This seems like a way to reduce homelessness and fix the housing market in one fell swoop.
I too want a penthouse in Manhattan, who do I need to mail to demand I am given a penthouse in Manhattan?
California clearly doesn’t have the capacity to serve the current population, let alone an increased population. All services are 3rd world quality, besides a few rich enclaves.
Is the homeless problem due to the cost of housing? Or is it moreso due to fentanyl?
These people are addicts and homeless. We can cure homelessness with more homes, but we also need to help them get rid of addiction.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2356643-we-can-reduce-h...
Private market housing in SF will not get most of the very visible & mentally ill off of the streets, this likely requires services and some level of compulsion.
Other areas with higher rates of addiction, but cheaper housing, have lower rates of homelessness. Cheaper housing really does allow people to get off the streets.
I am not redefining anything, I am describing to you what people are colloquially talking about and why these conversations oftentimes are just people talking past each other because they have different issues in mind. When people in SF say "homelessness is out of control", they are typically talking about the population I am mentioning - one that is unlikely to be helped by changes to housing costs at the margin.
SF/LA has numerous programs that will give you housing if you're homeless. The issue is that many of the homeless refuse to take up these programs and insist on staying in their tents.... because they're mentally ill.... because of drugs.
- They're homeless
- Because they're mentally ill
- Because they're on drugs
- Because they're mentally ill
- Because they're homeless
I'm just unsure if the root cause is the price of housing (despite there meaning numerous problems to house & relocate them) or if it's due to the drug addiction.
Anyway, obviously I'm for more housing to reduce the price of rent.
There's a youtube channel called Invisible People that interviews homeless people on the streets and the story is very frequently
had job -> got on highly addictive drugs -> everything is about getting another hit -> tried rehab multiple times and want to go to rehab again
And yeah I mean, heroine/meth/whatever is obviously super dangerous & addictive so you can't really blame them.
* No Pets
* No Visitors
* Curfew Time
* Limits on the number of people per unit (meaning, families and couples cannot always be accommodated together)
- and a host of others. Also in some places there is a requirement that you have a social worker, and/or receiving mental healthcare treatment - except there are long waiting periods.
For most long term homeless people telling them "you have to give up your dog" will keep them on the streets - its not "housing, no questions asked" its "housing with rules".
Building more housing will reduce the existing homeless population - because a significant portion of existing homeless are working poor, but more importantly, it will stall the creation of new homeless, the longer you're homeless the more likely you are to acquire an addiction, or other mental health issue.
You would of course still need some rules in these places and there would certainly be various issues and difficulties, but it seems a whole lot better than what we have happening now in city centers?
In reality housing first solves a great many problems, and creates some others - but its better than anything else we're currently doing.
So, a generation ago, we warehoused people who had an inability to thrive in society in mental hospitals, now we do it with jails, or just leave them on the streets. I think it's a thought that upsets people (and runs into ideological issues across the spectrum), but essentially, there is some percentage of the population, that no matter the supports they are given, will fail to thrive. If we try to jail them all, or just ignore the problems, it creates a great number of externalities which effect all of us in a myriad of ways.
To further drill down, it's a spectrum of behaviors, some folks have enough problems that cash benefits and subsidized housing are not enough to allow them to follow the rules in general society.
In any case, to circle back around, it essentially creates an second class citizen and nuisances around these places, thats a solvable problem though, but rather authoritarian in how you'd have to solve it.
I've had extensive conversations for this with friends, and we've come to the conclusion (reluctantly) that the only complete fix for homelessness would be something the equivalent of civil commitment to a 'guided living' community, you'd have a large community on the edge of town, it'd have a mix of halfway houses, group living and individual apartments and has centers for mental health, social work, as well as sources of employment, shops and communal spaces.
The idea is, if simple housing supports wont get you out of homelessness, you could be sent there - there would be a way to graduate out of the program, but for some they would go and might never be able to leave.
It's clear, as you say, that we need something that is not prison or a psych ward, but also not the streets of a city center.
It definitely seems that we're letting perfect be the enemy of good on this. It's like there's a burning building and everyone's standing around arguing about what the pH level of the water from the hoses should be rather than putting the damn thing out.
And while I agree with the concern about creating second class citizens, I'd say these people are in a worse situation than that currently, and they are bringing entire neighborhoods full of innocent people down with them.
* It's incredibly authoritarian, ripe for abuse (as the commitment to mental hospitals was), and requires an evolution in legal thinking about what civil commitment can be used for.
* It offends a wide swath of people in an ideological way. No one really want to believe that some people cannot help themselves improve enough to exist in wider society (liberals assume everyone unless profoundly disabled can if given proper support, conservatives just assume people need to tug harder on those bootstraps). Similarly everyone on some level I've talked to about it is offended by the authoritarian nature of - it bothers people of all stripes once they think about it a little (including myself as a liberal with a general libertarian lean). Conservatives also object to spending money on such a venture (why should those people who contribute nothing to society eat better than I do?) for pretty obvious and consistent reasons.
* No one knows how to fund it, you need to either create new sources of revenue or deallocate money from someplace else, now, yes perhaps you could reduce funding allocated to policing - but there are existing stakeholders who will fight ardently to prevent it.
* Finally, there are existing stakeholders (the homeless industrial complex, as I glibly descried them) who want the status quo to persist for various reasons (for many organizations it is raison d'être - either for religious reasons, or more basal ones - money, they have workforces who are paid, and are a consumer of taxpayer grants).
I agree broadly with you, that the current illness is worse than the cure, but the cure isn't without its own side effects.
For what it's worth the example that I use of some people not being able to improve themselves is the Vanderbilt family, One of Cornelius Vanderbilt's great grandchildren was born into poverty. No matter what advantages afforded, some people will fail to thrive. (See https://www.amazon.com/Fortunes-Children-Fall-House-Vanderbi... for more information)
I agree with you, everyone is very busy arguing about either the PH of the water, the color of the water spout or if you should spray the base of the fire, or the top of the fire, and the fire rages further consuming people in its path and we never quite get around to putting the fire out.
There are a whole host of issues in society that are like this - where the optimal solution will never get significant political support behind it without the problem being perceived by voters as much worse than it is perceived now.
Some of these are:
* End of Life Care (from old age, chronic illness, etc)
* Cigarette Regulations (There are a ton of stakeholders who want to preserve the status quo of regressive taxes with general availability, when lower taxes with a gradually increasing age of purchase would be better for society)
* Overemphasis on safety in automobiles and other things (I did a cost benefit analysis on backup cameras, and it came out to something like 15,000 dollar per life saved, and most of these added burdens end up on the poor)
The biggest one is: if you’re going to have zones where hard drugs are de facto legalized, it should be in one of these places that are out of the way and designed to handle the externalities as well as possible rather than in the middle of cities.
It would also give police a place to take people who are creating quality of life issues for residents (tents, screaming, littering, using streets as toilets, etc.). Instead of the “bus out of town” or simply moving people around in the city, they could keep bringing people back to these facilities. Perhaps not all would stay, but I imagine many would.
Maybe the way to think about it is almost like a business serving customers. If homeless people don’t want to stay in this housing voluntarily, how can it be improved to change that? They have reasons for choosing the places that they do now, so if those factors can be replicated and improved upon, force might not generally be necessary.
I think at least trying it would be better than what we're doing now, and I think we're on the same page about that.
You win victories against great social ills by convincing one person at a time that we need to try something different. I believe firmly that most of the ills our society has are caused by poverty, if we can solve 3/4 of poverty, we will end up with a richer, safer and happier world.
NYC, HI, CA >40 per 100k homeless in 2020 (higher now)
States with lots of poverty but also extremely cheap housing at the bottom with a 5x lower rate of homelessness: LA, AL, MS
Similarly, WV very low on the list despite being high on all of the other supposedly causal factors such as mental health and drug problems
Poor people with mental health and addiction problems can still live with a roof over their head as long as they're not competing with tech salaries to buy any kind of shelter.
No, I would expect the opposite. All the would be homeless in unappealing states leave and go to california or NYC because if they're not paying for housing they figure might as well go to the nicest area.
Not obvious that there's evidence for that
For example, in NYC, more than 95% of the homeless are actually sheltered (whether in the city shelter system, or in other temporary situations like doubling up with friends or relatives), and more than 80% of homelessness is situational rather chronic. 30% of homeless families have at least one employed adult. 60% of all shelter residents are families.
Most spending on combating homelessness is invisible to us; and most improvements in affordable housing are going to have little impact on the (predominantly) male, drug-using and/or mentally-ill street sleepers.
> Over the course of the book, the researchers illustrate how absolute rent levels and rental vacancy rates are associated with regional rates of homelessness. Many other common explanations—drug use, mental illness, poverty, or local political context—fail to account for regional variation.