Californians acknowledge that there needs to be more housing built, but many of them are also NIMBYs who don't want multi-family housing built in their areas, because it'd lower their personal property value if there was more housing available.

Why does there need to be more housing built in an already dense area? People have moved for thousands of years to areas where they were more easily able to afford to buy or build a home. My parents moved from basically a 3rd world country to the US, not speaking the language, with about $200 in 1988. They already had me as a child to deal with too. Now a college grad doesn't want to move to another part of the US to afford a cheap house?

> Pushing people out on the streets due to eye watering rents also literally drives people insane.

I've seen handful of YouTube videos interviewing homeless people that were pushed out due to high prices and none of them seem the drug-addict pee-on-the-starbucks-floor type. I've seen videos about homeless camps that self-regulate drug free zones for non-addicts.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NXJAYUwlC8 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9abrZwnPThE

Definitely a sad situation, but functional people seem to try to continue to be functional.

Hard worker being evicted for rent and resorting to drug use sounds like a nice narrative, but it feels fictional. Do you have any sources on people being evicted b/c of rent issues and becoming insane?

Most homeless people are living in hotels, with friends, or their cars (like 80%+). This should make sense as their are steps from houses to living on the streets. Just pointing out that our popular perception of a typical homeless person is skewed

>I've seen handful of YouTube videos interviewing homeless people that were pushed out due to high prices and none of them seem the drug-addict pee-on-the-starbucks-floor type

It takes a good number of years on the street to transition to that stage.

>Hard worker being evicted for rent and resorting to drug use sounds like a nice narrative, but it feels fictional.

Probably because there's an unholy amount of wealth and power pushing the narrative that the correlation flows the other way.

A housing first approach to homelessness would depress property prices. Nobody owning a major media outlet wants that and they can shape what "feels real".

> It takes a good number of years on the street to transition to that stage.

Do you have a source for this?

> A housing first approach to homelessness would depress property prices.

No amount of housing will cure drug addictions or mental health problems.

> No amount of housing will cure drug addictions or mental health problems.

But the main part of problems -- for others, if not the drug addicts themselves -- caused by drug addiction are not direct but indirect: Crime (to get money for drugs) and "general nuisance" behaviour like peeing on the floor at Starbucks.

More "liberal" drug policies (like, e.g, Portugal's?) would go a long way towards fixing the former; providing housing for the homeless would go a long way towards fixing the latter. Sure, it's "fixing the symptoms, not the disease" -- but since the "symptoms" seem to be a large (the largest?) part of the problem (it's them the OP article is about, and what we seem to dicussing here), fixing them kind of is fixing "the problem".

The legal basis of this is a US Supreme Court decision, O’Connor v. Donaldson (1975). "Mentally ill plaintiff was confined without treatment for 15 years. Held: states cannot constitutionally confine, “without more,” a person who is not a danger to others or to himself." That ended forced custodial care for the mentally ill who are merely annoying.

There's no constitutional prohibition, though, to offering druggies "drug camp", located somewhere in Outer Nowhere, where they get all the drugs they want.

Who’s job would it be to stop it? I’m told the government is incapable of solving problems. The Starbucks employee? How much would I have to pay you to confront this homeless person? More than a barista makes I would imagine. Perhaps the problem persists because it is indeed unsolvable.

We can look at how other places in the world solve the unsolvable problems that Americans have.

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