2 ms·
The Housing First initiative was hugely successful. The idea being all of the causes of homelessness are easier to treat when someone has a home: mental illness
by more_corn 3y ago
The Housing First initiative was hugely successful.
The idea being all of the causes of homelessness are easier to treat when someone has a home: mental illness, drug addiction, health conditions etc
Turns out you don’t have to force people to have a home. If you provide it they’ll take it. And you can provide treatment once they had an address to visit. Treating them in the home is 5x more cost effective than treating them on the street and in emergency rooms and cleaning up the streets and dealing with the fallout of living outdoors.
The house first initiative was hugely successful, but got defunded by people who ideologically didn’t believe it could work and didn’t bother to check the evidence that it was working smashingly. That language about “tough love and junkie degenerates” is an example of exactly the ideology that killed the most successful effort we’ve ever had to combat homelessness.
- bsder 3y agoHere's the retort: "If this program is so successful, why do I still see all these degenerates?" You can house 50% of the homeless and the average voter won't give one iota of damn unless they see a decrease in the homeless in their surroudings. The most visible homeless are those who will be kicked out of these kinds of programs--often for substance abuse (as was, in fact, pointed out in the article). Even if they are "successful", these programs will keep getting defunded unless you somehow decrease the quantity of the most visible homeless.