> 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.
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.
Update, here's a reference: https://endhomelessness.org/blog/new-research-quantifies-lin...
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?
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”.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/homelessne...
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...
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...
Isn't population density supposed to introduce efficiencies that would lead to lowering costs? I think, that's the usual argument against suburban sprawl.
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.
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.
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.
What are some (policy) ideas for making them more desperate, more miserable?
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.
[1] Australia, though, is currently in the middle of a rental crisis and becoming much worse.
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.
Being homeless sucks. There's a number of reinforcing conditions that convert non-users into users.
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.
'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...
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.
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.
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
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.
Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their ability to pay?
Yes
Priorities?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.