I don't agree with this author at all. Housing First has proven to be very successful when implemented on the local and state level.[0] This author seems to be taking a strange economic view that just because it has worked doesn't it mean it will continue to work, or work on a national level.<p>I hate to say it but he sounds very bitter and thinks this is just throwing good money after bad. IMO if it gets people off the streets and into a safety net, then we should try, and if it works keep doing it.<p><a href="https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic-homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...</a>
This skirts pretty close to saying that homelessness is an issue of "personal responsibility" while claiming to be apolitical.<p>Homelessness is a complicated issue but the core of the solution is very simple: Provide housing. Whether that is a short term stay in a shelter or a lifelong stay in permanent housing is going to depend on the individual. But either way, you need a safe place to sleep and live before you can start seriously addressing other problems.
All of the land is 100% owned, even the land that nobody ever uses. Nobody can use it - zoned off. There are no spots left to find and build a house somewhere. You're also not allowed to set up in a city - that's homelessness. You're not even allowed to plant seeds of food, that's illegal. The only way you are allowed to have a roof over your head or have food is when you pay someone for it, and it's all 100% already owned, you can't just go get it. How much should it cost? Hm, thousands of dollars every 30 days. Or you can get out of that if you pay hundreds of thousands up front for a mortgage and then property tax forever.
This guy came to my city over the summer, and he seems like he's got his own grift in terms of telling conservative politicians what they want to hear about homelessness and getting paid for it.<p>He mentions Obama and "Housing First", but it goes back further, to GWB, and was actually fairly successful: <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2013/04/29/opinion/frum-less-homelessness/index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.cnn.com/2013/04/29/opinion/frum-less-homelessnes...</a><p>Some people clearly need more than just a roof over their heads, but those other problems become much more difficult to treat when people do not have a stable place to stay.<p>And the statistics are very clear about the relationship between housing and homelessness:<p><a href="https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-about" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...</a>
Among housing advocates we usually call this the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. The NPIC is a shakedown racket that uses government powers to thwart market forces and funnel tax funds into their own pockets. It is simple corruption, because these organizations are also politically active, and the "community benefits" they extract amount to bribes, which are partly laundered into coordinated campaign spending. If you are ever dealing with people who say market-built housing is evil and we can only accept 100% non-profit housing, you are dealing with the NPIC.<p>The NPIC relies on your ignorance of the scale of the housing crisis. This article, as poorly written and argued as it is, appears to commit the same mistake. "Hundreds of millions of dollars" is nothing, can make no impact in a city the size of Seattle. In Berkeley, where I live, every little apartment building costs at least $100 million. That's just how much a building costs these days. Private industry in my county spent $6.8 billion on new construction last year. If you live in a county of several million people and the NPIC plan of record is to spend low hundreds of millions over a decade, that indicates that your local NPIC intends to perpetuate the housing crisis, which makes sense for them because otherwise they would need to get new jobs.<p>The only serious response to the American housing crisis involves West Coast cities spending at least $10k per capita per year on new construction for the foreseeable future. At least 95% of this money needs to come from private investment.
Author positions himself as an authority on homelessness by proximity to the people experiencing the issue. But nowhere in this is there the voice of homeless people themselves, or even a recognition that they are an authority as well.<p>I was homeless on and off for many years. The cause of my homelessness was not having enough money to afford a home; not having enough money to afford the healthcare that would allow me to work consistently enough to afford a home. I find "capitalism" an effective, useful, and accurate enough shorthand for that cycle.<p>The author of this article apparently does not, but neither does he offer an alternate nomenclature that still aligns with the actual experiences of homeless people. He erases our authority and replaces it with his own, but his is insufficient to the task.
the reason people are throwing rocks at this guy is because he will organize groups for "trash pickup" and then go into encampments and remove tents
This is not possible. No other country have implemented a program against homeless that works, and those who tried in the past have given up because it's an impossible problem to solve.
Ohh wait. Finland Housing First program have been running since 2008?<p>How do they can? Maybe there are other factors, like a better economy and support systems that generate less homeless people, maybe? Or maybe most homeless people die in the cold and are lost in the snow forever?<p><a href="https://www.themandarin.com.au/205500-finland-ends-homelessness-and-provides-shelter-for-all-in-need/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.themandarin.com.au/205500-finland-ends-homelessn...</a>
A few tangential questions:<p>Assuming services are available and accessible on a voluntary basis, what is the success rate for overcoming major substance abuse or mental health issues?<p>How does that success rate change with various levels of coercion?<p>Assuming the success rate is fairly low, that still leaves a lot of people with substance abuse or mental health problems. What is the right thing to do for them? Independent housing is one option but wouldn't some kind of institution make more sense?<p>If someone's main problem is homelessness and some minor criminal behavior, I can imagine that free housing could turn their situation around quickly. But only if it's a safe environment around similarly-situated people.
Theres a great book in portuguese about about it called "Mafia dos Mendigos - como caridade aumenta a miséria" translate to somethinh likeThe Beggars mafia.<p>Its a book about a evangelic priest who lived in the streets among beggars for a year, and through observations came to write this a book about how non-goverment organizations make money exploiting the misery of this people.
The author gave up the game with the bald-faced assertion that "The reason why it was decided to make it voluntary is because all homeless people according to them are victims of capitalism and would not be fair to have any expectations of them."<p>This is a nonsense straw dog. The author bemoans the lack of "metrics" while neglecting to mention that metrics have shown that Housing First approaches have had a higher success rate than the alternatives.<p>I think the author's treatment at the hands of activists is deplorable but the arguments in the article don't hold water.
I wonder if it's also how the public attention meant that the news had to be bite sized and simplified. But in real life homelessness is immensely complex and varies per person.<p>Rather than that, just slap a one size fits all onto everyone. Because that's what governments are best at handling.
Funny, this guy protests that he wasn't asked to return after saying they needed specific metrics and measurable results, but doesn't provide any metrics or results for alternatives to Housing First-- which does actually have studies.<p>He also talks about how he has witnessed the rise of homelessness and scoffs at the notion that the economic system (capitalism) is squeezing people into losing their homes, but provides no alternative system-wide issue.
Homelessness becomes a problem when building houses is illegal. Allow people to do what they want with their land, and the problem fixes itself. Central planning has failed every single time it has tried, even at local levels.
> <i>This was not enough though. We were only spending millions and the system wanted billions. So after months/years of intensive lobbying, in 2013 President Barack Obama inaugurated the Housing First model as a one size fits all solution to homelessness. Despite no evidence it would work the administration promised it would end homelessness by 2023.</i><p>So I guess, the problem really was Capitalism after all...
As I've said before, there is a counter-intuitive meta-problem with homelessness.<p>Fixing homelessness doesn't require love, or honesty, or any other virtue. Like most problems, it requires money. But no matter how much money is allocated to fix the problem of homelessness, fixing it attracts more homeless. Their feet aren't nailed to the ground on the other side of the continent... if they hear of a magical place that solves homelessness, they go there. They hitchhike, they'll panhandle for cash for a bus ticket, if nothing else they'll hoof it.<p>So while your city is busy celebrating its miraculous solution to homelessness that took 500 people off the streets and put rooves over their heads, there's an army of homeless marching there, invisible to you. 8000 of them, and you budgeted for up to 550.<p>But it really never even gets this far. Your local politician is a bit more savvy than you give him credit for, and he recognizes this meta-problem, at least subconsciously. So when it comes time to solving the problem for those 500 homeless, he deflects and postpones. He changes the subject, he asks for more studies. In the end, he has the cops chase them out and then bulldozes the tent city. And this happens regardless of his politics, because the meta-problem doesn't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican. It doesn't even care what the real solution is either. Maybe the homeless do need tough love, maybe they just need a handout. But tough love costs money just like handouts need money, and you can't ever allocate enough. Red state, blue state, it's all the same.<p>They need to fix the meta-problem first.