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> The homeless issue is so complex Is it though? I'm an Australian so take my comments with a grain of salt. Seeing the US from an external viewpoint, it seems

> The homeless issue is so complex Is it though? I'm an Australian so take my comments with a grain of salt. Seeing the US from an external viewpoint, it seems the mental gymnastics that people go through in the US to basically wreck the public spaces and infrastructure is fascinating. From a purely selfish point of view being surrounded by homeless unmedicated crazy people is a bad thing, the solution is fairly obvious - cheap medical for those that can't afford it, homeless shelters for the less fortunate, build more houses so that houses are cheaper, cheap education. Looking from the other side of the world, what started out as apparent greed some years ago has now become ideology - there is no solution. There are some with the same ideology here, they are trying to create the same situation, fortunately they are not winning, though it's a continual fight. I've had the same argument with many people here - the argument seems to be dying though, which I find promising, why should I pay taxes? Well you should pay taxes for roads, you need roads? well yes. You want education for your children? well yes. Sewerage? Well yes, and so on. By enumerating the things that taxes pay for seems to make them acceptable. Do you want to be surrounded by crazy people when you go out? No, well we should pay taxes to have cheap health etc. I was at our state library yesterday, it was crazy people free, there are always a couple of people sleeping in the library, but they seem to be looked after. There's a lot of support infrastructure that seems to keep them somewhere, I don't know really, but I know if the government spending is reduced they'll reappear so taxes are paid. Is there waste in my tax money? probably, the idea that private enterprise has no waste though is farcical - I've been a corporate consultant.

DoreenMichele 7y ago
cheap medical for those that can't afford it, homeless shelters for the less fortunate, build more houses so that houses are cheaper, cheap education. I'm all for cheap medical and build more houses. I think that would go a long way towards resolving the housing issue in the US. I've had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy and I spent nearly six years homeless. I blog about it. It's routine for people to reiterate the same tired point of view that "It's all crazies and junkies and more housing won't solve it." Quoting data that increases in housing costs correlates to about 96% of the increase in homelessness and people still insist they're version of events is the one true explanation. I'm not denying there's a lot of drug use and mental health issues on the street. But both of those are actively fostered by homelessness and there are millionaire rock stars who are in and out of rehab, so it's really not accurate to pretend that addiction is done kind of root cause explanation. It's just not that simple and the mantra of "junkies and crazies" mostly gets used to act like it's an unsolvable personal issue and not a systemic issue. Our housing issues are rooted in events that occurred at the end of WW2. Most people don't see the connection between those events, the policies that grew out of them and the debacle we currently have. I've studied this issue for many years. I don't know how to get traction on solving it. I'm a woman and I was homeless for years. Sexism and classism close a lot of doors in my face while people basically sit around listening intently to well-heeled white men repeat the usual BS as to why we can't actually fix anything. Just an FYI for people tempted to jump up and tell me UBI is the solution: my personal opinion of UBI is that it's a puke worthy fuck you that intentionally and with malice aforethought shits all over the poor and actively excludes them from the halls of power. So let's just skip that part of the conversation. I'm not sympathetic.
- chadcmulligan 7y ago
  Let's say you had unlimited funds - just as a thought experiment - would you have a solution then?
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    Possibly not because so much of it is political, for lack of a better word. I would like to see housing policy changed in this country and I would like to see us solve the healthcare stuff. If I had unlimited funds, I would make a go of building SROs/microunits and Missing Middle Housing as a real estate developer. This country has torn down about a million SROs in recent decades and largely zoned out of existence the ability to build Missing Middle Housing, which used to be a common form of housing. New Urbanism was an attempt to build walkable neighborhoods. It wasn't wildly successful in bringing back historical patterns of neighborhood development and became mostly enclaves of nicer homes for upper class Americans. It faced a huge uphill battle in getting anything built at all and it was apparently common for developers and architects to take their New Urbanist neighborhood plan to the city, get it declined and then comb through the building codes and regulations and rename a bunch of stuff on their map while making little to no changes. Then take it to the city again. Rinse and repeat until they got approval of something vaguely similar to their initial vision. The new version of this is YIMBYism. What little I have seen of YIMBYism is political stuff and I am mostly not seeing them bring answers as to what kind of housing works well, what kind of financing works well, etc. They seem to just campaign for "more housing in my town" and that seems to be it, which has potential to go all kinds of bad places. If I had both money and power, I would wave my magic wand and bring back walkable neighborhoods full of Missing Middle Housing (and SROs) that even ordinary joes can afford and I would move this country to single payer healthcare. And then I would go on vacation for the rest of my life, having done enough to feel satisfied with my life.
    - chadcmulligan 7y ago
      > If I had both money and power, I would wave my magic wand and bring back walkable neighborhoods full of Missing Middle Housing (and SROs) that even ordinary joes can afford and I would move this country to single payer healthcare. And then I would go on vacation for the rest of my life, having done enough to feel satisfied with my life. Sounds like you have a plan, here they're building a huge amount of apartments, and its keeping rents low. The other long term item I'd suggest is education, if a chunk of the population is uneducated then they're easily exploitable. The thing with education when you have a large population of working poor is that its a low priority for them. You can make education as free as you want, but when people are working 20 hours a day to live then it doesn't matter. imho its a systems problem, with the underlying issue being the lower stratum of society aren't getting enough money - even if they work, its ridiculous. Its not socialism to pay people enough to live when they work, if people only have to work one job, then they can focus on things like night school if they want, looking after they're kids so they can go to school. Again with my telescopic view from across the pond it does seem engineered to keep a class of uneducated god fearing slaves.
caconym_ 7y ago
The traditional "conservative" position here seems to be that entitlements should be cut, and I guess services for the homeless fall under than umbrella. But I'm afraid that the left's focus is often less on treatment/rehabilitation/management and more on preserving the "right" of the homeless to keep doing what they're doing, i.e. making public spaces dirty, often frightening, and sometimes quite literally unsafe. Both positions seem to depend on studiously ignoring the fact that things can be better than they are right now. When I moved to the city I was a fair bit younger than I am now, and I had an idealistic view of the issue. Now, my partner and I have had enough nasty encounters with the homeless (including assault and battery) that we generally refuse to acknowledge their existence. To some folks with a social justice bent, this is an unforgivable sin against our community's most vulnerable members, but to me it's self-preservation. I would love to see my tax dollars go to programs with a proven track record of fixing these issues, or even to experimental programs that show promise. But that (seemingly, to me) more reasonable middle ground seems to have been lost in a mess of ideological bickering. A friend of mine who works in local government told me that it's the center-leaning-right cities that tend to have the most pragmatic and effective programs, and I haven't independently verified that, but I believe it.
- chadcmulligan 7y ago
  > preserving the "right" of the homeless to keep doing what they're doing Seriously? Does anyone want to live that way - there was a guy who said he liked living that way many years ago I remember, he was the local homeless guy, he'd make the papers now and then and even saw an interview with him now and then. He said he had money and just liked living that way, I'm fairly sure he was the exception. This just seems to be more "framing" to me.
  - vanniv 7y ago
    Yes. Lots of homeless people are "happy" with their drugged-out life. Shelters that require people to stop doing drugs or require even the most bare minimum amount of being willing to not act like an animal are often mostly empty -- the only services people will take are ones that let them continue to drug themselves into oblivion
darawk 7y ago
Except that in the US, the problem is not a lack of funding. In California, one of the places in the US with the worst homeless problem, there are about 150,000 homeless people[1]. Over the last two years california has spent $2.7 billion dollars. That's approximately $18,000 per homeless person. Which is literally enough to pay their rent, even in a major metropolitan city like Los Angeles. The issue isn't funding. It's how the funds are being spent. 1. https://calmatters.org/explainers/californias-homelessness-crisis-explained/ https://calmatters.org/explainers/californias-homelessness-c... 2. https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/san-diego-news/lawmakers-call-for-audit-of-californias-homeless-spending https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/san-diego-news/lawmak...
- chadcmulligan 7y ago
  Oh ok, we have a crime and misconduct commission to investigate this stuff. Currently there are three local councils in my local surrounds where the mayor is on charges or in jail and the councils are "under administration" for doing this stuff. Our federal government is fighting tooth and nail to not have one - one can only wonder why.
- dllthomas 7y ago
  > That's approximately $18,000 per homeless person. IIUC, a lot of that spending is to get (or keep) people in housing. The people thus supported aren't reflected in the homelessness figures, and redirecting that portion of money to the presently homeless would lead to these people being homeless instead. It could be that the result would still be an improvement, but that's not obvious.
  - base698 7y ago
    In a lot of cases to divert funds to private companies. There are companies setup to extract federal resources for states. However that many in many cases ends up in the general fund and not to help those in need. https://nyupress.org/9781479874729/the-poverty-industry/ https://nyupress.org/9781479874729/the-poverty-industry/
    - 7y ago
dhhdhdjshhd 7y ago
The problem is that none of those things are why California has a homeless problem. We have it because they come here from other states /because/ we offer those types of services. Most of the homeless in my area aren't even especially wretched, they're just lazy teens and druggies who would rather get handouts than rebuild themselves. What California needs is a wall against its neighboring states not those things you mentioned, California already has public health and mental health programs that we provide and don't charge for if you're poor. No amount of funding will help you if other people can just dump their problems onto you.
mortehu 7y ago
Having traveled extensively in Australia I don't think you can hold this position if you have ever been to The Northern Territory, where more than 7% of the population is homeless and 0.4% of the overall population sleep outside. If the same was true in NYC, there would be 35000 people sleeping outside, 9 times the actual number.
hoorayimhelping 7y ago
>Is it though Yes. It is, at least in America. Here, due process and trial by jury of your peers permeate almost every facet of our culture and its interpretation of law. It's why we have such a cultural aversion to rounding up homeless people and putting them in a shelter. We've tried it in the past and it was unpalatable and ineffective. We've tried getting people help but telling them they're free to go, and they usually end up going because they can't be compelled to stay. It's a very complicated problem to solve here because the bill of rights is meant to protect the 'undesirables' that a majority can easily oppress - homeless, rebels, drug users, convicts, etc.
roenxi 7y ago
> Do you want to be surrounded by crazy people when you go out? No, well we should pay taxes to have cheap health etc. This argument doesn't stand up to close inspection at all. Why am I going to be better off being forced to pay for someone else's healthcare when I already had that choice to do that and chose not to? Speaking as an Australian; I do pay my taxes, we do have cheap healthcare and I'm still walking by homeless people every day. I'm not against a government safety net to make sure everyone has access to somewhere to sleep that is out of the weather & 3 square meals a day but healthcare is a bottomless pit. There is no limit of any sort on how much we can spend on healthcare. The line has to be drawn somewhere, it has to be arbitrary because there is no other way of making the system work. It is all very well to say that you can spend more of my money on things you think are good ideas; but why am I so incapable of spending money on things I think are good ideas? The major thing stopping me from spending money on roads, education, sewerage, etc, etc is that the government is taking all the money I'd use for that and giving it to old people who haven't saved and needy cases that I frequently disagree are needy. The amount of money in my taxes that goes towards infrastructure is tiny in proportion.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

cheap medical for those that can't afford it, homeless shelters for the less fortunate, build more houses so that houses are cheaper, cheap education. I'm all for cheap medical and build more houses. I think that would go a long way towards resolving the housing issue in the US. I've had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy and I spent nearly six years homeless. I blog about it. It's routine for people to reiterate the same tired point of view that "It's all crazies and junkies and more housing won't solve it." Quoting data that increases in housing costs correlates to about 96% of the increase in homelessness and people still insist they're version of events is the one true explanation. I'm not denying there's a lot of drug use and mental health issues on the street. But both of those are actively fostered by homelessness and there are millionaire rock stars who are in and out of rehab, so it's really not accurate to pretend that addiction is done kind of root cause explanation. It's just not that simple and the mantra of "junkies and crazies" mostly gets used to act like it's an unsolvable personal issue and not a systemic issue. Our housing issues are rooted in events that occurred at the end of WW2. Most people don't see the connection between those events, the policies that grew out of them and the debacle we currently have. I've studied this issue for many years. I don't know how to get traction on solving it. I'm a woman and I was homeless for years. Sexism and classism close a lot of doors in my face while people basically sit around listening intently to well-heeled white men repeat the usual BS as to why we can't actually fix anything. Just an FYI for people tempted to jump up and tell me UBI is the solution: my personal opinion of UBI is that it's a puke worthy fuck you that intentionally and with malice aforethought shits all over the poor and actively excludes them from the halls of power. So let's just skip that part of the conversation. I'm not sympathetic.

chadcmulligan 7y ago
Let's say you had unlimited funds - just as a thought experiment - would you have a solution then?
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Possibly not because so much of it is political, for lack of a better word. I would like to see housing policy changed in this country and I would like to see us solve the healthcare stuff. If I had unlimited funds, I would make a go of building SROs/microunits and Missing Middle Housing as a real estate developer. This country has torn down about a million SROs in recent decades and largely zoned out of existence the ability to build Missing Middle Housing, which used to be a common form of housing. New Urbanism was an attempt to build walkable neighborhoods. It wasn't wildly successful in bringing back historical patterns of neighborhood development and became mostly enclaves of nicer homes for upper class Americans. It faced a huge uphill battle in getting anything built at all and it was apparently common for developers and architects to take their New Urbanist neighborhood plan to the city, get it declined and then comb through the building codes and regulations and rename a bunch of stuff on their map while making little to no changes. Then take it to the city again. Rinse and repeat until they got approval of something vaguely similar to their initial vision. The new version of this is YIMBYism. What little I have seen of YIMBYism is political stuff and I am mostly not seeing them bring answers as to what kind of housing works well, what kind of financing works well, etc. They seem to just campaign for "more housing in my town" and that seems to be it, which has potential to go all kinds of bad places. If I had both money and power, I would wave my magic wand and bring back walkable neighborhoods full of Missing Middle Housing (and SROs) that even ordinary joes can afford and I would move this country to single payer healthcare. And then I would go on vacation for the rest of my life, having done enough to feel satisfied with my life.
  - chadcmulligan 7y ago
    > If I had both money and power, I would wave my magic wand and bring back walkable neighborhoods full of Missing Middle Housing (and SROs) that even ordinary joes can afford and I would move this country to single payer healthcare. And then I would go on vacation for the rest of my life, having done enough to feel satisfied with my life. Sounds like you have a plan, here they're building a huge amount of apartments, and its keeping rents low. The other long term item I'd suggest is education, if a chunk of the population is uneducated then they're easily exploitable. The thing with education when you have a large population of working poor is that its a low priority for them. You can make education as free as you want, but when people are working 20 hours a day to live then it doesn't matter. imho its a systems problem, with the underlying issue being the lower stratum of society aren't getting enough money - even if they work, its ridiculous. Its not socialism to pay people enough to live when they work, if people only have to work one job, then they can focus on things like night school if they want, looking after they're kids so they can go to school. Again with my telescopic view from across the pond it does seem engineered to keep a class of uneducated god fearing slaves.

caconym_ 7y ago

The traditional "conservative" position here seems to be that entitlements should be cut, and I guess services for the homeless fall under than umbrella. But I'm afraid that the left's focus is often less on treatment/rehabilitation/management and more on preserving the "right" of the homeless to keep doing what they're doing, i.e. making public spaces dirty, often frightening, and sometimes quite literally unsafe. Both positions seem to depend on studiously ignoring the fact that things can be better than they are right now. When I moved to the city I was a fair bit younger than I am now, and I had an idealistic view of the issue. Now, my partner and I have had enough nasty encounters with the homeless (including assault and battery) that we generally refuse to acknowledge their existence. To some folks with a social justice bent, this is an unforgivable sin against our community's most vulnerable members, but to me it's self-preservation. I would love to see my tax dollars go to programs with a proven track record of fixing these issues, or even to experimental programs that show promise. But that (seemingly, to me) more reasonable middle ground seems to have been lost in a mess of ideological bickering. A friend of mine who works in local government told me that it's the center-leaning-right cities that tend to have the most pragmatic and effective programs, and I haven't independently verified that, but I believe it.

chadcmulligan 7y ago
> preserving the "right" of the homeless to keep doing what they're doing Seriously? Does anyone want to live that way - there was a guy who said he liked living that way many years ago I remember, he was the local homeless guy, he'd make the papers now and then and even saw an interview with him now and then. He said he had money and just liked living that way, I'm fairly sure he was the exception. This just seems to be more "framing" to me.
- vanniv 7y ago
  Yes. Lots of homeless people are "happy" with their drugged-out life. Shelters that require people to stop doing drugs or require even the most bare minimum amount of being willing to not act like an animal are often mostly empty -- the only services people will take are ones that let them continue to drug themselves into oblivion

darawk 7y ago

Except that in the US, the problem is not a lack of funding. In California, one of the places in the US with the worst homeless problem, there are about 150,000 homeless people[1]. Over the last two years california has spent $2.7 billion dollars. That's approximately $18,000 per homeless person. Which is literally enough to pay their rent, even in a major metropolitan city like Los Angeles. The issue isn't funding. It's how the funds are being spent. 1. https://calmatters.org/explainers/californias-homelessness-crisis-explained/ https://calmatters.org/explainers/californias-homelessness-c... 2. https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/san-diego-news/lawmakers-call-for-audit-of-californias-homeless-spending https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/san-diego-news/lawmak...

chadcmulligan 7y ago
Oh ok, we have a crime and misconduct commission to investigate this stuff. Currently there are three local councils in my local surrounds where the mayor is on charges or in jail and the councils are "under administration" for doing this stuff. Our federal government is fighting tooth and nail to not have one - one can only wonder why.
dllthomas 7y ago
> That's approximately $18,000 per homeless person. IIUC, a lot of that spending is to get (or keep) people in housing. The people thus supported aren't reflected in the homelessness figures, and redirecting that portion of money to the presently homeless would lead to these people being homeless instead. It could be that the result would still be an improvement, but that's not obvious.
- base698 7y ago
  In a lot of cases to divert funds to private companies. There are companies setup to extract federal resources for states. However that many in many cases ends up in the general fund and not to help those in need. https://nyupress.org/9781479874729/the-poverty-industry/ https://nyupress.org/9781479874729/the-poverty-industry/
  - 7y ago

dhhdhdjshhd 7y ago

The problem is that none of those things are why California has a homeless problem. We have it because they come here from other states /because/ we offer those types of services. Most of the homeless in my area aren't even especially wretched, they're just lazy teens and druggies who would rather get handouts than rebuild themselves. What California needs is a wall against its neighboring states not those things you mentioned, California already has public health and mental health programs that we provide and don't charge for if you're poor. No amount of funding will help you if other people can just dump their problems onto you.

mortehu 7y ago

Having traveled extensively in Australia I don't think you can hold this position if you have ever been to The Northern Territory, where more than 7% of the population is homeless and 0.4% of the overall population sleep outside. If the same was true in NYC, there would be 35000 people sleeping outside, 9 times the actual number.

hoorayimhelping 7y ago

>Is it though Yes. It is, at least in America. Here, due process and trial by jury of your peers permeate almost every facet of our culture and its interpretation of law. It's why we have such a cultural aversion to rounding up homeless people and putting them in a shelter. We've tried it in the past and it was unpalatable and ineffective. We've tried getting people help but telling them they're free to go, and they usually end up going because they can't be compelled to stay. It's a very complicated problem to solve here because the bill of rights is meant to protect the 'undesirables' that a majority can easily oppress - homeless, rebels, drug users, convicts, etc.

roenxi 7y ago

> Do you want to be surrounded by crazy people when you go out? No, well we should pay taxes to have cheap health etc. This argument doesn't stand up to close inspection at all. Why am I going to be better off being forced to pay for someone else's healthcare when I already had that choice to do that and chose not to? Speaking as an Australian; I do pay my taxes, we do have cheap healthcare and I'm still walking by homeless people every day. I'm not against a government safety net to make sure everyone has access to somewhere to sleep that is out of the weather & 3 square meals a day but healthcare is a bottomless pit. There is no limit of any sort on how much we can spend on healthcare. The line has to be drawn somewhere, it has to be arbitrary because there is no other way of making the system work. It is all very well to say that you can spend more of my money on things you think are good ideas; but why am I so incapable of spending money on things I think are good ideas? The major thing stopping me from spending money on roads, education, sewerage, etc, etc is that the government is taking all the money I'd use for that and giving it to old people who haven't saved and needy cases that I frequently disagree are needy. The amount of money in my taxes that goes towards infrastructure is tiny in proportion.