5 ms·

Cities will do anything to 'solve' the problem of homelessness except building enough housing for everyone.

gustavus 3y ago
The only housing that works for a dude that's cracked out on meth and smearing human excrement on the walls is a cement room. Until we can figure out what to do with people who refuse to live in the rest of society we'll be limited on any possible solution to assist people in need.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- badwolf 3y ago
  Overdoses and tweakers exist just about everywhere, you just don't see them because... they are housed.
- livefox 3y ago
  Having been homeless before - fuck that mentality. The majority of homelessness is brought about as a result of circumstances, not drugs. Domestic Violence, lack of affordable housing, lack of social safety nets, LGBTQ individuals ousted from their families, mental illness with lack of support. I was homeless for 3 years, because I was LGBT and my parents cut me off from support. Rent in Seattle doubled when Amazon moved in, and the roommates I was living with were unreliable. I ended up homeless and moved to a small town that had even less amenities and had the mentality that if I was homeless I must have been on drugs. I was treated with disdain by most of the people I was trying to get help from, finding a job was much harder without a permanent address. Housing assistance programs had 3 year waitlists. I was told if I wanted more assistance I should have a baby because it would push me to the front of the list. The "cracked out methhead smearing human excrement on the walls" is someone that needs psychiatric help, not jail. And they are a relatively small portion of the homeless population.
- jjk166 3y ago
  Such cases are a very tiny minority of homeless people. The vast majority go unnoticed because they don't "look" homeless. 74% of homeless people aren't drug addicts. 43% of homeless people are employed. Most sleep temporarily at friends homes, or in their cars, or in shelters. Homeless youth especially tend to blend in. Most people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity do so because of economic reasons like high housing prices, poor employment opportunities, and low wages, often coupled with medical disability. The next leading cause is people escaping abuse. And homelessness is merely the most extreme case of housing insecurity, which affects around 12% of Americans. The idea that we can't do anything for 4 people because 1 of them has a drug problems is absurd.
  - NeuNeurosis 3y ago
    "The idea that we can't do anything for 4 people because 1 of them has a drug problems is absurd." I've noticed this with almost all social issues especially social services for a long time. People I am close to would argue how they don't support food stamps for example because there was corruption or some people would be taking advantage of it. I always argued back that they were completely ignoring the unspoken majority of beneficiaries that it dramatically helped. As you can probably see by so many of the comments in this thread there is a lot of that thinking that the problem is intractable due to the minority being seen as the majority. My concern is how can we change the narrative? How do we communicate the unseen majorities plight in a way that doesn't get ignored or overlooked? It seems that using statistics like those provided would be enough but in my experience it rarely convinces those that solely think that the homeless should "get a job" or be put in jail as the OP of this specific thread stated. They seem to have a negative visceral reaction to this and really any of the social ills that are affecting so many people. What is driving that visceral reaction? How can we create solidarity between these disparate groups and organize people in a way that real change can occur?
hackerfooze 3y ago
I always felt that DeFi is the obvious solution to these problems. These people need ways to get paid or take out loans so they can get back on their feet, but it’s difficult with America’s draconian regulations. More succinctly, we need to bank the unbanked.
- razakel 3y ago
  The obvious solution is for the banking industry to partner with the post office and offer basic services through them. It's win-win - the post office gets a new revenue stream, and the banks get to close branches. Nowhereville doesn't need a Bank of America, but it'll always have a post office.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    Example: afaik, Japan essentially does this
    - omginternets 3y ago
      Example 2: France
      - Kalium 3y ago
        Example 3: The USA. It was subsequently shut down because it couldn't compete with private banks.
        omginternets 3y ago
        Why does a public service need to be competitive with private banks? I think much of the point is to collectively pay for a safety-net service. That service is: minimal banking functionality for all citizens, so that they can contribute to society. (Edited for tone. Sorry about that!)
        3y ago
toomim 3y ago
Building housing can address the housing-prices problem, but the homeless problem is actually a drug problem, which is actually a mental health problem, which is actually a deep social problem. You can't solve fentanyl with housing.
- loeg 3y ago
  It's both! There is a subset of homeless who are addicted to drugs and a subset that isn't. It is oversimplifying to reduce homelessness to a drug problem. Lower housing prices would help most homeless (and everyone else who pays for housing).
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    I thought you were wrong but in Vancouver BC for instance, “only” two thirds said they were addicted to one or more substances. https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/vancouver-homeless-count-2019-final-report.pdf https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/vancouver-homeless-count-2019...
    - bb611 3y ago
      > Of those who reported an addiction, 38% identified an addiction to cigarettes ... alcohol (22%), marijuana (21%)
      - barbazoo 3y ago
        > followed by opioids (33%), methamphetamine (29%), alcohol (22%)
- no_moms_no_hugs 3y ago
  If this was true, you would expect to see high rates of homelessness correlate with high rates of drug and alcohol use, no? It seems like in the US, states with high rates of overdose deaths [0] don't seem to have correspondingly high rates of homelessness [1], but do have much cheaper housing [2]. It's obviously a contributor, but I really don't think it's a silver bullet - you could 'solve' drug addiction today and you'd still have a homelessness crisis. Obviously both are problems - but I think there are many people who would remain housed in spite of their addictions if housing was, on the whole, much cheaper. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mortality/drug_poisoning.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor... [1] https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-and-lowest-rates-of-homelessness/ https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-... [2] https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/median-home-price/#median-price-by-state https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/median-home-price/#medi...
stcroixx 3y ago
Which cities are building houses? Traditionally, owners of private property do that. Chicago once built housing. It became so crime infested they had to tear it all down.
- loeg 3y ago
  Cities often have policies that prevent private developers from building more housing.
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  cities and nimbys use zoning to prevent it
- alexb_ 3y ago
  Owners of private property want to build housing, but cities create laws that prevent anything from being built.
- burnished 3y ago
  I'm not familiar with the event you are talking about, could you provide a little more context? Purely for my own edification.
  - trackone 3y ago
    I am not sure which housing they are referring to, but I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes.
    - burnished 3y ago
      That looks like a match, thank you! Wow, looks like it was a pretty complicated situation. I don't think OPs reference to it made any sense. Might make sense for a checklist of what not to do with regards to public housing.
gottorf 3y ago
> except building enough housing for everyone. More specifically, except to allow the building of enough housing, through removing onerous regulation.
nonameiguess 3y ago
This has sort of been said, but this really isn't true. The type of homelessness solved by building more housing is people living out of weekly rentals, hotels, couch-surfing with their friends, or staying with their parents forever. They're not the kind of people cities are trying to bus away. The kind of people cities are trying to bus away are walking the streets screaming at imagined ghosts. Some small number may have jobs and money but just not enough to afford housing and no friends or family to turn to, but some are functionally incapable of operating in normal society. A humane community needs some solution to what to do with these people as well, aside from send them somewhere else, put them in prison, and/or hope they die.
- matkoniecz 3y ago
  > They're not the kind of people cities are trying to bus away. But they easily can become them if few more things will go wrong. Not banning housing construction and lowering its prices helps people on border (and if someone has larger house/flat or has own one - they can help their family/friends)
jorblumesea 3y ago
Pretty much every American solution is to bandaid over or do expensive fixes instead of actually addressing root causes. See the giant thread around homeschooling we had yesterday.
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  “ expensive fixes instead of actually addressing root causes.” There is the old quote “the Americans will always do the right thing. Right after they have tried everything else”. It feels like this in a lot of social issues like health care.
- vaidhy 3y ago
  I think the underlying problem is that US does not believe in community or society. Every solution has to be at the level of the individual or the business. This places a lot of constraint over what would be common-sense solutions in rest of the world. There are trade-offs between being part of the society and being alone. If Japan were to be an example of an extreme societal compliance, US is in extreme in "me for myself, screw the rest" approach.
jseliger 3y ago
Homelessness is a housing problem: https://seliger.com/2022/06/29/homelessness-is-a-housing-problem-when-cities-build-housing-homelessness-goes-down/ https://seliger.com/2022/06/29/homelessness-is-a-housing-pro...: There’s a naive, common view that homelessness is primarily about “mental illness” and “drugs” and other potential contributors to homelessness; while those factors exist, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV, formerly called Section 8), and other income supports to keep a person housed. Intuitively, this makes sense: it’s easier to cover $750 in rent than $2,000 in rent, even for someone with mental illness and drug problems. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of being “housed” to being “homeless” goes concomitantly up. While mental illness and drug abuse are factors, they’re secondary to housing costs, and they’re really red herrings relative to overall housing costs and ongoing housing shortages across America. The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform and the removal of barriers to new housing construction, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or “neighborhood input” or “community input.”
- c22 3y ago
  It is true that housing is too expensive and this is a primary cause of homelessness, but I can't accept the logic that just "building more housing" is the solution here. Sure, adding a bunch of empty houses to an area will create a downward pressure on prices, but at best this is temporary. When I look around, the densest cities are also the most expensive to live in so making places denser will only hurt low income earners who want to live there even more. The reality is if we want low income families to be able to live in desirable places the only solution is public subsidization. Just handing this problem to the land developers and removing all zoning restrictions is not going to fix anything in the long run.
  - jseliger 3y ago
    I can't accept the logic that just "building more housing" is the solution here Read the book, and look at the evidence rather than trying to reason from random feelings.
alexb_ 3y ago
Cities don't have to build housing for people. They just have to make it legal for developers to build it and actually participate in the market. That solves the biggest group of homeless people, those who are down on their luck & couch surfing because they literally cannot afford a house. The second, more visible group, is a completely different story. But just allowing people to build housing instead of creating archaic and backwards rules that prevent any building will solve a huge part of it.
matkoniecz 3y ago
> except building enough housing for everyone. lets go for simpler one, not banning building housing
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
This is plainly wrong. Homelessness is a game theory problem. The first city that "builds enough homes to house everyone" get to house everyone in the country. Why would Los Angeles ever build housing, if San Francisco is doing it for them? The first city to solve this is punished mercilessly. Why would any city subject themselves to that, when they can anticipate that it would happen? Doesn't matter what your politics are. Left and right both know that it will happen, and will refuse to do it because of the punishment. Because this is a game theory problem, the solution is (surprising, to me at least) very bureaucratic. It doesn't involve people "just loving enough". You won't solve it by showing the world how charitable and compassionate you are. Some dislike that. Why was love not enough? Why was charity and compassion not enough? Because it's a math problem, and love, charity, and compassion have never solved math problems. Similarly, accusations that greed or callousness interfere are just plainly wrong too. What's needed is a system that allocates the homeless across all the tends of thousands of municipal and local governments, such that small towns aren't overwhelmed with thousands, and large cities don't somehow cheat and solve their fair share of the homelessness issue by buying bus tickets for them. Such a system can be achieved via policy alone from the ground-up, no need for state or federal government to be involved (except possibly to pick up some small part of the tab for the few who would inevitably fall between the cracks).

The only housing that works for a dude that's cracked out on meth and smearing human excrement on the walls is a cement room. Until we can figure out what to do with people who refuse to live in the rest of society we'll be limited on any possible solution to assist people in need.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
badwolf 3y ago
Overdoses and tweakers exist just about everywhere, you just don't see them because... they are housed.
livefox 3y ago
Having been homeless before - fuck that mentality. The majority of homelessness is brought about as a result of circumstances, not drugs. Domestic Violence, lack of affordable housing, lack of social safety nets, LGBTQ individuals ousted from their families, mental illness with lack of support. I was homeless for 3 years, because I was LGBT and my parents cut me off from support. Rent in Seattle doubled when Amazon moved in, and the roommates I was living with were unreliable. I ended up homeless and moved to a small town that had even less amenities and had the mentality that if I was homeless I must have been on drugs. I was treated with disdain by most of the people I was trying to get help from, finding a job was much harder without a permanent address. Housing assistance programs had 3 year waitlists. I was told if I wanted more assistance I should have a baby because it would push me to the front of the list. The "cracked out methhead smearing human excrement on the walls" is someone that needs psychiatric help, not jail. And they are a relatively small portion of the homeless population.
jjk166 3y ago
Such cases are a very tiny minority of homeless people. The vast majority go unnoticed because they don't "look" homeless. 74% of homeless people aren't drug addicts. 43% of homeless people are employed. Most sleep temporarily at friends homes, or in their cars, or in shelters. Homeless youth especially tend to blend in. Most people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity do so because of economic reasons like high housing prices, poor employment opportunities, and low wages, often coupled with medical disability. The next leading cause is people escaping abuse. And homelessness is merely the most extreme case of housing insecurity, which affects around 12% of Americans. The idea that we can't do anything for 4 people because 1 of them has a drug problems is absurd.
- NeuNeurosis 3y ago
  "The idea that we can't do anything for 4 people because 1 of them has a drug problems is absurd." I've noticed this with almost all social issues especially social services for a long time. People I am close to would argue how they don't support food stamps for example because there was corruption or some people would be taking advantage of it. I always argued back that they were completely ignoring the unspoken majority of beneficiaries that it dramatically helped. As you can probably see by so many of the comments in this thread there is a lot of that thinking that the problem is intractable due to the minority being seen as the majority. My concern is how can we change the narrative? How do we communicate the unseen majorities plight in a way that doesn't get ignored or overlooked? It seems that using statistics like those provided would be enough but in my experience it rarely convinces those that solely think that the homeless should "get a job" or be put in jail as the OP of this specific thread stated. They seem to have a negative visceral reaction to this and really any of the social ills that are affecting so many people. What is driving that visceral reaction? How can we create solidarity between these disparate groups and organize people in a way that real change can occur?

hackerfooze 3y ago

I always felt that DeFi is the obvious solution to these problems. These people need ways to get paid or take out loans so they can get back on their feet, but it’s difficult with America’s draconian regulations. More succinctly, we need to bank the unbanked.

razakel 3y ago
The obvious solution is for the banking industry to partner with the post office and offer basic services through them. It's win-win - the post office gets a new revenue stream, and the banks get to close branches. Nowhereville doesn't need a Bank of America, but it'll always have a post office.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Example: afaik, Japan essentially does this
  - omginternets 3y ago
    Example 2: France
    - Kalium 3y ago
      Example 3: The USA. It was subsequently shut down because it couldn't compete with private banks.
      - omginternets 3y ago
        Why does a public service need to be competitive with private banks? I think much of the point is to collectively pay for a safety-net service. That service is: minimal banking functionality for all citizens, so that they can contribute to society. (Edited for tone. Sorry about that!)
        3y ago

toomim 3y ago

Building housing can address the housing-prices problem, but the homeless problem is actually a drug problem, which is actually a mental health problem, which is actually a deep social problem. You can't solve fentanyl with housing.

loeg 3y ago
It's both! There is a subset of homeless who are addicted to drugs and a subset that isn't. It is oversimplifying to reduce homelessness to a drug problem. Lower housing prices would help most homeless (and everyone else who pays for housing).
- barbazoo 3y ago
  I thought you were wrong but in Vancouver BC for instance, “only” two thirds said they were addicted to one or more substances. https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/vancouver-homeless-count-2019-final-report.pdf https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/vancouver-homeless-count-2019...
  - bb611 3y ago
    > Of those who reported an addiction, 38% identified an addiction to cigarettes ... alcohol (22%), marijuana (21%)
    - barbazoo 3y ago
      > followed by opioids (33%), methamphetamine (29%), alcohol (22%)
no_moms_no_hugs 3y ago
If this was true, you would expect to see high rates of homelessness correlate with high rates of drug and alcohol use, no? It seems like in the US, states with high rates of overdose deaths [0] don't seem to have correspondingly high rates of homelessness [1], but do have much cheaper housing [2]. It's obviously a contributor, but I really don't think it's a silver bullet - you could 'solve' drug addiction today and you'd still have a homelessness crisis. Obviously both are problems - but I think there are many people who would remain housed in spite of their addictions if housing was, on the whole, much cheaper. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mortality/drug_poisoning.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor... [1] https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-and-lowest-rates-of-homelessness/ https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-... [2] https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/median-home-price/#median-price-by-state https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/median-home-price/#medi...

stcroixx 3y ago

Which cities are building houses? Traditionally, owners of private property do that. Chicago once built housing. It became so crime infested they had to tear it all down.

loeg 3y ago
Cities often have policies that prevent private developers from building more housing.
micromacrofoot 3y ago
cities and nimbys use zoning to prevent it
alexb_ 3y ago
Owners of private property want to build housing, but cities create laws that prevent anything from being built.
burnished 3y ago
I'm not familiar with the event you are talking about, could you provide a little more context? Purely for my own edification.
- trackone 3y ago
  I am not sure which housing they are referring to, but I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes.
  - burnished 3y ago
    That looks like a match, thank you! Wow, looks like it was a pretty complicated situation. I don't think OPs reference to it made any sense. Might make sense for a checklist of what not to do with regards to public housing.

gottorf 3y ago

> except building enough housing for everyone. More specifically, except to allow the building of enough housing, through removing onerous regulation.

nonameiguess 3y ago

This has sort of been said, but this really isn't true. The type of homelessness solved by building more housing is people living out of weekly rentals, hotels, couch-surfing with their friends, or staying with their parents forever. They're not the kind of people cities are trying to bus away. The kind of people cities are trying to bus away are walking the streets screaming at imagined ghosts. Some small number may have jobs and money but just not enough to afford housing and no friends or family to turn to, but some are functionally incapable of operating in normal society. A humane community needs some solution to what to do with these people as well, aside from send them somewhere else, put them in prison, and/or hope they die.

matkoniecz 3y ago
> They're not the kind of people cities are trying to bus away. But they easily can become them if few more things will go wrong. Not banning housing construction and lowering its prices helps people on border (and if someone has larger house/flat or has own one - they can help their family/friends)

jorblumesea 3y ago

Pretty much every American solution is to bandaid over or do expensive fixes instead of actually addressing root causes. See the giant thread around homeschooling we had yesterday.

rqtwteye 3y ago
“ expensive fixes instead of actually addressing root causes.” There is the old quote “the Americans will always do the right thing. Right after they have tried everything else”. It feels like this in a lot of social issues like health care.
vaidhy 3y ago
I think the underlying problem is that US does not believe in community or society. Every solution has to be at the level of the individual or the business. This places a lot of constraint over what would be common-sense solutions in rest of the world. There are trade-offs between being part of the society and being alone. If Japan were to be an example of an extreme societal compliance, US is in extreme in "me for myself, screw the rest" approach.

jseliger 3y ago

Homelessness is a housing problem: https://seliger.com/2022/06/29/homelessness-is-a-housing-problem-when-cities-build-housing-homelessness-goes-down/ https://seliger.com/2022/06/29/homelessness-is-a-housing-pro...: There’s a naive, common view that homelessness is primarily about “mental illness” and “drugs” and other potential contributors to homelessness; while those factors exist, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV, formerly called Section 8), and other income supports to keep a person housed. Intuitively, this makes sense: it’s easier to cover $750 in rent than $2,000 in rent, even for someone with mental illness and drug problems. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of being “housed” to being “homeless” goes concomitantly up. While mental illness and drug abuse are factors, they’re secondary to housing costs, and they’re really red herrings relative to overall housing costs and ongoing housing shortages across America. The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform and the removal of barriers to new housing construction, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or “neighborhood input” or “community input.”

c22 3y ago
It is true that housing is too expensive and this is a primary cause of homelessness, but I can't accept the logic that just "building more housing" is the solution here. Sure, adding a bunch of empty houses to an area will create a downward pressure on prices, but at best this is temporary. When I look around, the densest cities are also the most expensive to live in so making places denser will only hurt low income earners who want to live there even more. The reality is if we want low income families to be able to live in desirable places the only solution is public subsidization. Just handing this problem to the land developers and removing all zoning restrictions is not going to fix anything in the long run.
- jseliger 3y ago
  I can't accept the logic that just "building more housing" is the solution here Read the book, and look at the evidence rather than trying to reason from random feelings.

alexb_ 3y ago

Cities don't have to build housing for people. They just have to make it legal for developers to build it and actually participate in the market. That solves the biggest group of homeless people, those who are down on their luck & couch surfing because they literally cannot afford a house. The second, more visible group, is a completely different story. But just allowing people to build housing instead of creating archaic and backwards rules that prevent any building will solve a huge part of it.

matkoniecz 3y ago

> except building enough housing for everyone. lets go for simpler one, not banning building housing

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

This is plainly wrong. Homelessness is a game theory problem. The first city that "builds enough homes to house everyone" get to house everyone in the country. Why would Los Angeles ever build housing, if San Francisco is doing it for them? The first city to solve this is punished mercilessly. Why would any city subject themselves to that, when they can anticipate that it would happen? Doesn't matter what your politics are. Left and right both know that it will happen, and will refuse to do it because of the punishment. Because this is a game theory problem, the solution is (surprising, to me at least) very bureaucratic. It doesn't involve people "just loving enough". You won't solve it by showing the world how charitable and compassionate you are. Some dislike that. Why was love not enough? Why was charity and compassion not enough? Because it's a math problem, and love, charity, and compassion have never solved math problems. Similarly, accusations that greed or callousness interfere are just plainly wrong too. What's needed is a system that allocates the homeless across all the tends of thousands of municipal and local governments, such that small towns aren't overwhelmed with thousands, and large cities don't somehow cheat and solve their fair share of the homelessness issue by buying bus tickets for them. Such a system can be achieved via policy alone from the ground-up, no need for state or federal government to be involved (except possibly to pick up some small part of the tab for the few who would inevitably fall between the cracks).