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>Lack of affordable housing is the number one cause of homelessness

Homelessness isn't a monolith. Treating someone who gets evicted after job loss the same as mentally ill drug addicts is making the problem worse. Homeless assistant programs are successful at helping people who accept the help.

The drug addicts you see on the streets are engaging in destructive antisocial behavior. Sadly the only effective remedy for this behavior is to be roughed up by police and thrown in jail.

No, homelessness is not a monolith.

But lack of affordable housing is still the number one cause.

We only claim someone's problems are entirely due to drug use when they hit skid row. We don't predict homelessness for millionaire rock stars who go to rehab repeatedly.

Drug use doesn't cause homelessness. Lack of housing causes homelessness.

The real solution is: We need to fix the housing crisis.

Lack of affordable housing is the reason people might fall into despair and then drugs, but the people who get into drugs are basically a lost caused compared to the ones that don’t. The drug addicts…you can throw millions at just one case and make no progress in getting them back in their feet, the non-drug addict just needs housing.

At that point, isn’t a moral judgement, just an effective use of limited resources (do we burn money trying to treat drug addicts who try to cook meth in the housing you give them, or do we spend $2k/month getting that non addict an apartment so they can get a job).

A. I think that's a vast oversimplification.

B. I would like to address the housing crisis per se as a first line of defense rather than wait until people are homeless and then try to decide who merits help and what the cost-benefit ratio is and etc.

For many people, if there was enough affordable housing, this whole argument about their merits and defects and etc wouldn't happen at all. There would, no doubt, be other arguments but my research indicates lack of affordable housing is the primary issue here.

You would discover two very different problems between those where housing costs too much but were functional otherwise, and the other problem of completely non-functioning people where even cheap housing is too expensive since they can’t hold even a minimum wage job.

The only debate right now is whether the first category mostly leads to the second category (and vice versa if the second mostly comes from the first). That is should we just treat the categories the same or not, then more affordable housing would help if most people in category two are coming from one. If the assumption is wrong, we will still see people on the streets even if housing is affordable.

The other part of the debate is whether these problems are local or national, which has implications in how homeless programs are funded and where the affordable housing should be built. If all of the country’s homeless decides to move to SF, Seattle, LA for their affordable housing, the program will obviously fail.

Let me try this one more time and then I give up:

You: "Let's throw a bunch a people off a cliff and then assess who is worth saving afterwards!"

Me: "Let's stop throwing people off a cliff. If we stop doing that, we can stop arguing about who is too broken to save and whether or not it's a personal character defect that they ended up more broken than others who got thrown off the same cliff."

You didn’t even read my comment, so I give up. Ok, everyone just come to Seattle for their affordable housing, because DoreenMichele doesn’t want to think about the problem and would rather just throw half baked solutions at it.

Oh you don't understand? It's simple--BC's lawmakers were presented with the option of either making housing affordable nationwide or criminalizing drug use in their city. Darn lawmakers always picking wrong!

Housing is affordable in many cities where people don’t want to live, at least in the states. If everyone wants to live on the west coast though, is it even possible to just make housing more affordable on one place until everyone lives there? If not, it basically means you induce more demand with lower home prices, so you wind up trying to fit a hundred million people in a few big metros.

Lawmakers can’t magic up affordable housing, especially at the federal level. I get people have crazy ideas, but this is the craziest. We could do what Singapore or Austria does with a residency system, though, but progressives don’t like that either.

Hope it was obvious but I was being sarcastic. Suggesting we simply "fix housing" is akin to suggesting we just "eradicate poverty" when confronted with widespread, immediate famine.

Eh, either way my comment would have been the same. This is a wicked problem in the classic sense.

And then everyone clapped.

Me: "Thanks guys!"

I wish there was a sane and humane way of shutting off the infinite supply of out-of-state (and, increasingly, international) transients. Our homeless programs here in Portland are absolutely overwhelmed with people who arrive here daily from all across the country. Recent arrivals have been either a plurality or an outright majority of our homeless population for many years now.

I’d absolutely choose going all-in on affordable housing over a return to the war on drugs or doubling down on catastrophic decrim. But without limits on in-migration for social programs, the idea seems frustratingly doomed from the start.

Isn't that what you have a Federal Government for in the US? Naturally if just one city starts some programs it can't take on the entire US population of homeless people.

The solution to this in-migration should be clear. These programs need to be offered in every single city in the entire country. People need to pay more taxes to fund social programs. I'm clearly not American ;)

A federal solution is the only solution that has any chance of working. But I don’t see it as working without restrictions on migration, like a residency system of some kind. Not everyone gets to live in affordable Santa Barbara housing, obviously, some people have to live in Toledo or even Gary. Anything that isn’t market must be restricted in some way, even the USSR didn’t let everyone live in Moscow even though most wanted to.

Not sure how the USSR is relevant, in the USSR people had no freedom to choose anything.

But your point is valid. That said there's still probably enough friction in the system such that someone living in a certain place isn't just going to move to Santa Barbara. Moving is expensive and has uncertainties. People coming today to places like Portland or Vancouver, BC, are desperate. If they had some basic support where they're currently living they would be a lot less likely to take those risks.

Yes, but there are people where there is not much more friction than the cost or donation of a greyhound bus ticket, who we are talking about in this story. There is also a trend that people move to where their addiction isn’t going to get them thrown in jail, social services are better, and they won’t freeze to death outside in the winter.

I’m not sure if people would stay put in say great falls MT if the support was better. But even among the well to do housed, they often move from these towns because the economic opportunities are better in larger richer cities. People have freedom of movement in the USA and mostly use it across the economic spectrum.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the people on the street doing drugs have other issues. I live in Vancouver. People have mental health and other problems that aren't related to their housing status.

The problem isn't simply housing costs. The problem is the lack of a social support structure. Shelters, access to (mental) health care of various forms, addiction treatment etc... Even in "socialist" (ha) Canada you're mostly on your own. BC used to have more money for those things and at some point in the early 2000's those budgets were cut with pretty immediate impact on the homelessness situation. That said housing should be part of the solution but it all boils down to the attitude that you don't need to take care of ($$$) your neighbor. Each to their own. Worse in the US ofcourse but still.

When I came to Vancouver ~23 years ago I was absolutely shocked by the homeless situation. I've never seen anything like that. It's much worse now. Again, boils down to are members of society willing to take care of each other- or is it each to their own and ignore the people who are down. House prices were 1/8th of what they are now but there was no shortage of drug addicts on the streets. North Americans seem to generally be ok with having a mix of worse than the 3rd world alongside middle class and well off. Nobody cares about what goes on in their city. I guess not trending on TikTok.

Often the mentally ill drug addict you see today was the person evicted after a job loss yesterday. Homelessness hurts people.

I’m calling bullshit on this one. Too many examples on YouTube of folks interviewing homeless folks en mass and finding that the overwhelming majority of them were not “normal people down on their luck who end up on drugs”. Rather, mostly folks who had terrible home lives and were basically screwed up from the beginning. The “functional” heroin users you may claim exist are almost always functional enough to not be homeless.

Houston for example simply throws your ass in jail if you’re doing drugs and houses you if you aren’t. They claim to have solved homelessness, and they have in that the actual folks you’re talking about end up housed or in shelters every night.

Being married to an immigrant who actually had to struggle in a third world country with almost no social or economic mobility has left me with almost no sympathy for the homeless in America. Folks in far shittier situations than them play their hands far better.

> Rather, mostly folks who had terrible home lives and were basically screwed up from the beginning.

> Folks in far shittier situations than them play their hands far better.

Aren't you contradicting yourself here? If these folks were screwed up from the beginning doesn't this mean they had no hand to play from the start?

There are many, many folks in third world countries that don't make it through life too well either. Life is pretty doomed for you if you're just born in Sudan right now for example. Yet some, very few, of them will succeed in extirpating themselves from the situation.

Statistically there will always be people who fare better than others, through a combination of sweat, blood, and luck. I don't know if it's fair to have "almost no sympathy" for the ones who were too stupid and unlucky to be winners.

TIL extirpating is a word!

Still I think you meant extricate.

Yes I did. Thanks.

This reeks of the American brain rot that views poverty as a personal moral failure. Some might couch it as "wealth is the result of hard work and talent". The latter is known as the myth of meritocracy. Those are two sides of the same coin.

Luckily, we have studies we can rely on rather than feelings or Youtuber anecdata eg [1]:

> In many instances, substance abuse is the result of the stress of homelessness, rather than the other way around. Many people begin using drugs or alcohol as a way of coping with the pressures of homelessness

[1]: https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/homeless

I know it’s just more anecdata, but that just does not match my experience at all. I’ve known over a dozen people who have struggled with this over the years, become homeless, had drug overdoses, and several who’ve died.

Every single one of them had a home when they started using the hard drugs, and many had a home through most of their addiction, and only became homeless after the addiction had progressed to severe levels.

If most people have personal experience like mine, then maybe there are issues with the research (people blaming their personal failings on things outside of their control, for example)

> If most people have personal experience like mine

This seems anecdotal too. Very meta.

In any case, I'd rather trust actual research rather than a random HN user and what they feel most people's experiences are like.

It is silly to think that question is one that can be investigated by scientific inquiry. The only thing that study (which you haven't linked to) reveals are the opinions of those who funded it.

> the overwhelming majority of them were not “normal people down on their luck who end up on drugs”. Rather, mostly folks who had terrible home lives and were basically screwed up from the beginning.

Those aren't mutually exclusive, and furthermore, they likely have major overlap.

> Sadly the only effective remedy for this behavior is to be roughed up by police and thrown in jail.

As clearly evidenced by decades of this very successful strategy.

98% of homeless people are addicts or mentally ill people. They can't hold a home no matter how cheap it is. Affordable housing won't stop homelessness, because drug addicts and mentally ill people will consume themselves and in the process lose everything including their housing.

I’d be mentally ill too if I had to live on the street.

Not just unaffordable housing, but homelessness and addiction is a nationwide problem. Only a few cities try to do anything at all, while the rest of the country just pushes them toward those cities. No matter how much money a city throws at the problem, there’s no way it can ever deal with it at the volume necessary.

what comments like GP ignore is that there has been housing provisions for homeless/drug addicted population in the past and each time it did not alleviate any of its residence from their afflictions, instead these free housing units became just another bazaar, a place to do business.

Arguing that a random homeless drug addict with negative net social utility is entitled to housing on some of the most expensive land in the world is completely bonkers.

All human life is valuable. Measuring people's worth through "social utility" is such a fucked way to look at the world.

And yet you do it every day when you decide who to associate with and invite into your life and home.

Why can't the community do the same thing you do personally?

Should we kick out our children from our home who misbehave? Or do we try to teach them, and help them and let them grow.

Many (most?) of the homeless you see around you are your community. They don't need to be invited into the city because it's their home too.

I live in SF and I know homeless people who have lived on the same street corner longer than some of my coworkers have lived in the city (or even the country). Many of the people who experience such misfortunes - even drug addicts who behave poorly - are long-time residents who once helped make the city the place it is. Sure their behave causes issues, and society needs to do something, but implying they don't have a claim to be helped in their own city is unfair.

> Should we kick out our children from our home who misbehave? Or do we try to teach them, and help them and let them grow.

The second one. Over and over again. And when they are adults and we've given them a few more chances, we should then cut our losses. Many families go through the heartbreak which is trying again and again and failing. I don't judge those families, and know a few of those personally. And this is people's blood relatives. Extrapolate from that what you will.

If someone in my home is daily screaming at me, shitting on the floor, stealing things and threatening children - they're going. Roommate, relative, doesn't matter. They're out, or I am.

Someone's claim to live in a good community ends when they start actively destroying that community day after day. You get the community you work to build; you don't get to live in my wonderful community every day while you daily do horrifying things to ruin it.

This is the only way good communities can exist.

They only have net negative social utility at the moment, they have the potential to be productive citizens.

Plus, productive citizens need to share a society with the drug addicted homeless. That society is going to be more peaceful if the needs of those homeless are met.

Some of those people were around before it became some of the most expensive land in the world. Why should people be pushed out of their communities?

Because some people view privilege of any kind critically. Also, especially in North America, being some place first has not historically proven to be a sufficient claim.

I’m really in favor of the opposite: zone for fewer jobs. Set limits on headcount per sq ft. Limit zoning of anything that provides jobs to be no more than local housing. If the locals want to keep their residential density, fine, no more commercial development.

This is such a bad idea, I nearly spit out my coffee, which I drank several hours ago.

You want to build a building? Sorry, there's too many jobs in this area already, so you can't hire people to do that.

Seriously, please draft a law to enact this policy. It sounds hilarious.

Portland is substantially cheaper than all the other areas and has a worse drug problem, so it doesn't seem correlated at all.

Portland was ranked #21 in the most expensive places to live [1].

[1]: https://realestate.usnews.com/places/rankings/best-places-to...

Yeah, but compared to SF, Seattle, and Vancouver?

Who would've thought that a lack of available housing implies fewer people in housing?

maybe the people downvoting you have some kind of skin in the game and are benefiting from the housing shortage