The problem is: the "science" is used only as a tool to buttress one's pre-defined notions.
Here in San Francisco, near the beginning of COVID, we put our homeless in hotel rooms. One resident per room, no shared bathrooms, etc. Plus, we gave them free food, free alcohol and free drugs (weed, IIRC). The idea was to satisfy all of their needs and not have them going outside. This lasted close to 2 years.
This was a fairly big sample: close to 3700 people. That is a statistically significant sample, given that SF's total homeless population is around 20K - 30K (including those in shelters).
So what happened with these people? How many of them cleaned up their acts and became productive members of society? This would be a fairly straightforward question to answer, right?
BUT! The Homeless Industry in SF has refused to do so! There were no studies done on this population and their outcomes. Whatever happened to these scientists? Why did they ignore this golden opportunity to study this situation? What we _do_ know is that the residents trashed the hotels and the City of SF is being sued by these hotels to the tune of 10s of millions of dollars.
I remember when all flights were grounded after 9/11, and scientists took the opportunity to study the impact of contrails on the night sky, visibility of celestial bodies, etc. Weirdly, no scientist considered it worthwhile to study these homeless people in their new housing.
> How many of them cleaned up their acts and became productive members of society?
It doesn’t sound like this was the purpose, it sounds like the purpose was to temporarily keep them off the street. So I’m not exactly shocked that it didn’t give a result it wasn’t designed to give.
Way to dodge the question. Sure, it wasn't the purpose, but it was the same situation!
If you're going to tell me that providing housing alone is enough for these people, then this is exactly that situation: they were provided free room and board (and *NOT* shared rooms, either). So where are the positive outcomes that "housing first" is supposed to bring?
> Weirdly, no scientist considered it worthwhile to study these homeless people in their new housing. Why did they ignore this golden opportunity to study this situation?
Scientists are a scarce resource and job offers need to compete for them. Those able to provide a workplace better than: "typing in your computer using an unmade bed as table in a trashed small hotel room filled with weed smoke and shared with drunk people that could or not have previous mental issues and could be violent or not" got all the talent.
Not really difficult to understand. Science is hard enough yet.
I think we have to separate caring for our fellow community members from and supporting people in being productive members of society. So many people are with stable homes because they weren’t able - for whatever reason — to be a productive member of society (and there are plenty of arguments about what productive means). We should still care for them.
This article is a good overview of the research about treatment-first vs housing-first approaches.
The last paragraph is pretty clear on the real difficulty:
>The major obstacles to resolving homelessness remain ideological. It is politically hard to sell the idea that people who take drugs or are disruptive should get free housing – even when the evidence shows that is actually what works.
My observation is that it's more politically contentious to decide where to put these free homes. We have a lot of them in the SF Bay Area (some legit, many not), and they all attract activity that "I don't love" having kids around.
I try to fight my internal NIMBYism, but clutter horde and verbal assaults are where I draw the line.
Iirc the Victorian government in Australia decided to buy individual apartments in high rises to put drug addicts in resulting in the buildings becoming so unsafe that the original occupants had to sell and move somewhere else. Turning them in to radical anti public housing activists so they don’t have to move and lose a load of money again.
Imagine saving up for ages to buy a nice 3 bedroom apt to move in with your family with and then a few years later your kids are being threatened by an unstable meth head in the elevator forcing you to move and lose most of your wealth in the process.
The majority of effectively homeless in the US are working people. This means people who dont own or rent any kind of housing. They crash in other people's places, frequently going homeless for periods. This includes working families. Their size is estimated in millions.
The chronic homeless are people who dont even have any place to crash from time to time. People refer to these people as 'the homeless', without knowing that a lot of the above category also enters this category frequently over any given year. The chronic homeless category also includes working people due to the skyrocketing housing costs, especially in major metropolises like NY, SF etc. This segment's size is estimated in a range in between 500,000 to 3 million, depending on whose research and criteria you take.
Drug addicts are also in this category, and the existing economic establishment prefers to identify the homeless with them in order to thwart any reform that could cause an increase in their taxes or disturb the real estate sector.
...
So that's right - the problem is ideological. But maybe even before that, its economical - those who hoard the wealth dont want anyone to disturb them and their ever-increasing hoards of wealth with any pesky taxes...
This is one big root of the problem. There are very few resources that someone falling into homelessness can lean on, that are not their friends/family.
People who have that safety net can spend a few weeks or months crashing on couches until they get their housing situation sorted out. People who, for whatever reason, don't, are the ones trying to hold a job while living out of a car, and one bad encounter with the police can cause them to lose that job.
And once you fall into the same strata as the chronic homeless, it is almost impossible to crawl out of it.
If you want to reduce the number of chronic homeless give years from now, we need services for the temporary homeless, today. If you're getting kicked out of your apartment next Tuesday, and have nobody you can lean on, what you need is four walls and a roof so that you don't land on the street.
Neither section 8 housing, nor the current shelter system supply that. Especially if you're a man, or are queer, or, or, or...
As usual, the logic is backwards, tons of people who take drugs and are disruptive have housing, lack of housing make those things worse.
From the New York Times article on my hometown Houston trying to end homelessness with a housing first policy:
> But housing first involves a different logic: When you’re drowning, it doesn’t help if your rescuer insists you learn to swim before returning you to shore. You can address your issues once you’re on land. Or not. Either way, you join the wider population of people battling demons behind closed doors.
Because as soon as it happens, I will be first in the line with the question: okay, what should I do to get a free house? Do I need to consume drugs? Would weed do, or it has to be some heavier stuff?
I guarantee I could produce a program that would be acceptable to conservatives and provide free housing.
Note also that Utah, a very conservative state, solves homelessness in exactly this way.
It just might be that the housing would not be provided by funneling huge amounts of tax dollars to the rentier class, and might involve constructing more houses, and therefore would be opposed by the left.
If you guarantee you could do this, then do it? Plenty of states the left has no actual say in governance (MS, AL, SC, FL, TX) right now- perfect time to prove it.
Socialism becomes a lot more palatable to majority populations as long as minority populations are kept to a minimum. With a reasonable expectation that the recipients of help look like you, helping starts to seem more like an obligation than an imposition.
Portland, cited in the article, announced it's beginning yet another sweep of homeless encampments yesterday. At the press conference announcing it, the mayor - who's been ordering sweeps his entire tenure - admits they don't and haven't ever helped the people being swept.
He's also still pushing his plan to establish city-run outdoor camps for homeless people, and to criminalize rejecting those city-run camps when swept - but the city-run camps' locations haven't even been announced, much less started.
From a NIMBY perspective, a city-run homeless camp sounds even worse than a normal homeless camp. At least in the latter case you can hope that the city will get rid of the camp soon, but if the camp is made by the city itself then what hope can you have?
So I think this plan of his will never be implemented. Politically, talking about it makes more sense than actually implementing it.
Don't these permanent "homeless camps" already exist though? When I was in Portland last January I saw a large grouping of what I can only describe as very-tiny homes - essentially glorified shacks on rollers and stilts - which were obviously city-sanctioned homeless encampments next to a bypass.
Actually there is a huge amount of local support for these camps politically. Both in issue polling [1] and in terms of which candidates won election to city council, etc.
Part of this has to do with the fact that there have been persistent homeless camps directly in some of the richest neighborhoods, and the city is proposing that the sanctioned camps won't be in residential neighborhoods.[2] If they happen, it will more likely be in a parking lot on the edges of the city or in industrial/commercial zones. Combine the site selection criteria and the obvious advantages of having a centralized set of camps with waste collection, fire code enforcement, and 24/7 onsite security, and it's no-brainer to most people. The real barrier is the question of where the money comes from and who will be in charge, because Portland has an extremely dysfunctional, fractured local government where funding for homeless services is run by an office jointly administered by the city and the county.
The difference is that in practice, impromptu camps are often set up in city centers and dense residential neighborhoods. Officially sanctioned sites can be farther removed from those areas.
There's a Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode about government run homelessness camps on the US West Coast in 2024. I see we're working on making this happen.
This doesn't seem to address that if you are the nicest place to move to as homeless, more will move there, perpetuating the need for the chosen solution. I'm all for helping people, but if it's not sustainable, it will eventually screw everyone, not just the previously homeless.
> This doesn’t seem to address that if you are the nicest place to move to as homeless, more will move there, perpetuating the need for the chosen solution.
That mitigates its effectiveness as a local solution, but that problem is in turn mitigated when you move it up to wider regions (and particularly when you move it up to jurisdictions with some form of border control.)
Probably because people are free to migrate anywhere within a country's borders, so cities with lots of social services get overrun with a disproportionate amount of people wanting to use them. These sorts of policies need to be implemented at a nation-wide level for them to be truly effective.
"Thing that fails in the small scale needs to be implemented on an even bigger scale" is a hard sell. How do you convince a state that thinks California is a hell hole that they should implement Californian policies in their own state? This doesn't seem possible to me.
If there can be a politically practical solution at all, I think it must be one that can be demonstrated to work in the small scale.
If you implement them nation-wide the only result would be people coming from abroad to enjoy housing-first social services. Unless you are saying the first step towards solving homelessness is the prevention of illegal entry and the mass expulsion of illegal immigrants.
By all means, use data to make your case for effective solutions.
Do not for a second forget that it’ll happen person by messy person and that this is not only inevitable, but good.
Convincing NIMBYs of this is, well, a shitton of work.
So three men from the recovery house next door help him to his feet, walk him to the halfway house and put him in the shower. They wash his clothes and shoes and give him their things to wear while he waits. They give him coffee and dinner, and they give him respect. I talked to these other men later, and even though they had very little sobriety, they did not cast this other guy off for not being well enough to be there. Somehow this broken guy was treated like one of them, because they could see that he was one of them. No one was pretending he wasn't covered with shit, but there was a real sense of kinship.
[…]
I was just totally amazed by what I had seen. And I had a little shred of hope. I couldn't have put it into words, but until that meeting, I had thought that I would recover with men and women like myself; which is to say, overeducated, fun to be with and housebroken. And that this would happen quickly and efficiently. But I was wrong.
I wish this article were more specific on what "housing first" means. My understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) is that homeless shelters across the country have empty beds, and that these are not considered housing.
When the article describes an alternative of providing the homeless "housing," what does this housing look like? What aspects of housing are provided that are not generally provided at homeless shelters? Is it privacy, security of belongings, a place to stay during the day, quietness during the night, or other factors that are most substantially different from what is currently available?
Basically something that resembles a home aka apartment.
'Shelters' are not close to that. They are places to 'kind of sleep' and that's usually it.
It's not a 'home' if you have to share a room with 40 other smelly people and you have to be out by morning. There is a lot of theft, violence, many homeless find it much more peacable to sleep rough than in a shelter.
Many people are so messed up and many incorrigably irresponsible so this program won't work (the flats will immediately turn into repulsively dirty crack houses), but for many it's foundational to be able to sleep and 'be' somewhere that's warm, protected from the elements, where you're not going to be accosted, stolen from.
Just imagine trying to 'get a job' when you live in a tent. Our society is not very capable of handling that. Forget the physical duress of it - it's the psychological aspect. If you are in bum like conditions, surrounded by other bums, crackheads, thieves, it's really hard to fathom yourself as a 'good coffee server'.
Give people a flat with decent neighbours, a community etc and that's the bedrock from which everything else is founded, including their own identity.
All of that said, Finland is not California, and they are light years apart.
I can 100% see it working in Helsinki and not in Cali at all. For one thing, there would be 20 million people lined up for 'free housing' in Cali. They don't have the same kinds of communities to integrate people into, weaker family and cultural structures. Much, much worse violence etc..
But 'housing first' is an important insight to consider because when you think about it it makes sense.
> But 'housing first' is an important insight to consider because when you think about it it makes sense.
And it's a good goal, too. I mean, to achieve that, you'd have to aggressively build apartments, because it's not like we have 50% of flats being empty and people ending up on the street because nobody will take the government's money and rent out apartments. Once you do that appropriately, some of the pressure will be lowered. You'll still end up with some people landing on the streets, but you'll have fewer, because rents are more affordable and especially smaller apartments are being built. Fewer people, smaller problem.
Unfortunately, that might also be why we're not doing it everywhere. For all I can tell, most local governments don't want new housing.
Shelters are not homes and are no intended to be. They are a bed to sleep in if you don't have one that night and can comply with all of their many, many rules.
Readit News
Here in San Francisco, near the beginning of COVID, we put our homeless in hotel rooms. One resident per room, no shared bathrooms, etc. Plus, we gave them free food, free alcohol and free drugs (weed, IIRC). The idea was to satisfy all of their needs and not have them going outside. This lasted close to 2 years.
This was a fairly big sample: close to 3700 people. That is a statistically significant sample, given that SF's total homeless population is around 20K - 30K (including those in shelters).
So what happened with these people? How many of them cleaned up their acts and became productive members of society? This would be a fairly straightforward question to answer, right?
BUT! The Homeless Industry in SF has refused to do so! There were no studies done on this population and their outcomes. Whatever happened to these scientists? Why did they ignore this golden opportunity to study this situation? What we _do_ know is that the residents trashed the hotels and the City of SF is being sued by these hotels to the tune of 10s of millions of dollars.
I remember when all flights were grounded after 9/11, and scientists took the opportunity to study the impact of contrails on the night sky, visibility of celestial bodies, etc. Weirdly, no scientist considered it worthwhile to study these homeless people in their new housing.
It doesn’t sound like this was the purpose, it sounds like the purpose was to temporarily keep them off the street. So I’m not exactly shocked that it didn’t give a result it wasn’t designed to give.
If you're going to tell me that providing housing alone is enough for these people, then this is exactly that situation: they were provided free room and board (and *NOT* shared rooms, either). So where are the positive outcomes that "housing first" is supposed to bring?
Scientists are a scarce resource and job offers need to compete for them. Those able to provide a workplace better than: "typing in your computer using an unmade bed as table in a trashed small hotel room filled with weed smoke and shared with drunk people that could or not have previous mental issues and could be violent or not" got all the talent.
Not really difficult to understand. Science is hard enough yet.
is nice to the homeless
Finland-land-land
Super cool to the homeless
In the city
City of Helsinki
Lots of rich people giving change to the homeless
The last paragraph is pretty clear on the real difficulty:
>The major obstacles to resolving homelessness remain ideological. It is politically hard to sell the idea that people who take drugs or are disruptive should get free housing – even when the evidence shows that is actually what works.
I try to fight my internal NIMBYism, but clutter horde and verbal assaults are where I draw the line.
Imagine saving up for ages to buy a nice 3 bedroom apt to move in with your family with and then a few years later your kids are being threatened by an unstable meth head in the elevator forcing you to move and lose most of your wealth in the process.
The majority of effectively homeless in the US are working people. This means people who dont own or rent any kind of housing. They crash in other people's places, frequently going homeless for periods. This includes working families. Their size is estimated in millions.
The chronic homeless are people who dont even have any place to crash from time to time. People refer to these people as 'the homeless', without knowing that a lot of the above category also enters this category frequently over any given year. The chronic homeless category also includes working people due to the skyrocketing housing costs, especially in major metropolises like NY, SF etc. This segment's size is estimated in a range in between 500,000 to 3 million, depending on whose research and criteria you take.
Drug addicts are also in this category, and the existing economic establishment prefers to identify the homeless with them in order to thwart any reform that could cause an increase in their taxes or disturb the real estate sector.
...
So that's right - the problem is ideological. But maybe even before that, its economical - those who hoard the wealth dont want anyone to disturb them and their ever-increasing hoards of wealth with any pesky taxes...
People who have that safety net can spend a few weeks or months crashing on couches until they get their housing situation sorted out. People who, for whatever reason, don't, are the ones trying to hold a job while living out of a car, and one bad encounter with the police can cause them to lose that job.
And once you fall into the same strata as the chronic homeless, it is almost impossible to crawl out of it.
If you want to reduce the number of chronic homeless give years from now, we need services for the temporary homeless, today. If you're getting kicked out of your apartment next Tuesday, and have nobody you can lean on, what you need is four walls and a roof so that you don't land on the street.
Neither section 8 housing, nor the current shelter system supply that. Especially if you're a man, or are queer, or, or, or...
From the New York Times article on my hometown Houston trying to end homelessness with a housing first policy:
> But housing first involves a different logic: When you’re drowning, it doesn’t help if your rescuer insists you learn to swim before returning you to shore. You can address your issues once you’re on land. Or not. Either way, you join the wider population of people battling demons behind closed doors.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...
Note also that Utah, a very conservative state, solves homelessness in exactly this way.
It just might be that the housing would not be provided by funneling huge amounts of tax dollars to the rentier class, and might involve constructing more houses, and therefore would be opposed by the left.
That's trivial; prison. (Ignoring the part where prisons now charge prisoners rent...)
Finding a solution everybody can agree on is much harder than finding a solution only one side or the other can agree with.
He's also still pushing his plan to establish city-run outdoor camps for homeless people, and to criminalize rejecting those city-run camps when swept - but the city-run camps' locations haven't even been announced, much less started.
https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/2023/01/27/46321180/cit...
So I think this plan of his will never be implemented. Politically, talking about it makes more sense than actually implementing it.
Part of this has to do with the fact that there have been persistent homeless camps directly in some of the richest neighborhoods, and the city is proposing that the sanctioned camps won't be in residential neighborhoods.[2] If they happen, it will more likely be in a parking lot on the edges of the city or in industrial/commercial zones. Combine the site selection criteria and the obvious advantages of having a centralized set of camps with waste collection, fire code enforcement, and 24/7 onsite security, and it's no-brainer to most people. The real barrier is the question of where the money comes from and who will be in charge, because Portland has an extremely dysfunctional, fractured local government where funding for homeless services is run by an office jointly administered by the city and the county.
1. https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2022/11/housed-portlande... 2. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/portland-may...
What could go wrong?
(Maybe they can decorate the entrance with an ode to the liberating power of work, too.)
IIRC the in-episode description, every major city in the United States, not just “on the US West Coast”.
That mitigates its effectiveness as a local solution, but that problem is in turn mitigated when you move it up to wider regions (and particularly when you move it up to jurisdictions with some form of border control.)
Cities that have done treatment first policies have seen a reduction homelessness.
A great book on this topic is San Fran-sicko. https://www.amazon.com/San-Fransicko-Progressives-Ruin-Citie...
If there can be a politically practical solution at all, I think it must be one that can be demonstrated to work in the small scale.
Do not for a second forget that it’ll happen person by messy person and that this is not only inevitable, but good.
Convincing NIMBYs of this is, well, a shitton of work.
So three men from the recovery house next door help him to his feet, walk him to the halfway house and put him in the shower. They wash his clothes and shoes and give him their things to wear while he waits. They give him coffee and dinner, and they give him respect. I talked to these other men later, and even though they had very little sobriety, they did not cast this other guy off for not being well enough to be there. Somehow this broken guy was treated like one of them, because they could see that he was one of them. No one was pretending he wasn't covered with shit, but there was a real sense of kinship.
[…]
I was just totally amazed by what I had seen. And I had a little shred of hope. I couldn't have put it into words, but until that meeting, I had thought that I would recover with men and women like myself; which is to say, overeducated, fun to be with and housebroken. And that this would happen quickly and efficiently. But I was wrong.
https://www.salon.com/1998/12/10/10lamo/
When the article describes an alternative of providing the homeless "housing," what does this housing look like? What aspects of housing are provided that are not generally provided at homeless shelters? Is it privacy, security of belongings, a place to stay during the day, quietness during the night, or other factors that are most substantially different from what is currently available?
'Shelters' are not close to that. They are places to 'kind of sleep' and that's usually it.
It's not a 'home' if you have to share a room with 40 other smelly people and you have to be out by morning. There is a lot of theft, violence, many homeless find it much more peacable to sleep rough than in a shelter.
Many people are so messed up and many incorrigably irresponsible so this program won't work (the flats will immediately turn into repulsively dirty crack houses), but for many it's foundational to be able to sleep and 'be' somewhere that's warm, protected from the elements, where you're not going to be accosted, stolen from.
Just imagine trying to 'get a job' when you live in a tent. Our society is not very capable of handling that. Forget the physical duress of it - it's the psychological aspect. If you are in bum like conditions, surrounded by other bums, crackheads, thieves, it's really hard to fathom yourself as a 'good coffee server'.
Give people a flat with decent neighbours, a community etc and that's the bedrock from which everything else is founded, including their own identity.
All of that said, Finland is not California, and they are light years apart.
I can 100% see it working in Helsinki and not in Cali at all. For one thing, there would be 20 million people lined up for 'free housing' in Cali. They don't have the same kinds of communities to integrate people into, weaker family and cultural structures. Much, much worse violence etc..
But 'housing first' is an important insight to consider because when you think about it it makes sense.
And it's a good goal, too. I mean, to achieve that, you'd have to aggressively build apartments, because it's not like we have 50% of flats being empty and people ending up on the street because nobody will take the government's money and rent out apartments. Once you do that appropriately, some of the pressure will be lowered. You'll still end up with some people landing on the streets, but you'll have fewer, because rents are more affordable and especially smaller apartments are being built. Fewer people, smaller problem.
Unfortunately, that might also be why we're not doing it everywhere. For all I can tell, most local governments don't want new housing.