Years ago I read about an excellent effort in Italy to reduce the homeless problems there. They examined what made folk homeless and what kept them there.
A big focus was on re-employment and having a fixed postal address. Those who lost their jobs and then their homes with no fixed address were unable to obtain another job and hence fell into a spiral of chronic homelessness.
One of the big takeaways from Italian policy was to firstly provide temporary housing. The second was to create a 'virtual' postal address for anyone affected by homelessness. This apparently helped a lot in enabling people to climb out of homelessness and back onto the career ladder.
From what I've seen, this feeling might be due to the fact that mentally ill people are overly "visible" because they make way more "disturbance" if I may say.
I read about it in a UK magazine called 'The Big Issue' probably about a decade ago. A quick Google turns up nothing unfortunately but IIRC the policy was practised in just a single region, not nationwide so perhaps they discontinued the practise (or I could have misrememebered the country the policy was implemented in!).
> I always felt P.O. boxes should be free for those that are homeless. If said box goes unused it is put back into general use.
They (basically) already are. USPS provides free mailing service for people who don't have a fixed address, and you can use that as your street address (unlike PO boxes, which are invalid for use in circumstances that require a street address). They'll hold onto any mail addressed to you for 30 days.
What's really rude is you can't get a USPS PO BOX without a permanent address. I got the run around with a USPS employee about why I couldn't provide that information. I told them I was essentially transient (coming back from a long trip, no family), and they told me, "tough".
There are private PO boxes you can rent out, instead.
Oh hey, I've been to that shelter. I live in (and grew up in) Utah. My Aunt is severely mentally ill and homeless and relies on the Road Home shelter, I've visited her there a few times. They are doing good work, although being homeless is still pretty shitty, obviously. The hardest part is that the state could take much better care of her if she would allow herself to be diagnosed as handicapped due to her mental illness, but she doesn't believe that she's mentally ill. And of course forcing treatment on her is unethical and probably counter-productive. I don't really know where she's at now, we only have fleeting contact with her.
EDIT: A sad/curious anecdote - at one time she was placed in an apartment. I don't know the details but it was probably using the programs outlined in the article. She lit the apartment on fire and ended up in the hospital. As I understand she believed that she owned the apartment complex and could not understand why the managers would not let her make decisions, so she lit it on fire.
> And of course forcing treatment on her is unethical and probably counter-productive.
Counter-productive is an empirical question, but why is forcing treatment always unethical?
> ...She lit the apartment on fire and ended up in the hospital.
...for example. Do we need to wait for manslaughter charges before the government is responsible?
Often people on the street are at least committing fraud (lying for food, bus fare, cash, etc.). I understand that people do what they need to for survival (at least on their terms), but there is an actual cost to that. For instance, if someone actually lost their wallet and needed fare home, they have to compete with people who say they haven't eaten in days but actually don't want professional help (and may even be unfit to make that decision in the first place). The information asymmetry is enormous in this sort of interaction. To reiterate, the people getting conned aren't the biggest victims here; it's the people who have to deal with a jaded audience and fraudulent sob stories when $20, bus fare, or a prepaid phone is legitimately their biggest need.
Anyway, I'm willing to listen to counterpoints about this, but it just doesn't make sense to me that the government isn't responsible for people who can't (or won't) take care of themselves. I'm talking haven't showered in weeks; open sores on their feet, faces, and bodies; etc. Literally no other group has (or should have!) the power to require someone to get care. If we say it's not the government's job, we're saying it's nobody's job.
I'm willing to hear other thoughts on this. My current conclusion is that the status quo is ethically unconscionable but politically impossible to do anything about, but maybe I'm missing something.
> Counter-productive is an empirical question, but why is forcing treatment always unethical?
Ask most people who were diagnosed as mentally ill by east-german authorities before 1990.
Trust me, however nice they are today, you don't want an authority, a committee, or even "community standards" enforce any medical treatment on someone.
> ...for example. Do we need to wait for manslaughter charges before the government is responsible?
You need offenses to put charges forward. That's how justice works. You just don't jail people for things you suspect they will do.
I don't know. Honestly it seems unethical to me to compel someone to do anything if they haven't done anything illegal, and being homeless / not showering / having sores isn't illegal. There's a fine line between 'helping the mentally ill through compulsory treatment' and 'rounding up the homeless so we don't have to see them all the time' and it seems like whenever we try to do the former we end up doing some of the latter as well.
In my Aunt's case, apparently they decided not to press charges about the fire. Maybe they thought they were doing her a favor, and insurance probably covered the damage anyway.
Although sometimes the lack of consent to be treated is the issue, I think the far bigger issue is underfunded/understaffed mental health services. I think the consent issue is a bit of a distraction from that.
"A 302 commitment in Pennsylvania is an involuntary commitment into a mental health institute for emergency psychiatric evaluation. The person who signs or calls for the 302 must have direct first hand knowledge of the person and the danger they pose to themselves or others."
I think this is an excellent solution, but it is one that won't be replicable by cities like NY, Seattle, or San Francisco until they fix their housing cost problems. If you think about it from a systems perspective, with inflows and outflows, you will begin to see the problem.
1) Inflows: higher housing costs increase the inflow into homelessness. Whether it is job loss, drug addiction, mental illness, or whatever...if you have higher housing costs, you are more likely to end up homeless.
2) Outflows: higher housing costs become a higher bar to leaving homelessness. Let's say someone can address, over time, their underlying cause to homelessness. That person will take longer to overcome the bar of housing costs in a high cost area than an equivalent person with lower housing cost bars to overcome.
Both of these arguments seem obvious, almost tautological, but combined what you have is a higher rate of inflows, and a lower rate of outflows. This means two things: ceteris paribus, you have more homeless people, and the homeless people that you do have take longer to leave homelessness.
Now take into account the fact that in high housing cost areas, housing costs more to build because land prices and construction prices are higher (even taking into account Eminent Domain), and you have:
1) More demand (in terms of quantity of people) for relief housing
2) Higher expected time of use of housing.
3) Higher cost of building housing.
These factors are multiplicative, not additive. Combined, I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of attaining the same success rate is two orders of magnitude higher in San Francisco than it is in Salt Lake City. Construction costs alone take care of your first order of magnitude...now multiply those by the higher inflow rates and outflow rates.
This solution is obvious, but you can't put the cart before the horse. Salt Lake City never had to worry about it...San Francisco does.
Worth noting, since you mention Seattle: Seattle actually ran a Housing First program, but it was limited in scope. It saw similar successes (again within its limited scope).
I'm familiar with it, but I'm not saying an equivalent program can't achieve equivalent success rate, I'm saying that an equivalent program will have an extremely disproportionate cost of implementation if housing costs are higher.
Those cities are also destinations for migrant homeless. How would this SLC system cope if new homeless were showing everyday from out of city like they are in Seattle or SF, or where I live as the eastern street youth population migrates out here every winter to avoid the cold.
Seems like every city would have to try the SLC model instead of putting their homeless on a bus with a one way ticket.
You're ignoring homeless migration, the nature of mental illness, and the fact that people can move. The majority of homeless people you see on the street in cities like Seattle are not people who want help or will utilize it effectively -- they're people who have burned bridges that keep most people who are down on their luck in secondary homelessness.
I'm not ignoring any of that. Chronic and migrant homelessness exist, but they aren't anywhere near a majority of the population. The best data we have available shows chronic homelessness to be between 10-20% of the homeless population. And just because they are chronically homeless doesn't mean they don't want or can't benefit from help. Disability, mental as well as physical, is the largest known contributor to chronic homelessness and most forms of disability are treatable, but treatments are less effective when basic needs like housing are not met.
You sound like an expert on the homeless in Seattle. Do you actually know this for a fact or are you just speculating? Have you talked to the homeless there and seen data? Do you realize mental health issues can cause people to burn bridges even if that's not what they want to do?
The reason there are so many homeless is because they can't build slums for themselves like in developing countries such as India. Living in a slum would be better than being homeless. But in America, the police would tear them down.
This has come up on a number of HN posts about homelessness I've seen recently.
I'm interested in the topic, and actively worked with an encampment in Seattle (Nickelsville) that intended to build permanent dwellings. They were inspired by Dignity Village in Portland. But like you say, their efforts were demolished. But surprisingly to me, the cops involved were openly apologetic and gave everyone involved an opportunity to leave rather than risk arrest or property confiscation.
Do you have direct experience with homeless communities that have built dwellings for themselves? If so, can you talk about that experience?
I barely have any direct experience. I visited Occupy Boston when it was still around and saw their small tent city. I've been to India multiple times and have seen how the very poor live, but I haven't spoken to them. I'm mostly just interested in the topic a lot and have researched it on my own. When I was younger I used to have some homeless friends, but they didn't construct dwellings.
I spend quite a bit of time in Utah and just want to reinforce that chronic homelessness is very different from 'the amount of homeless people you see on the streets' because the area around Pioneer Park is actually worse now than I've seen in years in terms of sheer number-of-homeless.
homelessness is tough. In our medium size city (Columbia, SC) we have roughly 1,400 homeless and no one (myself included) seems to know what to do. I feel like affordable/free housing has been tried before, and you end up with "projects" with a drug problem. I wonder how they expect this will be different.
Am I off here? Does it not seem naive to say: "they're homeless, so let's just give them an apartment and say our 'homeless' rate dropped"? As if that was the essential problem? What about the mental health and drug (etc) issues that created the environment for unsustainable work...
I'm not saying it sounds like a bad solution, but it seems like a bandaid on a gaping wound.
Well now they are not homeless. They have a home. So yes the homeless rate drops. Now that they have stability, the security of a warm home to come home to. A safe place to sleep. Maybe you'll have more luck addressing the other problems that affect them.
I wish people wouldn't latch onto drug addiction as the first thing that must be solved, you're really picking the hardest problem to tackle first and trying to do it in the hardest possible environment to recover. Remember there are plenty of functioning drug addicts in the world wearing suits to their day jobs on Wall Street and the like.
Something this article didn't really get into that I've seen elsewhere: Utah also assigns a caseworker to these people, to help them work on their problems (drugs, drinking, whatever). It's a little more hands-on than just handing over some keys to an apartment; they seem to want this program to work, to have results that stick.
Part of me wonders how much of this program is influenced by Mormon culture. There's this thing known as ward council where they discuss people in the ward (congregation) who have unmet needs, and what can be done to help. Reading the article the similarity popped out to me right away. This program seems like an extension of that on a grander scale.
The problem with your theories is that actual evidence says the programs work far better than anything else we've tried. (I don't intend that to be mean or glib).
These programs typically assign a caseworker who gets to know the homeless people and forms a relationship with them. The early period involves a lot of hand-holding and helping the homeless figure out (or re-discover) how to live a productive adult life.
Most people who end up homeless turn to drugs, prostitution, and have any existing mental problems hugely exacerbated AFTER they become homeless. In other cases it is some other underlying situation (abusive childhood, etc) that triggers drug use that leads to homelessness.
There's also a strong selection effect: many people who become homeless quickly attempt to find employment and a new place to live. Those who don't get out of being homeless quickly become unemployable and thus are locked into the cycle.
As a society we seem to be stuck in this Victorian-era meme that moral failure brings calamity upon people (aka the Just World fallacy).
That applies to success the same as failure... being ambitious and smart is a necessary but not sufficient condition to become successful.
If Mark Zuckerberg got hit by a drunk driver (through no fault of his own) and became a paraplegic while at Harvard he wouldn't be a billionaire today. If he hadn't gotten into Harvard would he have had the connections to get funding and start Facebook? A million things entirely outside his control had to go right for him to be successful. It was a combination of his character, circumstances, and pure luck. If you don't have all three you won't be successful.
Similarly it doesn't take much weakness or bad luck to completely ruin someone's life.
That's why you don't house everyone together. This is something that America's War on Poverty got very wrong. You have to decentralize extreme poverty.
>What about the mental health and drug (etc) issues that created the environment for unsustainable work...
We have to find a way to house people who have mental health problems and drug addictions. If you look in any rich neighborhood you'll find lots of people who meet this description living in relative comfort.
You could just put them in high quality apartments and give them a stipend. The current proposal for a "projects" style homeless shelter where I am would have each unit cost $4,500 per month, with 90% of the units not having a private bathroom (and most not having a full kitchen).
For that price you could easily afford a high end apartment and give the people a large stipend. And if you spread the units out across the city so that each apartment building only had 1-2 homeless families, you'd avoid the problems of concentrating poverty.
Great, but then you'll notice that many other people also like to have a high quality apartment and a stipend. Eventually, you have to give it to a lot of people, and those who work on low salary and pay their rent for a not-so-high-quality apartment will not be happy and many of them will also acquire a status where they deserve a high quality apartment and a stipend.
Much of homelessness is caused by the high cost of housing (SF, NYC, LA, Boston, DC, London, ...) which itself is a result of "market failures" of "economic rents" which are the use of politics to create artificial scarcity. In this case, it is the use of zoning density restrictions and the overuse of historic landmark status. These restrictions make rent and the purchase of homes more expensive to the benefit of landlords. Fix the market failure, fix the zoning rules that create artificial scarcity through politics, and you will do much more to create affordable housing.
I've held for a while that a homeless person getting into housing solves one of the biggest time sinks they have. Once the time is freed up, they are more comfortable, safer and can therefore sleep better, and they can think and make a plan to get re-integrated into mainstream society.
Commenters note that 'housing first' does not work in larger cities like San Francisco and New York because of the cost of housing. Were a basic income in place, homeless persons would be more mobile and could afford basic accommodations in many more places. Therefore, they'd not be so attracted to more hospitable climates or cities with more homeless services. That would increase the options they'd have to move to less expensive housing.
The system proposed here is almost the exact opposite of a basic income:
What Powered Utah's Success...And finally, most of the advocates and agencies in Utah know each other and work well with each other. They also know most of the homeless people by name...One person recommends a name from the list...Ed Snoddy, who does medical outreach for Volunteers of America, a faith-based nonprofit, speaks up...."He is notoriously dealing (drugs) right now,"...The group agrees that this individual does not play nice with others, and isn't right for this particular apartment. For now, his name stays on the list.
They assess need/sociability and provide specific rooms to specific people they think will be well suited to them. Each person has a caseworker who helps them manage their life, since evidently these people can't do it themselves.
And these are mostly "supportive housing". I.e. paternalistic organized homes, rather than just handing out money and expecting the homeless to successfully manage their own lives. This housing isn't just regular flats, it's patrolled by off-duty cops, has lots of rules, and you get kicked out if you don't obey them.
This program is run by the guy who organizes paternalistic social programs for LDS - the state literally asked the church if they could borrow him. This is story about how awesome Mormon social technology is, and is completely the opposite of BI.
It strikes me that the militant egalitarianism of the present age has reached its peak. The intolerant maximalism of its vulgar shamans has made such a grim backdrop that even modest efforts to hold people responsible for their actions create a bright contrast to the sad state of urban America.
You can't eat housing. Yes instead of basic income or our current social services we could just build a lot of homes.
But why would you even build homes in the first place. Do you think Salt Lake City in 2005 with 2000+ chronically homeless people didn't have at least 2000 homes on the market?
Readit News
A big focus was on re-employment and having a fixed postal address. Those who lost their jobs and then their homes with no fixed address were unable to obtain another job and hence fell into a spiral of chronic homelessness.
One of the big takeaways from Italian policy was to firstly provide temporary housing. The second was to create a 'virtual' postal address for anyone affected by homelessness. This apparently helped a lot in enabling people to climb out of homelessness and back onto the career ladder.
I am curious about what you are mentioning: any way for you to retrieve more info so I can look it up?
Verification could be supplied by the county.
They (basically) already are. USPS provides free mailing service for people who don't have a fixed address, and you can use that as your street address (unlike PO boxes, which are invalid for use in circumstances that require a street address). They'll hold onto any mail addressed to you for 30 days.
There are private PO boxes you can rent out, instead.
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EDIT: A sad/curious anecdote - at one time she was placed in an apartment. I don't know the details but it was probably using the programs outlined in the article. She lit the apartment on fire and ended up in the hospital. As I understand she believed that she owned the apartment complex and could not understand why the managers would not let her make decisions, so she lit it on fire.
Counter-productive is an empirical question, but why is forcing treatment always unethical?
> ...She lit the apartment on fire and ended up in the hospital.
...for example. Do we need to wait for manslaughter charges before the government is responsible?
Often people on the street are at least committing fraud (lying for food, bus fare, cash, etc.). I understand that people do what they need to for survival (at least on their terms), but there is an actual cost to that. For instance, if someone actually lost their wallet and needed fare home, they have to compete with people who say they haven't eaten in days but actually don't want professional help (and may even be unfit to make that decision in the first place). The information asymmetry is enormous in this sort of interaction. To reiterate, the people getting conned aren't the biggest victims here; it's the people who have to deal with a jaded audience and fraudulent sob stories when $20, bus fare, or a prepaid phone is legitimately their biggest need.
Anyway, I'm willing to listen to counterpoints about this, but it just doesn't make sense to me that the government isn't responsible for people who can't (or won't) take care of themselves. I'm talking haven't showered in weeks; open sores on their feet, faces, and bodies; etc. Literally no other group has (or should have!) the power to require someone to get care. If we say it's not the government's job, we're saying it's nobody's job.
I'm willing to hear other thoughts on this. My current conclusion is that the status quo is ethically unconscionable but politically impossible to do anything about, but maybe I'm missing something.
Ask most people who were diagnosed as mentally ill by east-german authorities before 1990.
Trust me, however nice they are today, you don't want an authority, a committee, or even "community standards" enforce any medical treatment on someone.
> ...for example. Do we need to wait for manslaughter charges before the government is responsible?
You need offenses to put charges forward. That's how justice works. You just don't jail people for things you suspect they will do.
In my Aunt's case, apparently they decided not to press charges about the fire. Maybe they thought they were doing her a favor, and insurance probably covered the damage anyway.
https://www.reference.com/government-politics/302-commitment...
"A 302 commitment in Pennsylvania is an involuntary commitment into a mental health institute for emergency psychiatric evaluation. The person who signs or calls for the 302 must have direct first hand knowledge of the person and the danger they pose to themselves or others."
1) Inflows: higher housing costs increase the inflow into homelessness. Whether it is job loss, drug addiction, mental illness, or whatever...if you have higher housing costs, you are more likely to end up homeless.
2) Outflows: higher housing costs become a higher bar to leaving homelessness. Let's say someone can address, over time, their underlying cause to homelessness. That person will take longer to overcome the bar of housing costs in a high cost area than an equivalent person with lower housing cost bars to overcome.
Both of these arguments seem obvious, almost tautological, but combined what you have is a higher rate of inflows, and a lower rate of outflows. This means two things: ceteris paribus, you have more homeless people, and the homeless people that you do have take longer to leave homelessness.
Now take into account the fact that in high housing cost areas, housing costs more to build because land prices and construction prices are higher (even taking into account Eminent Domain), and you have: 1) More demand (in terms of quantity of people) for relief housing 2) Higher expected time of use of housing. 3) Higher cost of building housing.
These factors are multiplicative, not additive. Combined, I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of attaining the same success rate is two orders of magnitude higher in San Francisco than it is in Salt Lake City. Construction costs alone take care of your first order of magnitude...now multiply those by the higher inflow rates and outflow rates.
This solution is obvious, but you can't put the cart before the horse. Salt Lake City never had to worry about it...San Francisco does.
Seems like every city would have to try the SLC model instead of putting their homeless on a bus with a one way ticket.
I'm interested in the topic, and actively worked with an encampment in Seattle (Nickelsville) that intended to build permanent dwellings. They were inspired by Dignity Village in Portland. But like you say, their efforts were demolished. But surprisingly to me, the cops involved were openly apologetic and gave everyone involved an opportunity to leave rather than risk arrest or property confiscation.
Do you have direct experience with homeless communities that have built dwellings for themselves? If so, can you talk about that experience?
Am I off here? Does it not seem naive to say: "they're homeless, so let's just give them an apartment and say our 'homeless' rate dropped"? As if that was the essential problem? What about the mental health and drug (etc) issues that created the environment for unsustainable work...
I'm not saying it sounds like a bad solution, but it seems like a bandaid on a gaping wound.
I wish people wouldn't latch onto drug addiction as the first thing that must be solved, you're really picking the hardest problem to tackle first and trying to do it in the hardest possible environment to recover. Remember there are plenty of functioning drug addicts in the world wearing suits to their day jobs on Wall Street and the like.
These programs typically assign a caseworker who gets to know the homeless people and forms a relationship with them. The early period involves a lot of hand-holding and helping the homeless figure out (or re-discover) how to live a productive adult life.
Most people who end up homeless turn to drugs, prostitution, and have any existing mental problems hugely exacerbated AFTER they become homeless. In other cases it is some other underlying situation (abusive childhood, etc) that triggers drug use that leads to homelessness.
There's also a strong selection effect: many people who become homeless quickly attempt to find employment and a new place to live. Those who don't get out of being homeless quickly become unemployable and thus are locked into the cycle.
As a society we seem to be stuck in this Victorian-era meme that moral failure brings calamity upon people (aka the Just World fallacy).
That applies to success the same as failure... being ambitious and smart is a necessary but not sufficient condition to become successful.
If Mark Zuckerberg got hit by a drunk driver (through no fault of his own) and became a paraplegic while at Harvard he wouldn't be a billionaire today. If he hadn't gotten into Harvard would he have had the connections to get funding and start Facebook? A million things entirely outside his control had to go right for him to be successful. It was a combination of his character, circumstances, and pure luck. If you don't have all three you won't be successful.
Similarly it doesn't take much weakness or bad luck to completely ruin someone's life.
That's why you don't house everyone together. This is something that America's War on Poverty got very wrong. You have to decentralize extreme poverty.
We have to find a way to house people who have mental health problems and drug addictions. If you look in any rich neighborhood you'll find lots of people who meet this description living in relative comfort.
You could just put them in high quality apartments and give them a stipend. The current proposal for a "projects" style homeless shelter where I am would have each unit cost $4,500 per month, with 90% of the units not having a private bathroom (and most not having a full kitchen).
For that price you could easily afford a high end apartment and give the people a large stipend. And if you spread the units out across the city so that each apartment building only had 1-2 homeless families, you'd avoid the problems of concentrating poverty.
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See Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser, Build Big, Bill an article which explains the high cost of housing is caused for the reasons I stated. http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1....
I've held for a while that a homeless person getting into housing solves one of the biggest time sinks they have. Once the time is freed up, they are more comfortable, safer and can therefore sleep better, and they can think and make a plan to get re-integrated into mainstream society.
Commenters note that 'housing first' does not work in larger cities like San Francisco and New York because of the cost of housing. Were a basic income in place, homeless persons would be more mobile and could afford basic accommodations in many more places. Therefore, they'd not be so attracted to more hospitable climates or cities with more homeless services. That would increase the options they'd have to move to less expensive housing.
What Powered Utah's Success...And finally, most of the advocates and agencies in Utah know each other and work well with each other. They also know most of the homeless people by name...One person recommends a name from the list...Ed Snoddy, who does medical outreach for Volunteers of America, a faith-based nonprofit, speaks up...."He is notoriously dealing (drugs) right now,"...The group agrees that this individual does not play nice with others, and isn't right for this particular apartment. For now, his name stays on the list.
They assess need/sociability and provide specific rooms to specific people they think will be well suited to them. Each person has a caseworker who helps them manage their life, since evidently these people can't do it themselves.
And these are mostly "supportive housing". I.e. paternalistic organized homes, rather than just handing out money and expecting the homeless to successfully manage their own lives. This housing isn't just regular flats, it's patrolled by off-duty cops, has lots of rules, and you get kicked out if you don't obey them.
This program is run by the guy who organizes paternalistic social programs for LDS - the state literally asked the church if they could borrow him. This is story about how awesome Mormon social technology is, and is completely the opposite of BI.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/housing-first-so...
Do you have any evidence that this would be the outcome? What makes you say that much of the money would go towards housing in the first place?
But why would you even build homes in the first place. Do you think Salt Lake City in 2005 with 2000+ chronically homeless people didn't have at least 2000 homes on the market?