Something that has continually frustrated me in discussions of homelessness is progressives’ seemingly willful conflation of two groups that the average person thinks of as being very different: There are people who are otherwise pretty normal aside from their lack of a place to live, and then there are those who are solidly asocial—often drug addled, schizophrenic, unwilling and perhaps genuinely unable to recognize the norms and laws of civilized society. In my experience, the average person has a lot more compassion and forbearance for the former group, and mostly wishes the latter group could be institutionalized, but progressives insist on lumping them together in their social taxonomy, and this ultimately prevents either group from being well served by the best of political intentions.
When I lived in San Francisco, there was a handful of unregulated parking spaces under the shade of some trees across the street from my apartment, and I remember a few weeks where there was a car parked there that never moved--in the mornings I saw a guy get out of the passenger side, swing open the door and stand behind it as a makeshift privacy wall, take a sort of towel bath, change his clothes, and then wait at the nearby bus stop to go wherever he went for the day before returning in the evening. It looked like he was going to work and trying his best to appear presentable while living out of his car. I admired his grit and felt a lot of sympathy for his circumstances, knowing that it would only take a few unlucky coincidences to put me in the same boat.
A month later, next to those same parking spaces, a rickety tent was erected and one afternoon I saw a man emerge, covered in cuts and abrasions, wearing nothing but moon boots and jean shorts stained with his own excrement. He would wander back and forth in the nearby crosswalk, going nowhere and screaming loudly at no one in particular. From the side of my bay window I could see my neighbors looking on with concern, and ultimately I called SFPD when he started throwing D batteries and cans of food at oncoming traffic.
I have no illusions that there is some uncrossable line between the situations of these two men. It’s entirely possible that the guy living out of his car might end up mentally ill and throwing soup at cars one of these days if his situation gets worse, and I concede that they are both subsumed under the spectrum of homelessness, but when my relatives from the east coast asked me about “the homeless situation” in the city, they were picturing Mr. Moon Boots, not the guy in his car just trying to get by. The same could be said of my neighbors’ conception of the problem, and mine too, because this is in fact how normal people conceive of the term. When Super Bowl 50 and its attendant influx of visitors came to the Bay Area, there wasn’t a sudden rush to purge struggling workers sleeping in their cars, but the crazies were hastily shuffled out of sight because that’s what bothers normal people.
But if you ask progressive minded folks about homelessness, or if you listen to some of the otherwise excellent Weeds episodes on the subject, there is almost no mention of this distinction. Rather, they are quick to point out that homelessness is a spectrum, and care is taken with language to describe those “experiencing homelessness” as mostly families whose needs could be met by providing subsidies and addressing zoning issues and other systemic problems in the housing market. This is all well and good (and true!) but it takes great pains to avoid the normal person’s complaints of people defecating on the sidewalk, screaming at nonexistent things, breaking into cars, using IV drugs in broad daylight, and otherwise roaming the streets stark raving mad. When normal people speak of homelessness they are really talking about *vagrancy* rather than housing insecurity, but that word (and indeed the very concept) has fallen out of fashion, and so the two are commingled under a single genus and spoken about in purely academic and economic terms. But they have very different underlying problems, and a lack of housing is one of the only common denominators between them. Both need shelter, of course, but car-dwelling families by and large don’t need institutionalized psychiatric care, and offering to help a can-thrower update his résumé and practice his interviewing skills won’t get you very far.
I think I know why progressives insist on the conflation, and it is a very reasonable one on its face. It’s the same reason that gay issues became gay and lesbian issues, then LGB, then LGBT, then LGBTQ, then LGBTQIA, and finally the usefully expansive LGBTQIA+. There is political power in the concatenation of identities, and where 10 stalks may be easily snapped individually, bundle them together and they are strong. I think progressives rightly recognize that voters are very sympathetic toward people like the guy living out of his car in my neighborhood and toward families struggling to get by in the face of absurd housing costs, but not so sympathetic to asocial vagrants. Progressives want the state to help *both* groups, and at the highest level of generality if you close one eye you can conceive of both as mere housing problems at their root, and so they are bundled together into a Hobson’s choice--bold and expansive programs are proposed in the hopes of making societal changes that are sweeping enough to address the problems of car-dwellers *and* can-throwers.
As I said above I think this is done with the best of intentions, but once the ballot initiatives are approved this conflation comes back to bite progressives, and they seem baffled that the same voters who say they want to address the problem don’t want new shelters built in their neighborhood. I often see this interpreted cynically to imply that kindhearted voters in liberal areas are in fact closet NIMBYs, and undoubtedly this is true for some subset of people, but I think the majority are just responding rationally to the conflation that has been sold to them. Of course they don’t want a building full of drug addled can-throwers moving in next to them. No one does! And the irony is that statistically this is not likely to happen, since most of the homeless population is much closer to car-dwellers than can-throwers, but by then it’s too late to make that case, and this is the other side of the conflation coin. You don’t get to conflate housing insecurity and vagrancy for the sake of political expediency, but then turn around and disaggregate the two when it comes time to convince residents of orderly neighborhoods that you aren’t about to unleash bedlam upon them.
If progressives disaggregated the two from the start (the way that normal people always have) they could probably get more initiatives passed and get more buy-in when it comes time to build. If you asked me whether I would mind having a shelter built in my district and stipulated that it would *only* be for car-dwelling type families who are trying their best to make it in a ruthless housing market, I would be on board, and I think a lot of my neighbors would be too. If you asked me whether I would commit to more local funding for getting asocial vagrants off the streets and institutionalized in a setting designed to address their unique problems, far away from me, I would definitely be on board. But progressives seem bent on putting both these populations in one big bag, and as long as that’s the case I don’t trust them to constructively address the problems of either group, and certainly not to try out their grand social experiments in my neighborhood.
Yes, and the man in the car may have found a super-cheap rooming house a useful way station (it would have a real shower), but any rooming house that would be tolerable to live in/near would have to kick out the can guy.
I liked your comment because I think there you make a good point. That being said, I think we're missing the forest for the trees here. Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Illinois have a combined population of ~86.5 million people compared to New York's 19.5 million people but have fewer homeless people than NY. And I don't think that its the weather in NY that's bringing people there.
Unless we think there is something specific about NY that makes people crazy, Matt's point is that we could solve an enormous amount of homelessness by just providing cheaper places to live. It wouldn't solve it all, because the point about mental illness is true. But I don't see how you reconcile that comparison without acknowledging the way to address this for the most people is to address the costs of housing and not mental health.
Oh, I agree that addressing housing costs is the way to do the most good for the most people, and a lot of the imbedded problems vanish or become more manageable when there’s just more housing. Matt’s takes in this sphere are part of why I subscribed. My point is mostly a semantic/branding one, but I think it’s important for voter trust and actual policy implementation:
-I think most people use the word “homeless” to refer to general vagrancy, whereas when progressives use that same word they mean a spectrum encompassing a much wider set of people that average folks might not even recognize are struggling.
-Because of these differing definitions, when an average person hears a progressive politician or commentator talking about homelessness, they are often interested in a solution and may vote for initiatives that claim they will address it, only to find later this means a shelter proposed for building near them. Because they’re operating on normie definition, they assume a building full of “homeless” means a bunch of riffraff, and no one wants that. They also see that per their definition of homeless, nothing has been done—vagrancy remains the same or worse.
-Progressives can either embark on a project of educating everyone on the more thorough definition of homelessness and its many nuances and intersections, or understand the connotations of the folk definition and tackle it as a separate topic. People are (I think) generally supportive of cheaper housing and generally intolerant of vagrants. Even if the galaxy brain in you understands the spectral definition and interconnectedness of it all, resist the urge to talk about it in those terms, and treat it as two distinct problems, because that is how normal people conceive of them.
The situation is not improved by the perception (or fact) that sponsors of these projects and the City government that enables them, cannot seem to be trustworthy to host communities when it comes to social service facilities, However much is said about responsible ownership, no kind or quality of management can prevent their difficult clients from hanging around on the streets outside the facility, creating an unsafe (or actually dangerous) situation, especially for women. After all, it’s not like the City is going to remove the facility if it turns out their promises aren’t being kept. People know that the only negotiating leverage they have is to keep them out in the first place, and they have tools to do it. Eventually the politicians get involved and some are more powerful than others and the less powerful get dumped on, which is not fair but entirely predictable.
If there could be some way to ensure that SRO-type housing could include people who can be seen as the same as other people except unhoused, and exclude the antisocial people from the neighborhood, you might be able to start building a foundation of trust that would allow facilities like these to be built in the quantity that is needed. Screening was done in “respectable” rooming houses and residential hotels in the past, and was also required for entrance into public housing. In the past we were not indignant or squeamish about this. I don’t even know if this is legal anymore but I don’t see any alternative.
This is exactly what I was trying to say. You were just way more articulate than I was. You are spot on. And your last paragraph is exactly the sort of argument that is happening in Boise right now.
Yes. While there may indeed between these two types, defining the poles is useful.
We need to accept that the second type of homeless person is a person largely not fit (in their current state) to be completely in charge of their own life.
I don't know why this would be controversial; we readily accept this proposition for criminals and those certified insane.
They need to be made wards of the state. I personally favour some kind of New Deal style work programme, in which they get housed and fed in exchange for doing some kind of useful or pseudo-useful work, with the intention being for them to "graduate" from the programme by means of getting a job, and their own room. Plenty of hand-holding at each step towards independence, and no sudden "cut-offs" in the support provided by the state either.
Yes, something in that vein. IDK it might have to be adapted somewhat to the circumstances of those who are genuinely troubled rather than just unemployed.
Where do you live that "voters are very sympathetic toward people like the guy living out of his car in my neighborhood and toward families struggling to get by in the face of absurd housing costs"? My experience in California Bay Area suburbs is that local residents are not in the least sympathetic to people living in cars or RVS because they can't afford housing, and want those people forcibly removed by the police.
If there was a guy living out of his car, who had some hard luck, but was working every day. Showering at the YMCA. etc... The neighbors, and most people, would support providing him with an affordable apartment next door to them, so that he didn't have to live in his car.
They wouldn't want someone with drug or mental health issues living in an affordable apartment next door to them.
So they are tolerable of the person. In fact, most people actively want to help the first guy. They are not tolerable of the latter.
In Silicon Valley, where I live, this problem actually does exist. RVs are proliferating on streets and people are living in them. These are not crazy drug addicts: they're people who can't afford anywhere else to live, because our housing prices are crazy because we don't allow new housing to be built.
And where I live, neighbors do not support people living in cars or RVs. They hate it. They're kicking the RV dwellers out of Palo Alto, RV dwellers could never live in Los Altos—they'd be evicted after a day or two, Mountain View is struggling with more and more RV dwellers and more and more neighborhood opposition.
You make some fair points, and I think with any situation people’s sympathies are pretty quickly stretched thin by parking scarcity, but I guess my point is that people are more sympathetic toward those who are (perceived as) only temporarily on the street, and actively trying to work through it, which is how the car-dweller I described looked to me.
RVs and tents (and certainly some cars I’ve seen) give the impression of permanence, of this-is-plan-A-ness, and I think that’s where you lose most people.
Why do you think the RV people stay in the Bay area? Family and friends? Kids in school? It's a sincere question; I can only guess at the answers. But I imagine that if I were in their shoes I'd drive my RV to Utah and work on affording an apartment there eventually
Right. Rory is not saying existing neighbourhood residents are necessarily tolerant of people living in their cars on their streets, but would be tolerant of the kind of people who tend to do that living in nearby affordable housing, as opposed to the kind of people who would never be able to hold onto even a car for long because they would sell it for drug money.
This is spot on, and I too often fall into this trap.
Vagrants are annoying. People do not like vagrants. People do not like being accosted when they are entering a store. They do not like hearing the wailing of mentally imbalanced people. They do not like the person who hasn't taken a shower for four months taking the metro.
But there is a lot more sympathy (but not total, just like not everyone is annoyed by the above) the person who lost their job and got kicked out of their house. The mother/father who broke up and has no place to live. Etc etc.
But a lot of homeless advocates basically seem to take the perspective that to most people basically seem like you can't really do anything about them (e.g., civil liberty concerns), or something that doesn't really make that much sense to most people (that person still won't be able to function that well in a house)
One qualification is that there is an overlap between these groups. And I do think new development probably displaces some people into homelessness. Lots of illegal boarding houses, substandard rentals, or cheap motels end up getting torn out by gentrification. Given that residents include some people existing on the margins of society - people with addiction issues, mental health issues, etc., their disappearance probably does cause some new camping and rough sleeping.
While I have very mixed feelings about camping bans or rules against sleeping in parks, etc., I am unconvinced by progressive arguments that this just makes the problem invisible without reducing numbers. It's a weirdly libertarian fallacy, that the same number of people will engage in a behavior whether it's illegal or not. But that isn't true for drug use, it wasn't true for alcohol use, I doubt it's true of camping bans. Yes, in response to a camping ban, some will just move to a different jurisdiction or try harder to evade law enforcement. But I'm not convinced the overall number wouldn't also fall.
Matt is hopelessly naive on homelessness. First, you can’t trust the numbers because advocates conflate them. The Homeless consist of two distinct populations. People who lost her job, who are going through a temporary bit of hard luck; they are sleeping on their friends couch or use an emergency shelter for a few days or a week. And the visible homeless, who are chronically un-housed or permanently living in shelters.
The first group are usually in and out of homelessness pretty quickly. But there is a rotating population, so there is always someone, just not always the same people.
Then you have the chronic homeless, which is what everyone sees, who are there almost entirely because of drugs and mental health issues.
The average person goes to San Francisco and says hey why do we have so many homeless people, committing crimes, doing drugs, defecating on the street…
The advocates come back and say, don’t stereotype them, only 50% of the homeless I have these issues, which is obviously different from what people perceive.
So you have both groups of people talking past each other.
Affordable housing, is only going to help that portion of the homeless population that we don’t see.
Part of the reason why our visible homeless population has increased so much in Cities, is that our society has got more permissive of drug use and disruptive behavior. There are two aspects to recovery, one is having the facilities and resources to treat it, and the other is having penalties, to discourage it. A carrot and a stick.
So while I agree with mats tennis, that we need a lot more Housing, we also need to know that all the housing in the world wouldn’t solve the issue that the average city resident has to deal with.
Disclaimer. I have done a lot of research on homelessness because in my city they are trying to move an emergency shelter from valuable down town real estate to a lower income residential neighborhood in my city. While I will not be directly affected by it, the area they want to put it on is right for development. It’s on a major transportation Corridor, and was on its way to being developed.
Matt acknowledges this concern that housing does not directly affect the crisis aspects of homelessness, specifically disruptive and visible homelessness.
But housing abundance would mostly solves the 'pipeline' problem of crisis homelessness. Homelessness itself makes latent mental health issues worse, be it from increased drug use, noise and air pollution, or a myriad of other stressors that go along with being sheltered on the street. Here in Portland, and I'm sure in many other cities, aggressive or violent behavior can lead to permanent exclusion from shelters and therefor accessible social services (Source: I work in homeless services). People don't get evicted one day and get aggressively disruptive the next, its a vicious cycle that gets worse the longer they remain unhoused.
If less people are entering homelessness then less people will be caught in these self destructive cycles, thereby making this crisis management aspect easier.
An October 2019 article in the Economist provides some figures. Homelessness in NYC is like an iceberg - mostly invisible.
"The pessimism is the result of three widely believed myths. The first is that the typical homeless person has lived on the street for years, while dealing with addiction, mental illness, or both. In fact, only 35% of the homeless have no shelter, and only one-third of those are classified as chronically homeless. The overwhelming majority of America’s homeless are in some sort of temporary shelter paid for by charities or government. This skews public perceptions of the problem. Most imagine the epicentre of the American homeless epidemic to be San Francisco—where there are 6,900 homeless people, of whom 4,400 live outdoors—instead of New York, where there are 79,000 homeless, of whom just 3,700 are unsheltered."
You have a point, but calling someone hopelessly naive is uncharitable. I'd say that there's a gap between the headline and the content, as you and others have pointed out, in that only some homelessness is about direct market malfunction.
Thank you, I appreciate you sharing your perspective and at least being willing to think about how we treat each other down here in the sewers of the internet: the comments section.
There's no reason we can't have a little fun, either; wildly exaggerate the real world impact of Matt's writing. It's not enough that he's naive, his bad take on homelessness is causing instability in Kashmir and acidifying the oceans. "I heard there was an earthquake in Peru." "Yeah, Matt wrote about zoning again, made all the historic home advocates mad and caused a 6.4 in the Andes..."
To tell the truth, he probably isn't that naïve either. There are just certain issues that rile me up more than others. Homelessness, wearing masks, and Mexican food east of the Rocky mountains are my hot button issues.
I think you're right that there is a subpopulation that requires more intensive intervention than housing alone (the Housing First cohort) but I think they have outsized sway in the public understanding of the issue because they experience a very visible form of homelessness. In Alameda County, they estimate roughly 16% of the homeless population fits this category, but they are the most expensive to serve and the most visible subpopulation. https://everyonehome.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/2018-EveryOne-Home-Strategic-Update-Executive-Summary.pdf
There are different estimates, and it may be that "the subpopulation that requires more intensive intervention" differs from location to location (I've seen it pegged as high as 25%). But for some reason people seem awfully resistant to the notion that when making it illegal to build housing makes housing very expensive, a portion of the population won't be able to afford housing. A lot of these skeptics would appear to be firm believers in the workings of the market in other areas.
take a homeless addict, give them housing, and they are no longer urinating on the street. if people knew that housing were available, it would cut down on pan handling because it would be much clearer the dude was asking for money for intoxicants
Where are you going to put that housing? Is that guy going to stay inside all day? What condition do you expect that housing to be in after say a week or two? Where is the guy going to purchase his drugs at? Where is he going to get the money to purchase the drugs?
I am an advocate of housing first. But it’s a lot more complex and just say provide housing.
"It’s a lot more complex and just say provide housing."
Yes and no, right? I know what you mean--that you cannot just stick someone with addiction, mental health issues, or whatever else, in a home by themselves and expect them to make it. But at the same time, the philosophy behind Housing First (as I understand it) says that *unless* you give someone a stable home, you cannot expect to help someone with their addiction, mental health issues, or whatever else.
I don't think Matt's really engaging with this question on the level of "what's the best way to provide supportive housing to the chronically homeless." Instead, he's saying that any solution to provide housing for the homeless is functionally impossible if there isn't adequate housing supply.
The argument is that housing is necessary but not sufficient to alleviate the visible homeless problem, right? And the argument is what *is* sufficient - lots of homeless advocates say that housing's basically enough, while more skeptical people believe that lots of the visible homeless will refuse the housing, trash the housing, etc. I lightly lean toward the latter camp, but I don't know how to address that issue without a lot of surveillance of homeless-in-their-provided-housing, which starts to just look like a fancy and expensive shelter.
I'd like examples of housing advocates who say housing is basically enough. All the housing advocates I know of (which is a lot, because I'm a YIMBY activist) say that housing is the start. The new or renovated housing for homeless people that I know about has in-house services for the residents.
Yes I am. As long as the housing also included the support that people needed. Was spread out across any city so there was no concentration of poverty.
David only mentioned housing, he did not mention the support part of it.
I support housing FIRST (that is housing, followed immediately by supportive services).
A hotel with 1 bathroom for 10-20 units would be a cheep cheep living arrangement. Some of the currently homeless would live there a drug addict which a family member who could put them up for example.
And that is because of regulations. requiring every unit to have a kitchen, a bathroom and a parking space makes it too expensive for a waitress to put her cousin up for a few months. Spending 500 a month for your drug addict relative is doable for a lot of people. Spending 2k isn’t.
You're going to put that housing in every city, wherever you can put multifamily housing, and all housing built or renovated for people who were living on the street comes with social services built in.
I am nervous about tying housing to services. You have rules like no drugs sounds sensible but you have roommate or partner with a drug problem and your banned.
It's not that simple. Much of this population actually prefers to live on the streets with their "freedom" compared to having to follow the minimal rules of shelter living.
The problem with shelters is the three Ps: partners, possessions, pets. A homeless person can't share a room with her boyfriend, can't bring her dog, can't bring her stuff. And since shelters are often short-term, you just made her lose her tent and her blankets, and pretty soon she'll be back on the street without them.
This is a good point. It's crazy that a shelter can't provide a safe storage space for possessions. I can see how the first 2 could be more problematic though.
But my understanding is that shelter's also don't provide any sense of "your own space" - even a tent encampment is at least "your own tent". Some percentage might still rather be outdoors in a tent than inside in a room of their own - but I expect many of them feel: small room > tent > shelter
Right. And then you get a situation where it can be very zero sum, if the housed aren't willing to change zoning laws and only authorize congregate shelters.
I would want to live outside instead of giving up my possessions for a bed in a communal room, where I had no safe place to store my possessions and was kicked out during the day. Wouldn't you?
It lets them clean. I suspect they also like that they can kick everyone out and then potentially apply some kind of selection to who they let back in, rather than try to single people out to kick out if their decisions about who is not safe to have in the shelter is contentious.
The data in that report is taken from the national point-in-time count, which, while not perfect, is a good standard to use (and reliably consistent over time).
Something to note is that increase in homelessness is almost entirely attributable to individual homelessness--rates of chronic homelessness have dropped overall, although those rates still remain high in places like CA, NY, MA. Also note this comment about "doubling up":
"Another measure of housing hardship is “doubling up,” or sharing the housing of others for economic reasons. In 2018, an estimated 4 million people were in these situations. Some of these people have fragile relationships with their hosts or face other challenges in the home, putting them at risk of homelessness. Over the last five years, this number of doubled up people has been trending downward but is still 12 percent higher than it was in 2007.
Over the last decade, the nation hasn’t made any real progress in reducing the number of Americans who are at risk of homelessness."
Oh I agree. Boarding house type accommodation would help many of the "temporarily embarrassed" type homeless, which would be good, because, as Matt mentions, many people develop problems due to being homeless rather than vice versa.
If you help this first type of homeless population, you will end up with fewer of the second type (chronic homeless).
You mention a "stick". But there is little point in punishing those in the street with e.g. jail time, which may actually be preferable to living on the street.
I think that what those who are truly living outside of society (yet also acting as a nuisance to that society) need, is something like New Deal style work camps. They need to be taken out of the environment they're in, given something productive, or at least productive-seeming (make-work is fine if there's no real work to be done, so long as it's not too obviously make-work) to do, given a roof of their heads, some amenities, a couple of hot meals a day etc.
But also supervision. Esp. with respect to drug use and other anti-social behaviours. After all, if these people were competent to be fully in charge of their own lives, most of them would not be in this situation. That's fine. People should have as much freedom as they can handle; no more.
The goal should not be to keep them in this state permanently, but to prepare them for full re-entry into society, with things like job-interviews set up for them, suits and haircuts provided, subsidised housing (possibly in a boarding house type situation) for a while after they get a job etc.
The benefit of the stick, aka jail time, is more to the people living and working in the neighborhood, in the case of a homeless person who's yelling and threatening people, aggressively panhandling or defecating on the sidewalks. Whether it's actually a carrot or a stick for those individuals is somewhat beside the point.
I do think providing structure, meaning and productiveness would greatly benefit people who are outside society. And if my city wanted to try that kind of program I'd support it. But it wouldn't change the fact that most of that other anti-social stuff should be directly discouraged by policing
Perhaps I was being too euphemistic. I wasn't suggesting going to the kind of institution I was suggesting would be strictly *optional*. (Though it could be, if someone wanted to voluntarily "check themselves in" to such a place.)
What I'm suggesting is that for those sentenced, for e.g. threatening people on the street, generally abusive and anti-social behaviour, that they would be "sentenced", so to speak, to spend time in the kind of place I'm suggesting, in order to reform them.
I suppose it would therefore be the "stick", but not really intended to be a punishment per se. A way of removing those causing a nuisance and turning them into people who will not cause a nuisance, both for their own benefit and for society's.
1. Would not pass any kind of legal muster here in the US. I guess you could try to make it work if there's a defined sentence, aka 1 month for repeated vagrancy, 2 months for another offense, etc. But you cannot do indefinite sentences- they were common for decades in the mid 20th century, but were federally outlawed in the 80s, and in any case would not fly Constitutionally now.
2. ....some of these people are simply not functional to work in a work camp man. The feces-smeared, the alien worms have invaded my brain types are not going to be able to build a trail or what have you
This sort of acts like the real issue with homelessness is aesthetic. I think Matt is clear that we still need welfare state programs that would help the chronically homeless deal with a more complicated set of issues they may face. The way to do that is get more people housed and expand the tax base. Pick the low hanging fruit, increase human welfare, and then focus on the thornier problems.
I basically agree, but the issue is that law enforcement is not a panacea. You probably can't detain anyone arrested for public drug usage or defecation for very long, and then they're back out again. Arresting the same group of people every week is not a solution. And if you lengthened the sentences- so now we're just going to detain them in jail forever? It simply switches the expense to the taxpayer, jail and three meals a day ain't cheap.
I think there's some room for more aggressive psychiatric detentions, and better-funded state mental hospitals, but I'm a bit uncomfortable going in that direction
I think just like we need a continuum of housing, we probably need a continuum of intervention options, some forced (jail being the most extreme). I agree that it makes me a bit uncomfortable though.
Except if the driving cause of chronic homelessness were drug abuse, you would expect California to have the biggest drug abuse problems (they clearly have the biggest population of chronic/unsheltered homeless people). But California is not nearly as high on measures of drug abuse as other states with much smaller chronically unhoused populations... https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/opioids/opioid-summaries-by-state
But I think there’s other factors as well. The other states, aren’t as tolerant as some of the social issues. And if you look at homelessness per capita, I think you could make the argument that permissiveness is related.
I don't think social tolerance explains why New York state has a homeless population 5x NJ, Pennsylvania, and Illinois... seems to me the much more salient difference is major cities in those states have more slack in their housing markets.
See the reply (or below) above from RunnyEggYolks It sums up my thinking on the matter exactly. Thank god there are people smarter than me. He hit the nail on the head.
I think the housing debate would be more sensible of more people would understand that new housing is like new cars—it’s going to be aimed at customers of above-average means, while “used” stock fills in the rest of the market. Housing even has a much longer useful life than cars.
This recent increase in the price of used cars is bad, but imagine what would have happened to the market if people could stop manufacturers from making as many new cars as the market could bear.
(I do agree with many of the commenters that a housing-affordability strategy is more useful for the rent-burdened, those who are in crowded homes, and those who are transitionally homeless than the chronically, visibly homeless—but that’s a huge population. And if they are better able to help themselves social services can concentrate on people who couldn’t manage to make rent however cheap.)
If you walk the streets of SF, the people living on the streets are not just people who can't make rent.
There's definitely a large number of people with drug problems, or mental health problems, or some other unknown problem that causes them to be passed out in the middle of the day on the sidewalk with no shoes on.
This article needs to answer the question "What fraction of these homeless people have drug problems or mental health problems?"
They will not tell you this. The numbers are collected in a way to purposely deceive you, In fact, they stopped recording this in the annual Homelessness report to Congress documents.
There have been several analysis done by newspapers and other groups, which show very high numbers, but these are never publicized.
Walk around in San Francisco, and trust your eyes.
Can't make a chicken omelette without breaking some eggs, and killing a chicken.
Solve both problems at once. Take them out of the environment they're in, provide them accommodation, amenities, food etc.
And work... if not fit for real work - make-work is OK so long as it's not too obvious.
I'm thinking about a New Deal style work camp situation.
People who are not competent to run their own lives need help, assistance, and also some supervision and maybe some "tough love" with respect to overcoming drug addiction etc.
The goal should be to return them to normal society after a period, with plenty of assistance provided toward this (see my other posts today).
This makes the civil libertarian in me very nervous. Who decides when someone needs to be go to "work camp" and when they can get out?
I'm not saying it might not be the best out of bad solutions, just that there are some significant downsides to expanding that kind of power over people.
If someone is walking down the street his pants stained with his own feces, open infected sores, screaming that the CIA is stealing his thoughts - he needs to be locked up.
If it was a little old lady with dementia we'd send her to the memory care unit. But someone equally impaired but 35 years old and some are like, "Maybe he chose to live that way? Who is to say its really wrong?"
Yes I suppose these kind of ideas *should* make people a bit nervous.
Still, to double down on it a bit:
we are already comfortable with removing from society some classes of people, including criminals and those judged to be insane.
And to be fair, the people we're talking about (not all homeless, just the "chronic homeless" with many problems, who typically do not help themselves), often technically *are* criminals. At least in the sense that it's illegal to do meth and scream abuse at people.
Not to mention that in many places that are still actual laws against vagrancy on the books.
And many would likely also meet the criteria to be sectioned, it's just that we don't necessarily want to throw every crazy person on the street in a mental institution, and probably don't have the places anyway.
So we could probably operate through existing legal pathways?
"we are already comfortable with removing from society some classes of people, including criminals and those judged to be insane."
I'm not at all comfortable with how many criminals we "remove from society." I tend to think we use prison far to much and would be better off as a society if we weren't so willing to lock people up. I would be even less comfortable doing it when the reason we're taking someones liberty away is we don't like the way they look/smell/sound.
Sure, but there are still the hard core- if Moon Boots is throwing D batteries down the hall at his neighbors, he is going to get kicked out. Providing safe housing and providing housing as a right aren't completely compatible.
See my comments on Rory's comment above, but i) there is good data on this kind of stuff, and ii) the data shows that the level of chronically homeless is steady or decreasing (although not where you are in CA) while the levels of individual homelessness are increasing, as well as the number of "at risk for homelessness" (people who are doubling up/in long-term unaffordable living situations).
Also, I know what you're getting at with your comment, but it's worth noting that a person you see passed out on the street in the middle of the day isn't necessarily homeless. I volunteer at a neighborhood kitchen, and many of the people there live in supportive housing in the neighborhood. I also see many of the same people spending time outside/on corners, etc. and a casual observer might conclude they are "homeless" when in fact they have a place to live.
This seems something of a strawman. I don't believe anybody is claiming that people suffering from mental illness or drug addiction don't sometimes become homeless, but:
A) It's hardly the case that such ailments inevitably lead to homelessness; indeed, there are questions of causation: homelessness causes deleterious effects on human health, including, naturally, mental health.
B) The geographic correlation between housing unaffordability and homelessness seems strong, as Matt points out. Regions characterized by the most severe affordability issues appear to associated with more homelessness than less expensive areas.
C) The phenomenon you mention has been studied far beyond merely eyeballing the streets of cities, and the consensus appears increasingly strong that homelessness is indeed first and foremost an economic issue:
Much as it’s always a dicey plan to extrapolate from NYC to the rest of the country on any number of issues, using SF and LA as a starting point for discussions of homelessness is problematic because California faces tbe someone unique problem due to its climate of being a _destination_ for the severely mentally ill.
In much the same way as a cancer diagnosis can spell the end of your life’s savings in this country, if you are not generationally wealthy there are absolutely no good long term care options available to you if your sibling, spouse or child is schizophrenic. If you’re lucky, their symptoms can be somewhat managed with medication and they can and will stay at home with you, but if not? Well, you buy them a bus ticket to somewhere that the climate won’t quickly kill them if they’re sleeping on the streets, and in this country that means San Francisco first and foremost.
Depends on what you mean by "overwhelming majority".
A new count of the homeless, released earlier this week, tallied a 2 percent rise from two years ago -- from 6,248 to 6,377 people. After the one-night count on Jan. 31, in a follow-up survey of homeless people, 31 percent noted that they became homeless outside San Francisco.
"That is close to a third of the people we counted," says Trent Rhorer, director of the San Francisco Human Services Agency. "It begs the question of why they came here; I don't know that the answer is necessarily one of homelessness."
I think part of the reason we don't tend to see it as a housing problem is the disconnect between the average homeless person we actually see and the overall homeless population. The homeless guy lying on the sidewalk on 9 am who smells strongly of booze and other less pleasant things - you identify him as homeless. The homeless guy sleeping in his car or the woods and showering at the gym, or in the shelter line early every night so he gets a slot, and working a full-time job - you would probably never know he was homeless. Not to say there's not a large number in the first category, but it's lower than the 90% most people would estimate, simply because of the homelessness they can actually "see".
Something that has continually frustrated me in discussions of homelessness is progressives’ seemingly willful conflation of two groups that the average person thinks of as being very different: There are people who are otherwise pretty normal aside from their lack of a place to live, and then there are those who are solidly asocial—often drug addled, schizophrenic, unwilling and perhaps genuinely unable to recognize the norms and laws of civilized society. In my experience, the average person has a lot more compassion and forbearance for the former group, and mostly wishes the latter group could be institutionalized, but progressives insist on lumping them together in their social taxonomy, and this ultimately prevents either group from being well served by the best of political intentions.
When I lived in San Francisco, there was a handful of unregulated parking spaces under the shade of some trees across the street from my apartment, and I remember a few weeks where there was a car parked there that never moved--in the mornings I saw a guy get out of the passenger side, swing open the door and stand behind it as a makeshift privacy wall, take a sort of towel bath, change his clothes, and then wait at the nearby bus stop to go wherever he went for the day before returning in the evening. It looked like he was going to work and trying his best to appear presentable while living out of his car. I admired his grit and felt a lot of sympathy for his circumstances, knowing that it would only take a few unlucky coincidences to put me in the same boat.
A month later, next to those same parking spaces, a rickety tent was erected and one afternoon I saw a man emerge, covered in cuts and abrasions, wearing nothing but moon boots and jean shorts stained with his own excrement. He would wander back and forth in the nearby crosswalk, going nowhere and screaming loudly at no one in particular. From the side of my bay window I could see my neighbors looking on with concern, and ultimately I called SFPD when he started throwing D batteries and cans of food at oncoming traffic.
I have no illusions that there is some uncrossable line between the situations of these two men. It’s entirely possible that the guy living out of his car might end up mentally ill and throwing soup at cars one of these days if his situation gets worse, and I concede that they are both subsumed under the spectrum of homelessness, but when my relatives from the east coast asked me about “the homeless situation” in the city, they were picturing Mr. Moon Boots, not the guy in his car just trying to get by. The same could be said of my neighbors’ conception of the problem, and mine too, because this is in fact how normal people conceive of the term. When Super Bowl 50 and its attendant influx of visitors came to the Bay Area, there wasn’t a sudden rush to purge struggling workers sleeping in their cars, but the crazies were hastily shuffled out of sight because that’s what bothers normal people.
But if you ask progressive minded folks about homelessness, or if you listen to some of the otherwise excellent Weeds episodes on the subject, there is almost no mention of this distinction. Rather, they are quick to point out that homelessness is a spectrum, and care is taken with language to describe those “experiencing homelessness” as mostly families whose needs could be met by providing subsidies and addressing zoning issues and other systemic problems in the housing market. This is all well and good (and true!) but it takes great pains to avoid the normal person’s complaints of people defecating on the sidewalk, screaming at nonexistent things, breaking into cars, using IV drugs in broad daylight, and otherwise roaming the streets stark raving mad. When normal people speak of homelessness they are really talking about *vagrancy* rather than housing insecurity, but that word (and indeed the very concept) has fallen out of fashion, and so the two are commingled under a single genus and spoken about in purely academic and economic terms. But they have very different underlying problems, and a lack of housing is one of the only common denominators between them. Both need shelter, of course, but car-dwelling families by and large don’t need institutionalized psychiatric care, and offering to help a can-thrower update his résumé and practice his interviewing skills won’t get you very far.
I think I know why progressives insist on the conflation, and it is a very reasonable one on its face. It’s the same reason that gay issues became gay and lesbian issues, then LGB, then LGBT, then LGBTQ, then LGBTQIA, and finally the usefully expansive LGBTQIA+. There is political power in the concatenation of identities, and where 10 stalks may be easily snapped individually, bundle them together and they are strong. I think progressives rightly recognize that voters are very sympathetic toward people like the guy living out of his car in my neighborhood and toward families struggling to get by in the face of absurd housing costs, but not so sympathetic to asocial vagrants. Progressives want the state to help *both* groups, and at the highest level of generality if you close one eye you can conceive of both as mere housing problems at their root, and so they are bundled together into a Hobson’s choice--bold and expansive programs are proposed in the hopes of making societal changes that are sweeping enough to address the problems of car-dwellers *and* can-throwers.
As I said above I think this is done with the best of intentions, but once the ballot initiatives are approved this conflation comes back to bite progressives, and they seem baffled that the same voters who say they want to address the problem don’t want new shelters built in their neighborhood. I often see this interpreted cynically to imply that kindhearted voters in liberal areas are in fact closet NIMBYs, and undoubtedly this is true for some subset of people, but I think the majority are just responding rationally to the conflation that has been sold to them. Of course they don’t want a building full of drug addled can-throwers moving in next to them. No one does! And the irony is that statistically this is not likely to happen, since most of the homeless population is much closer to car-dwellers than can-throwers, but by then it’s too late to make that case, and this is the other side of the conflation coin. You don’t get to conflate housing insecurity and vagrancy for the sake of political expediency, but then turn around and disaggregate the two when it comes time to convince residents of orderly neighborhoods that you aren’t about to unleash bedlam upon them.
If progressives disaggregated the two from the start (the way that normal people always have) they could probably get more initiatives passed and get more buy-in when it comes time to build. If you asked me whether I would mind having a shelter built in my district and stipulated that it would *only* be for car-dwelling type families who are trying their best to make it in a ruthless housing market, I would be on board, and I think a lot of my neighbors would be too. If you asked me whether I would commit to more local funding for getting asocial vagrants off the streets and institutionalized in a setting designed to address their unique problems, far away from me, I would definitely be on board. But progressives seem bent on putting both these populations in one big bag, and as long as that’s the case I don’t trust them to constructively address the problems of either group, and certainly not to try out their grand social experiments in my neighborhood.
Yes, and the man in the car may have found a super-cheap rooming house a useful way station (it would have a real shower), but any rooming house that would be tolerable to live in/near would have to kick out the can guy.
Mr. Moon Boots
I liked your comment because I think there you make a good point. That being said, I think we're missing the forest for the trees here. Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Illinois have a combined population of ~86.5 million people compared to New York's 19.5 million people but have fewer homeless people than NY. And I don't think that its the weather in NY that's bringing people there.
Unless we think there is something specific about NY that makes people crazy, Matt's point is that we could solve an enormous amount of homelessness by just providing cheaper places to live. It wouldn't solve it all, because the point about mental illness is true. But I don't see how you reconcile that comparison without acknowledging the way to address this for the most people is to address the costs of housing and not mental health.
Oh, I agree that addressing housing costs is the way to do the most good for the most people, and a lot of the imbedded problems vanish or become more manageable when there’s just more housing. Matt’s takes in this sphere are part of why I subscribed. My point is mostly a semantic/branding one, but I think it’s important for voter trust and actual policy implementation:
-I think most people use the word “homeless” to refer to general vagrancy, whereas when progressives use that same word they mean a spectrum encompassing a much wider set of people that average folks might not even recognize are struggling.
-Because of these differing definitions, when an average person hears a progressive politician or commentator talking about homelessness, they are often interested in a solution and may vote for initiatives that claim they will address it, only to find later this means a shelter proposed for building near them. Because they’re operating on normie definition, they assume a building full of “homeless” means a bunch of riffraff, and no one wants that. They also see that per their definition of homeless, nothing has been done—vagrancy remains the same or worse.
-Progressives can either embark on a project of educating everyone on the more thorough definition of homelessness and its many nuances and intersections, or understand the connotations of the folk definition and tackle it as a separate topic. People are (I think) generally supportive of cheaper housing and generally intolerant of vagrants. Even if the galaxy brain in you understands the spectral definition and interconnectedness of it all, resist the urge to talk about it in those terms, and treat it as two distinct problems, because that is how normal people conceive of them.
The situation is not improved by the perception (or fact) that sponsors of these projects and the City government that enables them, cannot seem to be trustworthy to host communities when it comes to social service facilities, However much is said about responsible ownership, no kind or quality of management can prevent their difficult clients from hanging around on the streets outside the facility, creating an unsafe (or actually dangerous) situation, especially for women. After all, it’s not like the City is going to remove the facility if it turns out their promises aren’t being kept. People know that the only negotiating leverage they have is to keep them out in the first place, and they have tools to do it. Eventually the politicians get involved and some are more powerful than others and the less powerful get dumped on, which is not fair but entirely predictable.
If there could be some way to ensure that SRO-type housing could include people who can be seen as the same as other people except unhoused, and exclude the antisocial people from the neighborhood, you might be able to start building a foundation of trust that would allow facilities like these to be built in the quantity that is needed. Screening was done in “respectable” rooming houses and residential hotels in the past, and was also required for entrance into public housing. In the past we were not indignant or squeamish about this. I don’t even know if this is legal anymore but I don’t see any alternative.
This is exactly what I was trying to say. You were just way more articulate than I was. You are spot on. And your last paragraph is exactly the sort of argument that is happening in Boise right now.
Yes. While there may indeed between these two types, defining the poles is useful.
We need to accept that the second type of homeless person is a person largely not fit (in their current state) to be completely in charge of their own life.
I don't know why this would be controversial; we readily accept this proposition for criminals and those certified insane.
They need to be made wards of the state. I personally favour some kind of New Deal style work programme, in which they get housed and fed in exchange for doing some kind of useful or pseudo-useful work, with the intention being for them to "graduate" from the programme by means of getting a job, and their own room. Plenty of hand-holding at each step towards independence, and no sudden "cut-offs" in the support provided by the state either.
Are you thinking of something l like a CCC camp?
Yes, something in that vein. IDK it might have to be adapted somewhat to the circumstances of those who are genuinely troubled rather than just unemployed.
*meant to say "indeed be a spectrum of homelessness between these two types"
Where do you live that "voters are very sympathetic toward people like the guy living out of his car in my neighborhood and toward families struggling to get by in the face of absurd housing costs"? My experience in California Bay Area suburbs is that local residents are not in the least sympathetic to people living in cars or RVS because they can't afford housing, and want those people forcibly removed by the police.
They would be tolerable and sympathetic to give the guy living out of his car, who works every day an affordable apartment or house next door to them.
Could you clarify that? I don't understand what you're saying.
If there was a guy living out of his car, who had some hard luck, but was working every day. Showering at the YMCA. etc... The neighbors, and most people, would support providing him with an affordable apartment next door to them, so that he didn't have to live in his car.
They wouldn't want someone with drug or mental health issues living in an affordable apartment next door to them.
So they are tolerable of the person. In fact, most people actively want to help the first guy. They are not tolerable of the latter.
In Silicon Valley, where I live, this problem actually does exist. RVs are proliferating on streets and people are living in them. These are not crazy drug addicts: they're people who can't afford anywhere else to live, because our housing prices are crazy because we don't allow new housing to be built.
And where I live, neighbors do not support people living in cars or RVs. They hate it. They're kicking the RV dwellers out of Palo Alto, RV dwellers could never live in Los Altos—they'd be evicted after a day or two, Mountain View is struggling with more and more RV dwellers and more and more neighborhood opposition.
You make some fair points, and I think with any situation people’s sympathies are pretty quickly stretched thin by parking scarcity, but I guess my point is that people are more sympathetic toward those who are (perceived as) only temporarily on the street, and actively trying to work through it, which is how the car-dweller I described looked to me.
RVs and tents (and certainly some cars I’ve seen) give the impression of permanence, of this-is-plan-A-ness, and I think that’s where you lose most people.
Why do you think the RV people stay in the Bay area? Family and friends? Kids in school? It's a sincere question; I can only guess at the answers. But I imagine that if I were in their shoes I'd drive my RV to Utah and work on affording an apartment there eventually
Right. Rory is not saying existing neighbourhood residents are necessarily tolerant of people living in their cars on their streets, but would be tolerant of the kind of people who tend to do that living in nearby affordable housing, as opposed to the kind of people who would never be able to hold onto even a car for long because they would sell it for drug money.
I think that Rory is wildly off-base with that, no offense intended.
This is spot on, and I too often fall into this trap.
Vagrants are annoying. People do not like vagrants. People do not like being accosted when they are entering a store. They do not like hearing the wailing of mentally imbalanced people. They do not like the person who hasn't taken a shower for four months taking the metro.
But there is a lot more sympathy (but not total, just like not everyone is annoyed by the above) the person who lost their job and got kicked out of their house. The mother/father who broke up and has no place to live. Etc etc.
But a lot of homeless advocates basically seem to take the perspective that to most people basically seem like you can't really do anything about them (e.g., civil liberty concerns), or something that doesn't really make that much sense to most people (that person still won't be able to function that well in a house)
This is a really good analysis!
One qualification is that there is an overlap between these groups. And I do think new development probably displaces some people into homelessness. Lots of illegal boarding houses, substandard rentals, or cheap motels end up getting torn out by gentrification. Given that residents include some people existing on the margins of society - people with addiction issues, mental health issues, etc., their disappearance probably does cause some new camping and rough sleeping.
While I have very mixed feelings about camping bans or rules against sleeping in parks, etc., I am unconvinced by progressive arguments that this just makes the problem invisible without reducing numbers. It's a weirdly libertarian fallacy, that the same number of people will engage in a behavior whether it's illegal or not. But that isn't true for drug use, it wasn't true for alcohol use, I doubt it's true of camping bans. Yes, in response to a camping ban, some will just move to a different jurisdiction or try harder to evade law enforcement. But I'm not convinced the overall number wouldn't also fall.
Matt is hopelessly naive on homelessness. First, you can’t trust the numbers because advocates conflate them. The Homeless consist of two distinct populations. People who lost her job, who are going through a temporary bit of hard luck; they are sleeping on their friends couch or use an emergency shelter for a few days or a week. And the visible homeless, who are chronically un-housed or permanently living in shelters.
The first group are usually in and out of homelessness pretty quickly. But there is a rotating population, so there is always someone, just not always the same people.
Then you have the chronic homeless, which is what everyone sees, who are there almost entirely because of drugs and mental health issues.
The average person goes to San Francisco and says hey why do we have so many homeless people, committing crimes, doing drugs, defecating on the street…
The advocates come back and say, don’t stereotype them, only 50% of the homeless I have these issues, which is obviously different from what people perceive.
So you have both groups of people talking past each other.
Affordable housing, is only going to help that portion of the homeless population that we don’t see.
Part of the reason why our visible homeless population has increased so much in Cities, is that our society has got more permissive of drug use and disruptive behavior. There are two aspects to recovery, one is having the facilities and resources to treat it, and the other is having penalties, to discourage it. A carrot and a stick.
So while I agree with mats tennis, that we need a lot more Housing, we also need to know that all the housing in the world wouldn’t solve the issue that the average city resident has to deal with.
Disclaimer. I have done a lot of research on homelessness because in my city they are trying to move an emergency shelter from valuable down town real estate to a lower income residential neighborhood in my city. While I will not be directly affected by it, the area they want to put it on is right for development. It’s on a major transportation Corridor, and was on its way to being developed.
Matt acknowledges this concern that housing does not directly affect the crisis aspects of homelessness, specifically disruptive and visible homelessness.
But housing abundance would mostly solves the 'pipeline' problem of crisis homelessness. Homelessness itself makes latent mental health issues worse, be it from increased drug use, noise and air pollution, or a myriad of other stressors that go along with being sheltered on the street. Here in Portland, and I'm sure in many other cities, aggressive or violent behavior can lead to permanent exclusion from shelters and therefor accessible social services (Source: I work in homeless services). People don't get evicted one day and get aggressively disruptive the next, its a vicious cycle that gets worse the longer they remain unhoused.
If less people are entering homelessness then less people will be caught in these self destructive cycles, thereby making this crisis management aspect easier.
An October 2019 article in the Economist provides some figures. Homelessness in NYC is like an iceberg - mostly invisible.
"The pessimism is the result of three widely believed myths. The first is that the typical homeless person has lived on the street for years, while dealing with addiction, mental illness, or both. In fact, only 35% of the homeless have no shelter, and only one-third of those are classified as chronically homeless. The overwhelming majority of America’s homeless are in some sort of temporary shelter paid for by charities or government. This skews public perceptions of the problem. Most imagine the epicentre of the American homeless epidemic to be San Francisco—where there are 6,900 homeless people, of whom 4,400 live outdoors—instead of New York, where there are 79,000 homeless, of whom just 3,700 are unsheltered."
Note that SF is about 1/10th the size of NYC, so per capita, the number of homeless is not wildly different.
You have a point, but calling someone hopelessly naive is uncharitable. I'd say that there's a gap between the headline and the content, as you and others have pointed out, in that only some homelessness is about direct market malfunction.
You are right. I would probably edit that if I could. Thank you for calling me out on it. I would say... naïve and leave out "hopelessly"
Thank you, I appreciate you sharing your perspective and at least being willing to think about how we treat each other down here in the sewers of the internet: the comments section.
There's no reason we can't have a little fun, either; wildly exaggerate the real world impact of Matt's writing. It's not enough that he's naive, his bad take on homelessness is causing instability in Kashmir and acidifying the oceans. "I heard there was an earthquake in Peru." "Yeah, Matt wrote about zoning again, made all the historic home advocates mad and caused a 6.4 in the Andes..."
To tell the truth, he probably isn't that naïve either. There are just certain issues that rile me up more than others. Homelessness, wearing masks, and Mexican food east of the Rocky mountains are my hot button issues.
I think you're right that there is a subpopulation that requires more intensive intervention than housing alone (the Housing First cohort) but I think they have outsized sway in the public understanding of the issue because they experience a very visible form of homelessness. In Alameda County, they estimate roughly 16% of the homeless population fits this category, but they are the most expensive to serve and the most visible subpopulation. https://everyonehome.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/2018-EveryOne-Home-Strategic-Update-Executive-Summary.pdf
This.
There are different estimates, and it may be that "the subpopulation that requires more intensive intervention" differs from location to location (I've seen it pegged as high as 25%). But for some reason people seem awfully resistant to the notion that when making it illegal to build housing makes housing very expensive, a portion of the population won't be able to afford housing. A lot of these skeptics would appear to be firm believers in the workings of the market in other areas.
take a homeless addict, give them housing, and they are no longer urinating on the street. if people knew that housing were available, it would cut down on pan handling because it would be much clearer the dude was asking for money for intoxicants
Where are you going to put that housing? Is that guy going to stay inside all day? What condition do you expect that housing to be in after say a week or two? Where is the guy going to purchase his drugs at? Where is he going to get the money to purchase the drugs?
I am an advocate of housing first. But it’s a lot more complex and just say provide housing.
"It’s a lot more complex and just say provide housing."
Yes and no, right? I know what you mean--that you cannot just stick someone with addiction, mental health issues, or whatever else, in a home by themselves and expect them to make it. But at the same time, the philosophy behind Housing First (as I understand it) says that *unless* you give someone a stable home, you cannot expect to help someone with their addiction, mental health issues, or whatever else.
I don't think Matt's really engaging with this question on the level of "what's the best way to provide supportive housing to the chronically homeless." Instead, he's saying that any solution to provide housing for the homeless is functionally impossible if there isn't adequate housing supply.
The argument is that housing is necessary but not sufficient to alleviate the visible homeless problem, right? And the argument is what *is* sufficient - lots of homeless advocates say that housing's basically enough, while more skeptical people believe that lots of the visible homeless will refuse the housing, trash the housing, etc. I lightly lean toward the latter camp, but I don't know how to address that issue without a lot of surveillance of homeless-in-their-provided-housing, which starts to just look like a fancy and expensive shelter.
I'd like examples of housing advocates who say housing is basically enough. All the housing advocates I know of (which is a lot, because I'm a YIMBY activist) say that housing is the start. The new or renovated housing for homeless people that I know about has in-house services for the residents.
>>>I am an advocate of housing first.
You sure about that?
Yes I am. As long as the housing also included the support that people needed. Was spread out across any city so there was no concentration of poverty.
David only mentioned housing, he did not mention the support part of it.
I support housing FIRST (that is housing, followed immediately by supportive services).
A hotel with 1 bathroom for 10-20 units would be a cheep cheep living arrangement. Some of the currently homeless would live there a drug addict which a family member who could put them up for example.
Alas, in the places in the US where homelessness is the worst, there is no "cheap cheap" housing arrangement.
And that is because of regulations. requiring every unit to have a kitchen, a bathroom and a parking space makes it too expensive for a waitress to put her cousin up for a few months. Spending 500 a month for your drug addict relative is doable for a lot of people. Spending 2k isn’t.
You're going to put that housing in every city, wherever you can put multifamily housing, and all housing built or renovated for people who were living on the street comes with social services built in.
I am nervous about tying housing to services. You have rules like no drugs sounds sensible but you have roommate or partner with a drug problem and your banned.
You don't tie housing to social services. You have services in the building for residents.
It's not that simple. Much of this population actually prefers to live on the streets with their "freedom" compared to having to follow the minimal rules of shelter living.
The problem with shelters is the three Ps: partners, possessions, pets. A homeless person can't share a room with her boyfriend, can't bring her dog, can't bring her stuff. And since shelters are often short-term, you just made her lose her tent and her blankets, and pretty soon she'll be back on the street without them.
This is a good point. It's crazy that a shelter can't provide a safe storage space for possessions. I can see how the first 2 could be more problematic though.
But my understanding is that shelter's also don't provide any sense of "your own space" - even a tent encampment is at least "your own tent". Some percentage might still rather be outdoors in a tent than inside in a room of their own - but I expect many of them feel: small room > tent > shelter
Right. And then you get a situation where it can be very zero sum, if the housed aren't willing to change zoning laws and only authorize congregate shelters.
I would want to live outside instead of giving up my possessions for a bed in a communal room, where I had no safe place to store my possessions and was kicked out during the day. Wouldn't you?
Why do the shelters kick people out during the day? What's the logic of it?
It lets them clean. I suspect they also like that they can kick everyone out and then potentially apply some kind of selection to who they let back in, rather than try to single people out to kick out if their decisions about who is not safe to have in the shelter is contentious.
This.
I’m not familiar with Alameda county, though I would be skeptical about the 16%. your link just doesn’t provide enough data.
It's a little hard to compare apples-to-apples, since the Alameda report is referencing the 16% who need supportive housing, but the 16% number is almost exactly the same as the percentage of "chronically homeless" nationally in 2019: https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-2020/ (see the first bar chart).
The data in that report is taken from the national point-in-time count, which, while not perfect, is a good standard to use (and reliably consistent over time).
Something to note is that increase in homelessness is almost entirely attributable to individual homelessness--rates of chronic homelessness have dropped overall, although those rates still remain high in places like CA, NY, MA. Also note this comment about "doubling up":
"Another measure of housing hardship is “doubling up,” or sharing the housing of others for economic reasons. In 2018, an estimated 4 million people were in these situations. Some of these people have fragile relationships with their hosts or face other challenges in the home, putting them at risk of homelessness. Over the last five years, this number of doubled up people has been trending downward but is still 12 percent higher than it was in 2007.
Over the last decade, the nation hasn’t made any real progress in reducing the number of Americans who are at risk of homelessness."
" I agree with mats tennis"
I'm guessing: "Matt's thesis"?
Probably! I believe Rory dictates his comments on his phone, leading to occasional misinterpretations.
Exactly... I was eating breakfast at the hotel... I try and catch some, but ehhhh... Im lazy. Its become my calling card!
I was thinking maybe tenet?
"tenets," anyone?
Was meant to be tenet... dam mis-dictations are hard to spot when they don't highlight. Also, the writing is so tiny on my phone.
Oh I agree. Boarding house type accommodation would help many of the "temporarily embarrassed" type homeless, which would be good, because, as Matt mentions, many people develop problems due to being homeless rather than vice versa.
If you help this first type of homeless population, you will end up with fewer of the second type (chronic homeless).
You mention a "stick". But there is little point in punishing those in the street with e.g. jail time, which may actually be preferable to living on the street.
I think that what those who are truly living outside of society (yet also acting as a nuisance to that society) need, is something like New Deal style work camps. They need to be taken out of the environment they're in, given something productive, or at least productive-seeming (make-work is fine if there's no real work to be done, so long as it's not too obviously make-work) to do, given a roof of their heads, some amenities, a couple of hot meals a day etc.
But also supervision. Esp. with respect to drug use and other anti-social behaviours. After all, if these people were competent to be fully in charge of their own lives, most of them would not be in this situation. That's fine. People should have as much freedom as they can handle; no more.
The goal should not be to keep them in this state permanently, but to prepare them for full re-entry into society, with things like job-interviews set up for them, suits and haircuts provided, subsidised housing (possibly in a boarding house type situation) for a while after they get a job etc.
The benefit of the stick, aka jail time, is more to the people living and working in the neighborhood, in the case of a homeless person who's yelling and threatening people, aggressively panhandling or defecating on the sidewalks. Whether it's actually a carrot or a stick for those individuals is somewhat beside the point.
I do think providing structure, meaning and productiveness would greatly benefit people who are outside society. And if my city wanted to try that kind of program I'd support it. But it wouldn't change the fact that most of that other anti-social stuff should be directly discouraged by policing
Perhaps I was being too euphemistic. I wasn't suggesting going to the kind of institution I was suggesting would be strictly *optional*. (Though it could be, if someone wanted to voluntarily "check themselves in" to such a place.)
What I'm suggesting is that for those sentenced, for e.g. threatening people on the street, generally abusive and anti-social behaviour, that they would be "sentenced", so to speak, to spend time in the kind of place I'm suggesting, in order to reform them.
I suppose it would therefore be the "stick", but not really intended to be a punishment per se. A way of removing those causing a nuisance and turning them into people who will not cause a nuisance, both for their own benefit and for society's.
1. Would not pass any kind of legal muster here in the US. I guess you could try to make it work if there's a defined sentence, aka 1 month for repeated vagrancy, 2 months for another offense, etc. But you cannot do indefinite sentences- they were common for decades in the mid 20th century, but were federally outlawed in the 80s, and in any case would not fly Constitutionally now.
2. ....some of these people are simply not functional to work in a work camp man. The feces-smeared, the alien worms have invaded my brain types are not going to be able to build a trail or what have you
This sort of acts like the real issue with homelessness is aesthetic. I think Matt is clear that we still need welfare state programs that would help the chronically homeless deal with a more complicated set of issues they may face. The way to do that is get more people housed and expand the tax base. Pick the low hanging fruit, increase human welfare, and then focus on the thornier problems.
I basically agree, but the issue is that law enforcement is not a panacea. You probably can't detain anyone arrested for public drug usage or defecation for very long, and then they're back out again. Arresting the same group of people every week is not a solution. And if you lengthened the sentences- so now we're just going to detain them in jail forever? It simply switches the expense to the taxpayer, jail and three meals a day ain't cheap.
I think there's some room for more aggressive psychiatric detentions, and better-funded state mental hospitals, but I'm a bit uncomfortable going in that direction
I think just like we need a continuum of housing, we probably need a continuum of intervention options, some forced (jail being the most extreme). I agree that it makes me a bit uncomfortable though.
Except if the driving cause of chronic homelessness were drug abuse, you would expect California to have the biggest drug abuse problems (they clearly have the biggest population of chronic/unsheltered homeless people). But California is not nearly as high on measures of drug abuse as other states with much smaller chronically unhoused populations... https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/opioids/opioid-summaries-by-state
But I think there’s other factors as well. The other states, aren’t as tolerant as some of the social issues. And if you look at homelessness per capita, I think you could make the argument that permissiveness is related.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/727847/homelessness-rate-in-the-us-by-state/
I’m not saying that housing affordability is not a factor.
Also, like a couple of people of said. There could be a different ratio of chronic homelessness with hardluck Homelessness in different states.
I don't think social tolerance explains why New York state has a homeless population 5x NJ, Pennsylvania, and Illinois... seems to me the much more salient difference is major cities in those states have more slack in their housing markets.
See the reply (or below) above from RunnyEggYolks It sums up my thinking on the matter exactly. Thank god there are people smarter than me. He hit the nail on the head.
I think the housing debate would be more sensible of more people would understand that new housing is like new cars—it’s going to be aimed at customers of above-average means, while “used” stock fills in the rest of the market. Housing even has a much longer useful life than cars.
This recent increase in the price of used cars is bad, but imagine what would have happened to the market if people could stop manufacturers from making as many new cars as the market could bear.
(I do agree with many of the commenters that a housing-affordability strategy is more useful for the rent-burdened, those who are in crowded homes, and those who are transitionally homeless than the chronically, visibly homeless—but that’s a huge population. And if they are better able to help themselves social services can concentrate on people who couldn’t manage to make rent however cheap.)
If you walk the streets of SF, the people living on the streets are not just people who can't make rent.
There's definitely a large number of people with drug problems, or mental health problems, or some other unknown problem that causes them to be passed out in the middle of the day on the sidewalk with no shoes on.
This article needs to answer the question "What fraction of these homeless people have drug problems or mental health problems?"
They will not tell you this. The numbers are collected in a way to purposely deceive you, In fact, they stopped recording this in the annual Homelessness report to Congress documents.
There have been several analysis done by newspapers and other groups, which show very high numbers, but these are never publicized.
Walk around in San Francisco, and trust your eyes.
I'd also question whether or not the drug / mental health problems were caused or exacerbated by being homeless.
Either way, it's easier to overcome those types of problems housed vs. being on the street.
It's a chicken and egg problem. Mental health and substance abuse issues are a lot easier to deal with when you have a roof over your head.
Can't make a chicken omelette without breaking some eggs, and killing a chicken.
Solve both problems at once. Take them out of the environment they're in, provide them accommodation, amenities, food etc.
And work... if not fit for real work - make-work is OK so long as it's not too obvious.
I'm thinking about a New Deal style work camp situation.
People who are not competent to run their own lives need help, assistance, and also some supervision and maybe some "tough love" with respect to overcoming drug addiction etc.
The goal should be to return them to normal society after a period, with plenty of assistance provided toward this (see my other posts today).
This makes the civil libertarian in me very nervous. Who decides when someone needs to be go to "work camp" and when they can get out?
I'm not saying it might not be the best out of bad solutions, just that there are some significant downsides to expanding that kind of power over people.
If someone is walking down the street his pants stained with his own feces, open infected sores, screaming that the CIA is stealing his thoughts - he needs to be locked up.
If it was a little old lady with dementia we'd send her to the memory care unit. But someone equally impaired but 35 years old and some are like, "Maybe he chose to live that way? Who is to say its really wrong?"
Yes I suppose these kind of ideas *should* make people a bit nervous.
Still, to double down on it a bit:
we are already comfortable with removing from society some classes of people, including criminals and those judged to be insane.
And to be fair, the people we're talking about (not all homeless, just the "chronic homeless" with many problems, who typically do not help themselves), often technically *are* criminals. At least in the sense that it's illegal to do meth and scream abuse at people.
Not to mention that in many places that are still actual laws against vagrancy on the books.
And many would likely also meet the criteria to be sectioned, it's just that we don't necessarily want to throw every crazy person on the street in a mental institution, and probably don't have the places anyway.
So we could probably operate through existing legal pathways?
"we are already comfortable with removing from society some classes of people, including criminals and those judged to be insane."
I'm not at all comfortable with how many criminals we "remove from society." I tend to think we use prison far to much and would be better off as a society if we weren't so willing to lock people up. I would be even less comfortable doing it when the reason we're taking someones liberty away is we don't like the way they look/smell/sound.
Sure, but there are still the hard core- if Moon Boots is throwing D batteries down the hall at his neighbors, he is going to get kicked out. Providing safe housing and providing housing as a right aren't completely compatible.
Lo and behold! https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-2020/
See my comments on Rory's comment above, but i) there is good data on this kind of stuff, and ii) the data shows that the level of chronically homeless is steady or decreasing (although not where you are in CA) while the levels of individual homelessness are increasing, as well as the number of "at risk for homelessness" (people who are doubling up/in long-term unaffordable living situations).
Also, I know what you're getting at with your comment, but it's worth noting that a person you see passed out on the street in the middle of the day isn't necessarily homeless. I volunteer at a neighborhood kitchen, and many of the people there live in supportive housing in the neighborhood. I also see many of the same people spending time outside/on corners, etc. and a casual observer might conclude they are "homeless" when in fact they have a place to live.
This seems something of a strawman. I don't believe anybody is claiming that people suffering from mental illness or drug addiction don't sometimes become homeless, but:
A) It's hardly the case that such ailments inevitably lead to homelessness; indeed, there are questions of causation: homelessness causes deleterious effects on human health, including, naturally, mental health.
B) The geographic correlation between housing unaffordability and homelessness seems strong, as Matt points out. Regions characterized by the most severe affordability issues appear to associated with more homelessness than less expensive areas.
C) The phenomenon you mention has been studied far beyond merely eyeballing the streets of cities, and the consensus appears increasingly strong that homelessness is indeed first and foremost an economic issue:
https://nlchp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Homeless_Stats_Fact_Sheet.pdf
Are you the same Jasper who used to post on Matt's thinkprogress blog?
Slowboring is a lot like Matt's old blog. I wonder how many of us are back.
Much as it’s always a dicey plan to extrapolate from NYC to the rest of the country on any number of issues, using SF and LA as a starting point for discussions of homelessness is problematic because California faces tbe someone unique problem due to its climate of being a _destination_ for the severely mentally ill.
In much the same way as a cancer diagnosis can spell the end of your life’s savings in this country, if you are not generationally wealthy there are absolutely no good long term care options available to you if your sibling, spouse or child is schizophrenic. If you’re lucky, their symptoms can be somewhat managed with medication and they can and will stay at home with you, but if not? Well, you buy them a bus ticket to somewhere that the climate won’t quickly kill them if they’re sleeping on the streets, and in this country that means San Francisco first and foremost.
The overwhelming majority of homeless people in San Francisco are Californians.
Depends on what you mean by "overwhelming majority".
A new count of the homeless, released earlier this week, tallied a 2 percent rise from two years ago -- from 6,248 to 6,377 people. After the one-night count on Jan. 31, in a follow-up survey of homeless people, 31 percent noted that they became homeless outside San Francisco.
"That is close to a third of the people we counted," says Trent Rhorer, director of the San Francisco Human Services Agency. "It begs the question of why they came here; I don't know that the answer is necessarily one of homelessness."
that’s true of anywhere warm. sleeping outdoors in florida is healthier than sf, where it’s pretty chilly
I think part of the reason we don't tend to see it as a housing problem is the disconnect between the average homeless person we actually see and the overall homeless population. The homeless guy lying on the sidewalk on 9 am who smells strongly of booze and other less pleasant things - you identify him as homeless. The homeless guy sleeping in his car or the woods and showering at the gym, or in the shelter line early every night so he gets a slot, and working a full-time job - you would probably never know he was homeless. Not to say there's not a large number in the first category, but it's lower than the 90% most people would estimate, simply because of the homelessness they can actually "see".