For f**k’s sake I would love to hear what Matt imagines Israel could do to pursue a political solution to the IRGC’s deranged obsession with killing Jews.
Israel has earned their negative reputation among Democrats, most independents and even many Republicans. No more blanket support and blank checks. Not a dollar more for more bullets to kill Palestinian children. They can fight their own wars on their neighbors.
Most of our aid to Israel pays for weapons and ordnance to stop terror groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, ISIS, the Houthis, and the IRGC from killing Israeli children.
Thanks you for addressing my question on hard core homelessness (aka vagrants). I agree with your recommendations (being both stricter and more generous). I also agree that the solution to normal homelessness is to start by not making cheap housing illegal.
I will add a few other semi random thoughts…
1) It seems to me the focus on affordability is often sidetracked in progressive cities into the idea that the government should fund/build the housing. This is a recipe for disaster and waste. Just make it legal to quickly and easily build granny flats, garage units, mobile homes, etc. The emphasis should be on the government no longer being the cause of the problem, not that they need to solve it for the market.
2) I wouldn’t say that moderate locales “dump” their homeless on progressive places. This is probably pretty rare all things considered. What they do though is effectively squeeze vagrants so that they end up voluntarily going to the places where they are not squeezed. The result is effectively the same. Conservatives don’t have to outrun the bear, they just have to outrun progressives. And on this problem that is easy. The progressive framing is itself the root of the problem.
Mentally ill people are, on average, fairly annoying to deal with. But I resent being told that I need to spend scads of tax dollars institutionalizing everyone who looks at a prissy suburbanite the wrong way. Forget personal liberties, due process, all that-- it's expensive. Institutionalization is incredibly freaking expensive. I'd rather spend that money on, like, regular healthcare.
Certainly the suburbanites aren't willing to pay for it. So they end up dumping the cost on city-dwellers, who then either have to waste inordinate public resources on what are, let's be real here, prisons, or have those prisons turn into dungeons with horrible, scandalous conditions. Which is what we had in the 1960s when we started this whole cycle.
What about after they break the law by sleeping in public park/beach or using the bathroom without, well, a bathroom? Or creating a public nuisance or stealing?
If we're not going to provide housing or bathrooms, then we can't fault people without those things for sleeping or peeing outside of one. That's criminalizing someone's bare existence-- obviously both morally wrong and unconstitutional.
If someone is actually violating a legitimate law, on the other hand, then arrest them.
Laws against camping on the sidewalk or spreading hepatitis and disease seem pretty legitimate to me. Any locale not policing these issues pretty much by definition lacks any claim to legitimacy, in my opinion.
Steel-manning your argument, I would certainly agree that the government should first step in and ensure that there are legitimate, safe places with bathrooms to camp or go to a shelter, or just park.
Even after building these, I would recommend first warning violators and only policing the issue with those stubbornly refusing to comply.
Turning a public park, meant for (mostly) daylight shared recreation and greenspace for local people into living space for people who don't have shelter involves tradeoffs, and in a democracy the affected people (whose tax money pays for the park) get a vote. I live in a large building next to a large public park, and I don't want to see it converted to residential housing or a campsite.
Spend tax money addressing the relevant community problem of ensuring quiet enjoyment of public parks, thoroughfares, and residences. This may require tradeoffs between community interests on the one hand, and the individual liberties of addicts, the mentally ill, and those who simply dislike permanent homes on the other (I've known some of the latter).
If the bulk of the homeless are suffering from temporary issues due to job loss or underemployment, let's deal with it through a mechanism like Federal unemployment benefits. Such an approach will almost certainly require more housing supply - taking us back to Mr Yglesias's primary argument.
I think we agree. Yes, parks, thoroughfares and beaches should be preserved for their intended use. Safe, clean shelters should be established in democratically approved places, preferably well away from these areas.
Good take on Mahdami as far as I know. Your up top discussion of homelessness is decent, but there is a problem. It is a wonkish solution, "let's crack down on the addicts and crazy people hanging out in the park and simultaneously build more housing for them." That is like the wonkish solution for the border, stricter enforcement at the border and grant citizenship to illegals who have been here more than X years." Crackdowns on illegal entrants and homeless addicts can be done in a matter of weeks, policy changes take years to enact and more years to implement. Many voters want something done now.
Building more housing for addicts and the mentally ill doesn't solve the underlying problem, it leads to damaged public housing most people don't want to live in. People who can't or won't take care of themselves won't take care of free housing, either - in some cases, that's why they're homeless.
Building more housing helps with those who are temporarily homeless due to job loss or underemployment, which according to Mr Yglesias's data is the majority of the homeless population.
I too lived in NYC, and what we’re experiencing in Seattle is not that. I DO know that the people I see openly using, dealing, and decompensating in my neighborhood are homeless because they live in tents and RV encampments. I’m pretty sure Matt’s rather patronizing, “I’m a sophisticated NYC boy so I’m not scared by a few eccentrics the way suburbanites and flyover folk are,” means he’s not living in that same reality.
I’m a city girl. I’m not scared, I’m angry. I - along with a lot of liberals, many of whom are too afraid to speak their frustration - am done being told by homeless advocates and YIMBY’s that I don’t get it, that stats belie my daily experience, that it’s really an affordable housing problem. Sorry, but we have thousands of people living on our streets who can’t take care of themselves, simply put.
I appreciate Matt trying to differentiate between two groups, the financially insecure and the severely damaged, but there’s an insouciance and a tinge of condescension (and ignorance?) in his treatment of the latter. Encampment communities of the chronically homeless are a true urban crisis. For ten years it’s been so designated in our city. Yet, in the name of compassion, wokeness, and some future in which the 80, topographically-challenging, square miles of one of the most expensive cities in the country has built enough affordable/free housing for our over 17,000 unhoused; these folks have been left to feed their hellish addictions, permanently fry their brains, prostitute themselves and others, and die among dealers and fellow addicts.
This is not only unacceptable from a moral and basic city-management perspective, it’s politically disastrous. Progressives and some Democrats position themselves as defenders of the right of addicts and mentally ill folks to illegally camp in our parks and on our sidewalks, to refuse offers of shelter, to form longterm communities which instead of discouraging, progressives and do-gooders enable with sanitation, donations, needles. meals, and opposition to so-called “sweeps.” This is akin to the way we positioned ourselves as the defenders of the right of people to live in our country illegally; as consistently and self-righteously caring about the struggles of illegal immigrants and non-normative identity groups over everybody else - creating hierarchies of deservingness that exclude most Americans, including the middle-class, working-class, and poor of all races and ethnicities.
Respectfully, the claim that most of the homeless are employed - and thus your focus on housing affordability as the key to addressing homelessness - isn’t supported by the research cited in the linked source. That research, from University of Chicago economists, finds that 50% of sheltered and 40% of unsheltered adults of working age earned some income from employment over a one year period of observation. Median annual income from employment *and government transfers* is around $4,000 for sheltered and around $2,000 for unsheltered adults of working age. The same study finds “stark” differences in cognitive impairment and higher rates of physical limitation than versus the housed poor. It concludes that, “Cognitive limitations appear to be a significant factor distinguishing the sheltered homeless from the rest of the poor. Homelessness appears to be a symptom of long-term low material well-being. In other words, people experiencing homelessness appear to be having not just a year of deprivation and challenge, but a decade (at least).”
I appreciate Matt’s penchant for housing abundance. Permitting less expensive housing types and eliminating Progressive Era restrictions on SRO would be great. But the truth is that ending homelessness requires a level of care, accommodation, and financial support beyond what even our most liberal communities seem prepared to resource. This is particularly sad given that, contrary to stereotypes and rhetoric, homeless individuals are no more likely to move from state to state than other populations. In other words, most are long-term members of their community.
I mean, maybe it is but it has not been successfully applied anywhere. Just kicking people out to a different jurisdiction is not a generalizable solution.
I tend to agree because if you ask the average person about what precise disorder in their daily life they are talking about they usually point to "well subways in SF...". Okay, but you live in a suburb in Phoenix. Tell me what disorder in Chalder, AZ, you're seeing on a regular basis when you spend 98% of your life is at home, in a car, or at work? Under 10% of people in America take subways, so stop telling stories about subways. Tell me stories about the actual car-centric suburbs that the vast majority of Americans actually live in.
"My life used to be 99.9% insulated from experiences that made me unsafe and uncomfortable, and now it is more like 97%. For instance, I used to be able to by toothpaste at Walgreens without waiting for someone to unlock the case. Why is the case locked? Should I be worried while I am in this store?
Perhaps I should be less selfish in my concerns, but as far as material society-scale problems in my life go, it's basically this and the rising price of eggs. That is a worrying trend in the wrong direction."
I think this is the basic sentiment. There are many forms of disorder short of there being shit on BART.
Why did they start citing crime as one of their primary issues in the years leading up to the 2024 election, and then when it was pointed out that crime rates were historically low and had declined, why did the social media vibe shift turn to urban disorder? Most of the people speaking do not even live in cities.
Because that's what motivates voters. Is it an actual problem? Yes. Saying people afraid of what is an actual problem is "just a meme" doesn't win votes.
There is a big difference between thinking 80% of voters are bigots and thinking 10% are, Gillian Duffy, was a Labour voting polite grandma when Brown called her a bigot, it reflects something really bad when you don't like your own voters. Brown also was a fairly unpleasant character with a closed mind who threw staplers at aides and attacked furniture when annoyed, and he was also known for personal feuds with leading moderates like Peter Mandelson.
P.S. I was a Labour candidate campaigning on the doorstep on the day it happened, it wasn't fun, lots of people brought it up.
Mamdani has already filed briefs trying to expropriate private property and has vowed to make NYC’s rent control regime even worse. He is precisely as good on housing as Karen Bass. I simply can’t comprehend why Matt and others in the “YIMBY” community are so intent on being useful idiots here.
Great answers today. Thanks for the thought put into them.
As support for your comment, I visited Santa Monica and walked around with young children and based on my experiences there, would never raise kids there. The kids were disturbed and worried to see all the people in obvious distress on the sidewalks and have to step over broken glass and random unidentifiable organic matter to get to the pier.
It seems rather evident providing housing for the homeless would be inherently easier, if we stopped producing more of them.
While a drug culture has long existed in SF, it was largely contained to certain areas, like SF homelessness. That changed with the de facto decriminalization of drug dealing and use. It is not difficult to draw a straight line between mass SF homelessness and the City's de facto decriminalization of drugs.
Undocumented Hondurans have long controlled the bulk of the SF drug trade. After felony drug convictions, they were often deported. At some point, SF leaders decided dealers and mules were victims of circumstance, and deportation was simply re victimization.
Their answer was de facto decriminalization of felony drug offenses. To prevent the deportations, SF largely stopped charging drug felonies. It turns out drug dealers, foreign or domestic, prefer to ply their trade where imprisonment is a practical impossibility.
The de facto decriminalization attracted dealers from across the nation and world. The variety of drugs available soared, as prices dropped, due to competition. Everything is more expensive in SF, from a soft drink, to a gallon of gas, to housing, except illicit drugs.
Soon drug addicts from across the nation arrived in SF, attracted by a large variety of drugs, with some of the nation's cheapest prices. As consumption soared, new arrivals joined local functioning addicts, who became homeless as their disease progressed, often thanks to cheaper dope.
At the same time, government policies provided food, water, needles and variety of other homeless freebies, if not out right cash, for the unhoused who are largely chronically addicted. Simultaneously, SF also stopped charging many crimes, addicts utilized to fund their addiction.
All, as soaring tech salaries and mass immigration exasperated SF's omnipresent housing shortage. That pushed housing costs ever higher, increasing homelessness even among the non addicted.
It was the perfect slow storm, to create mass homelessness. While the current Mayor has promised to criminally charge dealers and require users to seek treatment or be incarcerated, it remains to be seen, if re criminalization will actually be implemented and maintained long term.
In retrospect, the de facto decriminalization of drugs was likely the worst policy ever implemented in CA. Preventing the production of new homeless, is much easier than housing them after the fact.
The way you prevent the production of homeless is by building housing. If drugs were driving homelessness, then vacancy rates would have been increasing. But since vacancy rates have been decreasing, it’s clear that housing is a bigger factor in the production of homelessness. (It’s possible that your analysis is a better analysis of the problem in St. Louis or West Virginia.)
Isn't this exactly the point of distinguishing the different kinds of homelessness? Cheaper housing will lead to more basically functional people who can't quite make rent being able to afford rent. That is a good thing and we should do it.
But I don't think it will have so much effect on the folks passed out on the subway. Whatever leads to more drug addiction increases the number of people in that category, whether they have permanent shelter or not. Nor will it have much effect on people whose life-wrecking mental illness has left them unable to function in life. Those folks will continue shouting at passers-by on the street corner even if housing costs drop by 50% over the next decade, because their primary problem is their mental illness, not their lack of rent money.
The out-of-control crazy people would not be welcome tenants by anyone, and if they somehow get to rent a low-cost apartment, their neighbors will suffer as a result. A rooming house or flophouse or whatever would kick them out, just as many homeless shelters kick them out. Rooming houses and cheap apartments and homeless shelters are all good things we should have, but none of them are much use for treating life-wrecking addictions or mental illnesses.
For f**k’s sake I would love to hear what Matt imagines Israel could do to pursue a political solution to the IRGC’s deranged obsession with killing Jews.
Rom for President.
https://continuingmissionsta.com/2019/02/21/featured-crew-rom/
Me, I favor generous construal.
Israel has earned their negative reputation among Democrats, most independents and even many Republicans. No more blanket support and blank checks. Not a dollar more for more bullets to kill Palestinian children. They can fight their own wars on their neighbors.
Most of our aid to Israel pays for weapons and ordnance to stop terror groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, ISIS, the Houthis, and the IRGC from killing Israeli children.
Thanks you for addressing my question on hard core homelessness (aka vagrants). I agree with your recommendations (being both stricter and more generous). I also agree that the solution to normal homelessness is to start by not making cheap housing illegal.
I will add a few other semi random thoughts…
1) It seems to me the focus on affordability is often sidetracked in progressive cities into the idea that the government should fund/build the housing. This is a recipe for disaster and waste. Just make it legal to quickly and easily build granny flats, garage units, mobile homes, etc. The emphasis should be on the government no longer being the cause of the problem, not that they need to solve it for the market.
2) I wouldn’t say that moderate locales “dump” their homeless on progressive places. This is probably pretty rare all things considered. What they do though is effectively squeeze vagrants so that they end up voluntarily going to the places where they are not squeezed. The result is effectively the same. Conservatives don’t have to outrun the bear, they just have to outrun progressives. And on this problem that is easy. The progressive framing is itself the root of the problem.
Mentally ill people are, on average, fairly annoying to deal with. But I resent being told that I need to spend scads of tax dollars institutionalizing everyone who looks at a prissy suburbanite the wrong way. Forget personal liberties, due process, all that-- it's expensive. Institutionalization is incredibly freaking expensive. I'd rather spend that money on, like, regular healthcare.
Certainly the suburbanites aren't willing to pay for it. So they end up dumping the cost on city-dwellers, who then either have to waste inordinate public resources on what are, let's be real here, prisons, or have those prisons turn into dungeons with horrible, scandalous conditions. Which is what we had in the 1960s when we started this whole cycle.
What about after they break the law by sleeping in public park/beach or using the bathroom without, well, a bathroom? Or creating a public nuisance or stealing?
If we're not going to provide housing or bathrooms, then we can't fault people without those things for sleeping or peeing outside of one. That's criminalizing someone's bare existence-- obviously both morally wrong and unconstitutional.
If someone is actually violating a legitimate law, on the other hand, then arrest them.
Laws against camping on the sidewalk or spreading hepatitis and disease seem pretty legitimate to me. Any locale not policing these issues pretty much by definition lacks any claim to legitimacy, in my opinion.
Steel-manning your argument, I would certainly agree that the government should first step in and ensure that there are legitimate, safe places with bathrooms to camp or go to a shelter, or just park.
Even after building these, I would recommend first warning violators and only policing the issue with those stubbornly refusing to comply.
Turning a public park, meant for (mostly) daylight shared recreation and greenspace for local people into living space for people who don't have shelter involves tradeoffs, and in a democracy the affected people (whose tax money pays for the park) get a vote. I live in a large building next to a large public park, and I don't want to see it converted to residential housing or a campsite.
Spend tax money addressing the relevant community problem of ensuring quiet enjoyment of public parks, thoroughfares, and residences. This may require tradeoffs between community interests on the one hand, and the individual liberties of addicts, the mentally ill, and those who simply dislike permanent homes on the other (I've known some of the latter).
If the bulk of the homeless are suffering from temporary issues due to job loss or underemployment, let's deal with it through a mechanism like Federal unemployment benefits. Such an approach will almost certainly require more housing supply - taking us back to Mr Yglesias's primary argument.
I think we agree. Yes, parks, thoroughfares and beaches should be preserved for their intended use. Safe, clean shelters should be established in democratically approved places, preferably well away from these areas.
Good take on Mahdami as far as I know. Your up top discussion of homelessness is decent, but there is a problem. It is a wonkish solution, "let's crack down on the addicts and crazy people hanging out in the park and simultaneously build more housing for them." That is like the wonkish solution for the border, stricter enforcement at the border and grant citizenship to illegals who have been here more than X years." Crackdowns on illegal entrants and homeless addicts can be done in a matter of weeks, policy changes take years to enact and more years to implement. Many voters want something done now.
Building more housing for addicts and the mentally ill doesn't solve the underlying problem, it leads to damaged public housing most people don't want to live in. People who can't or won't take care of themselves won't take care of free housing, either - in some cases, that's why they're homeless.
Building more housing helps with those who are temporarily homeless due to job loss or underemployment, which according to Mr Yglesias's data is the majority of the homeless population.
Sucking up to the factional left? https://www.newyorker.com/culture/on-and-off-the-avenue/the-embarrassment-of-democrats-wearing-kente-cloth-stoles
I too lived in NYC, and what we’re experiencing in Seattle is not that. I DO know that the people I see openly using, dealing, and decompensating in my neighborhood are homeless because they live in tents and RV encampments. I’m pretty sure Matt’s rather patronizing, “I’m a sophisticated NYC boy so I’m not scared by a few eccentrics the way suburbanites and flyover folk are,” means he’s not living in that same reality.
I’m a city girl. I’m not scared, I’m angry. I - along with a lot of liberals, many of whom are too afraid to speak their frustration - am done being told by homeless advocates and YIMBY’s that I don’t get it, that stats belie my daily experience, that it’s really an affordable housing problem. Sorry, but we have thousands of people living on our streets who can’t take care of themselves, simply put.
I appreciate Matt trying to differentiate between two groups, the financially insecure and the severely damaged, but there’s an insouciance and a tinge of condescension (and ignorance?) in his treatment of the latter. Encampment communities of the chronically homeless are a true urban crisis. For ten years it’s been so designated in our city. Yet, in the name of compassion, wokeness, and some future in which the 80, topographically-challenging, square miles of one of the most expensive cities in the country has built enough affordable/free housing for our over 17,000 unhoused; these folks have been left to feed their hellish addictions, permanently fry their brains, prostitute themselves and others, and die among dealers and fellow addicts.
This is not only unacceptable from a moral and basic city-management perspective, it’s politically disastrous. Progressives and some Democrats position themselves as defenders of the right of addicts and mentally ill folks to illegally camp in our parks and on our sidewalks, to refuse offers of shelter, to form longterm communities which instead of discouraging, progressives and do-gooders enable with sanitation, donations, needles. meals, and opposition to so-called “sweeps.” This is akin to the way we positioned ourselves as the defenders of the right of people to live in our country illegally; as consistently and self-righteously caring about the struggles of illegal immigrants and non-normative identity groups over everybody else - creating hierarchies of deservingness that exclude most Americans, including the middle-class, working-class, and poor of all races and ethnicities.
I’m done.
Thanks for one of the best distillations of the issue that I've read in a long time.
Respectfully, the claim that most of the homeless are employed - and thus your focus on housing affordability as the key to addressing homelessness - isn’t supported by the research cited in the linked source. That research, from University of Chicago economists, finds that 50% of sheltered and 40% of unsheltered adults of working age earned some income from employment over a one year period of observation. Median annual income from employment *and government transfers* is around $4,000 for sheltered and around $2,000 for unsheltered adults of working age. The same study finds “stark” differences in cognitive impairment and higher rates of physical limitation than versus the housed poor. It concludes that, “Cognitive limitations appear to be a significant factor distinguishing the sheltered homeless from the rest of the poor. Homelessness appears to be a symptom of long-term low material well-being. In other words, people experiencing homelessness appear to be having not just a year of deprivation and challenge, but a decade (at least).”
I appreciate Matt’s penchant for housing abundance. Permitting less expensive housing types and eliminating Progressive Era restrictions on SRO would be great. But the truth is that ending homelessness requires a level of care, accommodation, and financial support beyond what even our most liberal communities seem prepared to resource. This is particularly sad given that, contrary to stereotypes and rhetoric, homeless individuals are no more likely to move from state to state than other populations. In other words, most are long-term members of their community.
I mean, maybe it is but it has not been successfully applied anywhere. Just kicking people out to a different jurisdiction is not a generalizable solution.
Call me a cynic, but I don’t believe that conservative voters actually care about “disorder.” It’s just a meme at this point.
I tend to agree because if you ask the average person about what precise disorder in their daily life they are talking about they usually point to "well subways in SF...". Okay, but you live in a suburb in Phoenix. Tell me what disorder in Chalder, AZ, you're seeing on a regular basis when you spend 98% of your life is at home, in a car, or at work? Under 10% of people in America take subways, so stop telling stories about subways. Tell me stories about the actual car-centric suburbs that the vast majority of Americans actually live in.
"My life used to be 99.9% insulated from experiences that made me unsafe and uncomfortable, and now it is more like 97%. For instance, I used to be able to by toothpaste at Walgreens without waiting for someone to unlock the case. Why is the case locked? Should I be worried while I am in this store?
Perhaps I should be less selfish in my concerns, but as far as material society-scale problems in my life go, it's basically this and the rising price of eggs. That is a worrying trend in the wrong direction."
I think this is the basic sentiment. There are many forms of disorder short of there being shit on BART.
But it was the same problem in 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016.
It feels made-up, kind of like the vibe session.
I couldn't disagree more - it's their primary concern. A society needs rules and those rules need to be obeyed.
Why did they start citing crime as one of their primary issues in the years leading up to the 2024 election, and then when it was pointed out that crime rates were historically low and had declined, why did the social media vibe shift turn to urban disorder? Most of the people speaking do not even live in cities.
Because that's what motivates voters. Is it an actual problem? Yes. Saying people afraid of what is an actual problem is "just a meme" doesn't win votes.
Sucks to be Rosa Parks!
Rosa Parks didn't fight for the freedom to jack off on the subway
And that's why Trump won.
There is a big difference between thinking 80% of voters are bigots and thinking 10% are, Gillian Duffy, was a Labour voting polite grandma when Brown called her a bigot, it reflects something really bad when you don't like your own voters. Brown also was a fairly unpleasant character with a closed mind who threw staplers at aides and attacked furniture when annoyed, and he was also known for personal feuds with leading moderates like Peter Mandelson.
P.S. I was a Labour candidate campaigning on the doorstep on the day it happened, it wasn't fun, lots of people brought it up.
Mamdani has already filed briefs trying to expropriate private property and has vowed to make NYC’s rent control regime even worse. He is precisely as good on housing as Karen Bass. I simply can’t comprehend why Matt and others in the “YIMBY” community are so intent on being useful idiots here.
Great answers today. Thanks for the thought put into them.
As support for your comment, I visited Santa Monica and walked around with young children and based on my experiences there, would never raise kids there. The kids were disturbed and worried to see all the people in obvious distress on the sidewalks and have to step over broken glass and random unidentifiable organic matter to get to the pier.
It seems rather evident providing housing for the homeless would be inherently easier, if we stopped producing more of them.
While a drug culture has long existed in SF, it was largely contained to certain areas, like SF homelessness. That changed with the de facto decriminalization of drug dealing and use. It is not difficult to draw a straight line between mass SF homelessness and the City's de facto decriminalization of drugs.
Undocumented Hondurans have long controlled the bulk of the SF drug trade. After felony drug convictions, they were often deported. At some point, SF leaders decided dealers and mules were victims of circumstance, and deportation was simply re victimization.
Their answer was de facto decriminalization of felony drug offenses. To prevent the deportations, SF largely stopped charging drug felonies. It turns out drug dealers, foreign or domestic, prefer to ply their trade where imprisonment is a practical impossibility.
The de facto decriminalization attracted dealers from across the nation and world. The variety of drugs available soared, as prices dropped, due to competition. Everything is more expensive in SF, from a soft drink, to a gallon of gas, to housing, except illicit drugs.
Soon drug addicts from across the nation arrived in SF, attracted by a large variety of drugs, with some of the nation's cheapest prices. As consumption soared, new arrivals joined local functioning addicts, who became homeless as their disease progressed, often thanks to cheaper dope.
At the same time, government policies provided food, water, needles and variety of other homeless freebies, if not out right cash, for the unhoused who are largely chronically addicted. Simultaneously, SF also stopped charging many crimes, addicts utilized to fund their addiction.
All, as soaring tech salaries and mass immigration exasperated SF's omnipresent housing shortage. That pushed housing costs ever higher, increasing homelessness even among the non addicted.
It was the perfect slow storm, to create mass homelessness. While the current Mayor has promised to criminally charge dealers and require users to seek treatment or be incarcerated, it remains to be seen, if re criminalization will actually be implemented and maintained long term.
In retrospect, the de facto decriminalization of drugs was likely the worst policy ever implemented in CA. Preventing the production of new homeless, is much easier than housing them after the fact.
The way you prevent the production of homeless is by building housing. If drugs were driving homelessness, then vacancy rates would have been increasing. But since vacancy rates have been decreasing, it’s clear that housing is a bigger factor in the production of homelessness. (It’s possible that your analysis is a better analysis of the problem in St. Louis or West Virginia.)
Isn't this exactly the point of distinguishing the different kinds of homelessness? Cheaper housing will lead to more basically functional people who can't quite make rent being able to afford rent. That is a good thing and we should do it.
But I don't think it will have so much effect on the folks passed out on the subway. Whatever leads to more drug addiction increases the number of people in that category, whether they have permanent shelter or not. Nor will it have much effect on people whose life-wrecking mental illness has left them unable to function in life. Those folks will continue shouting at passers-by on the street corner even if housing costs drop by 50% over the next decade, because their primary problem is their mental illness, not their lack of rent money.
The out-of-control crazy people would not be welcome tenants by anyone, and if they somehow get to rent a low-cost apartment, their neighbors will suffer as a result. A rooming house or flophouse or whatever would kick them out, just as many homeless shelters kick them out. Rooming houses and cheap apartments and homeless shelters are all good things we should have, but none of them are much use for treating life-wrecking addictions or mental illnesses.
lol, lmao even