Well written, but it says nothing. No real breakdown of the problem, certainly no solution. Just generic hatred for the rich and empathy for the poor. Like most people who use the word "unhoused," it's performative. If you want to help, volunteer. I have. It's heartbreaking. You realize how dehumanizing it is to try to help someone who is unstable. Mental health, addiction, and deep trauma cannot be solved with money, or shelter, or food. Real treatment is necessary. A modern asylum, crushing drug markets, and taking responsibility for those who cannot take responsibility for themselves needs to be seriously considered. We did this poorly in the past, but the current paradigm clearly is not working, and it might be time to try again. Hard problems need hard solutions, not soft words.
Right, it's an issue that requires intensive care to address mental health issues. The human resources required for this is always going to be a bottleneck. Much more so than housing shortages or funding for programs that are largely self service (if you can navigate the system, you may not be homeless for long.) Building, staffing, and funding such an institution seems like it would be extremely difficult.
SF is currently spending $100K per homeless person. I agree, it will be extremely difficult, and that the human resources may be a bottleneck. But that's enough for an average person to live in SF, go out sometimes, and pay for therapy. There must be a way to deploy those funds effectively.
$100k/year, and ya, public orgs non-profits that get the money aren’t very efficient. What is worse is that much of that money goes to chronic cases with drug addiction and mental illness, the people who are just struggling to pay rent (much cheaper than $100k/year) and wind up living in their car often get ignored until they become chronic cases that are no longer easy to help.
I'm sure it is a conflation, but it is directionally correct. We are burning money and making zero progress.
The ethical dilemma is deep. Is forcing someone into an asylum—where they can be sheltered, monitored, and treated—more ethical than giving someone the self-determination to self-destruct on the street?
I don't have the answer, I'm not Kant. But it's a question we have been unwilling to face because it is deeply unsettling. It goes against our liberal instinct.
I think the only way is to give up a bit of freedom for the person's best interested AND societies.
This never works though because once you decide to do this, it is abused. So to prevent abuse, you use law enforcement. What I mean is that we decided freedom is more important than forcing treatment. And since there are no other levers, law enforcement is left to deal with the problem.
The question is what do you do in the face of abuse of the system? Do we shut everything down and walk away and pretend it didn't happen and let's just not talk about it, like an emotionally immature six year old child that pooped in the living room? Because that doesn't make the problem go away, but that's what we did.
You set up a system to help people that could be abused, and then you set up oversight committee, external auditors, regulators, board of trustees, ombudsman, inspector general. A giant pile of bureaucrats and bureaucracy. And yes, abuses will still happen. You get it all on camera, in writing, you find the abuses of the system and you close those down. New abuses happen, you find those loopholes and close them down. The problem is there's no will to do that. The systems broken, so we just threw it out and the people that it was helping got fucked. Instead of like, hey the systems broken, lets fix it.
So instead we got people living in tents with no running water, no sewage, no electricity.
the human resources required to make it work are a bottleneck, but even if we had the resources we need to build a humane modern asylum system, there'd be a whole slew of civil liberties issues
> Mental health, addiction, and deep trauma cannot be solved with money
You use the money to pay for goods and services. Services like staff and therapists and psychologists and case workers. And yes, the occasional administrator as well. "Real treatment doesn't just happen. It's expensive, but under capitalism, you use the money to get it for the people that need it. The problem that I've seen volunteering is that money gets siphoned off, away from the people it's supposed to help, and it goes into pockets that part of the non-profit's stated mission.
Prohibition drives black markets where normal price discovery, quality control, and dispute resolution vanish, producing high prices, inconsistent purity, and violence. It does nothing to reduce demand. Low-level dealers effectively stabilize these markets through competition and supply continuity. Enforcement intensifies instability and empowers predatory actors. Mental health care and treatment work better alongside regulated supply, which reduces violence and desperation while letting users seek help outside illicit markets. Real solutions require rethinking the structures causing the crisis, not doubling down on failed approaches.
I agree with what you said; "mental health care and treatment work better alongside regulated supply."
But open-air drug markets are not regulated supply. They are a scourge. America's problem with fentanyl is unique in it's scale and it is not something that can be solved with permissive policy. It must be systematically dismantled.
I do think decriminalizing all drugs for use in clinical settings would be a healthy step forward. I don't think allowing illicit markets for the most dangerous substances helps anyone except criminals.
We’ve basically put most of our pharmacies out of business here in Washington state due to a state lawsuit against pharmacists not being more paranoid when filling opioid prescriptions (written by doctors). That sh*t is addictive and a permissive stance in illicit fent has only led to had things here.
If fentanyl were legalized, how much would you personally consume?
News flash: nobody does/does not do drugs based on legality.
The Rat Park experiment showed that rats in enriched, social environments consumed far less drugs than isolated rats, highlighting how environment strongly affects addiction.
In Defending the Undefendable, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s chapter “The Pusher” argues that drug dealers, often vilified as destructive criminals, play a complex social role by supplying a demand that already exists. He suggests that punishing them does little to stop drug use and may actually exacerbate harm by driving the trade underground, increasing prices and danger. Since demand for illegal drugs is inelastic, higher prices directly leads to increase in petty crimes like theft that are often motivated by addiction. I.e. addicts wouldn't have to steal as many catalytic converters if drugs were pennies per day instead of hundreds of dollars. And it's only expensive because it's illegal. It's kind of ironic.
Dark speculation here, but addiction may even be an evolutionary coping mechanism, providing just enough short-term reward to keep individuals alive when life feels unbearable. The alternative to addiction might be even worse given e.g. an unusually strong biological emotional response to a (possibly accurate) negative assessment of their personal reality.
I engaged in good faith, made a nuanced point, and you open with an insult? I appreciate the knowledge you bring, but I’m not exactly sure what you’re defending here. Breathe man, we’re all in this together.
I opened with a rhetorical question, not an insult. The answer is obviously "the same as I consumed before it was legalized" - presumably zero fentanyl use for you whether it's legal or illegal. I was not implying you do fentanyl lol. I was implying your decision not to do fentanyl has nothing to do with it being illegal.
99% reading this thread is not the problem. They are not taking your hypothetical offer.
But there is a small slice of the population that would take your offer. The small percent of people that would take more would have devastating effects on a community.
My point is that it's always available whether it's legal or not. It's always available. It's just a question of how much violence, impurity, and price gouging you want to create by making it illegal. That's the only lever of control available. Abuse of prescription drugs is arguably a bigger problem than illegal drugs.
I don’t understand who commissions and who reads pieces like this. Here is a person with no expertise in housing policy, no expertise in homelessness, and no expertise in tech. The only thing he’s bringing to the table is an opinion, which, as the saying goes, are like assholes. Blame inequality and tech and libertarians all you want, but it won’t do a damn thing to solve the homelessness crisis, which is fundamentally a housing supply issue. But I suppose that doesn’t lend itself to the kind of uninformed moralizing that apparently brings such delight to the hearts of lithub readers.
Okay, I disagree with a lot of views expressed in this piece, but still found it worth reading. It's well written. In particular, a lot of people here may agree with what the author wrote on housing.
Why is wealth inequality an issue for people who have mental disorders, chronic drug issues or people who just don't want to live by societal standards?
The scale of homelessness isn’t explained by individual traits. Societal factors produce and reproduce it. It’s greatest in areas of high inequality for example - a fact not explained by individual traits.
Take mental illness. A mentally ill person with more resources can get the care they need, but someone who is poor can soon find themselves on the street. And homelessness itself is quite stressful, and can produce or exacerbate mental illness as well as drive people to drug addiction.
Homeless people are just like the rest of us, with their own basic human needs, and just like everybody else are trying to navigate their world as best they can.
What do you mean by "The scale of homelessness isn’t explained by individual traits."? Are you saying it's not obvious that being high all day with no income will eventually lead to eviction from whatever housing you had?
My pet conspiracy theory is there is a fair amount of coordinated manipulation to get political posts on the HN front page. Fortunately, they are often quickly flagged to the abyss.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. Anyone who doesn’t realize at this point that online discourse is heavily engineered and manipulated is an unthinking rube.
Homelessness is NOT a housing supply issue. The left love to imagine that homeless people are just down-on-their-luck people who just missed out on a mortgage payment or a rent payment.
No. They are 98% drug addicts or mentally ill people. And the "Homeless Activists" are simply people who make their careers over spending the billions of dollars given out by the various governments to "address" the homeless crisis.
It's well known that the money that gets given out attract more homeless people. People will go back and forth between LA and SF and collect money and use it to buy drugs from drug dealers. And the fact nothing is being done to stop this is why homelessness has gotten worse despite the billions upon billions of dollars that get spent every year. Gavin Newsom admitted that California spent $24 billion on homelessness and there was no accountability, and homelessness went up. The same goes for SF with their homeless business tax that amounts to over $600 million per year.
It's insane that left-wing governments think that spending MORE money will solve the problem when in fact it is the cause of the problem. If they stop spending so much money then all the homeless activist grifters will leave and so will the "homeless" that are here only to get a payout and buy their drugs.
> No. They are 98% drug addicts or mentally ill people.
That might be true, but there are plenty of drug addicts and mentally ill people in West Virginia (#1 in per capita overdose deaths and well above CA/NY/etc in suicides) and yet West Virginia has a pretty low rate of homelessness (roughly 1/5th CA's and 1/8th NY's) so that's clearly not the explanation.
I'm sorry, who do you think the majority of homeless are? 2/3rd are people living in their car or moving from a friend apartment to another, sometimes sleeping in their school (I did that) if possible, or at their workplace (I know a cook who did that for a year). The visible homeless, sleeping in the street or in homeless camps, is the minority.
I guarantee you that 98% of homeless aren't drug addicts or mentally ill. Most of them are students from a poor family (me, for 2 years until my grandmother died and I use the inheritance to finance my last years) or working poors, who don't make enough to be eligible for rent.
But people have a mental picture of homeless, and it is people on the streets they see everyday, not families living in a van or someone couch surfing for years.
> The left love to imagine that homeless people are just down-on-their-luck people who just missed out on a mortgage payment or a rent payment.
> No. They are 98% drug addicts or mentally ill people.
Drug addicts and mentally ill people can be down-on-their luck. That somebody is mentally ill or have an addiction does not mean that society should discard them.
BTW addiction is very rarely the root cause of a wasted life. It's usually a failed coping strategy.
> It's well known that the money that gets given out attract more homeless people.
Homeless people are not infinite resource. You can solve homelessness on the country level, not only on the state level, and then it doesn't matter which state attracts more homeless people - because there's very few of them in the whole country.
> It's insane that left-wing governments think that spending MORE money will solve the problem when in fact it is the cause of the problem.
Poor countries in Eastern Europe does not have this problem. Maybe instead of pretending US is the whole world and if it can't deal with something - it's impossible to deal with it - try to listen to what people did elsewhere?
"Drug addicts and mentally ill people can be down-on-their luck. That somebody is mentally ill or have an addiction does not mean that society should discard them."
This line of thinking (IMO) is both manipulative and harmful. At some point we need to realize that we are enabling and not helping.
You really want to help both the person and the society that they are part of, you need tough decisions that will not be easy or fun.
The way to prevent addiction is to help people before they get addicted (and/or become homeless).
What caused the opioid crisis? Doctors prescribing opioids for no good reason. Why wasn't it happening in EU? Because in EU doctors are paid and controlled by the taxpayers not by the industry. And because in EU doctors have free public education so they aren't 100 000 dollars in debt when they graduate.
Ok but opioids is one way people get addicted/homeless. Another is that they get sick and don't have coverage. Again - in a sane country they get public healthcare so they don't have to default and lose everything - so they have no reason to get addicted.
How about mental sickness? Early childhood is very important. Most EU countries have 6 months or more of mandatory paid maternity leave. On top of 20+ days of paid vacations yearly and unlimited paid health leave. Mandated by the state for all employees. If you don't take them - your company gets fined. HR people force you to take the days off.
Do you see how that would prevent a lot of mental illness/addiction/homelessness?
You can go through most problems in the US, and ultimately they are caused by the insane labour laws, healthcare, or education system.
And the funniest part is - you make all these sacrifices by not having a civilized welfare state, and you still end up paying more for healthcare (yes, including the taxes) and living shorter than people in the EU. You get addictions, homelessness, crime, shorter life spans, AND you pay more :)
Agree with each of your points, but must add some counterpoints as illustration:
Land of the free, home of the brave, there are some Americans who will rebel against the requirements and constraints of their lifelong socialization. I think this is an underappreciated factor in the study of homelessness-- people fight to be free, and as the song goes, Freedom is just another word for "nothing left to lose". There is some serious freedom that does along with having only the clothes on your back and whatever is in your pockets...
I am from a "poor country in Eastern Europe". I'm not sure how you think homeless is dealt with here, but it is nothing that left-wing US liberal would find palatable I assure you.
I'm from Poland. Homelessness is not solved maybe, but it's nowhere near to the level of US.
The solution seems to be public healthcare, education, transport, safety net and cheap housing.
Addiction and mental illness are excuses. Eastern Europe has more mental ilness (generational trauma from WW2 is still alive) and alcoholism than US and yet it has less homeless people.
In early 90s my parents were earning 20 USD per month each. It was about average. There were still almost no homeless people.
It is not "solved", it is marginalized because homeless people are much less tolerated compared to, say, California. In very simple terms a homeless person getting caught shitting on someones porch in Eastern Europe gets punched in the face and kicked out. And no way homeless would be allowed to just squat some park or square with tent encampment in a major city here.
Overall, I don't see neither US nor Poland as a big outliers by looking at the stats[0], it just seems like some specific places (SF) made homeless population a highly-visible nuisance by feel-good unrealistic policies that can't possible work.
There are plenty of houses. The issue is demand; people are paying $4,000/month to live in a shithole because nobody knows what things are worth. Rich executives, H1Bs and digital nomads all flock there to displace working-class families that support the basic service economy. If you built 400 condos, 1600 more rich people move in. Supply is not the issue as far as I can see it.
We dont build high density housing. We killed off the boarding house. There's like one left in DC when there used to be dozens... They were common enough that even in the 80's you could make a tv show about it, now if you said bording house someone would look at you like you had 9 heads.
We dont have SRO's any more... In 1940 the YMCA of New York had 100k rooms for rent...
> If you built 400 condos, 1600 more rich people move in. Supply is not the issue as far as I can see it.
Do you know what the largest predictor of voting is? Home ownership. DO you know what drives home owners to the polls more than anything else? Protecting the value of their home.
The state has, and continues to sue towns for the fuckery that they have been doing to block housing development to prop up property prices. 60 percent of people who are the most likely to vote will turn up to the polls to make sure the costs do NOT go down. It is the tyranny of majority...
SO yes there are plenty of HOUSES, and not enough of everything else that we need for people to live.
Makes no sense. You can build until demand goes down. Demand is high in part because supply’s low. If there were more homes than rich people who wanted them, prices would be lower. But that doesn’t happen because of NIMBYism. I suspect you know all this but are mythologizing the situation as inescapable destiny.
Maybe you’re used to seeing half measures. Be careful with that because half measures are sometimes used as justification to throw out the whole idea of progress instead of doing it properly (“well we tried that and things were still bad so now we have to do it my way”)
I understand why building doesn't happen. OP is saying that even if you build, it's hopeless because demand is endlessly met by rich people keeping prices high.
Gibson was writing about California specifically, and the Bay Area specifically. That state and that part of it had already had, since the 1960s at least, a reputation for attracting homeless people from across the country thanks to its clement weather. He could have merely been extrapolating from that and not necessarily prophetic about any of the issues today.
Well written, but it says nothing. No real breakdown of the problem, certainly no solution. Just generic hatred for the rich and empathy for the poor. Like most people who use the word "unhoused," it's performative. If you want to help, volunteer. I have. It's heartbreaking. You realize how dehumanizing it is to try to help someone who is unstable. Mental health, addiction, and deep trauma cannot be solved with money, or shelter, or food. Real treatment is necessary. A modern asylum, crushing drug markets, and taking responsibility for those who cannot take responsibility for themselves needs to be seriously considered. We did this poorly in the past, but the current paradigm clearly is not working, and it might be time to try again. Hard problems need hard solutions, not soft words.
Right, it's an issue that requires intensive care to address mental health issues. The human resources required for this is always going to be a bottleneck. Much more so than housing shortages or funding for programs that are largely self service (if you can navigate the system, you may not be homeless for long.) Building, staffing, and funding such an institution seems like it would be extremely difficult.
SF is currently spending $100K per homeless person. I agree, it will be extremely difficult, and that the human resources may be a bottleneck. But that's enough for an average person to live in SF, go out sometimes, and pay for therapy. There must be a way to deploy those funds effectively.
$100K per homeless and yet each homeless person doesn’t receive anywhere close to $100K of services.
$100k/year, and ya, public orgs non-profits that get the money aren’t very efficient. What is worse is that much of that money goes to chronic cases with drug addiction and mental illness, the people who are just struggling to pay rent (much cheaper than $100k/year) and wind up living in their car often get ignored until they become chronic cases that are no longer easy to help.
As Buffett says “Show me an incentive and I’ll show you an outcome.”
I’m not one to think in conspiracies. But here is a clear, structural issue. The reward to NGOs should be granted upon reintegration, not upon crises.
I’ve heard that this is an over simplification and conflates a bunch of factors.
The big question I have is how do you help people who refuse to be helped? That’s an ethical dilemma not necessarily a $ question.
I'm sure it is a conflation, but it is directionally correct. We are burning money and making zero progress.
The ethical dilemma is deep. Is forcing someone into an asylum—where they can be sheltered, monitored, and treated—more ethical than giving someone the self-determination to self-destruct on the street?
I don't have the answer, I'm not Kant. But it's a question we have been unwilling to face because it is deeply unsettling. It goes against our liberal instinct.
I think the only way is to give up a bit of freedom for the person's best interested AND societies.
This never works though because once you decide to do this, it is abused. So to prevent abuse, you use law enforcement. What I mean is that we decided freedom is more important than forcing treatment. And since there are no other levers, law enforcement is left to deal with the problem.
The question is what do you do in the face of abuse of the system? Do we shut everything down and walk away and pretend it didn't happen and let's just not talk about it, like an emotionally immature six year old child that pooped in the living room? Because that doesn't make the problem go away, but that's what we did.
You set up a system to help people that could be abused, and then you set up oversight committee, external auditors, regulators, board of trustees, ombudsman, inspector general. A giant pile of bureaucrats and bureaucracy. And yes, abuses will still happen. You get it all on camera, in writing, you find the abuses of the system and you close those down. New abuses happen, you find those loopholes and close them down. The problem is there's no will to do that. The systems broken, so we just threw it out and the people that it was helping got fucked. Instead of like, hey the systems broken, lets fix it.
So instead we got people living in tents with no running water, no sewage, no electricity.
the human resources required to make it work are a bottleneck, but even if we had the resources we need to build a humane modern asylum system, there'd be a whole slew of civil liberties issues
> No real breakdown of the problem, certainly no solution.
The article appears to be an excerpt from a 300 page book.
Big enough to keep someone warm.
> Mental health, addiction, and deep trauma cannot be solved with money
You use the money to pay for goods and services. Services like staff and therapists and psychologists and case workers. And yes, the occasional administrator as well. "Real treatment doesn't just happen. It's expensive, but under capitalism, you use the money to get it for the people that need it. The problem that I've seen volunteering is that money gets siphoned off, away from the people it's supposed to help, and it goes into pockets that part of the non-profit's stated mission.
Prohibition drives black markets where normal price discovery, quality control, and dispute resolution vanish, producing high prices, inconsistent purity, and violence. It does nothing to reduce demand. Low-level dealers effectively stabilize these markets through competition and supply continuity. Enforcement intensifies instability and empowers predatory actors. Mental health care and treatment work better alongside regulated supply, which reduces violence and desperation while letting users seek help outside illicit markets. Real solutions require rethinking the structures causing the crisis, not doubling down on failed approaches.
I agree with what you said; "mental health care and treatment work better alongside regulated supply."
But open-air drug markets are not regulated supply. They are a scourge. America's problem with fentanyl is unique in it's scale and it is not something that can be solved with permissive policy. It must be systematically dismantled.
I do think decriminalizing all drugs for use in clinical settings would be a healthy step forward. I don't think allowing illicit markets for the most dangerous substances helps anyone except criminals.
We’ve basically put most of our pharmacies out of business here in Washington state due to a state lawsuit against pharmacists not being more paranoid when filling opioid prescriptions (written by doctors). That sh*t is addictive and a permissive stance in illicit fent has only led to had things here.
If fentanyl were legalized, how much would you personally consume?
News flash: nobody does/does not do drugs based on legality.
The Rat Park experiment showed that rats in enriched, social environments consumed far less drugs than isolated rats, highlighting how environment strongly affects addiction.
In Defending the Undefendable, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s chapter “The Pusher” argues that drug dealers, often vilified as destructive criminals, play a complex social role by supplying a demand that already exists. He suggests that punishing them does little to stop drug use and may actually exacerbate harm by driving the trade underground, increasing prices and danger. Since demand for illegal drugs is inelastic, higher prices directly leads to increase in petty crimes like theft that are often motivated by addiction. I.e. addicts wouldn't have to steal as many catalytic converters if drugs were pennies per day instead of hundreds of dollars. And it's only expensive because it's illegal. It's kind of ironic.
Dark speculation here, but addiction may even be an evolutionary coping mechanism, providing just enough short-term reward to keep individuals alive when life feels unbearable. The alternative to addiction might be even worse given e.g. an unusually strong biological emotional response to a (possibly accurate) negative assessment of their personal reality.
I engaged in good faith, made a nuanced point, and you open with an insult? I appreciate the knowledge you bring, but I’m not exactly sure what you’re defending here. Breathe man, we’re all in this together.
I opened with a rhetorical question, not an insult. The answer is obviously "the same as I consumed before it was legalized" - presumably zero fentanyl use for you whether it's legal or illegal. I was not implying you do fentanyl lol. I was implying your decision not to do fentanyl has nothing to do with it being illegal.
It's still a poor question IMO.
99% reading this thread is not the problem. They are not taking your hypothetical offer.
But there is a small slice of the population that would take your offer. The small percent of people that would take more would have devastating effects on a community.
My point is that it's always available whether it's legal or not. It's always available. It's just a question of how much violence, impurity, and price gouging you want to create by making it illegal. That's the only lever of control available. Abuse of prescription drugs is arguably a bigger problem than illegal drugs.
I see, I appreciate the clarification.
I don’t understand who commissions and who reads pieces like this. Here is a person with no expertise in housing policy, no expertise in homelessness, and no expertise in tech. The only thing he’s bringing to the table is an opinion, which, as the saying goes, are like assholes. Blame inequality and tech and libertarians all you want, but it won’t do a damn thing to solve the homelessness crisis, which is fundamentally a housing supply issue. But I suppose that doesn’t lend itself to the kind of uninformed moralizing that apparently brings such delight to the hearts of lithub readers.
Okay, I disagree with a lot of views expressed in this piece, but still found it worth reading. It's well written. In particular, a lot of people here may agree with what the author wrote on housing.
Well it's a fairly entertaining read as someone with no current ambitions of solving any of these crises.
More housing supply doesn’t house people who have no people to pay for those houses. It’s a wealth inequality issue we just don’t want to face.
Why is wealth inequality an issue for people who have mental disorders, chronic drug issues or people who just don't want to live by societal standards?
The scale of homelessness isn’t explained by individual traits. Societal factors produce and reproduce it. It’s greatest in areas of high inequality for example - a fact not explained by individual traits.
Take mental illness. A mentally ill person with more resources can get the care they need, but someone who is poor can soon find themselves on the street. And homelessness itself is quite stressful, and can produce or exacerbate mental illness as well as drive people to drug addiction.
Homeless people are just like the rest of us, with their own basic human needs, and just like everybody else are trying to navigate their world as best they can.
What do you mean by "The scale of homelessness isn’t explained by individual traits."? Are you saying it's not obvious that being high all day with no income will eventually lead to eviction from whatever housing you had?
Does an article need to supply all this expertise or can it not just be descriptive?
Also, why does it get upvotes so quickly?
My pet conspiracy theory is there is a fair amount of coordinated manipulation to get political posts on the HN front page. Fortunately, they are often quickly flagged to the abyss.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. Anyone who doesn’t realize at this point that online discourse is heavily engineered and manipulated is an unthinking rube.
I think many like to think HN is excepted.
Homelessness is NOT a housing supply issue. The left love to imagine that homeless people are just down-on-their-luck people who just missed out on a mortgage payment or a rent payment.
No. They are 98% drug addicts or mentally ill people. And the "Homeless Activists" are simply people who make their careers over spending the billions of dollars given out by the various governments to "address" the homeless crisis.
It's well known that the money that gets given out attract more homeless people. People will go back and forth between LA and SF and collect money and use it to buy drugs from drug dealers. And the fact nothing is being done to stop this is why homelessness has gotten worse despite the billions upon billions of dollars that get spent every year. Gavin Newsom admitted that California spent $24 billion on homelessness and there was no accountability, and homelessness went up. The same goes for SF with their homeless business tax that amounts to over $600 million per year.
It's insane that left-wing governments think that spending MORE money will solve the problem when in fact it is the cause of the problem. If they stop spending so much money then all the homeless activist grifters will leave and so will the "homeless" that are here only to get a payout and buy their drugs.
> No. They are 98% drug addicts or mentally ill people.
That might be true, but there are plenty of drug addicts and mentally ill people in West Virginia (#1 in per capita overdose deaths and well above CA/NY/etc in suicides) and yet West Virginia has a pretty low rate of homelessness (roughly 1/5th CA's and 1/8th NY's) so that's clearly not the explanation.
Counterpoint, WV and NY have snow several months a year.
What is your point?
I mean I get it, people don't like sleeping in the snow, but what are you saying? Where are they going when it snows?
You're saying CA cities wouldn't have this problem if it snowed but still gave out billions and allowed open drug usage?
I'm sorry, who do you think the majority of homeless are? 2/3rd are people living in their car or moving from a friend apartment to another, sometimes sleeping in their school (I did that) if possible, or at their workplace (I know a cook who did that for a year). The visible homeless, sleeping in the street or in homeless camps, is the minority.
I guarantee you that 98% of homeless aren't drug addicts or mentally ill. Most of them are students from a poor family (me, for 2 years until my grandmother died and I use the inheritance to finance my last years) or working poors, who don't make enough to be eligible for rent.
Good for you for doing better!
But people have a mental picture of homeless, and it is people on the streets they see everyday, not families living in a van or someone couch surfing for years.
> The left love to imagine that homeless people are just down-on-their-luck people who just missed out on a mortgage payment or a rent payment.
> No. They are 98% drug addicts or mentally ill people.
Drug addicts and mentally ill people can be down-on-their luck. That somebody is mentally ill or have an addiction does not mean that society should discard them.
BTW addiction is very rarely the root cause of a wasted life. It's usually a failed coping strategy.
> It's well known that the money that gets given out attract more homeless people.
Homeless people are not infinite resource. You can solve homelessness on the country level, not only on the state level, and then it doesn't matter which state attracts more homeless people - because there's very few of them in the whole country.
> It's insane that left-wing governments think that spending MORE money will solve the problem when in fact it is the cause of the problem.
Poor countries in Eastern Europe does not have this problem. Maybe instead of pretending US is the whole world and if it can't deal with something - it's impossible to deal with it - try to listen to what people did elsewhere?
"Drug addicts and mentally ill people can be down-on-their luck. That somebody is mentally ill or have an addiction does not mean that society should discard them."
This line of thinking (IMO) is both manipulative and harmful. At some point we need to realize that we are enabling and not helping.
You really want to help both the person and the society that they are part of, you need tough decisions that will not be easy or fun.
The way to prevent addiction is to help people before they get addicted (and/or become homeless).
What caused the opioid crisis? Doctors prescribing opioids for no good reason. Why wasn't it happening in EU? Because in EU doctors are paid and controlled by the taxpayers not by the industry. And because in EU doctors have free public education so they aren't 100 000 dollars in debt when they graduate.
Ok but opioids is one way people get addicted/homeless. Another is that they get sick and don't have coverage. Again - in a sane country they get public healthcare so they don't have to default and lose everything - so they have no reason to get addicted.
How about mental sickness? Early childhood is very important. Most EU countries have 6 months or more of mandatory paid maternity leave. On top of 20+ days of paid vacations yearly and unlimited paid health leave. Mandated by the state for all employees. If you don't take them - your company gets fined. HR people force you to take the days off.
Do you see how that would prevent a lot of mental illness/addiction/homelessness?
You can go through most problems in the US, and ultimately they are caused by the insane labour laws, healthcare, or education system.
And the funniest part is - you make all these sacrifices by not having a civilized welfare state, and you still end up paying more for healthcare (yes, including the taxes) and living shorter than people in the EU. You get addictions, homelessness, crime, shorter life spans, AND you pay more :)
Agree with each of your points, but must add some counterpoints as illustration:
Land of the free, home of the brave, there are some Americans who will rebel against the requirements and constraints of their lifelong socialization. I think this is an underappreciated factor in the study of homelessness-- people fight to be free, and as the song goes, Freedom is just another word for "nothing left to lose". There is some serious freedom that does along with having only the clothes on your back and whatever is in your pockets...
I am from a "poor country in Eastern Europe". I'm not sure how you think homeless is dealt with here, but it is nothing that left-wing US liberal would find palatable I assure you.
I'm from Poland. Homelessness is not solved maybe, but it's nowhere near to the level of US.
The solution seems to be public healthcare, education, transport, safety net and cheap housing.
Addiction and mental illness are excuses. Eastern Europe has more mental ilness (generational trauma from WW2 is still alive) and alcoholism than US and yet it has less homeless people.
In early 90s my parents were earning 20 USD per month each. It was about average. There were still almost no homeless people.
It's a solved problem.
It is not "solved", it is marginalized because homeless people are much less tolerated compared to, say, California. In very simple terms a homeless person getting caught shitting on someones porch in Eastern Europe gets punched in the face and kicked out. And no way homeless would be allowed to just squat some park or square with tent encampment in a major city here.
Overall, I don't see neither US nor Poland as a big outliers by looking at the stats[0], it just seems like some specific places (SF) made homeless population a highly-visible nuisance by feel-good unrealistic policies that can't possible work.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ho...
> which is fundamentally a housing supply issue
There are plenty of houses. The issue is demand; people are paying $4,000/month to live in a shithole because nobody knows what things are worth. Rich executives, H1Bs and digital nomads all flock there to displace working-class families that support the basic service economy. If you built 400 condos, 1600 more rich people move in. Supply is not the issue as far as I can see it.
> There are plenty of houses.
Are there?
Home ownership is a functional unmovable number in the USA: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S
The problem is that we only have plenty of houses... that are under occupied.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q...
We dont build high density housing. We killed off the boarding house. There's like one left in DC when there used to be dozens... They were common enough that even in the 80's you could make a tv show about it, now if you said bording house someone would look at you like you had 9 heads.
We dont have SRO's any more... In 1940 the YMCA of New York had 100k rooms for rent...
https://ishc.com/wp-content/uploads/YMCAs2.pdf
> If you built 400 condos, 1600 more rich people move in. Supply is not the issue as far as I can see it.
Do you know what the largest predictor of voting is? Home ownership. DO you know what drives home owners to the polls more than anything else? Protecting the value of their home.
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/wealthy-bay-area-town-a...
The state has, and continues to sue towns for the fuckery that they have been doing to block housing development to prop up property prices. 60 percent of people who are the most likely to vote will turn up to the polls to make sure the costs do NOT go down. It is the tyranny of majority...
SO yes there are plenty of HOUSES, and not enough of everything else that we need for people to live.
Makes no sense. You can build until demand goes down. Demand is high in part because supply’s low. If there were more homes than rich people who wanted them, prices would be lower. But that doesn’t happen because of NIMBYism. I suspect you know all this but are mythologizing the situation as inescapable destiny.
Maybe you’re used to seeing half measures. Be careful with that because half measures are sometimes used as justification to throw out the whole idea of progress instead of doing it properly (“well we tried that and things were still bad so now we have to do it my way”)
>Makes no sense. You can build until demand goes down.
It makes a lot of sense when you realize who builds and brings capital. Debeers for an extreme example.
I understand why building doesn't happen. OP is saying that even if you build, it's hopeless because demand is endlessly met by rich people keeping prices high.
Let’s say prices go down until houses are sold at cost. Even at cost people with little money won’t be able to buy houses.
Labor costs and a big part of materials cost is driven by landlords
In san jose, I stayed at an airbnb in a home located inside a trailer park (though a nice trailer park). The owner went to stanford.
Go back to the 1990's, Gibson publishes Virtual Light that predicts that the bay bridge would be one massive homeless encampment.
It was clear 30 ish years ago to him how it would turn out.
It might be appalling but it should not be shocking.
Gibson was writing about California specifically, and the Bay Area specifically. That state and that part of it had already had, since the 1960s at least, a reputation for attracting homeless people from across the country thanks to its clement weather. He could have merely been extrapolating from that and not necessarily prophetic about any of the issues today.