In 2020, Sacramento County released a budget of $62.3 million to address the homeless situation. Tiny homes, converted motels, manufactured homes, building tent cities etc. The result? An increase of 67% of homeless since 2019. It's almost like making it really easy to be homeless somehow increases the number of homeless.
Unfortunately you can't solve a broadly distributed problem locally. If one town offers the homeless services, and the next town over offers them beatings, all the homeless are going to gravitate toward the place that offers them services. You need a broad-based approach at a state or even national level.
Yea, but making it harder isn't either. Also, it's not easier "being homeless". If you get a home that you can't just be shoved out of at the will of some shithead with money, and that includes having stable rent, then you aren't homeless. From there, you're going to be able to find and hold on to work, children are going to be able to attend school effectively, health and addiction services will see lighter loads, and yea, only if widely implemented. That being said, most of the places that do these initiatives are in extremely wealthy metropolises and they should be taking the brunt of these things. Will there be free riders? Yea, absolutely. However, the proportion of people who actually are free riders is going to be vanishingly small, but the spotlight from people who hate the poors will be blindingly bright.
Part of the problem is that we don't so much have a homelessness problem as we have four or five homelessness problems. We have a general income inequality and housing cost problem which pushes the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder out of homes and into their cars or into inadequate temporary housing. We have a domestic abuse problem that pushes victims (predominantly women) and their children into inadequate shelters and other subpar living situations. We have a mental illness problem (and a healthcare problem generally) that leaves untreated individuals incapable of functioning in society, and therefore dumps them on the street as the location of last resort. We have a drug addiction problem that is both a cause of, and a symptom of, other types of homelessness and general quality of life issues. One solution isn't going to address all of them, and some solutions may be a near-silver-bullet for one type of homelessness, but a completely ineffectual moneypit for another.
We have a housing supply problem and a set of policy problems that seem to encourage a house increasing in value, in perpetuity, for no real reason. I do miss the Bush-era construction boom, fueled by illegal immigrants, keeping home prices, especially near the border, artificially low. I like the Japanese model where your savings is a tax deduction, and your home depreciates, as opposed to the other way around here. Why? Because housing is a universal need, perhaps. I am in WA right now, and the homeless issue here is astounding.
I feel insane every time I hear someone say that we need to preserve home vaues, but also we need to lower housing costs. They're the same fucking thing. Literally two (slightly) different phrases for the exact same concept. You can't make one go up while the other goes down, BECAUSE THEY'RE THE SAME GOD DAMN NUMBER.
Maybe I'm just jaded because the homeless that I see around me aren't homeless because home prices are too high. They're homeless because they're junkies. This picture is the most common site that I see near gatherings of homeless people. This is not the picture of a someone down on their luck or a spousal abuse victim escaping their abuser. This is a pic of someone spun out of their mind.
Well what the fuck else you gonna do when you have no job and no house? It seems more likely to me, you start as homeless and descend to junkie, because that's a smaller distance than you had a six figure job, a house in the burbs, the world to lose and decided heroin was too tempting. If you're already on the fringe, why not try something to deaden the pain of a failed existence? No excuses made, but chances are fewer homeless means fewer future junkies.
I've also seen it go the other way... 6-figure execs getting hooked on shit and then that's where all their money goes, until they can't hold their job, pay their mortgage, or car lease payment, and eventually spiral down to homeless. It'd be interesting to see numbers on that.
The six figure folks can usually afford rehab, get gigs from friends, mooch off family (especially when young). It's a longer fall for them, thus slightly less likely. The most common path to junkie is still workplace injury, painkillers, lose job so no Healthcare, crippling addiction, and the streets have all the medicine and work you need....
Yeah, I'd bet good money that most people get addicted to drugs first. Most people are homeless because of addictions or mental issues. We should try to help them of course, but acting like it's a lack of housing is nonsense.
I did mention both mental illness and drug addiction as the other homelessness problems we have. It's also worth nothing that the "quiet homeless" who live out of cars they park in out of the way places still consume resources that could otherwise be focused on the more visible and chronically homeless. They're separate problems, but they intersect.
I disagree. Fewer junkies mean fewer homeless IMO. I personally know people that got hooked on pills, then meth, then heroine, then burned all their bridges and ended up homeless. They didn't lose their job, couldn't find a new one and turn to heroine. I'll add that the large majority of homeless people around here are low-mid 20's. I don't want to hear that they can't get a job and get an apartment with a few friends. They don't because they're junkies and they'd rather sit around and get high. You think you've seen it bad in WA? Come to CA where it's actually bad. I have a 17 mile commute to work. I see about eight "camps" like these with shit strewn everywhere.
And you're 100% correct. So let's change the focus to mental health and addiction. Stop saying that it's because rent is too high.
You know it’s addiction when an actual professional dick sucker would rather live in a sewer shooting up then ply her trade and rent an apartment.
I like how we handle them in Boston: we push the bums into the harbor with snow plows during the first big storm of the year and then blame on some fabled serial killer.