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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25974 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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How does a prosperous society combat insidious "compassion"?

NYT: A City’s Campaign Against Homelessness Brings Stories of Violence Local officials called for residents to deter the homeless in Kalispell, Mont., but unhoused residents said they were then accosted and attacked.

In Kalispell, city leaders approved an ordinance to punish motorists who give money or supplies to panhandlers. They shut off water and electricity at a city park where some were seeking refuge. The county commissioners wrote an open letter to the community early last year, warning that providing shelter or resources to homeless people would “enable” them and entice more of them into the area.

Homeless residents said the city’s letter unleashed a punishing public backlash, with many reporting that groups of young people were roaming through homeless encampments and tormenting those living there.

The article then notes acts of violence including eggs thrown, paintballs shot, and one homeless beaten dead (though the motive is not specified). None of this seems particularly remarkable to me, as the base rate for being subject to intra-homeless violence and general excess mortality seems substantial in any American city.

Yet the article's top reader comments predictably shout from the rooftops "cruelty", "what happened to compassion", "these so-called Christians", "it's a war against the homeless, not homelessness". Worse, I don't get the sense this chorus is particularly performative as compared to other virtue signaling hobby horses. Instead, my read, based on nothing more than a decade-long familiarity of NYT reader comments, is that a majority of the readership genuinely believes the people of Kalispell, Montana to be deplorables as a result of their anti-homeless actions.

I haven't egged, paintballed, or beaten any homeless and don't intend to start, but I firmly believe that any city will be worse off if a "compassionate" genie magically conjured up 100 homeless people to live its streets; no comment on whether I think a city should welcome a "cruel" genie who's able and willing to magically poof away the same. I also understand second order effects and believe people respond to incentives. It seems to me, then, that every compassionate Times reader equals something like 0.0001 compassionate genies, and every cruel Kalispell resident 0.01 cruel genies. Mechanics and process aside, the end result is a San Fran full of growing compassion and ever more unhoused, and a Kalispell with a cruel lid on the homeless, and maybe even a reduction down the line.

The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion? Even if the rational counterarguments are themselves obvious, it seems like a fundamentally losing messaging game. We raise our children to be compassionate and we look for spouses who are compassionate. Trying to shout from the rooftops that compassion is actually bad when it comes to the homeless feels akin to telling the world that generosity is bad when it comes to tipping. Which is why I'm resigned that no matter how many articles are written about the tipping culture being out of control, it will creep up to more industries and circumstances and higher preset amounts. Similarly, I'm resigned that more tax and charity dollars will go to the homeless and the homeless industrial complex ad infinitum, because you can't argue against compassion, at least not outside of the ratsphere and among the voting masses.

But perhaps an answer is to change the framing entirely. Ivy League campus DEI would have never died from straight white men (and adjacent Asians) arguing how anti-white and anti-man the apparatus is; it's just not persuasive enough for the public long accustomed to hearing about oppression, systemic racism, patriarchy, and the value of diversity. Falling the accepted wisdom requires something entirely different, recently having one oppressed in-group fight another until the contradiction is impossible to sustain.

So is there an entirely different approach to beating back compassion when it comes to the homeless problem? Is it possible to effectively campaign for the cruel genie?

How does a prosperous society combat insidious "compassion"?

With actual compassion.

It's not like homelessness is an unsolvable problem.

Sure, we'd need to spend money on it, but not that much; do you have any idea how much money we spend on beer and makeup? More to the point, do you realize that the labor force participation rate for adults is around 62%? We have plenty of excess capacity that could be turned towards solving this problem, if we wanted to.

Hell, the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices. We could make a big impact just by lifting the zoning restrictions that economists are already telling us to lift for non-compassionate reasons.

It may be true that some specific types of half-measures towards compassion are worse than nothing, but that doesn't mean we should accept doing nothing. It means we should use full measures.

Hell, the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices.

Is this correlation or causation? What do you think it's like being homeless in small town Indiana? Way shittier than San Francisco or Seattle, I guarantee, both in terms of support for subsistence as well as entertainment and amusement.

The chronic, problematic homeless have very little incentive to stick around where they grew up, their families, local support networks, because they have already lost or devalued them. The people shitting or shooting on sidewalks in SF have already exhausted the patience of those who once cared about them.

People want to deny this for some reason, and say that the vast majority of SF homeless are former SF residents, implying that maybe they've never left.

The question I would ask any homeless in SF:

Did you once rent or own here? Have you ever lived anywhere else?

As for why they might choose SF over Indiana, I hope it's obvious.

Did you once rent or own here? Have you ever lived anywhere else?

From the 2019 San Francisco homeless survey

With the relevant 2019 answers being-

Seventy percent (70%) of respondents reported living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless. Of those, over half (55%) reported living in San Francisco for 10 or more years. Six percent (6%) reported living in San Francisco for less than one year.

Eight percent (8%) of respondents reported living out of state at the time they became homeless. Twenty- two percent (22%) reported living in another county within California.

Thirty percent (30%) of respondents reported living in a home owned or rented by themselves or a partner immediately prior to becoming homeless. Thirty-three percent (33%) reported staying with friends or family. Twelve percent (12%) reported living in subsidized housing, and 5% were staying in a hotel or motel. Six percent (6%) of respondents reported they were in a jail or prison immediately prior to becoming homeless, while 4% were in a hospital or treatment facility, 3% were living in foster care, and 1% were in a juvenile justice facility.

I have a prior against the accuracy of the surveys, as there is definitely a "narrative" to uphold, and I have to imagine the survey takers are themselves homeless advocates and activists, more interested accumulating and distributing resources than hardheaded analysis. Still, taking these numbers at face value:

Of 100 homeless people:

  • 30 were homeless elsewhere and moved to SF
  • 4 became homeless within a year of moving to SF
  • 28 were living housed in SF for between 1 and 10 years
  • 38 were living housed in SF for more than 10 years

How does one randomly sample homeless people? Is this a representative sample? I would survey most egregious cases first -- the zombies milling about the UN plaza in the open air drug market. The shitters, shooters, hitters, harassers, yellers. Maybe the ones with the most encounters with police. I can imagine the sampling in this survey was done via more "official" means, like those contacting advocacy orgs, shelters, case workers, etc. There are very real methodological difficulties here. I haven't yet dug into the details of the survey, but maybe you are familiar with it?

Smells like narrative to me too. But even if we accept the numbers are accurate, I don't see how having a high percentage of locals changes the bottom line. SF has had high levels of out-migration to other cities and states for years, with cost of living being the top cited reason. Presumably the vast majority of these who moved did not end up homeless in their new locales. Why should policy reward those who chose to stay behind and end up homeless? Seems to me society is better off if it incentivized mobility so people on the verge of homelessness at a HCOL area can have a home in a LCOL area.

Not beyond what is covered in the document itself, but yes any survey like this is going to be biased because at the bare minimum the respondents are cooperative and capable enough to answer a survey instead of stabbing the person attempting to administer it or simply staring into space when asked questions.

Here is how they said they got responses:

Surveys were conducted by peer survey workers with lived homeless experience who were referred by local service providers. Training sessions were facilitated by ASR, City staff, and community partners. Potential interviewers were led through a comprehensive orientation that included project background information as well as detailed instruction on respondent eligibility, interviewing protocol, and confidentiality. Peer survey workers were compensated at a rate of $7 per completed survey. It was determined that survey data would be more easily obtained if an incentive gift was offered to respondents in appreciation for their time and participation. Socks were provided as an incentive for participating in the 2019 homeless survey. The socks were easy to distribute, had wide appeal, and could be provided within the project budget. The incentives proved to be widely accepted among survey respondents.

Based on a Point-in-Time Count estimate of 8,035 homeless persons, with a randomized survey sampling process, the 1,054 valid surveys represented a confidence interval of +/- 3% with a 95% confidence level when generalizing the results of the survey to the estimated population of individuals experiencing homelessness in San Francisco. The 2019 survey was administered in shelters, transitional housing facilities, and on the street. In order to ensure the representation of transitional housing residents, who can be underrepresented in a street- based survey, survey quotas were created to reach individuals and heads of family households living in these programs. Strategic attempts were also made to reach individuals in various geographic locations and of various subset groups such as homeless youth, minority ethnic groups, military veterans, domestic violence survivors, and families. One way to increase the participation of these groups was to recruit peer survey workers. Since 2009, the ASR survey methodology has prioritized a peer-to-peer approach to data collection by increasing the number of currently homeless surveyors. In order to increase randomization of sample respondents, survey workers were trained to employ an “every third encounter” survey approach. Survey workers were instructed to approach every third person they considered to be an eligible survey respondent. If the person declined to take the survey, the survey worker could approach the next eligible person they encountered. After completing a survey, the randomized approach was resumed.

And their self-admitted problems with their methodology:

The 2019 San Francisco Homeless Survey methodology relies heavily on self-reported data collected from peer surveyors and program staff. While self-report allows individuals to represent their own experiences, self-reported data are often more variable than clinically reported data. However, using a peer-to-peer interviewing methodology is believed to allow respondents to be more candid with their answers and to help reduce the uneasiness of revealing personal information. Further, service providers and City staff members recommended individuals who would be the best suited to conducting interviews and these individuals received comprehensive training about how to conduct interviews. Service providers and City staff also reviewed the surveys to ensure quality responses. Surveys that were considered incomplete or containing false responses were not accepted, the process for which included reviewing individual surveys submitted by surveyors and assessing patterns in survey responses for inconsistencies. It is important to recognize that variations between survey years may result from shifts in the demographic profiles of surveyors and accessibility to certain populations. Survey confidence intervals presented indicate the level of variability that may occur from year to year when interpreting findings. While every effort was made to collect surveys from a random and diverse sample of sheltered and unsheltered individuals, the hard-to-reach nature of the population experiencing homelessness prevents a true random sampling. Recruitment of diverse and geographically dispersed surveyors was prioritized. However, equal survey participation across all populations may be limited by the participation and adequate representation of subpopulations in planning and implementation processes. This includes persons living in vehicles, who are historically difficult to enumerate and survey.

Edit :To your point:

Is this a representative sample? I would survey most egregious cases first -- the zombies milling about the UN plaza in the open air drug market. The shitters, shooters, hitters, harassers, yellers. Maybe the ones with the most encounters with police.

I am not sure how this would be a more representative sample of the homeless population as a whole. I do think that for many matters involving the homeless it would be far more useful to drill into the disruptive + perennial homeless population rather than those who are unobtrusive or temporary. Though there are obvious difficulties in collecting data on those actively working against you doing so.

Great response. No quibbles. Fully agreed on final paragraph.

Hell, the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices.

Could that be because both homeless people and non-homeless people want to live in certain areas, while the latter pay for the privilege and thereby drive up housing prices?

Probably not. The vast majority of homeless people became homeless in their current locale, which suggests the relationship is people move to attractive location => housing costs go up => some segment of the population that wasn't at risk of becoming homeless now is => individual episodes of misfortune amongst the now-larger at-risk population lead to more homeless people.

Ah, that additional data does give a clearer picture.

the labor force participation rate for adults is around 62%?

It's actually 85% when you remove people past retirement age.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

You can get paid six figures working at a buc-ees in rural Alabama. The 15% not participating in the labor force have reasons for this and are unlikely to be interested in government make-work.

Considering stay at home parents, students and people between jobs or purposefully marginally employed: that's really high.

I thought labor participation rate was at an all time low, but this sounds sensible.

People between jobs or marginally employed usually count as the labor force, but yes.

Sure, we'd need to spend money on it, but not that much; do you have any idea how much money we spend on beer and makeup?

It's hard to get exact numbers, but between the city, state, and non-profits, the spending on San Francisco's homeless is on the order of 1 billion per year. That's like $4000 per San Francisco household, and a far cry from "beer and makeup" money.

What has SF received in exchange for these billions spent? Nothing but more squalor, decay, and crime. That's because more money is either useless or actively harmful. Solving homelessness is a fairly intractable problem if all you have is a carrot and no stick.

Housing isn't the problem. Drugs are the problem. Last year in King County (Seattle), there were 1293 drug overdose deaths. In 2022, there were 1001. In 2021, there were 708. In 2020, there were 509. In just 3 years, overdose deaths increased 150% from an already high level.

These are the drug deaths. Imagine how many drug users there are. Imagine trying to get a job or respond to government incentives if you are addicted to fentanyl.

The best thing we can do to reduce homelessness right now is to arrest, prosecute, and jail fentanyl dealers. Maybe this wouldn't save our current batch of junkies. But it would stop new ones from being created.

The best thing we can do to reduce homelessness right now is to arrest, prosecute, and jail fentanyl dealers.

To be the devil's advocate: the true best thing we can do to reduce homelessness right now is to spike drugs with enormous elephant-killing doses of carfentanyl.

I'm not saying, "Do it," I'm just saying to run it through the computer and check. It'll say that it won't help, and I'll stop going on about it.

It's crazy, but fentanyl is probably making a dent in the homeless population. With 3,000 deaths in last 3 years, that means 0.1% of the county's population has died of an overdose.

Possibly something like 10% of the people living on the streets have died of a fentanyl overdose in the last 3 years.

A few years ago I read an article from a group of journalists in some Midwest city on their experiences following police and ambulances for a week. All the drug addled homeless they saw. All the fatal overdoses they saw, seemingly miraculously reversed and the dead brought back to life by narcan.

I can't seem to find the full write up now, but here is one of the fun parts.

If you like the sound and feeling of dental drills pressing into you, you'll love the emergency drill used to bore holes into the bones of fentanyl addicts. And then the addict in question comes back to life and runs off with a medical stent sticking out of his leg. The costume designers for Hellraiser are reading this and thinking it's a bit too much.

But more seriously, yes, fentanyl and it's equivalents have surely killed off a significant minority of the would-be indigent population. And the fake not-meth cooked by the cartels is rotting the brains of much of the rest. This is an enormous tragedy seemingly unnoticed by almost everyone.

If you like the sound and feeling of dental drills pressing into you, you'll love the emergency drill used to bore holes into the bones of fentanyl addicts. And then the addict in question comes back to life and runs off with a medical stent sticking out of his leg. The costume designers for Hellraiser are reading this and thinking it's a bit too much.

Hmm, I've never actually seen an interosseous injection or infusion, I always assumed it involved a very sturdy needle and a hammer, but I suppose power tools make more sense.

Insane story. Yeah, Narcan has saved many. I've heard anecdotes about the same person being revived a dozen times by paramedics.

I mentioned elsewhere on this forum that I am mostly a libertarian. Addictive and deadly drugs are one of the few areas that I am not. The harms to society are just too great.

I find it bizarre that some people would defend statements like "you need a license to cut hair" while at the same time saying "if someone wants to sell an addictive and lethal drug that's fine". And yet that is the status quo we've arrived at in places like SF and Seattle.

Overdoses deaths are like 10x what they were during the so-called War on Drugs.

The dealers are just people responding to market incentives. If you arrest them, someone else will take their place.

I can understand the people who look at the crime that results from drug prohibition and try to estimate that it is higher than would be from increased drug usage in the population. Reasonable minds can estimate those factors differently. What I can't understand is this seemingly pervasive opinion that increasing costs in a market somehow doesn't affect equilibrium quantity. Some people go so far as to say that decreasing costs would lower equilibrium quantity, which is even more absurd. At least with the former, one could have the faintest of theoretical support if they posited a totally inelastic demand curve, one that could not even be shifted by applying/removing literal criminal penalties. This still seems like a pretty whack assumption, but that's what you'd need to even get the weakest version of this sort of claim.

Addicts are relatively insensitive to cost fluctuations. Sure maybe the equilibrium will drop slightly, but I don’t think” arrest the dealers” (if you can identify and incarcerate enough of them without authoritarian measures) isn’t going to solve the problem in a way that would be satisfactory to me.

You're not thinking marginally. Any demand curve has "high value consumers". The "addicts", so to speak. They're the ones all the way up at the top left part of the curve. Literally no other product in existence leads people to reason by way of, "There are some high value consumers of this product; therefore, the entire demand curve is nearly perfectly price inelastic." None.

Years back, in the old old place, we analyzed published estimations of the price elasticity of marijuana. I can try to find some time to dig it up. In the meantime, would you like to venture a guesstimate?

What I can't understand is this seemingly pervasive opinion that increasing costs in a market somehow doesn't affect equilibrium quantity. Some people go so far as to say that decreasing costs would lower equilibrium quantity, which is even more absurd.

Aren't there some goods for which lowering their price actually decreases the quantity sold, because it allows people to substitute it with more expensive, higher quality products? However, I've also been told that this was just a hypothetical good speculated by some economists rather than something observed to exist in reality.

But either way, I think almost no one thinks to model this type of thing in terms of supply and demand. There was another comment a couple days back here about why Freddie DeBoer and/or people like him didn't find it obvious that slut shaming was a metaphorical form of unionizing by women in the metaphorical mating market where I think the same phenomenon happens. For some topics, people tend to see as almost supernatural in how they're free from the basic laws of reality, and both crime and love fit into those things. As for why people treat these things as supernatural instead of bound by reality, I think it mostly has to do with how most people, most of the time, including people like me who write on this site, prefer to feel good than to be right. Being right takes hard work, research, skepticism, correcting self-biases, modeling, etc. But it's easy to believe that whatever my side is saying about some controversial topic is correct, and it feels so damned good to do so.

It still shifts the supply curve leftwards. No one ever said it would eliminate the supply completely.

Huh? No they won't. The chance of getting arrested changes the incentives.

SF is more or less the poster child for "I will do anything to end homelessness but build more housing". It's not surprising that their spending on homelessness has failed to resolve the issue when they've made only the most tepid efforts to actually house the homeless rather than just ameliorate their conditions.

Housing isn't the problem. Drugs are the problem.

Drugs aren't the problem. They're a problem, but West Virginia has one of the highest drug overdose rates and lowest homelessness rates (this pattern is true in weaker forms across the rest of Appalachia and parts of the Midwest).

I have the misfortune of visiting San Francisco. When I bitterly complain about the aggressive street-shitting drug-addled homelessness people, I don't mean to say that they'd be productive citizens if only $1000/month studio apartments existed.

Sure, rezone and build some high rises. Step 2: the guy screaming while he sprays diarrhea onto the sidewalk for some reason doesn't get a lease in one. What shall we do with this man when more multi-home zoning doesn't fix his drug-fried brain?

I currently reside in a city that has a homelessness rate similar to SF. While there are some really unhinged characters, the vast majority are merely visibly homeless (which, I will grant, still puts people off - most people don't like being accosted by scruffy strangers asking for money). Cheap housing won't transform them into model citizens, but it will get them off the street and facilitate enforcement against the more genuinely anti-social. I don't know, maybe the SF vagrants are built different.

Perhaps more importantly, it alters the homelessness-generating function. As mentioned, WV is dirt poor and full of addicts, but they are able to die of a fentanyl overdose in the comfort of their own living room, because housing in WV is cheap enough that even a marginally employed fent addict can afford a place to live. If the current crop of homeless contains a large share of people who are unfixable to the degree the only real choice for them is whether or not their cell has padding, preventing more people from ending up in that circumstance is a major part of actually fixing the problem.

Point taken, I guess I was responding to GoodGuy's attitude that "it's just so simple". It's really not.

  1. Which place has "built more housing" and solved their homeless problem. People were pointing to Salt Lake City as an example. As far as I know that has utterly failed now.

  2. Which place has successfully housed fentanyl addicts at reasonable cost

West Virginia has one of the highest drug overdose rates and lowest homelessness rates

I'd have to see if that's even true anymore with the huge increase in overdose rates in places like Washington. But it's worth pointing out that drug addicts don't move to West Virginia, they move AWAY from West Virginia. So West Virginia is outsourcing their drug problem elsewhere.

Even if housing prices are a root cause, we'd have to build a LOT of housing to solve our problems. Many places with cheap housing in the Midwest have had declining populations for decades. West Virginia has a lower population today than it did in 1950. On the other hand, the U.S. has built tons of homes and has the same amount of housing per capita as in the year 2000.

The amount of housing we'd need to build to make a dent is huge. Marginal increases aren't going to cut it. Cutting rent from $3000/mo to $2800/mo isn't going to make SF any more affordable for the fentanyl addict. So what's the cost of increasing our housing stock by 20%? There are 144 million homes in the U.S. Building new ones is very expensive, on the order of let's say $350,000 per (a huge underestimate for places like SF). So it would cost $10 trillion to build enough homes, although of course in practice it would be impossible.

Building housing is not really workable. It's too damn expensive. I would be in favor of measures that make homes a much worse investment in order to curtail market speculation. But I don't think it'd fix the homeless problem.

But it's worth pointing out that drug addicts don't move to West Virginia, they move AWAY from West Virginia.

Drug addicts mostly don't move anywhere. I've never seen any evidence that bears out the idea that there's a significant mobile homeless population migrating towards the most accommodating locales. As near as I can tell, it's the opposite: homeless addicts (and homeless generally) are overwhelmingly in the locality where they became homeless, and where they aren't they're usually near-ish.

we'd have to build a LOT of housing to solve our problems.

True.

There are approximate 1,500,000 new housing starts in the US per year. If we take your estimated cost per unit of 350k (tbh I think this is high, but this is all ROM so it's not going to radically change the picture), we're already spending ~$525b/year. $5T over ten years. Hitting the 20% you suggested entails doubling that. Don't get me wrong, that's a lot of money, but an extra $5T over years for a country with the wealth of the US is not some inconceivable sum. Especially considering that most of it would be coming from the private sector rather than the government. (I also note that it is probably overkill - housing shortages are highly concentrated. WV doesn't need to increase its housing stock at all, CA needs to increase it a lot)

I'd also note that marginal shifts do matter. If the average rent goes down by $200, that suggests low end rent is also going down. It may not be a radical, sweeping improvement, but there will be people who can afford housing who couldn't before or who move from precarious to... less precarious. If building housing is unworkable than that is in effect saying the problem is unsolvable. Solving the opioid crisis is a worthy political goal, but it won't do much for homelessness.

I'd have to see if that's even true anymore with the huge increase in overdose rates in places like Washington.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mortality/drug_poisoning.htm

Even if it's equalized in the intervening time, it doesn't alter the underlying point that the relationship between drug ODs and homelessness rates are not strongly correlated. A hypothetical scenario where WA and WV have the same OD rate but WA has four times the homelessness rate does not suggest drugs are driving homelessness. On the other hand, the median home price in Charleston is $150k, in Seattle it's $800k.

Wonder if all the confusing noise can be cleared up if a city managed to build a sufficient number of bare bones housing that the bulk of the local homeless simply do not want to live in. As it stands, the call to build more housing is all muddled up between the (imo) legitimate call to ease zoning and environmental regulations and the (imo) facile crutch that a city should not be cruel because the simple compassionate answer is to build more.

the (imo) facile crutch that a city should not be cruel because the simple compassionate answer is to build more.

Contra this, there is a certain fetishization of cruelty - often disgust papered over with affected ruthlessness ("sometimes hard choices are necessary; this is a hard choice, therefore it is necessary) - when it comes to discussions of how to handle the homeless/drug addicts/[insert undesirable here]. There is a great deal of room in between the idea that kindness requires us to tolerate anti-social behavior from homeless people and endorsing extra-legal violence against them.

In particular, I tend to find a tendency to underestimate how harshly the homeless are currently treated. For example, I often see the question asked "why don't they break up homeless encampments?" or similar sentiments. And the answer to that is that in most cities they do (to the extent that it's legal to do so). But this doesn't actually accomplish very much - they might temporarily move to a different street, but it can't meaningfully fix the problem because the homeless don't have anywhere to go. Selfish local remedies (e.g. bussing out the homeless) tend to be zero sum, since other localities implement the same measure and you waste a bunch of money pushing the homeless back and forth grandstanding about how tough you are on vagrants.

Selfish local remedies (e.g. bussing out the homeless) tend to be zero sum, since other localities implement the same measure and you waste a bunch of money pushing the homeless back and forth grandstanding about how tough you are on vagrants.

It's a nice thought to think one categorization up, but akin to Theresa May's warning of citizen of nowhere, in practice Texans aren't going to be losing too much sleep over the welfare of people in NYC or Chicago forced to deal with bussed migrants, just as the latter cities never lost much sleep over Texans.

I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread that one way this can be positive sum is to better match what a community is willing to give with how much it actually gives--let the compassionate sanctuary cities provide the sanctuary, and let the cruel law and order states enforce rule of law.

the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices

Yeah sure, offer all of them a spot in a shelter or halfway house.

And then the unrelated problem of crazy aggressive street-dwelling drug addicts will remain. Because there are two problems here: homeless "but there for the grace of God go I" and by-choice drug addicts. No one forced the meth pipe into their mouth.

And if housing prices were so high that you and I couldn't live in our current places: we'd move. We wouldn't move to a city park and get really high and yell at people and shit on the sidewalk.

I want compassion for the homeless. I support shelters for them somewhere far from my neighborhood and I want huge Chinese-style concrete housing blocks legalized on the city core. And we are going to need some other strategy for the drug-addled street-shitters.

In an alternate world, considering China has a glut of housing in its ghost cities and a population bomb, America can send its homeless over along with a big fat check for each.

At 650k homeless and 500k per unit of housing, that’s 320 billion which is maybe doable for the federal government. Double that price (for California) and not so much. I have no idea what the ongoing maintenance cost for that housing would be - a typical house is .5%. Let’s 10x to 5% which is tens of billions per year. Having said that, we’ll manufacture more homeless next year and it’s not like we have the infra, materials, real estate or man power to actually build all of that anyway. I’m not sure this is actually fixable with money after all.

  1. Is it possible that housing pricing is correlated with cities and cities may be easier for homeless people to navigate? That is, high home prices don’t cause homelessness but instead is a function of the same thing that attracts homelessness.

  2. Other argument is people aren’t really worried about the working homeless that housing prices may cause. Instead, they are worried about the drugged out crazy.

I think it’s likely that the correlation is caused by far left politics that favor both impediments to building housing and funding homelessness.

  1. It's possible, but my understanding is that the homelessness is highly correlated with housing prices between cities in a way that's hard to square with that assumption, and that homelessness rates responds to changes in housing prices too quickly for anything like that to be a plausible mechanism. Not an expert though, feel free ot research it more and report back.

  2. Maybe, but a lot of the money and political capital that gets spent on 'homelessness' as an issue end up going to support the working/sane homeless. Take them out of the equation, maybe we find that the drugged out crazies are actually a really small population that we could help pretty cheaply. It at least resolves the confound between the groups and lets us work on the problem more directly.

When people make this argument it drives me nuts. I'm sorry, but I hope you don't actually believe this and honestly I think you are arguing this in bad faith and we should dismiss it because you aren't even arguing against what people are actually talking about. When people complain about the homeless, they aren't complaining about people who can't afford rent or have fallen on tough times. They are complaining about the insane people who scream at women and children and shit on the street or the drug addicts who have no intention of getting sober and leave used needles in parks children play at. Housing prices have no effect on these people because they either have no intention of getting a home, are too mentally ill for it to matter and need full time care, or would just use any housing you give them as a flop house to use and sell drugs at. The only way to help these people is to force them into institutions that will treat their mental illness and addiction against their will. Since you aren't allowed to do that, the only other thing you can do is to make it clear to them being homeless in your areas will suck and force them to go elsewhere.

The only way to help these people is to force them into institutions that will treat their mental illness and addiction against their will.

Even three months in jail (for possession) would probably work miracles. Break their cycle of compulsive using and let them sober up and give them a chance to try being something other than a junkie living in a tent in a park.

(The public thinks of jail as a fate almost like death but they’re not that bad. The best jail is probably better than the worst public school)

Jail is much worse if you're a typical middle class person. If you have no family, no job, and no home, jail isn't such a step down.

Right. If you're a middle class person and go to jail, you're probably no longer a middle class person when you get out.

Going to jail doesn't stop people from using drugs -- in fact it's even worse than rehab in that not only do you meet & spend all your time with a lot of people having a shared interest in doing drugs, but these people also enjoy doing crime in order to get more drugs.

Going to jail forces them to mostly stop being floridly actively addicted for a bit. Those few months where they can think some thoughts aside from how to get their next hit of meth/fentanyl 100% of the time is the valuable opportunity here. Jail has bad parts too: person's re-integration in society becomes harder because they have a record, and they meet a lot more criminals who can teach them to do more crime.

But, this forced sobering up might also be the only tool our society has that stops them from being a junkie destined to overdose in the near future committing crime the whole way.

That's just it -- it's pretty easy to get drugs in jail, drugs addicts that are sent there don't (generally) sober up.

And zero interest in helping you get off drugs. Negative interest really, if they're cooking or supplying helping you get clean cuts into their bottom line.

To be fair, I think of the worst public school as a fate almost like death.

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