The Oakland homeless problem is beyond belief
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So many people also try to lay the blame at the feet of the victims here, but drug abuse, mental health problems, etc. are not the cause of homelessness, but rather symptoms of a broader societal pathology of which homelessness is just another symptom.
As long as things keep going the way they're going, where wealth and power are increasingly concentrating in fewer and fewer hands, we're just going to see more and more homelessness, especially with the financialization of housing that's current ongoing at a disturbing and accelerating rate.
Make cheaper houses.
Other areas of the country mass-produces mobile homes, trailer parks, and other low-income options. Sure, you now have "ghettos", but a ghetto is preferable to homelessness.
Target $50,000 homes or cheaper, and build lots of them. Yes, $50k. Maybe $20k. These people can't afford too much. Build them close enough to areas where the homeless can find jobs, and enough public transit options to support them so that they can do useful work as well.
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"Ghettos" are unavoidable, and much preferred over homelessness. The next step is how to improve the lives of people in Ghettos (ex: the low-education, high-crime, poor justice), but you must start with shelter before you can make progress.
The former doesn't have to be endemic, and not the default option for the latter.
Evidence? I'd be very interested to see the research that supports your assertion that mental health/ substance abuse are not significant primary causal factors to homelessness, but rather merely coincident parallel "symptoms".
Its not like crazed schizophrenics are inhuman or whatever. And a home won't solve their mental problems. But getting them off the streets (by finding cheap enough housing for them to afford) solves a lot of other issues.
They still have stress, both physical and mental. And that stress could be making it harder for them to deal with their mental issues.
Depending on the state of their delusion, it might be possible for them to hold a job as well. Maybe you need some social-workers checking in on them depending on how bad the mental illness is, but even schizophrenics are still able to make meaningful contributions to society in the right environment (ex: John Forbes Nash Jr.).
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The goal isn't to solve mental diseases, but to build environments where people inflicted with those mental diseases can still be of net-benefit to society.
We all can agree that a __HOMELESS__ crazed schizophrinic is worse than a crazed schizophrinic, right? Solving the homeless problem is a step in the right direction, even if the delusions are unsolvable.
And again: plenty of schizophrinics are high-functioning enough to check into the doctor, mental care, social workers, etc. etc. They can act independently, hold jobs and benefit society. That's probably one of the worst diseases to have but even then its not a hopeless situation.
Actually, no. Some crazed schizophrenics simply are unable to live in a stable environment without being coerced, precisely because their affliction effects their ability to think and behave in a manner conducive to maintaining their own health and safety. And that's just one end of an entire spectrum of distorted thinking. At the opposite end of that spectrum is... nobody, because nobody is perfectly rational.
This is why we have a horrendous problem now, because too many people approach the issues by imagining themselves in these situations, imposing their own desires and fears. But that's not empathy; that's about as selfish as you can get. Empathy is about imagining yourself as another person, not imagining oneself simply physically swapping circumstances.
Have you ever met a schizophrinic before? Its not like they're off the loony bin / completely off their rocker, its actually pretty similar to QAnon-style conspiracy theorists. They have some delusions and have difficulty accepting which facts are real or not. But that's not enough of a reason to prevent them from holding a stable job or house.
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Have you studied John Forbes Nash Jr.? A celebrated mathematician, the one who discovered "Nash Equalibrium"? He's literally diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and never suffered from homelessness.
Its not like "bam, I'm mentally unstable, lol I don't want my house anymore". That's the stuff of crappy Hollywood stories, and has no basis in reality. In most cases, any person, be they crazy / delusional / schizo / mentally sick or normal, will want a warm place to sleep and the rain out of their clothes.
They'll need various amounts of care. Maybe a few drugs is sufficient to hold off their worst symptoms. Maybe socialization / keeping up with friends is what's needed. Hard to say exactly, I'm not a psychologist. But from what I've seen and experienced, mental illness is not an excuse for homelessness. Not at all.
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Homeless people, the ones I meet and interact with, are people who don't have enough money for a home. They've been kicked out of their apartment and don't know what to do.
Maybe they're crazy, maybe they're schizo as well. But even if they are, that doesn't change the fundamental issue (ie: their lack of money, their inability to afford a home right now).
Yes. And as a child I experienced homelessness on multiple occasions, though for all my mother's failings (alcoholism, poor choices in relationships) we never had to sleep rough. And in those types of social circles you also tend to meet all kinds of people, including people who regularly experienced homelessness (some occasionally by choice, if you call choosing alcohol or drugs over shelter a choice).
> Have you ever met a schizophrinic before?
Yes. Many times. Homeless and otherwise. And on several occasions as an adult I've endeavored to get to know them, if we crossed paths regularly. And also I've lived with adults who struggled with bipolar disorder. Indeed, one of the periods of homelessness was when my step father, lost in the bowels of severe depression, overdosed and killed himself. Not long afterward, I came home from school to the scene of the sheriff helping to toss all our belongings onto the curb.
One thing you learn growing up in circumstances that I did (and also something every decent economist would be quick to tell you) is that people say one thing but do another. (This is true of everybody, but even more so with people suffering from mental disorders.) Empathy to me means learning how to listen to people by watching what they actually do, not merely what they say. It was a skill I had to learn early on in order to make sense of my world. Learning how to "decode" adults kept me out of alot of trouble, yet also prevented me from becoming a resentful and angry person, something that happens to some people who grew up the way I did. We all struggle, some of us more than others; and specifically we struggle with competing and conflicting desires. But a just world doesn't require giving people a free pass to engage in anti-social behavior simply because they struggle and suffer. That's the sort of logic only the privileged could fashion.
No god or philosopher ever promised that figuring out how to thread the needle of treating people compassionately and humanely while maintaining a healthy social order would be easy or quick. We can't wait to "fix" social inequity or cure mental illness simply because we're too squeamish to recognize the truth of the human condition: that agency and rationality are largely fictitious, at least most of the time. Few people choose to be homeless in the normal meaning of the word. But the flip side to that coin is that exiting such circumstances (and the circumstances that led there) isn't a simple choice either. The choices that matter, good and bad, are made at moments often far removed from their consequences. For this reason, all people need to be incentivized (some more than others) to make the healthier choices. (For people who grew up in healthy homes and under secure financial conditions, these incentives are quietly inculcated as preferences.) Call it paternalism or condescension, but it's true all the same. Our society's obsession with individualism is at the root of many of our social pathologies. The very thing that induces economic inequality (individualism) is the same thing that makes us too squeamish to coerce people to obey the most basic and (for all but the most ideological) sane social norms. In both cases we simply throw our hands up because we're too wedded to the notion of individualism and "freedom".
That's far in excess of what an average person can be able to afford, let alone someone who is struggling with mental illness.
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That's why I'm saying the first step here is to make $50,000-ish housing units as a first step. It doesn't matter if they're low-end high-density condos or trailer parks, you need something cheap to solve the problem of homelessness.
The lack of money + the expensive houses cause homelessness directly. The issue of mental health is a diversion. Mental health complicates things but its certainly not the end-all / be-all of this situation. Its not even the most important issue.
Oakland's problem is fundamentally the the number of housing units available. If you don't have enough homes at low enough prices, homelessness will come around. You don't need to be mentally sick to become unable to live in a $749,000 home.
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This is a city completely devoid of low-income housing units (ie: trailer parks). Is it really that big of a surprise that people can't afford a home to degrees far greater than other cities?
I've seen autistic people, schizophrinic people, and bipolar individuals hold their own homes and be productive members of society. Mental health is no "excuse" for becoming homeless. I've also seen perfectly rational, 100% healthy people lose their homes and become homeless.
Couple of questions for you, since you seem to be expert on refractory homelessness:
- How do you propose to prevent severely mentally ill and drug addicted people from destroying the $50,000 homes they're allowed to live in free of charge?
- Are you aware of the strict screening and eligibility requirements that homeless applicants undergo to qualify for existing housing-first programs? Why do you suppose things are done this way? Are you familiar with the cost of maintaining the housing in these programs, even with the strict screening in place? What solutions do you propose for many homeless folks who don't pass these screenings? Or for the many others who do pass initially, but relapse into the addictions, illnesses, and crimes that brought them here to begin with, and bring those problems into the communities you've put them in?
- Exactly how do we go about building your $50,000 dwellings near any big city in California, let alone the bay area? Detailed steps, please. Keep in mind that your super affordable housing must actually be in these cities, enough to provide even remotely affordable intensive mental health and addiction treatment services and high frequency wellness and maintenance checkups that these folks will require, often indefinitely. So... where will the land come from? What's your budget for that land, and for the necessary improvements like grading, sewer, water, and electric? What is your budget for condemning or buying out existing housing in the most expensive cities in the country?
But we (San Francisco, Oakland, etc) can't build ourselves out of the homeless problem. Our problems and their causes are multifaceted. In 2004 Mayor Newsom committed San Francisco to that very solution with a 10-year plan, and by 2014 it had acquired or built a long-term residence for every chronically homeless person in 2004. Approximately 3,000 units for 3,000 people. See https://sfmayor.org/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Documents... Chronic homelessness was near a nadir. However, over the next several years homelessness exploded even though in terms of economic inhospitableness nothing had appreciably changed since 2014.
As a child we moved all over the place, town to town, state to state, chasing better jobs and cheaper living, with varying degrees of success. Poor people, even with empty pockets, are resourceful and somehow manage to get around. Some are better at it than others. This phenomenon is especially stark in accounts of genocide, where some people are seemingly unable to fathom relocating even when they have the economic and physical means and despite knowing their death is imminent. But the operative word is some; some can't, but some can. (Neither the poor nor even the homeless are a homogenous group, and much is lost in our--including my own--reductive aggregations.) It would be patently inhumane and unreasonable to pick any homeless person on the street and demand that they move away. On the other hand, policies that assume as a general matter that the poor or homeless can't, won't, or shouldn't relocate in search of better opportunities or conditions are sorely misguided, not to mention doomed to failure when adhered to at such a local level.
Moreover, from a purely accounting perspective, neither San Francisco nor Oakland have the resources to mitigate all the economic pressures for housing. For definitions of "affordable" bandied about by many on the far left, if you crunch the numbers (e.g. $500k per unit, which is somewhat conservative) San Francisco would need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build enough subsidized housing, and that's if the situation remained static. That's not remotely realistic even though the City of San Francisco already enjoys the highest revenue per capita of any major American city. To think Oakland, a far less wealthy city, could merely build its way out of the current problem using public funds and without displacing anybody is even less realistic, to say the least.
Now we have a multifaceted problem for sure. The people who own homes don't want their homes losing value. We need to build new homes without destroying the value of the older homes.
_THAT_ is the problem. A neighborhood that currently is filled with $700k to $2mm homes attracts a certain clientele. Filling it up with a trailer park is going to be rejected by the local boards / NIMBYism.
For good measure. I personally wouldn't want my $1mm investment to go down the drain to fix the housing issue.
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But that doesn't change the fundamental problem at play here. The price of current homes is too high, and that's largely because the bay area doesn't have enough homes. Either now, nor being built.
> To think Oakland, a far less wealthy city, could merely build its way out of the current problem using public funds and without displacing anybody is even less realistic, to say the least.
A trailer park is cheap as hell. The issue isn't about building it. Its about the NIMBYism revolving around home prices, and how that kind of addition would lower the value of properties.
I'm not demonizing NIMBYism. I understand it. But you gotta understand that political issue as well to see how it affects the greater region.
So you keep saying. Care to put some numbers to that? Try ballparking the per-unit cost of land, improvements, and construction for what is essentially single-family development in and around the bay area. Then let us know who's going to pay for it.
> But that doesn't change the fundamental problem at play here. The price of current homes is too high
Literally not a single person here would disagree with that. You're not saying anything new or revelatory. You think you have some kind of nuanced perspective, but you're just repeating what everyone else has said here for years; runaway housing inflation, nimbyism, etc. Yes, true, very good.
I don't think anyone who believes the solution to homelessness involves building "cheap as hell" trailer parks in the most expensive areas of the country can have thought about this too deeply.
$90,000 for the lot. Place maybe 2 or 3 trailer-homes onto the property + a driveway to access the trailer-homes. Maybe $300k for 3 family units.
The issue isn't the price of land or the price of trailer-homes ($20,000 per trailer home). Its the NIMBYism, the neighbors who will run you out of the neighborhood for bringing down the value of their homes.
> Most researchers agree that the connection between homelessness and mental illness is a complicated, two-way relationship. An individual’s mental illness may lead to cognitive and behavioral problems that make it difficult to earn a stable income or to carry out daily activities in ways that encourage stable housing. Several studies have shown, however, that individuals with mental illnesses often find themselves homeless primarily as the result of poverty and a lack of low-income housing.
That was a summary article that lists some sources at the bottom.
Aside from the research, it makes intuitive sense to me as well. Even high severity mental illness is not exclusive or close to exclusive to homeless populations. For every mental illness you find in a homeless person, you can usually find a non-homeless person who has managed it with social support and/or medication. It doesn't make sense to portray homelessness as a causal outcome of mental illness that won't be affected by social & economic policy.
This is impossible. Scarcity is not a solved problem, but on top of that, some people choose to be homeless. That their choice seems miserable and irrational doesn't make it less of a choice — people choose all sorts of unpleasant things.
Example: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/rescuing-jessica-s...
(If addiction in particular didn't involve a component of choice, nobody would be able to choose to escape, with or without help, and thankfully some people do.)
Pay people to get sterilized. Right now our current welfare system encourages homeless women to have children - since they are immediately granted public housing.
Offering homeless men $5,000 and women $10,000 for vasectomies and tube tying will save a fortune in welfare costs and end the cycle of poverty.
This would have been unheard of in 2019.
You DO NOT under any circumstances enforce invoulontary medical procedures on a living human being. EVER!!!! No exceptions. What the hell are we becoming?
Well, in fairness, paying people to do it is hardly involuntary.
Many people voluntarily seek out birth control. Its difficult for homeless people to manage that long-term. Vasagel is also a solution for homeless men. Long-term implants can be used for women.
There is some evidence that homelessness & poverty increases the likelihood that the next generation is homeless/poor but that would be a secondary factor. The moral & political cost of a forced sterilization program is indescribably immense in the West and would need to promise similarly immense outcomes which are nowhere to be seen.
Eliminate minimum wage and most worker protections. Make lawsuits more difficult. Eliminate all non private handouts. Remove most restrictions on housing density. Lower tax rates.
Basically be Hong Kong back before China took over.
Only the most severe cases will end up on street.
Everyone else will have some level of income and housing will be cheap.
Private charity can handle the most extreme cases.
And here it is.
r > g in the flesh - the other side of "the magic of compounding".
What could help them is psychological / psychiatric treatment, rehabilitation from addictions, and offering some better prospects in life than to get wasted every day. This is not a (purely) money distribution problem.
The two are not compatible, though.
This is very much reflected in American investor owned media (all media, pretty much).
This is, realistically, why Americans perceive the cause and effect of homelessness and poor mental health to be reversed.
The reality is seen in Finland where homelessness was completely solved just by adopting a "house people first" policy.
This policy is at the same time going to keep a lid on house prices, rental income and REITS in your portfolio. Hence why it's politically impossible in America and why we strangely keep hearing from Very Smart Talking Heads on TV that 200% rent increases actually have very little to do with those homeless camps.
Providing no-strings-attached housing in the United States appears to do little but get rain off people's heads. That is not really solving the problem — having lived near some of these projects, the street people continue being street people (substance abuse, crime, etc.) but now they can go inside when it rains or the SF Sheriffs show up to recover fugitives. They largely do not progress after getting the keys to the SRO room. That does not strike me as a 'win'.
That's supposed to be expensive? That's pathetic. It'll provide temporary accomodation for a handful of people at most.
I understand the political imperative to declare it a failure though. House prices uber alles.
San Francisco spends over $100,000 per homeless individual, per year. It is ridiculous that I kept seeing the same faces doing the same things for years, and of course their population has grown and continues to grow. Throwing money at the problem doesn't work in the United States. The continued advocacy for these programs seems to be rooted in either progressive wishful thinking or simple graft (there's a lot of money changing hands).
That said, I imagine there would be some significant differences simply due to the weather. Also, the metrics for "success" sometimes seem questionable. Example: percentage of residents still in the same residence a year later. Aren't we trying to help them progress out of the lot they're in and towards returning to a productive member of society? Stagnating in a room just means they're dying slower, not becoming better.
What I've seen firsthand is 'street people' moving from a tent or the like into an SRO, but continuing with their addictions, criminal behavior (often to sustain said addictions), etc. I've even seen people whom I know have a room in an SRO on 6th street (SF) produce bodily waste in an alley because they didn't feel like going back inside. I would think a better metric would be the percentage who move from a housing-first program into transitional housing, or rehab, or find employment, or some other indicia we're doing something other than giving them a roof and calling it a day.
AFAIK this statistic is misleading because it takes all the dollars spent fighting homelessness, and divides it by the amount of homeless on the streets. That's fine if you're talking about outreach programs or whatever, but if you also include programs that are actively keeping people off the streets (eg. housing vouchers), then you're undercounting the denominator.
The society is broken then. When are people going to reconcile this?
Sure there are people who can’t cope and can’t function, but we regularly pay people far less than it costs to live, and that is the leading cause of homelessness. And even the people with fragile mental health or substance addiction are far more likely to overcome those issues if they have housing stability.(see the housing first initiative in Utah for evidence)
What’s the answer I hear you asking? Build. More. Housing. Housing prices in the Bay Area go up 15% a year. More people move here than we build housing by a factor of 3. Pop quiz from Econ 101. What happens when demand grows at 3x the rate supply does? Since we’re not stinkin commies we probably don’t want to say people aren’t allowed to move here, so the supply side of the equation is all we have to work with.
Many cities have figured this out. Pick the most successful one and copy it. Take a look at Vienna for starters. I leave that research as a task for the reader (it’ll be fun trust me)
Without drastic intervention on the housing supply side the problem will continue to get worse as we continue to squeeze the most vulnerable people out the bottom of the housing market.
Agreed, it's a much deeper issue in modern society.
But treatments like those you mention are not a complete solution. They're a sticking plaster on a wet wound.
Society will need to change at it's core and the issues show worse in places where the biggest changes are needed.
And the future of “the US” is actually your projected future for a fairly tiny geographic region of densely urban US, something the other 95+% of Americans look at with a combination of bemusement and amazement. It’s been a few decades since those dense urban areas have been considered any sort of default desired social or cultural target for most Americans or American culture as a whole. It was different 70 years ago…
Let me repeat that: I had to navigate the sidewalk by stepping over the bodies of human beings scattered on the ground to get to work.
Part of the reason why homelessness is so visible in places like Oakland because the governing body in cali cities tend to decriminalize homelessness. I've also known homeless in east coast go down to the southern states during the winter... only to come back up north during the summer.
We also need to consider the fact that homelessness is multi-facted. There are folks who are employed but still gets classified as homeless due to high CoL.
That's what Jesus would do. The evangelicals seem to skip reading the full New Testament, as they arrest and harass homeless for being homeless.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-10-18-me-622-st...
https://www.sidmartinbio.org/how-were-the-okies-treated-when...
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/ca-bumblockade/
Does the Pacific Coast want to reinstitute “bum blockades”?
Past Pacific Coast strategies for managing the unwanted included offering a reward for scalps of the unwanted, like the State of California had implemented for First Nations peoples in the 1850s…
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2008/8/14/567667/-
The Pacific Coast States in the US era have made some really bad missteps in addressing problems like this over the years. May just be a case of taking the “good” (weather) with the “bad” US citizens (that just aren’t as socially or economically desirable). The homeless/van life are living a lifestyle that, for hundreds of years prior to the Anglos/RR, was perfectly acceptable in that/your part of the country. Not an easy problem to address.
In the past, these types of surveys are filled with methodology errors.
A Seattle based survey I see regurgitated often simply asked where their LAST place of residence before becoming homeless was, and it included stays in shelters as residence... So essentially anyone who had been there more than a few months was counted.
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that doesn't seem to refute the parent comment at all.
This is a logical conclusion, but one that isn't compatible with one of the fundamental tenants of US culture: liberty. You could offer a free house to a homeless person in the Rust Belt, and even pay them to live there, but would they want that? We will not force the homeless from where they want to be.
As well, such a solution would end up raising the ire of homeowners, who see costal homeless as strictly Not Their Problem. Especially costal homeless who are Black and Latino.
I have wondered if cities couldn't require that surface parking lots reserve a space or two for an RV or tiny house, and the residents could work as watchmen in exchange for living there.
1: https://komonews.com/news/local/tacoma-launches-program-to-p...