These policy experts need to sit down with social workers, case managers, ER and psychiatric center physicians and staff.<p>The most visible homeless people that are the jarring entropy in American cities are always going to be the low functioning indigent population with mental health and/or addiction issues.<p>These people have no choice but to be visible. They obviously can’t succeed in their current state. Where can someone go who has baseline mental health issues, has been low SES for their entire life, and has no real support network? When this type of person is in crisis a shelter isn’t going to be a safe convalescent house to get mental health treatment and stability/sobriety.<p>The US is woefully inadequate here. We let our lowest functioning and least supported (as in support network of family and friends) members of society walk the streets panhandling by day and sleeping in the dirt by night.<p>US cities need convalescent facilities and long term psychiatric facilities for the indigents who are mentally unable to tackle their own enormous critical problem and for the ones who are long term addicted and need strong support. (Long term alcohol use and amphetamine use lead to different kinds of psychosis. Wernicke/Korsakoff and amphetamine induced psychosis respectively. These people are not sound enough of mind to do this without long term facilities. We don’t have those in the US anymore. Unsupervised public housing is not the answer for these people. Perhaps for the less apparent higher functioning and invisible poor it is.
Alan Graham. founder of Community First Village, a 27-acre community in East Austin that provides affordable, permanent housing for the homeless believes that the single greatest cause of homelessness is “a profound, catastrophic loss of family,” whether by forces like death or divorce, or institutional failures in the criminal justice and foster care systems.<p>“The Community First Village is the recognition that human beings need to be in relationship with each other, and that housing will never solve homelessness but community will,”<p>Does housing availability have an effect on homeless, sure. But addiction, mental health, and trauma, play a much more prevalent role.<p>I'm far from am expert in this topic, this just reflects my understanding. I'd love to hear a different point of view.
I want to defend this article since a lot of people in the comments are bashing it. There are a few facts here that point to housing prices as the primary driver in homelessness rates:
- as an example in the article, King County WA has a homelessness rate 5x of Miami-Dade County.
- Why is that? Florida is obviously not more generous with subsidies or financial help to homeless people, it’s not a climate where people can’t live outside, it doesn’t have way more mental health issues than Seattle
- if you look at the homelessness rates in cities they correspond strongly with rents. Mental illness rates don’t seem to change much between cities.<p>It’s true that the thing that causes people to become homeless is often a crisis of some kind - adiction or mental health, job loss, etc. What people in the comments here aren’t doing is modeling what happens in a place where housing is cheap vs housing is expensive. In a place where housing is cheap, addiction or mental health issues might mean you can keep living in your shitty apartment and making rent; life is less precarious. Mentally ill people talk to themselves in the comfort of their own home! Obviously there are people who are homeless even in low cost of living areas and they need support to find shelter, but if rich areas built enough housing to lower prices, some amount of the homelessness crisis would be solved “for free.”
This is just obviously not true. Sure, there are people that sleep in their car and could probably use somewhere to stay. However the visible majority of homeless in California, let’s say the “dramatic” homeless, are absolutely not just a house away from normalcy.<p>Tale as old as time, California charters a hotel to house the homeless and it turns into a drug orgy smearing shit on the walls paradise.<p>Yeah yeah, the only difference between the aggressive homeless person screaming and smashing water bottles against plate glass store windows and me is that I have a roof over my head. Look around and give me a break with that nonsense.
There are at least 3 types of homelessnes and each of these types have different solution:<p>1) people who have drug and mental issues<p>2) people (and families) who do not have drug and metal issues
but just bad luck (lost job, released from jail and cannot find job, etc.)<p>3) people want be to transient (runaways, hanging out and traveling, etc.). Members of this group slowly become group one.<p>I have a strong opinion that there needs to 3 different solutions which should NOT be mixed (I.e., do not provide shared housing for the first group and second group).
"Why do some US cities struggle more with homelessness? A new book explores a key component of the issue: housing supply."<p>It's a Captain Obvious class of article, hopefully the next one will explore the correlation between thirst and water deprivation
I know people who work on sustainable & affordable housing as well as homelessness. It's generally understood that we need more housing. A lot more. And some huge fraction of the "unhoused" (?) is due to affordability (ever rising rents).<p>Confirming this folk theory with hard data and analysis will prove very useful in the ongoing policy battles.<p>(A lot of political hobbyists continue to mindlessly repeat value-based and morality tale stories, when simple economics explains quite a bit.)
Parts of the piece I'd have hoped would be reflected in the discussion:<p>> First, the people sleeping on the street only represent a subset of the total population of people experiencing homelessness. In the 2020 count, chronic homelessness (what policy makers call being homeless for at least a year and living with some kind of physical or mental disability, including mental illness, a chronic health condition, and substance use disorder) accounted for less than 30 percent of the homeless cases in King County, while the chronic unsheltered population made up less than 17 percent of total cases. Second, we know that mental health and drug use can be both a cause of homelessness and a consequence. The trauma associated with homelessness is significant; that drug use and mental illness might result from this experience is not surprising. Research confirms this relationship.<p>> Despite this complexity, the fundamental question remains: Does variation in rates of these individual risk factors like poverty explain variation in rates of homelessness witnessed across the country? In other words, do we have more homelessness in Seattle because we have more poor people or more drug users? Our research suggests the answer is no.<p>There follow some supporting graphs, etc.<p>> Individual risk factors help account for who in a given city might lose their housing at any given point in time, but housing markets—rents and vacancy rates—set the context in which those risk factors are expressed. Without looking at housing markets, you can’t explain why Seattle has a much higher rate of homelessness than Chicago, Minneapolis, or Dallas. The fundamental conclusion is that the consequences of individual vulnerabilities are far more severe in locations with less accommodating housing markets.
There's a strong disincentive to cast homelessness as a housing problem: property prices.<p>Nobody particularly minds if a bit of money is spent on mental health services or drug addiction therapy but money spent on new social housing in your area that uses your tax money to reduce the value of your home and potentially bring people you wouldnt want as neighbors?<p>Yeah, people arent keen on that. Even ordinary, caring "lefty" people hate that idea.<p>The 1% also dont want to put downward pressure on the value of their property portfolios with extra housing or upward pressure on wages and they own the media and think tanks so mental health/drugs <i>cause</i> homelessness rather than <i>are caused</i> by homelessness when they discuss it.<p>Or, it gets cast as a lack of personal responsibility for the right wing press.<p>Either way the only working solution is the least politically palatable, so cities run by people who care end up just building a methadone clinic or something because that's all you'll be <i>allowed</i> to do.<p>Then the right wing and liberal press will take a shit on them because what little they were able to do on a tiny budget didnt really solve anything.
"Homelessness Is a Housing Problem"<p>Tautology? That doesn't really help us fix it, or even understand it. You could give people housing, but that's not going to fix the underlying causes, and may not be the best help we can give some of the individuals. That could be inability to get or hold a job due to criminal history or mental health, jobs that don't pay enough to afford living expenses (more about market/job structure than simply raising minimum wage, although reforms around that can make sense), etc. Now for some segment of the homeless population, possibly a fairly large one, giving someone an address can help them get a job and get back on their feet - I'm thinking Norway's (or was it Sewden?) model, but other structural issues would have to be addressed to make that work, like how the "justice" and healthcare (substance abuse and mental health especially) system are structured as well as social conventions/stigmas related to them.
Homelessness is a feature, not a bug, it's the stick. Nobody would work wearing diapers in Amazon warehouses for miserable wages if they weren't afraid of lacking food and becoming homeless.
Those trend line fits are hilarious. Unmodeled confounding factors, anyone? I especially like where they choose if something should be a log-linear fit vs. a linear fit. And the 95% confidence interval only containing less than 10% of the samples. These guys are amazing. And Greg Colburn is a professor! Good job, guys. Go find other work.
The idea that "homelessness" is about a lack of homes is a dumb idea that just won't die. Those who promote it endlessly simply will not go out in the world and use their own senses to determine for themselves that it isn't true. Here's how you do it: go out and talk to the "homeless" and keep notes as to whether homelessness is probably that person's primary problem. The results: upwards of 90% of those surveyed will have some other main problem, and it will almost certainly be addiction, mental illness, or both.<p>All of a sudden, it stops being a mystery why "homelessness" is a perennial problem: because we're misusing the term "homeless" for two of the most intractable problems in the human world. Calling those people "the homeless" is like calling cancer patients "the hairless".<p>When I lived in a different place, I went on long walks. I started buying little care packages to give to those who were suffering out on the street. I gave an older woman a package and she was grateful and we had a nice exchange. The next time I tried, she almost attacked me. Think her primary problem is lack of a home? Lack of a home is just one symptom of her real problems.
Homelessness is caused by:<p>1) Drug addiction (addicts and the mentally ill are no longer rational actors and it's cruel to treat them as such, stop paying them to sleep on the sidewalk)<p>2) Immigration (like it or not, pumping up demand weather they're paying for it or the government makes housing much more expensive for everyone.)<p>3) Cheap credit (Everyone knows how this works and worse still it directly effects the most disadvantaged while funneling their money to the wealthy.)<p>4) High cost of construction labor<p>5) Material supply chain issues (which is largely the same as the last two, it's all just inflation.)<p>6) Expensive regulation that adds to construction cost (zoning, building codes etc.)<p>Housing is part of it but not the only part. Some of these things could be <i>easily</i> fixed in ways that benefit everyone who lives here (housed or not.) No one in charge wants to though and you should be asking why.
I believe that homelessness is only a housing problem for a percentage of people who are temporarily "down on their luck" and need a place to stay while they find a job. For the normal person who had a string of simultaneous bad things happen to them (car broke down, water heater exploded, they fell down the stairs and couldn't work for a months, etc) that caused their finances to die, most normal people have the ability to recover from that, especially with some assistance.<p>But there's no helping the mentally ill or drug addicts with a house. You could gift them a mansion, and they'll find a hammer and tear up the walls either looking for demons hiding in the walls to kill, or trying to find wiring or metal scrap to sell for drugs.