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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.
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 the other replies have said, the vast majority of “homeless” people are unemployed or mostly unemployed people living in their parents’/friend’s/trap house or in their car or couchsurfing. Even the majority of homeless people of no fixed abode aren’t like those living in tents on Venice Beach. These people can indeed be helped by cheaper housing costs or state-subsidized housing schemes. But they also aren’t what is usually meant by the public when talking about the homeless problem.
The problem is with the minority of homeless who are psychotic fent or meth addicted predators. These are the people living on the street in San Francisco or LA and causing problems for everyone else. Demography of the more general “homeless” population isn’t relevant. These are people who deliberately refuse shelters with space because they want to stay on the street to do drugs, offering them housing isn’t going to solve that problem or associated problems with drug-related crime done by people who want a fix.
It seems plausible that the absence of affordable housing for the first type of person creates a pipeline whereby they are more likely to become the second type of person.
This seems likely.
But, in my mind, the biggest thing that turns a type 1 down-on-their luck person into a type 2 pants pooper is the wide availability of fentanyl and heroin on the streets today.
Fixing housing affordability issues seems is a hard problem. Fixing housing affordability has never been done by any country (as far as I know).
Meanwhile, there are lots of countries with essentially zero drug use. Taiwan, China, Singapore, and Japan have don't have drugs. And unlike the Prohibition Al Capone memes, these countries also have very few if any gangs. We could reduce drug use by a ton and it wouldn't be that hard. All it would take is a serious effort to criminalize drugs.
And before anyone says "War on Drugs didn't work", we should take a look at the overdose stats. Overdoses deaths in the U.S. are up 1000% since the 1980s. The correct take, IMO, is that the war on drugs did work. We just didn't do it hard enough and gave up too soon.
I think it's meth much more than opiates. Opiates can kill you and make you unproductive, but they don't fry your brain and give you psychosis like hardcore simulants do.
The main reason overdoses are up is that fentanyl is really potent and easy to overdose on, but it's also the most popular illegal opiate because it's cheap to make and can be smuggled across the border in large quantities because it's so concentrated. If lower potency opiates (and narcan) could be purchased legally over the counter, fentanyl use and fentanyl deaths would plummet.
Only if we legalized it the right way, which we wouldn't. Look how we legalized marijuana. See how it's celebrated and commercialized now with billboards and brightly lit stores in every shitty small town in America. If we do the same for opioids, usage will go through the roof - as will overdoses.
I would advocate a method where junkies can, under medical supervision, get free opioids in a super boring and lame way that ensures no one will ever do it for fun. That would have the effect of making street dealers unprofitable while reducing the chance of non-junkies getting hooked. Long prison sentences for dealers will do the rest.
But that's exactly why street dealers would still be popular.
And that's why we should arrest the dealers and throw them in prison for decades.
Push/pull works better than just push (prison) or pull (medically-supervised injections) alone.
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Usage would go up, but overdoses would plummet because people could dose accurately.
Why do you assume they would? People are dumb and don't pay attention to what's in their chicken nuggets - suddenly they're going to turn into savvy consumers when it comes to doing complex chemistry calculations to determine correct dosing, and batch testing to ensure that the product isn't being stepped on or cut with fentanyl as it often is currently?
This is what junkies do already -- many of them are good enough at it to survive for many years!
If the junk is government supplied/inspected, the whole point is that is won't be stepped on -- inform them of a dose that is unlikely to kill a zero-tolerance user, and let them figure the rest out themselves. They are quite resourceful -- this way if they OD at least nobody will be able to say it wasn't their 'fault'.
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You don't need the dependent clause. We can just do the math (economics). Many moons ago, at the old old old place, I did an estimate, ignoring any effect of removing criminal penalties, ignoring any effect of branding/marketing/whathaveyou, ignoring any cultural or other developments which could change the elasticities, of how usage of marijuana might change in response to the change in price that was observed. Let's just say that anyone who thinks that usage of drugs is going to go down (or even stay flat) in response to legalization is getting high on their own supply. Marginal Revolution just referred to Portugal. The Bloody Atlantic is almost going after Oregon. It was trendy to think otherwise for a while (I believed it when I was a kid), but like most silly lefty trends, at some point the need to shut out the data and embrace cognitive dissonance becomes too difficult.
The question isn't whether drug use will go down; it's whether ODs will go down. I suspect they would; if you know how much you're getting you're not going to OD because your usual hit is 10x the potency.
Of course if you legalized hard drugs the way pot has been legalized in NY or NJ that might not work, but that's because government can screw anything up. You also can't just decriminalize possession (like Oregon did); you have to legalize production and sales.
This line of thinking is tempting as well, that it's just product uncertainty. There may be some factor, but I'm skeptical that it would be the overwhelming factor that a lot of people think. One could easily talk about two movies from this image. In one movie, fentanyl is primarily about product uncertainty, and that has driven a rise in deaths. In another movie, fentanyl is just way more potent and way more dangerous in general, so of course it's going to be higher. But hell, there are still quite a few prescription opioid deaths there; those are chugging along, even though they don't have the same product uncertainty problem. Instead, they mostly fit into the ordering just fine in terms of inherent danger of the substance, regardless of product uncertainty.
Even alcohol is still chugging along, causing deaths, even though there's basically no product uncertainty there. People still try to cram as much as they can into their bodies, just to see if they can and to see if it feels "super awesome, yo". They still party and try different shit, not actually paying all that much attention to what someone is pouring for them or what pill was handed to them. Certainly not carefully looking up the risk statistics of mixing substances and consulting a dosing chart or whatever. Nah, it's, "GET DAT SHIT IN ME AND LET'S GET SUPER HIGH!"
Maybe I'll try putting it this way... the belief that it's just about product uncertainty smells to me a lot like one of Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs. Sure, you may be a rich upper class person who can manage to make casual cocaine holiday work in your life, so long as there isn't product uncertainty in your cocaine, but for many many other people, life just isn't like that. Intense addiction, the need to try always-increasing quantities, and frankly low intelligence/conscientiousness is just going to lead to deaths mostly in proportion to how inherently dangerous the substances are. Product uncertainty can play a role, but a more minor one.
Finally, even if acute ODs do go down a little, what is the cost in terms of long-term mortality? During alcohol prohibition, the government was literally poisoning alcohol, and yet the health benefits in terms of long-term mortality and such were much more significant than the acute effects of their literal, intentional poisoning.
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The key thing isn’t the treatment options. Surprisingly opiates are enjoyable and they don’t want to quit and they also don’t want to do it in the environment you describe.
Jailing dealers would do a lot of the heavy work alone. Clearing out the city-center encampments for doing the dope would do a lot. Yes I know you said long prison sentences for dealers but that’s the hard part we have no appetite for right now. Afghanistan solved the dope issue without treatment centers. They just jailed everyone high for a couple months till they were sober.
Also supposedly the Euro countries that did the legalizing thing cleared out the encampments etc. but I don’t see political will in those cities to do that.
Yes, I agree. Clearly strict enforcement is the only real way to solve the opioid problem which is currently killing over 100,000 Americans every year. Every "soft" method has either been ineffective or made the problem worse. But I do think a push/pull might work better than push alone. Giving junkies a way to comply with the law without having to go clean seems like a useful outlet valve for when we do start actually arresting dealers.
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There's something amusingly ironic about Afghanistan, a country the US military helped to ensure produced large amounts of opiates during the occupation, being capable of solving this particular issue.
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Scandinavian way, System shops for drugs? Does it work in Sweden in lowering alcohol use?
Yes. Somewhat.
"In 2016, annual alcohol consumption per capita (for those aged 15 years and older) was 9.2 liters of pure alcohol in Sweden and 7.5 liters in Norway, compared to the European region's average of 10.3 liters."
The monopoly/system shops way of selling alcohol means that there will be no advertising and no discount/bulk buying which would lead to over-consumption.
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The report (or executive summary) also cites meth.
I realize that meth is probably cheaper per hour spent fucked up, but when you have twice as many tweakers as drunks…
I've spoken to bosses of low-skilled labor who actively prefer hiring alcoholics because if they're drunk every night, they go to bed before 10, and get up at 4 too hung over to go back to sleep, and get to work on time because what the fuck else you gonna do in the morning, and then do their work until quitting time because they don't want to be pressured to take overtime- that would cut into their drinking- so on the whole they're a lot better workers than tweakers or potheads. It's possible that low functionality people do better on booze, at least compared to other substances.
The problem with drunks is that they commit violent crimes (particularly domestic ones) in a way which potheads don't - not that they can't hold down jobs. In most of America, also that it is impossible for non-rich people to avoid driving (rich people can afford taxis) so if you are drinking you are probably drink-driving. Stimulants don't make you as bad a driver as depressants like alcohol.
At least, not until the potheads turn psychotic. At that point they're perfectly capable of violence.
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