| That's changing in CA in 2024. The state legislature passed a law permitting involuntary holds on people who are unable to provide for their own physical safety or are suffering from substance abuse disorders. What a lot of people don't understand is that the policy inadequacies that led to this point are mostly state-based, and in CA, cities simply couldn't do much about strung-out junkies on their streets once city councils started experimenting with decriminalizing drug use and deprioritizing drug enforcement. It's not like arresting them was a great solution, but it was the only thing available to city police forces, and it kept these people out of the public eye. Once that was removed as a tool, they were pretty much left with "Unless they're actively threatening someone, nothing we can really do." That's changing, mercifully. Here in SF, a lefty-fringe position took over for a while, wherein homelessness with thought of as some sort of legitimate lifestyle, and society had to be forced to see it so we could all gaze upon the misery that tech money had wrought. After a while though, normal people just get sick of having to step over an unconscious body while taking their kids out for a walk. While it's tempting to blame Reagan for the contemporary homeless problem, I'm not sure that's really right. Reagan was a giant piece of shit, but I don't find it plausible that his policy decisions in 1980 were the proximate cause of the homeless problem that started taking off in the late 2000s. Personally I think a lot of the homeless problem comes down to two things that worked together to produce unintended consequences. 1. Opioids 2. Evolving attitudes toward drug use Opioids are a scourge that created lots of new addicts. At the same time, society finally started realizing that criminalizing drug use was stupid. So the first thing to happen was the easiest: we stopped throwing people in prison. But it's not like these were people who had their lives together in the first place -- they had problems, and previously the prison system is how we dealt with those problems and kept them out of public view. And simultaneously, we were seeing an explosion of addicts thanks for opioids and pharma marketing. So lots more addicts plus lots less enforcement means lots more homelessness. Now we're in a transitional phase where we're trying to figure out the best way to help these people and maintain their dignity. In the mean time, they live in tents on the street for everyone to see. CA is now codifying the obvious -- these people cannot care for themselves, and law-abiding citizens have a right to use public sidewalks without having to worry that a guy in a tent will think they're trespassing. |