Nah, it’s caused by mental illness and drug addiction. Short of rounding them up and forcing them to get help, there’s actually nothing we can do to get these people off the street.
It's certainly an element, but that's largely washing your hands and victim blaming. There's a direct correlation between housing costs and homelessness rates.
From the reporting I’ve seen, the vast majority of folks on Skid Row or on the street in SF are heavy addicts. And they refuse shelters because then they couldn’t use.
From a census of homeless people in LA county a few years back[1]:
15% of LA's homeless population has substance abuse problems. Only 12% of these people are in shelters.
25% have serious mental illnesses. 20% of these people are in shelters.
Overall 33% of homeless people are in shelters.
So you are partially right that drug use and mental health issues can make sheltering some people more difficult. But you are very wrong that people with either of these issues make up a majority of all homeless people. It is just classic confirmation bias in that people with these issues are the most visibly homeless. The people who are living in their car or a shelter and simply can't afford a home aren't easily identifiable as homeless when you walk past them on the street. This can also be seen in the previously linked data as only 28% of LA's homeless population qualifies as chronically homeless.
Basically you are only able to see a small portion of the problem and are assuming that is the whole problem when in actuality homelessness is roughly 4x worse.
2. Therefore, the homelessness is caused by drug addiction.
Not exactly sound reasoning. Plenty of people with mental illness and drug addiction still manage to pay rent.
No one disputes the rates of addiction and mental illness among the homeless. California has neither the highest rates for drug addiction/overdoses nor the highest rates of mental illness, yet it has the highest rate of homelessness.
There is no correlation between rates of mental illness and rates of homelessness. There is no correlation between drug addiction rates and homelessness. There is a strong Correlation between rents and homelessness.
Why? Being mentally ill and a drug addict doesn't automatically make you homeless in an area where rent for a room is $400/month.
> Dry shelters are arguably a massive part of the problem.
As someone who has housed and lived close to addicts, to put it plainly: this is a naive, academic view. Dry shelter are "a massive part of the problem"? Absolutely incorrect, and harmfully ignorant if implemented at societal scale.
As someone who provided food and shelter to an addict in my own home, guaranteeing these things does nothing to increase the willingness to quit heroin. Material deprivation may cause you to seek drugs, but remedying deprivation does not lead to recovery. In fact, I honestly believe offering it unconditionally hampers it.
If your understanding of the scientific evidence is that it supports "dry shelters are harmful and their existence exacerbates heroin addiction," then I think that's a good argument in favor of the inclusion of anecdotes on this topic.
>Cities also have higher costs of living because they are densely populated
Isn't population density supposed to introduce efficiencies that would lead to lowering costs? I think, that's the usual argument against suburban sprawl.
Nah it's caused by poor family cultures that lead to mental illness and drug addiction. Short of rounding up families and forcing them to be responsible for their children, teens, and young adults, there's actually nothing we can do to get these people off the street.
You know it's funny. A lot of people look at the US and turn up their noses at our "poor infrastructure". Just a couple of months ago I watched a very tropey discussion take place on the lack of a robust US rail system. In another discussion, the lack of a robust US healthcare system.
All the armchair pundits come out to point to other countries as leaders in these areas, but when it comes to homelessness, I see a lot less of it pointing to places like Japan, Singapore and the APAC region, where homelessness is a cultural stigma placed not just on the individual but on the family. Family name and culture mean something. Generational safety nets are present because the family cares for the individual simply because they share a common genealogy. Families will go very far to avoid allowing a member of their heritage to become a vagabond.
Weird to me how this part is left out of the conversation. Perhaps this is a consequence of our indulgence in unrestricted libertarian individualism.
I'm glad you brought up Singapore, since they can actually force people with mental health or addiction issues into shelters. Imprisoning people for being mentally ill or addicts is a viable to solution to homeless and it clearly works for Singapore, however this will never happen in the West. For better or worse, individual liberty is sacred in our cultural tradition, and it will never be politically palatable to force people into shelters.
Forcing people into treatment was our standard approach to this problem for decades and it worked very well. We need to bring it back.
There should be zero people doing meth on the street; if you see one it should be a single phone call to have the cops pick that person up and send them to the secured treatment facility on the edge of town.
Yet too many people think it's better to just let people do meth on the street, despite the problems it causes for everyone, and the huge amount of money wasted not solving the problem of the chronically homeless.
My point is that our drunkenness on individualism has led to a low view of the family. If you have a low view of family then you're primed to inevitably become ambivalent at best, cynical at worst, to your own kin.
The vast majority of people who are homeless don't suffer from mental illness or drug addiction. The most visible do, but not most of them. And of those, a bunch didn't suffer from drug addiction when they become homeless.
I don't know, the article mentions people who work two jobs having to live in an RV because they can't afford rent. As an external observer, it seems to me that in some parts of the US, inequality is so bad that homelessness is eating the working class. In Europe or Australia[1], the lady working two jobs or the war veteran taking $1200/month in social security would definitely not be homeless. Would they live in government housing, in a sketchy part of town? Sure. But how can you even compare that to being homeless...
[1] Australia, though, is currently in the middle of a rental crisis and becoming much worse.
The visible homeless—the vagrants you see in tent cities under the freeway or harassing pedestrians—are more likely to have drug addictions or other mental illnesses. And the more mentally ill they are, the more visible they become since they end up committing crimes and making a nuisance of themselves. If you’re mainly concerned about the externalities of homelessness—e.g. needles and human feces on the street, crime, harassment, etc—then you’d be well served addressing this problem in particular.
If you define “homeless” by people not having consistent housing, there is a much larger population of those people. Maybe they’re sleeping on a buddy’s couch, or they find a kind stranger to take them in, or they get by via stealth camping. On the margin, expanding public housing or making housing more affordable would help these people. But it wouldn’t do much about the more visible and troublesome ones.
What is this help anyway? Can you magically fix someone who was fucked in the ass by foster parents as a child or someone who was born with schizophrenia?
Some people fall through the cracks. My mother was a therapist and she used to tell me tragic stories about her clients.
If I had lived those lives I'd be out there smoking crack too.
Update, here's a reference: https://endhomelessness.org/blog/new-research-quantifies-lin...