Miami advances plan to move homeless onto island
newsnationnow.com
newsnationnow.com
It's quite obviously not beneficial to the homeless people to segregate them.
And then, the thing that killed/delayed the proposal seems to be a NIMBY protest at 'having a bunch of homeless people on our leisure beach'.
What kind of society is this?
That’s roughly the plan here. Move them out of sight (site? No pun intended).
As for actually how to solve the mess? Eh, just tuck the dirty laundry under the bed. Clean room in seconds. The society needs a refactor in certain parts of the codebase, but few have the courage to take on a legacy codebase.
Lol what?
There’s a lot of different world views out there. The prominent world view throughout the world is that society forms to protect itself. Pretty basic reasoning: we band together to protect other people stealing our stuff.
Homeless are in effect stealing. They are living beneath the society often selling drugs, on drugs, committing crimes, leaving excrement on the street, screaming wildly, etc.
The homeless are not part of society and are not contributing members. They are living off the society and causing a net negative effect. You could potentially reverse that by getting people into shelters, etc. - how’s that working SF, LA, etc?
The common world view (in Asia, parts of Africa, parts of Europe, etc and historically everywhere) is to push the homesless out of the cities. It’s safer for the society and allows the society to be more prosperous.
Society can care about the homeless, empathy is good. But it’s empathetic to everyone to separate them from the society. People that can conduct themselves can join the society, otherwise your hurting everyone.
That said, the island:
> The program calls for the construction of 50 to 100 “tiny homes” on Virginia Key, an 863-acre barrier island.
Seems like a decent option. They get a home and have the option to rejoin society after they pull themselves together. Although, it’s a barrier island… and I can’t imagine that’ll end well.
This has to be satire, right? Poe’s law. I can’t believe anyone would honestly hold this opinion, let alone be willing to voice it publicly.
That seems to describe Floridian frat boys...
Homelessness is a problem caused by society, not really a problem to society, but homeless people are a GREAT scapegoat for asshole politicians and people like you are more than willing to jump on that bandwagon. Disgusting.
My experience with the homeless has instilled that it can be very difficult to help them in a way that I would consider helping. I always accuse my wife of believing that each homeless person is just one protein bar away from becoming a contributing member of society. But if I convince you that many homeless people have a best case scenario of net negative to society, what do you propose then? Probably just help them as much as we can? I think there are probably best paths, but no total wins.
This is all based on my experience volunteering at homeless shelters (in SF) and trying to interact with the homeless near me (now in NC). 100% anecdotal. But now I'm just another member of society shrugging at the homeless. I suspect most of us here are. Lots of strong opinions, but not much action. I'm guilty of that too now.
I can tell you locally we put people in jail when they defecate in the streets or shoot up in public. We also offer space at shelters for people that can follow basic rules - no drugs, no fighting, etc. In addition, our local food bank is fairly well stocked and funded, and several churches in the area have outreach programs. The end result is that I can walk downtown and never have to dodge human feces and rarely see a panhandler.
The reality is that you see downtown being clean but don't see the other people you've pushed your problems onto. And that's a consistent trend of trying to solve the homeless issue in America through things like bussing initiatives, relocating homeless camps and so forth. No conservative or progressive city has solved this problem because it's a societal issue with the US in general.
Some ""conservative"" cities are better because "pro-business" laws allowed more units to be built so less people fall into homelessness. There are still examples like Houston though which has always had homelessness problems in spite of trying to build as hard as possible. Obviously it's not a probably with a single answer as there are people that are homeless for different reasons.
I think this is just a police activity so far. No profit means no fascism.
In a society with some measure of respect for individual choices (freedom) we have apparently decided that we cannot physically force homeless people (a very large portion are heavily addicted to drugs and/or have massive mental health issues) to seek help.
As things stand, either we have to violate the homeless peoples' rights to free choices, or cities must accept having a plethora of mentally ill people around their families.
This creates a situation where neither outcome is socially acceptable and is what inspires attempted solutions like building voluntary housing for the homeless on an island. I actually have to admire the ingenuity of the proposed solution, allowing homeless people to VOLUNTARILY (that's key) go on an island with no assistance is obviously a recipe for disaster for them, but in and of itself is a solution that actually cuts through this particular impossible conundrum.
PS: I'm not necessarily advocating for one kind of society or another in this post, merely giving my attempt at explaining what inspires these kinds of solutions.
While there certainly are individuals whom it is very hard to help, that is the minority.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...
So yes - literally "no strings attached". They go around to homeless people and say "would you like a place to live?" and provide it. There's no requirements for sobriety, faith, counseling, etc.
There are just so many ways no strings attached housing can and does go wrong when substance abuse is ignored. Around here, they sure to couple it with at least an equal amount of social services since many of these people can’t live on their own. Costs are around $10k/month.
The nice thing about no drug shelters is that it really works for those that aren’t on drugs anyways. We can’t just assume all homeless are on drugs and can stand being in permissive shelter/housing environments (which can be quite dangerous for the above reasons and more).
Most of the comments here makes me incredibly upset and disgusted just by their nature of inhumane scape-goating and denigrating from a privileged position. But its not just that, I lost some hope that people here would be curious enough not to bring up these shitty panels. But these questions are especially wrong, not just by the attitude but also because it is totally irrelevant to homeless of Houston.
All these questions you ask apply to sheltered people with addiction, or sheltered people dealing to people with addiction, and mind you old people (elders, grandparents, who you might think much of and respect [rightly so!]) who can not take care of themselves anymore, as well.* Why would you need to differentiate let alone lump all of homeless people under the label of "addict." Some are addicts yes, however have you thought that this might be not the cause but the effect of their state? They are easy targets for blame, wouldn't you agree that it is intellectually quite an easy way out of interacting with part of our society? Why would you point fingers at those who lose for the whole slew of issues with how modern societies are priced and functioning? For me your comment comes off as an example of ignorant and narrow-minded attitude: assuming the worst and pointing out all the why-nots. I encourage you to study this issue and read upon it, just here for example on HN if you search for homelessness there is a nice study on how Finland provides for them. I hope you can develop some empathy towards these people who are behind the veneer of urban filth just the same as you or me or ancestors from 500 years ago.
Disclaimer: I have been homeless while sober and have been an addict while sheltered and working.
* As far as I know, the contract between old people and society is to move them to homes for the elderly. Which makes me think that while there is more love and money involved, the motives and solutions are the same to both problems
I get it, I’m just another NIMBY becuase I’ve experienced someone trying to cook meth in their apartment next door, or a rat infestation overflowing from a hoarder. There are simply a lot of people out there who can’t live alone without lots of help. To think otherwise is insanity.
Houston’s approach is going to have blowback (I f it hasn’t already) if they are just throwing people in housing in the community. Again, housing first simply doesn’t work, you need to throw in a lot of additional social services if you don’t want the place to burn down. We also want to avoid slums where we just concentrate all the unhoused together, making the problem even more difficult.
I get the ideal that everyone deserves housing regardless of their lifestyle choices, implementation is much more complicated than that.
No need for strawmanning.
> There are simply a lot of people out there who can’t live alone without lots of help
You seem to keep labeling people as being intrinsically "homeless", "addicts", "unable to live alone".
This can happen to anybody, just like mental and physical illness can come without warning and without asking for permission.
"housing first" does not automatically imply "housing first and zero social services".
Housing 1st doesn't mean no social services. Providing social services is easier when people have homes actually.
[1] https://www.samhsa.gov/data/report/2019-nsduh-annual-nationa...
> housing first simply doesn’t work, (...) implementation is much more complicated than that.
Thanks for sharing your experiences as well which helps understanding your position. However by your comment you seem to be arguing with yourself. I totally agree that they need support that's what I'm advocating for. You are the one in our discussion advocating against (or, at least, pointing out fairly hypothetical and broad-scoped reasons for possible failure) any advancement on giving that "lots of help" (eg. basic human decency). Surely you can't mean that leaving these poor people on the street, or moving them to an island for some zoning law schenanigans or just general sociopathic disregard (if they need it -- shouldn't they be consulted what is that they need?) looking through them or commenting here how giving them housing won't work, is a way towards giving them that?
Just for the fun of it you might try to imagine a situation where your home gets broken into you are robbed of your posessions, your sense of security but worse follows, a misinterpreted word on your interview with the kind insurance guy, or a mail never delivered makes them mark you suspicious and stall on paying you. You have no friends or ones you have are out of town, your parents can't pay for your accomodation, you spend a few nights at a hotel but then you might not have more cash, you are out of options and spend a few nights strolling or staring in a McDo, stressed out and tired. US has this stupid no-notice firing thing, so let's say after a week of no-show you get to charge your laptop to see you have been terminated. Now imagine how would you like others and the society to handle you and your situation. In one world you are now described as an addict, homeless person that might be unable to live alone on some webforums.
One thing I'm concerned about with this Houston solution is sort of "The McNamara Fallacy". If you're just focusing on one variable "how many people don't have a home?" it's easy to get these numbers very low if you ignore all qualifications for homes and just give homes out as quickly as resources allow.
But a problem is that the statistic of low homelessness doesn't necessarily measure the overall quality of life for the general population. In fact, this solution (depending on how its implemented) might cause untold misery to normal communities who are now dealing with an influx of homeless.
You might go from a homeless person sleeping on a bench outside of an apartment complex (not a good situation), to them having a key to the door and being able to wander down the hall, in the laundry room, at the mailbox, etc. For average working people, this situation isn't necessarily progress even if the homeless statistics are officially better.
Other typical strings include strict bedtimes, including getting awoken early and told to leave. Mandatory religious activities. And a lot of homeless people will report being talked down to at shelters, and generally not being treated well.
The good shelters are always filled, if it is cold enough, the bad ones are as well.
Homelessness is mainly a result of poverty, if you want fewer homeless people you should do something for the poor people, so that they may stay or return to being homed. What government programs exist for this purpose are generally woefully inadequate.
Another example of strings attached is SNAP/food stamps. You set up a bureaucratic system in order to give money to poor people that can only be used for food. Those poor people then wonder how they are going to pay rent.
Second, difficult to help individuals being in the minority will require a very good citation. The difficult to help ones are likely causing the biggest issues - shooting up on street corners and deficating in public.
As for homeless people, you can't tell that someone is homeless just by looking at them. Your personal statistic include only those very visible people who in addition to being homeless have tattered clothes and are incapable of personal hygiene. The majority look like ordinary people.
Furthermore, complaining about the use of “you Americans” is childish tone policing and something one does when they are unable to address the merits of an argument. Maybe if you had an actual argument you could think up something else to share, rather than attempts to stymie discussion because it appears to make you uncomfortable.
Lastly, you brought up nationalism. From my vantage point (as another American) it looks like you’re just trying to shut down debate instead of face the reality of the outcomes we Americans have engineered for our most vulnerable populations.
I remember another time when I bought a few different food items from a convenience store and offered them to a couple homeless guys sleeping in the sidewalk in the middle of downtown. They picked through the five or six items and each grabbed one thing. Nothing wrong with having preferences, but it astonished me that they didn’t want all of it.
These people are not being deprived of their basic needs. They just don’t want to live in shelters.
I think what your experience shows is that food is not that hard to come by in the US, the local shelter or soup kitchen may have sandwiches that are superior to yours. Pizza once in a while is way cheaper than a home, not to mention access to medical care, so they get the luxury they can afford.
> These people are not being deprived of their basic needs. They just don’t want to live in shelters.
Or maybe shelters are very dangerous or too noisy to sleep or too difficult to access without enqueuing for hours every day or too far from places where people can earn some money with odd jobs or begging.
In another news today from NYT: New York City is now straining under the load of illegal immigrants after the Texas governor simply took all the sanctuary cities by their word: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/20/nyregion/nyc-migrants-tex...
jacknews - I have no idea where you live but one day, busloads of migrants may end up in your city. Would love to see what you actually do at that time. Words of "kindness" are cheap.
Homeless are moved to a place they can find shelter. It is the compassionate thing to do.
I don’t understand societies that support the rights of the homeless to live outdoors and take over the commons rendering it useless for its intended purpose.
By having the homeless encampment there, it allows the long-term zoning laws governing it to change, which means that in a few years, the homeless will be kicked out and the developers will move in and build a mammoth complex rivaling 10Thousand Museum, Miami World Center, Aston Martin Tower, etc...
The county commissioner who pushed this, Joe Carallo, is a real estate guy first and foremost and is in the back pocket of the major developers who run the political scene in Miami.
The whole point of this move is to change zoning laws. Everything else is theater disguised as people pretending to give a shit about the homeless.
Apparently we’re so important that "this site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area". Is there some way to read it anyway?
Some sites have determined that ratio is out of whack.
Server logs that store an IP address could be a problem. Want to estimate where you're traffic is coming from in the world? Well that may be considered data derived from PII.
Want to try to do some due diligence by salted+hash user ip addresses for DAU analysis or security reasons? Probably can't. Maybe? Why? Because salted and hashed IP addresses can be reversed.
The spirit of the law is great. The actual law sucks and the Internet is a much worse place for it.
Reminds me of that old Mitchell&Webb skit "Kill all the poor":
~27K in all Florida
For Europeans.
Failed cities like San Francisco are being completely overrun by drug addicts living in the streets, and the truth is, it is too late to do anything about it. Shipping off homeless people to other cities is the only way to clean the streets now. There is no budget big enough and no patience strong enough anymore that can solve this problem. A generation of homeless people simply has to pass away and not be replaced. This process will take decades, and will rob many people the pleasure of enjoying a city in their prime years.
I do not blame the good city of Miami for wanting to just ship off the homeless to a remote island where they can be out of sight and out of mind. The city depends heavily on tourism and has an image of copious wealth to uphold.
+ mental health
> Failed cities like San Francisco are being completely overrun by drug addicts living in the streets, and the truth is, it is too late to do anything about it.
If you really believe that, you should find some way to short San Francisco real estate investment. You’ll get burned badly, since you don’t have very good information, but it will be a good lesson.
Homeless people have been moving into good weather west coast cities since the late 1800s, the scale going up and down over time, but the cities keep booming and busting along.
I don’t think parent was making a comment about real estate prices. Obviously the market tolerates the issue.
Some parts of SF have gotten pretty bad. I volunteered at a couple places and honestly was surprised at how little effort is going into fixing things, so I’d expect the present situation to continue.
The US has historically and still largely does treat addicts as criminals.
Socialize healthcare and treat drug addiction as a medical problem. A good chunk of those addicts are refugees of the opioid crisis caused by profit-seeking pharmaceuticals in the first place! There should be no shortage of tax dollars to allocate for these problems if there's just the will to fix it.
Turns out universal health and even free IV drugs don't solve the problem.
Not that I'm suggesting Canada is some kind of model implementation for how to utilize social healthcare in assisting homeless citizens addicted to drugs.
My main point is before you have resources to even get to fail to use successfully in treating what is a social health problem, we need a damn socialized healthcare budget to even try make mistakes with.
The US can't even manage to treat healthcare as something every citizen needs let alone start caring about the citizen addicts in the streets as sick people in need of medical help.
[0] https://media.blogto.com/uploads/2021/10/19/1634663178-chart...
I think the point is, you can lead a horse to water, but you cant make them drink. If people don’t want to stop using drugs, then they won’t.
Free healthcare, free counseling, free clean drugs and a generous social safety is clearly not going to solve this problem.
That's substantially moving the needle.
The level of human misery seems about the same to me.
I argued that the state of the homeless is no different (because OP argued "you just need universal healthcare and the problem will be solved). People putting up tents in the street, people overdosing on the sidewalk (did you know 10,000 people have died from overdoses in Vancouver to date? [1]), people suffering from untreated mental illness, people suffering from serious medical issues.
The point is not that Vancouver and SF have the same number of homeless, it's that the areas where the homeless are don't look all that different in terms of human misery.
The causes of homelessness will vary from place to place, but in Victoria (Australia) health issues (which includes addiction) is only listed as the cause for 2% of homelessness [1]. Now obviously this doesn't necessarily give the whole picture - for example, DV accounts for 35%, but it's possible that the violence is exacerbated by drug use.
[1] https://vincentcare.org.au/our-services/homelessness-statist...
The "homeless epidemic" is basically a fiction. The US homeless population tracks the broader economy a bit, but on the whole tends to be quite stable. Here are some numbers from Statista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-...
The reason people feel like it's getting worse (beyond simple politics) is that there's been a general shift in public sentiment away from the kinds of policies in the linked article. Where we used to use law enforcement to force the homeless out of core public areas, now we generally tolerate them in most urban environments. They do, after all, have to sleep somewhere.
But that creates backlash, which leads to impressions like yours about a problem ("failed cities" ... really?) that really doesn't exist.
But the core point is that they were always there. You just couldn't see them.
That's a bold assertion. Why do you think it's too late?
Get in a car accident -> hurt back -> prescribed opiates -> get addicted -> prescription stops -> seek street alternatives -> move up the food chain, from buying pills to fentanyl -> lose everything -> end up on the street
Loved one dies -> super depressed -> looking to numb the pain -> starts drinking heavily at bars -> exposed to the drug scene -> offered a bump of cocaine one day -> feels good -> start to do cocaine -> coke dealer has fentanyl to -> you try it -> on the street
Get out of the military -> racked with PTSD -> suicidal -> being around consumerist Americans who know nothing of danger or the dark side of life is alienating -> feeling all alone -> same as loved one dies pipeline -> on the street in a tent draped with the American flag.
There are also ones like:
Irresponsible teenager -> raised in single mother household -> no good role models -> raised by T.V. -> doesn't known how to navigate the world -> ends up in a minimum wage job -> everyone there is doing drugs because their life is so bleak (I've seen this personally)-> nothing to look forward to -> most of pay goes to rent -> feel trapped and abused -> confused, doesn't know how this happened -> does drugs like his coworkers because he feels disposable -> starts fucking up on the job -> no more willingness to keep working -> on the street, begging for his fix.
*Idealistic middle class college grad -> going to save the world -> faces the world -> crippling despair -> can't fix this mess -> hopeless -> give up and drop out -> ×_× drug scene to street.
There are many more pipelines.
It's not simply a "drug problem." There are a lot of pipelines that inevitably lead people there. Once people end up there, they are typically very hard to fix because they have been knocked out of the standard career pipeline. Who wants to hire an ex homeless person with a huge job gap? They feel hopeless, like there's not a place for them anymore in society. Once you've accepted this, you stare long into the abyss. With that comes a great deal of trauma. Making these people very unstable, unlike ordinary citizens who have never danced along the knife's edge. This gives them a bad reputation because you can give them a job and home, but they will often keep going back to their old ways. They are broken inside and a job and house won't fix what has happened to them.
Source: I binge watch documentaries on this issue and read about it.
>This isn’t an inequality or poverty issue, it’s a drug issue.
That might be true of other locales, such as LA or SF. However, Miami at its core is a haven for Latin American robber barons and money laundering - and the real estate dollars follow that.
While yes, there are definitely some homeless who are on drugs (shoutout to the crack addict who spends his life walking around the city block I happen to live next to), it's mainly people who have been priced out over time. Miami is exorbitantly expensive and there is no middle-class housing to speak of (let alone lower-class housing) if you want to live anywhere near the city or the main areas of sustained economic activity (which is to say nothing of the horrible state of public transit and urban sprawl). I've been there 7 years now and I've seen a flood of high-rise "luxury" developments with $3-4k-a-month studios being built in formerly middle-to-lower-class areas, and that's to say nothing of the flurry of insanely expensive highrises that sit at like 40-50% occupancy at best, bought up by people (read: money launderers) that will never step foot in the USA, much less rent out their places.
>I do not blame the good city of Miami for wanting to just ship off the homeless to a remote island where they can be out of sight and out of mind.
Thing is though that Key Biscayne isn't a remote island. The park where they are building this is less than a 3 mile walk to the heart of Brickell. I've walked that exact route before and it takes no time at all. It's literally past a school, over a bridge, and you're right in Brickell. This park literally hosted Ultra Music Festival a few years ago, and is very easy to access. If you live or work in Key Biscayne, you pass this park every day. It's not remote.
> The city depends heavily on tourism and has an image of copious wealth to uphold.
The homeless don't really factor in here. The areas with a lot of wealth are nowhere near the main homeless areas. The tourist areas are mainly concentrated around Miami Beach, which is a city in it's own right and is not controlled by the City of Miami.
The homeless areas are predominantly in the Haitian & African-American enclaves like Overtown and Little Haiti. Nobody who is in Miami for tourism goes even close to those areas.
Short-term, when it's just a few islands here and there literally losing ground, I don't anticipate a lot of urgency over saving Homeless People Island.
I anticipate that if this plan goes through, and if the island is threatened by sea rise before Miami, there will be incidents. The people living on the island will obviously want to leave a disappearing island, but there'd be no place for them on the mainland, and confrontations result.
https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/stories/why-were-convicts...
Yet being homeless is already criminalized and the police have been harassing homeless people for decades.
If you have to preemptively defend something as “not a concentration camp” and feel the need to couch it with “in my opinion”, it should probably give you pause.
> The term concentration camp originates from the Spanish–Cuban Ten Years' War when Spanish forces detained Cuban civilians in camps in order to more easily combat guerrilla forces. Over the following decades the British during the Second Boer War and the Americans during the Philippine–American War also used concentration camps.
> The term "concentration camp" or "internment camp" is used to refer to a variety of systems that greatly differ in their severity, mortality rate, and architecture; their defining characteristic is that inmates are held outside the rule of law. Extermination camps or death camps, whose primary purpose is killing, are also imprecisely referred to as "concentration camps".
Now I only know about this particular plan what TFA says, but I don't think it's a reach to be concerned about this becoming an internment camp if implemented.
Etymology is cool and interesting, but virtually everyone thinks “Nazi” when they hear “concentration camp” and furthermore you know that.
The popular approach to the vagrancy crisis here is akin to fighting a raging inferno with policy discussions on the fire code. Yes, root causes matter, and yes in the long run they ought to be addressed, but right now the roof is on fire.
Antisocial vagrants are shooting up, shitting, threatening, and even attacking people, all in our formerly safe public streets and parks. This blight on public spaces is an ongoing violation of the civil rights of every decent citizen and it ought to be promptly stopped.
I’m open to any workable approach, but pragmatically, putting these people who are incapable of managing their own lives into programs that manage their lives for them is the only evident immediate solution. Everything else that’s been tried, from giving them free stuff to shuttling them around has observably failed miserably. Whether those programs are permanent or transitional and the other particulars are best decided on a case by case basis by affected communities. Assuredly though some of them will need to be managed living facilities of some sort.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/poverty/520415-...
> Researchers behind the bold new study that kicked off in 2018 gave a one-time lump sum of 7,500 Canadian dollars — about $5,700 — to 50 people who had recently become homeless, and allowed them to choose how to spend the money while following their lives over 12 to 18 months.
> Researchers found that those who received the money on average were able to find stable housing faster, maintain financial security and stability, and increased their spending on food, clothing and rent.
> The study also found the funds freed up space in shelters and saved the shelter system $8,100 per person over a year.
One only needs to look at SF, my home for many years before I took my kids and left in disgust, to see how bad the outcomes that this sort of thinking leads to can get.