The actually progressive option is to provide meaningful public support programs, and also make housing affordable (by building enough housing). The US mostly doesn't do either of those, but it should.
From a partner who used to work in one, people:
- didn't trust the program and wouldn't sign up
- didn't actually want to quit using so they avoided it
- wanted to get the benefits from the program without changing anything (i.e. showed up to get free food etc)
- tried but didn't like it and went back to using
Very few people actually went all the way through compared to the population in the city that could have used it.
The real question is: how do you help people who do not want your help. Do you let them waste away and die on the sidewalk, or do you institutionalize them?
I'm not convinced that involuntary incarceration will actually fix the problem. I believe it will just take it off of the streets and out of the public consciousness.
Sometimes using drugs is fine, depending on the drug, the reason, and the person. For example, I did cocaine once and immediately knew I needed to cut ties with those friends because if I had access to it regularly, I would ruin my life. Others can do coke recreationally and not have an issue. Others can't form the insight I had until their lives are in shambles, and maybe not even then.
> Have you ever interacted with a heroine or meth user?
We separate them legally the same way we separate alcohol use vs. alcohol abuse. The consequences of getting caught for speeding vs. getting caught for speeding while under influence tend to drastically differ in magnitude, so I suggest we do the same for other kinds of drug abuse.
Being under influence shouldn't be a mitigating factor while committing crimes, but for non-driving offenses it often ends up being such. So I suggest we treat it the same way for violent crimes as we do for driving offenses.
> Oh, relax! "Oh, I'm Mark, I'm in the '80s, I'm dying of heroin in a puddle in the corner in an advert!" Drugs are fine, Mark, everyone agrees now. Drugs are what happen to people, and that's fine, so shut up.
If antisocial people do not exist in the public consciousness, then that means the problem is fixed. Even you never have to worry about locking your front door, then the problem of burglars has been fixed even if technically would be burglars may exist in prison.
For example, putting you in prison would also solve the problem of your objection to them. You would still be surrounded by drug addicts and the mentally ill in prison, but we wouldn't have to listen to you complain about it, so our problems would be solved.
But that's also not a good solution.
Anyhow he wound up getting arrested and spent a couple of weeks in jail where he got clean and decided to turn his life around. He went on to get a couple of masters degrees, get married, have two kids, and has a good job. He credits his time in jail for saving his life.
If I tell you that covering something in red paint and covering something in tomato sauce will stain them both red, I'm not saying that red paint is tomato sauce.
I also know people who have changed their lives after heart attacks. Am I saying that heart attacks are roughly equivalent to prison stays?
If your anecdote can prove your point, then mine can disprove it.
Now I don't think that this would necessarily work for everyone, but it worked for my friend, and I've heard a number of other similar stories. Sometimes you need to get a very clear message from society/the system that your behavior is unacceptable, and you need to get that message sober or it may not get through.
no cage can ever be a healthy environment.
Not to sound too crass, but doesn't that pretty much "fix the problem" (i.e. homeless people on the street) by definition?
> leaving them on the street is not helping them. committing them would give them access to (force upon them) care, and is the more humane thing to do
> I'm not convinced that involuntary incarceration will actually fix the problem
> doesn't that pretty much "fix the problem"?
Which problem? Every misunderstanding is someone replying to someone else without knowing who was replying to whom
but to say that the majority of them don't want any help is just wrong.
Arresting and prosecuting is slow and expensive, prisons are full. A prison sentence destroys whatever remaining support system a person has and a conviction like that makes getting a job in the future nearly impossible.
We should just have a quick path to short and non-damaging corporal punishment. A quick video recording, an instant review by a judge via zoom, then immediate punishment. This would deter theft, damaging public property, etc. while not costing a lot to taxpayers and not causing long term damage to the individual. Crime is never on the record at all so does not affect background checks. Treatment programs are always offered instead of the corporal punishment.
(Of course mental health conditions complicate this, it's difficult to solve that without forced institutionalizing them).
Prison is as medieval an institution as the mindsets of those that see it to be appropriate.
Homelessness rates increase and decrease in direct proportion to the cost of housing as a proportion of median income. When housing costs increase more and more people become homeless and the ones that end up on the street tends to be those already living at the margins so you see more drug addicts and mentally ill people on the street and assume it's the cause.
Its well understood that being homeless makes it much harder to provide treatment and services. Sweeps of encampments make it even harder as their belongings tend to be thrown out.
So we have places with lots of services, but extremely expensive housing or places with affordable housing, but no poor public services.
Imagine if people could have housing and services how much better it would be. Maybe we wouldn't even have to strip people of their freedoms to make improvements. Wouldn't that be preferable? Isn't it worth trying?
Also we are chasing a lagging indicator by focusing exclusively on the homeless population. The vast majority of people who end up homeless because of addiction would have benefited from some far earlier, far milder form of intervention, or from the absence of something that actively drove them into addiction, e.g. some quack pushing oxycontin on them because Purdue Pharma promoted it as non-addictive. Or job loss because of offshoring pushing them into economic despair that then drives addiction, which they are unable to recover from because of the lack of affordable or accessible retraining or educational opportunities.
In many cases over the last 20-30 years, it was the combination of both job loss and careless opioid prescription that pushed people into an unrecoverable spiral, especially in the rust belt, where the opioid crisis hit the hardest. We may not have fixed the job loss side of the problem, but at least doctors aren't pushing pills the same way they were 10-20 years ago after Purdue's corporate downfall, so the number of people driven into addiction-mediated homelessness by that disaster should at least start tapering off soon. But if we don't help people before their lives fall apart with a continuum of support options that are accessible before they are in deep crisis, and are accessible to people who are beginning to spiral but don't yet appear to be in deep crisis, it will cost far more and be far more challenging to help them recover once they are on the street.
Drug addiction is a dark place and it's very common that the availability of free support programs is entirely rejected by the user, and the only hope at a normal life requires forceful intervention by family and friends.
The only way to solve drugs on the street is to look at the cities that have solved them and copy what works. And, at least with what I'm familiar with, arresting people tends to work and alternatives tend to not.
There are different programs needed for drug addiction than for homelessness. Not everyone who's homeless has a drug problem, and not everyone with a drug problem is homeless.
False, and harmful. US HUD says it's ~16% of homeless people, other sources give different numbers, but it's certainly not a majority, let alone anywhere near 100%.
The biggest problem, unsurprisingly, is housing cost. The US GAO states that a $100 increase in median rent correlates to a 9% rise in homelessness. Rents have gone up a lot more than that.
Sorry. But you're either misinformed or actively malicious here.
> US HUD says it's ~16% of homeless people
It absolutely is close to 100% of _unsheltered_ people. Some social workers helping the unsheltered homeless are now saying that they have not seen anybody who's _not_ on drugs or who is not mentally ill.
If you want authoritative source, here's UCLA study from the blessed pre-COVID era: https://capolicylab.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Health-Co...
> The biggest problem, unsurprisingly, is housing cost.
No, it's really really not.
> The US GAO states that a $100 increase in median rent correlates to a 9% rise in homelessness.
And the correlation disappears when you look at the states with cold climate.
Which specifically leads with a page saying:
> Hundreds of studies - including our own - show economic pressures are the primary drivers of homelessness, that housing people ends homelessness, and that targeted financial assistance helps people at risk of homelessness stay stably housed
Also, the cited study blatantly does not show the numbers ("close to 100%") you claim it has, even leaving that aside. You're also now equivocating between drugs and mental illness, as well as between drugs and alcohol. And you're not taking into account the direction of cause and effect (e.g. which came first, the homelessness or the addiction).
I understand that you're also referencing anecdata from social workers. In those cases, there's an inherent bias: people with a drug problem are going to be harder and more memorable cases, which makes them feel like a larger proportion than they are. People homeless for economic reasons are likely to loom less large in people's minds than the times they dealt with someone who had a drug problem.
"Homeless people" is a broad category that includes people temporarily living in vehicles, bouncing between family members, or sleeping on a friend's couch. It also includes people who are about to lose their home, young people living alone.
But when everyday people use the term, they usually mean, specifically, visible homeless people - i.e. people who are homeless long-term, sleeping rough on the streets or in parks, etc.
The two groups are pretty different to each other. I would be very surprised if the rate of drug addiction in the second group was the same as the rate of drug addiction in the first group
But that's a far far weaker claim than the one above.
If the rate is 90% or higher in the second group, then we get close to the claim being true. (Though still a subset rather than the circles being the same; lots of people with drug problems have homes.)
Temporarily living in vehicles is absolutely a thing.
We eliminated benches to reduce the rate at which the problematic homeless cross paths with the complainers.
The DPW as an organization doesn't give a shit about how many commuter's asses a bench serves from 6am to 8pm. It just knows that every day when Karen sees a homeless man sleeping on that bench at 5AM she submits a complaint from the web form.
From their stupid "not my job, I just solve tickets" keyhole view of the situation removing the benches makes the problem smaller and they will iterate on that until complaint equilibrium is reached.
Suffice to say, I don't think it's fair to categorize me as a Karen for asserting that San Francisco has a large number of problematic homeless people. I could give about 8 other stories (from SF, Boston, NYC, and Chicago) that happened to me, two of which (both SF) include grown men dropping their pants, exposing their genitals, and visibly pooping on public streets where children were present, with no attempt to obtain any degree of privacy.
These aren't stories from my friends, these are things that I personally witnessed and experienced. These aren't 'oh that guy is ugly and smelly' stories, these are 'if I did that myself I would be arrested' stories.
Did you call the police after this person made a threat on your life?
I probably would not have called the police after this person if this happened to me, because I expect they would do nothing about it.
In the U.S. police will show up, investigate, and absolutely arrest someone who made a loud, direct, threat to murder another human being in public.
It’s a pretty common experience for anyone who is out and about using public transit in public spaces. They know nothing will be done to the suspect so what’s the point of bothering to respond at all?
We're not talking about the people who have been genuinly victimized. We're talking about the people who wring their hands over some smelly guy in some corner on the subway. Because they dominate the stats.
I hope people like you lose every election for the rest of time.
What I've read many times is that (essentially) the oppposite is widely accepted consensus: Arresting never works. The US tried the 'drug war' for decades and it was ineffective. Do you have evidence otherwise? It's also unjust to criminalize illness and medical problems for poor people (rich people get sympathy, rehab, and lots of second chances).
What does work is overdose prevention, including needle exhanges and safe injection sites, treating addition as the disease it is (which is how it's treated for rich people), and housing (people experiencing the great instability and stress of homelessness are much less likely to make other changes). Maybe some others I'm not thinking of, too.
We're paying hours a day in overtime to basically have the cops, firefighters, and EMTs deal with the same small population of mentally ill people on the same street corner every week, for years. These people cannot get better because they choose not to stay in the mental hospital or substance abuse programs offered to them. Someone is 5150'd, placed on a 3-day hold, and 72 hours later they walk out of the hospital and back to the same street corner, where they have a mental breakdown again the following week. You can offer support -- they will basically tell you the same thing, I'm not sick at all, there's nothing wrong with me, I am not a danger to myself or others, and you are shit out of luck.
At the same time, there are way more homeless people who are silently and cleanly living in their cars and showing up to work every day at a low wage job. Most people won't ever see them unless they look closely. Visit /r/urbancarliving sometime to get an idea of what that population looks like. Those people might get a 15 minute "knock" from the cops once a month.
The actually progressive option is to involuntarily incarcerate people who need it, while not criminalizing car/RV living, offering work placement services, housing assistance etc. The most realistic thing would probably be to build subsidized mobile homes and clean, low-rent central places to park an RV.
You correctly identified the biggest thing here though which is making housing affordable. Unfortunately, that will never happen.
There are definitely people for whom it would be a compassionate (and often societally optimal) thing to do. Giving the government the power to decide to take people away indefinitely is just a spectacularly bad precedent. Especially right now.
I mean the reason this is a pipe dream and we all just opt to deal with it is that our state/institutional capacity has been eroded so completely. So, we just take away the public benches and call it a day.
The cruel way to do this is to just criminalize the behavior and then move all these people into the prison system. I think that would be a moral sin, but I see why people go there -- the alternative would be to construct a totally new, parallel mental health system with kinda like a jury/parole board type system, representation, and so on, and make it explicitly not part of the criminal justice system. Since the point is rehabilitation, not justice. All that would probably be insanely expensive, but a society focused on the humanity of its citizens would probably see it as worthwhile. Our society unfortunately, just does not see its citizens that way.
Now, this isn't to say living is great. You are living in a dorm with 20+ felons, you have bedbugs to contend with, and it's dirty. I still have a normal ass job as well. Being homeless fucking sucks.
Also most "affordable" housing initiatives attack it by mandating "affordable" for new construction instead of just letting developers build what they can make the most money building. No developer wants to build "affordable" homes if they can build and sell high-end homes. So by imposing "affordability" mandates, they just encourage developers to go elsewhere.
New high-end homes make the older homes more affordable. New "affordable" homes simply don't get built, at least not in anywhere near the numbers that are needed.
> Also most "affordable" housing initiatives attack it by mandating "affordable" for new construction instead of just letting developers build what they can make the most money building. No developer wants to build "affordable" homes if they can build and sell high-end homes. So by imposing "affordability" mandates, they just encourage developers to go elsewhere.
> New high-end homes make the older homes more affordable. New "affordable" homes simply don't get built, at least not in anywhere near the numbers that are needed.
Complete agreement that the current approach is not working, yes. The right approach is to build, and keep building, until everything is affordable. And the political challenge is the existing cohort of people who think a house should be an asset that appreciates rather than a necessity of life that everyone should be able to afford. People who are put in a particularly bad position by that (e.g. difficulty moving or retiring because housing prices went down) may need help.
Any kind of assistance has to be built on a foundation of mandatory rehab/treatment and staying clean or it will fail.
Sometimes the dichotomy is correct, but the bias exists.
This isn't a resource allocation problem, or rather, it isn't a resource allocation problem the way you seem to think it is.