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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Has the Beinoff Homelessness and Housing Initiative Report been discussed yet here? You can read the report here, an executive summary here, and a transcript of the report being discussed on the Ezra Klein Show here.

Released in June, it’s a statewide study on homelessness in California, the largest of its kind in some thirty years. It’s built on “nearly 3,200 participants, selected intentionally to provide a representative sample, and weighted data to provide statewide estimates. To augment survey responses, we recruited 365 participants to participate in in-depth interviews”. No question as to the state of focus: California is just over a tenth of the American population but nearly a third of its homeless population and nearly half of the unsheltered homeless population.

Approximately one in five participants (19%) entered homelessness from an institution (such as a prison or prolonged jail stay); 49% from a housing situation in which participants didn’t have their name on a lease or mortgage (non-leaseholder), and 32% from a housing situation where they had their name on a lease or mortgage (leaseholder)...Leaseholders reported a median of 10 days notice that they were going to lose their housing, while non-leaseholders reported a median of one day.

Other takeaways are that contra claims that homeless populations are traveling to California for warm weather or social services, 90% of interviewed participants said they were from California (and 75% from the same county they were homeless in), and backed it up with various details about their hometowns and whatnot. This also aligns with the finding that only about a third of the homeless even sought out government services, suggesting that most people are not taking advantage of whatever unique government services for the homeless California offers (which aren't good anyway). This overall makes some common sense imo - if you’re so broke you don’t have somewhere to live then your options for travel are likely limited as well.

The paper is interesting as a resource in its own right, but I think it’s most useful combined with the claims made in a book referenced in the Ezra Klein discussion of the report: “Homelessness is a Housing Problem.”

The piece argues that housing costs are the primary driving factor behind homelessness. For those who claim that homelessness is mostly a reflection of insanity and addiction, researchers point out that those things are frequently worse in other states with less severe homeless problems (correlations available in the hyperlink).

For instance, West Virginia has worse poverty, mental health, and substance abuse, but has a homeless problem vastly less bad than California's (0.09% vs 0.4%). The only thing California performs worse than West Virginia on is, predictably, housing costs. Or why does San Francisco, with a poverty rate of 11.4%, have such a worse homelessness problem (0.95%) than much poorer cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans, all of which have poverty rates more than twice as high around 23% and homelessness rates around only 0.27%? The clearest answer is the most straightforward: San Francisco is simply twice as expensive to live in (a studio apartment in SF is little over $2k vs a little over 1k for the other three cities). This also lines up with the survey responses, with 89% of respondents saying housing costs were a barrier to them finding housing.

This doesn’t necessarily mean those mental health and addiction aren’t highly important here are as well, but that there may be a demographic of fairly low functioning people who are able to take care of themselves, just barely, at low costs, but are simply unable to under heavier financial burdens. Jerusalem Demsas compares this to a game of musical chairs: as you take away chairs one by one steadily the slower and weaker kids will find themselves without a place to sit. But if you don’t have enough chairs / are going through a severe housing shortage, of course you’re gonna have a worse chairlessness problem then elsewhere, even if their kids are slower and weaker.

And once you’re out, it can be very hard to get back on your feet. Your credit history is gonna be terrible, as is your appearance. Maybe you live in your car for a while but then it gets impounded because you have nowhere legal to park it and can’t pay for the tickets. Then you’ve lost your shelter as well as your ability to go to a job. From there you’re really in the streets, which is scary - some people may take uppers due to fear of being asleep in public where people can hurt you or steal from you, and thus pick up addictions. Things spiral very fast from bad to worse.

Taken together, these suggest early intervention and a clear policy prescription to build more housing and do what can be done to lower costs - not because every disheveled person on the street is a fresh-faced suburban homeowner waiting to happen, but specifically the opposite - that every poor or unstable person living on the cusp of not being able to afford where they stay bears the risk that it’ll be much harder for them to bounce back from a fall than to sustain where they are.

Interested to hear what other people thought.

As others have pointed out, there's some sleight of hand in what people mean when the say "homeless" and what the causal factors in those populations are.

When people talk about San Francisco having homelessness problems, they aren't talking about people that merely lack a fixed address. They're talking about the people living in and defecating on the streets, frequently deranged. People that have defected entirely on societal norms.

Cities like Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle have much higher amounts of these total defectors than other cities. The relevant difference between these and other cities is that total defectors are more or less tolerated in those cities. You can build permanent structures on public land and nothing bad will happen. At worst, something bad like a murder happens at the camp and then you'll be kicked out and lose the materials you likely stole to construct your building. You can do drugs openly. At the moment Seattle Police aren't even legally capable of arresting people for drug possession and public drug use.

I don't know if this environment creates total defectors or merely attracts them, it's probably some combination.

I once had a conversation with a gentleman standing around a nightclub exit, who explained that he supported himself while in Dallas from April to October by giving life advice for tips to women who were crying as they left, that he took a greyhound to New Orleans the rest of the year(he didn’t explain what he did there), and that he would live in a cheap hostel when he managed to beg enough.

This man’s lifestyle choices were eccentric, and it’s plausible to me that he doesn’t have the ability to hold down a normal job, maintain an apartment, etc. But he didn’t seem to be the sort to live a lifestyle based on public nudity, drug use, assaulting random people, vandalism, and public defecation. He was polite and normal seeming except for his life decisions when I spoke to him, and more than likely is not on a societal level a problem. I mean, sure, he’d be better off if he was given a free apartment. But that’s not my problem and he isn’t asking for one anyways.

I gave him a fiver for an interesting story and I think that’s a microcosm of someone being low-functioning to the point of not being able to support himself, but not causing problems for others.

Yeah, this guy is self-employed, for some values of "self-employed", and doesn't seem to be hurting people through his eccentric lifestyle.

he supported himself while in Dallas from April to October by giving life advice for tips to women who were crying as they left

What was his apparent age and how did he monetize giving unsolicited advice to devastated strangers ?

He looked like Morgan freeman with more ‘kindly grandfather’ vibes. I’m assuming that helped.

As far as I know, he straight up asked for a tip and crying drunk girls frequently gave it to him.

Yeah I'm not so sure "homeless man explains how he harasses distressed (and probably inebriated) women as they're leaving a night club for fun and profit" is exactly a heartwarming anecdote...

Never underestimate the power of charm. What may, heard secondhand, or when read on the page, seem to be opportunistic manipulation can, in the moment, take on a transcendent feel, like contact with the divine. Various cognitive twists then immunize the tipper from ever feeling they've been manipulated, even after-the-fact.