Homeless Numbers Rise in U.S. Cities
wsj.com
wsj.com
To solve the homelessness problem we first need to help these folks recover their health.
A drug addict with a house will still be a drug addict, the only difference is we won't see their struggle on the streets.
Seriously, if you have ever dealt with addiction you know when you are sick you can't even do the dishes or wash yourself, so how are these guys, just by getting a home, going to manage to get sober, find a job, pay the bills and eventually be able to support themselves and move out so that the next person in need can use the place?
Unfortunately the answer is very unpopular and controversial.
A drug addict will never voluntarily quit drugs and check themselves into rehab then follow a long, difficult treatment to get sober.
Addiction is an awful, depressing, humiliating and painful disease with momentary lapses of reason where many times you just want to put it all to rest with an overdose.
The most frustrating part is the resources are there, we can build SoTA facilities and run the programs and treatment plans these guys need, even customize them if necessary.
But again, we will somehow need to bring them in, most likely by force, and that's the part many in this country can't even consider for debate.
I don't think self reporting is useful here. Ask the guy who is smoking fent in the back of the bus (smells like burnt peanut butter) if he is a drug addict, and he will confirm that he has never even tried them before.
More to the point, most homeless are only homeless for a week or two. They usually aren't abusing drugs and find themselves back on their feet relatively quickly (or at least can get help and haven't burned all bridges with their family). However, among the chronic homeless, the ones that are the most visible to everyone, substance abuse and/or mental illness is a common problem (with fent, permanent mental illness results pretty quickly).
I really think we should be dumping our resources into easy cases (people who just need some financial support/housing) because if they fall into hard cases (people abusing drugs), it is very expensive to impossible to solve their problems. I don't even think force will work very well, unless you can apply it at the beginning of addiction, most of them will never be productive again and will, humanely, require some kind of assisted living for the rest of their lives.
Finland's method of dealing with chronic homeless should provide a model for an assisted living solution. It comes out to be cheaper than providing services they would consume on the street. A small apartment and a (more well payed than in the states) social worker for every 10 or so residents to make sure they don't burn down the place they are being given by the government.
But we need to provide it nationally rather than at the state or local level. This would give us the opportunity to house them in less expensive locations and would prevent the current "tragedy of the commons" situation we have now.
https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...
I guess the question here is: does Finland's assisted living solution scale to the size of the United States' homeless problem? And I truly don't have that answer, but while I think it's valuable to point out the patterns that other countries have done to course correct their issues, I think it's also fair to say not every pattern that smaller countries use will work at scale, or even work with our current economic and social systems.
This feels like a reverse Bloom filter situation. Positive means positive, negative means maybe.
>“Gradual” is the key here: Soft Apocalypse shows normal people clinging to the shreds of life as they knew it, while things slowly go from bad to worse. Many still hope that the economy will pick up and life will go back to what it used to be. Even though the streets are filled with homeless people and unemployment stands at 40%, others can still drive a car to work. [1].
1. https://www.tor.com/2011/04/13/the-gradual-collapse-of-a-soc...
It feels to me that homelessness is more "tolerated" these days. If someone is sleeping in front of the metro station entrance we have a "leave them be" kind of attitude. I wonder if this correlates to a reduction in homelessness management systems like described in the article "less beds". If we're okay with homeless people camping on our trails and in our parks maybe there is less incentive to spend money on creating other places for them to go. Then with less places to go we have more homeless people so then we have less incentive to create places for them to go.
Makes me speculate if tolerance is part of the problem here. If culturally we found homelessness intolerable then we would be more motivated to solve it.
I don’t think homelessness should be tolerated. That said, homeless people definitely deserve our tolerance and compassion.
I've been homeless a lot and literally never heard this view until now. Asserted and dismissed without evidence.
> we are a long way to having social discussion about helping men.
Are we? Which men? With which problems?
I hear this argument all the time from anti-feminists. MRM propagandists often make an argument like, "Almost all the domestic violence shelters are for women. You feminists only care about women." The response from feminists is generally, "Feel free to get to work." But of course, MRM people don't care about men's suffering under sexism, they care about bashing feminists, so they don't do any organizing. This dynamic would be funnier if it weren't so sad.
So what are you personally doing to address the suffering of men under sexism? I mean, aside from alienating your natural allies?
Painting the above poster with an anti-feminist brush is uncharitable.
Disposable male theory isn't incompatible with a feminist perspective. I realize it's a mens rights talking point, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.
My take: Patriarchy reinforces male supremacy which puts men in positions of power, and prioritizes the needs of men at a societal level; but men without power (as well as non-white, non-straight, non-"traditionally masculine" men) are also victims of patriarchy, and face challenges specific to men.
I'd point you to the /r/menslib subreddit which was a great, anti-men's rights, intersectional, and feminist-allied discussion forum for men's issues, but they've unfortunately gone dark. For a brief introduction, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_liberation_movement at least
edit: Here's a fascinating video essay deconstructing the toxic masculinity of Andrew Tate, and how patriarchy affects men: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6_TOFy3k6k I found it on /r/breadtube, but it's definitely the type of fare common on /r/menslib
The other comment is using undiluted MRA & anti-feminist talking points without compromise or condition. The only way to read it charitably is to insert statements they didn't make, but easily could have and chose not to.
The person seemed to be commenting from a place of anger at how their brother was treated adversarially in his time of greatest need.
I volunteered with homeless people for years, and 80% or more were men. This issue is close to my heart as well and I absolutely think the commenter was pointing out relevant systemic issues, including touching on toxic masculinity and its attitude of treating other men adverserially
> The only way to read it charitably is to insert statements they didn't make, but easily could have and chose not to.
By the same token, can you explain how it can be read uncharitably without inserting statements they didn't make? Because as you said, they "easily could have" included misogynistic commentary "and chose not to"
You yourself were enough aware of this context and dynamic that you carefully phrased your comment to avoid it. It's dog whistle shit, intentionally plausibly deniable neutral-seeming language. Corin called it out and you're saying "but plausibly, couldn't they deny this?" Yes! That's the point of it.
I talked about caring for men. It makes them so angry to care about men. When we talk about men freezing to death on the streets, the topic extends to "toxic patriarchy". I not participate in these abstract conceptual fictitious wars of mainstream though on any side. I care about helping life. Men are your brothers and need to be saved.
One day the world will wake up from their trance. I am optimistic.
I give out food, hygiene kits and money to homeless communities (predominately men). I stop and tell them where to access warming shelters and provide information on groups where they can find case workers to secure jobs and housing. I tell people it's safe to talk about saving men, that it does not make you a radical or an enemy of women. I try to give people hope by showing that you can save freezing men and still care about everybody, that they aren't opposites. It is time we give up abstract fictitious mainstream war philosophies so we can be effective.
They are wonderful people and deserve it.
Absolute numbers of homelessness are on the rise, in the Bay Area there was a dramatic uptick in COVID. This is in part due to rising housing costs and because homelessness is a "cumulative" problem. The most common outcomes for homeless people are either get it together after 2-4 years or become so damaged they're never able to re-enter society. We've been accumulating at an ever increasing rate since the 90s.
Visibility is also due to "management" side as you called it. IMO the driving force is the Supreme Court decision Martin v. Boise which forbids criminalizing homelessness. Previously a lot homeless were hidden out of necessity, being visible meant that police would confiscate your belongings and either jail you or move you forcefully. It's now quite easy to get restraining orders against cities who try to do this and people are doing it. For an example of how this can go see this article[0] on a Sausalito homeless encampment. The city spent north of $2 million trying and failing to disperse a homeless encampment.
> If culturally we found homelessness intolerable then we would be more motivated to solve it.
Plenty of people are deeply intolerant of the homeless, but the reaction is usually to hurt not help. Homeless people I know are regularly brutalized by the police and even by ordinary citizens.
The blocker here is that a large number of Americans don't believe that the state has a role in providing the necessities for life. This means its hard to fund programs and even if you do there's no institutional expertise to run them with any competency.
IMO we're decades away from a solution.
[0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sausalito-homele...
Kidding aside, don't speculate--educate yourself. Then you would at least recognize when you say ridiculous and cruel things about people you don't like, don't know, and never bothered to understand.
Basically, turn struggling cities into the business of rehabilitation — federal investment into local housing, rent paying tenants, medicine, treatment, etc.
Trying to build affordable housing in places like San Francisco doesn’t make sense.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/which-city-has-most-vac...
There is a youtuber that did a drive through the deep south recently (https://www.youtube.com/@NickJohnson). Poor places in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. Housing isn't a problem in these places (well, for some definition of housing), but survival is still hard. You can't just move to places where housing is available and cheap, they are looking for more than that.
Capitalism gives stuff according to one’s production, where one’s production is judged in a distributed way by others in the society (subject to various flaws and exploits, of course).
The question is - what do we do with the people whose production (again, as judged by others in society, not in any absolute sense) does not cross the threshold to get enough stuff to live?
We need to tack on some extra subsystem which generally has not integrated well with capitalism in terms of scalability, distribution of judgement, etc.
We should be looking for a decentralized fix of some sort, ideally, in the way that capitalism itself is decentralized. Any ideas?
Mass produced self-contained pre-fab storage container style houses. Bed, shower, toilet, window, stove. The uglier, the better. You don't even need to sell them cheap, just cheap enough for enough millenials to be able to buy one in two years.
Flood the market, and deregulate where they can be dropped. There'll be a mass exodus of people fleeing from tight landlords to these beauties, and rents and housing prices would drop.
I'm waiting for the 3D printing revolution to take care of this one.
Most people are not willing to work in the ways and amounts that are necessary to generate surplus value for asset owners. Left to their own people would work enough to meet the needs of themselves and their communities and stop. So we don't leave them alone. We create a dangerous and criminalized situation you can fall into to provide "incentive" to create excess labor.
Capitalism can't solve this problem because this isn't a problem from the point of view of capital. From capital's perspective unrest and violence is a problem, and that is what police are for.
California also keeps homeless people down with their insane rents and requirements.
Even working people have a hard time getting and keeping a 650 credit score, as well as first and last month's rent and a security deposit. Used to be the last month's rent was the security deposit.
Couple that with the fact that 99% of properties are run by the same handful of 'property management firms', and it's nigh impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Perhaps instead of spending so much money on what I saw accurately dubbed as 'the homeless industrial complex' it could better use the funds to assist home-buyers and even renters to get off the streets.
California offers a form of assistance in helping you by paying your first, last, deposit, and three months rent at a new place. They issue you a letter but inform you that it takes 90+ days to pay out. No one will accept the paper in lieu of real money now, so the case worker's advice? 'Pay it up front and we can pay you back instead'...because homeless people have several grand on hand and a good credit score. Three months of searching until the letter expired and all I had to show for it was approximately $600+ spent on rental applications that were supposed to be paid back by the entity providing the assistance but never was. I stopped paying for them when I realized this. Also some places had literally hundreds of pending applications for the same places and were still accepting more- how is that legal?
Good ideas killed by bureaucracy should be termed 'Californication'.
Edit to add- they also have insane income requirements like 4-6x and up. So $1200/mo for a one bedroom would easily be $4800+/mo required income. On top of $3600+ to move in. At minimum wage if you're lucky enough to find full time you will barely make $2400 pre-tax.
It seems to me more like capitalism just does not do anything to prevent poverty, since the system itself is blind to human needs.
I do think that inequality is fundamental to capitalism, and that if we added an equality constraint the system would definitely cease to function. But I don’t see how the same applies to poverty.
When you look at capitalism globally it depends on a tremendous number of people who are paid much less than the value their labor produces, straightforwardly because the alternative is misery and plausible death. The real threat of penury provides the coercive force that gets work done at rates that capital owners are able to take as profit.
And like yes there is varying tolerance of different forms and degrees of deprivation, and maybe there is some balanced "sweet spot" where you can keep people sad enough, and provide a well paid-enough minimum wage where grim poverty is gone but owners can still accrue profits.
But if that's even possible which I'm not convinced about, we are deep in a local maximum and not climbing out of it. The accumulation of capital provides its own feedback loop for optimizing the value extracted from peoples' labor. The existence of poverty is a highly efficient pressure mechanism in that cycle. There's no incentive from the top to remove it and make the machine less effective at its purpose, generating profit.
Anyhow. Keep up the thoughtful writing, and thanks.