We can reduce homelessness if we follow the science on what works
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
Here in San Francisco, near the beginning of COVID, we put our homeless in hotel rooms. One resident per room, no shared bathrooms, etc. Plus, we gave them free food, free alcohol and free drugs (weed, IIRC). The idea was to satisfy all of their needs and not have them going outside. This lasted close to 2 years.
This was a fairly big sample: close to 3700 people. That is a statistically significant sample, given that SF's total homeless population is around 20K - 30K (including those in shelters).
So what happened with these people? How many of them cleaned up their acts and became productive members of society? This would be a fairly straightforward question to answer, right?
BUT! The Homeless Industry in SF has refused to do so! There were no studies done on this population and their outcomes. Whatever happened to these scientists? Why did they ignore this golden opportunity to study this situation? What we _do_ know is that the residents trashed the hotels and the City of SF is being sued by these hotels to the tune of 10s of millions of dollars.
I remember when all flights were grounded after 9/11, and scientists took the opportunity to study the impact of contrails on the night sky, visibility of celestial bodies, etc. Weirdly, no scientist considered it worthwhile to study these homeless people in their new housing.
It doesn’t sound like this was the purpose, it sounds like the purpose was to temporarily keep them off the street. So I’m not exactly shocked that it didn’t give a result it wasn’t designed to give.
If you're going to tell me that providing housing alone is enough for these people, then this is exactly that situation: they were provided free room and board (and *NOT* shared rooms, either). So where are the positive outcomes that "housing first" is supposed to bring?
I’m sorry where did I say that. Don’t fucking accuse me of saying something I didn’t say. All I implied is that your expected result was likely not the expected result of the actual program.
Scientists are a scarce resource and job offers need to compete for them. Those able to provide a workplace better than: "typing in your computer using an unmade bed as table in a trashed small hotel room filled with weed smoke and shared with drunk people that could or not have previous mental issues and could be violent or not" got all the talent.
Not really difficult to understand. Science is hard enough yet.
is nice to the homeless
Finland-land-land
Super cool to the homeless
In the city
City of Helsinki
Lots of rich people giving change to the homeless
The last paragraph is pretty clear on the real difficulty:
>The major obstacles to resolving homelessness remain ideological. It is politically hard to sell the idea that people who take drugs or are disruptive should get free housing – even when the evidence shows that is actually what works.
Note also that Utah, a very conservative state, solves homelessness in exactly this way.
It just might be that the housing would not be provided by funneling huge amounts of tax dollars to the rentier class, and might involve constructing more houses, and therefore would be opposed by the left.
Utah is also heavily Mormon, which complicates things. Mormons have a lot of beliefs that sound fairly socialist when you describe them in practice, except that they believe the church should be the administrator of those policies.
Mormons also heavily oppose abortion, which makes them a nearly single-issue voting bloc, making Utah deep red in a purely partisan sense.
If somehow abortion were a non-issue - like, overnight, everyone somehow magically forgot abortion even existed - it's not hard to imagine Mormons being one of the least conservative Christian denominations.
(Yes, I'm aware that other Christians don't consider the LDS to be Christians, but that's beside the point)
A lot of hardline religious sects superficially look like socialism if you only examine their in-groups and entirely ignore their out-groups. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is no exception.
You're getting downvoted, but you're broadly correct. There's a lot of research showing how more homogeneously white populations are more likely to support leftist or socialist policies (policies, not affiliation) than people of the same demographics who live in more heterogeneous places.
The key according to this article is the cost of housing, not implied racism.
https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/12/being-poor-alone-do...
In ten years, incidence of chronic homelessness in Utah went from 1,932 to 178.
Solving 91% of homelessness is a fantastic achievement, even if the remaining 9% needs further work.
The reduction was closer to 60%, and in the past few years, they've stopped investing in the program. It's been a good thing, but without ongoing effort and investment it will regress back to the mean.
See also the book “SanFranSicko” by Michael Schellenberger.
Additionally, the two party system has effectively declawed the vox populi and made the barriers to change very, very large.
This means that until we're out of boomers (and a significant portion of Gen xers) the isn't going to be a possibility of the sort of critical mass necessary to make the systemic changes we need to reconnect the will of the people with the behavior of the government / media / business machine.
Although, if we make it that far, I'm sure the well organized entrenched upper class will have a whole new set of tricks to try. It's very difficult to properly organize against them.
It's a variant of a straw man that right wing people sometimes use. Which makes sense given that OP is forming their perceptions of the left from a book subtitled "How Progressives Destroy Cities".
(Conservative areas are generally both socially, and economically conservative. I know someone will mention Utah's housing first program, and I'll cut them off at the pass, by pointing out that subsequent governments have been severely under investing in it.)
That's trivial; prison. (Ignoring the part where prisons now charge prisoners rent...)
Finding a solution everybody can agree on is much harder than finding a solution only one side or the other can agree with.
This comment proves you don't know your adversary, which is a dangerous situation to be in.
Historical and contemporary conservative approaches to homelessness tend to fixate on criminalization and enforcement: more cops to break up camps, more pretenses to jail homeless persons, more opportunities for the prison-industrial complex to get its cheap labor. "Jail the beggars, jail the addicts, jail the crazies." Today, a century ago, a millennium ago... the dynamics between the rich and poor are basically unchanged; all that's changed, at most, is how the rich get selected.
The majority of effectively homeless in the US are working people. This means people who dont own or rent any kind of housing. They crash in other people's places, frequently going homeless for periods. This includes working families. Their size is estimated in millions.
The chronic homeless are people who dont even have any place to crash from time to time. People refer to these people as 'the homeless', without knowing that a lot of the above category also enters this category frequently over any given year. The chronic homeless category also includes working people due to the skyrocketing housing costs, especially in major metropolises like NY, SF etc. This segment's size is estimated in a range in between 500,000 to 3 million, depending on whose research and criteria you take.
Drug addicts are also in this category, and the existing economic establishment prefers to identify the homeless with them in order to thwart any reform that could cause an increase in their taxes or disturb the real estate sector.
...
So that's right - the problem is ideological. But maybe even before that, its economical - those who hoard the wealth dont want anyone to disturb them and their ever-increasing hoards of wealth with any pesky taxes...
People who have that safety net can spend a few weeks or months crashing on couches until they get their housing situation sorted out. People who, for whatever reason, don't, are the ones trying to hold a job while living out of a car, and one bad encounter with the police can cause them to lose that job.
And once you fall into the same strata as the chronic homeless, it is almost impossible to crawl out of it.
If you want to reduce the number of chronic homeless give years from now, we need services for the temporary homeless, today. If you're getting kicked out of your apartment next Tuesday, and have nobody you can lean on, what you need is four walls and a roof so that you don't land on the street.
Neither section 8 housing, nor the current shelter system supply that. Especially if you're a man, or are queer, or, or, or...
I try to fight my internal NIMBYism, but clutter horde and verbal assaults are where I draw the line.
Imagine saving up for ages to buy a nice 3 bedroom apt to move in with your family with and then a few years later your kids are being threatened by an unstable meth head in the elevator forcing you to move and lose most of your wealth in the process.
From the New York Times article on my hometown Houston trying to end homelessness with a housing first policy:
> But housing first involves a different logic: When you’re drowning, it doesn’t help if your rescuer insists you learn to swim before returning you to shore. You can address your issues once you’re on land. Or not. Either way, you join the wider population of people battling demons behind closed doors.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...
He's also still pushing his plan to establish city-run outdoor camps for homeless people, and to criminalize rejecting those city-run camps when swept - but the city-run camps' locations haven't even been announced, much less started.
https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/2023/01/27/46321180/cit...
So I think this plan of his will never be implemented. Politically, talking about it makes more sense than actually implementing it.
Under highways, particularly, also have the political advantage of reduced visibility.
As a bonus (for the people who don’t want the homeless around), these locations (near and under highways) are also extremely unhealthy, particularly for people with respiratory conditions (and staying in them is a good way to develop such conditions in the first place), so it helps reduce the population served.
The liability alone that Wheeler's proposing is incredible. It'll cost tens of millions to set up (by his estimate) and there'll be lawsuits against the city within days, guaranteed. Nobody will be helped, hundreds will be harmed, and people who aren't chronically homeless will wind up in jail. The camps won't have enough capacity, so nothing fundamentally changes on the ground. Nobody wins.
Part of this has to do with the fact that there have been persistent homeless camps directly in some of the richest neighborhoods, and the city is proposing that the sanctioned camps won't be in residential neighborhoods.[2] If they happen, it will more likely be in a parking lot on the edges of the city or in industrial/commercial zones. Combine the site selection criteria and the obvious advantages of having a centralized set of camps with waste collection, fire code enforcement, and 24/7 onsite security, and it's no-brainer to most people. The real barrier is the question of where the money comes from and who will be in charge, because Portland has an extremely dysfunctional, fractured local government where funding for homeless services is run by an office jointly administered by the city and the county.
1. https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2022/11/housed-portlande... 2. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/portland-may...
What could go wrong?
(Maybe they can decorate the entrance with an ode to the liberating power of work, too.)
IIRC the in-episode description, every major city in the United States, not just “on the US West Coast”.
That mitigates its effectiveness as a local solution, but that problem is in turn mitigated when you move it up to wider regions (and particularly when you move it up to jurisdictions with some form of border control.)
Cities that have done treatment first policies have seen a reduction homelessness.
A great book on this topic is San Fran-sicko. https://www.amazon.com/San-Fransicko-Progressives-Ruin-Citie...
Either way, I don't understand this idea that we shouldn't care for Americans because what if some non-Americans got in?
If there can be a politically practical solution at all, I think it must be one that can be demonstrated to work in the small scale.
First step would be to identify the specific things that make California a hellhole v. the things California gets right.
Do not for a second forget that it’ll happen person by messy person and that this is not only inevitable, but good.
Convincing NIMBYs of this is, well, a shitton of work.
So three men from the recovery house next door help him to his feet, walk him to the halfway house and put him in the shower. They wash his clothes and shoes and give him their things to wear while he waits. They give him coffee and dinner, and they give him respect. I talked to these other men later, and even though they had very little sobriety, they did not cast this other guy off for not being well enough to be there. Somehow this broken guy was treated like one of them, because they could see that he was one of them. No one was pretending he wasn't covered with shit, but there was a real sense of kinship.
[…]
I was just totally amazed by what I had seen. And I had a little shred of hope. I couldn't have put it into words, but until that meeting, I had thought that I would recover with men and women like myself; which is to say, overeducated, fun to be with and housebroken. And that this would happen quickly and efficiently. But I was wrong.
When the article describes an alternative of providing the homeless "housing," what does this housing look like? What aspects of housing are provided that are not generally provided at homeless shelters? Is it privacy, security of belongings, a place to stay during the day, quietness during the night, or other factors that are most substantially different from what is currently available?
'Shelters' are not close to that. They are places to 'kind of sleep' and that's usually it.
It's not a 'home' if you have to share a room with 40 other smelly people and you have to be out by morning. There is a lot of theft, violence, many homeless find it much more peacable to sleep rough than in a shelter.
Many people are so messed up and many incorrigably irresponsible so this program won't work (the flats will immediately turn into repulsively dirty crack houses), but for many it's foundational to be able to sleep and 'be' somewhere that's warm, protected from the elements, where you're not going to be accosted, stolen from.
Just imagine trying to 'get a job' when you live in a tent. Our society is not very capable of handling that. Forget the physical duress of it - it's the psychological aspect. If you are in bum like conditions, surrounded by other bums, crackheads, thieves, it's really hard to fathom yourself as a 'good coffee server'.
Give people a flat with decent neighbours, a community etc and that's the bedrock from which everything else is founded, including their own identity.
All of that said, Finland is not California, and they are light years apart.
I can 100% see it working in Helsinki and not in Cali at all. For one thing, there would be 20 million people lined up for 'free housing' in Cali. They don't have the same kinds of communities to integrate people into, weaker family and cultural structures. Much, much worse violence etc..
But 'housing first' is an important insight to consider because when you think about it it makes sense.
And it's a good goal, too. I mean, to achieve that, you'd have to aggressively build apartments, because it's not like we have 50% of flats being empty and people ending up on the street because nobody will take the government's money and rent out apartments. Once you do that appropriately, some of the pressure will be lowered. You'll still end up with some people landing on the streets, but you'll have fewer, because rents are more affordable and especially smaller apartments are being built. Fewer people, smaller problem.
Unfortunately, that might also be why we're not doing it everywhere. For all I can tell, most local governments don't want new housing.
There is tons of space in Cali and no reason whatsover to build cheap housing in the most choice spots. It's ideology.
Just get the housing built.
LA County and Cali in general seems to be incompetent on the level of corruption in many ways which is sad.
And FYI state shoud be sharing this problem, moving individuals into already built housing in different states.
https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-housing-first-ni...
If I were solving the problem, I would do it something like this:
- A place to sleep needs to be provided for everyone, regardless of mental health or drug usage or general intolerableness.
- Housing for the homeless should be grouped into small places with a few units each that are well spread out.
- Housing should be guaranteed for at least the month, so you are not waiting in line every single day.
- There should be a quota per city and per census tract of required homeless housing, including the richest parts of the city. If your neighborhood meets the budget, then they can sweep for tents and there are consistent cleaning services. Otherwise it is open camping.
- Some of the housing should be allocated as drug free, with regular drug testing for residents who choose these sites. Ditto for alcohol free. Ditto for more restrictive quiet hours. In non-drug-free housing, your still forbidden from open drug usage in common spaces, but no testing. We should balance each restriction according to demand.
- We need solutions for handling mental health problems. That can include levels of conservatorship, such as having your door locked for the night but being allowed to leave during the day. We need lawyer or social worker representation, so that people are not restricted unnecessarily.
- We should aim for individual rooms and bathrooms. If that's not economically feasible, then application criteria should exist for better sleeping locations, including how long you've been a resident in the city and disability status.
It’s another way to lower homelessness.
No, you don’t say.
It’ll never happen though. We look at housing as an investment from a cultural perspective in the USA. This has been a brilliant plan by the capitalist landlords to further concentrate their holdings and become more fiendishly rich.
But hey - your house goes up in value even though your kids will never get to own their own home. Maybe when you die - but oh wait you probably did a reverse mortgage because you didn’t save enough for retirement. Whoops. Too bad junior - no house for you!
It's not the capitalist landlords pointing guns at people who are trying to build more housing.
But your point is basically right. Both parties and a large majority of the public believe that housing should be "a good investment", which is equivalent to the position that it should become increasingly unaffordable for the average person.
His facilities have a cost of care that is 25% of what the state has paid in the past. They have intensive rehabilitation programs, and serve the communities in multiple cities remarkably well.
His work is under fire from all sides. The Democrats don't like him because of the color of his skin, because he is a Christian (though his facilities aren't), and because he has privatized to some degree a system that was previously union work. The Republicans don't like him because they see these people as deserving life in jail (or a worse fate), and his work as "socialism" (because he's housing the homeless).
He exists in a really precarious position - by properly balancing his political detractors, he is "allowed" to service the community.
https://sfgov.org/mod/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Documen... https://libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-1663-bdc2-8fa6-27737287...
Personally I'm holding out until 2024 so the Bell Riots can give us the utopia we've all been promised.
Sigh.
I'm not too worried. You'll all be standing out in the breadline with me soon enough. Keep building robots that automate your jobs out of existence. I find it amusing.
"participants had... median costs of $4066 per person per month... Median monthly costs decreased to $1492 and $958 after 6 and 12 months in housing, respectively" [1]
This was looking at 1811 Eastlake in Seattle- which exists specifically to help alcoholic homeless. NPR has a good article about it. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/01/19/1454774...
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/183666
I expect that housing will be bifurcated, much like it is in England. The Blocks (made of cinderblock and stone to minimize the inevitable fires) and what we currently think of as traditional wood-and-stucco housing.
"Curing" people with a problem like that is not as simple as putting a roof over their heads. The cat can take a pill, but the alcoholic needs a life redirection, and that takes social infrastructure. If you put yourself on the hook by providing said roof, their problems become yours. At that point, you need to ask yourself if you have the time, energy, patience, and most importantly, compassion.