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.
This is as much about tax policy and wealth inequality.
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?
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".
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.
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".
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.