7 ms·

> There’s no easy fix for homelessness True, but that's only because there's no easy way to add housing in modern society. Homelessness is caused primarily by

> There’s no easy fix for homelessness True, but that's only because there's no easy way to add housing in modern society. Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes.

spydr 3y ago
In Seattle where I live, homeless is definitely the result of drug use
- chagen 3y ago
  "Definitely the result"? I think you might be confusing correlation with causation.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    That really isn’t true either. Homelessness doesn’t cause drug abuse, there is plenty of drug abuse among the housed, it isn’t weird that some of them eventually lose their support network. There are definitely economic homeless in Seattle, they just aren’t as visible as the fent addicts.
    - Supermancho 3y ago
      > Homelessness doesn’t cause drug abuse, Being homeless sucks. There's a number of reinforcing conditions that convert non-users into users. https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/homeless https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/homeless
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Only the visible homeless problem. There are plenty of homeless you don’t notice because they aren’t raving like a lunatic without a shirt on. We have two separate problems, but they are sadly often conflated.
apstls 3y ago
How many homes could $17B make?
- jupp0r 3y ago
  ~17000 in CA
  - chrisbrandow 3y ago
    apartments would be cheaper than 400K per.
- jonny_eh 3y ago
  We don't even need to have the government build the homes, just allowing the construction of homes would be a huge positive change.
- x0x0 3y ago
  Not very many. Even if you could build a home for $400k and it only cost $100k in maintenance / utilities / upkeep for the next 10 years, that's still only 34k homes.
  - Firmwarrior 3y ago
    You could build a lot of them for $3.7B/year though.. split among 150,000 homeless, that's $24,000 per year each 'course, it's not hard to imagine those homes ending up like the free zone in The Wire or the housing projects in Judge Dredd...
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Where are you gonna build? It's illegal to build pretty much anything in CA cities with high homelessness
hnuser847 3y ago
Nah, it’s caused by mental illness and drug addiction. Short of rounding them up and forcing them to get help, there’s actually nothing we can do to get these people off the street.
- jonny_eh 3y ago
  It's certainly an element, but that's largely washing your hands and victim blaming. There's a direct correlation between housing costs and homelessness rates. Update, here's a reference: https://endhomelessness.org/blog/new-research-quantifies-link-housing-affordability-homelessness/ https://endhomelessness.org/blog/new-research-quantifies-lin...
  - khazhoux 3y ago
    Where’s the “victim-blaming”? From the reporting I’ve seen, the vast majority of folks on Skid Row or on the street in SF are heavy addicts. And they refuse shelters because then they couldn’t use. How does more housing help them?
    - fullspectrumdev 3y ago
      Dry shelters are arguably a massive part of the problem. You fix the housing issue first, make their lives less fucking miserable, then it’s easier to get someone to accept help for their drug addiction. You can’t “cure” an addict who isn’t ready to be “helped”.
      - paisawalla 3y ago
        > Dry shelters are arguably a massive part of the problem. As someone who has housed and lived close to addicts, to put it plainly: this is a naive, academic view. Dry shelter are "a massive part of the problem"? Absolutely incorrect, and harmfully ignorant if implemented at societal scale. As someone who provided food and shelter to an addict in my own home, guaranteeing these things does nothing to increase the willingness to quit heroin. Material deprivation may cause you to seek drugs, but remedying deprivation does not lead to recovery. In fact, I honestly believe offering it unconditionally hampers it.
robomartin 3y ago
> Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes. That is absolutely not true. Not even close. Mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse are major factors. Dozens of studies show this. I've seen numbers as high as 76% having substance abuse and severe mental illness. One study from 2017 says 80% mental illness, 88% drug abuse and 59% alcohol addiction. There are studies with lower numbers. In most, if not all, of these, the government entities who publish them will typically change the definition of "homeless" to artificially reduce the numbers and make themselves look good. There are two ways to fix homelessness: You make them disappear (put them in a building, creative counting, etc.), or actually address the real root causes --which nobody is doing or even talking about. Saying the issue is lack of homes implies these people could actually pay for a place to stay. They cannot. They are sick and/or addicted to something. They likely cannot work or earn even the legally minimum wage without a massive intervention to get them back to functional status. In a free society we do not have the legal means to round-up sick people, get them cleaned-up, help them, rebuild them as necessary and then put them back in circulation. We just don't have that legal power. People do as they wish and there's very little society can really do to help them. Throwing them into a buildings merely (and conveniently) hides the real problems: Mental illness and addiction.
- AgentOrange1234 3y ago
  “Saying the issue is lack of homes implies these people could actually pay for a place to stay.” Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their ability to pay?
  - worik 3y ago
    > Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their ability to pay? Yes Priorities?
  - robomartin 3y ago
    > Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their ability to pay? That solves absolutely nothing. I refer you to the $17B we spent in CA on this problem. The fundamental issues are mental health and addiction. All you achieve is making the problem invisible so everyone can feel like they did something. When, in reality, the root causes are not addressed at all. It is critical to understand that our laws DO NOT ALLOW US to force anyone to do anything. Meaning, if a mentally ill or addicted person says "I am not going anywhere" and "I refuse treatment" we CANNOT force them. The root causes, for the most part, are mental illness and addition. We cannot be effective helping these people because --by law-- we cannot effectively arrest and force them to accept help of any kind. In a lot of cases you have addicts who are 100% out of their mind and you are trying to reason with them to accept help. Good luck. A member of my family and a couple of good friends are professionals deeply involved with the treatment side of this issue. What they tell me is exactly what I have conveyed here. If we could force people into a solid 12 to 24 month program we could eliminate most of the problem in 5 to 10 years. We can't. Because we have laws that protect citizens from being detained and incarcerated unless they commit a crime. Mental health and addiction are not crimes. In other words, that path is impossible. How, then, do they propose this be solved? Conceptually simple. Politically...well, our politicians are fucking incompetent morons. You have to clamp down hard on the illicit drugs that are destroying so many lives. Shit like cocaine and heroin should not exist on our streets. Fentanyl-laced pills should not be able to pour through our border like candy (quite literally, google it). Etc. For some unexplained reason we are willing to burn $17B in just one state of this country to pretend we are helping people and virtue-signal and, at the same time, we refuse to put real money and effort into real actions that would almost make this problem disappear. Simple math: If none of the drugs a huge portion of these people take were to be available for, say, six months, most of them would gladly get detox help and come out of it a year later with a very different perspective in life. You have to stop the drugs. Things like safe injection spaces are horrible ideas. What you want is free detox centers and a complete clamp-down on drug availability. Then you get results. I was just in Singapore. Before I could fly there I had to sign a document that had a warning in big, bold, all upper-case letters that read: The penalty for bringing illicit drugs into Singapore is death. And there you go.
ryandrake 3y ago
It's not even a lack of homes--its a lack of access to existing homes. There are already ~16 million vacant homes in the USA, a tiny fraction of which could house the homeless if there were political will. We all can say homelessness is a problem, but if you ask these people hoarding vacant homes if they'd be willing to house a homeless person on their property, or if you ask a politician whether they are willing to nationalize those properties to provide homes, suddenly their response will be "Uhh... Ohh... Hrrmm... I guess it's not that big a problem." The rubber is not hitting the road.
- ZoomerCretin 3y ago
  The vast majority of those "vacant" homes are either very temporarily up for sale or rent, dilapidated, or in need of a lot of repairs. There are not 16 million habitable units sitting empty year after year.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  The vast majority of those homes are either being actively fixed/waiting for a tenant to move in or are in bumfuck where no one wants to live. If you can convince the homeless on the west coast to move to the vacant places in kansas congratulations, you just won California's governor election. The reality is that there are not nearly enough homes where people want to be. Until you can force the homeless to go to less desirable areas the homes there arent helpful.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    When I was homeless, I was placed on a waiting list and sent to "my" freight elevator/park bench to count the days. My number came up and I was called into an office. I was verbally introduced to a program that would take control of my finances and then send me wherever they had something available. Some of the cities mentioned might as well have been Kansas. I said no thanks, I'll stay on the streets. I waited for a longer time and another program opened up. They didn't take control of my finances and they allowed me to choose exactly where I wanted to apply for a lease. That was 20 years ago, and I have lived happily ever after.
- 3y ago
Tiktaalik 3y ago
yep. Absolutely there's plenty of addiction problems, toxic drug problems and mental illness problems in my city, but the numbers don't lie and we have lost thousands on thousands of the most affordable rental housing stock over the last few decades even as population grew. If we had actually gained affordable housing stock as population increased, or at least kept pace, we would be in a different situation. No doubt we would still have issues of a small amount of people having issues with mental illness, but we would be dramatically more capable of helping them than we are now with the incredibly scarce level of apartments we have now.

> There’s no easy fix for homelessness True, but that's only because there's no easy way to add housing in modern society. Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes.

spydr 3y ago

In Seattle where I live, homeless is definitely the result of drug use

chagen 3y ago
"Definitely the result"? I think you might be confusing correlation with causation.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  That really isn’t true either. Homelessness doesn’t cause drug abuse, there is plenty of drug abuse among the housed, it isn’t weird that some of them eventually lose their support network. There are definitely economic homeless in Seattle, they just aren’t as visible as the fent addicts.
  - Supermancho 3y ago
    > Homelessness doesn’t cause drug abuse, Being homeless sucks. There's a number of reinforcing conditions that convert non-users into users. https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/homeless https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/homeless
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Only the visible homeless problem. There are plenty of homeless you don’t notice because they aren’t raving like a lunatic without a shirt on. We have two separate problems, but they are sadly often conflated.

apstls 3y ago

How many homes could $17B make?

jupp0r 3y ago
~17000 in CA
- chrisbrandow 3y ago
  apartments would be cheaper than 400K per.
jonny_eh 3y ago
We don't even need to have the government build the homes, just allowing the construction of homes would be a huge positive change.
x0x0 3y ago
Not very many. Even if you could build a home for $400k and it only cost $100k in maintenance / utilities / upkeep for the next 10 years, that's still only 34k homes.
- Firmwarrior 3y ago
  You could build a lot of them for $3.7B/year though.. split among 150,000 homeless, that's $24,000 per year each 'course, it's not hard to imagine those homes ending up like the free zone in The Wire or the housing projects in Judge Dredd...
ajmurmann 3y ago
Where are you gonna build? It's illegal to build pretty much anything in CA cities with high homelessness

hnuser847 3y ago

Nah, it’s caused by mental illness and drug addiction. Short of rounding them up and forcing them to get help, there’s actually nothing we can do to get these people off the street.

jonny_eh 3y ago
It's certainly an element, but that's largely washing your hands and victim blaming. There's a direct correlation between housing costs and homelessness rates. Update, here's a reference: https://endhomelessness.org/blog/new-research-quantifies-link-housing-affordability-homelessness/ https://endhomelessness.org/blog/new-research-quantifies-lin...
- khazhoux 3y ago
  Where’s the “victim-blaming”? From the reporting I’ve seen, the vast majority of folks on Skid Row or on the street in SF are heavy addicts. And they refuse shelters because then they couldn’t use. How does more housing help them?
  - fullspectrumdev 3y ago
    Dry shelters are arguably a massive part of the problem. You fix the housing issue first, make their lives less fucking miserable, then it’s easier to get someone to accept help for their drug addiction. You can’t “cure” an addict who isn’t ready to be “helped”.
    - paisawalla 3y ago
      > Dry shelters are arguably a massive part of the problem. As someone who has housed and lived close to addicts, to put it plainly: this is a naive, academic view. Dry shelter are "a massive part of the problem"? Absolutely incorrect, and harmfully ignorant if implemented at societal scale. As someone who provided food and shelter to an addict in my own home, guaranteeing these things does nothing to increase the willingness to quit heroin. Material deprivation may cause you to seek drugs, but remedying deprivation does not lead to recovery. In fact, I honestly believe offering it unconditionally hampers it.

robomartin 3y ago

> Homelessness is caused primarily by a lack of homes. That is absolutely not true. Not even close. Mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse are major factors. Dozens of studies show this. I've seen numbers as high as 76% having substance abuse and severe mental illness. One study from 2017 says 80% mental illness, 88% drug abuse and 59% alcohol addiction. There are studies with lower numbers. In most, if not all, of these, the government entities who publish them will typically change the definition of "homeless" to artificially reduce the numbers and make themselves look good. There are two ways to fix homelessness: You make them disappear (put them in a building, creative counting, etc.), or actually address the real root causes --which nobody is doing or even talking about. Saying the issue is lack of homes implies these people could actually pay for a place to stay. They cannot. They are sick and/or addicted to something. They likely cannot work or earn even the legally minimum wage without a massive intervention to get them back to functional status. In a free society we do not have the legal means to round-up sick people, get them cleaned-up, help them, rebuild them as necessary and then put them back in circulation. We just don't have that legal power. People do as they wish and there's very little society can really do to help them. Throwing them into a buildings merely (and conveniently) hides the real problems: Mental illness and addiction.

AgentOrange1234 3y ago
“Saying the issue is lack of homes implies these people could actually pay for a place to stay.” Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their ability to pay?
- worik 3y ago
  > Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their ability to pay? Yes Priorities?
- robomartin 3y ago
  > Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their ability to pay? That solves absolutely nothing. I refer you to the $17B we spent in CA on this problem. The fundamental issues are mental health and addiction. All you achieve is making the problem invisible so everyone can feel like they did something. When, in reality, the root causes are not addressed at all. It is critical to understand that our laws DO NOT ALLOW US to force anyone to do anything. Meaning, if a mentally ill or addicted person says "I am not going anywhere" and "I refuse treatment" we CANNOT force them. The root causes, for the most part, are mental illness and addition. We cannot be effective helping these people because --by law-- we cannot effectively arrest and force them to accept help of any kind. In a lot of cases you have addicts who are 100% out of their mind and you are trying to reason with them to accept help. Good luck. A member of my family and a couple of good friends are professionals deeply involved with the treatment side of this issue. What they tell me is exactly what I have conveyed here. If we could force people into a solid 12 to 24 month program we could eliminate most of the problem in 5 to 10 years. We can't. Because we have laws that protect citizens from being detained and incarcerated unless they commit a crime. Mental health and addiction are not crimes. In other words, that path is impossible. How, then, do they propose this be solved? Conceptually simple. Politically...well, our politicians are fucking incompetent morons. You have to clamp down hard on the illicit drugs that are destroying so many lives. Shit like cocaine and heroin should not exist on our streets. Fentanyl-laced pills should not be able to pour through our border like candy (quite literally, google it). Etc. For some unexplained reason we are willing to burn $17B in just one state of this country to pretend we are helping people and virtue-signal and, at the same time, we refuse to put real money and effort into real actions that would almost make this problem disappear. Simple math: If none of the drugs a huge portion of these people take were to be available for, say, six months, most of them would gladly get detox help and come out of it a year later with a very different perspective in life. You have to stop the drugs. Things like safe injection spaces are horrible ideas. What you want is free detox centers and a complete clamp-down on drug availability. Then you get results. I was just in Singapore. Before I could fly there I had to sign a document that had a warning in big, bold, all upper-case letters that read: The penalty for bringing illicit drugs into Singapore is death. And there you go.

ryandrake 3y ago

It's not even a lack of homes--its a lack of access to existing homes. There are already ~16 million vacant homes in the USA, a tiny fraction of which could house the homeless if there were political will. We all can say homelessness is a problem, but if you ask these people hoarding vacant homes if they'd be willing to house a homeless person on their property, or if you ask a politician whether they are willing to nationalize those properties to provide homes, suddenly their response will be "Uhh... Ohh... Hrrmm... I guess it's not that big a problem." The rubber is not hitting the road.

ZoomerCretin 3y ago
The vast majority of those "vacant" homes are either very temporarily up for sale or rent, dilapidated, or in need of a lot of repairs. There are not 16 million habitable units sitting empty year after year.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
The vast majority of those homes are either being actively fixed/waiting for a tenant to move in or are in bumfuck where no one wants to live. If you can convince the homeless on the west coast to move to the vacant places in kansas congratulations, you just won California's governor election. The reality is that there are not nearly enough homes where people want to be. Until you can force the homeless to go to less desirable areas the homes there arent helpful.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  When I was homeless, I was placed on a waiting list and sent to "my" freight elevator/park bench to count the days. My number came up and I was called into an office. I was verbally introduced to a program that would take control of my finances and then send me wherever they had something available. Some of the cities mentioned might as well have been Kansas. I said no thanks, I'll stay on the streets. I waited for a longer time and another program opened up. They didn't take control of my finances and they allowed me to choose exactly where I wanted to apply for a lease. That was 20 years ago, and I have lived happily ever after.
3y ago

Tiktaalik 3y ago

yep. Absolutely there's plenty of addiction problems, toxic drug problems and mental illness problems in my city, but the numbers don't lie and we have lost thousands on thousands of the most affordable rental housing stock over the last few decades even as population grew. If we had actually gained affordable housing stock as population increased, or at least kept pace, we would be in a different situation. No doubt we would still have issues of a small amount of people having issues with mental illness, but we would be dramatically more capable of helping them than we are now with the incredibly scarce level of apartments we have now.