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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   38347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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I think that Scott's latest article on how to defeat homelessness, was an okay steelman argument for the liberal policies with regards to the issue. At least, it's completely in line with the arguments I hear regarding my city's issues. There are a couple of things missing, though.

  1. People don't become psychotic out of nowhere. Years of unrestricted drug use does that to a person. And no, I don't want the continuation of the war on drugs, but I'm convinced that without somehow removing the drugs from the equation it's infinitely harder to approach a solution.
  2. Why do other countries don't have this problem? It's multifaceted, for sure - Finland and Japan use the "housing first" system Scott suggests and achieve great results, but I'll highlight one factor that I don't see anyone talking about in the first world: shame. In some societies like China or Turkey it's shameful to have a relative who is homeless. It's largely a cultural thing, but ultimately having relatives care about the homeless is a cheaper solution than building endless fields of Soviet blocks and intentionally creating ghettos that require policing. Is it possible to change a culture? How exactly is the western culture different? This is much harder to answer, but if we are talking about an ideal world with ideal outcomes, I'd prefer the community that experiences the issue to directly handle the issue.

I think it is becoming pretty obvious that homelessness is a national problem that can no longer be addressed at a local level.

If any one municipality gets the solution to homelessness "correct" their reward for doing so is to be flooded by homeless people from other areas. This doesn't require maliciousness on anyone's part. Imagine city A has the correct solution, and city B just lets them die in the streets. If you are a doctor in city B with a homeless patient, your best advice to them might be to tell them to get a bus ticket to city A. And that doctor would be right to continue sending patients from city B to city A until the conditions in both cities was equal. Or if you are just a semi-aware homeless person, you'd do the move yourself.

If you are just a random person in one of these cities, and all you care about is just not having homelessness. Then being closer to city B is the best option. Its cheaper and will cause the homeless to flee or be taken away by people in the system that care. Any additional amount of draconian rules or cruelty towards homelessness will move your city closer to B. If your job has you living in city A and taking care of homeless people, then you are probably correct to be a little pissed off at the people in city B advocating cruelty or draconian rules in their city. They are just foisting their problem off onto you.

Once you realize its a national problem the approaches that make sense change quite a bit.

There are lots of ways to address it. The government can build the ghettos. That has been done many times in the past. The federal government could offer subsidies to state and local entities that provide beds to homelessness. I think that would at least fit with our existing federal system of governance. The government can build prisons / mental institutions / etc.

Addressing the problem at the national level will not look pretty. It will almost certainly look ugly. Because homeless people have lives that are objectively shitty right now. Even if you are improve their lives significantly you aren't likely to get out of "objectively bad life to live" and into "objectively good life to live". So you'll have the government running a program where a bunch of people seemingly live terrible lives on the government dime, and it will definitely look like the government is causing them to live these terrible lives.

There are a few paths I can envision that lead to 'national government addresses homelessness':

  1. Some existing government org or agency decides to make it their responsibility. I don't see this as very likely. Maybe someone will get suckered into it, but no savvy politician would willingly choose for it to happen. Again, this will be an ugly program that wins you nothing but national condemnation.
  2. The treatment of homeless people gets much much worse. The number of homeless people continues to expand anyways. The calculus on helping these people will eventually shift. But I think it will get very bad before the calculus shifts. Think of every downtown city being worse than Kensington in Philly. And a few cities having violent riots where people hunt down and kill the homeless.
  3. The issue grows worse, but people and political organizations make a big push to have it addressed at the national level. Some well-meaning but ultimately stupid politicians spearhead the effort and put their names on it. Their names get dragged through the mud for the results, but it gets the ball rolling on a federal bureaucracy.

If any one municipality gets the solution to homelessness "correct" their reward for doing so is to be flooded by homeless people from other areas.

This is true only if homeless people have no agency to determine their place of residence, or if the solution is one that the homeless people themselves prefer to the default "unsolved" conditions.

If on the other hand there is a solution that the homeless people would prefer to avoid and they have some agency to avoid it by relocating, then the incentive would flow the opposite direction, with localities that do not adopt it getting flooded.

This is one reason "combining housing with aggressive anti-vagrant policing" might actually work.
The first places to start it get to keep all the fixable workers while pushing the dregs out, while holdout cities have to deal with an increasing burden of irredeemables.
In the end San Francisco would be overrun by every fentanyl zombie in the country. (Then we build the San Bruno Wall and blow up the bridges.)

For every fixable homeless person in a city with expensive housing, there is likely a responsible homeful person living within their means in a cheaper city who would jump at the chance to move, if only housing were affordable.

I don't think you get to (fairly) keep the fixable workers while pushing the dregs out. You either build more housing or you don't, but the current homeless in your city probably all have to go.

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