10 ms·

This article is a good overview of the research about treatment-first vs housing-first approaches. The last paragraph is pretty clear on the real difficulty:

This article is a good overview of the research about treatment-first vs housing-first approaches. The last paragraph is pretty clear on the real difficulty: >The major obstacles to resolving homelessness remain ideological. It is politically hard to sell the idea that people who take drugs or are disruptive should get free housing – even when the evidence shows that is actually what works.

epicureanideal 4y ago
I guarantee I could produce a program that would be acceptable to conservatives and provide free housing. Note also that Utah, a very conservative state, solves homelessness in exactly this way. It just might be that the housing would not be provided by funneling huge amounts of tax dollars to the rentier class, and might involve constructing more houses, and therefore would be opposed by the left.
- Overtonwindow 4y ago
  Utah has done wonders for its homeless population with the housing first initiative and I think it's a model for the rest of the country.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Socialism becomes a lot more palatable to majority populations as long as minority populations are kept to a minimum. With a reasonable expectation that the recipients of help look like you, helping starts to seem more like an obligation than an imposition.
  - epicureanideal 4y ago
    The loss of the distinction between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor also caused many people who would’ve supported help to one of those to just throw their hands in the air and forget the whole thing.
    - superorganism 4y ago
      Well don't leave us hanging, how do you make the distinction?
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      That's what I'm talking about. The ability to hold back aid from the "undeserving" becomes a lot less important to people who live in relative homogeneity racially and culturally. Absolutely no surprise to me that Utah is relatively socialist internally while being on the extreme right externally.
      - chimeracoder 4y ago
        > Absolutely no surprise to me that Utah is relatively socialist internally while being on the extreme right externally. Utah is also heavily Mormon, which complicates things. Mormons have a lot of beliefs that sound fairly socialist when you describe them in practice, except that they believe the church should be the administrator of those policies. Mormons also heavily oppose abortion, which makes them a nearly single-issue voting bloc, making Utah deep red in a purely partisan sense. If somehow abortion were a non-issue - like, overnight, everyone somehow magically forgot abortion even existed - it's not hard to imagine Mormons being one of the least conservative Christian denominations. (Yes, I'm aware that other Christians don't consider the LDS to be Christians, but that's beside the point)
        yellowapple 4y ago
        Mormon conservatism encompasses a lot more than just abortion. Discrimination by gender and orientation are still doctrine, and to some extent so is discrimination by race. A lot of hardline religious sects superficially look like socialism if you only examine their in-groups and entirely ignore their out-groups. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is no exception.
    - 8note 4y ago
      It's gone for good reason. "Deserving" tends to mean "white" and "Undeserving" tends to mean "Black"
  - LarryMullins 4y ago
    Amazon is known to track low workplace diversity as a unionization risk. Diverse work forces are less likely to unionize.
  - chimeracoder 4y ago
    > Socialism becomes a lot more palatable to majority populations as long as minority populations are kept to a minimum. You're getting downvoted, but you're broadly correct. There's a lot of research showing how more homogeneously white populations are more likely to support leftist or socialist policies (policies, not affiliation) than people of the same demographics who live in more heterogeneous places.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - cudgy 4y ago
      How does that concept reconcile with Mississippi having a low homelessness rate and providing housing at a high rate for those that need it despite a non-homogenous population? The key according to this article is the cost of housing, not implied racism. https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/12/being-poor-alone-does-not-make-people-homeless-being-poor-where-housing-is-unaffordable-makes-people-homeless/ https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/12/being-poor-alone-do...
- xabotage 4y ago
  Homelessness doesn't exactly sound "solved" in Utah... https://www.sltrib.com/news/2022/12/22/this-year-least-159-homeless/ https://www.sltrib.com/news/2022/12/22/this-year-least-159-h...
  - chimeracoder 4y ago
    > Homelessness doesn't exactly sound "solved" in Utah... In ten years, incidence of chronic homelessness in Utah went from 1,932 to 178. Solving 91% of homelessness is a fantastic achievement, even if the remaining 9% needs further work.
    - vkou 4y ago
      They didn't solve it by 90%, they lied with statistics, and compared exponential-growth forecasted counts with point-in time counts. The reduction was closer to 60%, and in the past few years, they've stopped investing in the program. It's been a good thing, but without ongoing effort and investment it will regress back to the mean.
- enkid 4y ago
  I'm so confused by this comment. Are you suggesting the left is against public housing and pro landlord?
  - epicureanideal 4y ago
    Yes that’s exactly what I’m saying. More precisely, they’re for public housing only if they can capture a lot of the funds to enrich themselves and their supporters and friends. See also the book “SanFranSicko” by Michael Schellenberger.
    - lupire 4y ago
      "the left" has a lot of people in it.
      - LarryMullins 4y ago
        A lot of people? I've been informed by knowledgeable Europeans that a left wing doesn't exist in America at all!
        pksebben 4y ago
        a couple generations of ostensibly left individuals got co -opted and hoodwinked into playing team politics, because they grew up in a time when the economy worked better in general and the effects of politics in general were more subtle. Additionally, the two party system has effectively declawed the vox populi and made the barriers to change very, very large. This means that until we're out of boomers (and a significant portion of Gen xers) the isn't going to be a possibility of the sort of critical mass necessary to make the systemic changes we need to reconnect the will of the people with the behavior of the government / media / business machine. Although, if we make it that far, I'm sure the well organized entrenched upper class will have a whole new set of tricks to try. It's very difficult to properly organize against them.
    - 8note 4y ago
      To get it done in a republican area, you'd use the same trend. The people in charge only do things that benefit themselves
- superorganism 4y ago
  If you guarantee you could do this, then do it? Plenty of states the left has no actual say in governance (MS, AL, SC, FL, TX) right now- perfect time to prove it.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  > I guarantee I could produce a program that would be acceptable to conservatives and provide free housing. That's trivial; prison. (Ignoring the part where prisons now charge prisoners rent...) Finding a solution everybody can agree on is much harder than finding a solution only one side or the other can agree with.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
    > That's trivial; prison. This comment proves you don't know your adversary, which is a dangerous situation to be in.
    - lotsoweiners 4y ago
      Care to elaborate?
    - LarryMullins 4y ago
      Are you saying that jailing the homeless wouldn't be popular with conservatives? I'm quite sure it actually is (although they prefer running them out of town because that's even cheaper.)
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      I have numerous conervative family members, acquaintances, and friends. That comment proves one knows one's adversary remarkably well. Historical and contemporary conservative approaches to homelessness tend to fixate on criminalization and enforcement: more cops to break up camps, more pretenses to jail homeless persons, more opportunities for the prison-industrial complex to get its cheap labor. "Jail the beggars, jail the addicts, jail the crazies." Today, a century ago, a millennium ago... the dynamics between the rich and poor are basically unchanged; all that's changed, at most, is how the rich get selected.
unity1001 4y ago
> people who take drugs The majority of effectively homeless in the US are working people. This means people who dont own or rent any kind of housing. They crash in other people's places, frequently going homeless for periods. This includes working families. Their size is estimated in millions. The chronic homeless are people who dont even have any place to crash from time to time. People refer to these people as 'the homeless', without knowing that a lot of the above category also enters this category frequently over any given year. The chronic homeless category also includes working people due to the skyrocketing housing costs, especially in major metropolises like NY, SF etc. This segment's size is estimated in a range in between 500,000 to 3 million, depending on whose research and criteria you take. Drug addicts are also in this category, and the existing economic establishment prefers to identify the homeless with them in order to thwart any reform that could cause an increase in their taxes or disturb the real estate sector. ... So that's right - the problem is ideological. But maybe even before that, its economical - those who hoard the wealth dont want anyone to disturb them and their ever-increasing hoards of wealth with any pesky taxes...
- vkou 4y ago
  This is one big root of the problem. There are very few resources that someone falling into homelessness can lean on, that are not their friends/family. People who have that safety net can spend a few weeks or months crashing on couches until they get their housing situation sorted out. People who, for whatever reason, don't, are the ones trying to hold a job while living out of a car, and one bad encounter with the police can cause them to lose that job. And once you fall into the same strata as the chronic homeless, it is almost impossible to crawl out of it. If you want to reduce the number of chronic homeless give years from now, we need services for the temporary homeless, today. If you're getting kicked out of your apartment next Tuesday, and have nobody you can lean on, what you need is four walls and a roof so that you don't land on the street. Neither section 8 housing, nor the current shelter system supply that. Especially if you're a man, or are queer, or, or, or...
rib3ye 4y ago
My observation is that it's more politically contentious to decide where to put these free homes. We have a lot of them in the SF Bay Area (some legit, many not), and they all attract activity that "I don't love" having kids around. I try to fight my internal NIMBYism, but clutter horde and verbal assaults are where I draw the line.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Iirc the Victorian government in Australia decided to buy individual apartments in high rises to put drug addicts in resulting in the buildings becoming so unsafe that the original occupants had to sell and move somewhere else. Turning them in to radical anti public housing activists so they don’t have to move and lose a load of money again. Imagine saving up for ages to buy a nice 3 bedroom apt to move in with your family with and then a few years later your kids are being threatened by an unstable meth head in the elevator forcing you to move and lose most of your wealth in the process.
  - AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
    Yeah, the problem here is that leaving syringes on the floor, urinating in flower beds and talking shit is insufficient to arrest the person. But is sufficient to drive a lot of tenants away from the house.
AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
Because as soon as it happens, I will be first in the line with the question: okay, what should I do to get a free house? Do I need to consume drugs? Would weed do, or it has to be some heavier stuff?
kthejoker2 4y ago
As usual, the logic is backwards, tons of people who take drugs and are disruptive have housing, lack of housing make those things worse. From the New York Times article on my hometown Houston trying to end homelessness with a housing first policy: > But housing first involves a different logic: When you’re drowning, it doesn’t help if your rescuer insists you learn to swim before returning you to shore. You can address your issues once you’re on land. Or not. Either way, you join the wider population of people battling demons behind closed doors. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html?unlocked_article_code=LbEyMm3SWkJfM7kPcPygW0PB9OFmZCQFTb_ZGh5xdx-2sooKwGPObCVMLFmW9ASDQ-FsZ7ZeflMSDkHvyGgw6RKZYw5q6XdhhZgJRo_lJzpw2MeFHuu5MY3QegDgEXypFJQqQpqa163WlKbjmHfNvtS5AerePfeNZtc84tV2m9Ju4DXjU_MKTEWYoIMQ2hKCSgKBeEl6bVYVyl01WLvDP6iom77TDWadXrcoBJ03Wp9iG4VbPgYDOChquvLtTBz2OmZof_j6o8ppnj4eobgJle3WS4McZCh1nMr7gbdZmQ09UQIduNK1qs0C0cN99X7JjyE1QH7UMoy6DC2slDqsZfI&smid=share-url https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...

epicureanideal 4y ago

I guarantee I could produce a program that would be acceptable to conservatives and provide free housing. Note also that Utah, a very conservative state, solves homelessness in exactly this way. It just might be that the housing would not be provided by funneling huge amounts of tax dollars to the rentier class, and might involve constructing more houses, and therefore would be opposed by the left.

Overtonwindow 4y ago
Utah has done wonders for its homeless population with the housing first initiative and I think it's a model for the rest of the country.
pessimizer 4y ago
Socialism becomes a lot more palatable to majority populations as long as minority populations are kept to a minimum. With a reasonable expectation that the recipients of help look like you, helping starts to seem more like an obligation than an imposition.
- epicureanideal 4y ago
  The loss of the distinction between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor also caused many people who would’ve supported help to one of those to just throw their hands in the air and forget the whole thing.
  - superorganism 4y ago
    Well don't leave us hanging, how do you make the distinction?
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    That's what I'm talking about. The ability to hold back aid from the "undeserving" becomes a lot less important to people who live in relative homogeneity racially and culturally. Absolutely no surprise to me that Utah is relatively socialist internally while being on the extreme right externally.
    - chimeracoder 4y ago
      > Absolutely no surprise to me that Utah is relatively socialist internally while being on the extreme right externally. Utah is also heavily Mormon, which complicates things. Mormons have a lot of beliefs that sound fairly socialist when you describe them in practice, except that they believe the church should be the administrator of those policies. Mormons also heavily oppose abortion, which makes them a nearly single-issue voting bloc, making Utah deep red in a purely partisan sense. If somehow abortion were a non-issue - like, overnight, everyone somehow magically forgot abortion even existed - it's not hard to imagine Mormons being one of the least conservative Christian denominations. (Yes, I'm aware that other Christians don't consider the LDS to be Christians, but that's beside the point)
      - yellowapple 4y ago
        Mormon conservatism encompasses a lot more than just abortion. Discrimination by gender and orientation are still doctrine, and to some extent so is discrimination by race. A lot of hardline religious sects superficially look like socialism if you only examine their in-groups and entirely ignore their out-groups. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is no exception.
  - 8note 4y ago
    It's gone for good reason. "Deserving" tends to mean "white" and "Undeserving" tends to mean "Black"
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  Amazon is known to track low workplace diversity as a unionization risk. Diverse work forces are less likely to unionize.
- chimeracoder 4y ago
  > Socialism becomes a lot more palatable to majority populations as long as minority populations are kept to a minimum. You're getting downvoted, but you're broadly correct. There's a lot of research showing how more homogeneously white populations are more likely to support leftist or socialist policies (policies, not affiliation) than people of the same demographics who live in more heterogeneous places.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - cudgy 4y ago
    How does that concept reconcile with Mississippi having a low homelessness rate and providing housing at a high rate for those that need it despite a non-homogenous population? The key according to this article is the cost of housing, not implied racism. https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/12/being-poor-alone-does-not-make-people-homeless-being-poor-where-housing-is-unaffordable-makes-people-homeless/ https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/12/being-poor-alone-do...
xabotage 4y ago
Homelessness doesn't exactly sound "solved" in Utah... https://www.sltrib.com/news/2022/12/22/this-year-least-159-homeless/ https://www.sltrib.com/news/2022/12/22/this-year-least-159-h...
- chimeracoder 4y ago
  > Homelessness doesn't exactly sound "solved" in Utah... In ten years, incidence of chronic homelessness in Utah went from 1,932 to 178. Solving 91% of homelessness is a fantastic achievement, even if the remaining 9% needs further work.
  - vkou 4y ago
    They didn't solve it by 90%, they lied with statistics, and compared exponential-growth forecasted counts with point-in time counts. The reduction was closer to 60%, and in the past few years, they've stopped investing in the program. It's been a good thing, but without ongoing effort and investment it will regress back to the mean.
enkid 4y ago
I'm so confused by this comment. Are you suggesting the left is against public housing and pro landlord?
- epicureanideal 4y ago
  Yes that’s exactly what I’m saying. More precisely, they’re for public housing only if they can capture a lot of the funds to enrich themselves and their supporters and friends. See also the book “SanFranSicko” by Michael Schellenberger.
  - lupire 4y ago
    "the left" has a lot of people in it.
    - LarryMullins 4y ago
      A lot of people? I've been informed by knowledgeable Europeans that a left wing doesn't exist in America at all!
      - pksebben 4y ago
        a couple generations of ostensibly left individuals got co -opted and hoodwinked into playing team politics, because they grew up in a time when the economy worked better in general and the effects of politics in general were more subtle. Additionally, the two party system has effectively declawed the vox populi and made the barriers to change very, very large. This means that until we're out of boomers (and a significant portion of Gen xers) the isn't going to be a possibility of the sort of critical mass necessary to make the systemic changes we need to reconnect the will of the people with the behavior of the government / media / business machine. Although, if we make it that far, I'm sure the well organized entrenched upper class will have a whole new set of tricks to try. It's very difficult to properly organize against them.
  - 8note 4y ago
    To get it done in a republican area, you'd use the same trend. The people in charge only do things that benefit themselves
superorganism 4y ago
If you guarantee you could do this, then do it? Plenty of states the left has no actual say in governance (MS, AL, SC, FL, TX) right now- perfect time to prove it.
LarryMullins 4y ago
> I guarantee I could produce a program that would be acceptable to conservatives and provide free housing. That's trivial; prison. (Ignoring the part where prisons now charge prisoners rent...) Finding a solution everybody can agree on is much harder than finding a solution only one side or the other can agree with.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
  > That's trivial; prison. This comment proves you don't know your adversary, which is a dangerous situation to be in.
  - lotsoweiners 4y ago
    Care to elaborate?
  - LarryMullins 4y ago
    Are you saying that jailing the homeless wouldn't be popular with conservatives? I'm quite sure it actually is (although they prefer running them out of town because that's even cheaper.)
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    I have numerous conervative family members, acquaintances, and friends. That comment proves one knows one's adversary remarkably well. Historical and contemporary conservative approaches to homelessness tend to fixate on criminalization and enforcement: more cops to break up camps, more pretenses to jail homeless persons, more opportunities for the prison-industrial complex to get its cheap labor. "Jail the beggars, jail the addicts, jail the crazies." Today, a century ago, a millennium ago... the dynamics between the rich and poor are basically unchanged; all that's changed, at most, is how the rich get selected.

unity1001 4y ago

> people who take drugs The majority of effectively homeless in the US are working people. This means people who dont own or rent any kind of housing. They crash in other people's places, frequently going homeless for periods. This includes working families. Their size is estimated in millions. The chronic homeless are people who dont even have any place to crash from time to time. People refer to these people as 'the homeless', without knowing that a lot of the above category also enters this category frequently over any given year. The chronic homeless category also includes working people due to the skyrocketing housing costs, especially in major metropolises like NY, SF etc. This segment's size is estimated in a range in between 500,000 to 3 million, depending on whose research and criteria you take. Drug addicts are also in this category, and the existing economic establishment prefers to identify the homeless with them in order to thwart any reform that could cause an increase in their taxes or disturb the real estate sector. ... So that's right - the problem is ideological. But maybe even before that, its economical - those who hoard the wealth dont want anyone to disturb them and their ever-increasing hoards of wealth with any pesky taxes...

vkou 4y ago
This is one big root of the problem. There are very few resources that someone falling into homelessness can lean on, that are not their friends/family. People who have that safety net can spend a few weeks or months crashing on couches until they get their housing situation sorted out. People who, for whatever reason, don't, are the ones trying to hold a job while living out of a car, and one bad encounter with the police can cause them to lose that job. And once you fall into the same strata as the chronic homeless, it is almost impossible to crawl out of it. If you want to reduce the number of chronic homeless give years from now, we need services for the temporary homeless, today. If you're getting kicked out of your apartment next Tuesday, and have nobody you can lean on, what you need is four walls and a roof so that you don't land on the street. Neither section 8 housing, nor the current shelter system supply that. Especially if you're a man, or are queer, or, or, or...

rib3ye 4y ago

My observation is that it's more politically contentious to decide where to put these free homes. We have a lot of them in the SF Bay Area (some legit, many not), and they all attract activity that "I don't love" having kids around. I try to fight my internal NIMBYism, but clutter horde and verbal assaults are where I draw the line.

Gigachad 4y ago
Iirc the Victorian government in Australia decided to buy individual apartments in high rises to put drug addicts in resulting in the buildings becoming so unsafe that the original occupants had to sell and move somewhere else. Turning them in to radical anti public housing activists so they don’t have to move and lose a load of money again. Imagine saving up for ages to buy a nice 3 bedroom apt to move in with your family with and then a few years later your kids are being threatened by an unstable meth head in the elevator forcing you to move and lose most of your wealth in the process.
- AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
  Yeah, the problem here is that leaving syringes on the floor, urinating in flower beds and talking shit is insufficient to arrest the person. But is sufficient to drive a lot of tenants away from the house.

AlexTWithBeard 4y ago

Because as soon as it happens, I will be first in the line with the question: okay, what should I do to get a free house? Do I need to consume drugs? Would weed do, or it has to be some heavier stuff?

kthejoker2 4y ago

As usual, the logic is backwards, tons of people who take drugs and are disruptive have housing, lack of housing make those things worse. From the New York Times article on my hometown Houston trying to end homelessness with a housing first policy: > But housing first involves a different logic: When you’re drowning, it doesn’t help if your rescuer insists you learn to swim before returning you to shore. You can address your issues once you’re on land. Or not. Either way, you join the wider population of people battling demons behind closed doors. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html?unlocked_article_code=LbEyMm3SWkJfM7kPcPygW0PB9OFmZCQFTb_ZGh5xdx-2sooKwGPObCVMLFmW9ASDQ-FsZ7ZeflMSDkHvyGgw6RKZYw5q6XdhhZgJRo_lJzpw2MeFHuu5MY3QegDgEXypFJQqQpqa163WlKbjmHfNvtS5AerePfeNZtc84tV2m9Ju4DXjU_MKTEWYoIMQ2hKCSgKBeEl6bVYVyl01WLvDP6iom77TDWadXrcoBJ03Wp9iG4VbPgYDOChquvLtTBz2OmZof_j6o8ppnj4eobgJle3WS4McZCh1nMr7gbdZmQ09UQIduNK1qs0C0cN99X7JjyE1QH7UMoy6DC2slDqsZfI&smid=share-url https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...