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Comment by bildung | Hacker News Reader

> 1) How many homeless people are interested in a productive life, with the work/sobriety expectations (and the housing/benefits) that implies?

Almost all, as becomes evident if you compare the drastically different homelessness rates in other countries.

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Other countries use nonvoluntary methods for dealing with their addicts or mentally ill and have substantial treatment programs and public asylums. That's the big issue with a lot of these homeless populations here. Case workers reach out, offer care, offer shelter, the person out of their mind with a necrotic leg from their intravenous drug habit says no, and in a few months they die on the street. Maybe they luck out and get a 72 hour hold and are able to actually get the medication they need in that span, find some clarity, and decide to take up these offers of help, but most just end up back where they started. We gutted the public institutions we used to have for these issues, now we are dealing with decades of a failure to treat public mental health and addiction.

> Other countries use nonvoluntary methods for dealing with their addicts or mentally ill and have substantial treatment programs and public asylums.

What other countries do you mean? In northern Europe, you can't nonvoluntarily do anything to anyone that isn't imminently a danger to themselves or others. Everyone gets help that needs it, no excuses, and we have virtually no homeless people at all.

Portugal, if I’m not mistaken, requires mandatory drug treatment to avoid criminal prosecution for drug possession.

It's complicated, so that could be the case for some specific situations (or maybe not? I don't really know) but in general drug use is decriminalized (for possession of less than a ten day supply of drugs) in Portugal. You can even get a waiver for use if addicted and clean substitutes. They have persuasion therapy and treatment that is covered by healthcare. Although one can be summoned to a dissuasion committee periodically, they can't mandate compulsory treatment.

My (admittedly limited) understanding is that its sort of an escalating series of interventions, run by a panel of social workers and medical professionals. The penalties seem to ratchet up as a person’s addiction becomes more and more problematic or impactful on the community, which makes a lot of sense to me.

In my home state, Oregon, we voted to decriminalize all “personal use” amounts of all drugs back in 2020. However, the folks who crafted the ballot measure left out a lot of the “stick” parts that have made Portugal’s efforts more successful. That has not worked well. At a time when meth use was already skyrocketing, it has enabled dealers to proliferate rapidly. They simply have to make sure they only carry a personal use amount on them at any given time. I’d really like to see us implement some of the more persuasive elements of Portugal’s model to curb some of the downsides we’re now dealing with.

I'm not sure such comparisons control very well for climate and cultural factors.

Cultural factors like ethics that entail helping people and educating everyone that anyone could end up in a vulnerable situation and then dedicating resources to make sure everyone has a safety net in case they lose their job, have a mental illness, addiction or something else unexpected?

Then just look at the distribution in the USA: Among the states with most homelessness per capita are: District of Columbia, New York, Oregon, Washington State, Alaska. Yes, also Californa, but California has most of everything, including housed people.

Aside from D.C. and New York, these are all states within the ninth circuit court’s jurisdiction, and therefore are bound to the Martin v. Boise ruling, which allows public camping if there is not adequate shelter space available. If one part of the country allows that while the rest doesn’t, you’d expect that the homeless population will migrate over time to the more permissive area, which seems to be borne out in the growth of the homeless population on the West Coast since the ruling went into effect. Of course, we also mint plenty of new homeless ourselves with our astronomical housing costs, but I see a lot of people with out-of-state plates on the RVs they live in here in Oregon.

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