[seanmcdirmid]

There is a huge problem with conflating homeless and drug abuse problems, with the latter drawing empathy and funding away from the former. These are two very different problems with very different solutions. These former you just need housing, maybe job assistance, the latter you need millions of dollars in treatment and related assistance per case that has a very high chance of failing.

[potato3732842]

There is a huge problem with people portraying the problems as not connected.

A drug addiction problem is a fast track to homelessness for just about anybody.

And drug addiction will prevent anyone who's homeless from getting out because it sucks up any income that could be used to level up in any way.

[nonameiguess]

This seems to be a common belief on Hacker News but why? I don't claim to be an expert on these matters, but I've lived in downtown Dallas for about a decade now and spend a lot of time on the street, encountering many unsheltered, chronic homeless. I've also known a fair number of people with drug problems. My first wife was addicted to opioid pills. My brother-in-law has had serious heroin problems, OD'd twice, spent time in prison. My two best friends from high school include one guy who was addicted to speed and did a lot of ecstasy and hallucinogens on top of that, the other was a bad enough alcoholic that it killed her at 36. My wife is an alcoholic who has been hospitalized twice with acute liver failure and vitamin deficiencies.

Not a single one of these people was ever homeless. My wife is a 20+ year engineer with a top secret clearance.

The homeless people I meet, on the other hand, completely run the gamut. I met married couple in their early 20s a few weeks back that stopped to talk to me about skateboarding and showed me pictures of their dogs. I showed them pictures of my cats. They lost their jobs, had no family support, and didn't want to go to a shelter because they've have to give up the dogs, so they lived in a tent down by the cargo rail. Another guy I met the week before that was obviously completely insane. He emptied a bottle of hot sauce on me and threatened to stab me for making noise on a public bridge at 8 AM an hour past sunrise and waking him up. I had at least 8 inches and 80 pounds on him and he was trying to fight me anyway.

I don't think the reasons boil down to something as simple as they're all drug addicts and drug addiction is a guaranteed path to homelessness. Even for the openly crazy, antisocial people that are obviously who the San Francisco tech crowd are actually bothered by, I don't understand what the proposed solutions from the anti-housing crowd are. If we don't house them and don't treat them, are we throwing them all in prison for life? Executing them? If we don't do either of these things, they're living animals that have to eat, sleep, and shit somewhere. You might prefer it be somewhere you'll never see it, but where? What is a solution that isn't just making it someone else's problem?

[seanmcdirmid]

> If we don't house them and don't treat them, are we throwing them all in prison for life? Executing them? If we don't do either of these things, they're living animals that have to eat, sleep, and shit somewhere. You might prefer it be somewhere you'll never see it, but where? What is a solution that isn't just making it someone else's problem?

Morally we should house and treat them. That is a huge resource draw, since if you just throw them into low barrier housing, you just get a bunch of bad crap happening in whatever unfortunate neighborhood you choose for that. So we need millions of dollar in treatment per case, and maybe we can fix them? Like a 20% chance. Those are a high amount of resources for a low chance of success, ideally we should spend the money anyways but practically we can’t afford it. We could just house them with a social worker like Finland does, but 1 social worker per 4 residents is going to cost about the same and doesn’t even try to fix their problem.

So morally you are right. Maybe in the future when we achieve a post scarcity society we could do that. Today we could focus money instead on helping people before they become addicted to drugs, we would get much better bang for buck of limited resources. I think it is a bit dangerous to teach our kids that we can and will be able to save them even if they try fent (or something unknowingly laced with fent), because that likely isn’t true ATM.

[pookha]

You're downplaying a catastrophic loss of family. All of these people you're rattling off are connected to you and are part of your social graph, which is something humans thrive on. You disconnect people from a community (death loss of job) and you're likely to see homeless. It's one of the reasons people give up and succumb to living on the streets outside of mental illness (which is another major factor that goes into this). A clear means of treating this problem is to put people BACK into a community that has expectations and guidelines.

[sagarm]

> If we don't house them and don't treat them, are we throwing them all in prison for life? Executing them? If we don't do either of these things, they're living animals that have to eat, sleep, and shit somewhere. You might prefer it be somewhere you'll never see it, but where? What is a solution that isn't just making it someone else's problem?

Making it someone else's problem is what most of the country has chosen. As this thread notes, SF's homeless population is increasingly from outside the city. Trying to resolve this at the city level is not sustainable.

[riehwvfbk]

And so we stigmatize wanting a solution for this problem, and as for the answer to "where?" just say "downtown!" For some reason those with positive contributions to society have to pay a lot of money to stay there, but the insane drug addicts can do whatever they want, and opposing this is somehow not OK.

[seanmcdirmid]

Drug addicts on the street has become people's impression of homelessness, but it is a completely dishonest one. Yes, that's a problem, no, homes aren't going to help solve it. Low barrier housing (where drug addicts can live without curtailing their lifestyles) is a quick way to lose support for all homeless programs in your region (no one wants to live near low barrier housing), and that adversely effects the larger problem that is actually solvable (housing affordability for functioning people).

Yes, ideally we have infinite resources and we can solve the drug addiction problem without becoming China or Singapore and just stigmatizing the problem to death. But we don't, and dumping in 95% of our funds allocated to homelessness to what is really a drug addiction problem, and barely seeing any progress in either problem, is eventually going to wear the public out.

[scotty79]

> A drug addiction problem is a fast track to homelessness for just about anybody

Also homelessness is a fast track to addiction problems for many people. If you feel that bad you are prone to do anything to make it less bad even briefly.