Perhaps a less authoritarian option than civil commitment could be to create this type of housing then incentivize it in various ways. The biggest one is: if y

Perhaps a less authoritarian option than civil commitment could be to create this type of housing then incentivize it in various ways. The biggest one is: if you’re going to have zones where hard drugs are de facto legalized, it should be in one of these places that are out of the way and designed to handle the externalities as well as possible rather than in the middle of cities. It would also give police a place to take people who are creating quality of life issues for residents (tents, screaming, littering, using streets as toilets, etc.). Instead of the “bus out of town” or simply moving people around in the city, they could keep bringing people back to these facilities. Perhaps not all would stay, but I imagine many would. Maybe the way to think about it is almost like a business serving customers. If homeless people don’t want to stay in this housing voluntarily, how can it be improved to change that? They have reasons for choosing the places that they do now, so if those factors can be replicated and improved upon, force might not generally be necessary.