In the New York Times today, Maia Szalavitz writes about how Seattle finally tackled chronic homelessness. A few years ago Lisa Daugaard, a lawyer, developed a program called LEAD:
Instead of re-incarcerating homeless people who typically already have long histories of minor arrests, police departments that participate in LEAD refer them to case management services. The program has an overall philosophy of harm reduction, which, in addition to securing shelter, focuses on improving health, rather than mandating abstinence from drugs and other risky behaviors. LEAD originated as a collaboration of public defenders, the police and prosecutors, who put aside differences to work on solutions.
LEAD worked, but during the pandemic shelters were closed and police stopped arresting people for minor crimes. So Daugaard decided to try something new:
With federal pandemic funds becoming available and desperate hotel owners newly open to being paid to house nontraditional guests, she said she saw “our chance to show that there is another way.”
Ms. Daugaard and her colleagues created a program now known as JustCare. JustCare staff members, rather than police officers, would respond to urgent calls about encampments. After building trust with local homeless people, the workers would move them into housing without strict abstinence requirements and then help clean up the site. The police would be contacted only as a last resort.
The common element of both programs is an emphasis on getting people into shelter, not obsessing over behavioral rules or addictions to drugs or alcohol. Addicts would rather have drugs than housing, so insisting that they get clean in return for housing accomplishes nothing except to keep them on the streets.
There's a lesson here for homeless initiatives everywhere. Obviously, one thing you need is actual shelter, and public resistance makes that hard to build. But if you overcome that obstacle, you also need to get people off the street and into your shiny new shelters. The way to do that is to build trust and to let people live the way they want. That doesn't sound attractive to a lot of people, but it works.
Of course the biggest complaint against opening up housing is that it will bring drugs into the neighborhood (as though there's none there now)....
How is LA's "tiny house" project doing?
https://www.curbed.com/2021/04/tiny-home-village-homeless-los-angeles.html
In that case, residents don't have to be on the wagon, but no drugs or alcohol at the site.
...So the worst off don't get the same basic considerations everyone else does to dull the pain of life?
I hear that.
" in addition to securing shelter, focuses on improving health"
Expand on that. Details please. What health issues? Diabetes? Mental health?
If it's mental health, which I suspect is the case, that often requires regularly taking medicine as prescribed. Should that be enforced? If not, an overwhelming proportion will never improve their health.
Just giving people a way to sleep and hang out inside has a major impact on health.
This ^
I've spent my entire career in reporting on data and program policies for homeless/housing services.
I don't know the relevant law or generally accepted public policy in this area (it probably varies by state), but my sense is if people are ill enough to be institutionalized against their will, the medical staff in question will administer medications on an involuntary basis.
But for non-institutionalized people, we generally don't mandate healthcare against their will (although we may provide assistance if they need it and are amenable).
Are the hotels still inhabitable a year later?
Presumably they are, since multinational chain hotels with hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue aren’t known for making poor business decisions like “let’s take on a bunch of customers who will destroy the entire value of our properties within the next year.”
Also it’s not like people with good credit scores haven’t ever been known to trash a hotel room. There’s an entire cinematic genre of non-homeless men renting hotel rooms and destroying them: Bachelor Party, The Hangover, etc.
But thanks for your casual classist assumption that homeless people destroy everything they touch. Jesus owes you a cookie.
These usually aren't chain hotels. Hilton isn't taking on a bunch of homeless drug addicts unless you force them. These are usually knockoff Motel 6 sorts of places.
Like this one in Vancouver, Washington.
https://www.clarkcountytoday.com/health/a-new-identity-kasper-recovery-housing-and-the-value-motel/
https://www.pressherald.com/2022/02/25/two-south-portland-hotels-will-stop-hosting-homeless-people-because-of-complaints/
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/san-francisco-sros/
Don't worry: if Christina Drazen is elected governor of Oregon, she will engage the Dutertian homeless cleansing program your heart desires.
Eventually, too, it will expand to shitlibs generally, & transpaedogroomers specifically, & Portland will be Kigali on the Willamette.
*Key for understanding the 2022 Oregon governor race:
Drazen (Q - Klamath Falls**): wants to make Oregon 1858 again, the racially-covenanted Whitekanda of easterners's dreams, where the dream of a more perfect union could be realized, without that pesky Southern slave duskiness or native savage buckskinnedness. Would be good with using Joey Bishop & his Patriots Pride as paramilitaries.
Betsy Johnson (Independent/lifelong liberal Democrat (until someone used their pronouns)): wants to make Oregon 1985 again, or, the Bowling for Soup candidacy, restoring Oregon to the presumption of enlightenment, in opposition to the dirtiness of the rest of the country following the tumult of the 1960s & 70s, & as it was before the white supremacist battering of an Aethiopaean university student in 1988 (so recent, George H.W. Bush had already been elected president!) brooked the veil of Oregonian postraciality, & then the sexual depredations of Bob Packwood (Q) & David Wu (D) punctured the connubial transcendence of the Beaver State. Just wishes the Patriots Pride were a bit less uncouth in their wordchoice.
Tina Kotek (D): if we're being honest, would love to restore the pristine era of Portlandia as it was when it began, so roughly the same as Betsy Johnson, but she is too realistic to know there's no going back to the time of cartridge games & Oregon as a leftwing antivaxxxers paradise. Content to steer a course thru the unpleasantness of the standoff between Andy Ngo's masturbation fantasies in Fred Perry & the slumming it until after getting their MBA second generation black block anarchists still trying to recapture the tingle of Seattle, November 1999, & into a more equitable future. Would like to see the Patriots Pride broken up & in some cases prosecuted, but would be good if they just called it off & retired to being beardo beersnobs.
**Tell me why a resident of the State of Jefferson can be governor of an entirely different state.
Yes.
Yes.
Do you imagine hotel guests are normally non destructive?
Tell me you've never worked in the service industry by not telling me you're never worked in thenservice industry...
+1 bathtub methlab in a room at the Manchester Suites in Glendale, WI, c. 1999
Addicts or…
“They don’t seem to understand who the unhoused are,” says Petersen of hotel industry opponents. “We’re talking about seniors, students, working people – that’s who the voucher program would benefit the most.”
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/24/us/los-angeles-homeless-hotel-rooms-ordinance/index.html
“According to a 2020 report from the homeless services agency, more than 14,000 unhoused people in the county have serious mental illnesses and more than 15,000 are grappling with substance abuse issues.
I’m happy to help those people. Addicts? Not so much.
You prefer to have them sleeping in tents on the sidewalk and defecating in public? Have you been to California lately?
Or Seattle.
What I'd prefer is not on the table. And no, I don't live in CA. I'm sure it is perfectly awful to be around them. So whether they are on the street, the next room over at your hotel, in prison, or in some shelter, they will annoy and bother others. There is no real solution to this problem when you believe we should "let people live the way they want." Specifically, these "hard core" types.
If it were possible to take someone and immerse them in resources for treatment, counseling, education, rehabilitation, etc. it might be the right thing to do, but then we wouldn't be letting them live the way they want.
Mr. Drum's live and let live attitude guarantees they will remain a danger to themselves and others.
What do you prefer? Mass extermination, as Viktor Orban or Rodrigo Duterte would do?
That would require effort… which is definitely not worth it.
The Lazy Genocidaire.
A person with an addiction, who you're labeling (as well as KD) as just "an addict", is still a person.
I’m not so sure about that. The worst, I think, become some sort of monstrous being. Besides… humanity, as we see in the news every day in places all over the world, aren’t anything to write home about.
We have you in record as wanting these people to die on your lawn.
So there's that.
I will let them live and die they way they want to live and die. I owe them nothing and they owe me nothing. It's clear that your compassion and concern has had no effect whatsoever.
Not true. Some addicts, like my aunts & uncles, can grow up to be Trump voters.
(Crack & heroin, respectively, for those scoring at home.)
Helping addicts helps us.
But I do not think dumping addicts in hotel rooms and telling them to shoot up indoors helps them.
We seriously need to think about an affordable, manageable solution to this problem that involves getting addicts straight.
I think we need a combination of really hard core sentencing for drug dealers and some kind of confined residential work camp for addicts that gets them off drugs and that extends for longer and longer each time they relapse after released.
The hard part of the work camp is making sure drugs do not get smuggled in. Are draconian sentences for anyone who smuggles in drugs and decent salaries for the guards enough to make that work? I do not know.
You just described the Church of Scientology.
#DavidMiscavige2024
It's also a huge help in terms of actually trying to get clean to have housing in the first place.
Yup, this too.
(I've spent my entire career in reporting on data and program policies for homeless/housing services.)
This strikes me as being Section 8 for the private sector.
The hotels are paid though a voucher by the city
The hotel provides the maintenance for the rooms etc and the organizations involved try to make sure that the homeless people are helped in addressing their demons, e it drugs, mental issues or just poverty itself.
The ONLY difference seems to be that the majority of the hotel occupants are paid guests whereas Sect 8 housing usually lumps everyone with those demons in one place. By placing these folks with paid guest there may be some pressure on the homeless to "act right" and not partake in any illicit activities,
Lets put it this way. If you are a senior or veteran and are collecting benefits this program lets you keep your monthly payouts and THEY provide the vouchers for housing whereas Sect 8 takes a % of your monthly payout FOR the housing.
Am I correct on this?
No, that's not how Section 8 works.
Section 8 recipients pay rent to their landlord just like anybody else. Their benefits aren't garnished for rent payments.
This approach is not new. The old way was tell homeless to get a job, then we'll help you. How to get a job without an address, without a place to wash, etc.? So the movement started to give people a place to live first, then give them the services they need. During covid, shelters would be even less safe than usual, due to close quarters and the spread of covid. In Baltimore, the local government housed homeless in at least one hotel. It has apparently been safe and effective.
It isn't new, but I guess sometimes those of us in the field have to trumpet it as "HEY THIS IS WORKING (and no it's totally not the same thing we've been saying for years, even though it is because we've known that this works for years)."
They literally just described harm reduction and housing first in the quotes above. That's all. Those of us who work in the housing/homeless services fields have been doing both of those for literally a decade. Just give us more money and we can end homelessness, full stop.
WHAT???!!! Not be able to smite the sinners and force to see your light, YOUR way. Why would anyone be interested in that kind of altruism. Takes all the self-righteous fun out of it. Walking Jesus' path and doing his work, his way? NO WAY!!!!
Truly, very good. "The hole in our gospel" should be required reading by so-called "christians".
Thinking of recently vetoed legislation in California, the housing effectively becomes the safe injection site?
Alas, no.
This is going to throw conservatives into a panic, a non-abusive solution that demonstrably works, since for them it's the abuse that's always the answer, the actual purpose of any public interest.
You're channeling Mencken
I really wish our homeless initiatives focused as much on providing care as building housing. We always have $100 Million for new shelters, but people still have the same problems. Treatment for addiction and mental illness would do as much as another cheap apartment to get people off the street.
Reagan liberated the mentally ill from confinement, you dolt. Then the GQP over years weaponized them. If only Cesar Sayoc, Jr., had been able to finish the job for Trump.
Well, except that often the hardest part of putting together a new program is the acquiring the physical spaces for people to live. Be that renting units from the market, purchasing units, or building/renovating units.
I worked in Seattle's LEAD program when it was still fairly new and small. I went to work in another pilot program with a similar design, and continue to do social work in the city. We definitely have not solved chronic homelessness in Seattle. LEAD was a noble effort that had an impact ten years ago, but the new moderate dem leadership in City Hall and a nutcase city attorney (supported by a deputy who was a foundational member of LEAD) has begun to slowly chip away at the utility of the program. LEAD has become a more ineffectual program at this point. The first thing LEAD case managers now tell me and the clients who I refer is "we're not a housing program". Great. So much of this program is truly excellent, but it now suffers from being underfunded. I also think it failed to scale appropriately. They expanded LEAD into most of the county, but without having enough housing arranged for all the people who they accept. Finally, the program only works if police and prosecutors are willing to let it work. LEAD referrals must be approved by local LE (they have bi-weekly meetings where dept. of corrections, KC Sherriff, and SPD are all at the table). Newer precincts seem less likely to cooperate. As a social worker who works with people facing felony charges, and with complex criminal case histories, I see my clients who are most in need screened out for gang-related offenses from the 90's, a ten year old DV charge or any violent offense. I'm glad we have this program, but I think it's been overhyped. All that being said, Lisa Daugard is both extremely smart (winner of a MacArthur Genius Award) and apparently very difficult to work for, as her agency has terribly high turnover.
As an aside, anyone who says they're "not interested in helping addicts" and thinks they can easily parse people with mental illness, or health issues from people with addiction should either get a fucking clue, or go to hell. I hope your kids get hooked on dope and you live with the misery of watching them suffer in a city street. GFY.
Not sure Kevin will be glad to see a comment with so much LEAD in it. (-:
Sorry to hear that LEAD is not all that Kevin billed it as, but like a lot of things in this world, the only way to make things better is to keep on trying.
"anyone who says they're "not interested in helping addicts" and thinks they can easily parse people with mental illness, or health issues from people with addiction should either get a fucking clue, or go to hell."
Thanks for saying this out loud.
Hear, hear! Thanks for the comment, and for continuing to fight the good fight.
In a just world, IMO, social workers are the citizens who'd be thanked by random strangers "for your service." (Ironically, every single one I've ever known would be absolutely horrified by the idea.)
I am sure what I am going to say, will mean some on here will hate me.
The housing first idea sounds promising up, and until, they open a shelter close to your home or office. Once you accept "rather than mandating abstinence from drugs and other risky behaviors" and "the police would be contacted only as a last resort" THEN you are accepting active local drug dealing, prostitution and vagrancy.
My point, as you see in Los Angeles: very few/perhaps no neighborhood wants shelters under the aforementioned terms.
So what is my solution? Homeless should be provided basic, military style, bunks with communal kitchens and bathrooms with support services (employment, mental health etc). There are rules to enter and stay in the homeless shelter. The idea, as is happening in Los Angeles, that you spend $600,000 per apartment unit, for homeless housing, that most neighbors hate, seems like a bad solution.
my point, as you see in Los Angeles: very few/perhaps no neighborhood wants shelters under the aforementioned terms. So what is my solution?
Go back to the days when cheap single occupancy hotels and lowest cost rooming houses were A) legal and B) concentrated in the same part of town.
Sound draconian? Why, does anybody doubt 1950s way of doing it was better than current practice?
Yeah, why are you punishing people for doing the things all the other humans in the neighborhood are doing?
I generally think that LEAD-type programs are the right way to go (maybe with some civil commitment for people who demonstrate they can't even make it in a LEAD-type program), so I'm not really in favor of hard-ass solutions for the homeless.
But I will say, your argument- which I have heard from a lot of folks who advocate for the homeless- is quite misplaced. This gets to a way that life just isn't fair, but there are some addicts who are amazingly functional and who live productive lives, and there are other addicts who destroy their own lives and sometimes other lives because of their addiction, and the fact that the functional addicts get to go on being addicted doesn't mean society has no right to try and stop the non-functional addicts.
And I do mean it when I say this TRULY isn't fair. Because one thing that makes a huge difference in which addicts are functional is having big time family and monetary resources to back them up every time they screw up. A lot of times, the people who end up suffering the most harm from these sorts of behaviors are folks who are no different than anyone else except they didn't have an understanding family to rely on, or enough money to get back on their feet.
So it's an unfair thing, but it's nonetheless absolutely true. There's no right to sleep on the streets, or to take drugs to the point that you can't work and can't support yourself, or to lash out at people due to mental illness. Now, we should pursue LEAD-type programs because they work, and because people have a basic right to housing whether or not they live productive lives or are self-destructive. And we're a rich society and owe them that.
But if an intervention is necessary, if the only way to get a person off one of these destructive cycles is to commit them, and the evidence shows that they in fact can't support themselves, then we have to do what we have to do, and not fall back on some misguided "right to do stuff that other people can get away with but I can't".
Personal experience in Seattle. City purchases an Extended Stay America facility. Remodels it to accept 135 homeless residents. The location is right next to Seattle Housing Authority facility with Parking Enforcement garage around the corner. They had a remote community meeting regarding the use and of the 3 or 4 people who reside in the area - not one NIMBY. We welcome this facility because it gives these folks a place to stay that has social services on site. Great idea. I think it's working. These people are not out wandering the streets, they have somewhere to be.
This is so old fashioned. Imagine, getting people into cheap housing. For those who don't know, cheap housing is a place for people to get off the streets and live indoors at a relatively modest cost. Only a few older people remember when this still existed anywhere in the US.
In the 1960s, the Bowery in NYC was home to hundreds, possibly more, of substance abusers, generally alcoholics. You'd see them passed out on the street, but the streets were lined with "flop houses" which for a few dollars offered rooms rented by the night. The city social services department would pay for this along with soup kitchens, so these people could get off the streets, get some basic nutrition and die in peace. (Not all of them died. Some pulled themselves together and got off alcohol and the street.)
There used to be places like rooming houses, boarding houses and single room occupancy hotels that offered housing at modest prices with varying term leases. In the late 1970s they were declared a public nuisance. You can just imagine the sheer hell of having all the riffraff living indoors. By the 1980s, more and more people were living on the street. The old flophouses became pricey apartments and the SROs condominiums.
It wasn't a lot better in other cities. The simple fact is that living on the street is dangerous. It is dangerous to one's health, physical and mental, and it makes one vulnerable to a rough community of drug dealers, criminals and people with serious mental problems. Getting people off the street, even if they still get wasted, can help. Housing is an important part of any solution. It isn't necessarily enough. There also has to be security. That means security staff and a legal means to evict.
People with "serious mental problems" are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crimes.
Vancouver, Washington has a new program for homeless people. The country just released a report on its progress. https://pcdn.columbian.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/safestay6month_outpost_draft6_81222.pdf
The tiny shelters feature a bed, electricity, sink, roof, locking door. They have access to showers and toilets. Still lots of people pitching tents along the freeway.
More people need housing than programs to house them.
After 26 years as an evil landlord, I quit. Free at Last! Free at Last! Thank Glod Almighty, Free at Last!!!
Who gonna pay for the maintenance of the housing???
How many cycle of folks in and out before it is cheaper to tear down and rebuild?
Ugh, more nihilist progressive libertarianism with a smile. No one wants to sound like a conservative, but really the answer is more and more addiction treatment.
A solution that is more about making the liberal intelligentsia (or MAGA nationalists) feel good about themselves is usually not a solution.
No, the answer to people without somewhere to live is to give them somewhere to live and get back on their feet.
How is giving people a place to live their lives nihilism?
>>No one wants to sound like a conservative, but really the answer is more and more addiction treatment.<<
No, the answer mostly is more housing. Plenty of people in this world manage to remain addicted for many years while being housed.
Meh
I have dealt with a daughter with a serious addiction problem. I raised her daughter until she got out of prison (got caught committing a crime to support her habit). When she got out she wanted to come home to be with her daughter. I said no - you EARN that right. She went the halfway house route - walked to job interviews.
She is now a vibrant part of the work force.
But she's an addict and the old adage of once and addict - ALWAYS and addict still rings true, as I had to intervene when she started drinking a little too heavily. She straightened back up - fortunately.
But she was one interview away from needing housing assistance from us. It was harrowing to say the least. There is a fine line between help and hand outs when it comes to addressing addiction and addicts and NO ONE will be satisfied with either.
I applaud ANY Effort made by anyone in this regard. I just wonder why the Christian organizations like Southern Baptist Men who go around rebuilding communities after a hurricane goes through cannot provide the same "sweat equity" when it comes to personal failings like drug addiction - and build dorm like structures to hep them through the stormy days of their lives?
Heck, Joel Osteen had to be embarrassed enough by bad pres to open his Church in Texas to flooding victims from a hurricane a few years back.
She had a halfway house.
That's housing.
A perusal of The NY Times comments section shows many people absolutely savaging that article for glossing over the continuing problems in Seattle; open drug use/dealing, public defecation/urination, being accosted by disordered individuals, rampant theft.
As long as my kid doesn't have to dodge needles on our front steps because the newly housed made the area go to shit. If the JustCare advocates want to keep these places up I'll tolerate it.
If they have a place to be, why would they do that?
Recommend the documentary 'Dark Days' on this topic. Changed my thinking--Getting people off the streets should be #1 priority, do not focus on the worse among them, try to sort problems (addicts here, mentally ill here, just down on their luck here).
Anyone can lose everything at anytime in our country. Our healthcare system insures that...so those of you feeling all high-and-mighty should check yourselves. Mental illness can hit you like a thunderbolt, addiction is one slipped disk away and chronic pain eats against your good sense about opiods...I've seen it.