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".
See my reply below. That non-visible homeless guy, is usually in and out of it pretty quickly. They find a new job, find a new apartment. Now the numbers might stay the same, because there’s always people rotating in and out of the temporary Homelessness. There are actually a lot of programs that these people can use. And these are probably the people, numbers, that can be reduced by more affordable housing. But it’s really not gonna fix the “homeless “problem that people deal with it on the streets of San Francisco or PCH in Los Angeles.
In the California Bay Area, because there is not enough housing, the population of car and RV dwellers is growing,. People in that situation do not quickly find a new apartment because there is no apartment for them to afford, even though they have stable jobs.
I agree with all of your points, and the anecdote I present below is simply that, an anecdote.
Around 20 years ago when I had my first job out of college, I worked with a guy who had previously been homeless. He was the kind of guy that had played in a rock band and did some drugs, generally getting into trouble but nothing too serious (he was white). By the time I had met him, he had cleaned himself up, gotten a degree, job, wife, kids, the whole deal.
One thing that always stuck with me was his claim that his homelessness was a choice. He told me that there is an entire subculture of people like him who actively chose to be homeless and exist on the fringes of society. Notably, he pointed out that in the Bay Area (where we were at the time), there was a much higher proportion of what he called "crazy people."
Now I obviously don't think that the experiences of one person should set policy for all of our homeless, and I agree with Matt's prescriptions above. But the episode reminded me that (a) I didn't actually know any people who were homeless at the time (and still don't) and (b) have no idea what life situations got them to that point.
My friend Kris and I ran out of gas on the last office coast highway a few years ago. There is definitely a culture of people who have cars and a little money but not houses. I suspect many of them are trying to live on SSDI without a roommate or bring tied to subsidized housing.
Yeah. I mean some people live in vehicles kind of by choice. The fact that they have been able to hold onto an asset without selling it suggests that they are not *right* at the bottom of the barrel, and also maybe not addicted to hard drugs.
One of my ways to waste time is watching people on youtube who live in their vans. And at least a few of them make enough money from it to buy a house *if they wanted*.
When I was younger, I knew a guy about 10 years older than myself who had left home at 18 because of friction with his father. The way he explained it, he had slept in parks in Kenosha and Milwaukee for about a year (even though he had an okay job for a person that age) because he wanted to save up enough to pay for an apartment for an entire year at once, and then once he had safe housing and regular access to showers, etc., he took the civil service exam and started working for the post office. He could afford to do that because Kenosha, Wisconsin is not particularly expensive to live in.
To hear him tell it, his particular experience of homelessness was a choice of short-term discomfort in favor of a long-term plan, but also he (as far as I know) didn't have any addiction or mental health issues. Also, he didn't romanticize it in any way; he was pretty clear that sleeping outside for a year sucked, but that to him it was the fastest way to keep overhead low so he could save money. I don't think it's difficult at all, though, to envision a scenario where his particular situation goes downhill in a much worse direction, right? Maybe he gets into a fight with another homeless person and ends up in jail, maybe he loses his job and can't save money, etc. I think there are people who make tactical decisions where short-term homelessness is part of an overall plan, but it's easy for the whims of bad luck to mess those up, particularly if you live in an area where housing is non-existent or prohibitively expensive. The margin of error is just much thinner.
Completely off topic from homelessness and housing, but I recently saw The Day the Earth Stood Still and was struck by something else. To quote ikipedia:
"When Helen and her boyfriend Tom Stevens go out, Klaatu babysits Bobby. The boy takes Klaatu on a tour of the city, including a visit to his father's grave in Arlington National Cemetery; Klaatu learns that most of the deceased are soldiers killed in wars. They also visit the Lincoln Memorial."
I was struck that the movie would have it be perfectly fine for a single mom to leave her son in the care of a strange man who just showed up at the boarding house. Who would be willing to do that now except in grave emergency? And I don't know if we simply know more now, the world has actually changed that much, or most likely we're simply more risk averse, but it made me sad to think we've lost so much trust.
Yeah it is a real loss. I'm not sure what the reason is - mostly I think we are more risk averse. But it also kind of fits in with the core concept of the book "the abundant community": by professionalizing every kind of service, it's now assumed that regular people CANNOT provide those services. Eg you need a teacher to learn, you need a daycare to take care of young children, you need a psychologist to treat depression. As a teacher I'm not saying that teachers don't teach, nor would I dismiss mental health issues by saying "ignore the medical professional and just talk to your uncle". But I do tend to agree with the core idea: as professionalism increases, what used to be an everyday problem is now seen as outside the purview of your typical citizen.
That may be part of it, but not the biggest part. I think "News" tells us about all the terrible things that happen but don't provide any context of how likely something is to occur. So we hear about all the terrible things that people do to kids, but don't really appreciate that most people are reasonably fine and won't do those terrible things.
Its kind of like in Sweden, parents leave their kids outside in prams all the time, but if you do that in the US you would get arrested for child neglect because something bad could happen.
I also wondered the other day that this is where the size of America comes into play. If you look at all the awful stuff people do every day / week in Europe you might be able to compare it, but if you just look at country to country it's a bit of an apples to oranges situation.
Oo, boarding houses! One of my weird little hobby-horses! There was a tremendous range boarding houses back in the day. Some were flophouses, some were a step up from flophouses, some were solidly middle-class, and some were quite elegant indeed. Sometimes entire middle-class families lived for years in a nice boarding house. Young women striking out on their own could move into a "respectable" boarding house with less social opprobrium than living on their own. Romances sometimes flourished. Friendships often did. Naturally sometimes there were enmities and ongoing fights.
My father, a Palo Alto native, moved into a boarding house in Palo Alto when he came home from WWII and was working for awhile before resuming college. He was working nights, so he missed the daily dinner, and his landlady would pack him a meal to take to work. He appreciated that.
Impoverished widows would sometimes open their homes to boarders. I know three divorced women, each in a different part of the country, who rent out a room or two in their homes on AirBnB to help make ends meet. I see a certain similarity there, though the owners/managers of old boarding houses were also expected to provide at least one daily meal. Oh, and complaints about the food were as common as complaints about dorm food back when I was in college.
I wonder if boarding houses are really what we should be talking about, though? It seems to me people's expectations have changed over the decades in several ways:
- People grow up with fewer siblings;
- Unmarried young adults expect to have active sex lives;
- People eat more often in restaurants and less often at home;
- People indulge in more solitary leisure activities (watching TV, surfing the internet) and fewer group leisure activities (card playing, going to church).
I think all those changes would tend to make the boarding-house lifestyle feel more oppressive and less nurturing than it did in the good old days. You'd want to get rid of whatever regulatory barriers prevent it from being a contemporary option, but I think what Matt is really pointing to here is the need for *lower minimum floor space requirements* in apartment buildings. Most people nowadays would probably prefer the micro-apartment option, even though they might also benefit from more communal space in their buildings.
People in their 20s live in housemate situations all the time which is functionally the same it's just arranged by the tenants rather than having the landlord rent out the building piecemeal. Even in an SRO you still have a private room to watch TV and have sex.
Yes, you're right about Matt's intent. I just went off on a tangent. Though it does seem to me that it can be companionable to just sit around surfing the web with others in the room doing the same. And people might eat at home more if the food were cooked by someone else and presented at the table. But the larger point is one I have believed in for a long time, and prompted part of my interest in boarding houses. Flophouses > nothing. That's been my observation for years. So I'm pleased that Matt wrote about it.
I had the interesting experience of actually living in what was in effect a nicer SRO in East Lansing, MI while I was an undergrad at Michigan State. It was "nicer" because while the kitchen was shared for the whole building, I only shared a bathroom with my neighbor, a good friend, and I could afford to rent a room to myself rather than having roommates. (The rent was just over $300, which is insanely cheap even ten years ago in East Lansing--and it was especially so given that the building was close to campus and near the major bar streets.) It was my first place I could call my own and I really appreciated it. (I learned to cook there--though not in the kitchen, I used a slow cooker in my room.) It also kept me from going in with some other guys to rent out a house. I'm sure that a lot of the people in the building (it was pretty big, probably about 100 units) were in the same situation, so I suspect the building freed up some actual houses for families to rent and marginally cut the cost of housing in the area.
The flaw in your argument is that there are two kinds of homeless. Homeless includes people living in their cars, couch surfing, homeless for several days or even weeks, etc. And then there are the long term chronically homeless. This is the group with the most serious drug and mental health problems.
To fix the first group you need more housing. To fix the second you need serious intervention in their lives. Mandated treatment, confinement, etc. Now you might say that's terrible. Well...if a little old lady with dementia thinks it's still 1978 and she has to get to her job at the phone company - we put her in a memory care unit. If someone is equally disabled by mental illness we just let them wander the streets. That's not right.
Sure but if it solves the problem for the first group, and makes a small dent in the problem of the second group, then I'd say we're making great progress
But if you say your plan will help the “homeless” and people still see just as many mentally ill, drug addicts, etc on the street the public will say your plan failed.
To your point - I think a big lesson we should recognize is that if you have policies that are doing good things, but the public doesn't seem them working, then its very unlikely they'll sustain over time.
I guess that could be true but if lots of people are quietly housed that should count for something, even if the optics are no worse than before. But even so, some percentage of the more troubled homeless will be housed.
I lived in LA for most of the last decade and saw 1) rents and house prices spiking rapidly 2) the homeless population, tent cities and encampments growing rapidly. I think the two trends were connected, even if the most "Moon Boots" of the mentally ill had been homeless the whole time.
Sorry for the duplicate comments. Mobile is not great on here. If that’s true then you should lead with that. “Homelessness” is not the problem then, it’s addicts living on the street that’s the problem. Then people can come up with solutions that directly address that, rather than just true homelessness.
I basically agree with your second paragraph, but the issues are:
Court decisions since the 70s have made it much harder for the authorities to just forcefully institutionalize people. Check out O'Connor v Donaldson. There would have to be an actual legal process, perhaps extended, do-gooders and public interest attorneys would endlessly sue the city and make it extremely expensive, etc.
And, there are some pretty legitimate civil liberties concerns around letting the authorities simply lock up folks who are a nuisance. My understanding of psychiatry is that they mostly can't cure serious issues, but they can certainly drug people indefinitely and prevent them from causing issues or really having a personality. Some pretty dark stuff is possible when you just start locking up the inconvenient, especially without a defined process to be able to leave
Yeah, but even if you have a terrible addiction and a lot of problems and you live in Mississippi you can pay rent with a disability check, which is why Mississippi doesn't have high chronic homelessness.
HCOLAs definitely need to build more housing, but the homeless crises in major cities isn’t about housing costs. It’s mainly mental health and drug addiction and relaxed enforcement of laws. The people of Austin just voted on an initiative to ban encampments. Great decision! It is one of the most progressive cities in the country. They saw what happened in. SF, Seattle, LA and NYC and said no.
More housing is necessary for families living in two bedroom apartments that can’t afford to live near the city they work. Progressives will lose the battle, as they are, if they pretend that the people living in encampments are just healthy people down on their luck. They’re not. No sane person would agree to more housing if it just going to be filled with mentally unhealthy people.
I can't square that with the simple observation that as rents have gone up and housing has become more expensive, the homeless population has grown, too. Not too mention Yglesias' charts above that shows the same relationship across geography.
I worked in Hollywood / East Hollywood, which is one of those places with a disproportionate share very, very visibly disturbed homeless - the kind that bother and create problems for everybody around them, and it drove home to me that mental illness and anti-social disorders are part of the problem. But the correlation between housing prices and numbers of homeless couldn't exist if it was all about mental illness.
The housing crisis in San Francisco is absolutely not caused by mental health issues. Mental health issues have not increased, by the number of homeless people has skyrocketed because of high housing costs.
Do you have any explanation about how the ban on camping is supposed to work? All I imagine is people racking up a bunch of fines and then being either sent to jail, or moving to Pflugerville to camp.
This is an ignorant question, but to what extent would homeless people in high-cost areas be willing or able to relocate to lower-cost areas with financial assistance from the government? It's currently a moot point because homelessness policy is made at the local level, but perhaps that's an argument for a larger federal role.
There probably are some that would, but I think that in most cases, people are homeless because there's some particular reason they have for being in that place (perhaps being near friends or family or community or just familiarity with the space), but they can't afford to be there. Some people benefit from relocation, but for many that introduces new problems.
I'm hesitant to speculate about the lives of people whose experience is totally different from mine, but I would have thought that people who sleep on the street are people who *don't* have supportive friends and family in their home city. If there were a federal program to match mentally stable homeless people in San Francisco and New York with small towns where there's a shortage of unskilled labor, I think it might get decent uptake. You'd have to screen the beneficiaries carefully to make sure you didn't include the "wrong" kind of homeless, because the destination towns wouldn't want them, but those are the people who wouldn't benefit much from simple relocation anyway.
I volunteered at a local shelter several years ago and it was a real eyeopener. The experience changed my entire conception of homelessness and convinced me that the availability of affordable housing is a relatively small part of the overall problem.
From my limited and anecdotal experience, it seemed to me that the biggest contributing factors by far are addiction and mental health issues. I know some people can present data that says that it's mostly about economics, but that wasn't what I saw at all.
Sure, economics often plays a role, as a lost job can often be the precipitating event, but overall economics was much less of an issue than I expected it to be. Most of the people I interacted with would not make it through any job interview, even if they were given housing and an opportunity to present as well as possible at the interview.
If you haven't met any actual unhoused people, I'd suggest going over to youtube and searching on "homeless interviews." Some of these are uncomfortably voyeuristic and perhaps a bit exploitive, but spending an hour or two with these interviews can shed some light on what we're dealing with in terms of the typical challenges that unhoused people are struggling with.
What do we think about the theory that generous benefits for the homeless, relaxed law enforcement & nice weather attract non-local homeless folks to places like the Bay Area & LA? I.e. they're not all locals displaced by expensive housing. (This is in addition to the arguments in Matt's piece, not against them). With an emphasis on the first one. Some of these cities fork out an incredible amount of services to the homeless- San Francisco alone seems to spend at least $300 million annually on them (the true number may be higher, I found different sources).
How people end up homeless is sort of like 'what causes car crashes'- obviously a lot of totally different causes mixed in there. But there seems to be a decent chunk of folks who voluntarily choose the homeless/drug-using lifestyle because they simply enjoy it. If they only make up say .1% of the US population, but then all of that .1% from all over the country is attracted to a few cities with great weather that will basically fund their lifestyle choices.... That adds up to a large number of people who are frequently not displaced locals. Sorry to sound heartless
>>>What do we think about the theory that generous benefits for the homeless, relaxed law enforcement & nice weather attract non-local homeless folks to places like the Bay Area & LA? <<<
As far as I know it's not really a "theory" but baseless and inaccurate speculation that's been roundly proven wrong by experts in the field. People don't generally up and move across the country to upgrade the quality of their homelessness experience.
Florida has better weather than San Francisco and fewer homeless. Let’s be real lots of places in the Bay Area have better weather than San Francisco. Pacifica! and even the East bay because that fog sucks and the East bay doesn’t have it yet SF has way more homeless than Livermore.
Here in LA one reads (too) many stories about young people coming here with no skills but hoping to make it big in TV, music and films. Many of them wind up on the street. I don't know if this is just a brief interval and they then wind up back in Ohio, however.
Anyway, you can move someplace and become homeless, but not move there *because* you're homeless.
We had fewer stories like that in the 70's and 80's because the LA area was building housing like crazy. If you talk to old people from that time they would go on vacation and come back to a hill with 900 houses on it. Like the song 'story of my life" by Social Distortion even complains about it.
You really think people choose to be homeless? That the guy passed out drunk on the sidewalk was like, “I could have been a CPA with a wife and two kids in a colonial in the burbs. But hey, I want to be a wino.
Do you think they are suffering from disordered thinking? As an example certain people a very impulsive. At some point it goes beyond the normal range of human thought and becomes dangerous to themselves and others.
Well yes, but I would think that because they are doing something I think is foolish. I suspect that there are somethings I have done/do that many would considered disordered thinking - just read some of my other posts!
Yes, I think a small percentage of the population who has marginal earning/career prospects anyways enjoys the freedom of not having a fixed job or schedule, and likes getting drunk or high a lot, is fine with living in a tent in a beautiful warm weather locale with kinda generous benefits, free food, etc.
I wish this was unlocked. I’ve been a housing advocate for years (essentially since I read “The Rent Is Too Damn High”) and serve on the board of our big local shelter. I really didn’t put those two things together until recently listening to a weeds episode. They seemed liked 2 distinct policy issues tangentially related to “housing” but not really interconnected. I wish I could share this article around to people.
Boarding houses still exist. In the DC sub where I live, about 1/3 of my neighbors are recent immigrants, and about 1/3 of them rent out rooms to landsmen. Gossip is that the doc's office/residence around the corner was sold to an immigrant who's converting it into a boarding house, and 15 years ago my son managed a boarding house when he was a student at UMCP (it was owned by a local dentist, eight people in a three bedroom house at $500 a head). Of course, all of these arrangements are illegal, but no one bothers to enforce the law.
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".
See my reply below. That non-visible homeless guy, is usually in and out of it pretty quickly. They find a new job, find a new apartment. Now the numbers might stay the same, because there’s always people rotating in and out of the temporary Homelessness. There are actually a lot of programs that these people can use. And these are probably the people, numbers, that can be reduced by more affordable housing. But it’s really not gonna fix the “homeless “problem that people deal with it on the streets of San Francisco or PCH in Los Angeles.
The non-visible homeless guy is exactly the one whose homelessness is caused by housing scarcity, though. And that’s the majority of homeless!
In the California Bay Area, because there is not enough housing, the population of car and RV dwellers is growing,. People in that situation do not quickly find a new apartment because there is no apartment for them to afford, even though they have stable jobs.
I agree with all of your points, and the anecdote I present below is simply that, an anecdote.
Around 20 years ago when I had my first job out of college, I worked with a guy who had previously been homeless. He was the kind of guy that had played in a rock band and did some drugs, generally getting into trouble but nothing too serious (he was white). By the time I had met him, he had cleaned himself up, gotten a degree, job, wife, kids, the whole deal.
One thing that always stuck with me was his claim that his homelessness was a choice. He told me that there is an entire subculture of people like him who actively chose to be homeless and exist on the fringes of society. Notably, he pointed out that in the Bay Area (where we were at the time), there was a much higher proportion of what he called "crazy people."
Now I obviously don't think that the experiences of one person should set policy for all of our homeless, and I agree with Matt's prescriptions above. But the episode reminded me that (a) I didn't actually know any people who were homeless at the time (and still don't) and (b) have no idea what life situations got them to that point.
My friend Kris and I ran out of gas on the last office coast highway a few years ago. There is definitely a culture of people who have cars and a little money but not houses. I suspect many of them are trying to live on SSDI without a roommate or bring tied to subsidized housing.
Yeah. I mean some people live in vehicles kind of by choice. The fact that they have been able to hold onto an asset without selling it suggests that they are not *right* at the bottom of the barrel, and also maybe not addicted to hard drugs.
One of my ways to waste time is watching people on youtube who live in their vans. And at least a few of them make enough money from it to buy a house *if they wanted*.
pacific coast highway
When I was younger, I knew a guy about 10 years older than myself who had left home at 18 because of friction with his father. The way he explained it, he had slept in parks in Kenosha and Milwaukee for about a year (even though he had an okay job for a person that age) because he wanted to save up enough to pay for an apartment for an entire year at once, and then once he had safe housing and regular access to showers, etc., he took the civil service exam and started working for the post office. He could afford to do that because Kenosha, Wisconsin is not particularly expensive to live in.
To hear him tell it, his particular experience of homelessness was a choice of short-term discomfort in favor of a long-term plan, but also he (as far as I know) didn't have any addiction or mental health issues. Also, he didn't romanticize it in any way; he was pretty clear that sleeping outside for a year sucked, but that to him it was the fastest way to keep overhead low so he could save money. I don't think it's difficult at all, though, to envision a scenario where his particular situation goes downhill in a much worse direction, right? Maybe he gets into a fight with another homeless person and ends up in jail, maybe he loses his job and can't save money, etc. I think there are people who make tactical decisions where short-term homelessness is part of an overall plan, but it's easy for the whims of bad luck to mess those up, particularly if you live in an area where housing is non-existent or prohibitively expensive. The margin of error is just much thinner.
Completely off topic from homelessness and housing, but I recently saw The Day the Earth Stood Still and was struck by something else. To quote ikipedia:
"When Helen and her boyfriend Tom Stevens go out, Klaatu babysits Bobby. The boy takes Klaatu on a tour of the city, including a visit to his father's grave in Arlington National Cemetery; Klaatu learns that most of the deceased are soldiers killed in wars. They also visit the Lincoln Memorial."
I was struck that the movie would have it be perfectly fine for a single mom to leave her son in the care of a strange man who just showed up at the boarding house. Who would be willing to do that now except in grave emergency? And I don't know if we simply know more now, the world has actually changed that much, or most likely we're simply more risk averse, but it made me sad to think we've lost so much trust.
Yeah it is a real loss. I'm not sure what the reason is - mostly I think we are more risk averse. But it also kind of fits in with the core concept of the book "the abundant community": by professionalizing every kind of service, it's now assumed that regular people CANNOT provide those services. Eg you need a teacher to learn, you need a daycare to take care of young children, you need a psychologist to treat depression. As a teacher I'm not saying that teachers don't teach, nor would I dismiss mental health issues by saying "ignore the medical professional and just talk to your uncle". But I do tend to agree with the core idea: as professionalism increases, what used to be an everyday problem is now seen as outside the purview of your typical citizen.
That may be part of it, but not the biggest part. I think "News" tells us about all the terrible things that happen but don't provide any context of how likely something is to occur. So we hear about all the terrible things that people do to kids, but don't really appreciate that most people are reasonably fine and won't do those terrible things.
Its kind of like in Sweden, parents leave their kids outside in prams all the time, but if you do that in the US you would get arrested for child neglect because something bad could happen.
I also wondered the other day that this is where the size of America comes into play. If you look at all the awful stuff people do every day / week in Europe you might be able to compare it, but if you just look at country to country it's a bit of an apples to oranges situation.
Oo, boarding houses! One of my weird little hobby-horses! There was a tremendous range boarding houses back in the day. Some were flophouses, some were a step up from flophouses, some were solidly middle-class, and some were quite elegant indeed. Sometimes entire middle-class families lived for years in a nice boarding house. Young women striking out on their own could move into a "respectable" boarding house with less social opprobrium than living on their own. Romances sometimes flourished. Friendships often did. Naturally sometimes there were enmities and ongoing fights.
My father, a Palo Alto native, moved into a boarding house in Palo Alto when he came home from WWII and was working for awhile before resuming college. He was working nights, so he missed the daily dinner, and his landlady would pack him a meal to take to work. He appreciated that.
Impoverished widows would sometimes open their homes to boarders. I know three divorced women, each in a different part of the country, who rent out a room or two in their homes on AirBnB to help make ends meet. I see a certain similarity there, though the owners/managers of old boarding houses were also expected to provide at least one daily meal. Oh, and complaints about the food were as common as complaints about dorm food back when I was in college.
I wonder if boarding houses are really what we should be talking about, though? It seems to me people's expectations have changed over the decades in several ways:
- People grow up with fewer siblings;
- Unmarried young adults expect to have active sex lives;
- People eat more often in restaurants and less often at home;
- People indulge in more solitary leisure activities (watching TV, surfing the internet) and fewer group leisure activities (card playing, going to church).
I think all those changes would tend to make the boarding-house lifestyle feel more oppressive and less nurturing than it did in the good old days. You'd want to get rid of whatever regulatory barriers prevent it from being a contemporary option, but I think what Matt is really pointing to here is the need for *lower minimum floor space requirements* in apartment buildings. Most people nowadays would probably prefer the micro-apartment option, even though they might also benefit from more communal space in their buildings.
People in their 20s live in housemate situations all the time which is functionally the same it's just arranged by the tenants rather than having the landlord rent out the building piecemeal. Even in an SRO you still have a private room to watch TV and have sex.
Yes, you're right about Matt's intent. I just went off on a tangent. Though it does seem to me that it can be companionable to just sit around surfing the web with others in the room doing the same. And people might eat at home more if the food were cooked by someone else and presented at the table. But the larger point is one I have believed in for a long time, and prompted part of my interest in boarding houses. Flophouses > nothing. That's been my observation for years. So I'm pleased that Matt wrote about it.
I had the interesting experience of actually living in what was in effect a nicer SRO in East Lansing, MI while I was an undergrad at Michigan State. It was "nicer" because while the kitchen was shared for the whole building, I only shared a bathroom with my neighbor, a good friend, and I could afford to rent a room to myself rather than having roommates. (The rent was just over $300, which is insanely cheap even ten years ago in East Lansing--and it was especially so given that the building was close to campus and near the major bar streets.) It was my first place I could call my own and I really appreciated it. (I learned to cook there--though not in the kitchen, I used a slow cooker in my room.) It also kept me from going in with some other guys to rent out a house. I'm sure that a lot of the people in the building (it was pretty big, probably about 100 units) were in the same situation, so I suspect the building freed up some actual houses for families to rent and marginally cut the cost of housing in the area.
Interesting! Do you know whether it’s still there?
I just looked on Google Maps and it seems to be!
The flaw in your argument is that there are two kinds of homeless. Homeless includes people living in their cars, couch surfing, homeless for several days or even weeks, etc. And then there are the long term chronically homeless. This is the group with the most serious drug and mental health problems.
To fix the first group you need more housing. To fix the second you need serious intervention in their lives. Mandated treatment, confinement, etc. Now you might say that's terrible. Well...if a little old lady with dementia thinks it's still 1978 and she has to get to her job at the phone company - we put her in a memory care unit. If someone is equally disabled by mental illness we just let them wander the streets. That's not right.
Sure but if it solves the problem for the first group, and makes a small dent in the problem of the second group, then I'd say we're making great progress
But if you say your plan will help the “homeless” and people still see just as many mentally ill, drug addicts, etc on the street the public will say your plan failed.
To your point - I think a big lesson we should recognize is that if you have policies that are doing good things, but the public doesn't seem them working, then its very unlikely they'll sustain over time.
I guess that could be true but if lots of people are quietly housed that should count for something, even if the optics are no worse than before. But even so, some percentage of the more troubled homeless will be housed.
I lived in LA for most of the last decade and saw 1) rents and house prices spiking rapidly 2) the homeless population, tent cities and encampments growing rapidly. I think the two trends were connected, even if the most "Moon Boots" of the mentally ill had been homeless the whole time.
Because that’s what the public cares most about.
Sorry for the duplicate comments. Mobile is not great on here. If that’s true then you should lead with that. “Homelessness” is not the problem then, it’s addicts living on the street that’s the problem. Then people can come up with solutions that directly address that, rather than just true homelessness.
I basically agree with your second paragraph, but the issues are:
Court decisions since the 70s have made it much harder for the authorities to just forcefully institutionalize people. Check out O'Connor v Donaldson. There would have to be an actual legal process, perhaps extended, do-gooders and public interest attorneys would endlessly sue the city and make it extremely expensive, etc.
And, there are some pretty legitimate civil liberties concerns around letting the authorities simply lock up folks who are a nuisance. My understanding of psychiatry is that they mostly can't cure serious issues, but they can certainly drug people indefinitely and prevent them from causing issues or really having a personality. Some pretty dark stuff is possible when you just start locking up the inconvenient, especially without a defined process to be able to leave
How does that dark stuff compare with life on the streets?
Yeah, but even if you have a terrible addiction and a lot of problems and you live in Mississippi you can pay rent with a disability check, which is why Mississippi doesn't have high chronic homelessness.
HCOLAs definitely need to build more housing, but the homeless crises in major cities isn’t about housing costs. It’s mainly mental health and drug addiction and relaxed enforcement of laws. The people of Austin just voted on an initiative to ban encampments. Great decision! It is one of the most progressive cities in the country. They saw what happened in. SF, Seattle, LA and NYC and said no.
More housing is necessary for families living in two bedroom apartments that can’t afford to live near the city they work. Progressives will lose the battle, as they are, if they pretend that the people living in encampments are just healthy people down on their luck. They’re not. No sane person would agree to more housing if it just going to be filled with mentally unhealthy people.
I can't square that with the simple observation that as rents have gone up and housing has become more expensive, the homeless population has grown, too. Not too mention Yglesias' charts above that shows the same relationship across geography.
I worked in Hollywood / East Hollywood, which is one of those places with a disproportionate share very, very visibly disturbed homeless - the kind that bother and create problems for everybody around them, and it drove home to me that mental illness and anti-social disorders are part of the problem. But the correlation between housing prices and numbers of homeless couldn't exist if it was all about mental illness.
The housing crisis in San Francisco is absolutely not caused by mental health issues. Mental health issues have not increased, by the number of homeless people has skyrocketed because of high housing costs.
Do you have any explanation about how the ban on camping is supposed to work? All I imagine is people racking up a bunch of fines and then being either sent to jail, or moving to Pflugerville to camp.
https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/everything-we-know-about-the-new-austin-camping-ban/
This is an ignorant question, but to what extent would homeless people in high-cost areas be willing or able to relocate to lower-cost areas with financial assistance from the government? It's currently a moot point because homelessness policy is made at the local level, but perhaps that's an argument for a larger federal role.
There probably are some that would, but I think that in most cases, people are homeless because there's some particular reason they have for being in that place (perhaps being near friends or family or community or just familiarity with the space), but they can't afford to be there. Some people benefit from relocation, but for many that introduces new problems.
I'm hesitant to speculate about the lives of people whose experience is totally different from mine, but I would have thought that people who sleep on the street are people who *don't* have supportive friends and family in their home city. If there were a federal program to match mentally stable homeless people in San Francisco and New York with small towns where there's a shortage of unskilled labor, I think it might get decent uptake. You'd have to screen the beneficiaries carefully to make sure you didn't include the "wrong" kind of homeless, because the destination towns wouldn't want them, but those are the people who wouldn't benefit much from simple relocation anyway.
relevant: https://www.ajc.com/news/local/new-york-city-homeless-sent-marietta-other-cities/drHmf6LVgO3cyA6LY4GREP/
This seems like a sensible policy and people are objecting to it for all the wrong reasons.
I volunteered at a local shelter several years ago and it was a real eyeopener. The experience changed my entire conception of homelessness and convinced me that the availability of affordable housing is a relatively small part of the overall problem.
From my limited and anecdotal experience, it seemed to me that the biggest contributing factors by far are addiction and mental health issues. I know some people can present data that says that it's mostly about economics, but that wasn't what I saw at all.
Sure, economics often plays a role, as a lost job can often be the precipitating event, but overall economics was much less of an issue than I expected it to be. Most of the people I interacted with would not make it through any job interview, even if they were given housing and an opportunity to present as well as possible at the interview.
If you haven't met any actual unhoused people, I'd suggest going over to youtube and searching on "homeless interviews." Some of these are uncomfortably voyeuristic and perhaps a bit exploitive, but spending an hour or two with these interviews can shed some light on what we're dealing with in terms of the typical challenges that unhoused people are struggling with.
What do we think about the theory that generous benefits for the homeless, relaxed law enforcement & nice weather attract non-local homeless folks to places like the Bay Area & LA? I.e. they're not all locals displaced by expensive housing. (This is in addition to the arguments in Matt's piece, not against them). With an emphasis on the first one. Some of these cities fork out an incredible amount of services to the homeless- San Francisco alone seems to spend at least $300 million annually on them (the true number may be higher, I found different sources).
How people end up homeless is sort of like 'what causes car crashes'- obviously a lot of totally different causes mixed in there. But there seems to be a decent chunk of folks who voluntarily choose the homeless/drug-using lifestyle because they simply enjoy it. If they only make up say .1% of the US population, but then all of that .1% from all over the country is attracted to a few cities with great weather that will basically fund their lifestyle choices.... That adds up to a large number of people who are frequently not displaced locals. Sorry to sound heartless
>>>What do we think about the theory that generous benefits for the homeless, relaxed law enforcement & nice weather attract non-local homeless folks to places like the Bay Area & LA? <<<
As far as I know it's not really a "theory" but baseless and inaccurate speculation that's been roundly proven wrong by experts in the field. People don't generally up and move across the country to upgrade the quality of their homelessness experience.
Florida has better weather than San Francisco and fewer homeless. Let’s be real lots of places in the Bay Area have better weather than San Francisco. Pacifica! and even the East bay because that fog sucks and the East bay doesn’t have it yet SF has way more homeless than Livermore.
Won't be speculation for long. Austin is trying the "ban but nothing else" approach -- will see what happens.
Here in LA one reads (too) many stories about young people coming here with no skills but hoping to make it big in TV, music and films. Many of them wind up on the street. I don't know if this is just a brief interval and they then wind up back in Ohio, however.
Anyway, you can move someplace and become homeless, but not move there *because* you're homeless.
We had fewer stories like that in the 70's and 80's because the LA area was building housing like crazy. If you talk to old people from that time they would go on vacation and come back to a hill with 900 houses on it. Like the song 'story of my life" by Social Distortion even complains about it.
You really think people choose to be homeless? That the guy passed out drunk on the sidewalk was like, “I could have been a CPA with a wife and two kids in a colonial in the burbs. But hey, I want to be a wino.
You really think people want to rob a convenience store for $500 and risk going to prison for years of their life?
I think just because something seems unbelievably stupid to me, doesn't mean there aren't people out there who won't choose it.
Do you think they are suffering from disordered thinking? As an example certain people a very impulsive. At some point it goes beyond the normal range of human thought and becomes dangerous to themselves and others.
Well yes, but I would think that because they are doing something I think is foolish. I suspect that there are somethings I have done/do that many would considered disordered thinking - just read some of my other posts!
Yes, I think a small percentage of the population who has marginal earning/career prospects anyways enjoys the freedom of not having a fixed job or schedule, and likes getting drunk or high a lot, is fine with living in a tent in a beautiful warm weather locale with kinda generous benefits, free food, etc.
Why are their earning/career prospects marginal? Also what’s the difference between someone who likes to get drunk and high a lot an an addict?
The Bay Area does not provide generous benefits to the homeless.
What does San Francisco alone do with its $300 million or higher homeless budget then?
It mostly goes to prevent residents of San Francisco who are on the edge from becoming homeless.
I wish this was unlocked. I’ve been a housing advocate for years (essentially since I read “The Rent Is Too Damn High”) and serve on the board of our big local shelter. I really didn’t put those two things together until recently listening to a weeds episode. They seemed liked 2 distinct policy issues tangentially related to “housing” but not really interconnected. I wish I could share this article around to people.
If you got the e-mail, you can forward the e-mail to them - Matt has said that's fine.
Boarding houses still exist. In the DC sub where I live, about 1/3 of my neighbors are recent immigrants, and about 1/3 of them rent out rooms to landsmen. Gossip is that the doc's office/residence around the corner was sold to an immigrant who's converting it into a boarding house, and 15 years ago my son managed a boarding house when he was a student at UMCP (it was owned by a local dentist, eight people in a three bedroom house at $500 a head). Of course, all of these arrangements are illegal, but no one bothers to enforce the law.