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So you’re saying any attempt by a politician to go and talk to homeless people in person - not to get to the root of the cause, but just to listen to them and observe - should be avoided as it’s just a publicity stunt?

And what do you mean “ignore the problem”? I directly quoted his conclusion which included “we should do more to house them”. Can you point to a conclusion of his where he actively sought to ignore the problem?

I’m struggling to wrap my head around your rationale. If the situation were different - let’s say a lack of childcare options - would you also tell politicians not to talk directly to parents looking for childcare? Only talk to advocacy organizations because such a “stunt” doesn’t get to the “deep seated social issues at hand”?

And what do you mean “waste a week”? Since when is having leaders directly engage people a problem? What angle are you coming at this from? I’m trying to understand your motivations when you’re actively rejecting efforts to find solutions.

I believe he is trying to say that 1) drawing conclusions from the one-time observations of a single individual is unlikely to be accurately representative of the actual situation, and is at great risk of all sorts of selection, recall, and confirmation biases. 2) in that context, ignoring all the other managerial responsibilities of a mayoral position so you can engage in a relatively non-scientific attempt at information gathering when you have people you can consult who are experts on the topic and have spent years studying and collecting data, is quite rightly a poor use of time.

All of those biases are also applicable to experts. We hope they are less biased, but they can never be bias free and there are certainly cases where experts have been egregiously biased, often is very subtle ways, that have led policy grievously astray. Like when the USDA pushed the country away from fats and toward processed sugar

I think you two might be talking past each other here. There's nothing wrong with a politician (i.e. an elected leader) getting first hand experience with an issue. Many leaders do this all the time and get depressingly little press for it--and others do it purely for a PR win unmindful of the cynicism they're generating. I think this mayor was sincere in his intent, and also I think it's a good habit to assume positive intent (to be super corporate about it).

What I think people are taking issue with is the Mayor's seeming dismissal of some homeless as irredeemable, and his failure to acknowledge that homelessness is more than an issue of mental illness, substance abuse, and personal responsibility. That plays into the common stereotype of unhomed people, and as many pointed out, that makes the problem worse because it justifies doing little to solve the problem.

So while I believe the Mayor's intent was good, I also think he was misguided and a little arrogant. I'd be pretty peeved if my non-technical boss did a coding boot camp and came back all "huh I did that camp and I was right, your job isn't hard at all!"

It's also worth saying you don't need to go urban camping for a week to figure out how to solve homelessness. It's probably more effective to just go to endhomelessness.org.

Can you quote the exact statement by the mayor that you feel is unfair and/or unhelpful?

Sure but, I feel like you're gonna try and deeply litigate it so, I'm skeptical it'll be productive:

"What isn’t working is spending more money on it without changing behaviors. People are never going to [move] forward with their lives. You don’t want to be in a situation with public policy where you’re enabling really bad, destructive behavior."

It might sound kind of anodyne, but it's basically what leaders say when they're playing the personal responsibility card.

Personal responsibility is good though right? Not that a lack is the cause or having more is a cure for every homeless person, but if those who didn’t currently take person responsibility changed and did - would that be a bad thing?

I guess it depends on exactly how you interpret his statement, but the core idea that money alone isn’t going to fix the problem seems reasonable.

I mean, if someone is out on the street due to addiction, they won’t recover without personal responsibility. If someone is on the street due to untreated mental illness, then yeah, personal responsibility likely won’t help.

I though his statement was relatively even handed.

Sure, but it's so insufficient that to even bring it up is a red flag. It's like if we were all getting together to try and solve climate change and someone said "I'm super religious, I spent the last week in nature speaking with God, and it's clear to me that while there are other things we can and should do, this will never work without everyone individually praying every day." We would collectively be like "huh, convenient that the thing you're already super invested in seems to be critical to our efforts here, despite being completely unbacked by evidence...."

It's simply not the case that people will start making better decisions to the point that homelessness diminishes to background noise. It's a non-solution. We have to question the perspective of a leader who keeps pushing clear non-solutions.

The end of the road of the personal responsibility argument is "'good' people shouldn't waste their resources on irresponsible people". But homelessness isn't the result of an outbreak of personal irresponsibility (is anything?), so typically when leaders start talking about it, something else is up.

> Sure, but it's so insufficient that to even bring it up is a red flag.

This is the crux of it. Your position disagrees with mine, that's fine, but please don't assume that bringing up an issue based on personal experience with the problem is a "red flag." That's disingenuous and unproductive.

You then go on to strawman a bizarre tale of a religious person being overly evangelical about a deeply individual experience. Homelessness is a problem of society, and people. Yes we cannot address the individual at every point in a conversation, but that shouldn't mean we can't talk about the problems affecting individuals.

Personal experiences are valid and important, but they're almost never representative. That's why we run studies and experiments: our anecdotal experiences don't give us enough data and often lead to generalization fallacies. They also typically come along with confirmation bias, a pitfall which the Mayor here likely fell into.

For the rest of your post, I'm not saying we can't talk about problems affecting individuals? I think a lot of good can be done on the individual level: drug treatment, counseling, medical care, etc. Not sure where you're coming up with any of this.

There are policies that increase homelessness. But even if you do everything right, you won't be able to solve the problem completely in liberal societies. In some more authoritarian countries, homeless people are simply arrested, taken back to their hometowns, put in institutions or just driven out of the cities. That's one way to deal with it.

It's absolutely right to put emphasis on self agency, there's actually a very concerning trend in society that people expect the government to solve all problems and ideally even pay them for simply existing (see the antiwork movement). Should this sort of thinking gain popular support the problem is going to get much bigger than it already is.

I think your post needs a lot more research. Most Americans want to work. Most Americans want to have savings, own a home and a car, be in a relationship and have a family, etc.

Homelessness isn't the result of an outbreak of personal irresponsibility, nor is substance abuse [1] [2]. They're systemic failures. When opium overtook China in the early 19th century, it wasn't because suddenly everyone decided they'd throw caution to the wind.

It's nonsensical and leads to intense political problems (see: "Welfare Queens"). We put ordinary people into extraordinarily bad situations, and then we blame them for not being extraordinary enough to dig out.

[1]: https://stjosephinstitute.com/understanding-the-relationship...

[2]: https://borgenproject.org/addiction-poverty-connected/

Misunderstanding, that part of the comment wasn't directed at those who're already poor or homeless. I completely agree with what you say.

You characterize it as a publicity stunt which is a dismissive way to put it, and then go on to say since in your opinion it was a publicity stunt none of what he says really matters. Not sure I agree with that.

I think you are simplifying things. Try to live in a tent in a homeless camp for a week and I promise you will have more insight into all the dynamics there than any outside observer will ever have.

> For starters, can we agree that a publicity stunt like spending a week in a tent as a live action roleplay is no way to get any insight on a deep-rooted social and economic problem? Specially given the clear preexisting bias and political motivation to ignore the problem, avoid accountability, and continue doing absolutely nothing?

No, we cannot agree on this. I don't understand how this is walking the walk, and not just talking the talk. If the mayor went on to make grandoise claims about homelessness that were unreasonable, I would start to agree, but I don't see that happening here.

> But no. I this case we're only seeing a former senator turned mayor somehow arriving at the conclusion that homeless people are all drug addicts and/or suffering from mental health problems.

This is strawmanning the mayor's point. He is claiming that we are not addressing the root cause of homelessness. He's not saying "homeless people are all drug addicts." Those are your words.