California isn't doing nothing.
They keep spending even more money and wondering why it's not working.
If it was a problem that could be solved by giving people money, they'd have solved it already.
Therein lies the problem. A large proportion of homeless fall into this category [*], and it's very hard to institutionalize people against their will. We like to think that most homeless are functional people who are simply down on their luck, and thus putting them in stable housing and getting them set up to work would solve their problems. But this is sadly not the case.
[*] This study [0] found that 80% of homeless people have some kind of mental illness, with 30% having severe mental illness. This is compounded by the fact that >50% have substance abuse problems.
Either you start off with the first principle that it's OK for wealth-transfer schemes to make tax payers 'worse off' via compelled charity, or I don't think you can get to the point of supporting generalized homeless relief programs. Maybe programs targeted at short-duration stuff to get people into jobs that are capable of doing them and a housing contract might work, but it'd have to be extremely well thought out and wouldn't benefit most chronic homeless.
IIRC, For decades, the homeless "relief" programs run by states like Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and others pretty much ended at bus tickets to San Francisco for the homeless (whether they wanted to go or not) and that's it.
Is it any wonder the population of homeless in SF grew?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
Reality is always more complicated than a one-liner. Surprise, surprise.
But that doesn't make it a "myth." Rather it's more municipalities and more disposable people being "disposed" of.
That doesn't make it right and certainly shouldn't normalize such practices -- that said, it's a little late now.
It does, though, and the article I linked explains what actually happens: people are not systematically shipped to any particular big west coast city. There are numerous programs in numerous cities which send people back home, essentially, to places where they have support in place and simply need a way to get there.
And I disagree with your analysis. That's not an attack on you or The Guardian for that matter.
While there certainly are programs as you mention, there are (and have been for decades) others that do not seek to reunite people with support systems -- rather they just want those pesky homeless people gone.
Out of sight, out of mind and all that.
I'll point out that this is a myth as many time as you repeat it until you cite some source to back up the assertion.
And what I cited is not my analysis, it's a reputable publication that did actual investigative journalism.
So, sure, maybe it works if people sign up for it and show they actually want to do something.
But it clearly doesn't work if you just hand it out and hope for the best.
I actually think if they did just give 100k to homeless people a year that it would actually solve itself.
The problem is they give 100k to grifters who say they'll do something about it.
This is where good faith opinions can differ. Do these folks still deserve freedom/autonomy or can we force them into rehab or mental heath treatments? If the only crime they have committed is not having a bed to sleep in, I'm not sure I'm comfortable with taking away their freedoms. I'm closer than I was five years ago but I'm not universally there yet.
I got to meet the "org executives" (it was really only the two of them, grifting, in the entire org) who were collecting a nice fat government check per person enrolled in their program. They came by to see how we were doing, and were there for less than 15 minutes. Two ladies in their 50s who were more interested in talking about how excited they were to be going off to pick up their new company cars after lunch, matching Jaguar XJs.
That borders on irrelevant when 33% of your homeless population qualify as having a traumatic brain injury, etc. Hospital stays are about $5K per day--if a homeless person hits the hospitals for 20 days in a year you've already spent more than $100K.
After Saint Reagan (hack ... spit) "closed the institutions", there was supposed to be something better. That never happened. So, now you have the mentally ill cycling between the streets, the emergency rooms, and the prisons.
You can't fix homelessness without first fixing healthcare. Otherwise you're just rearranging the deck chairs.
The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which made it possible to close the institutions, was almost unanimously passed in the Assembly and the Senate, in an unholy union of civil libertarian do-gooders and budget cutting conservatives. In fact, the lone dissenter in either legislature was a law-and-order Republican.
And it's not like Democrats have been shut out of the government of California ever since.
The funding for the alternatives was also slated to come from the federal government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1...
But Reagan and a Republican controlled Senate killed it. Because funding was supposed to magically "trickle down" from thin air.
And, through it all, the mental health facilities were always chronically underfunded.
If you pass a bill that destroys mental health systems for the sake of civil libertarian concerns, "its issues weren't magically fixed through half a century later, which was totally unforeseeable" is not a good excuse.
Why? Because they're not permitted to use illegal drugs in the provided housing facilities, they will lose the housing. These "houseless" people basically have two homes, the streets are their summer home where they get high and continue to be a nuisance. The provided housing goes mostly unoccupied in these instances. Having written that, maybe the analogy works better in reverse - the public housing is the unoccupied summer home? Either way, it's totally not being used as intended because of the restrictions placed on the housing.
When I was homeless I lived outside because if you have a decent tent and sleeping bag it's perfectly comfortable, and I like to have a weapon handy no matter what and I reject any living circumstance that would prohibit that. At no point did drugs enter the equation, but if they did, it wouldn't have changed the calculus.
The problem is that politicians are afraid to do anything (outside of direct and indirect enrichment). No one can blame some John Doe, chief Busybody of the Busyarea, if he won't do something. Because that didn't happen, nothing to point finger at directly, except for "you don't do enough", which is generic enough to be used at anyone and so ineffective at everyone. But if he will do something and it is immediately painful to at at least some group, then he will be blamed and his opponent will do that with pleasure too.
The homeless population accounts for 0.23% of the total U.S. population, or about ~771K people.
https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/
For comparison, more people are getting DUI citations per year,
That's 1% of the population. Maybe not a big deal to you.
There's only 13,000 city blocks in SF.
That's a homeless person every 2 blocks.
Kind of dangerous to be walking past people in all different states of desperation multiple times every trip everywhere you go, is another way to look at it.
People looking like they have homes or acting like it won't stop this. It doesn't make people inherently dangerous.
Don't get me wrong, I think any percent of the population being homeless because of lack of options is a tragedy. (I don't really care if someone wishes to be so, and I think we should have appropriate living options for this). I understand that you can't really stop temporary homelessness - fires and urgent things happen - but that's something we can deal with as needed.
y% LIVES on the blocks - so the multiple on y is higher (higher probability you encounter them), and the desperation factor is also likely much higher.
The problem which sticks out to me is that homelessness can be addressed by providing housing, but that’s not an easy solution to provide in a country that gets 10s of millions of illegal immigrants. So why is someone talking so much about homelessness relative to other issues? Do they want the U.S. to provide a house for every illegal immigrant who crosses a border? If political officials in states struggling with homelessness really care about solving the problem, they would do what other states are doing, as mentioned in OP’s article.
Or are you just what-about-ing?
Homeless people can be a problem independent of housed-drug addicts being a problem.
They're a burden on society and should be removed. But why stop there? The bottom 20% of school kids are just going to end up being a burden on society too! Prison costs something like $50k/inmate/annum. So let's inject them too!
But why wait for the kids? We know who is popping out all those burden-on-society babies. Sterilize them. Then we can use them as "comfort women" for our brave, selfless Immigration Enforcement heroes!
USA! USA! USA!
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fox-news-involuntary-letha...
Granted, this is pretty obvious satire, but upvoting it?
If you did, is it because you support murdering poor and disadvantaged people?
I hope not. But some folks around here make me wonder.
Maybe I'll just stop, as I certainly don't want to encourage murderous pieces of shit.
While property crime is more likely to be committed by people the lower their income level is, the majority of all violent crime is committed by people who have homes.
In fact, the homeless are far more likely to be the victims of a violent crime than any other income demographic.
Furthermore, the unstable and dangerous people you see behaving erratically on the street are not necessarily sleeping there - and the homeless in the area probably feel much more unsafe about their presence than you do.
Gee, I wonder why, they make up 99% of the population.
How could they ever make up more than 50% of crime?
> I don’t really think this holds the point you think it does
Which is that if you’re scared of being assaulted by someone you should be scared of everyone around you at all times. Someone’s housing status does not make them any more likely to attack you.
Being scared of homeless people hurting you is like being scared of flying in a plane when you drive a car every day.
I think that one of the huge limitations of how we think about homelessness in the US is that we view it as a problem that non-homeless people encounter. This encourages a bunch of policies that make it easier for somebody to avoid ever having to see a homeless person but which do little to mitigate the suffering of a homeless person.
You also ignore that it's a rapidly growing problem.
Comparing it to DUI numbers doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
That's not doing anything about the root causes.
Sure, a quarter of a percent is not a big percent, but that sure is a lot of people. It is _more_ than the entire population of Alaska, Wyoming, or Vermont. It is near the population size of several other states.
An entire US state's worth of people are unable to find adequate housing and not just because they are off their meds. According to the 2024 Point-in-Time count, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated 22% of homeless are facing a severe mental illness. So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing.
That sure as hell sounds like a crisis to me.
How does it follow? Not having a severe mental illness makes one normal? It's as same as saying that not suffering from severe obesity makes you fit and healthy.
The unhoused has those people with a housing disorder, aka mental illness, and those who, simply, don't "house" enough.
Why don't they house enough? Many reasons. But nearly 4 out of 5 are not ticking the severe mental illness part. So there is less water in the argument that homelessness is caused by mental illnesses which is the leading reason I hear when people talk about homelessness. So, they aren't "mental," they are "normal."
No - the word there is severe. Requiring hospitalization more than once a month, often. When you look at "untreated mental illness" in the homeless, now you're above 50%.
But we can't do anything about it until we face up to the problem. Spending more money won't help. I'm somewhat familiar with the activity at our local jail, and a good part of it is homeless people rotating in and out. They get brought in because they were trespassing or shoplifting or something, the jail cleans them up and dries them out (they're usually on drugs, which they somehow manage to buy) and tries to get them back on their medications, they get released, and the cycle begins again. Most of them are mentally unstable, and perhaps they'd be somewhat functional if they could stay on their medication, but they don't, so they can't function in society for long.
We don't want to put them back in asylums, because some asylums really were hellholes, and I guess we don't trust ourselves not to let them be hellholes again. That seems awfully pessimistic; factories used to be pretty awful too, but we require them to be safe and clean now. Seems like we could do the same with asylums, but we won't even consider it. So we're left with letting them wander the streets, maybe bedding down at homeless shelters when they feel like it, using the jails as temporary asylums when they get in trouble, and throwing more money at the problem once in a while to soothe our guilt. It's sad.
The department of HUD generates this ~771K figure from a "point-in-time" estimate, a single count from a single night performed in January. They literally have volunteers go out, count the number of homeless people they observe, and report their findings.
It's not hard to imagine why this is probably a significant undercount. There is likely a long tail of people that happened to be in a situation that night where they were not able to be counted (i.e. somewhere secluded, sleeping in a friend's private residence that night, etc).
Even if these numbers are correct, to my mind a "crisis" is still more characterized by the trend than the numbers in absolute. From the first link you provided, we saw a 39% increase in "people in families" experiencing homelessness, and 9% in individuals. A resource from the HUD itself suggests a 33% increase in homelessness from 2020-2024, 18% increase from 2023-2024. That is far apace of the population increase in general.
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-...
And even then, I would say many people would suggest that the change in visible homelessness they've experienced in the last 10 years would amount to "crisis" levels, at least relative to the past.
It's completely fair to argue that it is not in fact a crisis, but claiming that it is certainly not "baseless."
I also feel like this write-up sugar coats some of the actions Houston/Texas has been taking against non-compliance. Ticketing homeless people $200 for existing on the streets seems a bit counter intuitive - and Texas has been systematically shipping homeless and immigrants around the country (human trafficking) for political theater, so are they excluding that data? Probably.
I'm not an expert, but this write-up really comes off as one-sided since it's only talking about what's not working in California and ignoring some of the background stuff Texas is up to. Overall, do agree that better management and accountability would do other cities favors, but again, that's such an easy statement to make about any plan or org.
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/city-of-hou...