What I see with a lot of these comments is that there's a fundamental disagreement with what the problem of homelessness actually is. It seems like a lot of advocacy groups and policy wonks approach it from the perspective of the problem is that a lot of people don't have reliable shelter and personal spaces. That is the problem from the perspective of people experiencing homelessness.
For most regular people who aren't homeless and don't have close acquaintances who are homeless, that's not the problem at all! The problem is that regular people going about their lives encounter unhygienic individuals who seem to be on drugs or have mental illnesses and are frightening and potentially dangerous to interact with or even have in your proximity. That is the problem that this sub-set of homeless people are creating for non-homeless people. Homeless people who aren't like that are not part of "the homeless problem" and one might in a general sense wish their situation were better, but their problems are their own, not everyone else's problem.
And yes, you could say that solving the first problem by reducing the cost of housing will eventually impact the second problem, but the scary, unhygienic, mentally ill people that are the "the homeless problem" will be among the last people to come off the streets. It's a "bank shot" solution that promises that solving this first problem that is not that important for many regular people will eventually over a long period of time help with the second problem that is important to non-homeless people. Normally that sort of "bank shot" is the hallmark of conservative policy solutions. "You see, if we cut taxes that will spur innovation and create a more productive society which will raise the standard of living and in the end everyone will be better off than if we had kept the tax money and used it on public assistance" If you don't find that convincing, you might consider why "if we reduce the cost of housing then all the scary, smelly people will no longer be in public spaces" isn't very convincing.
Of course I think reducing the cost of housing would benefit a lot of people who aren't homeless, but then you can sell it that way rather than making a bunch of promises about how it will get unhygienic people who are alarming to interact with out of public spaces.
This is the single best distillation of the issue, and the problem inherent in solutions which rely on a faulty definition of what the "homeless problem is" to the majority of people.
Matthew, you're saying that the important problem is the intrusion of the addicted or mentally ill on the lives of others, and the issue that there are many thousands of families and individuals who are homeless without those behaviors are not "the homeless problem" we care about. They may not be the problem you care about, but they are the core of the problem that the government and non-profits in my city care about, because their numbers are high and because of the lost potential their homelessness causes.
Of course the cases that involve multiple factors (homeless, psychotic, addicts) are going to be the hardest to address. But as Mr. Carr points out, an indeterminate number of the homeless who are disabled by mental illness turned to drugs or developed illness as one consequence of losing the shelter that allowed them to function independently. Available low-cost/subsidized housing would have a preventative impact on a sizable group. No one I have ever read on this subject has maintained that housing alone will resolve addiction or mental illness. "Housing first" proposals always entail community services that target and monitor the other issues.
But to the degree that you see this as a parallel to the deception of supply side arguments, I'd agree that no one should wait for new housing before advocating for better policies and increased social services for those homeless who are mentally ill or addicts. If conservative supply siders said, "Cut taxes to get distributed growth longterm and strengthen the safety net now to address immediate need" the policy would be internally incoherent (because one half reduces resources while other requires expansion). "Streamline construction now to solve homelessness longterm and address mental health and addiction now" is not incoherent, especially since housing construction is blocked less by lack of resources than by regulatory constraints.
The problem that the government and non-profits care about is NOT the core of the problem people complain about when they see their cities overrun by encampments.
Somehow, those nonprofits and government bureaucrats have succeeded at promoting their own agenda by encouraging people to say, "homelessness" whenever they see those tents.
@Felix writes, "The second problem shouldn't 'solved' without also solving the first problem, because then there will be no demand to solve the first problem at all"?
Talk about gaslighting the population! Talk about bait-and-switch!
Mitchell, The nonprofits here focus on shelters, food kitchens, individual support services, and, family relocation. The city and county regularly clear encampments, and there are none now on city streets, though there are many near parks, streams, and in woods (though those are also cleared periodically). When we had sub-zero weather, the police and nonprofits teamed very successfully to persuade those in tents to move to shelter and temporary space short-term.
I don't think either the nonprofits or "bureaucrats" have somehow gotten people to say "homelessness." And I have never, ever heard anyone say that the problems of addiction and mental illness should not be solved/addressed if we don't first solve the housing shortage. What they do say is that the housing shortage is an engine generating high numbers of people who are like the ones you're focused on, and if we want to stop adding to that number and have hope of providing recovery for the addicts/mentally ill who can be helped we need very large amounts of new housing.
It is interesting to me that on this string, when people began to point out that new housing could indeed have a great impact on settling the large majority of homeless people who are not addicts or mentally ill, a line of response began that no one really cares about that large majority (except nonprofits and bureaucrats, I suppose). Where I live, there a vocal conservative minority who seem to feel that way, and they use the focus on this minority to relentlessly attack the nonprofits for "attracting" them (although most are local) and the Democratic local government for not sending them to other counties by the busload so those places can bear the expense. I don't see this as a very promising social dynamic for solving any problem, but if you really don't care about most of the homeless it can certainly be an easy way to score political points.
Please forgive me if I ramble a bit here. I intend to shed some light on a political and cultural dynamic that you may (however inadvertently) have misrepresented.
FWIW, I'm attracted to guys. I've never hidden that fact, and I'm proud simply to be myself. OTOH, I never signed on to "smash cisheteropatriarchy" in the name of some Brave New World. In fact, I've fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing "Queer" about same-sex attraction. As an individual, that's all the respect I demand.
I'm a Pat Brown Democrat. A(n electric) car in every garage! I voted for Bernie (in California, as a write-in) in 2016.
I recognize that we're ruled by an oligarchy that keeps us focused on victimology (and uses "the most vulnerable" as a scourge) while it continues squeezing out (and disparaging the aspirations of) the middle class.
As I wrote in a prior comment, I'M ENTIRELY IN FAVOR OF A "HOUSING FIRST" APPROACH! We indeed have a critical shortage of housing -- low-income and otherwise.
However, we're faced with another crisis —involving the abuse of public space — and an "encampment" subculture rooted in that abuse (and an entire cottage industry hell-bent on legitimizing that subculture). I don't even seek to put the denizens of encampments into "tweetment," or subject them to a regime of "behavioral health." Warehouse them, if need be. Live and let live. I just want their detritus out of my face.
The Encampment Subculture and its "nonprofit" Advocacy Industry (aka the "Homeless Industrial Complex") exist in symbiosis, and have colonized cities like San Francisco.
If housing costs are the issue, why won't people move where housing is cheaper? If those in question have such "deep roots in the community," why won't any of their (ostensible) friends and neighbors put them up?
We need to stop conflating these issues under the rubric of "homelessness."
Again, see the quote from @Felix: "The second problem shouldn't 'solved' without also solving the first problem, because then there will be no demand to solve the first problem at all."
That's what I call "gaslighting the population" -- or a bait-and-switch.
PS: For every so-called 'NIMBY," there's a flock of YIMBYs (shilling for developers) who don't want your new neighbors even to HAVE a backyard -- just as what those whose goal is to "get people out of their cars" want is to keep you out of the driver's seat (as they refuse to recognize that [from Atlanta to Houston to the Bay area] the best mom-and-pop restaurants, many run by immigrants, are in suburban strip malls).
Does that really make me part of "a vocal conservative minority"? I think it makes me pretty mainstream. I certainly hope so.
It may ramble, Mitchell, but your comment is interesting and I can see it's in good faith. Let me address a few points as best I can. I'm going to ignore homeless families--a huge problem here (Indiana)--because they're probably irrelevant to your points.
First, why don't the homeless move to other cities? I'm sure many people who are priced out of their cities do move to other areas. What we're seeing in the homeless are those who haven't moved. Many of that subset may not have the resources to do so, and if they somehow get to a place with lower rents, how does that actually help them unless they are able to compete in the job market. Low rent areas are typically low-economy places. Without an income, rent is always unaffordable. (Which is why some who move actually move to places that are equally or more unaffordable, but with better weather or services. If you're unemployable rents don't really matter: you need fully subsidized housing anywhere.)
Why won't friends put them up? I'm sure lots do. Among those who don't have friends to put them up, many just don't have friends to put them up any longer. The homeless problem is surely far bigger than we see precisely because friends and family do put up the homeless for shorter or longer periods. Moreover, the in-your-face homeless you're concerned about are disproportionately unable to move or receive private help because addiction/mental issues reduce their competence and tolerability. From a public policy standpoint, saying, "You should impose on friends and family, not taxpayers" is not a constructive approach.
I'm not going to point out that your "warehousing" idea would be unconstitutional in practice because . . . oh . . .
When it comes to Felix, my response to him was the same as yours. I have never before seen anyone make this argument, and I have no evidence that people in government or nonprofits do. In any case, when it comes to bait-and-switch my experience doesn't confirm your view. Here, when they are provided with housing through "housing first" programs, some of the truly problematic homeless simply fail, but most reach a level of stability greater than they showed on the street, and we have more "success stories" who return to employment and seem to be off drugs. I have read that in the Bay Area there are groups that advocate for "housing first" at the expense of shelter expansion. I don't think that's rational, and here the approach is to build on both tracks.
My town has an active NIMBY/YIMBY debate, and part of the NIMBY perspective is that the YIMBYs are witting or unwitting tools of rapacious developers. I understand the idea and respond to it viscerally, but I think it's a counterproductive caricature. Of course developers are out to make money, and their goals are orthogonal to public policy goals (I hope I'm using "orthogonal" right). But we live in a system where private construction is done by developers, and the solution is not to shun developers because they're greedy, but to devise a new set of ordinances that will produce results that are at neither the extreme of ultra-status quo nor of maximum density. Aim for reasonably good quality by reducing costly regulation on other fronts or tailoring variances, favor developers who will accept lower profit margins as you reward their work with more orders (yes, they'll get rich), avoid extremes of density, be vigilant against corruption (which will unfortunately always be present in some form), but accept without catastrophizing it the fact that 1950s-style urban design that maximizes class segregation has reached a dead end. It's not going away, but to solve the current problem we have to plan for more economically mixed residential neighborhoods. America's very big, but economic growth is increasingly coalescing in geography around delimited metro areas, and that is going to break housing patterns one way or another.
We may actually agree on the value of "Housing First" (which, in a sense, is what I mean by "warehousing").
I hadn't seen your reply to Felix -- which was spot-on! OTOH, I was put off by Felix's pitch precisely BECAUSE it reflects the machinations of "homeless advocates" here in the Bay Area -- a world of fiefdoms built around claims to "social justice." Note how the Boise decision has been exploited by those who now assert an unrestricted right to establish encampments wherever they please. Check out the Coalition on Homelessness in SF, or the history of the Wood Street encampment in Oakland. This isn't Indiana.
On the pitfalls of urbanism (and again, on the role of the "clerisy" in denigrating the strivings of the middle class), I'll defer to Joel Kotkin. The notion of "1950s-style urban design that maximizes class segregation" flies in the face of those immigrant-run mom-and-pop eateries in the strip malls. "Economic growth coalescing around delimited metro areas" has already begun to change as more people work from home.
In the end -- even where we agree -- this is about how we frame the discourse, and how (and whether) that reflects (which?) people's priorities and values.
Once upon a time -- back when Brooklyn was still the old Brooklyn -- my grandmother told me, "Mitchell, you don't want to be involved in politics. Politics is a dirty business."
"This is different, grandma," I responded. "It's MOVEMENT politics."
"Mark my words," she said. "Politics is a DIRTY BUSINESS"
Similarly, moving itself is expensive and requires resources that people experiencing homelessness already probably don't have. Maybe they at least have a job and are hesitant to leave it and risk not finding anything in a new city. Maybe they share custody of children and are prohibited from leaving the area by their agreement. "Just move" isn't a simple solution for everyone.
I agree with this - even if you're a fan of housing (like me), proponents need to do a better job of making that connection, because for a lot of people, it's unclear how building a new condo tower downtown is going to help that screaming and/or shitting on the sidewalk.
As I understand it, though, there are indeed many ways it will help, directly or indirectly.
1. By reducing the general level of the local homeless population, you free up more resources to focus on those hard cases. Police or crisis teams can concentrate their responses on acute cases. Counselors can spend their time on fewer cases.
2. Shelter beds or SRO hotels get freed up, and can be converted into the kind of supportive housing the hard cases need. In a lot of cities, there's just nowhere for them to go right now.
3. If new construction is needed, city agencies & nonprofits have an easier time building out new capacity when land (or pre-existing buildings) are cheaper to find.
4. More indirectly (but still meaningfully) you make it easier to hire all the people you need to help manage the homeless population. A big part of SF's problem right now is simply that they don't have enough police, and the local cost of living is a big part of that. Without police (or nurses, counselors, case managers, etc.) your local agencies get stretched even thinner.
5. Finally, you also increase the local tax base, which increases the money you can spend on all of the above.
I see a direct connection between the conversion and destruction of SRO ( single room occupancy) housing caused much homelessness among single men. We need to remove cheap housing from market forces.
Look at claim #6 and info below that again. All the cities listed throughout here that *do not have* people complaining about homelessness (the 'ickiness' you're talking about) all have one thing in common: Cheap rent.
You gloss over "ok it may help a bit", but ignore the real world examples of where people are not complaining about the 'unhygienics' at all - cities with abundant / vacant housing! Your comment is all theory, he provides data and lots of it.
I think this comment proves that the author is right, this topic really does break people's brains!
If it were only about cheap rent, San Francisco wouldn't be overrun with encampments. All those folks in the tents would be flocking to Mississippi or Detroit. However, they'd rather be in San Francisco, along with the billionaires -- even if it means living on the street -- and (while I advocate a "Housing First" policy as triage) we're never going to be able to stack-and-pack our way out of that.
In that very situation, I hitchhiked to NY (where I had family [and, as it turned out, a job offer]). Left my few belongings in SF with a friend. Made a sign, put my thumb out at the bottom of the South Van Ness on-ramp to 80/101; spent a few hours that evening in Fernley, NV, beside a road-sign where someone had scrawled, "Been here 3 days, dying of thirst." Within a week, I was alive and well on the East Coast.
As for Mississippi? That's a stone's throw from Memphis. It worked for Elvis. ;-)
As I wrote in another comment: "There's ALWAYS someplace else to go -- another way to approach life."
In CA the vagrants get thousands each month in SSI, disability, free phones , clothes and food. How do you think they pay for their drugs and alcohol? But let's assume they are so wacked they have not been taking advantage of these programs ...all they have to say is "my long lost Uncle Elvis has a room for me in Memphis" and the CA taxpayers will pay to send him there.
Felix, try this thought experiment. If tomorrow someone came to "the government" with surefire cures for addiction and mental illness, would it be right to refuse to use them until the problem of homelessness is solved? Of course not. Equally of course, that's not going to happen, nor will we ever fully "solve the first problem" (addiction + mental impairment).
In real life, the problems of homelessness and "street pathologies" (I think I'm making up the term) are intertwined, and while it may be possible to fully remediate the housing shortage over time, with combinations of zoning/permit reform, investment incentives, and direct government funding, we will always be struggling to remediate street pathologies--although increased housing would move much of their impact off the streets.
The unaffordability of housing has plenty of toxic social and economic drawbacks in its own right that can be used to build support for addressing it. Where I live, most of the pressure for building afforable housing is not generated by street pathologies and I do not see them being linked (with one exception). The pressure comes from workforce needs in a growing, upscale city. The exception is two "housing first" apartment houses built for the chronically homeless, which accept people who have trajectories away from addiction and disabling mental illness. (Local conservatives like to point to failures in those projects: instances of crime and drug use. Local liberals like to point to cases where residents have gained employment and appear stable.)
Makes sense to me. I think we have to ask ourselves what is visible versus what is.
Back in the 90's, I remember a census was done of 'subway beggers'. That used to be a big thing in NYC and while one might guess most were homeless, that may or may not have been the case. Anyway, people thought the number of subway panhandlers would be in the thousands, maybe even tens of thousands. When the census was done, it was absurdly low, like 75 people or so! The impression of their large numbers came from the fact that they rode the subways all day so were visible for millions of people day in day out.
Likewise the mentally ill homeless person can draw a lot of attention. In NJ we had an infamous homeless person who was kicked out of the library and got a large settlement...only to remain homeless and harass people on the street.
But the person who may work changing tires or at Wal-Mart who may sleep in their car or crash on a friends couch or use his shower in the morning maybe far more common and much less visible to the general public because he isn't begging on the street or exhibiting mental illness in public.
This comment is the first I read and is close to what I was going to write. The availability bias colors people’s perception of the homeless, at least in NYC. The homeless who sleep on the streets instead of shelters, and generally draw more attention to themselves, are the ones who get noticed and form our impressions. We barely see the working homeless and those who are otherwise “functional” even if they are the majority. On the other hand, it is the mentally ill and drug-addled who citizens and voters think of as the “problem” when they think about the “problem” of homelessness, and these people would barely notice or give a politician any credit if they found homes for all the homeless who don’t have these problems without decreasing the numbers of disturbed people sleeping in streets and subways.
That scenario is roughly as unlikely as some lake or ocean being drained dry, while specks of foam - which previously formed on the crests of surface waves - somehow remain precisely in place, as if nailed to the sky high above the resulting salt flats.
Lasting stability for invisible / functional homeless means support networks currently keeping them functional can and will redirect freed-up resources to those with worse problems.
The case of the guy who sleeps in his car, showers at a friends house and goes to work is certainly not ideal. But to a degree that can be something we tolerate maybe as a stepping stone or brief phase of life. The more visible cases of begging in the streets, homeless tent camps, these may make up a smaller portion of the homeless but they are more disturbing to the public...esp. when they start to get paired with open drug use and such.
I agree, housing is the most bang for the buck here. Even so, the homeless were a concern in the 90's in NYC and that was before housing got as tight as it is now.
It’s hard to say what the solution to that problem is. The harsh reality is that the system, and also their parents, probably failed them when they were much younger
I don't disagree. Some probably did screw themselves over by getting into trouble as a kid or blowing off school. It can be a combination of things, too.
If he's doing it because he can't afford anything else, wouldn't take much bad luck for a public problem to emerge. Maybe his car needs significant repairs, then that missed night of sleep (and other stress) leads to misjudging some social cue and thereby damaging the friendship, but before that can be patched up, poor hygiene due to lack of showering gets him fired from the job... y'know, "for want of a nail."
"And while mental health and drug addiction aren’t lead factors in homelessness (the vast majority of homelessness is temporary..."
This article is pure bait and switch. The primary moral/policy concern in the context of homelessness is chronic homelessness, i.e. the people losing fingers in the winter or defecating on the sidewalk, the people who are trapped long-term on the streets. And for this population the conventional wisdom is correct, i.e. their main problems are mental illness and drugs/alcohol. And your attempts to "debunk" this view are based on stats that conflate chronic homelessness with the less serious (but numerically common) problem of temporary homelessness (e.g. people temporarily living in their car or living for a stint in a shelter), in order to mislead people into thinking that lowering home prices is going to make any kind of serious dent into the suffering and harm associated with people living their lives on the streets.
No, it is a game of three card Monty. Follow the flow of people who stumble financially and see that there are many more of them then there are tents. If we catch those that stumble financially, we will have fewer tents. Give us money.
But the tents are real and they are the major issue for anyone attempting to live in a community that has them. Look at the authors' data on the success in Houston. After a decade of housing first, there are still 3600 "experiencing homelessness". To me, that sounds like the remaining cohort that will not leave the streets.
For a city that has expensive housing, the solution is not just to increase supply. That is expensive and will take forever. Let the market do that. A better solution is to move anyone that does not have a reasonable chance of being self-sufficient out of the expensive market and into a less expensive one. To paraphrase what a HUD representative once told me in the early ought's: "No, you can not have a rent increase. Your tenant's voucher can be used anywhere in the country and we do not want to pay the market rate in Berkeley."
"Let the market do that" requires changing some zoning laws and so on which are actively preventing the market from doing that, as well as tax policies which (less directly, but no less severely) incentivize speculative hoarding and slumlords rather than truly efficient use.
Does the article not have a point when it cites a study that shows many homeless become addicted to drugs AFTER they became homeless. So if reduce the number of transient homeless, you reduce the amount of long term homeless. It's likely that reducing the size of the immiserated underclass in general, homeless or not, will lead to less drug abuse and less long term homeless.
Sure, likely many people develop drug problems after becoming homeless, e.g. it's not uncommon for mentally ill homeless to subsequently develop secondary drug problems. And the study he cites found that the main population (in Australia) that tended to develop these kinds of secondary drug problems was homeless teenagers (see table 2 in study); but while there are many policies which could potentially help teenage run-aways, reducing home/rent prices does not seem particularly high on the list.
Also, it's not clear how many of the teenagers from this study even ended up joining the ranks of the chronic homeless, not to mention that the study methodology seems likely to have classified many people as having developed their drug problems post-homelessness merely because (for example) they initially lied and denied such problems to their case worker and then later asked for rehab (see bullets on p345).
That said, I agree that temporary homelessness exacerbated by high home/rent prices could plausibly lead some people into chronic homelessness who wouldn't otherwise have gone down that path (e.g. if the life stress tips them towards alcoholism), but you could say this of any life stressor e.g. divorce, and the article gives virtually no evidence to suggest that this particular stressor is a major factor behind chronic homelessness, let alone more important than (primary) substance abuse and mental illness.
If housing prices were low enough for teenage runaways to afford, I suspect near all of them would eagerly leave the "teenage runaway" category entirely, and simply become young renters or homeowners, whose disagreement with their parents, day-to-day survival, etc. are no longer issues the wider society needs to be actively wrestling with.
I agree ! As I stated in an earlier post , I struggled with rent most of my working life. I was raising 3 children , and every rent raise put us 1 pay check away from being homeless . Housing should not cripple working class families. or anyone for that matter.
This counters the lived experience of every New York City resident for good reason. In reality there are two types of homeless: sheltered and unsheltered. Housing First will fix the urban homeless living in shelters (70% of all urban homeless according to an estimate I saw). But the visible problem of thousands of moaning and twitching homeless lying on sidewalks won’t be solved by Housing First.
Does your lived experience tell you how the people you see unsheltered on the sidewalks got there? Because I think that's the central claim of this piece - people end up homeless because housing is too expensive, and that while for some of them either mental illness or drug use exacerbated the original situation to leave them homeless, there's also a good number who developed these other problems after they lost their home.
I do not know how they got there of course. But I can tell you exactly what I saw: a strange increase in skeletal white males apparently smeared with their own feces sometimes doing violently self destructive things. More recently this has spread to black males. All of this is contemporary with the opioid crisis. Once again -- I don’t doubt that Housing First will help the 70% of homeless I never see - those living in shelters. But you can’t shoot up heroin in shelters and so the worst off live on the sidewalks.
Yeah, that sounds like it completely agrees with this account. The main reason that people end up homeless is that housing is too expensive, but when social trends occur that affect people in bad situations, the homeless will end up with more impacts than many other groups.
But the author should have led with outlining the difference between the visible and the invisible homeless. It was an oversimplified take on a problem that will require different interventions for the different populations. And it skews the stats - if the majority of homeless are invisible, then they likely make up most of the 70% who are from California. But what about the 30%? The tolerance for tent living is higher, weather is better, easier access to drugs so many addicts could be coming there for the network effect. Why not acknowledge that as a variable? Why is there less tent living in red states? Why not mention the possibility that they are less tolerant of it there? Why is there less tent living in extreme weather blue cities? Couldn't weather play any factor in why tent living could never get a foothold?
I completely agree that affordable housing is the number one issue, but oversimplifying the solution is obscuring rather than clarifying.
"But the visible problem of thousands of moaning and twitching homeless lying on sidewalks won’t be solved by Housing First."
1. It probably isn't 'thousands' since as I noted, the numbers of these people seem larger than they often are.
2. A portion of them will be solved by housing. It's one thing to have two bedrooms and another thing to have 3 or 4 bedrooms. Some people are homeless because relatives and friends simply do not have the capacity to help them out while they are cutting corners for their own immediate family. More housing means some of those cases can be solved.
Regardless, more housing also means more business, more revenue, more capacity to focus resources on hard cases that involve mental illness, substance addiction etc.
The annual “hope survey” in NYC found almost 3,500 unsheltered homeless living on sidewalks and in subways in 2022. This survey is conducted during the winter months when only the most resistant to sheltering are sleeping outside.
1. Not all unsheltered are hard core cases of mental illness or drug abuse.
(BTW, there are unsheltered who are probably totally fine but just that is a lifestyle they have fallen into and want to keep it that way. Consider 'Alexander the Grate' interviewed by Tyler Cowen https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/alexander-the-grate/)
2. If NYC builds 500K more houses, that's a lot of revenue and growth to provide the resources for 3500 intense cases.
100%. Most of the “advocates” like to pretend the unsheltered problem doesn’t exist. Counterproductive, because then people start thinking their solutions don’t work, even though they do for the functional homeless.
My anecdote and that of any New Yorker you ask is perfectly compatible with the data in Noah’s article. In my opinion, the difference is Housing First can solve the homelessness of the 70% who are in shelters but not necessarily the 30% living in the streets in part because they need to use drugs.
I think low-cost or subsidized housing would in fact solve the homelessness of most of the 30%, DSE, but not their addiction or mental health issues. A portion might not accept any housing on offer, perferring nomadic living, but I think that number would be small. There would still be problems of disruptive housed people, whose behavior or addiction was a threat to others living in the same location, but those issues would be addressed as they always have been, for better or worse--we can't aspire to solve every problem.
If those 70% are moved from shelters to proper houses, that'll free up shelter capacity for the rest, and reduce the recruiting pool, so to speak, for new worst-case outcomes.
I am astounded, frankly, that you think that's some huge deal-breaker. MILLIONS OF PEOPLE LIVE THAT WAY VOLUNTARILY because they have to be at work early and at night, they're tired and/or have small kids to take care of.
But sure, find a comfy spot behind a dumpster if that's your jam.
Some might make that choice; others (including me) would not. If a person without an addiction or acute psychiatric problem became newly homeless and was seeking a way to return to being able to afford a home, I think by far most would seek the security of overnight shelter despite its constraints, rather than figure out how to survive on the streets, where the stability needed to regain permanent shelter is hard to detect.
Shelters are not necessarily secure. Interviews with homeless individuals reveal that some avoid shelters due to violence and theft in the shelter. Some have pets, like dogs or cats, that aren't allowed in the shelter. Traditional shelters are gender-specific and exclude couples and families. Some local churches are opening over-night shelters for families, but again it's in early and out early. Lots of moving about every day. Chaotic.
Granted that there are cases of problematic shelters. But the comparison is general between shelters and the streets. Some experienced homeless people equip themselves to function relatively well in a tent, and small ad hoc communities form that may create additional reassurance, but my focus was on the newly homeless where those factors would be less likely (and Dr. Austin's focus was solely on curfew issues).
And, yes, accommodating homeless families is really tough. My community has several non-profits offering shelter, and the demand exceeds supply. For people working on that here the stress is unrelenting. I don't know how they keep it together.
Good points. One interesting study in Portland OR looked at pets with homeless humans. There was some concern that the 'homeless' pets weren't doing well. The conclusion was that most pets with homeless people did very well because they got to be with their humans, their pack, most all the time. Whereas the 'properly housed' pets were left alone at home while everyone else was at work or school. I found that interesting.
We could debate that, Mr. Ahmanson, but what's not debatable is that the cost of the shelter, food, clothing, cleaning, medical, and 24-hour security staff to keep the door locked will all be paid by us.
The other thing I will admit is that a locked or fenced facility will have to be in a place, and that place will have neighbors, and well you know. I myself would be bothered a lot less by a closed facility than one that allowed these people to wander out in the streets all day, but the average NIMBY is not so selective.
By the time you'd even consider staying at a shelter, you're ALREADY trying to "figure out how to survive on the streets." Otherwise, that's what friends with couches or floor space are for.
" Or to put it another way, while 33% of the homeless population suffers from mental illness, nearly 100% of the homeless population can’t afford housing. 100% is a much bigger number than 33%. Which is why mental health, while a factor in homelessness, cannot possibly or statistically be a lead factor."
Love this line of reasoning. E.g. "while xyz% of lung cancer patients are smokers, 100pct of them have cancer. 100pct is a larger number than xyz, which is why smoking, while a factor in lung cancer, cannot possibly or statistically be a lead factor."
I know what author is trying to say (and may even agree on the substance, particularly the bidirectional thesis that causality flows other way) but this phrasing is beyond awkward.
Also my main concern isnt whether drugs or mental issues cause homelessness or reverse, u suspect as author does that good proportion is latter. But that doesnt mean that by providing housing the mental issues and drug problems just melt away - much more likely to see wiring and sinks ripped out of walls in short order to raise cash for drugs for instance.
We actually know what happens in places that provide adequate affordable housing, because there are quite a few like AL, MS, WV, etc. And we don't see issues like housing being damaged to buy drugs at a significant level. What we *do* see is a better situation for the vast majority of homeless, *and* for the housed who have fewer nuisances to deal with.
Ok happy to be convinced. Am going to go try to find some links on these places later, but if you have any at the ready would be great to get them here as well.
wasn't really able to locate anything that specifically addresses what I am concerned about - that yes there is a proportion of relatively high functional homeless that doesn't suffer from acute mental health issues or addition, that could be rehoused and maybe moved successfully/hopefully permanently out of the homeless category, but that this wouldn't necessarily be a good solution to help the rest. Now i wasn't able to google articles about horror stories of homeless people ransacking the new places they were rehoused into, so am going to take that as a weak signal that maybe my fears are unfounded (weak because I can see how journalists would be reluctant to report such stories + unclear to me how many such hard cases are getting opportunity currently to be housed in non-supervised settings like shelters)
We don't have a way to magically teleport all the malignant tumors out of somebody's body, or prevent metastasis with zoning laws, so the fact that the vast majority of this month's cancer was caused by growth or persistence of last month's cancer isn't all that useful for treatment plans.
Legislation has a much easier time shifting around who owns exactly what land and how much they need to pay for it, since the underlying abstract concepts of land ownership and fiat currency were created almost entirely by legislation in the first place.
legislation is actually just about the hardest thing in as democracy, which is why both trump and biden administrations have tried to to accomplish so many of their goals through executive fiat.
Based on my experiences I think there may be a slight problem with how the above analysis looks at homelessness. It is similar to the problem with how people look at incarceration. If you look at the incident or individual level you see a ton of drug arrests or survey homeless individuals and find that they as a group their issues are caused by reasons other than drugs/mental health.
However, both those groups move through their respective systems quickly (arrests for drug users general little or no jail time and individuals who homelessness is due to financial or other non-mental health issues stay homeless a short time). Their respective impacts on the systems are minimal.
What drives incarceration are long-term incarceration for violent crime (here is a quick article:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/30/15591700/mass-incarceration-john-pfaff-locked-in). This is due to the longer sentences people receive for violent crimes. In the case of homeless individuals' it is a group who are called "service resistant" (i.e., difficult to provide services to, primarily due to, you guessed it, substance abuse and/or mental health) that drives most of the population. As the post points out they are a relatively small portion of all homeless but have a huge impact because they stay unhoused for long periods.
Here is mental experiment that illustrates this. Assume you survey 10 people who are unhoused. Nine are no service resistant and can be housed, on average, in 30 days. If one service resistant subject is unhoused for a year, their total nights unhoused exceeds the other nine combined. This is what happens in the incarceration analysis. Drug arrests dwarf other arrest in total numbers but in terms of actual jail beds, they do not drive a substantial portion of total prisoners (when you see a large portion of prisoners being held for drug crimes it is because you are looking at federal Bureau of Prison data, not data on all prisoners).
Finally, the service resistant individuals tend to gravitate to areas such as the west coast, New York, etc. where there are lots of services available to unhoused homeless individuals. This is anecdotal based on working with those populations however, so take it is just my opinion.
I think the problem with both the mass incarceration arguments and the homelessness argument from this post is that it offers hope in that it makes the problem look more manageable (just stop arresting people for drugs was the mass incarceration argument, and it is not accurate). In terms of h homelessness, most systems already do a good job of housing individuals open to and capable of taking advantage of them. This group is already a sort of revolving door, they go into and out of homelessness irregularly and their issues are solvable with money. Long-term, service resistant homelessness is a much tougher nut to crack, makes for a politically worse argument (i.e., many, possibly most, are substance abusers, often criminally involved and much less sympathetic to the lay person), and often have issues that leads to them being evicted or otherwise removed from housing when the are housed.
This is an excellent comment, and I think gets to the real issue much better than the article. The point is that we are combining two groups, the shorter term group that can’t afford housing but is looking for and receptive to help, and the criminal, substance abusing, mentally disturbed group. The latter group is the visible group that people are concerned about. These are the ones living in tents under the bridges, pooping in the street, yelling at pedestrians and getting in knife fights.
I believe the latter group (the visible minority) goes to areas where they are allowed to go, preferably with warmer weather. It is well known that police allow these indigents to sleep and stay in some places, and not others. They are definitely harassed in better neighborhoods (Del Mar and La Jolla for example) and are permitted in Ocean and Mission Beach. They are harassed in Tierrasanta and Rancho Bernardo, but allowed to have their way in Escondido and The Gaslamp.
The key to actually addressing the problem is to build shelters for the former group, and to have a zero tolerance policy for the latter. Arrest the criminals and druggies. Find mental homes for the crazies. As a last resort, make the latter group go to those liberal cities which want them.
Pretending this is about housing affordability, or that there is anything we can do about affordability in expensive coastal cities is just kicking the can down the road. Let’s get real.
Having reasonable zoning instead of ridiculously restrictive policies would help a lot of affordability, and cheaper housing would reduce the amount of “short term” (a huge portion of those that recently became homeless are at risk of staying that way in the long term) homelessness
I agree with that. It would likely free up resources to work on the more intractable issues.
While this would help, I am unsure if it is a primary solution for the larger issue. Again, this is my opinion and likely influenced by my firsthand experiences working with a small subset of unhoused individuals.
The issue, as I see it, is that there is really not a single "homeless" population. After the Great Recession there were considerably more homeless persons who were very open to services. As the economy improved the balance shifted (from my perspective in the Pacific NW), with service resistant persons becoming the norm. These are very different groups and probably require different solutions. Also, as pointed out by Swami, it is the service resistant population that generally causes issues for communities.
This should not be particularly surprising as we see the same concentrations of high-utilizers in ER visit costs, our justice system, crisis mental health (in fact often these are the same people being high utiliers across a range of systems). It is a power law type proposition where a small percentage of individuals utilize an inordinate amount of resources. It is important to remember this because the "average" unhouse individual could be helped (so I am not saying to not help the unhoused).
We just need to remember that helping the "average" unhoused person will probably be only a small part of the solution to addressing the housing issues seen in places like Portland, Seattle, SF, NY etc. That will require a different approach because the "average" unhoused person is not the causing the problems.
I think our unwillingness to acknowledge this is probably hurting our ability to work on the problem.
Lot of stuff works by a power-law distribution, where the tiny percentage with extreme values are causing all the noteworthy effects. Targeting those specifically often seems tempting, but hardly ever actually works, because the underlying dynamics creating that distribution will just raise up new ones. When there's a cloud of flammable gas, do you try to isolate the fastest-moving molecules?
I don't see how mixing the chronic homeless with the temporary homeless together as one cohort is useful. Of course the person sleeping in their car because they got evicted from their apartment is going to benefit from cheap and plentiful housing; it hardly needs to be said. Where is the evidence that all the chronic homeless need is a cheap home?
How much of the chronicity of someone's homelessness is fixed before homelessness even happens, and how much of it develops from being homeless?
If it's mostly fixed before homelessness even happens, so that people are either in group A (low propensity for chronicity) or group B (high propensity) even before becoming homeless, and mostly stay that way, no matter how long they're actually homeless, so that, say, a group-A person homeless for six months is still more likely to return to stable housing than a group-B person homeless for only one month, then getting the temporarily-homeless housed faster won't much reduce the chronic homeless population.
But if prolonging temporary homelessness changes people to become more like the chronically homeless, reducing how long the temporarily homeless are homeless will also reduce the number of chronic homeless. Carr's piece seems to argue that some significant portion of chronic homeless only got that way because of habits they wouldn't have developed had they returned to stable housing sooner.
If the cause of homelessness is rents that are too high, then why does the solution have to be building more housing in San Francisco and New York (two of the most expensive places to build on the entire planet)?
Why isn’t the solution to relocate homeless people from SF and NY to Detroit, where as you say, housing is cheap and plentiful?
If you have, say, $100 million to devote towards mitigating homelessness, which approach would help the most people?
Places with cheap housing tend to be that way because of poorer local economic conditions (though there are exceptions). Also, removing people from their support systems can make it harder to stabilize their situations.
Lastly, a significant minority of the homeless have the same reasons to stay as anyone else -- jobs, kids in school, family and friends nearby.
All true. But there are people who live entirely on Government support. Housing, food, basic income. Everything. None of them should be housed in an expensive location.
There are also people who can get back on their feet, but will never be able to earn enough to live in San Francisco. Sure, ask about the support network and whether or not it is irreplaceable. But for many in this group, costs will be minimized by having them live elsewhere.
Ordinary, housed people who work full time jobs leave their home towns and support networks all the time for better opportunities. I did. The idea that it should be considered beyond the pale for homeless people to move somewhere else for housing is absurd.
> Places with cheap housing tend to be that way because of poorer local economic conditions (though there are exceptions).
Sure, San Francisco has great economic conditions in the sense that if you're a software engineer you'll make more money there than somewhere else.
But it doesn't have good economic conditions for someone who is impoverished and genuinely interested in getting back onto the right track. Nor does New York City. The right place to be for someone like that is a place with minimum-wage jobs and housing that's affordable on minimum wage.
I think a big part of this is that you don’t need government spending to get more housing built in the expensive cities, only change regulations for something more reasonable and let the market do its job (obviously there are people who would still be unable to afford housing even after that but it would be easier to provide support for them with cheaper housing than right now and with a lower amount of homelessness due to cheaper housing the spending used to provide support would be divided among a lower amount of people)
This is a well-explained article on the causes of homelessness. However, this article does not do a good job in examining how homelessness contributes to the erosion of quality of life in progressive cities with large homeless populations.
True, mental health problems may not be the cause of homelessness, but there is a big difference to a citizen in a large city when the homeless person camped outside your house is a mentally-sane person and when they have severe schizophrenia and scream all night. The same reasoning applies to heavy drug users as well (especially those that use meth).
Yes, building vastly more homes would almost certainly eliminate homelessness as a large-scale problem. But that would take years even if we removed all housing constraints immediately and right now(!), I live in a city where people in near-permanent states of psychosis wander around screaming endlessly and there is nothing citizens can do. Likewise, I live in a city where homeless people can camp immediately outside the door to my apartment on public property and smoke meth and the police will do nothing if called.
So yes, the author is correct. But he is wrong to treat concerns about mental health and drug addiction among homeless populations so flippantly.
Without minimizing the frustrations of what you describe, Mr. Kudlow, I didn't read Mr. Carr as being flippant about these issues. I think he did get mildly snarky about those who see them as the principal drivers of homelessness.
Mr. Carr's points are directed toward the question of how we can minimize homelessness long term. And you're right, it will take many years (so we should get started asap!). Your comment is about responding to the effects of homelessness right now. The solutions (if there are any) will be different and would probably focus on building targeted services. (And these can be in tension. The quickest way to keep addicts from shooting up near your apartment might be to offer free drugs at neighborhood clinics, but that may not be the optimal way to reduce the number of addicts or homeless.)
If people are mentally ill and others are drug users (I am sure there is an overlapping Venn Diagram in this case, than the proportion is certainly larger than just 34-36%. These are people who need help, not just housing-- they need treatment. They are sick. They need some kind of residential treatment that can stabilize their respective conditions and a pathway to independence (housed independence) which would probably include intermediate housing and life skills training in group homes for example. Just putting them in a hotel room, boarding house or similar type housing is only going to degrade the quality of life for everyone else there.
Of course, cheerio; you're right. Housing alone does not solve addiction and mental illness. There has been a huge unfilled social services need in mental health for over forty years, since deinstitutionalization was not paired with community clinic infrastructure, as was originally intended, and addiction problems are far greater now as well, due primarily to the explosion of opioids.
Building low-cost/subsidized housing stock housing doesn't solve unemployment for healthy non-addicts either, but it does end their homelessness.
As I understand it, there is a debate between "housing first" advocates, who emphasize providing independent housing, and those (I'm thinking of people like Michael Shellenberger) who emphasize the need for expanded supervised shelters. I think it's clear that since housing stock is currently so low, we need to pursue both tracks. (Sometimes it seems to me the housing-first advocates dig in too hard on one track, but I'm sure that if there were a surge in affordable housing construction that would moderate too.)
But Mr. Carr's point is simple: the root cause of homelessness per se is the lack of homes in places where there are potential jobs and services available. As affordable/subsidized housing reduces homelessness, addressing the issues of addiction and illness should gradually become more feasible.
Great post. Regarding progressive policies - many of the policies which create a scarcity of housing in CA (my home state) are progressive. So, while lots of public monetary benefit doesn't necessarily increase homelessness, I think a serious argument could be made that progressive policy with respect to development, and particularly the cost to develop, land in CA does exacerbate the homeless problem.
I think there’s a key detail here, though: Those policies were seen as progressive AT THE TIME, but may no longer be, or may have later proven, to not achieve progressive goals.
Which tells us something important about progressivism: Progress is an overarching goal, not any one policy.
I agree with the great first Socialist, Progressive, Liberal President, Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln said: "The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities."
Lincoln the Liberal:
Gave away free land
Started free colleges
Started the Progressive income tax
Established the IRS Commissioner.
Created the 1st non Constitutional Cabinet Department, Department of Agriculture.
Zoning, primarily, but lots of things restrict the amount of housing that can be built in a particular area: parking requirements, height restrictions, setback rules.
Lots of government regulations that prevent housing from being built. Carr says that San Francisco and Seattle have expensive housing because they are peninsulas. But Seattle built more high rise apartments in the last few years and now rents are falling. San Francisco has zoning and regulations that prevent housing. Over 40% of its small area is restricted to single family homes. And even where it’s not, building is restricted by environmental (like a small shadow falling on a public school playground stopping a laundromat from being turned into a 5 story apartment building).
The short answer is that Japan has very strict earthquake codes and reasonably affordable housing, in spite of a very high population density, basically by having reasonable zoning and construction laws. We know it can be done because it *is* done.
I agree with all this, but housing policy is one of the few issues that cuts across current political divides. Given that the rightists tend to be more tribal than the leftists, I prefer to downplay my views on those issues when talking about housing problems and homelessness.
> basically by having reasonable zoning and construction laws
Also a declining population, which obviously helps. Anywhere with a declining population is probably going to have affordable housing, because there's less demand for houses than there was last year.
Making it exceedingly difficult to evict a non paying tenant has resulted in landlords being unwilling to rent to those with poor credit without substantial deposits in NE cities. It’s a policy that rewards true grifters at the expense of those living paycheck to paycheck but who actually have a paycheck.
Yes I’ve heard that renting an apartment these days is like taking out a bank loan. And for their first apartment, young people have to get their parents to co-sign (assume contingent liability) or no apartment. It was not so 50 years ago.
Hello Howard. To me it's more like buying a house using a credit card with a variable rate mortgage (end of fixed rate) where "variable" is an annual adjustment of at least 7% plus COLA (here in Portland, Oregon) resulting in even greater profits for the banks, big rips in the fabric of our communities, and lots more homeless individuals and families. In many of our neighborhoods renters now outnumber home (condo) owners with high rates of rent burdened folks across many of the largest neighborhoods, especially those in the Central City.
Thank you. I feel like I'm losing my mind talking about homelessness with people in California. Another claim I've heard many many times is that other states are bussing homeless people here (typically diabolical red states of course). People would literally prefer to come up with a silly conspiracy than admit that a 1 bedroom apartment costing $2000-$3000 might be the problem.
I want to add a modification thaty does not challenge the basic argument, but does affect one component. I live in a state with a very low homelessness rate (and, statewide, low rents . . . but also low wages). My town is a progressive enclave in this conservative state. The city's policies are relatively supportive of the homeless (we have two apartment buildings constructed on a Housing First model), and we have a range of non-profits that expand the range of shelters and services available.
The result has been an undeniable in-migration from elsewhere in the state. Since housing here is costly compared to elsewhere in the state (which is a national pattern with the urban/liberal, rural/conservative divide), these arrivals have less chance of finding affordable housing than they did before they came, although they have better chances of finding shelter and services, and it does appear (impressionistically) that a high percentage of those folks arrive with psychiatric and addiction problems. So on this level, local conservatives here are not wrong when they attribute the origins of our *local* homelessness problem to "progressive" policies.
(A related issue is that family and individual homelessness seem to be significantly different phenomena. A high proportion of our local-resident homeless problem concerns families, and there the problems seem to combine both shortages of affordable housing and a host of social issues pertaining to family dysfunctionality.)
So I think that while Mr. Carr's analysis is persuasive from a fifty-thousand foot perspective--and I'm convinced it points to the key element of a national approach: prioritizing fast and widespread housing construction in high rent counties--when you examine the issue as we live it now, the uneven distributions and clustered patterns of homelessness will alter the salience of many of these points.
I've been waiting since June 2022 for a permit to build an 8 by 12 foot basic deck in my own back yard. I have resubmitted plans repeatedly, secured a variance (with all the neighbors chiming in and agreeing to the plan), and hired a retired person from the office to help push it through. I haven't been able to sell my house, which I need to do to move closer to family since I'm retired. Nine months calling and waiting for a stupid permit when you're retired is a long time. I can't imagine the hoops you'd have to jump through for anything larger. If you want to know why there is a housing crisis, here's a bureaucratic nightmare in much smaller scale. (This is Prince George's County, Maryland)
A related cause of homelessness seems to be regulations on what type of housing is legal. It used to be more common for people to be able to rent a small room in a home or a building. But zoning regulations have reduced that practice in many cities. As laws & regulations have increased requirements for minimum housing standards, more people have been pushed into tents. So those lucky enough to afford the minimum legally allowed housing may be better off, but there are going to be people pushed into the street by those regs. Removing or reducing those regs would increase the available supply.
What I see with a lot of these comments is that there's a fundamental disagreement with what the problem of homelessness actually is. It seems like a lot of advocacy groups and policy wonks approach it from the perspective of the problem is that a lot of people don't have reliable shelter and personal spaces. That is the problem from the perspective of people experiencing homelessness.
For most regular people who aren't homeless and don't have close acquaintances who are homeless, that's not the problem at all! The problem is that regular people going about their lives encounter unhygienic individuals who seem to be on drugs or have mental illnesses and are frightening and potentially dangerous to interact with or even have in your proximity. That is the problem that this sub-set of homeless people are creating for non-homeless people. Homeless people who aren't like that are not part of "the homeless problem" and one might in a general sense wish their situation were better, but their problems are their own, not everyone else's problem.
And yes, you could say that solving the first problem by reducing the cost of housing will eventually impact the second problem, but the scary, unhygienic, mentally ill people that are the "the homeless problem" will be among the last people to come off the streets. It's a "bank shot" solution that promises that solving this first problem that is not that important for many regular people will eventually over a long period of time help with the second problem that is important to non-homeless people. Normally that sort of "bank shot" is the hallmark of conservative policy solutions. "You see, if we cut taxes that will spur innovation and create a more productive society which will raise the standard of living and in the end everyone will be better off than if we had kept the tax money and used it on public assistance" If you don't find that convincing, you might consider why "if we reduce the cost of housing then all the scary, smelly people will no longer be in public spaces" isn't very convincing.
Of course I think reducing the cost of housing would benefit a lot of people who aren't homeless, but then you can sell it that way rather than making a bunch of promises about how it will get unhygienic people who are alarming to interact with out of public spaces.
This is the single best distillation of the issue, and the problem inherent in solutions which rely on a faulty definition of what the "homeless problem is" to the majority of people.
Matthew, you're saying that the important problem is the intrusion of the addicted or mentally ill on the lives of others, and the issue that there are many thousands of families and individuals who are homeless without those behaviors are not "the homeless problem" we care about. They may not be the problem you care about, but they are the core of the problem that the government and non-profits in my city care about, because their numbers are high and because of the lost potential their homelessness causes.
Of course the cases that involve multiple factors (homeless, psychotic, addicts) are going to be the hardest to address. But as Mr. Carr points out, an indeterminate number of the homeless who are disabled by mental illness turned to drugs or developed illness as one consequence of losing the shelter that allowed them to function independently. Available low-cost/subsidized housing would have a preventative impact on a sizable group. No one I have ever read on this subject has maintained that housing alone will resolve addiction or mental illness. "Housing first" proposals always entail community services that target and monitor the other issues.
But to the degree that you see this as a parallel to the deception of supply side arguments, I'd agree that no one should wait for new housing before advocating for better policies and increased social services for those homeless who are mentally ill or addicts. If conservative supply siders said, "Cut taxes to get distributed growth longterm and strengthen the safety net now to address immediate need" the policy would be internally incoherent (because one half reduces resources while other requires expansion). "Streamline construction now to solve homelessness longterm and address mental health and addiction now" is not incoherent, especially since housing construction is blocked less by lack of resources than by regulatory constraints.
The problem that the government and non-profits care about is NOT the core of the problem people complain about when they see their cities overrun by encampments.
Somehow, those nonprofits and government bureaucrats have succeeded at promoting their own agenda by encouraging people to say, "homelessness" whenever they see those tents.
@Felix writes, "The second problem shouldn't 'solved' without also solving the first problem, because then there will be no demand to solve the first problem at all"?
Talk about gaslighting the population! Talk about bait-and-switch!
Mitchell, The nonprofits here focus on shelters, food kitchens, individual support services, and, family relocation. The city and county regularly clear encampments, and there are none now on city streets, though there are many near parks, streams, and in woods (though those are also cleared periodically). When we had sub-zero weather, the police and nonprofits teamed very successfully to persuade those in tents to move to shelter and temporary space short-term.
I don't think either the nonprofits or "bureaucrats" have somehow gotten people to say "homelessness." And I have never, ever heard anyone say that the problems of addiction and mental illness should not be solved/addressed if we don't first solve the housing shortage. What they do say is that the housing shortage is an engine generating high numbers of people who are like the ones you're focused on, and if we want to stop adding to that number and have hope of providing recovery for the addicts/mentally ill who can be helped we need very large amounts of new housing.
It is interesting to me that on this string, when people began to point out that new housing could indeed have a great impact on settling the large majority of homeless people who are not addicts or mentally ill, a line of response began that no one really cares about that large majority (except nonprofits and bureaucrats, I suppose). Where I live, there a vocal conservative minority who seem to feel that way, and they use the focus on this minority to relentlessly attack the nonprofits for "attracting" them (although most are local) and the Democratic local government for not sending them to other counties by the busload so those places can bear the expense. I don't see this as a very promising social dynamic for solving any problem, but if you really don't care about most of the homeless it can certainly be an easy way to score political points.
Please forgive me if I ramble a bit here. I intend to shed some light on a political and cultural dynamic that you may (however inadvertently) have misrepresented.
FWIW, I'm attracted to guys. I've never hidden that fact, and I'm proud simply to be myself. OTOH, I never signed on to "smash cisheteropatriarchy" in the name of some Brave New World. In fact, I've fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing "Queer" about same-sex attraction. As an individual, that's all the respect I demand.
I'm a Pat Brown Democrat. A(n electric) car in every garage! I voted for Bernie (in California, as a write-in) in 2016.
I recognize that we're ruled by an oligarchy that keeps us focused on victimology (and uses "the most vulnerable" as a scourge) while it continues squeezing out (and disparaging the aspirations of) the middle class.
As I wrote in a prior comment, I'M ENTIRELY IN FAVOR OF A "HOUSING FIRST" APPROACH! We indeed have a critical shortage of housing -- low-income and otherwise.
However, we're faced with another crisis —involving the abuse of public space — and an "encampment" subculture rooted in that abuse (and an entire cottage industry hell-bent on legitimizing that subculture). I don't even seek to put the denizens of encampments into "tweetment," or subject them to a regime of "behavioral health." Warehouse them, if need be. Live and let live. I just want their detritus out of my face.
The Encampment Subculture and its "nonprofit" Advocacy Industry (aka the "Homeless Industrial Complex") exist in symbiosis, and have colonized cities like San Francisco.
If housing costs are the issue, why won't people move where housing is cheaper? If those in question have such "deep roots in the community," why won't any of their (ostensible) friends and neighbors put them up?
We need to stop conflating these issues under the rubric of "homelessness."
Again, see the quote from @Felix: "The second problem shouldn't 'solved' without also solving the first problem, because then there will be no demand to solve the first problem at all."
That's what I call "gaslighting the population" -- or a bait-and-switch.
PS: For every so-called 'NIMBY," there's a flock of YIMBYs (shilling for developers) who don't want your new neighbors even to HAVE a backyard -- just as what those whose goal is to "get people out of their cars" want is to keep you out of the driver's seat (as they refuse to recognize that [from Atlanta to Houston to the Bay area] the best mom-and-pop restaurants, many run by immigrants, are in suburban strip malls).
Does that really make me part of "a vocal conservative minority"? I think it makes me pretty mainstream. I certainly hope so.
It may ramble, Mitchell, but your comment is interesting and I can see it's in good faith. Let me address a few points as best I can. I'm going to ignore homeless families--a huge problem here (Indiana)--because they're probably irrelevant to your points.
First, why don't the homeless move to other cities? I'm sure many people who are priced out of their cities do move to other areas. What we're seeing in the homeless are those who haven't moved. Many of that subset may not have the resources to do so, and if they somehow get to a place with lower rents, how does that actually help them unless they are able to compete in the job market. Low rent areas are typically low-economy places. Without an income, rent is always unaffordable. (Which is why some who move actually move to places that are equally or more unaffordable, but with better weather or services. If you're unemployable rents don't really matter: you need fully subsidized housing anywhere.)
Why won't friends put them up? I'm sure lots do. Among those who don't have friends to put them up, many just don't have friends to put them up any longer. The homeless problem is surely far bigger than we see precisely because friends and family do put up the homeless for shorter or longer periods. Moreover, the in-your-face homeless you're concerned about are disproportionately unable to move or receive private help because addiction/mental issues reduce their competence and tolerability. From a public policy standpoint, saying, "You should impose on friends and family, not taxpayers" is not a constructive approach.
I'm not going to point out that your "warehousing" idea would be unconstitutional in practice because . . . oh . . .
When it comes to Felix, my response to him was the same as yours. I have never before seen anyone make this argument, and I have no evidence that people in government or nonprofits do. In any case, when it comes to bait-and-switch my experience doesn't confirm your view. Here, when they are provided with housing through "housing first" programs, some of the truly problematic homeless simply fail, but most reach a level of stability greater than they showed on the street, and we have more "success stories" who return to employment and seem to be off drugs. I have read that in the Bay Area there are groups that advocate for "housing first" at the expense of shelter expansion. I don't think that's rational, and here the approach is to build on both tracks.
My town has an active NIMBY/YIMBY debate, and part of the NIMBY perspective is that the YIMBYs are witting or unwitting tools of rapacious developers. I understand the idea and respond to it viscerally, but I think it's a counterproductive caricature. Of course developers are out to make money, and their goals are orthogonal to public policy goals (I hope I'm using "orthogonal" right). But we live in a system where private construction is done by developers, and the solution is not to shun developers because they're greedy, but to devise a new set of ordinances that will produce results that are at neither the extreme of ultra-status quo nor of maximum density. Aim for reasonably good quality by reducing costly regulation on other fronts or tailoring variances, favor developers who will accept lower profit margins as you reward their work with more orders (yes, they'll get rich), avoid extremes of density, be vigilant against corruption (which will unfortunately always be present in some form), but accept without catastrophizing it the fact that 1950s-style urban design that maximizes class segregation has reached a dead end. It's not going away, but to solve the current problem we have to plan for more economically mixed residential neighborhoods. America's very big, but economic growth is increasingly coalescing in geography around delimited metro areas, and that is going to break housing patterns one way or another.
We may actually agree on the value of "Housing First" (which, in a sense, is what I mean by "warehousing").
I hadn't seen your reply to Felix -- which was spot-on! OTOH, I was put off by Felix's pitch precisely BECAUSE it reflects the machinations of "homeless advocates" here in the Bay Area -- a world of fiefdoms built around claims to "social justice." Note how the Boise decision has been exploited by those who now assert an unrestricted right to establish encampments wherever they please. Check out the Coalition on Homelessness in SF, or the history of the Wood Street encampment in Oakland. This isn't Indiana.
On the pitfalls of urbanism (and again, on the role of the "clerisy" in denigrating the strivings of the middle class), I'll defer to Joel Kotkin. The notion of "1950s-style urban design that maximizes class segregation" flies in the face of those immigrant-run mom-and-pop eateries in the strip malls. "Economic growth coalescing around delimited metro areas" has already begun to change as more people work from home.
In the end -- even where we agree -- this is about how we frame the discourse, and how (and whether) that reflects (which?) people's priorities and values.
Once upon a time -- back when Brooklyn was still the old Brooklyn -- my grandmother told me, "Mitchell, you don't want to be involved in politics. Politics is a dirty business."
"This is different, grandma," I responded. "It's MOVEMENT politics."
"Mark my words," she said. "Politics is a DIRTY BUSINESS"
Grandma was right.
Similarly, moving itself is expensive and requires resources that people experiencing homelessness already probably don't have. Maybe they at least have a job and are hesitant to leave it and risk not finding anything in a new city. Maybe they share custody of children and are prohibited from leaving the area by their agreement. "Just move" isn't a simple solution for everyone.
I agree with this - even if you're a fan of housing (like me), proponents need to do a better job of making that connection, because for a lot of people, it's unclear how building a new condo tower downtown is going to help that screaming and/or shitting on the sidewalk.
As I understand it, though, there are indeed many ways it will help, directly or indirectly.
1. By reducing the general level of the local homeless population, you free up more resources to focus on those hard cases. Police or crisis teams can concentrate their responses on acute cases. Counselors can spend their time on fewer cases.
2. Shelter beds or SRO hotels get freed up, and can be converted into the kind of supportive housing the hard cases need. In a lot of cities, there's just nowhere for them to go right now.
3. If new construction is needed, city agencies & nonprofits have an easier time building out new capacity when land (or pre-existing buildings) are cheaper to find.
4. More indirectly (but still meaningfully) you make it easier to hire all the people you need to help manage the homeless population. A big part of SF's problem right now is simply that they don't have enough police, and the local cost of living is a big part of that. Without police (or nurses, counselors, case managers, etc.) your local agencies get stretched even thinner.
5. Finally, you also increase the local tax base, which increases the money you can spend on all of the above.
I see a direct connection between the conversion and destruction of SRO ( single room occupancy) housing caused much homelessness among single men. We need to remove cheap housing from market forces.
Look at claim #6 and info below that again. All the cities listed throughout here that *do not have* people complaining about homelessness (the 'ickiness' you're talking about) all have one thing in common: Cheap rent.
You gloss over "ok it may help a bit", but ignore the real world examples of where people are not complaining about the 'unhygienics' at all - cities with abundant / vacant housing! Your comment is all theory, he provides data and lots of it.
I think this comment proves that the author is right, this topic really does break people's brains!
If it were only about cheap rent, San Francisco wouldn't be overrun with encampments. All those folks in the tents would be flocking to Mississippi or Detroit. However, they'd rather be in San Francisco, along with the billionaires -- even if it means living on the street -- and (while I advocate a "Housing First" policy as triage) we're never going to be able to stack-and-pack our way out of that.
Question: you're living on the street in SF. No real income. Certainly no car. How do you move to Mississippi?
In that very situation, I hitchhiked to NY (where I had family [and, as it turned out, a job offer]). Left my few belongings in SF with a friend. Made a sign, put my thumb out at the bottom of the South Van Ness on-ramp to 80/101; spent a few hours that evening in Fernley, NV, beside a road-sign where someone had scrawled, "Been here 3 days, dying of thirst." Within a week, I was alive and well on the East Coast.
As for Mississippi? That's a stone's throw from Memphis. It worked for Elvis. ;-)
As I wrote in another comment: "There's ALWAYS someplace else to go -- another way to approach life."
In CA the vagrants get thousands each month in SSI, disability, free phones , clothes and food. How do you think they pay for their drugs and alcohol? But let's assume they are so wacked they have not been taking advantage of these programs ...all they have to say is "my long lost Uncle Elvis has a room for me in Memphis" and the CA taxpayers will pay to send him there.
Yo, your comment sucks ass.
"Bank shot," indeed! Another way of putting it is: It's like betting everything on an "inside straight."
Felix, try this thought experiment. If tomorrow someone came to "the government" with surefire cures for addiction and mental illness, would it be right to refuse to use them until the problem of homelessness is solved? Of course not. Equally of course, that's not going to happen, nor will we ever fully "solve the first problem" (addiction + mental impairment).
In real life, the problems of homelessness and "street pathologies" (I think I'm making up the term) are intertwined, and while it may be possible to fully remediate the housing shortage over time, with combinations of zoning/permit reform, investment incentives, and direct government funding, we will always be struggling to remediate street pathologies--although increased housing would move much of their impact off the streets.
The unaffordability of housing has plenty of toxic social and economic drawbacks in its own right that can be used to build support for addressing it. Where I live, most of the pressure for building afforable housing is not generated by street pathologies and I do not see them being linked (with one exception). The pressure comes from workforce needs in a growing, upscale city. The exception is two "housing first" apartment houses built for the chronically homeless, which accept people who have trajectories away from addiction and disabling mental illness. (Local conservatives like to point to failures in those projects: instances of crime and drug use. Local liberals like to point to cases where residents have gained employment and appear stable.)
Makes sense to me. I think we have to ask ourselves what is visible versus what is.
Back in the 90's, I remember a census was done of 'subway beggers'. That used to be a big thing in NYC and while one might guess most were homeless, that may or may not have been the case. Anyway, people thought the number of subway panhandlers would be in the thousands, maybe even tens of thousands. When the census was done, it was absurdly low, like 75 people or so! The impression of their large numbers came from the fact that they rode the subways all day so were visible for millions of people day in day out.
Likewise the mentally ill homeless person can draw a lot of attention. In NJ we had an infamous homeless person who was kicked out of the library and got a large settlement...only to remain homeless and harass people on the street.
But the person who may work changing tires or at Wal-Mart who may sleep in their car or crash on a friends couch or use his shower in the morning maybe far more common and much less visible to the general public because he isn't begging on the street or exhibiting mental illness in public.
This comment is the first I read and is close to what I was going to write. The availability bias colors people’s perception of the homeless, at least in NYC. The homeless who sleep on the streets instead of shelters, and generally draw more attention to themselves, are the ones who get noticed and form our impressions. We barely see the working homeless and those who are otherwise “functional” even if they are the majority. On the other hand, it is the mentally ill and drug-addled who citizens and voters think of as the “problem” when they think about the “problem” of homelessness, and these people would barely notice or give a politician any credit if they found homes for all the homeless who don’t have these problems without decreasing the numbers of disturbed people sleeping in streets and subways.
That scenario is roughly as unlikely as some lake or ocean being drained dry, while specks of foam - which previously formed on the crests of surface waves - somehow remain precisely in place, as if nailed to the sky high above the resulting salt flats.
Lasting stability for invisible / functional homeless means support networks currently keeping them functional can and will redirect freed-up resources to those with worse problems.
There seems to be a skewed view of the nature of homelessness in this country.
I suppose the question is what is the problem?
The case of the guy who sleeps in his car, showers at a friends house and goes to work is certainly not ideal. But to a degree that can be something we tolerate maybe as a stepping stone or brief phase of life. The more visible cases of begging in the streets, homeless tent camps, these may make up a smaller portion of the homeless but they are more disturbing to the public...esp. when they start to get paired with open drug use and such.
I agree, housing is the most bang for the buck here. Even so, the homeless were a concern in the 90's in NYC and that was before housing got as tight as it is now.
It’s hard to say what the solution to that problem is. The harsh reality is that the system, and also their parents, probably failed them when they were much younger
Or they failed themselves. Why are we so afraid to cast blame on the individual when we're quite happy to cast it on their parents?
I don't disagree. Some probably did screw themselves over by getting into trouble as a kid or blowing off school. It can be a combination of things, too.
I don't see that guy as a public problem. What's wrong with living like that?
If he's doing it because he can't afford anything else, wouldn't take much bad luck for a public problem to emerge. Maybe his car needs significant repairs, then that missed night of sleep (and other stress) leads to misjudging some social cue and thereby damaging the friendship, but before that can be patched up, poor hygiene due to lack of showering gets him fired from the job... y'know, "for want of a nail."
100%. People judge the iceberg by the tip.
"And while mental health and drug addiction aren’t lead factors in homelessness (the vast majority of homelessness is temporary..."
This article is pure bait and switch. The primary moral/policy concern in the context of homelessness is chronic homelessness, i.e. the people losing fingers in the winter or defecating on the sidewalk, the people who are trapped long-term on the streets. And for this population the conventional wisdom is correct, i.e. their main problems are mental illness and drugs/alcohol. And your attempts to "debunk" this view are based on stats that conflate chronic homelessness with the less serious (but numerically common) problem of temporary homelessness (e.g. people temporarily living in their car or living for a stint in a shelter), in order to mislead people into thinking that lowering home prices is going to make any kind of serious dent into the suffering and harm associated with people living their lives on the streets.
No, it is a game of three card Monty. Follow the flow of people who stumble financially and see that there are many more of them then there are tents. If we catch those that stumble financially, we will have fewer tents. Give us money.
But the tents are real and they are the major issue for anyone attempting to live in a community that has them. Look at the authors' data on the success in Houston. After a decade of housing first, there are still 3600 "experiencing homelessness". To me, that sounds like the remaining cohort that will not leave the streets.
For a city that has expensive housing, the solution is not just to increase supply. That is expensive and will take forever. Let the market do that. A better solution is to move anyone that does not have a reasonable chance of being self-sufficient out of the expensive market and into a less expensive one. To paraphrase what a HUD representative once told me in the early ought's: "No, you can not have a rent increase. Your tenant's voucher can be used anywhere in the country and we do not want to pay the market rate in Berkeley."
"Let the market do that" requires changing some zoning laws and so on which are actively preventing the market from doing that, as well as tax policies which (less directly, but no less severely) incentivize speculative hoarding and slumlords rather than truly efficient use.
Does the article not have a point when it cites a study that shows many homeless become addicted to drugs AFTER they became homeless. So if reduce the number of transient homeless, you reduce the amount of long term homeless. It's likely that reducing the size of the immiserated underclass in general, homeless or not, will lead to less drug abuse and less long term homeless.
Sure, likely many people develop drug problems after becoming homeless, e.g. it's not uncommon for mentally ill homeless to subsequently develop secondary drug problems. And the study he cites found that the main population (in Australia) that tended to develop these kinds of secondary drug problems was homeless teenagers (see table 2 in study); but while there are many policies which could potentially help teenage run-aways, reducing home/rent prices does not seem particularly high on the list.
Also, it's not clear how many of the teenagers from this study even ended up joining the ranks of the chronic homeless, not to mention that the study methodology seems likely to have classified many people as having developed their drug problems post-homelessness merely because (for example) they initially lied and denied such problems to their case worker and then later asked for rehab (see bullets on p345).
That said, I agree that temporary homelessness exacerbated by high home/rent prices could plausibly lead some people into chronic homelessness who wouldn't otherwise have gone down that path (e.g. if the life stress tips them towards alcoholism), but you could say this of any life stressor e.g. divorce, and the article gives virtually no evidence to suggest that this particular stressor is a major factor behind chronic homelessness, let alone more important than (primary) substance abuse and mental illness.
If housing prices were low enough for teenage runaways to afford, I suspect near all of them would eagerly leave the "teenage runaway" category entirely, and simply become young renters or homeowners, whose disagreement with their parents, day-to-day survival, etc. are no longer issues the wider society needs to be actively wrestling with.
I agree ! As I stated in an earlier post , I struggled with rent most of my working life. I was raising 3 children , and every rent raise put us 1 pay check away from being homeless . Housing should not cripple working class families. or anyone for that matter.
This counters the lived experience of every New York City resident for good reason. In reality there are two types of homeless: sheltered and unsheltered. Housing First will fix the urban homeless living in shelters (70% of all urban homeless according to an estimate I saw). But the visible problem of thousands of moaning and twitching homeless lying on sidewalks won’t be solved by Housing First.
Does your lived experience tell you how the people you see unsheltered on the sidewalks got there? Because I think that's the central claim of this piece - people end up homeless because housing is too expensive, and that while for some of them either mental illness or drug use exacerbated the original situation to leave them homeless, there's also a good number who developed these other problems after they lost their home.
I do not know how they got there of course. But I can tell you exactly what I saw: a strange increase in skeletal white males apparently smeared with their own feces sometimes doing violently self destructive things. More recently this has spread to black males. All of this is contemporary with the opioid crisis. Once again -- I don’t doubt that Housing First will help the 70% of homeless I never see - those living in shelters. But you can’t shoot up heroin in shelters and so the worst off live on the sidewalks.
Yeah, that sounds like it completely agrees with this account. The main reason that people end up homeless is that housing is too expensive, but when social trends occur that affect people in bad situations, the homeless will end up with more impacts than many other groups.
The author of this essay is an advocate, he is not disinterested.
True. But if someone claims to disagree with him, but everything they say is compatible, that is worth noting too.
But the author should have led with outlining the difference between the visible and the invisible homeless. It was an oversimplified take on a problem that will require different interventions for the different populations. And it skews the stats - if the majority of homeless are invisible, then they likely make up most of the 70% who are from California. But what about the 30%? The tolerance for tent living is higher, weather is better, easier access to drugs so many addicts could be coming there for the network effect. Why not acknowledge that as a variable? Why is there less tent living in red states? Why not mention the possibility that they are less tolerant of it there? Why is there less tent living in extreme weather blue cities? Couldn't weather play any factor in why tent living could never get a foothold?
I completely agree that affordable housing is the number one issue, but oversimplifying the solution is obscuring rather than clarifying.
"But the visible problem of thousands of moaning and twitching homeless lying on sidewalks won’t be solved by Housing First."
1. It probably isn't 'thousands' since as I noted, the numbers of these people seem larger than they often are.
2. A portion of them will be solved by housing. It's one thing to have two bedrooms and another thing to have 3 or 4 bedrooms. Some people are homeless because relatives and friends simply do not have the capacity to help them out while they are cutting corners for their own immediate family. More housing means some of those cases can be solved.
Regardless, more housing also means more business, more revenue, more capacity to focus resources on hard cases that involve mental illness, substance addiction etc.
The annual “hope survey” in NYC found almost 3,500 unsheltered homeless living on sidewalks and in subways in 2022. This survey is conducted during the winter months when only the most resistant to sheltering are sleeping outside.
1. Not all unsheltered are hard core cases of mental illness or drug abuse.
(BTW, there are unsheltered who are probably totally fine but just that is a lifestyle they have fallen into and want to keep it that way. Consider 'Alexander the Grate' interviewed by Tyler Cowen https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/alexander-the-grate/)
2. If NYC builds 500K more houses, that's a lot of revenue and growth to provide the resources for 3500 intense cases.
100%. Most of the “advocates” like to pretend the unsheltered problem doesn’t exist. Counterproductive, because then people start thinking their solutions don’t work, even though they do for the functional homeless.
Your anecdata is not enough to overrule simple facts and logic.
My anecdote and that of any New Yorker you ask is perfectly compatible with the data in Noah’s article. In my opinion, the difference is Housing First can solve the homelessness of the 70% who are in shelters but not necessarily the 30% living in the streets in part because they need to use drugs.
I think low-cost or subsidized housing would in fact solve the homelessness of most of the 30%, DSE, but not their addiction or mental health issues. A portion might not accept any housing on offer, perferring nomadic living, but I think that number would be small. There would still be problems of disruptive housed people, whose behavior or addiction was a threat to others living in the same location, but those issues would be addressed as they always have been, for better or worse--we can't aspire to solve every problem.
If those 70% are moved from shelters to proper houses, that'll free up shelter capacity for the rest, and reduce the recruiting pool, so to speak, for new worst-case outcomes.
I am astounded, frankly, that you think that's some huge deal-breaker. MILLIONS OF PEOPLE LIVE THAT WAY VOLUNTARILY because they have to be at work early and at night, they're tired and/or have small kids to take care of.
But sure, find a comfy spot behind a dumpster if that's your jam.
Some might make that choice; others (including me) would not. If a person without an addiction or acute psychiatric problem became newly homeless and was seeking a way to return to being able to afford a home, I think by far most would seek the security of overnight shelter despite its constraints, rather than figure out how to survive on the streets, where the stability needed to regain permanent shelter is hard to detect.
Shelters are not necessarily secure. Interviews with homeless individuals reveal that some avoid shelters due to violence and theft in the shelter. Some have pets, like dogs or cats, that aren't allowed in the shelter. Traditional shelters are gender-specific and exclude couples and families. Some local churches are opening over-night shelters for families, but again it's in early and out early. Lots of moving about every day. Chaotic.
Granted that there are cases of problematic shelters. But the comparison is general between shelters and the streets. Some experienced homeless people equip themselves to function relatively well in a tent, and small ad hoc communities form that may create additional reassurance, but my focus was on the newly homeless where those factors would be less likely (and Dr. Austin's focus was solely on curfew issues).
And, yes, accommodating homeless families is really tough. My community has several non-profits offering shelter, and the demand exceeds supply. For people working on that here the stress is unrelenting. I don't know how they keep it together.
Good points. One interesting study in Portland OR looked at pets with homeless humans. There was some concern that the 'homeless' pets weren't doing well. The conclusion was that most pets with homeless people did very well because they got to be with their humans, their pack, most all the time. Whereas the 'properly housed' pets were left alone at home while everyone else was at work or school. I found that interesting.
The kind of shelter that a lot of these people need is one that doesn’t let you out.
We could debate that, Mr. Ahmanson, but what's not debatable is that the cost of the shelter, food, clothing, cleaning, medical, and 24-hour security staff to keep the door locked will all be paid by us.
The cost is paid by us either way.
The other thing I will admit is that a locked or fenced facility will have to be in a place, and that place will have neighbors, and well you know. I myself would be bothered a lot less by a closed facility than one that allowed these people to wander out in the streets all day, but the average NIMBY is not so selective.
By the time you'd even consider staying at a shelter, you're ALREADY trying to "figure out how to survive on the streets." Otherwise, that's what friends with couches or floor space are for.
No, Doc, you wouldn’t.
" Or to put it another way, while 33% of the homeless population suffers from mental illness, nearly 100% of the homeless population can’t afford housing. 100% is a much bigger number than 33%. Which is why mental health, while a factor in homelessness, cannot possibly or statistically be a lead factor."
Love this line of reasoning. E.g. "while xyz% of lung cancer patients are smokers, 100pct of them have cancer. 100pct is a larger number than xyz, which is why smoking, while a factor in lung cancer, cannot possibly or statistically be a lead factor."
I know what author is trying to say (and may even agree on the substance, particularly the bidirectional thesis that causality flows other way) but this phrasing is beyond awkward.
Also my main concern isnt whether drugs or mental issues cause homelessness or reverse, u suspect as author does that good proportion is latter. But that doesnt mean that by providing housing the mental issues and drug problems just melt away - much more likely to see wiring and sinks ripped out of walls in short order to raise cash for drugs for instance.
We actually know what happens in places that provide adequate affordable housing, because there are quite a few like AL, MS, WV, etc. And we don't see issues like housing being damaged to buy drugs at a significant level. What we *do* see is a better situation for the vast majority of homeless, *and* for the housed who have fewer nuisances to deal with.
Ok happy to be convinced. Am going to go try to find some links on these places later, but if you have any at the ready would be great to get them here as well.
hmm so finally got around to do the googling i said I would do. found a bunch of articles on these 3 states you mention above like
https://www.thecentersquare.com/west_virginia/west-virginia-sees-significant-decline-in-chronic-homelessness/article_cc73522e-8174-11ed-9e0a-fb5d5f315e0b.html
https://mountainstatespotlight.org/2021/10/13/west-virginia-had-a-plan-to-end-homelessness-gov-jim-justice-hasnt-made-it-a-priority/
https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2022/02/18/mississippi-organizations-address-homelessness-through-multi-step-approach/6802404001/
https://www.theclintoncourier.net/2022/04/28/mississippi-initiatives-to-address-homelessness/
https://www.uab.edu/news/research/item/7800-uab-physician-retools-the-case-for-housing-first-to-end-homelessness
wasn't really able to locate anything that specifically addresses what I am concerned about - that yes there is a proportion of relatively high functional homeless that doesn't suffer from acute mental health issues or addition, that could be rehoused and maybe moved successfully/hopefully permanently out of the homeless category, but that this wouldn't necessarily be a good solution to help the rest. Now i wasn't able to google articles about horror stories of homeless people ransacking the new places they were rehoused into, so am going to take that as a weak signal that maybe my fears are unfounded (weak because I can see how journalists would be reluctant to report such stories + unclear to me how many such hard cases are getting opportunity currently to be housed in non-supervised settings like shelters)
We don't have a way to magically teleport all the malignant tumors out of somebody's body, or prevent metastasis with zoning laws, so the fact that the vast majority of this month's cancer was caused by growth or persistence of last month's cancer isn't all that useful for treatment plans.
Legislation has a much easier time shifting around who owns exactly what land and how much they need to pay for it, since the underlying abstract concepts of land ownership and fiat currency were created almost entirely by legislation in the first place.
legislation is actually just about the hardest thing in as democracy, which is why both trump and biden administrations have tried to to accomplish so many of their goals through executive fiat.
Based on my experiences I think there may be a slight problem with how the above analysis looks at homelessness. It is similar to the problem with how people look at incarceration. If you look at the incident or individual level you see a ton of drug arrests or survey homeless individuals and find that they as a group their issues are caused by reasons other than drugs/mental health.
However, both those groups move through their respective systems quickly (arrests for drug users general little or no jail time and individuals who homelessness is due to financial or other non-mental health issues stay homeless a short time). Their respective impacts on the systems are minimal.
What drives incarceration are long-term incarceration for violent crime (here is a quick article:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/30/15591700/mass-incarceration-john-pfaff-locked-in). This is due to the longer sentences people receive for violent crimes. In the case of homeless individuals' it is a group who are called "service resistant" (i.e., difficult to provide services to, primarily due to, you guessed it, substance abuse and/or mental health) that drives most of the population. As the post points out they are a relatively small portion of all homeless but have a huge impact because they stay unhoused for long periods.
Here is mental experiment that illustrates this. Assume you survey 10 people who are unhoused. Nine are no service resistant and can be housed, on average, in 30 days. If one service resistant subject is unhoused for a year, their total nights unhoused exceeds the other nine combined. This is what happens in the incarceration analysis. Drug arrests dwarf other arrest in total numbers but in terms of actual jail beds, they do not drive a substantial portion of total prisoners (when you see a large portion of prisoners being held for drug crimes it is because you are looking at federal Bureau of Prison data, not data on all prisoners).
Finally, the service resistant individuals tend to gravitate to areas such as the west coast, New York, etc. where there are lots of services available to unhoused homeless individuals. This is anecdotal based on working with those populations however, so take it is just my opinion.
I think the problem with both the mass incarceration arguments and the homelessness argument from this post is that it offers hope in that it makes the problem look more manageable (just stop arresting people for drugs was the mass incarceration argument, and it is not accurate). In terms of h homelessness, most systems already do a good job of housing individuals open to and capable of taking advantage of them. This group is already a sort of revolving door, they go into and out of homelessness irregularly and their issues are solvable with money. Long-term, service resistant homelessness is a much tougher nut to crack, makes for a politically worse argument (i.e., many, possibly most, are substance abusers, often criminally involved and much less sympathetic to the lay person), and often have issues that leads to them being evicted or otherwise removed from housing when the are housed.
This is an excellent comment, and I think gets to the real issue much better than the article. The point is that we are combining two groups, the shorter term group that can’t afford housing but is looking for and receptive to help, and the criminal, substance abusing, mentally disturbed group. The latter group is the visible group that people are concerned about. These are the ones living in tents under the bridges, pooping in the street, yelling at pedestrians and getting in knife fights.
I believe the latter group (the visible minority) goes to areas where they are allowed to go, preferably with warmer weather. It is well known that police allow these indigents to sleep and stay in some places, and not others. They are definitely harassed in better neighborhoods (Del Mar and La Jolla for example) and are permitted in Ocean and Mission Beach. They are harassed in Tierrasanta and Rancho Bernardo, but allowed to have their way in Escondido and The Gaslamp.
The key to actually addressing the problem is to build shelters for the former group, and to have a zero tolerance policy for the latter. Arrest the criminals and druggies. Find mental homes for the crazies. As a last resort, make the latter group go to those liberal cities which want them.
Pretending this is about housing affordability, or that there is anything we can do about affordability in expensive coastal cities is just kicking the can down the road. Let’s get real.
Having reasonable zoning instead of ridiculously restrictive policies would help a lot of affordability, and cheaper housing would reduce the amount of “short term” (a huge portion of those that recently became homeless are at risk of staying that way in the long term) homelessness
I agree with that. It would likely free up resources to work on the more intractable issues.
While this would help, I am unsure if it is a primary solution for the larger issue. Again, this is my opinion and likely influenced by my firsthand experiences working with a small subset of unhoused individuals.
The issue, as I see it, is that there is really not a single "homeless" population. After the Great Recession there were considerably more homeless persons who were very open to services. As the economy improved the balance shifted (from my perspective in the Pacific NW), with service resistant persons becoming the norm. These are very different groups and probably require different solutions. Also, as pointed out by Swami, it is the service resistant population that generally causes issues for communities.
This should not be particularly surprising as we see the same concentrations of high-utilizers in ER visit costs, our justice system, crisis mental health (in fact often these are the same people being high utiliers across a range of systems). It is a power law type proposition where a small percentage of individuals utilize an inordinate amount of resources. It is important to remember this because the "average" unhouse individual could be helped (so I am not saying to not help the unhoused).
We just need to remember that helping the "average" unhoused person will probably be only a small part of the solution to addressing the housing issues seen in places like Portland, Seattle, SF, NY etc. That will require a different approach because the "average" unhoused person is not the causing the problems.
I think our unwillingness to acknowledge this is probably hurting our ability to work on the problem.
Lot of stuff works by a power-law distribution, where the tiny percentage with extreme values are causing all the noteworthy effects. Targeting those specifically often seems tempting, but hardly ever actually works, because the underlying dynamics creating that distribution will just raise up new ones. When there's a cloud of flammable gas, do you try to isolate the fastest-moving molecules?
Well said
I don't see how mixing the chronic homeless with the temporary homeless together as one cohort is useful. Of course the person sleeping in their car because they got evicted from their apartment is going to benefit from cheap and plentiful housing; it hardly needs to be said. Where is the evidence that all the chronic homeless need is a cheap home?
How much of the chronicity of someone's homelessness is fixed before homelessness even happens, and how much of it develops from being homeless?
If it's mostly fixed before homelessness even happens, so that people are either in group A (low propensity for chronicity) or group B (high propensity) even before becoming homeless, and mostly stay that way, no matter how long they're actually homeless, so that, say, a group-A person homeless for six months is still more likely to return to stable housing than a group-B person homeless for only one month, then getting the temporarily-homeless housed faster won't much reduce the chronic homeless population.
But if prolonging temporary homelessness changes people to become more like the chronically homeless, reducing how long the temporarily homeless are homeless will also reduce the number of chronic homeless. Carr's piece seems to argue that some significant portion of chronic homeless only got that way because of habits they wouldn't have developed had they returned to stable housing sooner.
If the cause of homelessness is rents that are too high, then why does the solution have to be building more housing in San Francisco and New York (two of the most expensive places to build on the entire planet)?
Why isn’t the solution to relocate homeless people from SF and NY to Detroit, where as you say, housing is cheap and plentiful?
If you have, say, $100 million to devote towards mitigating homelessness, which approach would help the most people?
Places with cheap housing tend to be that way because of poorer local economic conditions (though there are exceptions). Also, removing people from their support systems can make it harder to stabilize their situations.
Lastly, a significant minority of the homeless have the same reasons to stay as anyone else -- jobs, kids in school, family and friends nearby.
All true. But there are people who live entirely on Government support. Housing, food, basic income. Everything. None of them should be housed in an expensive location.
There are also people who can get back on their feet, but will never be able to earn enough to live in San Francisco. Sure, ask about the support network and whether or not it is irreplaceable. But for many in this group, costs will be minimized by having them live elsewhere.
Ordinary, housed people who work full time jobs leave their home towns and support networks all the time for better opportunities. I did. The idea that it should be considered beyond the pale for homeless people to move somewhere else for housing is absurd.
> Places with cheap housing tend to be that way because of poorer local economic conditions (though there are exceptions).
Sure, San Francisco has great economic conditions in the sense that if you're a software engineer you'll make more money there than somewhere else.
But it doesn't have good economic conditions for someone who is impoverished and genuinely interested in getting back onto the right track. Nor does New York City. The right place to be for someone like that is a place with minimum-wage jobs and housing that's affordable on minimum wage.
I think a big part of this is that you don’t need government spending to get more housing built in the expensive cities, only change regulations for something more reasonable and let the market do its job (obviously there are people who would still be unable to afford housing even after that but it would be easier to provide support for them with cheaper housing than right now and with a lower amount of homelessness due to cheaper housing the spending used to provide support would be divided among a lower amount of people)
This is a well-explained article on the causes of homelessness. However, this article does not do a good job in examining how homelessness contributes to the erosion of quality of life in progressive cities with large homeless populations.
True, mental health problems may not be the cause of homelessness, but there is a big difference to a citizen in a large city when the homeless person camped outside your house is a mentally-sane person and when they have severe schizophrenia and scream all night. The same reasoning applies to heavy drug users as well (especially those that use meth).
Yes, building vastly more homes would almost certainly eliminate homelessness as a large-scale problem. But that would take years even if we removed all housing constraints immediately and right now(!), I live in a city where people in near-permanent states of psychosis wander around screaming endlessly and there is nothing citizens can do. Likewise, I live in a city where homeless people can camp immediately outside the door to my apartment on public property and smoke meth and the police will do nothing if called.
So yes, the author is correct. But he is wrong to treat concerns about mental health and drug addiction among homeless populations so flippantly.
Without minimizing the frustrations of what you describe, Mr. Kudlow, I didn't read Mr. Carr as being flippant about these issues. I think he did get mildly snarky about those who see them as the principal drivers of homelessness.
Mr. Carr's points are directed toward the question of how we can minimize homelessness long term. And you're right, it will take many years (so we should get started asap!). Your comment is about responding to the effects of homelessness right now. The solutions (if there are any) will be different and would probably focus on building targeted services. (And these can be in tension. The quickest way to keep addicts from shooting up near your apartment might be to offer free drugs at neighborhood clinics, but that may not be the optimal way to reduce the number of addicts or homeless.)
If people are mentally ill and others are drug users (I am sure there is an overlapping Venn Diagram in this case, than the proportion is certainly larger than just 34-36%. These are people who need help, not just housing-- they need treatment. They are sick. They need some kind of residential treatment that can stabilize their respective conditions and a pathway to independence (housed independence) which would probably include intermediate housing and life skills training in group homes for example. Just putting them in a hotel room, boarding house or similar type housing is only going to degrade the quality of life for everyone else there.
Of course, cheerio; you're right. Housing alone does not solve addiction and mental illness. There has been a huge unfilled social services need in mental health for over forty years, since deinstitutionalization was not paired with community clinic infrastructure, as was originally intended, and addiction problems are far greater now as well, due primarily to the explosion of opioids.
Building low-cost/subsidized housing stock housing doesn't solve unemployment for healthy non-addicts either, but it does end their homelessness.
As I understand it, there is a debate between "housing first" advocates, who emphasize providing independent housing, and those (I'm thinking of people like Michael Shellenberger) who emphasize the need for expanded supervised shelters. I think it's clear that since housing stock is currently so low, we need to pursue both tracks. (Sometimes it seems to me the housing-first advocates dig in too hard on one track, but I'm sure that if there were a surge in affordable housing construction that would moderate too.)
But Mr. Carr's point is simple: the root cause of homelessness per se is the lack of homes in places where there are potential jobs and services available. As affordable/subsidized housing reduces homelessness, addressing the issues of addiction and illness should gradually become more feasible.
Great post. Regarding progressive policies - many of the policies which create a scarcity of housing in CA (my home state) are progressive. So, while lots of public monetary benefit doesn't necessarily increase homelessness, I think a serious argument could be made that progressive policy with respect to development, and particularly the cost to develop, land in CA does exacerbate the homeless problem.
I think there’s a key detail here, though: Those policies were seen as progressive AT THE TIME, but may no longer be, or may have later proven, to not achieve progressive goals.
Which tells us something important about progressivism: Progress is an overarching goal, not any one policy.
Mmm. Disagree.
I agree with the great first Socialist, Progressive, Liberal President, Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln said: "The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities."
Lincoln the Liberal:
Gave away free land
Started free colleges
Started the Progressive income tax
Established the IRS Commissioner.
Created the 1st non Constitutional Cabinet Department, Department of Agriculture.
Crated the National currency.
And did those other things.
That was a TOTAL non sequitur.
Be safe on your journeys.
It perhaps tells us something about those who call themselves "progressives"; that they should find a humbler name for their movement.
I saw it was just land and housing scarcity from the operation of the market. What policies that aren't from the market exacerbate homelessness?
Zoning, primarily, but lots of things restrict the amount of housing that can be built in a particular area: parking requirements, height restrictions, setback rules.
Lots of government regulations that prevent housing from being built. Carr says that San Francisco and Seattle have expensive housing because they are peninsulas. But Seattle built more high rise apartments in the last few years and now rents are falling. San Francisco has zoning and regulations that prevent housing. Over 40% of its small area is restricted to single family homes. And even where it’s not, building is restricted by environmental (like a small shadow falling on a public school playground stopping a laundromat from being turned into a 5 story apartment building).
https://sfstandard.com/housing-development/how-san-francisco-makes-it-insanely-hard-to-build-housing/
I'll look later at your links. I wonder how much the obviously necessary Earthquake codes affect all of that.
The short answer is that Japan has very strict earthquake codes and reasonably affordable housing, in spite of a very high population density, basically by having reasonable zoning and construction laws. We know it can be done because it *is* done.
I like your answer!! Agree.
Ponders my Liberal policys fkr translation of your excellent point:
National Healthcare! Save 10% GDP annually.
Significant gun control = Significant lower gun Homicides and gun Suicides.
Ponders...
I agree with all this, but housing policy is one of the few issues that cuts across current political divides. Given that the rightists tend to be more tribal than the leftists, I prefer to downplay my views on those issues when talking about housing problems and homelessness.
> basically by having reasonable zoning and construction laws
Also a declining population, which obviously helps. Anywhere with a declining population is probably going to have affordable housing, because there's less demand for houses than there was last year.
Making it exceedingly difficult to evict a non paying tenant has resulted in landlords being unwilling to rent to those with poor credit without substantial deposits in NE cities. It’s a policy that rewards true grifters at the expense of those living paycheck to paycheck but who actually have a paycheck.
Yes I’ve heard that renting an apartment these days is like taking out a bank loan. And for their first apartment, young people have to get their parents to co-sign (assume contingent liability) or no apartment. It was not so 50 years ago.
Hello Howard. To me it's more like buying a house using a credit card with a variable rate mortgage (end of fixed rate) where "variable" is an annual adjustment of at least 7% plus COLA (here in Portland, Oregon) resulting in even greater profits for the banks, big rips in the fabric of our communities, and lots more homeless individuals and families. In many of our neighborhoods renters now outnumber home (condo) owners with high rates of rent burdened folks across many of the largest neighborhoods, especially those in the Central City.
“Everything you know is wrong” titles manage to be not just smug and condescending but hackneyed as well.
A better title might be "If housing were free, everyone would have a free house."
Curious why more people aren't relocating to places with affordable housing instead of becoming homeless?
No relocation services. No money to move. Life long community members.
Also might simply not have good data on non-local options, and be reluctant to take risks.
Thank you. I feel like I'm losing my mind talking about homelessness with people in California. Another claim I've heard many many times is that other states are bussing homeless people here (typically diabolical red states of course). People would literally prefer to come up with a silly conspiracy than admit that a 1 bedroom apartment costing $2000-$3000 might be the problem.
But they do bus the homeless to the west coast where they often pay you to be homeless
is there a source on this?
https://youtu.be/RGaWD2GMh8Y
I think this is a great post. Thank you!
I want to add a modification thaty does not challenge the basic argument, but does affect one component. I live in a state with a very low homelessness rate (and, statewide, low rents . . . but also low wages). My town is a progressive enclave in this conservative state. The city's policies are relatively supportive of the homeless (we have two apartment buildings constructed on a Housing First model), and we have a range of non-profits that expand the range of shelters and services available.
The result has been an undeniable in-migration from elsewhere in the state. Since housing here is costly compared to elsewhere in the state (which is a national pattern with the urban/liberal, rural/conservative divide), these arrivals have less chance of finding affordable housing than they did before they came, although they have better chances of finding shelter and services, and it does appear (impressionistically) that a high percentage of those folks arrive with psychiatric and addiction problems. So on this level, local conservatives here are not wrong when they attribute the origins of our *local* homelessness problem to "progressive" policies.
(A related issue is that family and individual homelessness seem to be significantly different phenomena. A high proportion of our local-resident homeless problem concerns families, and there the problems seem to combine both shortages of affordable housing and a host of social issues pertaining to family dysfunctionality.)
So I think that while Mr. Carr's analysis is persuasive from a fifty-thousand foot perspective--and I'm convinced it points to the key element of a national approach: prioritizing fast and widespread housing construction in high rent counties--when you examine the issue as we live it now, the uneven distributions and clustered patterns of homelessness will alter the salience of many of these points.
I've been waiting since June 2022 for a permit to build an 8 by 12 foot basic deck in my own back yard. I have resubmitted plans repeatedly, secured a variance (with all the neighbors chiming in and agreeing to the plan), and hired a retired person from the office to help push it through. I haven't been able to sell my house, which I need to do to move closer to family since I'm retired. Nine months calling and waiting for a stupid permit when you're retired is a long time. I can't imagine the hoops you'd have to jump through for anything larger. If you want to know why there is a housing crisis, here's a bureaucratic nightmare in much smaller scale. (This is Prince George's County, Maryland)
A related cause of homelessness seems to be regulations on what type of housing is legal. It used to be more common for people to be able to rent a small room in a home or a building. But zoning regulations have reduced that practice in many cities. As laws & regulations have increased requirements for minimum housing standards, more people have been pushed into tents. So those lucky enough to afford the minimum legally allowed housing may be better off, but there are going to be people pushed into the street by those regs. Removing or reducing those regs would increase the available supply.