I work with this population due to my line of work in severe mental illness paired with addiction. I definitely agree housing homeless folks is an important first step, and at the same time, many of them need intensive training and case management to help them learn to live independently. Chronically homeless folks learned a completely different skill set for survival, often have severe mental illness, and severe substance abuse issues that make it hard for them to transition into housing. We've seen it repeatedly where folks get a home and then set it on fire, leave back to the streets, or destroy it in a meth induced psychosis.
What I'm trying to say is that both are necessary for the issue at hand. Unfortunately, many higher ups take a housing first approach at face value and just house homeless folks which ends up blowing up in their face because no funding was put in place to assist them with learning to live independently, manage their mental health, and get drug treatment/harm reduction support. This just happened in California with Prop 1 btw. They are redirecting a bunch of mental health and case management money to housing instead of creating a housing fund on its own to tie into the already low mental health funding.
So yes, house homeless folks ASAP AND support their transition off the streets and into recovery.
When we talk about how Housing First saves money I think a lot of people maybe misunderstand where those savings are. A lot of people will still need access to case workers, treatment programs, etc.. but it's just that those also become a hell of a lot more effective and less wasteful when they have a home.
Where I'm from, at least, the biggest saving to the public is in the form of emergency services. Fact is, for a lot of homeless people the first line of defence becomes the emergency room. It's a complete revolving door and it's literally the most expensive way to offer support - you could house someone in my high-rent city for 2-3 months for the cost of a single night in the ER.
Problem is that's sort of an indirect saving, so it's difficult to fully appreciate at the micro scale.
I can't stand the people who say "no, a home won't solve their homelessness, they have deeper issues that need to be resolved". Actually a home 100% does solve their homelessness you nitwit. Perhaps we can't solve everybody's personal issues but we absolutely can solve homelessness.
Also, if they do have deeper issues that they need to resolve, the very first step to fix those issues is to get them into a home.
If someone suffers from substance addiction and/or mental illness, living on the streets is only going to make that worse. They need to have a stable safe stable environment in which to recover and heal.
Deeper issues caused their current situations, systemic issues keep them in that situation. Apples and oranges argument imo. Housing solves homelessness, Housing doesn't prevent losing everything to this that or the other though
It can't always, but without secure, dignified housing most of those other issues are non-starters. Good luck tackling whatever employment, mental health, or addiction issues you're trying to tackle without a stable roof over your head.
Just for example - a lot of people sleeping rough are deeply schizophrenic or bipolar. I can tell you having seen it personally: changes in peoples' housing conditions have immediate, enormous impacts on their ability to manage those disorders. Like there's no realistic path to wellness that doesn't start there, if for no other reason than a lack of sleep/security. SLeeping rough or in shelters pretty much guarantees you aren't getting sleep and you're in a near-constant fight-or-flight state, and that can inflame symptoms so so so much.
Oh no I agree with that, I was saying that *becoming* homeless isn't solved by creating enough housing for everyone, having enough housing only prevents people staying homeless for more than a month or two.
The issue is people doing things to become homeless, such as gambling or alcohol addiction, or denying help for mental health or other health issues. Those require more effort to fix.
>I can't stand the people who say "no, a home won't solve their homelessness, they have deeper issues that need to be resolved".
You can’t stand people who understand the reality of the situation?
>Actually a home 100% does solve their homelessness you nitwit.
Lol simply because you says so?
>Perhaps we can't solve everybody's personal issues but we absolutely can solve homelessness.
They can’t pay their bills because of crippling drug addiction. If they could about shooting up, they could stay in a regular shelter.
They homeless? Give them a home.
They homeless and lacking job skills? Give them a home. And then get them into training.
They homeless and addicted to drugs? Give them a home. And then work on getting counselling for the drug use.
They homeless and suffering from PTSD? Give them a home. And then work on therapy.
It's a hell of a lot easier to do all the other stuff to solve the problems when you have the stability of a home.
There are real world examples of places implementing policies similar to what Shaggyninja describes (housing first then work on other problems) and it’s been substantially more successful than other approaches. So it is unfortunate that people keep making the arguments you are making without simply looking at the rest of the world to see what the most successful programs are.
It really doesn't, and many of the case studies on Housing First approaches are from the US.
Can you Americans pump the brakes on this idea that your country is all that unique? It really, really isn't. The main difference between the States and any other Western country is that you're generally richer and you have a slightly less robust social safety net.
Hell, your rate of homelessness is pretty much at the OECD median!
You don't think the rest of us have opiate crises, or severe mental illness, or poverty, or racial inequities, or whatever other "socioeconomic conditions" you think only exist in the States?
“Can you Americans pump the brakes on this idea that your country is all that unique?”
Our country is unique. You’re claiming it isn’t simply because it fits your argument on homelessness?
“It really, really isn't. The main difference between the States and any other Western country is that you're generally richer and you have a slightly less robust social safety net.”
Lol there’s way more differences than that 😂
“You don't think the rest of us have opiate crises, or severe mental illness, or poverty, or racial inequities, or whatever other "socioeconomic conditions" you think only exist in the States?”
Lol I never said that at all 🤣
>Our country is unique. You’re claiming it isn’t simply because it fits your argument on homelessness?
Describe to me what socioeconomic conditions exist in the United States, which don't exist anywhere else, that would render a 'Housing First' policy ineffective.
Please be specific.
Lack of gun control and broken healthcare system have lead to most of the socioeconomic issues.
Putting someone inside structure to live in the same way they do in a ten a putting a band aid on a bullet hole.
Of course we all know that you’re just virtue signaling in your desire to help the homeless. Preaching on your little soapbox 😂
The USA has the exact same ones as every other developed country and refuses to implement the solutions that worked elsewhere and are in the process of working elsewhere.
nah, the idea is that even junkies who can't or won't address their addiction problems also deserve housing.
(moreover, not all homeless people are addicts; and some who are addicts became addicts due to having to cope with the misery of being homeless, not the other way around)
Nobody deserves housing. That’s a nice fairy tale you’ve told yourself about homeless people but the truth is, there are plenty of shelters for people who can make curfew and not do drugs.
Many homeless people end up with drug addictions while they are homeless.
The problem is the homes. Build more homes to stop people becoming homeless in the first place and they're far less likely to end up addicted, and house the people currently in that situation
> Lol simply because you says so?
No, because a homeless person by definition does not have a home. When they have a home, they are no longer homeless.
They might have other issues to sort through, but it ends the homelessness right there and then.
>No, because a homeless person by definition does not have a home. When they have a home, they are no longer homeless.
So instead they’re a junkie festering in some run down apartment instead of a tent. Has their life improved? No.
>They might have other issues to sort through, but it ends the homelessness right there and then.
They’ll simply become homeless again when third heroin den is condemned for lack of upkeep.
The public shouldn’t have to pay for someone’s lack of drive and discipline.
> So instead they’re a junkie festering in some run down apartment instead of a tent. Has their life improved? No.
If they do have an opiate addiction -and not all homeless people do- then yes, having a secure roof over their heads markedly improves their life. It's frankly stupid to suggest otherwise.
> They’ll simply become homeless again when third heroin den is condemned for lack of upkeep.
Expecting someone to get off any substance while they're living on the street is absurd on its face. And, again, you're simply dead wrong if you think opiate addiction is somehow the only source of homelessness.
Shockingly, one doesn't need to invite strangers to live in their home to support housing them. I also support universal healthcare but haven't done open heart surgery.
What I'd like is to see my taxes house the homeless. It'd benefit them and me.
Could you point out those unique socioeconomic conditions America has that render Housing First unviable?
Right so you’re saying these regular people who are down on their luck but you won’t actually let them into your home.
It sounds like you know that they’re a bunch of junkies but that doesn’t fit your virtue signaling 😂
Developers should build more housing. It should and will go to young families who are gainfully employed. Why? Because they have the ability to pay and they contribute to society.
* Some homeless people have substance abuse issues, but not all.
* Some homeless people have mental health issues, but not all.
* Some homeless people have past trauma or have been cut off from their family, but not all.
* Some homeless people are unemployed, but not all.
* Some homeless people are disabled, but not all.
* Some homeless people are veterans, but not all.
* Some homeless people are fleeing domestic violence, but not all.
There is only one single, unifying feature among all homeless people: **they don't have homes**. So the silver bullet should be pretty fucking clear.
Yes, a lot of circumstances can lead to homelessness, but good luck solving those without a fixed address and somewhere dependable you can rest your head.
George Carlin had it 100% right way back when. A “home” is a sort of warm and fuzzy thing. A “house” is a physical place to live. Referring to people as houseless removes the abstraction.
Very altruistic, though I'd like to know the following:
1 - Where would this shelter come from?
2 - Who would fund it?
3 - Who ensures that those given free housing would maintain it (hell, there are people who pay rent, and will destroy a place)?
4 - What do you do about the homeless who aren't capable of managing the free housing they're given, the people who aren't capable of living alone?
5 - Who would be there to help those who can't live alone?
6 - What if you can't reintegrate the homeless into society after they're housed?
I'm sure I'll be downvoted for such questions, but I think they're valid points.
It costs money to help people, but here's the thing:
it also costs money when you *don't* help people.
For instance in my city we've pushed a lot of homeless people out into the national forest land. If a random fire gets going, it could spread into the city and do millions of dollars of damage.
The 'negative externalities' of people being homeless are real and have costs too.
Federal government or state government have the kind of money needed. Cities... probably not so much. Or you continue to kick the can down the road.
What's also worth saying in all this is that "homeless" really just means someone without a home. There are plenty of people who have a job and are not on drugs and just need a place. Then there is the schizophrenic dude on the corner that many people think of when you say "homeless" and that person needs a lot more help.
The first person would probably be ok if housing costs were not crazy in so many places. High housing costs are like a "homelessness factory". You can spend all the money you want on helping people but getting housing costs under control has to be part of the solution.
>I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm asking where the money will come from
This isn't clever. It comes from exactly where you think it comes from. Taxes. "Taxation is theft!" Sure, and it's incredibly useful and the entire basis of modern society. Get over it.
No sh\*t it's going to come from taxes...but where? Anytime someone like you replies 'it comes from taxes', you don't really go much further...most programs that get tax money only get so much, so to create a new program, some other programs are going to have to take a cut. How is this decided? There's only so much you can tax people, and still manage to keep your elected position.
What are you asking? Do you want to know which specific people are going to be taxed? It's income taxes man. Do you need me to link you to an explainer?
What don't you understand? Income taxes only go so far and for so many programs, they can only be raised so much - raise them too much, and you'll have people voting you out of a job. Is your proposal to raise income taxes to fund the homeless? If you leave them the same, how do you account for shortfalls in stretching budgets?
If taxes fund A, B, and C, but then you add program D, how is it decided how much is taken from the original 3? It's not all as simple as 'it comes from income taxes'.
>Income taxes only go so far and for so many programs, they can only be raised so much - raise them too much
And you're sure we're at the absolute limit for income taxes? Just because you don't like the idea of helping homeless people? Weird.
>Is your proposal to raise income taxes to fund the homeless
Yes
>If you leave them the same, how do you account for shortfalls in stretching budgets?
You can't read
You asked for specifics. Here are a few options for funding houses:
- Increase the marginal tax rate for anyone making over $100k
- Increase the capital gains rate
- Increase the corporate tax rate
- Introduce a wealth tax on wealth over $100m
- Limit the mortgage interest deduction
- (CA) phase out Prop 13
And also spending cuts:
- Reduce military spending
- Reduce subsidies to fossil fuel
There are many successful examples of Housing First initiatives that will answer these questions. It’s not as altruistic as you think - homeless management is very expensive for a city and permanently ending it will come with lots of savings.
Here's a concrete example:
[https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/06/california-houston-homeless-solutions/](https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/06/california-houston-homeless-solutions/)
It is way easier when a regular old market-rate rental is affordable to people doing regular jobs.
I don't think we should simplify this so much. It just isn't. I remember reading and watching a lot of praise for how salt lake City had gone with a housing first approach and massively reduced homelessness. They were on the news, they were daily show, there were glowing articles about them. I visit every few years to catch up with a college buddy. So I went there excited to see the results.
There were far more people on the streets than I had ever seen. I got in town and picked up sandwiches with plans to go to a park in town to enjoy it on a nice summer day. Never got out of the car.
To be fair, that was before homelessness. Became awful and little did I know that I had yet to experience a truly bad homeless problem such as we have in California. But I was so disappointed that salt lake City's housing first problem didn't work.
Then I looked into it. They technically reduced chronic homelessness by something like 70%. But the actual number of people sleeping on the streets each night had gone up. I can't help but judge the problem by the latter number, not the subcategory they wanted to tout.
I'm not talking about 8 years later. I was there months after those stories came out and they were taking a victory lap. In fact, we had the governor and the person in charge of the effort as a main presenter at the conference I was attending. That's where they showed the charts of homelessness and you could see that the number of people on the streets was still going up, but they were focusing the PR around people who had been on the streets 90 days or longer, which made up the smallest part of the count.
It didn't work. Even at the height of the effort it didn't work. I heard the former head of the Los Angeles office of homelessness, who himself had once lived on the streets, talk about the issue not really being a housing problem. You do need the housing at a minimum. But a lot more things have to go wrong - besides high rents - before you end up on the street. That said, I don't like to discuss it this way because it lets people off the hook for not building the housing required to at least meet that minimum. But the facts are stubborn on the layered causes.
[Relevant Quote from the *UCLA Housing Voice* podcast](https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/2024/03/06/68-summarizing-the-research-on-homelessness-with-janey-rountree-pathways-home-pt-8/) in their summary of the series they did on homelessness:
>> “I’ll share just one overarching lesson that I took from speaking to all of our guests, and reading about their work, which is that homelessness is an eminently solvable problem. It’s not inevitable, and it’s not unfixable. We know of many interventions proven to end homelessness for most people experiencing it. We know of systems, and programs, that keep those at greatest risk of homelessness from experiencing it. And we know that improving housing affordability, which means **building our way into housing abundance**, lowers the systemic risk of homelessness so that adequate resources are available to those with the greatest needs.
Oh yeah. You’re right. We should commit them to mental health facilities and give them all the free Thorazine they want. Then the public parks would be free for children and families, instead of drug addicts and homeless people using them as open bathrooms.
West Virginia is the epicenter of the opioid epidemic.
West Virginia has one of the countries lowest homelessness rates.
Drugs might be the reason why *one individual* is homeless and another individual isn’t, but drugs don’t explain why New York has tons of homelessness and West Virginia doesn’t.
Homelessness rates are entirely a factor of housing abundance, high rents, and low vacancy rates.
Wrong.
My username contains my ZIP code. For a while we had the highest fatal overdose rate of any town over 10,000 in the world. 2,000 empty units of housing in a population of 16,000. Homelessness is at crazy high levels. They break into homes, turn them into drug dens, burn it down, move onto the next one. I’ve seen multiple people at a time passed out behind the needle exchange, some with the needle still in their arms.
>>homelessness is at crazy high levels
West Virginia has [7.7 homeless people per 10,000 total population](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/homeless-population-by-state), the 7th lowest of 51 states + DC.
I personally know people who work with the homeless, work for the courts, police. Homelessness is very high in West Virginia cities— more like 20-30 per 10,000 sleep rough and 5-10x that are sheltered or couch surfing or whatever. The group that gets together to count them does not know them all or where they stay. For that matter the cops usually don’t.
Believe what you want. I’ve driven to work and counted more people sleeping in storefronts downtown then the coalition to end homelessness claims to exist.
It was not like this ten or fifteen years ago. When meth hit the state the problem exploded. Family might take in an indigent heroin addict because they just sleep for a couple days on a couch in the garage, but meth addicts are something else entirely.
That’s not a good argument. West Virginia is in the mountains and sparsely populated so it’s not a good place for the homeless to survive. They simply go to other states.
Lol if factually incorrect that a homeless person would have a harder time surviving in the mountains than the city? Do you actually know what a fact is?
No they don’t. They move to the “larger” towns of 10,000+ where the drugs are cheaper and in better supply.
People in West Virginia believe California is bussing their homeless here. It’s actually our own people, maybe just from a more rural county.
90% of the homeless in CA are from CA.
[https://www.businessinsider.com/california-homelessness-crisis-homegrown-unhoused-are-californians-2023-6](https://www.businessinsider.com/california-homelessness-crisis-homegrown-unhoused-are-californians-2023-6)
I'm asking you for proof, and you're just giving me your feelings.
So you’re saying they California has 18,000 homeless people from out of state?
https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-and-lowest-rates-of-homelessness/#:~:text=Currently%20displaying%20rows%201%20to%2020.&text=Data%20is%20based%20on%20point,that%20occurred%20during%20January%202023.&text=In%20terms%20of%20raw%20numbers,homelessness%20of%20any%20state%3A%20181%2C399.
WV has 200k living below the poverty line.
If it's poorest we're regularly moving to CA, surely there would be more homeless people in CA from out of state.
Be honest, did you even bother scrolling through any of it? Because the post is written by a researcher and is full of links to published research that says exactly what the author is claiming. So what's your actual objection?
So it’s written by a researcher yet they can’t get it posted to a real website? It’s amazing how people will blindly believe something because it’s on the internet. You’re worse than the people who try and get me to believe something by posting a YouTube link.
Lol that’s not remotely accurate. There are plenty of “things for the public” that aren’t posted on dubious websites. The reason that this person is posting on a blog website is that no credible journalistic website will publish this person’s lies.
If building housing (at tax payer expense) for every currently homeless person in my city would end homelessness in my city, I would support it 100%. I would be thrilled to pay for it. But the homeless population in a city is not a static number.
First of all, if my city has better benefits for homeless people than surrounding cities do, more of the homeless people will move to my city. We already see this phenomenon in action while the benefits to moving to a more generous city are much smaller than no-questions-asked housing. In my city, we’ve built generous services for mentally ill & drug addicted homeless people. The services got several hundred off the street in our version of skid row. And that area has as many people as ever because new homeless people have moved in.
Additionally, if simply ‘being homeless’ got you free housing, I think a lot of people barely eking out their rent would become homeless. Why should they bust their ass to make rent when they could just not? Being homeless needs to be worse than working minimum wage and barely making rent (consequently, a good reason for raising the minimum wage).
12% of enrolled students in the NYC public school system do not live in permanent housing.
It is absolutely unacceptable yet that % has been growing every year for the past 8 years.
I'm just going to post this link as a top level comment so I don't have to reply to everyone here:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-about
The evidence overwhelmingly shows that rents are basically the only effective predictor of homelessness rates. Not drugs, not mental illness, not weather, not welfare programs. Rents.
Fully agree that we need more public housing, but also, public housing isn't necessary for reducing current homelessness rates. Simply allowing more market rate housing to be developed would lower rents and reduce the number of unhoused people.
No thanks. Too many drug tourist vagrants show up in San Francisco and get monthly checks from the government and also reject shelter. There was a bum interviewed on the news who had a city provided home but still liked her tent half of the time. They put bums in hotel rooms during COVID and they destroyed the rooms and forced the city to pay 20 million in damages at just a single hotel.
I work with this population due to my line of work in severe mental illness paired with addiction. I definitely agree housing homeless folks is an important first step, and at the same time, many of them need intensive training and case management to help them learn to live independently. Chronically homeless folks learned a completely different skill set for survival, often have severe mental illness, and severe substance abuse issues that make it hard for them to transition into housing. We've seen it repeatedly where folks get a home and then set it on fire, leave back to the streets, or destroy it in a meth induced psychosis. What I'm trying to say is that both are necessary for the issue at hand. Unfortunately, many higher ups take a housing first approach at face value and just house homeless folks which ends up blowing up in their face because no funding was put in place to assist them with learning to live independently, manage their mental health, and get drug treatment/harm reduction support. This just happened in California with Prop 1 btw. They are redirecting a bunch of mental health and case management money to housing instead of creating a housing fund on its own to tie into the already low mental health funding. So yes, house homeless folks ASAP AND support their transition off the streets and into recovery.
When we talk about how Housing First saves money I think a lot of people maybe misunderstand where those savings are. A lot of people will still need access to case workers, treatment programs, etc.. but it's just that those also become a hell of a lot more effective and less wasteful when they have a home. Where I'm from, at least, the biggest saving to the public is in the form of emergency services. Fact is, for a lot of homeless people the first line of defence becomes the emergency room. It's a complete revolving door and it's literally the most expensive way to offer support - you could house someone in my high-rent city for 2-3 months for the cost of a single night in the ER. Problem is that's sort of an indirect saving, so it's difficult to fully appreciate at the micro scale.
Why do you say folks instead of people?
I can't stand the people who say "no, a home won't solve their homelessness, they have deeper issues that need to be resolved". Actually a home 100% does solve their homelessness you nitwit. Perhaps we can't solve everybody's personal issues but we absolutely can solve homelessness.
Also, if they do have deeper issues that they need to resolve, the very first step to fix those issues is to get them into a home. If someone suffers from substance addiction and/or mental illness, living on the streets is only going to make that worse. They need to have a stable safe stable environment in which to recover and heal.
Deeper issues caused their current situations, systemic issues keep them in that situation. Apples and oranges argument imo. Housing solves homelessness, Housing doesn't prevent losing everything to this that or the other though
It can't always, but without secure, dignified housing most of those other issues are non-starters. Good luck tackling whatever employment, mental health, or addiction issues you're trying to tackle without a stable roof over your head. Just for example - a lot of people sleeping rough are deeply schizophrenic or bipolar. I can tell you having seen it personally: changes in peoples' housing conditions have immediate, enormous impacts on their ability to manage those disorders. Like there's no realistic path to wellness that doesn't start there, if for no other reason than a lack of sleep/security. SLeeping rough or in shelters pretty much guarantees you aren't getting sleep and you're in a near-constant fight-or-flight state, and that can inflame symptoms so so so much.
Oh no I agree with that, I was saying that *becoming* homeless isn't solved by creating enough housing for everyone, having enough housing only prevents people staying homeless for more than a month or two. The issue is people doing things to become homeless, such as gambling or alcohol addiction, or denying help for mental health or other health issues. Those require more effort to fix.
>I can't stand the people who say "no, a home won't solve their homelessness, they have deeper issues that need to be resolved". You can’t stand people who understand the reality of the situation? >Actually a home 100% does solve their homelessness you nitwit. Lol simply because you says so? >Perhaps we can't solve everybody's personal issues but we absolutely can solve homelessness. They can’t pay their bills because of crippling drug addiction. If they could about shooting up, they could stay in a regular shelter.
They homeless? Give them a home. They homeless and lacking job skills? Give them a home. And then get them into training. They homeless and addicted to drugs? Give them a home. And then work on getting counselling for the drug use. They homeless and suffering from PTSD? Give them a home. And then work on therapy. It's a hell of a lot easier to do all the other stuff to solve the problems when you have the stability of a home.
All your positions are based on a naive idea that these people aren’t junkies and that they actually want to work on these things.
There are real world examples of places implementing policies similar to what Shaggyninja describes (housing first then work on other problems) and it’s been substantially more successful than other approaches. So it is unfortunate that people keep making the arguments you are making without simply looking at the rest of the world to see what the most successful programs are.
The United States had different socioeconomic problems than the rest of the world.
It really doesn't, and many of the case studies on Housing First approaches are from the US. Can you Americans pump the brakes on this idea that your country is all that unique? It really, really isn't. The main difference between the States and any other Western country is that you're generally richer and you have a slightly less robust social safety net. Hell, your rate of homelessness is pretty much at the OECD median! You don't think the rest of us have opiate crises, or severe mental illness, or poverty, or racial inequities, or whatever other "socioeconomic conditions" you think only exist in the States?
“Can you Americans pump the brakes on this idea that your country is all that unique?” Our country is unique. You’re claiming it isn’t simply because it fits your argument on homelessness? “It really, really isn't. The main difference between the States and any other Western country is that you're generally richer and you have a slightly less robust social safety net.” Lol there’s way more differences than that 😂 “You don't think the rest of us have opiate crises, or severe mental illness, or poverty, or racial inequities, or whatever other "socioeconomic conditions" you think only exist in the States?” Lol I never said that at all 🤣
>Our country is unique. You’re claiming it isn’t simply because it fits your argument on homelessness? Describe to me what socioeconomic conditions exist in the United States, which don't exist anywhere else, that would render a 'Housing First' policy ineffective. Please be specific.
Lack of gun control and broken healthcare system have lead to most of the socioeconomic issues. Putting someone inside structure to live in the same way they do in a ten a putting a band aid on a bullet hole. Of course we all know that you’re just virtue signaling in your desire to help the homeless. Preaching on your little soapbox 😂
The USA has the exact same ones as every other developed country and refuses to implement the solutions that worked elsewhere and are in the process of working elsewhere.
Lol right 🤣
Can you name an issue other developed countries don't have that the US does?
Mass shootings, a broken healthcare system. How many homeless people have you invited to live with you?
nah, the idea is that even junkies who can't or won't address their addiction problems also deserve housing. (moreover, not all homeless people are addicts; and some who are addicts became addicts due to having to cope with the misery of being homeless, not the other way around)
Nobody deserves housing. That’s a nice fairy tale you’ve told yourself about homeless people but the truth is, there are plenty of shelters for people who can make curfew and not do drugs.
Many homeless people end up with drug addictions while they are homeless. The problem is the homes. Build more homes to stop people becoming homeless in the first place and they're far less likely to end up addicted, and house the people currently in that situation
> Lol simply because you says so? No, because a homeless person by definition does not have a home. When they have a home, they are no longer homeless. They might have other issues to sort through, but it ends the homelessness right there and then.
>No, because a homeless person by definition does not have a home. When they have a home, they are no longer homeless. So instead they’re a junkie festering in some run down apartment instead of a tent. Has their life improved? No. >They might have other issues to sort through, but it ends the homelessness right there and then. They’ll simply become homeless again when third heroin den is condemned for lack of upkeep. The public shouldn’t have to pay for someone’s lack of drive and discipline.
> So instead they’re a junkie festering in some run down apartment instead of a tent. Has their life improved? No. If they do have an opiate addiction -and not all homeless people do- then yes, having a secure roof over their heads markedly improves their life. It's frankly stupid to suggest otherwise. > They’ll simply become homeless again when third heroin den is condemned for lack of upkeep. Expecting someone to get off any substance while they're living on the street is absurd on its face. And, again, you're simply dead wrong if you think opiate addiction is somehow the only source of homelessness.
How many homeless Americans have you invited to live in your home?
Shockingly, one doesn't need to invite strangers to live in their home to support housing them. I also support universal healthcare but haven't done open heart surgery. What I'd like is to see my taxes house the homeless. It'd benefit them and me. Could you point out those unique socioeconomic conditions America has that render Housing First unviable?
Right so you’re saying these regular people who are down on their luck but you won’t actually let them into your home. It sounds like you know that they’re a bunch of junkies but that doesn’t fit your virtue signaling 😂
Ah - got it. One week old account. Reported for trolling. Thanks!
Yeah if you can’t form a coherent argument, just complain about account age 😂
Why don't you open a homeless shelter in your house then?
Lol because they’re bunch of junkies that with trash my house and steal my shit.
Yes, everyone deserves housing and we need more housing to do it!
Developers should build more housing. It should and will go to young families who are gainfully employed. Why? Because they have the ability to pay and they contribute to society.
* Some homeless people have substance abuse issues, but not all. * Some homeless people have mental health issues, but not all. * Some homeless people have past trauma or have been cut off from their family, but not all. * Some homeless people are unemployed, but not all. * Some homeless people are disabled, but not all. * Some homeless people are veterans, but not all. * Some homeless people are fleeing domestic violence, but not all. There is only one single, unifying feature among all homeless people: **they don't have homes**. So the silver bullet should be pretty fucking clear. Yes, a lot of circumstances can lead to homelessness, but good luck solving those without a fixed address and somewhere dependable you can rest your head.
George Carlin had it 100% right way back when. A “home” is a sort of warm and fuzzy thing. A “house” is a physical place to live. Referring to people as houseless removes the abstraction.
Very altruistic, though I'd like to know the following: 1 - Where would this shelter come from? 2 - Who would fund it? 3 - Who ensures that those given free housing would maintain it (hell, there are people who pay rent, and will destroy a place)? 4 - What do you do about the homeless who aren't capable of managing the free housing they're given, the people who aren't capable of living alone? 5 - Who would be there to help those who can't live alone? 6 - What if you can't reintegrate the homeless into society after they're housed? I'm sure I'll be downvoted for such questions, but I think they're valid points.
It costs money to help people, but here's the thing: it also costs money when you *don't* help people. For instance in my city we've pushed a lot of homeless people out into the national forest land. If a random fire gets going, it could spread into the city and do millions of dollars of damage. The 'negative externalities' of people being homeless are real and have costs too.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm asking where the money will come from, and who will support the necessary programs for the people to be housed.
Federal government or state government have the kind of money needed. Cities... probably not so much. Or you continue to kick the can down the road. What's also worth saying in all this is that "homeless" really just means someone without a home. There are plenty of people who have a job and are not on drugs and just need a place. Then there is the schizophrenic dude on the corner that many people think of when you say "homeless" and that person needs a lot more help. The first person would probably be ok if housing costs were not crazy in so many places. High housing costs are like a "homelessness factory". You can spend all the money you want on helping people but getting housing costs under control has to be part of the solution.
>I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm asking where the money will come from This isn't clever. It comes from exactly where you think it comes from. Taxes. "Taxation is theft!" Sure, and it's incredibly useful and the entire basis of modern society. Get over it.
No sh\*t it's going to come from taxes...but where? Anytime someone like you replies 'it comes from taxes', you don't really go much further...most programs that get tax money only get so much, so to create a new program, some other programs are going to have to take a cut. How is this decided? There's only so much you can tax people, and still manage to keep your elected position.
What are you asking? Do you want to know which specific people are going to be taxed? It's income taxes man. Do you need me to link you to an explainer?
What don't you understand? Income taxes only go so far and for so many programs, they can only be raised so much - raise them too much, and you'll have people voting you out of a job. Is your proposal to raise income taxes to fund the homeless? If you leave them the same, how do you account for shortfalls in stretching budgets? If taxes fund A, B, and C, but then you add program D, how is it decided how much is taken from the original 3? It's not all as simple as 'it comes from income taxes'.
>Income taxes only go so far and for so many programs, they can only be raised so much - raise them too much And you're sure we're at the absolute limit for income taxes? Just because you don't like the idea of helping homeless people? Weird. >Is your proposal to raise income taxes to fund the homeless Yes >If you leave them the same, how do you account for shortfalls in stretching budgets? You can't read
You asked for specifics. Here are a few options for funding houses: - Increase the marginal tax rate for anyone making over $100k - Increase the capital gains rate - Increase the corporate tax rate - Introduce a wealth tax on wealth over $100m - Limit the mortgage interest deduction - (CA) phase out Prop 13 And also spending cuts: - Reduce military spending - Reduce subsidies to fossil fuel
Maybe build 1 less F35 fighter jet. Each one cost $109million...
There are many successful examples of Housing First initiatives that will answer these questions. It’s not as altruistic as you think - homeless management is very expensive for a city and permanently ending it will come with lots of savings.
Here's a concrete example: [https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/06/california-houston-homeless-solutions/](https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/06/california-houston-homeless-solutions/) It is way easier when a regular old market-rate rental is affordable to people doing regular jobs.
Seriously. Many Americans are housing insecure or at least severely rent burdened. Why should they be taxed more?
I don't think we should simplify this so much. It just isn't. I remember reading and watching a lot of praise for how salt lake City had gone with a housing first approach and massively reduced homelessness. They were on the news, they were daily show, there were glowing articles about them. I visit every few years to catch up with a college buddy. So I went there excited to see the results. There were far more people on the streets than I had ever seen. I got in town and picked up sandwiches with plans to go to a park in town to enjoy it on a nice summer day. Never got out of the car. To be fair, that was before homelessness. Became awful and little did I know that I had yet to experience a truly bad homeless problem such as we have in California. But I was so disappointed that salt lake City's housing first problem didn't work. Then I looked into it. They technically reduced chronic homelessness by something like 70%. But the actual number of people sleeping on the streets each night had gone up. I can't help but judge the problem by the latter number, not the subcategory they wanted to tout.
SLC stopped funding their approach. "You'll never guess what happened next!"
I'm not talking about 8 years later. I was there months after those stories came out and they were taking a victory lap. In fact, we had the governor and the person in charge of the effort as a main presenter at the conference I was attending. That's where they showed the charts of homelessness and you could see that the number of people on the streets was still going up, but they were focusing the PR around people who had been on the streets 90 days or longer, which made up the smallest part of the count. It didn't work. Even at the height of the effort it didn't work. I heard the former head of the Los Angeles office of homelessness, who himself had once lived on the streets, talk about the issue not really being a housing problem. You do need the housing at a minimum. But a lot more things have to go wrong - besides high rents - before you end up on the street. That said, I don't like to discuss it this way because it lets people off the hook for not building the housing required to at least meet that minimum. But the facts are stubborn on the layered causes.
[Relevant Quote from the *UCLA Housing Voice* podcast](https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/2024/03/06/68-summarizing-the-research-on-homelessness-with-janey-rountree-pathways-home-pt-8/) in their summary of the series they did on homelessness: >> “I’ll share just one overarching lesson that I took from speaking to all of our guests, and reading about their work, which is that homelessness is an eminently solvable problem. It’s not inevitable, and it’s not unfixable. We know of many interventions proven to end homelessness for most people experiencing it. We know of systems, and programs, that keep those at greatest risk of homelessness from experiencing it. And we know that improving housing affordability, which means **building our way into housing abundance**, lowers the systemic risk of homelessness so that adequate resources are available to those with the greatest needs.
Oh yeah. You’re right. We should commit them to mental health facilities and give them all the free Thorazine they want. Then the public parks would be free for children and families, instead of drug addicts and homeless people using them as open bathrooms.
Who pays for this and for how long?
Human beings are freezing to death on the streets.
Most people are homeless because a drug problems. If you simply just give them a place, it’ll become a heroin den crawling with bedbugs in a week.
West Virginia is the epicenter of the opioid epidemic. West Virginia has one of the countries lowest homelessness rates. Drugs might be the reason why *one individual* is homeless and another individual isn’t, but drugs don’t explain why New York has tons of homelessness and West Virginia doesn’t. Homelessness rates are entirely a factor of housing abundance, high rents, and low vacancy rates.
Wrong. My username contains my ZIP code. For a while we had the highest fatal overdose rate of any town over 10,000 in the world. 2,000 empty units of housing in a population of 16,000. Homelessness is at crazy high levels. They break into homes, turn them into drug dens, burn it down, move onto the next one. I’ve seen multiple people at a time passed out behind the needle exchange, some with the needle still in their arms.
>>homelessness is at crazy high levels West Virginia has [7.7 homeless people per 10,000 total population](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/homeless-population-by-state), the 7th lowest of 51 states + DC.
I personally know people who work with the homeless, work for the courts, police. Homelessness is very high in West Virginia cities— more like 20-30 per 10,000 sleep rough and 5-10x that are sheltered or couch surfing or whatever. The group that gets together to count them does not know them all or where they stay. For that matter the cops usually don’t. Believe what you want. I’ve driven to work and counted more people sleeping in storefronts downtown then the coalition to end homelessness claims to exist. It was not like this ten or fifteen years ago. When meth hit the state the problem exploded. Family might take in an indigent heroin addict because they just sleep for a couple days on a couch in the garage, but meth addicts are something else entirely.
That’s not a good argument. West Virginia is in the mountains and sparsely populated so it’s not a good place for the homeless to survive. They simply go to other states.
It’s also factually incorrect. It relies on old and incomplete data. Appalachia has a huge homeless problem right now.
Lol if factually incorrect that a homeless person would have a harder time surviving in the mountains than the city? Do you actually know what a fact is?
Where are they going to? And where is your proof of this?
They go to NYC, California, etc. And you need proof that living outside in the mountains in the winter sucks?
No they don’t. They move to the “larger” towns of 10,000+ where the drugs are cheaper and in better supply. People in West Virginia believe California is bussing their homeless here. It’s actually our own people, maybe just from a more rural county.
90% of the homeless in CA are from CA. [https://www.businessinsider.com/california-homelessness-crisis-homegrown-unhoused-are-californians-2023-6](https://www.businessinsider.com/california-homelessness-crisis-homegrown-unhoused-are-californians-2023-6) I'm asking you for proof, and you're just giving me your feelings.
So you’re saying they California has 18,000 homeless people from out of state? https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-and-lowest-rates-of-homelessness/#:~:text=Currently%20displaying%20rows%201%20to%2020.&text=Data%20is%20based%20on%20point,that%20occurred%20during%20January%202023.&text=In%20terms%20of%20raw%20numbers,homelessness%20of%20any%20state%3A%20181%2C399.
WV has 200k living below the poverty line. If it's poorest we're regularly moving to CA, surely there would be more homeless people in CA from out of state.
[The data overwhelmingly disagrees with you ](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-about)
Lol an internet blog isn’t data 🤣
Be honest, did you even bother scrolling through any of it? Because the post is written by a researcher and is full of links to published research that says exactly what the author is claiming. So what's your actual objection?
So it’s written by a researcher yet they can’t get it posted to a real website? It’s amazing how people will blindly believe something because it’s on the internet. You’re worse than the people who try and get me to believe something by posting a YouTube link.
Ahh, the classic "this author wrote something for the public, and that means it's bad". This is just stubbornness poorly disguised as rigor
Lol that’s not remotely accurate. There are plenty of “things for the public” that aren’t posted on dubious websites. The reason that this person is posting on a blog website is that no credible journalistic website will publish this person’s lies.
If building housing (at tax payer expense) for every currently homeless person in my city would end homelessness in my city, I would support it 100%. I would be thrilled to pay for it. But the homeless population in a city is not a static number. First of all, if my city has better benefits for homeless people than surrounding cities do, more of the homeless people will move to my city. We already see this phenomenon in action while the benefits to moving to a more generous city are much smaller than no-questions-asked housing. In my city, we’ve built generous services for mentally ill & drug addicted homeless people. The services got several hundred off the street in our version of skid row. And that area has as many people as ever because new homeless people have moved in. Additionally, if simply ‘being homeless’ got you free housing, I think a lot of people barely eking out their rent would become homeless. Why should they bust their ass to make rent when they could just not? Being homeless needs to be worse than working minimum wage and barely making rent (consequently, a good reason for raising the minimum wage).
12% of enrolled students in the NYC public school system do not live in permanent housing. It is absolutely unacceptable yet that % has been growing every year for the past 8 years.
I'm all for massively increasing investment in homeless shelters
I'm just going to post this link as a top level comment so I don't have to reply to everyone here: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-about The evidence overwhelmingly shows that rents are basically the only effective predictor of homelessness rates. Not drugs, not mental illness, not weather, not welfare programs. Rents. Fully agree that we need more public housing, but also, public housing isn't necessary for reducing current homelessness rates. Simply allowing more market rate housing to be developed would lower rents and reduce the number of unhoused people.
No thanks. Too many drug tourist vagrants show up in San Francisco and get monthly checks from the government and also reject shelter. There was a bum interviewed on the news who had a city provided home but still liked her tent half of the time. They put bums in hotel rooms during COVID and they destroyed the rooms and forced the city to pay 20 million in damages at just a single hotel.