[el_nahual]

I can tell you about the experience with "housing first" approaches in Chicago and some of the hidden subtleties that make us all have a bit of dunning-kruger here.

There are a few hotspots in Chicago that have resulted in "encampments" in major pedestrian thoroughfares.

In some of these, every single resident has been offered housing in exchange for leaving. Most of them refused housing.

Why? Because the one condition of getting housing was to join a drug counseling program.

There is an entire line of thought that goes something like "what? why are you putting conditions to housing? That's not housing first! What do you care if they go to drug counseling? That's you being a puritan! Be more compassionate!"

It turns out there's a very good reason why you want people that get off the street to get drug counseling before they move into an apartment...because if you don't, a large percent of them will die.

They will drug or drink themselves to death in an apartment with nobody around to save them (where do you think those cost savings your podcasts reference come from? fewer ambulance trips!). Almost every dangerous thing a person can do on the street, they can do worse in an apartment. Think, for example, of a couple living on the street in which one partner is physically abusive. Now imagine them in private.

So a measure that at first glance seems stupid, counterproductive, and inhumane, like conditioning housing, is actually the compassion maximizing measure, even though it may seem like the opposite.

This isn't to say that "housing first" is wrong...merely that it's not actually as simple as one would think.

[dmix]

A lot of full-on junkies will essentially trade their public housing apartments to dealers who use it as as safe spot to deal out crack/heroin. The dealers don't operate our of their own house for safety so they hire junkies and use their places as distribution centers in exchange for 'free' drugs, while still letting them sleep in their bedrooms.

Then the apartments eventually turn into crack dens. Eventually the door gets kicked in by police and the dealers find another person willing to exchange free drugs to let them use their place. Plus the junkies going in/out of jail and their apartment gets used when they aren't there.

This sort of thing puts a ton of pressure on the normal families trying to live in those apartment buildings. A small group can definitely ruin entire floors of those apartments.