I want this person off of the streets for completely selfish reasons to myself.
Recovery program or not, they are going to have to live somewhere. If it's not a publicly funded home then it's going to be a tent in a public park that I am paying taxes for.
Without a recovery program, some people will still just spend their day smashing car windows to get money for drugs, then go home to their free apartment
It might still be worth it regardless, but keep that in mind
There is a way around this dilemma that solves everyone’s problems. People who go around smashing windows etc. are arrested and thrown in jail. If they repeatedly offend, they receive longer and longer sentences, perhaps at some state penitentiary in a more cost effective location. If they are addicted to drugs, they are enrolled in mandatory treatment programs while in prison. This person is hence housed and separated from civil society, with much less incentive to cheat the system.
This even solves the other problem that you haven’t brought up: the person who sleeps on the street smashing windows all day is likely to wreck the free apartment you end up giving them, too.
I mean, there's more complexities here insofar as it seems the prisons need to be run a lot better than they currently seem to be run, and we need to get better about prosecuting petty crimes.
Since we currently aren't doing those things, people are searching for alternate solutions, but there don't seem to be any that show much promise (though I'm sure people can cite a study that "proves" I'm wrong and can explain why the $17B spent by California doesn't count as counterevidence, even though a lot of that money was spent on "housing first" friendly policies)
We've done that for a long time and it doesn't change the outcome. You either pay exorbitant rates for them to sit in jail or you pay exhorbitant collective insurance rates. Worse off cities will usually incentivize those people to stay out of certain areas and in other areas, which also causes equity issues.
We're better off actually helping people. Getting to the root of what's wrong and what threshold we declare someone needs help and of what type is what we're trying to figure out.
I mean SF or LA aren't the only cities with homeless problems. My home city Seattle has them, New York has them, Austin has them. For decades leading up to the 2010s we were convicting and throwing every homeless person we could in jail, but the problem is that it just becomes a revolving door. Either you accept that an entire class of people need to be jailed for life for the crime of being homeless, or you try and fix the revolving door.
Some cities have tried and failed, others haven't tried and also failed. Trying to solve a national problem on a state level is almost always bound to be a failure because the problem has to do with things that occurred 10-20 years ago with Purdue Pharma starting off the whole opioid epidemic. We're just now seeing the height of the problem they kicked off.
The other 'unspoken truth' about this issue is that people in the rust belt and such have just as many problems with drugs and crime. The difference is that they have homes and these issues aren't visible until someone dies from suicide or an OD.
This hypothetical person will either smash windows and go to an apartment, or smash windows and go sleep somewhere in public. If they are already at the point of smashing windows, then there’s some element of desperation or misanthropy that makes me prefer that they spend their night somewhere private.
Anyway if we’re designing hypothetical people, we can come up with sympathetic ones too, so it seems like a wash policy-wise.
Don’t be a tool. A heroin addict’s motivation to acquire heroin is infinitely greater than a heroin addict’s motivation for anything else in the world.
What is the link between “make sure they sleep on the street” and “prevent them from breaking windows?”
It isn’t a matter of whether or not I’m a tool. The proposed solution is just unrelated to the problem.
As you say, if someone really wants heroin, they’ll get heroin. So, making their life miserable won’t stop them from getting it. What do we gain as a society from making sure they shoot up and sleep in public?
Isn’t it a moral hazard? The nice thing about living in Ballard is I can point out to my kid what happens when you do fent, at least. If there are no consequences for behavior, what’s the disincentive for not doing it? “We will coddle you while you OD on fent” doesn’t sound appealing to me.
for some reason many people have stopped caring about the notion of societal trust and cohesion—even the idea of valuing it as something to be desired and strived for. it's an odd kind of defeatist nihilism, and I've seen it spread year after year.
these are the same people who will scoff when you suggest that stealing from Walmarts or Targets or whatever is wrong. they'll tell you, "dude, shrinkage is a thing, they build the cost of stolen or damaged goods into their budgets. and, anyway, why do you care so much about massive corporations' bottom lines, anyway?" obviously I don't, but I sure do care about living in a place where brazen broad-daylight theft is rare, and not something you see every time you go to the store!
I think you're on the same page with the person you're responding to.
@shepardrtc said people who get free housing should work for it, and @legitster is saying that it is in the taxpayer's self-interest to spend some taxes housing the unhoused. I took that to mean that a work requirement is secondary to getting them off the street in the first place.
I agree that we should be providing drug recovery mechanisms and promoting a work ethic in people who are long-term houseless, but our options seem to be (leave them on the streets, parks and front lawns of our cities), (put them in prison), or (put them in publicly funded housing ala halfway houses).
First one seems like none of us want it (unless you live in the suburbs and have fled the problem). Second one is too far, and even with good healthcare services, involuntary commitment should only happen for the severely ill. That leaves the third.
It’s a luxury belief as well, people of wealth don’t need to care about public spaces as much, they have plenty of other options. It hurts the poor the most.
Ok, call it handouts. But if you just care about the budget, providing housing is the cheapest way to solve the problem. Will some people "take advantage" of this arrangement? Sure. Does it matter that much?
But why does it matter, if the alternative is objectively worse for everyone concerned, even the taxpayer funding this "free" housing that some might abuse?
It's a perverse incentive. When people figure out the loophole, people who don't need the help will fill up all the allotted space, because who doesn't want free rent?
Fortunately San Francisco has had decades of social workers "dealing with the actual issues" and "solving the problem". To put it mildly, they didn't solve the issues.
This is a lot better than social workers "helping" people on the street with "treatment".
Most homeless people are just normal people who dont have a home. They can pick up garbage or dig ditches or plant trees at the very least. Plenty of menial labor that needs to be done.
1. send them to extremely cheap housing in bumfuck
2. jail
3. let them be homeless if thats what they want
Imo most of the people who think this way are addicts or mentally ill and should be involuntarily committed, so my preferred option is
4. Rebuild the asylums and commit people(with heavy oversight) who are completely incapable of caring for themselves. Although this option is similar to 2
Sounds pretty illiberal to me. Lately (due to the whole pandemic/vaccine controversies), I've begun to wonder what drugs the state can force individuals to take or not take, and increasingly it seems that individual freedom is the rule in the US at least.
Prison is a concept that has existed since the dawn of society. Maybe you disagree with criminalizing homelessness, that's certainly understandable and perhaps a bit illiberal, but it's certainly not unprecedented. And anyway, what I'm calling for is mandatory community service for the homeless, and then imprisonment/commitment/send them to kansas when they refuse to do it, not just criminalizing homelessness.
But if your question is if I believe in absolute freedoms, I absolutely do not. You are not free to harass people on the street. Not free to monopolize public parks. Certainly not free to be violent.
Who cares about someone slapping arbitrary labels of "liberal" or "illiberal" on things? Ultimately we need to find something that actually works, and treats people with compassion. It seems like the big focus is on the second half of that, completely ignoring the first.
Read a bit about Diogenes if you think this is a recent question. But I do wonder, what do you think members of society should be required to contribute to that society?
No one said they were going to be free. First of all, they'd be getting a home. Second, yes they should be paid something so they can afford food and other essentials. The point is to help them recover. Just throwing housing or money at them and saying good luck, do whatever you want, isn't going to work. With sponsored work, they can look for better jobs and tell their prospective employers that they've been working for a year or two with no issues at the state/federal job. That would go a long way.
Unless you can cite the source that they actually received that $17B it sure seems like you're looking to punish people for being poor rather than to fix the system which creates the environment and situations that lead to these outcomes. That's not going to work. It never has worked and it never will.
Recovery program or not, they are going to have to live somewhere. If it's not a publicly funded home then it's going to be a tent in a public park that I am paying taxes for.