Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass's signature homeless program is Inside Safe, a program to get people out of encampments and bring them indoors. It's now six months old, and according to the LA Times one out of six participants isn't happy indoors:
The agency reported that 153 people, or 10.5% of Inside Safe’s participants, have exited the program entirely....On top of that, 6.6% of Inside Safe’s participants are now listed as being “served from the streets.”
....Bass said she has been told that one reason for the departures is dissatisfaction with the rules in place at the program’s hotels and motels. At the L.A. Grand Hotel, which is in downtown Los Angeles and currently being used as temporary homeless housing, residents have been prohibited from having guests in their rooms, she said.
Every program like this has retention issues, though this seems a little high. As usual, a big part of the problem is well-meaning rules. Prohibition of alcohol and drugs, for example, may motivate some people to get clean. But it will motivate a lot more to stay on the street in their tents, where they can do as they wish. It's a tradeoff, but it strikes me that at least some of the housing should be rule-free (aside from necessary safety and violence restrictions). Why not try to service everyone?
POSTSCRIPT: Kudos to LAT reporter David Zahniser for digging this up. I scoured the LA Homeless Authority's website for the "report" with this information and found no sign of it. It's apparently not part of their commitment to data ("a critical tool") and transparency ("of the utmost importance").
And what would be the rules that decide who gets the "rules-free" version?
a LOT of people are homeless because there is a shortage of affordable housing, for a variety of political and structural reasons.
Five out of six people in CA are, it seems, perfectly happy live under rules in order to have a roof over their head.
My brother, who has an MS degree from one Ivy League university and a PhD from a different Ivy League university, is part of the LA homeless population. and I am fucking sure he is the one out of six that refuses to live by rules. Which is why he is fucking homeless.
I would prefer to spend all my time and a good amount of my money helping the five.
100% this.
That's a very sad post, I can only imagine the derivative stress.
In a perfect policy world, what would it take to help your brother?
Mandatory mental health treatment?
Fundamentally, it's unacceptable to just say "they're drug addicts, we'll just give them housing and do nothing about their drug addiction". That's basically saying "we'll give them a place in which they can ruin their lives and slowly or quickly kill themselves". That's not love. That's abandonment.
I agree that the correct policy is Housing First. Which does mean- at FIRST- that you have to get everyone into housing. But having done that, you have to now get the long term homeless off drugs. For several reasons:
1. Having provided them housing and now taken responsibility for their welfare, it is unfair to the homeless themselves to let them kill themselves with drugs.
2. To ensure public support for homeless programs, they have to contain the nudge towards eventual self-support. And the reality is that while if you are rich you can sometimes survive a drug habit, if you are poor and are a serious addict, you can't take care of yourself or fund your lifestyle. Which means you need to get off drugs so you can hold down a job and potentially eventually pay rent. If we don't at least try to get these people off drugs, the political support for fighting homelessness will quickly disappear because taxpayers will correctly perceive that we are paying a ton of money so a group of people can avoid work and just live life in relative comfort while stoned off their butts.
3. If we try to get them off of drugs, at least some percentage may actually kick their drug habits. And each such person will be a tremendous outcome, a life saved.
So yeah, let's get them into housing. And then let's get them off drugs.
The rules here are super-onerous, too. Like, you can't have guests, yes, but you also can't have people help you pack, clean, pick you up for the movies, at some you can't have food delivered, most say no alcohol - not even in private - and most disallow pets.
If I rented a hotel room I could have guests, alcohol, no curfew, get delivery... and some allow pets even!
This is such an uninformed take - at least as far as the judgement is concerned. The usual ignorance of harm reduction, trauma informed care, and housing first in general is also on display.
Why are you assuming that there is a prohibition on substances? I see nothing mentioned here or in the LA Times article itself about any prohibition on substance use. It just says, in general, "rules", and then mentions that the rules disallow guests. That doesn't sound too great and sounds like they should adjust the rules, but please try not to speculate on what they are without any sources. Resorting to the tired and discriminatory trope that people who are homeless are nothing more than addicts (as opposed to people suffering from an addiction) is not a good thing to do, either.
AND FURTHERMORE:
An 83% retention rate after 6 months for those who are street homeless is plenty good and even HIGHER THAN EXPECTED. I hate to caps-lock shout here, but for fuck's sake, man. Know what the benchmarks are before you say they're "having trouble." People placed into housing directly from the street remaining in that housing at a greater than 80% rate after 6 months is at least acceptable, if not good (see page 2 here: https://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/Housing-First-Research.pdf). Also, a temporary hotel placement does not really count as housing, at least as far as ending their homelessness is concerned. That living situation is still considered to be a homeless status.
Finally, as someone who actually does this reporting in another community in the country, I can all but guarantee just from reading the terminology that this is information directly from the database. It sounds like the LAT reporter simply asked someone with HMIS access and that person ran the report in HMIS and the reporter essentially repeated the sentences that the data person gave them. Every single X-number or X-% stat in that article reads like it was taken directly from the CoC-APR in HMIS (which is a basic report that can be run on live HMIS data; HMIS is a HUD-mandated database in which information about people being served by Continuum of Care services is entered). Given the disclosure by someone in the know (probably someone in the LA local government agency that runs HMIS), this IS following through on a commitment to data transparency.
It would be helpful if you knew what you were talking about instead of pontificating from your desk.
I was kind of surprised at how glib this entry by Kevin is. The retention issue seems a little high Kevin asserts ? Compared to what ? I thought 5 out of 6 people staying housed was pretty damned good given how difficult the problem of homelessness is.
Kevin needs homelessness (and a number of other problems) to be unfixable, because if it’s fixable then something about his life might have to change, and his life is perfect. Standard “liberal” Boomer MO
It does help with the willful ignorance on how the SFH suburban lifestyle that was marketed as attainable for everyone, and as the standard to be expected by everyone, has failed. I wouldn't expect anything different from someone who's been able to live it for all their lives to not want to acknowledge the problems with it. Hell, I'm even in the "I want that as my life" category.
Independent of the rest... A quibble on "transparency" - so if you know someone at the city who has access to the database ("disclosure by someone in the know" as it were) you can find-out what is in there. Perhaps that is one definition of transparency, but it certainly isn't Transparency or TRANSPARENCY.
You could email and ask them, just like the LAT reporter did.
I could probably email from across the country and ask them, if I wanted to.
You're characterizing this as "someone in the know", but that's not what it is. It's literally just asking whoever is responsible for the information. You can go to their CoC website and find who you can contact for this stuff. It took me 10 seconds to find the About page and then the Org Chart, where I easily picked out the "Director, Data & Analytics" position on the chart. https://www.lahsa.org/coc/ and https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=1927-lahsa-org-chart. Feel free to reach out to that person. They even have a contact us page, where one can select dashboarding or outcomes/reporting from the drop-down. https://www.lahsa.org/support/contact-us. But sure, that requires knowing "someone in the know." *eyeroll*
But yes, sure, this information SHOULD be posted on the CoC's website. And maybe it will be, after a suitable time period for reporting has passed. Failing that, I'll bet it gets reported to whatever appropriation authority is in charge of the funds. So sure, somebody might have to go looking into meeting materials for it later, instead of it being posted on a website for easy access. I also believe that posting things in a fully and easily accessible way is the best way to do it, but local governments typically fail spectacularly at that sort of thing.
It hasn't even been a year yet. Typical reporting on these things occurs on a yearly basis.
“someone in the know” was your phrasing.
Apologies. I read your use of the term as meaning something other than how I used it.
"An 83% retention rate after 6 months for those who are street homeless is plenty good and even HIGHER THAN EXPECTED. "
Well, maybe everyone expected a high retention rate because THAT IS WHAT THE HOMELESS ADVOCATES SAID WOULD HAPPEN???
A few years ago when this topic came up, I pointed out that at least some (I did not claim a majority, just some) people preferred to live on the streets. I know this from personal experience of one such person, the first commenter in this thread lists a second such person.
And I was AGGRESSIVELY excoriated for making this claim, and given the usual lines about how the problem is nothing but expense, no-one wants to live on the street, blah blah blah.
At least one part of why this problem is so difficult to deal with is the population of "advocates" who seem to feel that truth and honesty don't matter in this discussion...
Marx was aware of (and had contempt for) the lumpenproletariat, homeless people existed in the USSR, and the various utopias of the 19th C (you know, the industry towns created by large industrialists, often Quakers) all had rules that allowed for the expulsion of drunks and trouble-makers of various sorts.
But in the 21st C we (or at least the loudest of us) refuse to acknowledge this history. We insist that the language and concerns of the past (which were almost entirely aimed at the "bourgeois-in-waiting") are just as applicable to the lumpenproletariat, and that when fantasy-based programs aimed at them fail, it's of course the fault of larger society.
In what world is an 83% retention rate not high?
Get lost, troll.
Well, Kevin's basic premise is that one out of six is too many so people should be able to smoke meth or whatever.
Look I happen to agree with Kevin approximately 83% of the time, if not more, but he is wrong here.
"the homeless", like any other group we can make up, are not monolothic. There are serious structural problems that cause an awful lot of intermittent and chronic homelessness, and we should be tackling these. There are also people who will not be effectively served by tackling the structural problems because the cause of their homelessness is different.
I don't believe that anyone wants to live on the streets. But I do believe, because I happen to know such a person, that they want to live in the imaginary fantasy land where they can smoke and shoot and snort whatever, have sex with anyone they want, destroy their neighbors property in the name of fighting agains late stage capitalism or whatever, resist all attempts at treatment of psychiatric illnesses because it's just the Trump administration trying to kill the resistance, or whatever, and anyway they are smarter than you so you can't tell them how to live, or whatever.
Those people need an entirely different kind of help. Let them decline a program that seems to be effective. We still need to figure outhow to help them but damned if I know.
I don't believe that anyone wants to live on the streets. But I do believe, because I happen to know such a person, that they want to live in the imaginary fantasy land where they can smoke and shoot and snort whatever, have sex with anyone they want, destroy their neighbors property in the name of fighting agains late stage capitalism or whatever, resist all attempts at treatment of psychiatric illnesses because it's just the Trump administration trying to kill the resistance, or whatever, and anyway they are smarter than you so you can't tell them how to live, or whatever.
Not all these things, really. But some of them (smoke and hoot and snort whatever, resisting treatment of mental illness, and you can't tell them how to live) are very much part of the cause of long-term, service resistant homelessness. Which is only a small percentage of homelessness, but which we have to address if the public is going to go for big expenditures to end the other forms of homelessness.
And yet, an 83% tax rate on the top 0.01% percent income bracket would be unacceptably high, according to you. FOAD troll.
Here in Phoenix, we have one of the country's largest campuses for serving homeless folks and providing shelter beds. Services include a health care clinic, job search support, ID recovery, and 3 meals/day, and aren't limited to those using shelter beds.
In outreach to unsheltered homeless folks, it's routine to hear from those who have tried utilizing the shelter beds and found it unworkable. Airport-like security for entry to the building sleeping hundreds, constant staff and policy shifts, strict limits on amounts of possessions, curfews preventing engagement with local church and even 12-step support groups and high theft/loss rates of personal property add up to people feeling as if the system is determined to punish them.
So, I'm curious how many of the people no longer "inside safe" may have been bounced out for breaking rules, how that enforcement happens and how those folks show up in reports. Do residents have to have bags inspected as they come in? Are random room searches for contraband mandated? Rooms checked for unauthorized visitors? Curfews? Penalties for residents staying out for a night? Those kinds of things will directly impact retention rates.
I'm sure it's a difficult balancing act. Having dozens of people in one shelter can lead to frayed tempers, so making sure there are no weapons is important. Strict rules about what you can bring in can avoid rodent infestations (someone I know who was in a shelter for pregnant youth couldn't have any food in her room for exactly that reason). Early curfews probably improve what little rest people can get while there, by limiting disruptions late at night. Limits on visitors may help reduce fights, prostitution, etc.
They certainly come with a lot of negatives for the people staying there, though. It's kind of like all the onerous rules in high schools. We live in a very cold state, but my kid can't wear boots to school because the lockers are too narrow to fit a boot in them! And they aren't allowed to have cell phones, but also not allowed back in the school to call home if the school bus never shows up to take them home. It's crazytown bureaucracy because a handful of people ruined it for everyone else.
One big reason you need to build actual housing is precisely because of these sorts of problems in shelters and such. Your goal should be everyone living in a decent sized room of their own. You will still have to deal with behavior issues (especially drugs), but temporary solutions work best with the temporarily homeless. A person homeless for a few days may be able to make a go in a temporary facility, but you need real housing for anything longer than that.
My neighbors hate it when I smoke pot, drink, and piss in the community pool. The HOA has rules too. It sucks.
You HOA allows guests, friends to come help you clean or pick you up for the movies, and you can serve alcohol in your own home.
None of those things are allowed these people,
A retention of greater than 80% is impressive. You can't reasonably expect better than that.
For me, if you get housing and treatment but prefer to live on the streets because you'd rather get high, then I feel my social obligation to you is ended. I have no issue with shoving you out of sight and letting you die in the alley. It is clearly something you'd rather risk.
Pretty much in full agreement with you there.
I'm not. We shouldn't be letting people die. We should be trying to turn them around. If we can save one of those lives and turn him into a productive citizen, that is an enormous victory. Every human being counts.
Um, who said anything about dying?
Tone of the post is a bit odd. But the percentage is like in Canada -- "The results are startling: you can take the most hard core, chronically homeless person with complex mental health and addictions issues, and put them in housing with supports, and you know what? They stay housed. Over 80% of those who received Housing First remained housed after the first year. " From -- https://www.homelesshub.ca/solutions/housing-accommodation-and-supports/housing-first
Almost every state provides rest stops with bathroom facilities for highway travelers and campgrounds at their state parks for nominal fees to encourage overnight stays. The homeless and Bohemians need these facilities, too, but near or within urban areas. Providing shelter in publicly administrated housing may be appreciated by some of the homeless, but these institutions are beset with rules as well as unsavory characters in a high density situation, which is why people in precarious situations prefer to camp on the street. Urban camp grounds with bathroom facilities and a few rules, like a quiet time after 9-10pm might provide a better experience. What troubles citizens and city councils is the permanent homelessness of this set of surplus labor, for which the political economy has no solution.
A lot of times, it's a case of curfew or pets.
But, don't let the rules issue distract from the scale of the houseless population.
Until there is sufficient units to cover all of the people who can abide by the rules, the issue of rules won't matter.
I daresay that if the number of people visibly camping on the street was reduced by over 80% not only would the political victory laps never stop, but, unfortunately, any material effort to figure out how to get the other 20% down to 0% would go back to awaiting implementation around, oh, say the twelfth of never.
So add me to the list who think this is a very good result.
Any one-size-fits-all program is obviously not going to help everyone. And the numbers are a bit high in comparison to programs elsewhere - I'm most familiar with San Francisco, that being my town. It may well be that the policies are overly restrictive. On the other hand, they may have legal/staffing/logistical reasons for the restrictions - like other big programs, there are lots of moving parts.
There do need to be different types of housing - some people have kids, partners, nontraditional family attachments, dogs, disabilities, mental health needs, physical health issues, and on and on. And everything you do to accommodate each of those has two effects: it increases the odds that one set of folks will stay off the streets, and costs money you can't use to address someone else's needs.
Eventually, you need enough housing stock for all of them. And if we haven't lost well-meaning rich liberals before now, we do here. Because that means some of them need to be housed near them. And it costs a lot.
So sure, pat Bass on the back if you like. The dropout numbers are a little high, but on the margin they can come down.
Now just she needs to scale it up about 50x, and LA will have fixed its problem.
Except that it's a temporary housing placement, not a permanent fix.
The dropout numbers are not a little high - if anything, they're a little lower than to be expected for sheltering people directly from the street.
But yes, eventually you need enough housing stock. Homelessness is a housing problem, full stop. We have existing services (shelter, transitional housing, street outreach, rapid re-housing, permanent supportive housing, and so on) that would be sufficient to meet the needs of everyone who became homeless for non-economic reasons. If we solved the housing/economic problem, we'd solve homelessness as those who became homeless for other reasons would be fully served by existing systems that are overtaxed by the entirety of the current problem.
Solving the housing problem means making neighborhoods like Kevin's, where SFH is the only thing allowed, illegal. Not that there can't be SFHs, but the SFH neighborhoods need to be unlocked from amber so that they can grow and develop and meet the needs (which are far from just homelessness and affordability!) of all of our communities.
Zoning that is exclusively SFH is just another societal expression of pulling up the ladder after you've climbed it (which older generations have done basically across the board).
90% is a pretty high retention rate, but uhh...
What kind of housing is it if you can't be social?
I had a friend in housing like that for awhile, and it sucked rocks. Better than sleeping on the street for her, sure, but I wasn't even allowed to pick her up to go to the movies.
I would be interested to know if there is a difference between long term and short term homeless as well as a difference between single people and families. They certainly have different needs.