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Comment by fullspectrumdev | Hacker News Reader

Having lived/spent time in a few places with varying homeless problems and approaches to homelessness, I find it fucking depressing every time I read about how badly - and inefficiently - the US handles it.

Probably because I see alarming parallels with my own country.

Billions going where, exactly? If the problems growing, and you are just sinking billions into it without making any measurable impact, where the fuck is the money going?

Like looking at the supposed cost of building housing, it seems glaringly obvious that the taxpayers being fucked by someone. We also have this issue in Ireland, what with one hospital being billions over budget, years behind schedule, etc. never mind housing.

Zoning and planning issues can be dealt with trivially by the state almost anywhere, they just aren’t fucked doing so (we have this issue in Ireland).

There’s no easy fix for homelessness, shelters are at best putting a band aid on a severed limb. The only real solution is large scale construction of mixed use housing - some social, some affordable, some private. And that’s a whole clusterfuck that seems unachievable for political reasons globally, with the exception of some of the Nordic social democracies.

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The Greater Boston Food Bank CEO cleared a $500K salary this year, for a job that's largely remote because the area is too dangerous for the non-profit white collar workers. Do you think she wants "food insecurity" to be solved?

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/427...

That CEO runs an organisation that delivered food for 90 million meals to residents of the greater Boston area last year (according to them).

That salary is on par with a senior engineer at a big tech company who, one might reasonably argue, does not contribute a similar good to the world.

You've compared 2 positions that command a high salary. The average American only made 60K in 2022. You could argue that the CEO faces a higher cost of living, but to the average voter, this salary is obscene.

> The average American only made 60K in 2022

The average American does not run an organisation that delivered food for 90 million meals to residents of the greater Boston area last year.

> to the average voter, this salary is obscene

Any salary above minimum wage will seem obscene to the average voter if they're already inclined to dislike the person making the salary. But if you told them what that salary entails, and what Fortune 500 companies pay execs with similar responsibilities, they probably wouldn't think it so crazy.

>The average American only made 60K in 2022

So what?

>but to the average voter, this salary is obscene.

The average voter is an 80-year-old pearl-clutching moron who would rather see the homeless dead.

edit: sorry, 58-year-old.

Its not even close. She deserves every penny.

There are two ways to look at: (a) pay them more, and get the best results and less corruption (b) pay them less, and get the worst results with more corruption. In the states, politicians get paid, but they make through 'corruption' through revolving door, sinecure jobs for friends and family members, campaign contributions. In Singapore, politicians are paid better than the private sector, thereby reducing the corruption.

this seems fine to me, managing the greater boston food bank sounds like it needs a good manager to better spend the other 99.8%

That’s feeding 81k people a day. A huge job, for sure, but that’s the equivalent of a reasonably large town. Something has already gone wrong upstream if that many people cannot acquire food via their own means.

> Something has already gone wrong upstream if that many people cannot acquire food via their own means.

Out of a metro area of millions?

I don't understand your logic at all.

That doesnt seem wrong at all

> If the problems growing, and you are just sinking billions into it without making any measurable impact, where the fuck is the money going?

A lot of these programs are hard to stop paying into once you start. Say you are a political leader and you try to solve homelessness by pouring $X per year into some new program. 5 years later it's clear the program is not effective. However, if you axe the program, good luck getting re-elected since you've now made it very easy for your opponent to lambaste you ("Hundreds of society's most vulnerable brace themselves as Governor X seeks to axe homeless program").

And places like SF with a budget of about $100k/yr/person for homeless, make it effectively illegal to get an accounting of where the money goes.

Can you elaborate? I don't follow how the amount of money spent "makes it effectively illegal" to audit.

The amount doesn’t, it’s the culture of the city government and protection of the service providers that actually receive the money.

This is the fundamental reason why democracies often face challenges. For instance, let's consider a country like India, where a significant portion of the population isn't financially well-off. As a result, there is an expectation for government assistance and benefits during each election cycle. Consequently, politicians who promise freebies or welfare programs tend to have a higher likelihood of being elected. This pattern is not unique to India; it can be observed in various other places as well. Even in the United States, which prides itself on its democratic system, the influence of this phenomenon is evident

The government should help people and make their lives better. People should expect this, both as citizens and as tax payers. The government doesn’t just get free money from the people without being expected to offer something in return.

"Zoning and planning issues can be dealt with trivially by the state almost anywhere, they just aren’t fucked doing so (we have this issue in Ireland)."

This seems to not reflect reality in the US. There is strong local resistance to construction especially if it's for poor people or worse homeless, leading to tight zoning and rejection of projects during the byzantine approval process. If the government tries to build something, the EPA (environmental protection act) also allows anyone to request that a environmental impact study needs to take place. The study can take about a year and there are no teeth, other than causing delay and cost through the study. Nothing needs to change based on the findings, it's just another way to drag things out and increase cost on projects someone doesn't like.

> There is strong local resistance to construction especially if it's for poor people, or worse, homeless,

The US used to do that. It led to high-rise ghettos.[1] And that was before drugs were big.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_Homes

Honestly, social housing isn't my preferred solution. My solution is radical upzoning; removal of minimum unit-sizes; drastically simplify the approval/permit process and remove all local hearings etc. from the process, if it fits the regulations, you can build it; forced rehab for addicts; institutionalize mentally ill who cannot take care of themselves (this is the hardest part, I am least certain about).

Disagree on 'minimum unit sizes', at least where I live 0-bedroom loft-only units are already small enough!

I do agree with other ideas that promote more flexible application of possibly small units.

Ideas such as 'fire proof' (no flammable materials in building construction) buildings with relaxed regulations about access to egress, so that stupid middle hallway can be removed.

Very agree with an easier and known approval if checking the boxes process. Local hearings banned, environmental impacts should be part of the zoning for a given plot; fit 'within the lines' and no re-assessment.

Minimum unit sizes necessarily increase the price of housing and lower supply - there's no free lunch. Small apartments suck, sure, but you have to ask yourself whether it's a good idea to ban them and thus force everyone to pay more. Personally, I don't think small apartments have enough negative externalities to justify such regulation.

You don't seem to have countered any aspect of my argument, so I'll rephrase it for enhanced clarity.

Current laws about minimum sizes (WRT size alone) already sufficiently allow small sizes (as far as interior size of the unit is concerned).

Commonly it is __other_laws__ such as access to two fire escapes which cause larger sizes than some might desire. An example addressed in my reply's following lines 'Fireproof Buildings' which some localities allow to relax such rules.

We don’t know where you’re based, so it’s difficult to respond to your precise argument.

But your argument sure sounds like we shouldn’t allow the permitting of SROs or boarding houses anymore, which is what parent is arguing for.

Forcing everyone to have a kitchenette and their own bathroom sounds like the sort of thing we want to “preserve everyone’s dignity”, but mostly it forces people on the edge out of housing altogether.

So I probably disagree with you that your current zoning is small enough.

I may have misunderstood your earlier comment as a claim that minimum size laws are beneficial and should be maintained.

If I understand correctly now, your argument is that minimum size laws are not currently a bottleneck for building denser apartments? If so that’s a valid point wrt what changes should be prioritized, but I think it’s fine to point out that minimum sizes also need to go.

Any smaller than present and the bottlenecks become dominated by other factors. Commonly things such as: access to at least two emergency egress stairwells, a requirement for at least one window, the physics of being able to reach the entry door at all.

As a counter example, hotel rooms are usually required to have a restroom but not a kitchen area. Yet they're often even larger than studio apartments. This is because the other safety, engineering, and other-units factors enforce requirements that make smaller units pointless. They might even create security management issues in the common space between units.

If what you're really seeking is cheaper ways of housing more people, then generalizing the question and changing the variables being optimized (other than size, which most places, particularly in other countries, already do great jobs on).

Offhand, the 'wave a magic wand and fix the rules' solution just limited to this problem space might include something similar to. Fireproof (no flammable materials in the building construction, build in furnishings etc) buildings only require 1 fire-shelter level egress path. 'better' elevators (less shafts / density; might go to a Wanka-vator / turbolift like loop system). Eliminate window requirements in favor of two independent paths to sources of fresh air / shelter in place points.

With the above, the sort of smaller unit hacks that others (but not I) desire might include commons facilities for coffin-hotel things like a gym/pool lockerroom and shower, a common kitchen, etc. However my experience with shared amenities (E.G. rooftop BBQ grills) is that they suffer the Tragedy of the Commons. There's always going to be at least one person in a group that uses things improperly, or leaves cleanup to others, etc. In the case of shared lockerrooms that aren't rigorously cleaned this will also lead to communicable disease transmission.

Cabrini Green is the more infamous example, I think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini–Green_Homes

Yeah, probably was not intended when that was passed that all the world’s endangered species would happen to be found near wealthy people’s homes.

> The only real solution is large scale construction of mixed use housing - some social, some affordable, some private.

It's a LOT more than making affordable housing available. Most homeless where I am have severe mental health problems, drug addictions, or both. Some are also homeless in large part because of criminal records. Many many difficult social problems to fix before it's just a matter of affordability.

This is a common misconception. Actually the primary fix is indeed to make affordable housing available. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...

My best friend from high school is homeless right now despite my efforts to help him. My best friend from grade school was homeless in my town for a few years(I wasn't aware at first to help). My wife was a social worker. I've had many interactions, albeit brief, with homeless in my city. I'm not exactly ignorant and I'm not sure the fellow from your article isn't an activist with an agenda. I'm also skeptical of the data gathered on the problem. It's probably not very good because in most cities they can't even get an accurate census/count of homeless.

In today's climate in media and academia I'll take extensive personal experience and common sense over "data" and "studies" every time when it comes to societal and political issues. And they have nobody else but themselves to blame.

Noah Smith is no activist. He was a professor of finance and a journalist for the Associated Press, Bloomberg, and other reputable outlets. He now writes a very successful Substack.

The linked article says it is "A guest post by Aaron Carr."

It seems awfully convenient that you get to dismiss all of the evidence that goes against what you'd like to believe with a simple wave of your hand.

> Most homeless where I am have severe mental health problems, drug addictions, or both

If drug addicts don't have to pay rent, then they do drug addict stuff within the premises of their house. It doesn't solve the mental health crisis, but it does solve tents in public areas.

Secondly, it controls for for gateway drug scenarios. Eventually, a large percent chronically homeless & mentally ill people turn into addicts. But, if they have a roof over they shoulders, they aren't pushed into that life as hard as if they were living in a tent.

A lot of drug addict stuff in their house is not safe for the house. A lot cooking meth RV and tent fires show us that.

A house is a house, if you want to burn it down, burn it down.

We can't give houses to 100 meth heads who're about to kill themselves, because 1 of them might actually kill themselves via immolation is a hard argument to defend.

Yeah, that's 99 alive meth heads off the street.

It isn’t their house we are worried about, but the neighbors who live next to them. Are you volunteering?

That’s just not borne out by any evidence. It’s likely you don’t interact (or don’t knowingly interact) with a large portion of homeless people who aren’t drawing attention to themselves.

Yeah the low drama homeless people that would be easiest to help don't make the headlines. They're quietly struggling, working some minimum wage job while living in a camper somewhere.

And yet the high drama people that make the headlines are used as an argument to not build affordable homes at all.

The hard to house with an array of overlapping severe challenges will always be hard to house, but we can't let that small minority be any sort of barrier to helping the broader amount of people that are easier to help that are nonetheless struggling to find anywhere they can afford to live.

> Billions going where, exactly? If the problems growing, and you are just sinking billions into it without making any measurable impact, where the fuck is the money going?

Well, that’s simple. Most of the money goes to politically well connected non-profits with missions around alleviating homelessness. The problem is that if you alleviate homelessness, the money goes away and everybody at that non-profit loses their jobs. I’m not specifically accusing anyone of corruption, but the incentives aren’t good.

The funny thing is, you don't even need corruption. Every single one person in those GONGOs could be genuinely willing to help the homeless. The problem is, if their financing is detached from whether their strategies are successful - and even smart and honest people have great capacity for self-delusion, which is only enhanced when the mission is morally laudable - then the money could be wasted as thoroughly as if they were corrupt.

>The problem is that if you alleviate homelessness, the money goes away

That actually isn't what happens at all though. When we handle this at the state level, spending on homelessness just makes that state more attractive to the homeless in other states and exacerbates the problem.

In a way, the US "handles" it very efficiently, but only in terms of spending the money and funnel them to the related interest group, but not in terms of solving the homeless problem.

Because for them, problem is their opportunity.

> There’s no easy fix for homelessness

True, but that's only because there's no easy way to add housing in modern society. Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes.

Nah, it’s caused by mental illness and drug addiction. Short of rounding them up and forcing them to get help, there’s actually nothing we can do to get these people off the street.

It's certainly an element, but that's largely washing your hands and victim blaming. There's a direct correlation between housing costs and homelessness rates.

Update, here's a reference: https://endhomelessness.org/blog/new-research-quantifies-lin...

Where’s the “victim-blaming”?

From the reporting I’ve seen, the vast majority of folks on Skid Row or on the street in SF are heavy addicts. And they refuse shelters because then they couldn’t use.

How does more housing help them?

From a census of homeless people in LA county a few years back[1]:

15% of LA's homeless population has substance abuse problems. Only 12% of these people are in shelters.

25% have serious mental illnesses. 20% of these people are in shelters.

Overall 33% of homeless people are in shelters.

So you are partially right that drug use and mental health issues can make sheltering some people more difficult. But you are very wrong that people with either of these issues make up a majority of all homeless people. It is just classic confirmation bias in that people with these issues are the most visibly homeless. The people who are living in their car or a shelter and simply can't afford a home aren't easily identifiable as homeless when you walk past them on the street. This can also be seen in the previously linked data as only 28% of LA's homeless population qualifies as chronically homeless.

Basically you are only able to see a small portion of the problem and are assuming that is the whole problem when in actuality homelessness is roughly 4x worse.

[1] - https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=3423-2019-greater-los-ang...

1. Homeless are drug addicts.

2. Therefore, the homelessness is caused by drug addiction.

Not exactly sound reasoning. Plenty of people with mental illness and drug addiction still manage to pay rent.

No one disputes the rates of addiction and mental illness among the homeless. California has neither the highest rates for drug addiction/overdoses nor the highest rates of mental illness, yet it has the highest rate of homelessness.

There is no correlation between rates of mental illness and rates of homelessness. There is no correlation between drug addiction rates and homelessness. There is a strong Correlation between rents and homelessness.

Why? Being mentally ill and a drug addict doesn't automatically make you homeless in an area where rent for a room is $400/month.

"Rates of mental illness among people who are homeless in the United States are twice the rate found for the general population"

https://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/homelessne...

You've completely missed the point. These people aren't homeless in cheaper housing markets.

Dry shelters are arguably a massive part of the problem.

You fix the housing issue first, make their lives less fucking miserable, then it’s easier to get someone to accept help for their drug addiction.

You can’t “cure” an addict who isn’t ready to be “helped”.

> Dry shelters are arguably a massive part of the problem.

As someone who has housed and lived close to addicts, to put it plainly: this is a naive, academic view. Dry shelter are "a massive part of the problem"? Absolutely incorrect, and harmfully ignorant if implemented at societal scale.

As someone who provided food and shelter to an addict in my own home, guaranteeing these things does nothing to increase the willingness to quit heroin. Material deprivation may cause you to seek drugs, but remedying deprivation does not lead to recovery. In fact, I honestly believe offering it unconditionally hampers it.

>this is a naive, academic view

Academic maybe, but that's a hell of a lot better than one person who thinks their personal anecdote is more powerful than scientific evidence.

If your understanding of the scientific evidence is that it supports "dry shelters are harmful and their existence exacerbates heroin addiction," then I think that's a good argument in favor of the inclusion of anecdotes on this topic.

If your understanding of the scientific method and critical inquiry amounts to "if you have some belief I don't like then anecdotes are useful" then you need to level up your understanding of the scientific method and critical inquiry.

That is not my understanding.

What percentage of the unhoused are on Skid Row?

I agree blaming the homeless is oversimplifying a complicated issue, but I don't think it's evident that shortage of housing is the primary cause.

There are plausible explanations for non-causal correlations between housing costs and homelessness. For example:

- homeless tend towards warm climates, which have higher housing costs because most people prefer warm climates

- homeless tend towards cities, where they can more easily find support. Cities also have higher costs of living because they are densely populated

Looking at the list of cities with the most homelessness per capita, the vast majority of them are temperate year-round. http://www.citymayors.com/society/usa-cities-homelessness.ht...

>Cities also have higher costs of living because they are densely populated

Isn't population density supposed to introduce efficiencies that would lead to lowering costs? I think, that's the usual argument against suburban sprawl.

Nah it's caused by poor family cultures that lead to mental illness and drug addiction. Short of rounding up families and forcing them to be responsible for their children, teens, and young adults, there's actually nothing we can do to get these people off the street.

You know it's funny. A lot of people look at the US and turn up their noses at our "poor infrastructure". Just a couple of months ago I watched a very tropey discussion take place on the lack of a robust US rail system. In another discussion, the lack of a robust US healthcare system.

All the armchair pundits come out to point to other countries as leaders in these areas, but when it comes to homelessness, I see a lot less of it pointing to places like Japan, Singapore and the APAC region, where homelessness is a cultural stigma placed not just on the individual but on the family. Family name and culture mean something. Generational safety nets are present because the family cares for the individual simply because they share a common genealogy. Families will go very far to avoid allowing a member of their heritage to become a vagabond.

Weird to me how this part is left out of the conversation. Perhaps this is a consequence of our indulgence in unrestricted libertarian individualism.

I'm glad you brought up Singapore, since they can actually force people with mental health or addiction issues into shelters. Imprisoning people for being mentally ill or addicts is a viable to solution to homeless and it clearly works for Singapore, however this will never happen in the West. For better or worse, individual liberty is sacred in our cultural tradition, and it will never be politically palatable to force people into shelters.

Forcing people into treatment was our standard approach to this problem for decades and it worked very well. We need to bring it back.

There should be zero people doing meth on the street; if you see one it should be a single phone call to have the cops pick that person up and send them to the secured treatment facility on the edge of town.

This really is not complex or cruel or novel.

Yet too many people think it's better to just let people do meth on the street, despite the problems it causes for everyone, and the huge amount of money wasted not solving the problem of the chronically homeless.

That's a probable consequence, but not my point.

My point is that our drunkenness on individualism has led to a low view of the family. If you have a low view of family then you're primed to inevitably become ambivalent at best, cynical at worst, to your own kin.

Again, all in the name of individualism.

Your thesis is that the USA isn't sufficiently punitive towards the poor and working class?

What are some (policy) ideas for making them more desperate, more miserable?

The vast majority of people who are homeless don't suffer from mental illness or drug addiction. The most visible do, but not most of them. And of those, a bunch didn't suffer from drug addiction when they become homeless.

I don't know, the article mentions people who work two jobs having to live in an RV because they can't afford rent. As an external observer, it seems to me that in some parts of the US, inequality is so bad that homelessness is eating the working class. In Europe or Australia[1], the lady working two jobs or the war veteran taking $1200/month in social security would definitely not be homeless. Would they live in government housing, in a sketchy part of town? Sure. But how can you even compare that to being homeless...

[1] Australia, though, is currently in the middle of a rental crisis and becoming much worse.

You’re both sort of right.

The visible homeless—the vagrants you see in tent cities under the freeway or harassing pedestrians—are more likely to have drug addictions or other mental illnesses. And the more mentally ill they are, the more visible they become since they end up committing crimes and making a nuisance of themselves. If you’re mainly concerned about the externalities of homelessness—e.g. needles and human feces on the street, crime, harassment, etc—then you’d be well served addressing this problem in particular.

If you define “homeless” by people not having consistent housing, there is a much larger population of those people. Maybe they’re sleeping on a buddy’s couch, or they find a kind stranger to take them in, or they get by via stealth camping. On the margin, expanding public housing or making housing more affordable would help these people. But it wouldn’t do much about the more visible and troublesome ones.

What is this help anyway? Can you magically fix someone who was fucked in the ass by foster parents as a child or someone who was born with schizophrenia?

Some people fall through the cracks. My mother was a therapist and she used to tell me tragic stories about her clients. If I had lived those lives I'd be out there smoking crack too.

Which happens first? Do the unhoused become addicts? The addicts become homeless? A mix?

Hard drug addicts prefer using their limited income for drugs rather than rent. (Note that as of Jun 2023, hard drug addiction has no known cure.)

In Seattle where I live, homeless is definitely the result of drug use

Only the visible homeless problem. There are plenty of homeless you don’t notice because they aren’t raving like a lunatic without a shirt on. We have two separate problems, but they are sadly often conflated.

"Definitely the result"? I think you might be confusing correlation with causation.

That really isn’t true either. Homelessness doesn’t cause drug abuse, there is plenty of drug abuse among the housed, it isn’t weird that some of them eventually lose their support network. There are definitely economic homeless in Seattle, they just aren’t as visible as the fent addicts.

> Homelessness doesn’t cause drug abuse,

Being homeless sucks. There's a number of reinforcing conditions that convert non-users into users.

https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/homeless

yep.

Absolutely there's plenty of addiction problems, toxic drug problems and mental illness problems in my city, but the numbers don't lie and we have lost thousands on thousands of the most affordable rental housing stock over the last few decades even as population grew.

If we had actually gained affordable housing stock as population increased, or at least kept pace, we would be in a different situation. No doubt we would still have issues of a small amount of people having issues with mental illness, but we would be dramatically more capable of helping them than we are now with the incredibly scarce level of apartments we have now.

How many homes could $17B make?

We don't even need to have the government build the homes, just allowing the construction of homes would be a huge positive change.

Where are you gonna build? It's illegal to build pretty much anything in CA cities with high homelessness

Not very many. Even if you could build a home for $400k and it only cost $100k in maintenance / utilities / upkeep for the next 10 years, that's still only 34k homes.

You could build a lot of them for $3.7B/year though.. split among 150,000 homeless, that's $24,000 per year each

'course, it's not hard to imagine those homes ending up like the free zone in The Wire or the housing projects in Judge Dredd...

~17000 in CA

apartments would be cheaper than 400K per.

It's not even a lack of homes--its a lack of access to existing homes. There are already ~16 million vacant homes in the USA, a tiny fraction of which could house the homeless if there were political will.

We all can say homelessness is a problem, but if you ask these people hoarding vacant homes if they'd be willing to house a homeless person on their property, or if you ask a politician whether they are willing to nationalize those properties to provide homes, suddenly their response will be "Uhh... Ohh... Hrrmm... I guess it's not that big a problem." The rubber is not hitting the road.

The vast majority of those homes are either being actively fixed/waiting for a tenant to move in or are in bumfuck where no one wants to live. If you can convince the homeless on the west coast to move to the vacant places in kansas congratulations, you just won California's governor election. The reality is that there are not nearly enough homes where people want to be. Until you can force the homeless to go to less desirable areas the homes there arent helpful.

When I was homeless, I was placed on a waiting list and sent to "my" freight elevator/park bench to count the days.

My number came up and I was called into an office. I was verbally introduced to a program that would take control of my finances and then send me wherever they had something available. Some of the cities mentioned might as well have been Kansas.

I said no thanks, I'll stay on the streets. I waited for a longer time and another program opened up. They didn't take control of my finances and they allowed me to choose exactly where I wanted to apply for a lease.

That was 20 years ago, and I have lived happily ever after.

The vast majority of those "vacant" homes are either very temporarily up for sale or rent, dilapidated, or in need of a lot of repairs. There are not 16 million habitable units sitting empty year after year.

> but if you ask these people hoarding vacant homes if they'd be willing to house a homeless person on their property,

I fail to see that "ask" is the correct approach

If you own a vacant property where there is homelessness, where does "ask" come in?

The appropriate verbs are "tell" or "compell"

Private property is not an absolute right

> Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes.

That is absolutely not true. Not even close.

Mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse are major factors. Dozens of studies show this. I've seen numbers as high as 76% having substance abuse and severe mental illness.

One study from 2017 says 80% mental illness, 88% drug abuse and 59% alcohol addiction. There are studies with lower numbers. In most, if not all, of these, the government entities who publish them will typically change the definition of "homeless" to artificially reduce the numbers and make themselves look good. There are two ways to fix homelessness: You make them disappear (put them in a building, creative counting, etc.), or actually address the real root causes --which nobody is doing or even talking about.

Saying the issue is lack of homes implies these people could actually pay for a place to stay. They cannot. They are sick and/or addicted to something. They likely cannot work or earn even the legally minimum wage without a massive intervention to get them back to functional status.

In a free society we do not have the legal means to round-up sick people, get them cleaned-up, help them, rebuild them as necessary and then put them back in circulation. We just don't have that legal power. People do as they wish and there's very little society can really do to help them.

Throwing them into a buildings merely (and conveniently) hides the real problems: Mental illness and addiction.

“Saying the issue is lack of homes implies these people could actually pay for a place to stay.”

Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their ability to pay?

> Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their ability to pay?

Yes

Priorities?

> Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their ability to pay?

That solves absolutely nothing. I refer you to the $17B we spent in CA on this problem.

The fundamental issues are mental health and addiction.

All you achieve is making the problem invisible so everyone can feel like they did something. When, in reality, the root causes are not addressed at all.

It is critical to understand that our laws DO NOT ALLOW US to force anyone to do anything. Meaning, if a mentally ill or addicted person says "I am not going anywhere" and "I refuse treatment" we CANNOT force them.

The root causes, for the most part, are mental illness and addition. We cannot be effective helping these people because --by law-- we cannot effectively arrest and force them to accept help of any kind.

In a lot of cases you have addicts who are 100% out of their mind and you are trying to reason with them to accept help. Good luck.

A member of my family and a couple of good friends are professionals deeply involved with the treatment side of this issue. What they tell me is exactly what I have conveyed here.

If we could force people into a solid 12 to 24 month program we could eliminate most of the problem in 5 to 10 years. We can't. Because we have laws that protect citizens from being detained and incarcerated unless they commit a crime. Mental health and addiction are not crimes.

In other words, that path is impossible.

How, then, do they propose this be solved?

Conceptually simple. Politically...well, our politicians are fucking incompetent morons.

You have to clamp down hard on the illicit drugs that are destroying so many lives. Shit like cocaine and heroin should not exist on our streets. Fentanyl-laced pills should not be able to pour through our border like candy (quite literally, google it). Etc.

For some unexplained reason we are willing to burn $17B in just one state of this country to pretend we are helping people and virtue-signal and, at the same time, we refuse to put real money and effort into real actions that would almost make this problem disappear.

Simple math: If none of the drugs a huge portion of these people take were to be available for, say, six months, most of them would gladly get detox help and come out of it a year later with a very different perspective in life. You have to stop the drugs. Things like safe injection spaces are horrible ideas. What you want is free detox centers and a complete clamp-down on drug availability. Then you get results.

I was just in Singapore. Before I could fly there I had to sign a document that had a warning in big, bold, all upper-case letters that read: The penalty for bringing illicit drugs into Singapore is death.

And there you go.

Even if you think the root cause is always mental health or addiction (which is reductive victim blaming but I digress), what do you think is more likely to help someone recover: having them live on the streets feeling like worthless shit, or providing them the stability of a home?

The war on drugs has been an abject failure. Escalating it to killing people seems utterly barbaric. Legalizing, regulating, decriminalizing, and focusing on rehabilitation and harm reduction is the best course we have.

> I refer you to the $17B we spent in CA on this problem.

The $17B on homelessness wasn't all on housing.

> The fundamental issues are mental health and addiction.

A lot of money is spent on those, too. By your own logic, the failure of that to correct the problem proves those are the wrong issue.

Sorry, you don't know what you are talking about. There's report after report, from highly trusted sources such as Stanford, showing that up to 80% of the issue is mental health and 50% of those afflicted are addicted to drugs, with another 50% alcohol.

The ONLY way to improve this is to stop the flow of drugs. And then, yes, we probably need to rethink some of our laws so we can have the ability to force people into programs to help them.

Housing addicts and alcoholics or those with serious mental health issues does not fix anything at all. All you've accomplished it to make them invisible to society. Good job. They are still fucked.

It's like lots of other issues, people love to jump on a moral high ground that sounds great. Feels good, right? It helps nobody at all. Just like safe places for addicts to inject themselves and free needles, etc. Somehow the term "moronic" isn't enough to describe these ideas.

Talk to mental health professionals who actually work with the homeless --as I have, because we have many in our social group-- and you might just learn your ideas are not aligned with reality at all. Not even close.

> Sorry, you don’t know what you are talking about.

Yes, I do.

> There’s report after report, from highly trusted sources such as Stanford, showing that up to 80% of the issue is mental health and 50% of those afflicted are addicted to drugs, with another 50% alcohol.

Yes, there is lots of evidence that homelessness, addiction, and mental health issues are deeply intertwined (there’s a lot less clarity on root causation, and the evidence on solutions leans very heavily in favor of housing as key, but all of them needing to be addressed together. I wasn’t dismissing mental health and addiction as important areas to address, I was mocking the reductive, dismissive claim that spending money on housing and still having the problem proves that that is an incorrect place to invest; you could say the same thing just as much about mental health and addiction, because very large chunks of money have been spent on those things and…the problem persists. But, of course, that’s because the logic is bunk, and its just as stupid applied to housing as it is to behavioral health.

Spending money or how much is spent, as a metric, is meaningless. Ridiculous, really.

What matters are effective measures.

What also matters is what is attainable with the legal framework we have, not some fantasy land where you just put people in rooms for free and the problem is fixes.

Of course you have to house people who can't fend for themselves. Of course you have to feed them. Of course you have to treat them. Of course you have to provide training and counseling so they can rejoin society, get a job and have a life.

Of course.

Of course!

And yet, the problem isn't housing. Do they need a place to live that isn't the streets? Duh! Of course. However, above all, what they need is effective treatment and training. Without that, no amount of free housing fixes the problem.

Years ago I had an employee who would occasionally not come to work for a few days here and there. We never knew what was goin on. He was a good guy. We dealt with it as best we could.

Three months later the police knock on our door. He was found dead behind a 7-Eleven in the neighborhood. Turns out he was an alcoholic. It also turns out he would go into a drinking spree with almost every paycheck he got from us. He was deeply addicted to alcohol and nobody had a clue.

Well, I later met his brother. He told me his family had been trying to help him for decades. Nothing they could do about it at all. Once again, the laws I refer to. We cannot force people into treatment of any kind. Or, for that matter, housing. This guy was in his early 40's. He made good money doing construction work. He had housing. He had a car. He did not lack resources at all. And yet he was found dead by the trashcans behind a 7-Eleven.

The root cause is mental health, drugs and addiction.

The problem is we lack the legal tools to be able to interdict and help people under the grip of these afflictions.

Therefore, the only potential solution is some form of severe clamp-down on drugs and alcohol as well as coming up with an intelligent way to deal with mental health issues.

These are very difficult problems to solve. Some more than others.

We can definitely be extremely effective against illicit drugs. Violently effective. That would help a lot of people. Yet, for some reason, politicians don't seem interested in doing a thing about it.

Alcohol is tough. We can't ban it. Not sure how you keep alcoholics from alcohol. Again, the legal framework just isn't there for this. I don't know. Also, I don't drink alcohol. Never developed a taste for it. So, I don't really understand the appeal.

some of the inaction is truly disconcerting. We are being invaded by all kinds of fentanyl-laced products through the southern border, and our government is doing nothing to shut this down in a decisive manner. I mean, literally shit disguised as candy is coming through in industrial amounts:

https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2022/08/30/dea-warns-brig...

The problem isn't money. Or how much of it we might spend. It is not making the right decisions and not going after root causes of problems. The root causes are nowhere near to housing. Housing is a necessary tool for rehabilitation, of course. However, nothing will be solved unless the root causes are addressed with serious effectiveness first, or simultaneously.

I will remind you that my reply was to this statement (not made by you):

> Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes

This isn't true.

> Spending money or how much is spent, as a metric, is meaningless. Ridiculous, really.

I agree, that's why I’ve been mocking you for setting it up as a metric (and for misrepresenting the facts when you did so.)

> What also matters is what is attainable with the legal framework we have,

While I disagree with a lot of your rant, this is definitely true.

> Therefore, the only potential solution is some form of severe clamp-down on drugs and alcohol

We've tried, in both cases; neither is effectively attainable within anything like the legal framework we have, and even trying has massive adverse effects in other areas.

The solution is adequate housing (both quantitatively and with distributive support) [0] + much better health, especially behavioral health (which encompasses both what is usually known as mental health and substance use disorder prevention and treatment) support.

> The root causes are nowhere near to housing

The root causes are complex, but housing absolutely is one of them, and often preceds manifestation or significant deepening of health (behavioral and physical health) problems that make housing alone and inadequate solution for that individual. Adequate housing is not only necessary for other interventions for the currently homeless, it is an even more important preventive measure to reduce the rate at which people become homeless.

[0] And most of what has been seriously tried in CA is too little, too late on distributive support. Rather than actually achieving quantitatively adequate housing, though there are long-term measures toward adequacy finally beginning to exert some force.

It's going to the administrators of the homeless industrial complex. It's the same problem we're seeing with colleges where the number of administrators has dramatically grown year over year.

Managerial bloat. The more money we give, the more they grow.

My partner and I recently returned from a road trip through Cali and were absolutely shocked by the societal issues in San Francisco.

You’d be walking down a built up high street which would, all of a sudden, turn into a tented area full of people with terrible mental health and drug problems.

It seemed to us that the big issue is a lack of any medical care which exasperates the underlying issues brought about by homelessness. We were terribly saddened by what we saw.

I couldn’t even begin to fathom how you would fix such a complex problem without the involvement and empathy of the whole country.

Even if you figured out a solution to the local issue it would only last so long as people would (rightly so) travel in from other states/cities due to a lack of working solution where they are from originally. And then you would end up back at square 1 when your local solution’s resources have been depleted.

One homeless man I spoke to told me that he ventured to San Francisco in order to get HIV medication as he was unable to get it in his home state, for whatever reason.

That alone highlighted the need for a nationwide plan which would align all state governments. Without a federally mandated baseline of care for these people I feel as though this type of issue will persist.

And I think that the keyword in all of this is _people_. We often forget that that is what they are. They had hopes, they had dreams, they have just been forgotten and are now labelled as a ‘problem’ opposed to a ‘person’.

It's a very simple cycle.

The state spends money to help the homeless.

The broad availability of help for the homeless increases the likelihood that homeless will migrate to and stay in the state.

Repeat.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht...

> As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians.

> “This is a local crisis and a homegrown problem,” said Peter Lynn, the executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the agency that conducts the largest homeless census count in the country.

> L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years.

CA considers you a resident for tax purposes if you live in the state for a year but in homeless studies they consider you a resident if you live here for more than 10 years.

Edit: Reply to paisawalla

May I point out the post I replied to had no data. If you have data that addresses the two points you made, please post them. It is always easy to nitpick data when you have none.

Data which is

1) based on self-reported status

2) fails to distinguish between temporary hardship homelessness and that resulting of addiction/illness

Should not be relied upon. For the first, there is an obvious incentive towards exaggerating one's stay in state, and no counter-incentive whatsoever. For the latter, these are two separate problems which need drastically different solutions.

May I point out the post I replied to had no data.

If you have data that addresses the two points you made, please post them.

> For the first, there is an obvious incentive towards exaggerating one's stay in state, and no counter-incentive whatsoever.

Nothing obvious or even true about it. Using the word obvious just hides the fact it isn’t.

> Nothing obvious or even true about it. Using the word obvious just hides the fact it isn’t.

If you don't believe in the existence of incentives then unfortunately there's not enough shared reality for us to have a discussion.

Besides what the other person said, given that California is in fact, the most populous state, it seems obvious to me that what I said can be true while the majority of homeless in the state still originate from the state...

> it seems obvious to me that what I said can be true while the majority of homeless in the state still originate from the state...

This is one of the scenarios for which percentages were invented for.

I mean if you really want to be blunt and honest about it, the reason we have a worse problem is because ......

Drugs, mental illness, and sometimes just bad decision making skills. The US has a LOT of drugs, and you can look at our education system at large and make up your own conclusion about our decision making ability as a whole.

I volunteered with homeless and the facts are out there. Honestly the experience left me jaded. On the bright side, almost all people who become homeless only remain so for like 2 weeks. These are the majority of people who are just down on hard times and they seek out and utilize charity and social services to get back on their feet.

Then... you have the "homeless" that everyone means, like the stories you hear from SF. Half of these folks are mentally ill. The other half are basically just incapable or uninterested in making good decisions due to past circumstances. Because we live in a civilized society, it would be unconstitutional to force mentally ill people into mandatory mental health treatment. Also, people don't want to jail the guy who has been arrested dozens of times and beat a couple grandmas. The solution seems to be to allow open air drug markets and removal of police presence all around the Civic Center and downtown areas.

> Drugs, mental illness, and sometimes just bad decision making skills.

Any explanation which comes down to personal decisions has to account for the fact that many other developed countries have avoided the same dystopian hell of inequality as the Bay Area and likely have similar distributions of behavior. Are people in California just more prone to using drugs, being mentally ill and making bad decisions? No. In civilized places, if you mess up a little (or even a lot) the consequence should not be to sleep on the street. It’s a moral failing at a societal level.

so you skipped over the part where I said that almost everyone who becomes homeless is off the street within two weeks?

The people who continue sleeping on the street are the other group I mentioned. and yes they come to CA from other states because the laws here are loose and weather is nice every single day.

Refusing to stay in a shelter because drugs aren’t allowed. Instead of helping people wean off hard drugs, SF allows open air drug markets run by gangs. The “homeless” issue will always exist this way.

Most people in SF aren’t from California, let alone counting the unhoused population. America has freedom of movement, you just need a bus ticket, no hukou or residency permit needed.

If drugs and mental health were the reason for homelessness then nobody in the Midwest would live in a house

> Billions going where, exactly? If the problems growing, and you are just sinking billions into it without making any measurable impact, where the fuck is the money going?

Towards more homelessness. They are subsidizing it. Literally paying people money to be homeless.

It's ultimately a government jobs program, just like almost all government programs. If it employs people, it's good, regardless of whether it accomplishes the stated outcome.

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