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How does a prosperous society combat insidious "compassion"?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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It still shifts the supply curve leftwards. No one ever said it would eliminate the supply completely.
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Huh? No they won't. The chance of getting arrested changes the incentives.
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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.
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.
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Point taken, I guess I was responding to GoodGuy's attitude that "it's just so simple". It's really not.
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.
Which place has successfully housed fentanyl addicts at reasonable cost
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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