The latest homeless counts were released today for Los Angeles, and it just doesn't get any better. The total number of homeless jumped 9% to 75,000 people, and the share with no shelter stayed steady at 73%:
About 55,000 people live on the streets in Los Angeles County. The other 20,000 homeless live in emergency shelters or transitional housing of some kind.
This is the system. This is fine.
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Yeah, but I think both liberals and conservatives can all agree: NIMBY.
Up until there's a constitutional amendment guaranteeing all Americans the right to shelter, states and cities will try to pawn their troubles off to other jurisdictions or otherwise make houselessness a crime. You flip that paradigm and suddenly states and cities will have no choice but to build shelters.
If the Preamble to the Constitution -- [to] promote the general Welfare -- does not imply the right to shelter, then we ought to put forth a constitutional amendment making it explicit.
Homelessness is a complex problem. San Francisco has allocated $636 million to The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. There are currently fewer than 8,000 homeless in San Francisco. If just providing housing was the solution the problem would have been solved a long time ago.
If you think providing housing isn't the key component of solving houselessness, then what is?
Necessary vs sufficient.
But, what is sufficient?
As I indicated, it’s complicated, and I think you know this. If I had a real solution (and no, I don’t think prison or concentration camps are a “solution”) I’d be a hero.
This isn't a one-off. I've been casually paying attention to this issue, and the consensus for the last half-decade from houseless advocates is that housing is the first step.
That's why I ask you for your solution. I know the solution put forth by the experts.
What's your answer -- reject them?
My answer is that there isn’t a single answer or even a few. For each person there may or may not be an answer. Most answers seem temporary to me when in comes to mental health and addiction.
As for me, I vote for people who I think will do their best to compassionately work to lessen the problem and help people who can be helped. And I pay taxes to facilitate what they are doing and try to do.
What I don’t do is think there is an easy answer out there that the people who actually work on the issue have missed and it’s up to me to tell them.
I don't think anyone's saying there's a single answer. What the experts are saying is, the first step is getting people off the streets.
Are you, therefore, saying the experts are wrong -- that the first step isn't always to get people off the streets?
I'd like to delve into this with you because I've gone through the different scenarios in my process of reviewing the issue, and it always comes back to establishing some sense of order and stability. E.G. before one can find a job, a stable place of living is needed. E.G. before one can get off drugs, one needs a stable place of living and support structure. E.G. before one can effectively treat mental issues, one needs stable housing and stable, constant reinforcement.
Stability is the first step towards reintegration. I do not see how one reintegrates without stable housing.
That is why I think, when we speak of welfare as a general basic right for all, I think of housing, Universal Basic Income, and Universal Healthcare. With all three cornerstones of stability, do you think we'd ever have the level of houselessness we currently face?
Stability isn’t just providing housing. Giving people a place to stay without mental health and/or addiction help won’t work. But how do you force help on people? They have to want help and even when they do keeping them on meds and off substance abuse drugs isn’t easy. What I’m saying is that there isn’t some magic wand solution. San Francisco has about as compassionate a government as you are going to find and the amount of money the people who live there are willing to spend is about as much as you will find anywhere. And yet homelessness persists.
To me, it means you keep trying. But I don’t think we can constitutional amendment our way out of this.
I think D'orhk has this right. Housing First is not a panacea but it sure is a very good start and gives a lot of people a chance at a better life. Also, my anecdata, based on a family member who is seriously mentally ill, is that section 8 housing has made a world of difference for his quality of life. It won't cure him but it's not clear we know how to cure him of the type of psychosis he suffers from.
I'm just glad he isn't living outside.
1000+
I’m all for promoting general welfare. But that stops somewhere short of babysitting thousands of fented out lunatics, at least for me
They're going to exist regardless. How do you deal with them -- look the other way and ignore them?
Xi and other morally bankrupt people would shovel the homeless into ovens if we allowed them to. That why the homeless are all over the place on public lands: it’s the “compromise” we’ve implicitly reached between “helping them be not homeless” and “liquidating them all.”
If 2016 & 2020 elections as well as our national reaction to the pandemic (“oh it’s too hard to wear a mask, let’s just let the weak die”) didn’t demonstrate it enough for you, I’ll make it explicit: there are at least 74m morally bankrupt people walking amongst us in America.
And then there are the other 81 million virtue signalers.
If “virtue signaling” means voting against a morally bankrupt utterly corrupt candidate count me in.
👍
81 million ? Wait, so you are admitting Biden won in 2020 ? If so, then ipso facto your guy Trump was trying to undo the election and incite people to overthrow the government. What does that make Trump or are you too much of a snowflake to own up to it ?
👍
I’m all for helping people that have a chance of saving. But there is a difference between someone down on their luck and some crazy person who needs constant watching. And stuffing both sets of people into the same state-sponsored shithole shelter sounds like a very bad idea
Shelter and help the people who have a chance, institutionalize the crazies, and make life hard for the rest (not “hunt them down”, just don’t sponsor their lifestyle indefinitely)
So to come to terms with your beliefs: Some people deserve to be houseless.
Is that correct?
"But there is a difference between someone down on their luck and some crazy person who needs constant watching."
Yeah, but think of it this way: even the weakest/most useless person can still break things. You my ask why we ought to pay money to care for "some crazy person," and the answer (setting aside the fact that it's the morally right thing to do) is because that person could readily go around starting fires or screaming at strangers or whatnot if they aren't otherwise cared for.
Here in Tampa we had a slight homeless issue. (No where near LA or San Francisco.). The city council made it illegal to panhandle and sleep in parks or on sidewalks.
The 9th circuit has banned cities on the west coast from doing the latter. That’s a major factor in why the west coast has a lot more visible homelessness: the cities can’t ban them from “camping out” if they have no alternative place to stay the night. Cities in other circuits do exactly what you describe: ban tents on public lands, thus pushing the problem Somewhere Else.
The city council made it illegal to panhandle and sleep in parks or on sidewalks.
After which the homeless people went, "Wow -- I don't want to get arrested sleeping out here! I'd better get off drugs and get an apartment! Why didn't I think of that before?"
Problem solved!
Of course what happens is that they just get pushed up the road into some other jurisdiction for them to deal with it. I'm sure they appreciate it.
Homelessness is almost entirely a function of the availability of affordable housing. Yes, mental illness and drug abuse are often involved, but most people can cope if they can hold down a basic job and pay rent on a small apartment. But that simply doesn't exist any more in Southern California. Something happens -- e.g. injury on the job, car accident -- that keeps you from working and of course since you were on the margins anyway you have no savings and so lose your apartment and are out on the street. A basic studio in the shittiest neighborhood in LA is something like $1,500/mo now (+ first/last, security deposit, etc.). The stresses of being homeless exacerbates your mental illness so you start self-medicating with cheap booze or fentanyl and there we are.
Getting people housing once they're homeless and on drugs and habituated to life on the street is really, really, hard. A better approach is identifying people at risk of being evicted and finding ways to help them keep their current housing -- whether that's getting them a new job, drug treatment, cash assistance, or whatever.
Exactly. It requires more than just a one size fits all housing supply. It requires being able to institutionalize the mentally ill and the addicts that won't cooperate with outpatient treatment, laws that punish drug dealers, not allowing people to live in public spaces, and access to drug/alcohol addiction treatments. This does include building more temporary shelters and tiny home communities. But there need to be rules in these communities. Help the deserving who are being lost in the vast sea of addicts get back on their feet again.
*the addiction part of this is the hardest. A woman in Seattle chose to lose her feet instead of finding help for her addiction. The book "Dreamland" documented people who were addicted to heroin and opioid painkillers (the book was written before the wide availability of fentanyl) who would nearly die and were saved by radical and expensive heart surgery and would be looking for someone to bring them a fix before they left the hospital. Addiction breaks my heart. People are slaves to the substances.
**I miss Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
Best estimates are as much as 25% of the homeless are mentally ill and over a third are addicted to alcohol or drugs though there's very probably a lot of overlap. This is a population that is very problematic for sure but it means that the majority of the homeless are neither.
I don't think there is a one size fits all housing solution but clearly we as a society can do much much more. For starters improving and expanding section 8 housing so that there are not year long waiting lists would do a lot. Indeed I know some examples of severely mentally ill people who that works for. It isn't virtue signaling.
Did the homeless in Tampa go away? Where? Maybe DeSantis can fly them to another state. He's good at that.
Unfortunately, there are mentally ill people who won't stay in shelters, even if they. are provided. I know someone like this.
Many shelters provide only night shelter. I saw how much more helpful DC's shelter, named after Mitch Snyder, who inspired many of us to volunteer there, is than those where people must leave in the morning & then maybe are lucky enough to spend hours at a library or Burger King, which is where I became acquainted with some people. Only once was I able to write & call a Virginia Beach shelter & successfully request that they admit a friend of my late brother. He was treated well, taken to a hospital when he suffered a heart attack. He wouldn't have survived if he had not been there.
You don't have to be mentally ill to avoid shelters. There are people who have been assaulted, robbed, even raped in some shelters.
Okies?
Try “cokies”
For the folks who suggest making houselessness illegal by proxy of sleep-lie ordinances, all you're doing is housing those folks (eventually) in prison at a significantly higher cost.
If you can accept this, then say so.