For several years I've had an idea that would at least partially address the homeless problem in warm-weather cities. It was simple: Find a vacant lot, pave it over, and let people pitch their tents there. Provide toilets and running water. If it were up to me, I'd provide food three times a day too. Establish minimal police patrols, solely to prevent outbreaks of fighting or other violence. Otherwise, let the residents do whatever they want.
I never mentioned this for two reasons. First, I figured it probably violated a whole bunch of city codes and was therefore illegal. Second, who needs the grief from the professional homeless folks who will inundate me with tweets and emails telling me that only permanent housing is a real solution?
But last week the LA Times informed me that not only is my idea not outlandish, it's actually being used up and down the Pacific coast:
Cities up and down the West Coast, including Seattle, Sacramento and San Francisco, confronted by the high cost and slow progress of building housing for homeless people, have turned to these permitted tent encampments. They offer services such as toilets, meals and help finding a permanent place to stay. These efforts, once anathema among some homeless service providers, are becoming more widely accepted as unsheltered homelessness has grown and government officials reckon with a pandemic that has made placing people in large shelters dangerous.
The Times spoke with more than two dozen people who either have stayed or currently stay in these sites. Many wished for a room in a hotel or an apartment to call their own. Still, a majority said that they appreciate these lots, some of which will eventually have supportive housing built on them.
Johnson was one. He’s been trying to overcome an addiction to methamphetamine and wants to find a permanent place to live — something he hasn’t had since he broke up with his girlfriend two years ago. A hotel room would be a start, but he won’t go to one of the city’s large shelters, which have been the site of large outbreaks of COVID-19 and have strict rules and curfews.
“You can come and go as you please,” he said of the sanctioned tent encampments, which are called “safe sleep sites” by the city. “There are not as many rules.”
Like it or not, many people on the street actively avoid permanent housing because they don't want to put up with all the rules that come with it. Go ahead and ask anyone who's dealt with the homeless. They'll confirm that there's a percentage of the homeless who will flatly refuse if you offer them some kind of permanent shelter.
The LA Times story went up three days ago, and already there's the usual pushback from the professional homeless crowd. But I'm willing to bet that a big push to build tent encampments in Los Angeles would do more for homelessness in a year than the professionals can accomplish in ten. I mean, the pros are ecstatic if they can build a 50-unit shelter at a cost of $300,000 per unit. At that rate, homelessness will be conquered by around 2080.
So why not give the tent encampments a try? They're cheap, so they won't take much money away from more conventional shelter building, which can continue at its normal snail's pace. Meanwhile, though far from perfect, I'll bet that with cooperation and a concerted effort, you could build space for upwards of 20,000 street people in a year or so using tent encampments. It might not be great, but it would make a lot of lives better than they are now.
And the public would love it. What they want is some way to get homeless people off the streets, and this would do it. It would demonstrate visible progress, and this in turn would increase support for homeless programs. Right now there's tremendous cynicism about the billions of dollars allocated to homelessness that seem to have accomplished literally nothing. Why not try to change that?
The main problem is that this will probably kill any momentum toward a solution. As you said, they'd be off the street and given some resources. A lot of people will say they've done enough. Politicians will not support them at the appropriate level since homeless don't vote much. Shady elements will fill the void.
I agree that it might be a good band aid but...
What will eventually happen is we will get Brazilian style favelas by 2050.
The reason things are the way they are in Los Angeles is that city officials have decided they want a rich, expensive city. Rezone everything for build-up within half a mile of the Metro line. Lots of 5 to 12 story buildings for commerce springing up on arterial roads. Invite companies (e.g.Google) that pay extremely well. You end up with: super wealthy people, some highly paid professionals "passing through" until they amass enough money to move somewhere nicer, and a huge number of service employees that commute in OR live in crowded circumstances unsuitable for raising a family.
Neighborhoods? Who cares about those? Certainly not city officials. Residents in Los Angeles don't like the explosive development of the last 4 years. They don't like the homeless situation. Yet officials are deaf to the complaints because they are responding to the desires of big money, not citizens. It's as simple as that. It's also why the homeless situation is being addressed by money, not enforcement of the law. And there will be plenty of money coming in as Los Angeles transitions to an expensive city like San Francisco or London.
>>>Rezone everything for build-up within half a mile of the Metro line.
Get rid of zoning -- and thus the NIMBY veto -- altogether is a far better solution. There's no reason housing construction needs to get special permission from a municipal committee. Lots of places on earth don't use zoning. (And no, it doesn't mean there are no rules/regulations; it just means they're set at a higher level of government, and that a NIMBY veto doesn't exist.)
I think maybe you're underestimating two things, Kevin:
1. NIMBY resistance to locating these encampments anywhere. People are opposed to actual shetlers in their neigbhorhoods. Would they abide by tent camps? https://www.npr.org/2018/06/30/624911798/la-homeless-shelters-face-opposition
2. The sheer number of land required. You mention 20k people. For reference, dodger stadium has 16k spaces. Imagine one tent per parking space and we're talking about a ton of urban land. Even doubling up you're still talking about a ton of land in an urban area where land is expensive and desirable. As a committed urbanist, I'm more than happy to turn over all surface parking to this cause, but I suspect the median southern Californian will disagree.
The nice thing about (more expensive) permanent housing is that you can build apartments and use the land more efficiently.
You are absolutely spot on regarding NIMBY opposition. My local NextDoor is apoplectic about a proposal to use a portion of the Will Rogers State Beach parking lot for a tent encampment. The level of cognitive dissonance involved in screaming about how there are too many homeless people everywhere (and, in LA, there certainly are) and then rabidly opposing any solution that might mildly inconvenience you is probably impossible to measure using existing technology.
Same here in Denver as local officials Have begun trying what Mr. Drum describes.
Is it really cognitive dissonance or are they just afraid to admit to themselves that mass killing of homeless people is what they want?
People that use the word 'NIMBY' typically don't have a backyard. Not everyone wants to live in Hong Kong style tower blocks or their slightly lower Irvine equivalent.
> Why not try to change that?
For some the loud complainers, the reason is built-in: there's no money in it. I tell you, the only thing worse than a shitbag developer/money launderer, and that's a leftist developer with a vision.
And -
> The main problem is that this will probably kill any momentum toward a solution.
I kinda wish my fellow travelers didn't need reminding of this sort of thing, but they're not the ones sleeping rough. The folks outside my house are. And while some folks are carefully researching public polling to determine what the appropriate messaging is for their minimaxed vision of the Art of the Possible, I'd rather have people get access to running water and a decent night's sleep _now_, and fuck your perfect in search of a good to slaughter.
Yep.
You know if you're quoting me you should reply to me. I don't think tent cities on parking lots are a terrible idea (I think they are better on undeveloped lands, so woods but whatever.) Nor do I particularly want to hold out for "perfect." Which by the way comrade is usually employed as a rhetorical device in a situation where the good is the enemy of the mostly shitty.
But I don't think it's going to be a particularly good band aid. In other words the night sleeps won't be good and the water won't be clean for very long and we'll get new more interesting problems besides.
One of the benefits of allowing tent camps as described is that it gives residents autonomy in a way that shelters don't. From there people who are functional can make plans and take actions to change their situation - especially if resources are provided to assist.
Stability, first and foremost. Safety. Autonomy.
Tent cities appear spontaneously - that should tell you something. That instinct means something. I think we should work with that instinct instead of against it or a cross-purposes with it.
Mice
I mean nice.
"So why not give the tent encampments a try?"
Yeah! And shanty towns, while we are at it! The U.S. has the gini coefficient of a developing nation, so why not just lean into it?
That's because the US has the demographics of a 'developing' nation. You don't go from 5% Latino to 20% in a generation and a half and not become more like a Latin American polity.
I used to be able to entertain that in some measure but the reality is a huge number of non-latin Americans have done a great job of ensuring America follows the path of a latin American polity.
The Arbusto family , sure.
Doesn't sound like a bad idea unless they build one of these encampments in your neighborhood.
Santa Rosa did this and many of the people angry about it before it went up decided it wasn't so bad after all. It probably helped that it was was well managed.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-08/santa-rosa-neighborhood-went-from-fighting-to-embracing-tent-city-for-homeless
An example in Canoga Park:
https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/homelessness/2020/11/27/how-yurts-are-helping-the-unhoused-in-canoga-park-stay-safe-and-warm
Salt Lake City, Utah supposedly ended its homelessness a few years ago by providing housing and support services although I've heard that it was not quite so simple and New Orleans reportedly ended veteran homelessness a few years ago as well. You might want to look at those examples to see what can and should be replicated nationally.
There are many, many more vacant buildings that could be used for housing than there are homeless people who need them but let's not talk about that.
I think we need to move entirely away from having special segregate housing for the homeless. Give them homes, not shelter space.
Paved? Paved?! PAVED! Green...
And when it rains? It does occasionally even in Southern California... You want the tent encampment looking like Woodstock after the rains?
Ungraded? Ungraded?! UNGRADED!
Get the Red Hot Chili Peppers to play 'em out like Woodstock 1999.
In my state the homeless/affordable housing advocates would never go for it. Mostly because they are all funded by large developers. The solution to everything here is one of the developers building some multi-storey development. There no money to be had in a tent-based solution.
Homeless shelters should be abolished. These are human beings, not dogs. Pay for them to live in ordinary apartments.
One of the problems here is that various state, county, and municipal regulations have made it impossible to build the kind of cheap housing that the extremely poor could afford for themselves. I get that there need to be standards for housing but poor people also need places to live.
Kevin's tent city idea sounds dystopian to me. I honestly don't know why the efforts in some cities to provide ordinary housing first, with no special rules, did not catch on. Apartments are expensive, but homeless people cost cities in all kinds of ways that people don't think of. For one thing they are in the emergency room all the time. They also get arrested. This adds up to a lot of money. Providing a basic 1-room apartment to a homeless person, no questions asked, is the way to solve this problem.
You really don't understand why governments providing housing to people, with no special rules, did not catch on? If I reminded you that some of those people would be African American, does that help you understand?
White Americans oppose any government programs to help people if any of those people are non-whites.
Actually, I think the "rules" Kevin mentions are a more significant reason than racism.
Honestly, there's a couple of different groups of people we call homeless- one is people who have suffered some sort of short term shock which left them temporarily without housing, and the other is long-term homeless people, many of whom have serious mental health and/or substance abuse problems.
That second population doesn't want "rules" connected to their housing, while the first group is probably much closer to "yes!, yes!, please give me rules, I don't want some dope addict living near my kids!".
And honestly, when governments provide free housing, the preferences of the first group are much more consistent with the preferences of taxpayers, so that means lots of rules. It's not a race thing so much- indeed, there are plenty of minorities within the first group of homeless people, and plenty of whites within the second group. It's simply that subsidies that go to people who code as drug addicts or people with creepy behaviors and difficulty regulating their behavior are unpopular. The taxpayers want these people to obey some "rules".
Kevin - not all that long ago, you mentioned a property in your neighborhood was vacant. Is that still the case?
I find the sight of a tent city so repulsive I lost my appetite, so I skipped the usual drive thru breakfast on my 15 mile commute to the office park on the other side of town. /s
If a tent city develops it's a signal that current responses are insufficient. What we need are both short-term and long-term responses. The short-term responses are inadequate on multiple levels and the long-term responses are too slow and too limited.
(Increasing minimum wage to a living wage would help both short & long-term. It's not THE answer but it would help get some back on their feet and prevent others from being reduced to homelessness.)
Stop immigration. Wages go up, demand for housing levels out. Win win. Except for Dems who are demographically gerrymandering the electorate.
Nonsense.
Immigrants live under toadstools...and supply and demand has been repealed!
We're experiencing the slowest population growth in the nation's history, and it doesn't seem to be doing much good for housing affordability.
First of all, absolute numbers matter. People like to put growth in terms of percentages, which is find for stocks and bonds. It isn't fine for physical things like houses. 1% growth today is 33 million people, equivalent of 3% growth in 1900 (when there was a lot more comfortably habitable, easily buildable open land).
We have to build an entire Pac NW of homes every decade just to keep up with immigration. Also, there are really 'limits' -- any ecologist will tell you that.
I live 1,000 feet from a large under-the-freeway encampment. Over the last 4 years there's been three shootings, two substantial fires, many hostile encounters with pedestrians or neighborhood children, and plenty of bicycles reported stolen.
I do not want to listen to *anyone* on this topic if they haven't lived close to an encampment for at least a couple of years because they are ignorant about how the homeless really comport themselves.
Re Kevin's: "Otherwise, let the [homeless] residents do whatever they want."
No. They collect garbage, That attracts rats. There are children living nearby. Those homeless should be taken off the streets. Many are seriously mentally ill. A lot are thieves (just look at how many bicycles they "happen to have" - I recently saw a rentable electric scooter with cables cut).
Also re Kevin's: "Like it or not, many people on the street actively avoid permanent housing because they don't want to put up with all the rules that come with it."
If they do not want to put up with rules that address hygiene or public safety, they are criminals. Treat them as such.
Never forget what Kevin Drum and his ilk did to American-born construction workers. And yeah, the Libertarian/Chamber of Commerce wings of the GOP played along. Construction workers make less than they did 40 years ago because of amnesty and legal and illegal immigration. And that immigration puts a strain on housing stocks.
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-construction-trump/
never forget what your ilk did to unions and unionized labor.
The immigrants were right there to be scabs. I watched it working on construction sites as a laborer in the early 1990s.
Quite a few churches have gone this route with their parking lots. They are typically shirt term (a few weeks), and then the encampment moves to another location. The church can provide volunteers to help serve food & provide security, and bathrooms are available.
The thing is, tent encampments are crime magnets. Tents are easy to break into, and many homeless people have addictions or mental health issues that make them easy to target. Robbery and rape are easy to commit in an encampment, so the best ones require round the clock volunteers to keep an eye on the encampment and provide health services. There is also the issue of sanitation: restrooms, clean water, and garbage are all issues that need constant upkeep, and arecharder to deliver outdoors.
In MN there is a push to house people in individual tents/small structures within unused warehouses. This can help resolve some of the safety issues, since outsiders can't sneak into the camp in the middle of the night. Trash cleanup is also easier when there isnt mud, wild animals, etc to complicate it.
I live along the American River in Sacramento. The American River Parkway is known as the "jewel" of Sacramento, but it has become home to hundreds of tent encampments in recent years. There are many reasons homeless people don't want to live in a paved tent city even if there are services and safety there. Reasons might include proximity to prime panhandling locations or a desire not to live in a crowded encampment with people you don't know. Free meals would help, but homeless people want to direct their own lives just like the rest of us. They like living on the river because it's peaceful and pretty. Unfortunately, they also collect trash and poop in the river. We have a terrible E. coli situation here at one of the main public beaches. The county won't acknowledge that it may result from people living on the river banks until they complete what is projected to be a 3-year study. Meanwhile, the bar for rangers to displace campers is extremely high because of the Boise decision.
This is a complicated problem. People commenting that we just need to build more permanent housing apparently don't realize how much that costs in California, and how long it takes due to CEQA, etc. But saying we can just stick people in a tent city don't really understand that homeless people have complicated wants and needs just like the rest of us.
Yes.
What we need is a multi-pronged response that deals with the immediate crises and then the longer-term solutions.
I spent the summer in Seattle. Homeless encampments everywhere. Was a shock to my sheltered, east coast sensibilities (from what I understand Massachusetts has high levels of homelessness, but it's definitely less visible there).
Anyway, I don't know how many of these tent cities have city approval. Maybe none. But I doubt they'd become any more popular with Seattleites if they received permission. Kevin's idea might work if the tent cities can be moved to places nobody wants to live or go to. But in the middle of dense urban/suburban neighborhoods?
(I guess it's a net improvement if it liberates city parks; plenty of parks in Seattle were nigh un-usable from what I could see given the large numbers of homeless).
Per the first link below I see a lot of countries with more extensive welfare states than the U.S. have higher homeless rates. This includes Sweden, Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Germany, France, UK, and France. So even if we spend say $50 billion a year to build enough appartments to house the 500,000 homeless, will the problem really go away? Many homeless are mentally ill or drug adicts or both. They have a mean IQ of 85 (second link below). Their lifestyles are those of transients, and people resist changes to their habits. Not sure if building apartments will really get the majority of them off the streets.
And does a huge build-up of free housing invite many low-income persons to claim they are homeless after getting evicted or having problems paying bills? Many people barely pay bills each month. I can imagine regardless of how many free apartments you build for the homeless, there will always be a waiting list.
If we could truely solve the homeless problem by spending $50 billion a year to build apartments, I’m all for it. That’s just 1% of the federal budget.
In the meantime, I don’t like the idea of saying people can camp in public places not meant for camping just because they don’t want to go to the homeless shelter. So I don’t like KD’s idea unless it could be in some remote site, and that is not practical in a major city.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_population
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4310809/
If there's a mean IQ of 85 that would mean a lot of them are below 85. Isn't that sufficient for some kind of institutionalization, even in today's environment?
No. People with IQs that low can function. They won't be rocket scientists or maybe even plumbers, but they can take drive thru orders and clean bathrooms and mow lawns. Unless an immigrant takes that from them.
Something you've never gotten over?
Just don't put them anywhere near, you know, regular people.