4 ms·

Homeless epidemics are really just drug addiction epidemics, a problem that we have historically been unable to solve at scale, and one of the things that irks

by xwdv 4y ago

Homeless epidemics are really just drug addiction epidemics, a problem that we have historically been unable to solve at scale, and one of the things that irks me about people who oppose these sort of relocation programs is that they don’t put forward any realistic alternative solutions to the real problem. This isn’t an inequality or poverty issue, it’s a drug issue. Failed cities like San Francisco are being completely overrun by drug addicts living in the streets, and the truth is, it is too late to do anything about it. Shipping off homeless people to other cities is the only way to clean the streets now. There is no budget big enough and no patience strong enough anymore that can solve this problem. A generation of homeless people simply has to pass away and not be replaced. This process will take decades, and will rob many people the pleasure of enjoying a city in their prime years. I do not blame the good city of Miami for wanting to just ship off the homeless to a remote island where they can be out of sight and out of mind. The city depends heavily on tourism and has an image of copious wealth to uphold.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
>Homeless epidemics are really just drug addiction epidemics + mental health
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
Careful here. Drug epidemics and homeless epidemics often overlap, maybe in the most chronically homeless, but there are plenty of homeless who aren’t amped up on drugs who you aren’t noticing (because they aren’t amped up on drugs). So because drug problems are so visible in the homeless we can see, we can conflate the two issues. > Failed cities like San Francisco are being completely overrun by drug addicts living in the streets, and the truth is, it is too late to do anything about it. If you really believe that, you should find some way to short San Francisco real estate investment. You’ll get burned badly, since you don’t have very good information, but it will be a good lesson. Homeless people have been moving into good weather west coast cities since the late 1800s, the scale going up and down over time, but the cities keep booming and busting along.
- junofan 4y ago
  > If you really believe that, you should find some way to short San Francisco real estate investment. I don’t think parent was making a comment about real estate prices. Obviously the market tolerates the issue. Some parts of SF have gotten pretty bad. I volunteered at a couple places and honestly was surprised at how little effort is going into fixing things, so I’d expect the present situation to continue.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    If San Francisco is like Seattle, significant efforts are being made, they are just completely ineffective. When you try to treat a national problem locally, adding 1000 homes for 20k homeless people just means you’ll have people in those 1000 homes but now 21k homeless people next week.
pengaru 4y ago
"a drug issue" is a healthcare issue. The US has historically and still largely does treat addicts as criminals. Socialize healthcare and treat drug addiction as a medical problem. A good chunk of those addicts are refugees of the opioid crisis caused by profit-seeking pharmaceuticals in the first place! There should be no shortage of tax dollars to allocate for these problems if there's just the will to fix it.
- refurb 4y ago
  I take it you haven't been to Canadian cities? They look the same. Turns out universal health and even free IV drugs don't solve the problem.
  - pengaru 4y ago
    The stats seem substantially better for Canadian cities vs. major US cities [0]. Not that I'm suggesting Canada is some kind of model implementation for how to utilize social healthcare in assisting homeless citizens addicted to drugs. My main point is before you have resources to even get to fail to use successfully in treating what is a social health problem, we need a damn socialized healthcare budget to even try make mistakes with. The US can't even manage to treat healthcare as something every citizen needs let alone start caring about the citizen addicts in the streets as sick people in need of medical help. [0] https://media.blogto.com/uploads/2021/10/19/1634663178-chart4.jpg?w=1400&cmd=resize&height=2500&quality=70 https://media.blogto.com/uploads/2021/10/19/1634663178-chart...
    - refurb 4y ago
      Well, I’ll put it this way. I doubt you can tell the difference between the Downtown East Vancouver and the Tenderloin in SF. I think the point is, you can lead a horse to water, but you cant make them drink. If people don’t want to stop using drugs, then they won’t. Free healthcare, free counseling, free clean drugs and a generous social safety is clearly not going to solve this problem.
      - 4y ago
dekelpilli 4y ago
> Homeless epidemics are really just drug addiction epidemics The causes of homelessness will vary from place to place, but in Victoria (Australia) health issues (which includes addiction) is only listed as the cause for 2% of homelessness [1]. Now obviously this doesn't necessarily give the whole picture - for example, DV accounts for 35%, but it's possible that the violence is exacerbated by drug use. [1] https://vincentcare.org.au/our-services/homelessness-statistics/ https://vincentcare.org.au/our-services/homelessness-statist...
ajross 4y ago
> Homeless epidemics are really The "homeless epidemic" is basically a fiction. The US homeless population tracks the broader economy a bit, but on the whole tends to be quite stable. Here are some numbers from Statista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-of-homeless-people-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-... The reason people feel like it's getting worse (beyond simple politics) is that there's been a general shift in public sentiment away from the kinds of policies in the linked article. Where we used to use law enforcement to force the homeless out of core public areas, now we generally tolerate them in most urban environments. They do, after all, have to sleep somewhere. But that creates backlash, which leads to impressions like yours about a problem ("failed cities" ... really?) that really doesn't exist. But the core point is that they were always there. You just couldn't see them.
DoctorNick 4y ago
It’s truly terrifying to see how quickly people become damn near genocidal when describing the unhoused.
newswasboring 4y ago
> Failed cities like San Francisco are being completely overrun by drug addicts living in the streets, and the truth is, it is too late to do anything about it. That's a bold assertion. Why do you think it's too late?
archhn 4y ago
There are drug addiction pipelines. Get in a car accident -> hurt back -> prescribed opiates -> get addicted -> prescription stops -> seek street alternatives -> move up the food chain, from buying pills to fentanyl -> lose everything -> end up on the street Loved one dies -> super depressed -> looking to numb the pain -> starts drinking heavily at bars -> exposed to the drug scene -> offered a bump of cocaine one day -> feels good -> start to do cocaine -> coke dealer has fentanyl to -> you try it -> on the street Get out of the military -> racked with PTSD -> suicidal -> being around consumerist Americans who know nothing of danger or the dark side of life is alienating -> feeling all alone -> same as loved one dies pipeline -> on the street in a tent draped with the American flag. There are also ones like: Irresponsible teenager -> raised in single mother household -> no good role models -> raised by T.V. -> doesn't known how to navigate the world -> ends up in a minimum wage job -> everyone there is doing drugs because their life is so bleak (I've seen this personally)-> nothing to look forward to -> most of pay goes to rent -> feel trapped and abused -> confused, doesn't know how this happened -> does drugs like his coworkers because he feels disposable -> starts fucking up on the job -> no more willingness to keep working -> on the street, begging for his fix. *Idealistic middle class college grad -> going to save the world -> faces the world -> crippling despair -> can't fix this mess -> hopeless -> give up and drop out -> ×_× drug scene to street. There are many more pipelines. It's not simply a "drug problem." There are a lot of pipelines that inevitably lead people there. Once people end up there, they are typically very hard to fix because they have been knocked out of the standard career pipeline. Who wants to hire an ex homeless person with a huge job gap? They feel hopeless, like there's not a place for them anymore in society. Once you've accepted this, you stare long into the abyss. With that comes a great deal of trauma. Making these people very unstable, unlike ordinary citizens who have never danced along the knife's edge. This gives them a bad reputation because you can give them a job and home, but they will often keep going back to their old ways. They are broken inside and a job and house won't fix what has happened to them. Source: I binge watch documentaries on this issue and read about it.
NickC25 4y ago
Miami resident here. Lots of things to call out. >This isn’t an inequality or poverty issue, it’s a drug issue. That might be true of other locales, such as LA or SF. However, Miami at its core is a haven for Latin American robber barons and money laundering - and the real estate dollars follow that. While yes, there are definitely some homeless who are on drugs (shoutout to the crack addict who spends his life walking around the city block I happen to live next to), it's mainly people who have been priced out over time. Miami is exorbitantly expensive and there is no middle-class housing to speak of (let alone lower-class housing) if you want to live anywhere near the city or the main areas of sustained economic activity (which is to say nothing of the horrible state of public transit and urban sprawl). I've been there 7 years now and I've seen a flood of high-rise "luxury" developments with $3-4k-a-month studios being built in formerly middle-to-lower-class areas, and that's to say nothing of the flurry of insanely expensive highrises that sit at like 40-50% occupancy at best, bought up by people (read: money launderers) that will never step foot in the USA, much less rent out their places. >I do not blame the good city of Miami for wanting to just ship off the homeless to a remote island where they can be out of sight and out of mind. Thing is though that Key Biscayne isn't a remote island. The park where they are building this is less than a 3 mile walk to the heart of Brickell. I've walked that exact route before and it takes no time at all. It's literally past a school, over a bridge, and you're right in Brickell. This park literally hosted Ultra Music Festival a few years ago, and is very easy to access. If you live or work in Key Biscayne, you pass this park every day. It's not remote. > The city depends heavily on tourism and has an image of copious wealth to uphold. The homeless don't really factor in here. The areas with a lot of wealth are nowhere near the main homeless areas. The tourist areas are mainly concentrated around Miami Beach, which is a city in it's own right and is not controlled by the City of Miami. The homeless areas are predominantly in the Haitian & African-American enclaves like Overtown and Little Haiti. Nobody who is in Miami for tourism goes even close to those areas.

by xwdv 4y ago

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

>Homeless epidemics are really just drug addiction epidemics + mental health

seanmcdirmid 4y ago

Careful here. Drug epidemics and homeless epidemics often overlap, maybe in the most chronically homeless, but there are plenty of homeless who aren’t amped up on drugs who you aren’t noticing (because they aren’t amped up on drugs). So because drug problems are so visible in the homeless we can see, we can conflate the two issues. > Failed cities like San Francisco are being completely overrun by drug addicts living in the streets, and the truth is, it is too late to do anything about it. If you really believe that, you should find some way to short San Francisco real estate investment. You’ll get burned badly, since you don’t have very good information, but it will be a good lesson. Homeless people have been moving into good weather west coast cities since the late 1800s, the scale going up and down over time, but the cities keep booming and busting along.

junofan 4y ago
> If you really believe that, you should find some way to short San Francisco real estate investment. I don’t think parent was making a comment about real estate prices. Obviously the market tolerates the issue. Some parts of SF have gotten pretty bad. I volunteered at a couple places and honestly was surprised at how little effort is going into fixing things, so I’d expect the present situation to continue.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  If San Francisco is like Seattle, significant efforts are being made, they are just completely ineffective. When you try to treat a national problem locally, adding 1000 homes for 20k homeless people just means you’ll have people in those 1000 homes but now 21k homeless people next week.

pengaru 4y ago

"a drug issue" is a healthcare issue. The US has historically and still largely does treat addicts as criminals. Socialize healthcare and treat drug addiction as a medical problem. A good chunk of those addicts are refugees of the opioid crisis caused by profit-seeking pharmaceuticals in the first place! There should be no shortage of tax dollars to allocate for these problems if there's just the will to fix it.

refurb 4y ago
I take it you haven't been to Canadian cities? They look the same. Turns out universal health and even free IV drugs don't solve the problem.
- pengaru 4y ago
  The stats seem substantially better for Canadian cities vs. major US cities [0]. Not that I'm suggesting Canada is some kind of model implementation for how to utilize social healthcare in assisting homeless citizens addicted to drugs. My main point is before you have resources to even get to fail to use successfully in treating what is a social health problem, we need a damn socialized healthcare budget to even try make mistakes with. The US can't even manage to treat healthcare as something every citizen needs let alone start caring about the citizen addicts in the streets as sick people in need of medical help. [0] https://media.blogto.com/uploads/2021/10/19/1634663178-chart4.jpg?w=1400&cmd=resize&height=2500&quality=70 https://media.blogto.com/uploads/2021/10/19/1634663178-chart...
  - refurb 4y ago
    Well, I’ll put it this way. I doubt you can tell the difference between the Downtown East Vancouver and the Tenderloin in SF. I think the point is, you can lead a horse to water, but you cant make them drink. If people don’t want to stop using drugs, then they won’t. Free healthcare, free counseling, free clean drugs and a generous social safety is clearly not going to solve this problem.
    - 4y ago

dekelpilli 4y ago

> Homeless epidemics are really just drug addiction epidemics The causes of homelessness will vary from place to place, but in Victoria (Australia) health issues (which includes addiction) is only listed as the cause for 2% of homelessness [1]. Now obviously this doesn't necessarily give the whole picture - for example, DV accounts for 35%, but it's possible that the violence is exacerbated by drug use. [1] https://vincentcare.org.au/our-services/homelessness-statistics/ https://vincentcare.org.au/our-services/homelessness-statist...

ajross 4y ago

> Homeless epidemics are really The "homeless epidemic" is basically a fiction. The US homeless population tracks the broader economy a bit, but on the whole tends to be quite stable. Here are some numbers from Statista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-of-homeless-people-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-... The reason people feel like it's getting worse (beyond simple politics) is that there's been a general shift in public sentiment away from the kinds of policies in the linked article. Where we used to use law enforcement to force the homeless out of core public areas, now we generally tolerate them in most urban environments. They do, after all, have to sleep somewhere. But that creates backlash, which leads to impressions like yours about a problem ("failed cities" ... really?) that really doesn't exist. But the core point is that they were always there. You just couldn't see them.

DoctorNick 4y ago

It’s truly terrifying to see how quickly people become damn near genocidal when describing the unhoused.

newswasboring 4y ago

> Failed cities like San Francisco are being completely overrun by drug addicts living in the streets, and the truth is, it is too late to do anything about it. That's a bold assertion. Why do you think it's too late?

archhn 4y ago

There are drug addiction pipelines. Get in a car accident -> hurt back -> prescribed opiates -> get addicted -> prescription stops -> seek street alternatives -> move up the food chain, from buying pills to fentanyl -> lose everything -> end up on the street Loved one dies -> super depressed -> looking to numb the pain -> starts drinking heavily at bars -> exposed to the drug scene -> offered a bump of cocaine one day -> feels good -> start to do cocaine -> coke dealer has fentanyl to -> you try it -> on the street Get out of the military -> racked with PTSD -> suicidal -> being around consumerist Americans who know nothing of danger or the dark side of life is alienating -> feeling all alone -> same as loved one dies pipeline -> on the street in a tent draped with the American flag. There are also ones like: Irresponsible teenager -> raised in single mother household -> no good role models -> raised by T.V. -> doesn't known how to navigate the world -> ends up in a minimum wage job -> everyone there is doing drugs because their life is so bleak (I've seen this personally)-> nothing to look forward to -> most of pay goes to rent -> feel trapped and abused -> confused, doesn't know how this happened -> does drugs like his coworkers because he feels disposable -> starts fucking up on the job -> no more willingness to keep working -> on the street, begging for his fix. *Idealistic middle class college grad -> going to save the world -> faces the world -> crippling despair -> can't fix this mess -> hopeless -> give up and drop out -> ×_× drug scene to street. There are many more pipelines. It's not simply a "drug problem." There are a lot of pipelines that inevitably lead people there. Once people end up there, they are typically very hard to fix because they have been knocked out of the standard career pipeline. Who wants to hire an ex homeless person with a huge job gap? They feel hopeless, like there's not a place for them anymore in society. Once you've accepted this, you stare long into the abyss. With that comes a great deal of trauma. Making these people very unstable, unlike ordinary citizens who have never danced along the knife's edge. This gives them a bad reputation because you can give them a job and home, but they will often keep going back to their old ways. They are broken inside and a job and house won't fix what has happened to them. Source: I binge watch documentaries on this issue and read about it.

NickC25 4y ago

Miami resident here. Lots of things to call out. >This isn’t an inequality or poverty issue, it’s a drug issue. That might be true of other locales, such as LA or SF. However, Miami at its core is a haven for Latin American robber barons and money laundering - and the real estate dollars follow that. While yes, there are definitely some homeless who are on drugs (shoutout to the crack addict who spends his life walking around the city block I happen to live next to), it's mainly people who have been priced out over time. Miami is exorbitantly expensive and there is no middle-class housing to speak of (let alone lower-class housing) if you want to live anywhere near the city or the main areas of sustained economic activity (which is to say nothing of the horrible state of public transit and urban sprawl). I've been there 7 years now and I've seen a flood of high-rise "luxury" developments with $3-4k-a-month studios being built in formerly middle-to-lower-class areas, and that's to say nothing of the flurry of insanely expensive highrises that sit at like 40-50% occupancy at best, bought up by people (read: money launderers) that will never step foot in the USA, much less rent out their places. >I do not blame the good city of Miami for wanting to just ship off the homeless to a remote island where they can be out of sight and out of mind. Thing is though that Key Biscayne isn't a remote island. The park where they are building this is less than a 3 mile walk to the heart of Brickell. I've walked that exact route before and it takes no time at all. It's literally past a school, over a bridge, and you're right in Brickell. This park literally hosted Ultra Music Festival a few years ago, and is very easy to access. If you live or work in Key Biscayne, you pass this park every day. It's not remote. > The city depends heavily on tourism and has an image of copious wealth to uphold. The homeless don't really factor in here. The areas with a lot of wealth are nowhere near the main homeless areas. The tourist areas are mainly concentrated around Miami Beach, which is a city in it's own right and is not controlled by the City of Miami. The homeless areas are predominantly in the Haitian & African-American enclaves like Overtown and Little Haiti. Nobody who is in Miami for tourism goes even close to those areas.