I was under the impression that there is only _partial_ overlap between chronic public nuisance people and drug users. In particular, I've read comments that "Alcoholics go home and beat their wives. Opiate users go home and their wives beat them".: I also have a vague memory that stimulant users tend to be more of a hazard to people around them.
Can anyone suggest better (but hopefully somewhat compact) information?
"but would be irrelevant for determining *if* they are chronic public nuisances. "
Fair enough. My suspicion (if the quoted rule of thumb about opiate users is true) is that that class of drug users is probably not a chronic public nuisance - but this is a guess.
> I find it very, very hard to believe that the increased unhappiness of ~5000 people being put in some "meh" warehouse outweighs the increased happiness of probably tens to hundreds of thousands of people in San Francisco who don't have to deal with chronic public nuisances anymore.
Utility Monster v. Shut Up And Multiply, <current_year>'s most consequential court case. I can already see the picketers outside the courthouse, hoisting their "No One Is Happy Until Everyone Is Happy!" signs.
(If I were selected for that jury, I'd probably find in favour of the defendant...but, wow, what acrimonious proceedings so far. Most of the evidence is only barely admissible. Surely we can do better.)
Sorry, my legibility is declining the longer I stay up, really should check myself for clarity and "is there actually any real value in writing this reply?"
Utility Monster would be the opposing position, that the obligation to alleviate individual suffering doesn't diminish, even for large values of obligation and suffering. Failure mode is the perfect becoming the enemy of the marginally better. Shut Up And Multiply is an old kinda-deprecated LessWrong saying about the correct way to think of unfathomably large numbers, part of the logic for your proposition. Failure mode* is, uh... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs-dust-specks
A less snarky, more useful reply woulda been that I generally agree with your reasoning, with specifics negotiable. I seem to remember Scott's post about the 26 gubernational candidates mentioning one who wanted to, like, build high-rise parking structures to warehouse the homeless. Seems obviously kinda farcical at first, but it's the same sort of necessary evil; if it's good enough to be a Serious Policy Proposal for a state governor's campaign, then it's not totally outside the Overton Window. Properly pricing externalities is really important for accurate cost-benefit analysis; this is one of many tricky issues where morality frequently impedes empirical quantification. Like, it's noble and idealistic to say we ought to judge a society by how it treats the least among them...but, like climate change, the average person doesn't actually want to sacrifice terribly much to improve the lot. So something like warehousing is likely within the feasible-solution distribution.
*Ongoing disagreement as to whether this is indeed a failure mode.
How would this keep people off the streets? It seems like it would keep people dispersed, but still on the streets. And if anything, the loss of accumulated capital (social and otherwise) might keep people on the street.
Which runs back into the problem of there aren't enough shelter beds, shelters are closed during day hours, they often have policies that make them less helpful, and now you've got a large concentration of poverty again.
Plus it sounds like the plan is going from "busting up large camps" to "busting up camps of more than 1-2-3 people".
Why not just round people up at that point? Unless the goal isn't solving the problem but instead just encouraging people to move on to the next jurisdiction/city.
You are never going to solve the problem, or even improve it, by promoting a model in which people are free to pitch a tent, claim public space, dump trash, etc., wherever and whenever they want. There are some basic social norms that have to exist.
If folks don't like the rules at the shelters, then the public is just somehow obligated to have no rules for these folks at all?
With fairly good reason... I'm renting my spare room to a fellow on social assistance. He takes his meds and is always very nice and pleasant with me; but he's utterly destroyed the carpet in his bedroom in only 4 months and it will need to be ripped out and replaced before I use that room for anything else. (Oh, and he brought cockroaches with him.) If I were renting out the room for financial gain, taking him as a tenant would have been stupid.
And this guy is a very stable, just relatively low functioning dude who doesn't have any addiction issues besides nicotine (which I smoke more of than he does.) The vast majority of the "Riff-Raff" (as he calls people permanently on government assistance) are far harder on their homes.
I'd sooner just making renting out space illegal than refuse to let a landlord choose his tenants. Because the only rational response to "I have to rent out my units to anyone, including people who will trash them" is to raise prices to compensate for the additional repairs.
Or alternately "I'm not going to bother ripping out that carpet and exterminating the cockroches since the next guy will be just as bad" so you do have people living in squalor; the prices may be low, but the street might seem more appealing if the room is dirty, infested, and rundown and needs repairs to leaking roof etc.
When my wife and I were in the process of moving from a condo to a house in the same city, we considered renting out the condo, since it was going to take considerable time and effort to sell it. This was in New York State, which has some protections for tenants. We decided not to rent it, partially because of this, and partially because we were concerned about the possibility that we might get a bad tenant who would trash the place. The end result was that it was unoccupied for about a year. C'est la vie.
We had a tenant who flooded the basement with several feet of water and then didn't tell anyone until winter came (it had ruined all the mechanicals washer/dryer/furnace). That was great! Rented out the place for 7 years and lost money overall due to that and one other negligent tenant.
Discrimination is difficult to prove. Also, landlords then have incentives to act in ways when they search for tenants that makes it (even) more difficult to prove.
There are lots of mental illnesses that are chronic, i.e. NOT treatable; only manageable. It seems VERY reasonable to expect that they're over-represented among the 'visibly homeless' people.
How does the "attract homeless people to the area" part work exactly, though? Are they reading about how great being homeless is on a message board? Are there hobo signs? Is there a strong homeless gossip network? I know it seems like I'm ribbing you, and I am a bit, but I think it's worth taking the time to consider how exactly this works and how far homeless people are going to be willing to travel to get to a place that is "better for being homeless". Most people want to stay in neighborhoods where they know where everything is and know the people and have contacts they can call on. The poorer you are, the more that's true. If you have $10K in the bank you can take a chance on moving, and you have a buffer to simply buy assistance in your new location. If you're homeless and you get on a bus and travel 100 miles, you don't know where it's safe to sleep, where it's safe to eat, or anyone who will let you crash on their floor for a night. You better be real, real confidence about how strong the homeless community is in that new location. (Not to mention that if you stop being homeless, which is the goal, you're now not homeless 100 miles from the places you know.)
Agreed. Homeless people actually make decisions on where to move and are not just sort of blown around by the wind. And yeah, people still get knowledge by talking to other people. The open air drug market in the Tenderloin in San Francisco may not have a billboard or a website, but just about everyone knows where it is and how to find it.
My roommate moved in with me from living in a homeless shelter. He's 60 and has told me a lot of stories.
One of the things I've heard from him and many hitchhikers I've picked up, is that "homeless" folks and the general "Riff-raff" as he calls them like to travel just as much as anyone else. And being unemployed, they have lots of time to do it, but little money.
So people take buses or hitchhike to different cities just to visit them, same as any other tourist. (But since they don't have a home or a job to go back to, "Just stay" is a much more viable option once they're there than it would be for you or me; so part of it is right there) And while they're travelling, they're exchanging word of mouth info with other people.
So some mixture of "I went to San Francisco for a visit and decided not to leave" and "I heard from another dude that San Francisco is a great place to be homeless/get drugs/meet people/ect." seems to be the main information vectors.
And nowadays people can read things on the internet; many "Riff-Raf" who can't afford a cell phone plan will still keep an old phone to connect to the internet at McDonalds or elsewhere with open wifi.
> How does the "attract homeless people to the area" part work exactly, though? Are they reading about how great being homeless is on a message board? Are there hobo signs? Is there a strong homeless gossip network?
Absolutely
Even among people that are 'long-term homeless', some still find, e.g. an occasional couch to crash on for a few days. And lots of homeless know lots of 'nearly homeless' people, if only because they both do the same kinds of drugs. And lots of them have cell phones and call/text their friends, of which some are likely to be homeless too.
I knew two people – that I have in mind in particular – and they were both 'basically homeless'; they basically squatted in illegal 'housing'. They had friends all over the neighborhood, some of whom would squat where they could, or sleep on the literal streets. I had several conversations with one of the two people I'm thinking of about how they might fare if they moved 'back home' in another state. I am VERY certain that homeless people are absolutely sharing the same kind of info about their conditions.
I would be very surprised if people AREN'T/WEREN'T sharing things along the lines of "It's great out here! Drugs are cheap; lots of shit to steal and sell right away. You should come visit! Take the bus; it sucks, but it'll be worth it."
Historical anthropologists have mapped all the different types of signs (sort-of pictograms) tramps of old discreetely skratched on farmwalls to inform other tramps of things like: Friendly or unfriendly farmer, whether you can expect to be allowed to sleep in the hayloft, if the dog is dangerous, etc. A lot of relevant, fine-grained information captured through a shared "sign culture". This information exchange has been made much, much easier through the mobile phone revolution. It has really revolutionized hobo life.
Jack London's writings on homelessness & tramp life anno 1894, is still a great inside view on homelessness. Do not underestimate the homeless. They have agency, like everybody else.
Maybe – Austin gets plenty hot like this too. Houston isn't _that_ far from it.
Someone I know in NYC tho claims that a lot of 'drug addict homeless' where he lives – East Village – are seasonal/migratory and _most_ of them are 'snowbirds', i.e. leave in the winter for 'warmer climes'.
Used to work in a shelter in Illinois, got to know the homeless there fairly well. In the fall, a common goal of panhandling was a bus ticket to Key West. Lots of snowbirds among the homeless, yeah. A bus ticket costs so much less than housing.
"The US might not be so polarized after all, if both the left and the right agree that the solution is to round up all the homeless, strip them of human rights, and lock them for life out of sight into death camps."
Come come, Machine Interface, this is the sort of mealy-mouthed bleeding-heart-liberalism soft do-goodery that created the problem in the first place. The corpses, man, the corpses! You forget that this only makes sense if a profit can be turned out of it, and what better than using the death camp as large-scale human trials and blood donation centres. Probably you can't get any usable parts from the raddled wretches when they do die, but you can at least process the bodies into something like fertiliser and so forth. Plus, the 'testing to destruction' medical trials means that "for life" isn't going to be very long, so expenses can be cut down as much as possible. A bowl of gruel and a pannier of water a day can be done economically.
This is ... not helpful or kind or particularly true?
I don't think Shellenberger, or Scott, are of 'the intolerant right'. Jails/prisons can be bad, and along similar dimensions, and yet not be _usefully_ described as "death camps". It sure seems like everyone is not trying to punish the homeless worse than jails/prisons.
These are helpful for understanding what you meant by the original comment; thanks.
What I think Scott did differently was use the 'imagery' to describe the way this worked in the _past_, whereas you seemed to be claiming that people _consciously_, and deliberately, wanted to bring that kind of thing back.
I think a REALLY important component of any new policies/solutions is a clear, standard way for people to 'test OUT of' involuntary commitment. I'd hope that people, e.g. the ACLU, would monitor any new system too to, hopefully, ensure that everyone is being tested fairly.
But it's not like there aren't _other_ places that already fit your description of "filthy hovels where they'll have less rights than prison inmates and'll slowly die of manutrition, neglect and abuse.", e.g. 'retirement homes'.
Trying to be charitable, it really is a hard and expensive problem to take care of people that can't take care of themselves, especially in a way that's 'up to' our modern standards/sensibilities.
I don't think he left it out, I think (can't remember how explicitly the book made this connection) that they know the justice system won't press charges, so why bother bringing them in?
I'm not sure why you're saying one doesn't cause the other. Isn't the pathway not building houses -> high housing prices -> homelessness? Yes, the particular way high housing prices cause homelessness is that the upper class can afford the prices and the lower class can't, but that's part of the causal pathway.
I was linked to a blog recently (maybe a link on Zvi's blog?) that hypothesized that there are two homeless groups. One that swells and dissipates with housing prices, and one that is largely insensitive to those changes, and when it comes to negatively affecting others quality of life, it is the latter group that is the primary source.
Don't know if that is accurate. I hung out with some panhandle for a few months and that wasn't enough info to say one way or another, but it did seem plausible.
If so, fixing housing supply would help a lot of individuals, but wouldn't have much impact in solving the homelessness problem people normally talk about.
A lot of people go through some economic hard times, but many have relatives and friends who will put them up for awhile on the couch until they are back on their feet financially. These people are more or less homeless for awhile, but they aren't The Homeless.
The people camping under overpasses tend to have alienated everybody who let them in their front door.
Jazz legend Miles Davis tells a memorable story about when he moved to NYC in 1945 at age 18 and his affluent dentist dad paid for his rental of a nice apartment. Much to his surprise, his hero Charlie Parker asked if he could move in with him for a little while because he was having trouble with his old lady. But one day he came home and found Charlie had sold all of Miles' suits to buy heroin. Another day he came home and Charlie was sitting on the floor because Charlie had sold all of Miles' furniture to buy more heroin.
You can sort of get away with this kind of predation on your friends if you are the world's greatest musician. But if you aren't ...
I'm not so sure that there is a *group* that is actually insensitive to these changes, though there might be a *state* people can get into that is harder to get out of. A simple model that might make sense is that for every person, they can be housed, or in short-term homelessness, or in long-term homelessness. When you're in short-term homelessness, there's a certain difficulty of getting housed when you find an available home, but when you're in long-term homelessness it becomes a lot harder. Different people might have different lengths of short-term homelessness that push them into long-term homelessness, perhaps based on pre-existing levels mental health or education or executive function or whatever it is. Under this sort of model, if there's a small number of people in short-term homelessness at any point, and homes are abundant enough, then most of them are likely to find a home before ending up in long-term homelessness. But if the number of people in short-term homelessness swells for any reason, then the average duration of short-term homelessness will likely swell too, and this will mean there's a greater flow of people into long-term homelessness. It might be that the city recovering to a level of housing abundance doesn't do much to shrink the long-term homeless population, but it does drastically slow the growth of this population on that model. It might be that different things are needed to get people out of long-term homelessness, but housing abundance would still have a big effect on the rate at which people enter it.
I am concerned calling it "short-term" vs "long-term" makes it seem like people will naturally bleed from one to the other after a period of time. A lot of the documents I've been reading lately have stopped using those phrases and instead use a Transitional/Episodic/Chronic framework. While I can see some mechanisms for time spent transitioning someone from short- to long-term (increased comfort with homelessness, exposure to health/legal problems, dwindling reserves, increasing reliance on / beginning addictions) these don't seem as strong as it instead it sorting out those that have pre-existing difficulties (poor social skills, impulse control, psychosis, physical impairments, lack of social safety net, addictions).
So, for the example of the four panhandlers I hung out with for ~6 months: One actually had an apartment, they were just supplementing their income. One (allegedly) had a doctor as a father, but was not willing to move home (and accept the rules of being home) and lived in a camp. One was a snow bird and was currently living in a camp but was having sex with my housemate (refused to sleep indoors). One alternated between shelter and camp, admitted to a crack addiction he was trying to get clean from, was diagnosed bi-polar, and was trying to transition back into the restaurant industry (that chapter of his story ended sadly when he asked his sister to use her shower so he could be nice for an interview, she refused, so he broke into her house and trashed her stuff and he ended up in the legal system). For none of that group was the length of time they had spent homeless affecting whether or not they were going to be housed, and the cost of housing really only impacted 3/4 of them (well, who knows if free housing would have kept the bi-polar guy together or not, I still think about him a lot) and these are 4 people selected as safe/together enough that I spent a significant amount of time with them, not the kind of people walking down the street yelling obscenities at passerby.
There's a housing assocation called Focus in my country that provides emergency, short-term, and long-term accommodation to homeless people. There is a housing project run by them in my town.
Most of the people who avail of their services are in genuine need and respond well. There is, however, a minority who may be in need but abuse the services. They don't pay their rent. They cause trouble - getting in fights with other people living in the buildings, petty crime, drugs, alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, and so on. Eventually they have to be evicted, and then the cycle of "need emergency accommodation - get housed - fuck that up again' repeats.
Cheap housing is not the solution here, because while lack of access to cheap housing is part of the problem for them, they have a lot of other problems which make them homeless.
Absolutely lack of housing and emergency accommodation does make things worse, as you say; a swell in short-term homelessness does go on to become long-term homelessness and that gets worse the longer it goes on. But the unhappy truth is that there is, and always will be, a small core of people whose lives are a mess not because of homelessness but because they can't live a life that is beneficial to themselves.
I think that is the problem. The most visible homelessness is the most chronic; the people who are visibly mentally ill and/or criminal.
So if there were more cheap housing, the person who is homeless because "I got out of an abusive relationship but I haven't the resources to rent/buy housing" or "I lost my job and my debts ate my savings" or the like will be best served.
The person who is homeless because of mental illness and so on won't benefit if housing cost ten dollars, because they'd sell that house to pay for their fix. And it's the second group which may well be smaller but is the one most disturbing ordinary people trying to walk down the streets between their job and getting back to their own apartment.
If you're assuming that chronic homelessness is an intrinsic state, insensitive to environmental factors like housing affordability, and you're also assuming that the 'homelessness problem' (in the sense of unpleasantness/inconvenience to housed people) is due mostly/entirely to the chronically homeless, then how do you explain the fact that the problem is getting worse?
It seems to me that you can't have it both ways. One of the following has to be true:
a) It's possible for transitionally/situationally homeless people to become chronically homeless under certain conditions, probably involving the prolonged inability to secure housing and the mental/physical stress of prolonged homelessness.
b) Some of the community problems associated with high rates of homelessness are attributable to transitionally/situationally homeless people, probably because some of those problems are a result of behaviours that are situationally-rational in the context of homelessness.
If there are 20,000 bedrooms in a city and 30,000 disjoint sets of people who can share a bedroom, 10,000 of those sets will be not in a bedroom. If you gave everyone a billion dollars, 10,000 sets would still be not in a bedroom as long as those dollars couldn't be spent on constructing additional bedrooms or moving out of the city.
There's a direct causal linkage there, at least to the extent that "no houses" is the problem at all (if there are houses not being used, well, that's a different issue).
Of course, in real life, there is likely some demand elasticity. While price hikes push everyone down a few steps on the housing ladder, they will also decrease demand as people tend to move elsewhere.
It's strongly related, and I did think of mentioning the PHP, although the way the PHP is usually stated isn't quite strong enough for this application.
One responsible response to high housing prices in California is to move out of state. I've known plenty of working people who have.
Are the homeless in California Californians who don't like working, so they don't move out of state?
Alternatively, many in California suspect that a lot of the homeless moved to California to be homeless: for the nice weather, panhandling and petty crime opportunities, and lax enforcement. A big investigative article in the Orange County Register blamed the explosion of white people living in tents along the Santa Ana River a few years ago on the recent explosion in the drug rehab business in California: some addict in Kentucky gets 3 months of rehab from insurance, so why not go out to sunny California for 3 months? But after 3 months he still likes drugs and his old lady back in Kentucky moved in with his best friend so he can't crash with her anymore while spending his rent money on meth, so he doesn't see much reason to go home, so he heads over to the camping section in Walmart and is soon camping under a freeway overpass. (By the way the homeless sure own more stuff than they used to in the late 20th Century.)
The homeless industry is adamant that that's NOT what's happening.
Of course, like in the semi-fictional scenario I outlined above, it's arguable whether the drug rehabber turned homeless is a Californian or an out-of-stater. Lots of people move around the United States all the time. It appears that California tends to drive out Americans in the middle ranks of society and collects Americans of the most irresponsible stratum.
> Of course, like in the semi-fictional scenario I outlined above, it's arguable whether the drug rehabber turned homeless is a Californian or an out-of-stater
It seems astounding that we don't have any information about this. With all the money going around for homeless programs haven't we sent some sociology grad student around to _ask_ them where they're from? Sure, they won't always tell the truth, but their answers might be illuminating.
I don't think the part your quoting is about knowledge, but definition. If you move to California for rehab and decide you like the environment and policies enough to stay, whether to count you as Californian is a definitional issue.
I think the part of the causal relationship that (and thank you Scott for getting at this) is that "open air drug markets and people yelling GRAGH at you on the street" *creates NIMBYs* because The Voter(TM) does not want to live in a feces and needle infested miserable block of dilapidated buildings that no one can afford to fix because the *next* person is going to set them on fire or cook meth in them and condemn the building.
So when "building more housing and density" has a causal relationship with those problems, The Voter(TM) wasn't born yesterday and will activate to stop you.
An uncharitable reading of “if their neighborhood got denser, it would start looking … litter-filled, decaying, disgusting, unsafe, and ambiently miserable to exist in” makes it sound like the density is the cause of all of the problems.
But it’s also plausible that high land prices lead to both high density and high housing costs.
If housing costs are the problem, then part of the solution is to build more housing, which necessarily leads to more density somewhere.
But if density is the root of the problem then the NIMBYs are right and we should not build more housing and just let prices rise to the stratosphere.
Density without disorder definitely exists in places (mostly outside North America), so I lean toward the YIMBY explanation.
The density *is* the cause of the problems, because our current urban policy status quo is incapable of mitigating the downsides of density. That isn't *required* to be the case by any respect, but it is the situation as the Voter in a United States city sees it.
I think the obvious solution here for SF at least, where they want the density, is to build an enormous arcology at the far west end of Golden Gate Park. Replace the golf course, they'd have that nice little lake there, and SF could easily have a whole lot more urban density housing. Might need to extend the underground BART line out there, though. Conveniently, they could just build the BART station directly into the arcology. Make it as tall as the Burj Khalifa, section it into 500 square foot apartments (though, I dunno, maybe that's too big in SF) and I bet you could easily house another 100,000 people.
Homeless problem solved, and they'd have a nice new landmark. And being that large, I bet it'd look amazing lit up in Pride colors.
Part of the distinction is that even if you rent controlled all the apartments down to a level many homeless people could afford, if there just aren't _enough_ they will still go to the wealthy and connected first. So the distinction makes it clear you can't just subsidize individuals housing costs, you just gotta make more houses.
A SF with more houses and lower housing costs is goin to be a magnet for more people moving in. I am guessing each affordable housing unit maybe decreases the homeless population by .05 homeless, less?
Because the type of person who lives in the cities may not like homeless people, but they don't want to treat homeless people as basically lepers who need to be tossed out of the city.
The issue is that homeless services bring homeless congregations, and while a single homeless person or the abstracted "the homeless" are sympathetic - large congregations of homeless people bring all of the social ills commonly associated with Urban Decay. Suburbanites moved out of the city to escape urban decay, why should they let the failures of the progressive, nice , moral urban dwellers spill over into their town? City dwellers have volunteered to deal with these problems for you for no other reason than to write morally superior posts on the internet about suburbanites - let them deal with it!
Perhaps if there were actual breaking up of open air drug markets and police did something about crimes on public transportation and prevented them from being a direct pipeline to the surrounding area becoming a blight - there'd be more support for suburbs to actually house the homeless and provide services.
As it stands, there isn't - and the path from A to B is difficult, criticizing people for having a morally inferior amount of political willpower to Do the Right Thing(TM) does not convince large congregations of voters to Do the Right Thing when every time in the past they have done the right thing, the exact same, abominable results occur without fail.
It also helps that there’s nothing for a homeless person in a suburb. Cities have things for everyone, and that’s why people of all sorts go there. But suburbs have nothing for you unless you are accepted into a private space like a home or office.
The suburb is cheaper precisely because it has less demand for the space, because there is less economic activity going on. Once you have a job it's fine to move to a suburb, but it's harder to find a job when there are fewer jobs near you.
Every time I think of spending a week or two writing a long post, I get nervous that people will get angry that I haven't posted anything else that week or two. But nobody seemed to notice the gap this time, and I conclude all of you are very forgiving.
This was an excellent, old-fashioned longform review in the SSC style and I'm very grateful for it. Exactly the kind of content wherein I think your comparative advantage is strongest (especially given the breadth and specific types of topics the book in question touches on).
i enjoy these but the length does make them hard to share because unfortunately for most people on the social media anything longer then twitter length is considered rude to even share.
The examples of charts, “reproducing the method on this other data”, for example. Those are so obviously good and correct that they are shocking by way of highlighting just how rare they are.
This short innocent 500 page essay on city planning, ethics, praxis, the universe and other funny topics was so well hidden among the other book reviews nobody noticed it anyway :)
I didn’t notice. I would probably notice if it had been months, but 1-2 weeks barely registers. Your output is already sometimes difficult to keep up with if you try to read all of it.
Some content every week is important, but fortunately your book review contest does a great job of filling in the gaps. This is the perfect time to right something meatier, and you succeeded with this post.
Agree with many of the other commenters: I really appreciate the deep dive, and even though I don't care personally about Shellenberger or the book per se, the stats and analysis are worth 104 minutes on their own merits. A worthy addition to the ACX pantheon!
Want to get this out there early, rather than a couple hours later after I'm done reading: Scott, this review likely would have changed how I voted in the recent midterm elections. I didn't have the luxury of reading Shellenberger's book (retroactive campaign apologia?) before filling out the ballot, and casual perusal of commentariat characterizations were...not as trustworthy as I'd have liked. Thank you for this public service.
(For whatever it's worth, living in the same region, I do extra-appreciate your more local takes.)
well, I have my own thoughts on ethics, but it occurs to me that as a broad political group libertarians (I don't exactly identify as one but I have libertarianish leanings and will sometimes ise the label for the sake of convenience as its the closest thing that people who are big on such labels will understand that explains somewhat many of my perspectives) would distrust both groups as agents of the state. That seems like a significant, if comparatively small, logical demographic response that somewhat reflects a different viewpoint then neatly dividing people's responses to said groups in half.
I rapidly oscillate between not trusting centralized authority and not trusting the mob. Shit is just hard.
Like, I don't want to live under a Soviet style state capitalist "Communist" hellhole regime; I also don't want to live under a 1800's-today style railroad baron small business tyrant defacto authoritarian society.
The solution seems to be unions; but then those can degrade into actually the mafia really easy to.
But also, our current federal noncentralization means that we cannot accomplish a god damn thing, compared to the actually pretty tyrannical monoculture days of the 1940's-1970'sish.
The solution is clearly to declare me absolute immortal god king with power over the heavens and the earth. Simply place your lives into my hands it'll be fine lol
I think of political ethics very differently then most. I'm not worried about god's eye view sandbox models, my ethics are personally applicable and in some sense "better or worse" if there is an idel alternative, but I feel the sandox idea "as if i could change society myself" seems silly because you cant so why not have your ideal society be actually ideal?
As such, I would point out that my highest principle is non-violence (or rather thats where I draw the line between one person's freedom or another, tech that could directly alter the brain would be similary because the idea is actions have consequences but violence literally prevents the exercise of freee choice)
If one is against the iniation of coercivie force and doesnt bother mking the dubious distinction of whether its "government" one sees the robber baron era was very authoritarian as it was full of coercive violence, it just wasnt always "official government violence" although sometimes it was.
The trouble seems to be they send in law enforcement when social services are needed, and social services when law enforcement is needed.
There's no good answer anywhere. The old days when you could get a troublesome relative committed for life with (basically) a snap of the fingers were bad, there's no denying. The new days when a combination of "anti-psychiatry" movement and government penny-pinching meant the old Victorian asylums were closed down (and generally sold off to property developers) while the former inmates were left for 'care in the community' (which never eventuated as funding for social services to support them didn't appear) aren't much better.
What this book partially advocates to do seems to be send both police and social services to everything. This will probably be nearly twice as expensive, but if it's effective, that'd be great.
I mean... do we spend less per capita on the mentally ill now than we did when we had asylums?
It seems like we pour millions and millions into "Social Services" that largely just amount to some college grad getting paid to spout (good but) cliched advice at people once a week or so. Like, our social services budget in my city is huge, but... I have zero confidence these social workers are actually fixing any problems.
"I have zero confidence these social workers are actually fixing any problems. "
Knee-jerk response: RCT
Take a random half of the cases that social workers respond to and omit their response. Pre-register the outcomes to be examined, and compare outcomes in the cases with and without the social workers' responses after some period of time (a year?).
I suspect that it would be hard to convince anyone in my country to allow this study to take place, as the general belief seems to be that these workers are very needed; and that hiring more of them would solve all our problems. And if that's true, then denying access to their services to a control group would be bad.
I think Ian's point is that people these days are not scientists-first-seemingly-obvious-ethics-later and moreover that they call people who still are that thing "mad scientists" and arrest them.
And here's a weird potential confounder: if social workers are supposed to be so overworked they can't help anyone, then cutting their caseload in half for the RCT might allow them to better focus on the remaining half, which would make them actually able to do their jobs properly for once. This would lead to an over-estimated effect size, relative to what you'd see in the current baseline. I'm not sure how to account for this.
- Mental illness and drug abuse are not important contributors to the homeless being unable to follow shelter rules, find a job, rent a place and make payments on time?
- Concentration of homeless and attendant mental illness/public drug use/use of streets as toilets does not depress local economy and make even more people homeless through lack of opportunity?
Otherwise, it doesn't really matter if homelessness or addiction/mental illness came first, the point is that it's trapping the homeless and everyone else in vicious circle until these issues are addressed.
The Amsterdam model, sure, my point is that it doesn't matter in a big picture if mental illness or addiction is not the biggest initial cause of homelessness so long as it's a huge factor in not being able to escape it / lack of opportunities to do so in the neighborhood. On one hand, high housing prices are an obvious most direct driver of homelessness. Even drug users and mentally ill can often do some basic work, which might be enough to rent an apartment with roommates in an expensive area. Same goes for other cases like physical illness or losing a job, where small savings or help from family might tide one over with low cost of living. On the other hand, someone with a clear mind can almost always save for a Greyhound ticket to a more affordable place with basic jobs available. But one can't just move away from an addiction or mental illness.
You might think so, but I think the claims made in the book which seemed to suggest homelessness was very much just a product of addiction and mental illness are not strongly supported by the data like the book suggests.
In terms of what you imagine, there are structural factors that make things much more difficult then you sre suggesting. Many jobs today assume and require basic status and info that a person lacking a home just doesn't have. It seems like you are imagining what you might do if you suddenly found yourself without a place to live, but this is a case where likely you are not fully comprehending the degree to which people can find themselves in circular traps that dont allow for easy escape. On the other hand, presumably you could find ways to fulfill the requirements of having a job if you suddenly lost your home.
You are probably correct in the sense that whatever factors caused a person to be homeless in the first place are likely serious impediments to re-integrating into sociaty (that you don;t have)
For example, I was born with a genetic auto-i mmune disease, and I am very aware I am only ever a few steps away from being in that situation which if I were in it, given the realities Ive encontered with help for my illness, it would be very unlikely I could extricate myself from the situation.
I am not saying most people live perfectly settled lives, then get into cocaine and end up on the streets, although there are well known hit the bottom stories to that effect. Say it's much more common that people miss one rental payment because of unforeseen expenses, end up on the street and understandably use drugs to take the edge off otherwise unbearable situation. The point is that addiction than becomes the most important and difficult thing to overcome in order for such a person to get back on their feet. Otherwise even if money/housing is provided, one is going to spend money on dope, or get kicked out of housing for breaking drug or other rules, or get in trouble with the law and end up in jail. And tolerating petty crimes and bad public behavior like San Francisco does has too much of a cost on the rest of society.
In terms of other factors, consider that undocumented immigrants manage to support themselves despite lack of skills, language barrier and legal risks to self and employer. As a legal immigrant, I spent some time sleeping in someone's basement in exchange for helping them with basic repairs. And I have generally happy memories of that time period, but it was only possible because I was sober and reasonable and the family was not scared to have me around.
"Say it's much more common that people miss one rental payment because of unforeseen expenses, end up on the street and understandably use drugs to take the edge off otherwise unbearable situation. " Is it so in the USA? The most common (maybe 60%, my estimate) life history of the many opioid addicts I've met in Germany includes really bad childhoods and substance abuse from the early teens on. Homeless people here are to some extent immigrants without access to much welfare, also some addicts whose substance or mental health problem got so bad that the welfare system was not sufficient any more to provide them with a place to live. The latter sometimes get back into the system when their physical health deteriorates.
Addiction and mental health issues also often cause one to be enough of a nuisance to their family and close friends that such people are unwilling to let one live with them in the medium-to-long-term.
Having someone respectable to live with, store basic possessions with, use the shower of, and get your mail at the address of, is a pretty big step towards not being homeless.
I think part of the issue is that the review of the literature that Scott undertook is not comprehensive. I don't see Dennis Culhane mentioned anywhere in the review and he is very prominent in the field, one of the pioneers of the Housing First model.
I think you would be surprised what percentage of homeless people (high single digits at least)? are homeless simply because they lack/(lacked) the imagination to look for roommates at their moment of crisis, or see it as beneath their dignity. Particularly the working homeless (which is a population people love to talk about, but when interviewed are often very weird people making bizarre life choices).
Then once you have been on the street a while it becomes very hard to get off without support for the type of person who finds themselves there.
That doesnt appear to be what Scott is saying. Rather that the statistics just arent reliable, and he was "fact checking" the claims in the book. As far as alcohol/drug use goes, many people are homeless turn to those because time has a way of really dragging when there is nothing to do and nowhere to go.
Some thoughts on claim 1 (going to take quite a while to read through the rest):
As for why the rates of homeless are higher in dense/rich compared to sparse/rich, a dense and rich area provides more expected value for petty crime and panhandling, two major sources of income for the homeless. Higher general crime rates in the city also could cause the police to have less of an ability/will to persecute the petty crimes that the homeless usually commit, leading to an even higher risk-adjusted expected value.
Additionally, suburbs are probably going to have a higher rate of upper-middle class families with young children, and I suspect parents/police are going to be less tolerable of crazy homeless people yelling/chasing their kids around, which might explain why suburbs are also less tolerant.
I think this ascribes waaaay too much to homeless people loving to commit crime, and people wanting the cops to beat them up and throw them in jail.
Imagine that you are very poor. You can live out in the suburbs, where rows and rows of houses are only interrupted by the occasional convenience store (overpriced everyday goods in small quantities) and restaurant (expensive to eat at - a loaf of bread costs less than basically anything at McDonald's). Or you can live in the dense city center, where all the places you might buy anything are all right next to each other, and all the Walmarts and other places to buy cheap goods in mass are.
I know if I was so poor that I was forced to live out of my car, I'd park in the Walmart parking lot, not outside my house that's ten minutes drive down the highway from the grocery store. While San Francisco, presumably, is not a car-heavy environment, I'd imagine the same basic principle applies.
EDIT: My brother lived out of his car for a bit, asked him where he parked it - churches and Walmart.
People who shit on the sidewalk and bellow nonsense at passers-by *also* need to eat food, have blankets, have clothes, etc, despite being very poor, so no, I don't think I am.
You can watch countless videos of the "soft white underbelly" variety of homeless people describing retail theft for drugs. There are no Walmarts in any dense city center I've been in, which is many of them, and even the occasional Target is usually on the outskirts. Last work trip to NYC in 3 visits to the bodega I paid $10 for a 10 load (or so) container of laundry detergent, $3.50 for a gallon jug of water in milky #2 plastic, and $5 for a can of Modelo, which at only 2x the normal suburban price was actually the best deal of the 3. The slummy areas of Brooklyn and Bronx are cheaper but still usually more expensive than any nearby suburbs, and isn't where the homeless hang anyway. Homeless people aren't buying bread, they regularly beg outside takeout restaurants. Every pizza place in midtown NYC has one by the door. Cheap prepared food like pizza and sandwiches are usually comparable to suburbia, NYC does have it beat with the $1pizza though. About the only thing I've found to be cheaper in the cities is hard drugs - by far.
Economic activity of *all* sorts is easier in the city than elsewhere. It’s why the richest people and the poorest people flock to cities. If you’ve already got a stable set of work and social activities and aren’t looking for anything more, then the suburbs have some advantages (particularly since you don’t have to pay for the ease of access to economic opportunity that rich and poor people will pay for).
1. I don't see how we can have this conversation about homelessness in California without noting that San Francisco's budget for homeless services, in one year, is $676 million. LA's is apparently close a billion. This is why many of us are not sympathetic to pleas that we're 'not helping the homeless'.
2. Related to 1- this doesn't address allegations that many of California's homeless are from elsewhere, but deliberately moved to a few metro areas due to nice weather and generous social services. (Or, I've heard stories that their local town put them on a bus to SF). If .2% of the population everywhere is basically OK with a lifestyle of camping on the street and doing drugs, and then they all cluster in one area- that area will likely end up a mecca of homelessness.
3. In terms of law enforcement and comparisons with Europe, it's worth noting that they have vagrancy and loitering laws there, and we kinda really don't. US courts struck most of these down as unconstitutional in the 70s. If you want to camp or openly defecate on the streets of London, Paris, Berlin etc., the police will clear you out with force. I know Scott tackles law enforcement issues in this piece, but vagrancy is a pretty big one. You can't commit a crime if you're not physically present in the area to begin with! Europe combines social services with a firmer hand and less of a civil liberties culture than we have here.
4. Speaking of Europe's firmer hand, I'm fairly sure that they have a lower bar to forced institutionalization for the loudly mentally ill than we do. (Again, in cases like O'Connor v Donaldson in the 70s the SC raised the bar to lock someone away). Is 21st century Germany's asylums like Scott's dramatic description of 1950s America? I would lean towards no. There has to be some kind of middle ground to force treatment on the severely ill. Three different doctors who can't be in the same practice all have to sign off? A separate non-hospital employee doctor is required to check patients every few months and issue an opinion?
This would match the observation that most homeless in a metro area became homeless in that same metro area, but would add a mechanism whereby a metro area's homeless are even more concentrated in the downtown core than they otherwise would be. Suburbs are successfully expelling homeless people and urban cores are not (because they have no-where to send them without institutions except to prison would would be paid for by the urban core anyways).
These numbers are from 2019, but you might enjoy them:
Houston Texas has reduced its homeless population from ~7,000 to ~4,000 in the last 10 years even as the metro area's population increased from 5.8 million to 7.0 million, and they did it by doing a housing-first solution that was viable and scaleable because housing costs were low. They housed 17,000 formerly homeless people during that decade (notice that 17,000 >> 3,000, so a lot of homeless people are transiently homeless). Houston's funding to homeless programs was $38 million in 2019, compared to LA's $619 million, and LA's homeless population went from ~25,000 in 2009 to ~55,000 in 2019 while the LA metro area* went from a population of 12.9 million in 2009 to 13.3 million in 2019.
So to compare those 2 cities:
Both have about 1/3 of the population of their metro area in the city proper.
Houston provides $12,700 in funding per 2019 homeless person
LA provides $11,254 in funding per 2019 homeless person
Houston's metro area increased in population by 21% in the last decade
LA's metro area increased in population by 3% in the last decade
Houston's homeless population FELL by 42% in the last decade
LA's homeless population ROSE by 120% in the last decade
It's all about housing affordability, not Texans being better about things than Californians. Dallas is struggling to get its homeless population down partially because its real estate is getting less affordable than Houston:
>It's all about housing affordability, not Texans being better about things than Californians. Dallas is struggling to get its homeless population down partially because its real estate is getting less affordable than Houston:
CA is not as affordable to Texas in large part due to state regulations - labor, permits, zoning, etc. Something that CA and TX both have control over and TX is pretty clearly better at.
The thing is, as Crimson Wool points out, building cheap housing out in the middle of nowhere with no other amenities and no means of transport isn't much of a solution. Some people *will* prefer to be 'transiently homeless' and stay in the city centre where they have access to amenities, or be near their friends/family.
There are a scale of reasons people become homeless, and it really can be that someone who did have a home but is suddenly out of it for whatever reason (landlord sold up, they moved out because of abusive relationship, they lost their job) and needs emergency accommodation while they get back on their feet can't get it, because the social services don't have any free space. Those are the people who will be the success stories for projects like "Housing First".
What does seem to be the new problem that Shellenberger's book is highlighting is the apparent large increase in the worst kind of homelessness - the mentally ill, the criminal, the junkies, etc. People who don't want to go into shelters because they won't be allowed drink/take drugs or that the shelters are too dangerous, or that the person in question is so far gone they can't handle anything other than a hobo camp or sleeping on the street. *That's* the question to be answered - how did this happen, if it happened; what can be done about it; if ordinary people genuinely feel unsafe, are they unreasonable to ask for police intervention, etc.
"The thing is, as Crimson Wool points out, building cheap housing out in the middle of nowhere with no other amenities and no means of transport isn't much of a solution."
It is if the housing is cheap enough that people can afford the housing + a (second-hand, decrepit) car on a minimum wage, which many people in Texas can do (sub-minimum wage, in the case of many of the illegal immigrants in Texas).
"What does seem to be the new problem that Shellenberger's book is highlighting is the apparent large increase in the worst kind of homelessness - the mentally ill, the criminal, the junkies, etc."
2019 America's drug overdose death rate is massively higher than 2001 America's. The difference is 14.6 per 100,000 per year, or (using 2019 population) 48,579 deaths per year.
Of which ??? are in "the worst kind of homelessness" (almost certainly less than 1/3 since 2/3s are in shelters, probably more like 1/10th but I have no firm data for that guess).
Since people in "the worst kind of homelessness" would be people we would expect to stay homeless until they die (barring extraordinary interventions), the fact that the ratio of "extra overdose deaths" : "total people in the worst kind of homelessness" is 1:3 suggests that the phenomenon of expansion of "the worst kind of homeless" (if it is happening) could be easily explained as an outgrowth of the opioid crisis.
The follow-up question is, are all cities with homeless populations experiencing an increase in "the worst kind of homelessness", or is California's policy mix causing its homeless problem to be much worse than Houston?
(I don't know how to answer this question, because "are those 4,000 homeless in Houston in 2019 more disruptive than the 7,000 homeless in Houston in 2009?" is a question that official statistics are unlikely to capture accurately)
So I do think housing affordability does matter, but
>It is if the housing is cheap enough that people can afford the housing + a (second-hand, decrepit) car on a minimum wage, which many people in Texas can do (sub-minimum wage, in the case of many of the illegal immigrants in Texas).
Doesn't this only hold for people who can hold down a minimum wage job?
>Of which ??? are in "the worst kind of homelessness" (almost certainly less than 1/3 since 2/3s are in shelters, probably more like 1/10th but I have no firm data for that guess).
Why would you assume that none of the worst kind of homeless are in shelters when one of the reasons people give for avoiding shelters is the desire to avoid the worst kind of homeless?
Probably also worth remembering that some of the worst cases of homelessness are currently in jail or prison (I don't think such people count as homeless) but will be homeless again when they get out. Given the population sizes involved this probably doesn't move the numbers much but I think it is worth remembering.
The rest of your post just feels like fuzzy math supported by wild assumptions (and just looking at overdose deaths strikes me as inadvertent cherry picking, people in such conditions can survive that way for years/decades, not every homeless addict is addicted to opioids and not every mentally ill homeless person is an addict).
"Doesn't this only hold for people who can hold down a minimum wage job?"
It holds for people who can hold down a minimum wage job a % of the time that exceeds (1 - their savings rate while employed), yes.
"Why would you assume that none of the worst kind of homeless are in shelters when one of the reasons people give for avoiding shelters is the desire to avoid the worst kind of homeless?"
(1) Shelters have a variety of rules that make it much harder to maintain an active drug habit
(2) It can be extremely unpleasant to be around a large number of homeless people in a setting without any locked doors without any of those homeless people being in "the worst kind of homelessness"
(3) Shelters have rules like curfews that would tend to expel people experiencing "the worst kind of homelessness" if said homelessness was a major mental health problem (since they would struggle to consistently be back in time for curfew)
"Probably also worth remembering that some of the worst cases of homelessness are currently in jail or prison (I don't think such people count as homeless) but will be homeless again when they get out. Given the population sizes involved this probably doesn't move the numbers much but I think it is worth remembering."
Yes, this is a fair point since the prison population at ~2M is ~4X the size of the national homeless population, so a relatively small %age change in the composition of the prison population could result in a large shift in the composition of the homeless population, especially the smaller category "experiencing the worst kind of homelessness"
"The rest of your post just feels like fuzzy math"
Yes
"supported by wild assumptions"
I was offering simplifying assumptions to try to estimate the size of the problem. It's easy to lie with statistics but it's much easier to lie without statistics. Where are the errors in my numbers? Do you have different, less wild assumptions, or a different framework that would be useful?
I was trying to sketch out the case for "the increase in the size of the US drug problem is easily large enough to explain a significant increase in the number of people experiencing the worst kind of homelessness", but I acknowledge that this is a sketch rather than a clear proof
"and just looking at overdose deaths strikes me as inadvertent cherry picking, people in such conditions can survive that way for years/decades, not every homeless addict is addicted to opioids and not every mentally ill homeless person is an addict"
The increase in the number of people addicted to various drugs would be massively higher than the increase in the number of additional drug overdose deaths per year (unless there was a background condition of collapse of available services for preventing overdose death, and in fact the opposite of this happened, we got various drugs that administered in a timely fashion can save someone from dying of a previously fatal opioid overdose and then distributed those drugs to nearly every EMT / firefighter in the country).
Since the increase in the number of additional people addicted to various drugs is much much larger than the overall homeless population, an increase in "number of people experiencing the worst kind of homelessness" could be parsimoniously explained purely by this phenomenon, and it is reasonable to think the two are connected given that many people experiencing the worst kind of homelessness are observed to be addicted to hard drugs.
Causes of "people experiencing the worst kind of homelessness" appear to be (mostly) severe mental health problems and/or drug addiction. A massive increase in the addict population & the availability of certain kinds of very strong drugs could then explain nearly all of the change in the "people experiencing the worst kind of homelessness" population without needing any other factors.
Here are other factors that might increase the population of "people experiencing the worst kind of homelessness":
Reduced mental health in the general population (also observed)
Reduced state coercion to prevent homeless misbehavior (also observed in California)
Increased housing costs (also observed in California)
New drugs specifically causing mental health problems at a higher rate than old hard drugs (sometimes claimed but not clearly observed)
There are several other factors on that list that might have contributed, but I would suggest that the change in the rate of overdose deaths (useful proxy for rate of hard drug use) has increased more dramatically than anything else on that list (with the possible exception of the provision of policing services in SF and LA).
Is there any study of what fraction of overdose deaths are from inconsistent dosages from drug dealers?
My personal bias is against the drug war as a whole. I'd rather not have our rulers edict what we are and are not allowed to have in our bloodstreams. That said, the number of overdose deaths in the usa per year (~90,000) is above the number of vehicular fatalities (~40,000), which is the threshold that I use for when I count something as a real problem.
My impression is that drug overdose deaths have at least three components:
1) deaths from inconsistent dosages
2) suicides
3) deaths from the drug habit itself
Presumably (1) would go away if the drug war went away and recreational drugs were supplied through reputable pharmacies.
Depending on the causes of the suicides, those might be unchanged (though presumably switching to different means) even if recreational drugs were to magically vanish.
(3) is part of the 'justification' for the drug war - though we don't ban tobacco or alcohol on similar grounds.
Can anyone point to an approximate breakdown of the overdose deaths between these categories?
Texas's package of housing regulations resulted in much more affordability, yes, but that's different from "the Texas administrative state's ability to implement Housing First is better than the California administrative state's ability to implement Housing First", which is the claim I was (implicitly) trying to rule out.
It is not different. The administrative state is writing the housing regulations. Housing First is directly impacted by housing regulations. The admin state in Texas can implement housing first because of their conscious policy decisions, they have not tied their own hands.
Maybe you can argue that the individual offices that are in charge of implementing the housing first policy are largely the same. But those offices are only a small part of the larger admin state.
If I'm understanding you correctly, we both agree with the statement "The ability of a municipality to implement a Housing First approach to homelessness is largely determined by the cost of housing in that municipality", and we both agree that "Housing costs in a municipality are largely determined by the governments that govern that municipality [city + state]".
Taken together, I agree that the failure of Housing First in California is the fault of Californians and the success of Housing First in Texas is to the credit of Texans, but I disagree that the difference is only due to the "administrative state"
(1) I would refer to the administrative state in this case specifically being the policy-makers involved in crafting homelessness-addressing programs
(2) Even if you defined the administrative state as all non-elected officials, those non-elected officials do not have the power to change California's housing regulations to match the Texan standard. Many of the cost-increasing regulations are state-wide laws like CEQA, and other things at the municipal level that increase property costs are so locally popular with Californian voters that if the administrative state tried to unilaterally overturn them they were be overruled by local voters. California YIMBYs are focusing on the state legislature as the actor with the power to actually make changes large enough to affect housing prices.
Summary: there is a large difference between Texas and California, but the fault is in Californians not just California's administrative state.
>If I'm understanding you correctly, we both agree with the statement "The ability of a municipality to implement a Housing First approach to homelessness is largely determined by the cost of housing in that municipality", and we both agree that "Housing costs in a municipality are largely determined by the governments that govern that municipality [city + state]".
Yes
>Taken together, I agree that the failure of Housing First in California is the fault of Californians and the success of Housing First in Texas is to the credit of Texans, but I disagree that the difference is only due to the "administrative state"
Ok then don't know why you said the below unless you narrowly meant the homeless response / Housing First only. Which I mean isn't exactly clear. Not to be a dick
>It's all about housing affordability, not Texans being better about things than Californians. Dallas is struggling to get its homeless population down partially because its real estate is getting less affordable than Houston:
I don't think that's covered in the study, but AFAIK the supermajority of homeless populations of most metros studied became homeless in that metro area. The homeless don't seem to migrate between metros very much.
Plus, by quantity the fact that the # of people linked up to substantial housing assistance is ~5x the size of the reduction of the homeless population is consistent with the Housing First approach having a big enough impact to move the supply/demand curve of homelessness in Houston, but to confirm that w.r.t. California I guess you'd need to try to find an equivalent number for the number of homeless people in the LA region who received equivalent substantial housing assistance (scaled by metro pop difference) during that time, plus an adjustment for the fact that LA's housing costs increased much more than Houston's over that decade (from a higher starting point).
> Speaking of Europe's firmer hand, I'm fairly sure that they have a lower bar to forced institutionalization for the loudly mentally ill than we do.
I'm not sure of that. I don't have a source any more then you do, but I think I remember reading a complaint that institutionalization is too hard in germany, and should be easier, like in the US.
In Germany this is state law, so there are differences. In my state, one physician can get someone locked up until next noon with a convincing formal notice to the judge in charge. Next day, a judge has to see the patient and decide for how long or if at all the lockup continues, seldom more than two weeks. When, later, hospital staff thinks, it should take longer or shorter, they notice the court again.
It's not sth lightly done but it can help with immidiate crises.
German law says that in the event of acute danger to self or others, persons deemed mentally ill can be admitted to a psychiatric hospital by relatives, guardians, the social psychiatric service, a local court or the police - even without their consent.
After being admitted involuntarily, the patient has the right to speak to a doctor within 24 hours. Either then they are discharged, the person voluntarily consents to treatment, or - if the psychiatrist and patient disagree - a judge must be called in within the next 24 hours. The judge makes the decision based on a conversation with the patient and the assessment of the doctor. Upon judicial referral, individuals who are deemed to be an acute danger to themselves or others must remain in the closed psychiatric ward for the duration of the judicial order. They may also have to undergo compulsory treatment. The aim is to stabilize the patient and prevent further escalation of the crisis.
The biggest thing in this area that I'd like to see the USA import from Germany (all of Europe? I dunno, only ever hung out in Berlin) is the hard separation between the "call the police" and the "call an ambulance" emergency numbers.
I mean, there might be lots of other great stuff too, but I would absolutely adore that one.
>Or, I've heard stories that their local town put them on a bus to SF
I've heard claims along these lines, too. When I looked into them via poking around on Google, it sounded like what's actually going on is that one of the tools in the standard "social services for the homeless" toolbox is to identify people who are stuck somewhere with no local personal support network but have friends or family somewhere else in the country who could help them out, and to offer to buy these people a bus ticket to wherever their friends or family are. When used as intended, this seems like it'd be almost trivially low-hanging fruit: for a couple hundred dollars worth of bus fare and maybe half a day of a social worker's time, you get a situationally homeless person off the street and into the care of a private citizen who already knows them and is willing to help them get back on their feet.
On the other hand, it isn't always going to work as intended. Maybe the friends or family are already sick of trying to help them (which would explain why they haven't already sprung for bus fare for their homeless friend or relative on their own initiative). Maybe they're willing to try help at first but it doesn't work out and our homeless guy winds up back on the streets again. Or maybe the program sometimes gets abused by homeless people who just want a bus ticket to somewhere that seems like a better place to be homeless, and overworked and under-resourced social workers don't scrutinize their claims too closely when believing them means both less work now and a reduced local homeless population once their clients get on the bus.
One item I think is relevant to the end of 1: Suburbs are by and large designed for cars. If you don't have one it's hard to get to the suburbs, hard to leave them, and hard to buy food and etc.
The best way to avoid homeless may just be to move slightly further from public transportation. I would be very curious if there are any studies on the relationship between public transit access and homeless population within a metro area rather than between them.
Big If True...but I'd hope the real problem, or at least the eventual actual policy changes, would be something else. As someone both financially and physically (okay, probably more like psychosomatically) incapable of car ownership*, my quality of life is strongly tied to public transit access. The more a city gets towards dense, walkable, car-optional design, the more people like me end up living there - sometimes specifically moving for that reason alone. It'd be regressive to put the squeeze on us in order to reduce homelessness. Can't necessarily speak for others, but it'd make it much harder for me to keep a job as well. Seems important for preventing homelessless.
(OTOH, as an unabashed public transit hawk, I openly admit to being biased. "Check your priors!")
(Also incidentally, your user icon pleases me, as a fellow Mola mola fan.)
*And principally opposed to rideshare on economic grounds, nevermind <vast litany of other indignities not involving Softbank>. I seem to remember that Scott disagrees with this characterization, or at least claimed that rideshare frequently passed a cost-benefit analysis for employing his former (SSC-era) patients, but am having a damned hard time finding a citation. At any rate, it's a suboptimal kludge solution to bridge the gap between the public transit-dependent and suburb-like homelessness rates.
You don't need to oppose rideshare, rideshare economics itself opposes rideshare and now that we're entering a bear cycle I don't expect rideshare to last very long.
I, too, dream of a day when over-financialized equity printers stop getting VC life infusions. Profits are supposed to matter at some point - eventually Somebody Else's Money means Your Money.
It was more a last-minute throwaway proactive defense against an imagined argument that the carless will be okay with reduced public transit, since rideshare can pick up the slack, and therefore Shut Up And Multiply means reducing homelessness is the greater good. But on re-read that really isn't implied by your comment, so it was an unnecessary reaction on my part. I apologize.
This is what it comes down to… people like me would like transit connected walkable urbanism, homeless activists accuse us of pushing “playgrounds for the rich” at the expense of homeless and poor people’s freedom, they mostly win, and consequently most middle class people live in sprawl.
I'd love to take public transportation, but you need to make sure it's nice to take instead of some moral obligation. And "nice to take" means no homeless on it.
Yeah in Minneapolis/Saint Paul they spent all this time/money starting a light rail system. The activists ensured that the homeless were allowed to use it for shelter, and now very few people who have an option use it.
It is two parts of progressive policy that is in very grave conflict.
Exactly. Like all people, homeless people have a preference for places where it is easy to access all the things they need to do for their current life and for their life aspirations. If you make it harder to get around, then you will discourage people of all sorts, including homeless people, from living there. For people who don’t have as strong a desire for new economic and social opportunities as others (already in a stable job, already with a family) that isn’t as much of a cost as it is for other people, so those kinds of people flock to suburbs.
Scott actually mentions this in the conclusion section, subsection d:
> Also, what about NIMBYism? People have cogently argued that many of our worst problems - from high housing prices to declining technological progress - are downstream of our decision to stop building dense cities and walkable neighborhoods. But a big reason we don’t build dense cities and walkable neighborhoods is that people (correctly) hate and fear them. They accurately predict that if their neighborhood got denser, it would start looking like the dense parts of San Francisco - litter-filled, decaying, disgusting, unsafe, and ambiently miserable to exist in. The reason we don’t have better public transportation in the Bay Area is that people protest every time someone tries to build a BART station in their area - and the reason people protest every time someone tries to build a BART station in their area is that they weren’t born yesterday, and they’ve seen what other BART stations and the areas around them are like.
I agree with Scott that this leads to all sorts of bad outcomes. Even though this is California and everyone living in the suburbs is probably driving a Tesla anyhow, I can't help but think that public transportation has some important scale advantages over individual mobility, so anything which turns it into a net negative is bad?
By contrast, when the suburb of Munich I was living in was connected to the municipal rail network, there was generally much rejoicing. Of course, it did not exactly lower the rents, but the ability to take a train downtown was a net positive for basically everyone living there. While there is always something to complain about the rail network (more expensive than driving by car, frequently late (esp. S-Bahn), sometimes crowded, other people generally), I find it generally tolerable.
Do want to emphasize that this is an issue where transit agencies Have Noticed The Skulls, and it's a genuinely hard problem from inside the system too. Most easier fixes that *might* discourage the homeless also *definitely* discourage the regular ridership, the burden of which falls hardest on those non-homeless who need it most. They also discourage transit employees and lower their reputation with the public, so say goodbye to easy funding. Everything from hostile station architecture, more transit cops (BART police are infamously trigger-happy), higher/better enforced fares, cutting service routes and times...
I occasionally ride BART. The rampant fare evasion makes me resentful of other riders and somewhat fearful because of the general sense of lawlessness.
yet another book whose central premise is "_______________ is the fault of progressives / libs / environmentalists". the genre must make some serious $$$.
This is unsurprising when you realize that progressives/libs/environmentalist have had a 30-year run of governing the entire West Coast and--unsurprisingly--there are still many problems, and many new ones.
Ideologies can and should be criticized for their failures, and the response of those ideologies should be to adapt.
Exactly. The sardonic implication above of this "genre" as being surprisingly active to the point that there must be some sort of uniquely sinister ideological/financial factors at play is at odds with a basic grasp of two-party politics. For every book about "_______" being the fault of progressives/liberals/environmentalists", there are plenty of books which claim that __________ is the fault of conservatives/neoliberals/religious people.
There are a lot of politically motivated authority figures in the US, and there are a lot of problems. Thus, there is plenty of criticism on the basis of [insert proxy for one party or the other], and some of these criticisms will even be largely true and valuable.
Are they failing worse than, say, Texas or Florida? The review points out that SF has about the level of homelessness we should expect for its housing prices and climate.
If you reserve all criticism for only those who are failing the worst, then I'm afraid we'll all be stuck discussing Malawi for the rest of our lives.
As for whether San Francisco's particular approach to homelessness is worse than that of Houston or Miami, my takeaway from this review is that it might well be. After all, even in your question, you implicitly removed and responsibility San Francisco might have for its housing prices.
No argument from me on that point. I remain rather unconvinced on most of the premises, though I find the idea SA implies that "housing first" is a poor idea in San Francisco because of its high housing prices to be intriguing.
My main concern in this thread is just to defend the idea that liberals are deserving of criticism.
I actually reject the entire notion in this book that housing first was tried in a meaningful way. There is a monumental difference between a housing first label being applied by politicians, and like - actually passing YIMBY policies, building lots of actual housing, and rezoning.
This book argues (convincingly in my opinion) that the homeless population is homeless largely due to drug abuse, mental illness, and overall inability to productively and effectively survive and thrive independently within modern society. Housing prices have nothing to do with that.
...kind of seems like they do, given the R-squared values shown in the first paragraphs of this article. You can try to explain that homelessness is a combination of these factors, but you cannot entirely dismiss the fact that housing costs are empirically highly correlated with homelessness.
I particularly enjoyed the latest handwringing over Chesa Boudin getting the boot because San Francisco is a reactionary, right-wing, conservative city.
Such a pity the sole brave liberal political officer was done down by the iron grip of the Republicans and other conservatives on city politics!
Personally know several voters who treated that as a Single-Issue Emergency and voted no recall solely because a bit of the Wrong Kind of Money backed the campaign. Without doing any other research. So it's definitely a ridiculous post-hoc rationalization, but seems to have been effective pre-hoc too. "Reversed conservatism is not progressivism!" Except in SF, where there's always some Shadowy Neoliberal Cabal to blame for intra-coalition failures if no Foreign Republicans can be found to scapegoat.
The heavy racial skew of the final vote tally went curiously unremarked in my (almost all-white) local circles as well. Surely an oversight and not at all related to the earlier school board recall, whose results weren't remotely similar and definitely didn't have any of the same Wrong Kind of Money backing that campaign. Strange time to be an Asian in SF.
I think the counterpoint would be that a huge portion of the "normal" policy books are basically the inverted argument, but it doesn't need to be in the title because it is implicit.
What book would you recommend about the un-housed homeless issue on the US West Coast ?
From Youtube videos and from my partners recent experience in the US it seems that it has really changed for the worse recently.
I've read San Francsicko and as an outsider thought it was a really interesting book.
I don't live there, but again from reports it appears that Seattle has similar issues as San Francisco, Portland and LA but Bellevue does not despite having a substantial downtown.
Would anyone who lives in that area be able to comment ?
Bellevue is not a substantial downtown in the same way as these others. It has a cluster of office buildings, but my understanding is that it doesn’t have the walkable access to many other things that downtown Seattle does. My understanding is that not many metros in the United States have the true multiple nearly equal centers that Los Angeles and Dallas/Fort Worth and Oakland/San Francisco have.
Seattle is actually a good case study for this, because the way I commonly describe it is "lots of different cities wearing a trenchcoat" - the geography makes both car travel and transit travel between center locales pretty cursed, and there have been a lot of different primary industries that employ a *lot* of people that are located in each of these cities. Bellevue/Redmond is where Microsoft is situated, downtown Seattle is where Amazon is situated, Boeing is both north and south of the city itself for access to industrial level footprints.
The downtown of Seattle *looks* really big and dense, but it doesn't take that many blocks before you're in a neighborhood full of midrises and SFH. But there are lots of "Centers" like this in the metro area over all.
A recurring theme in this post is problems caused by a sort of motte-and-bailey of mental illness definitions, where sometimes someone is implicitly talking about only the most extreme cases, but quotes statistics that include all cases of depression and anxiety.
It would be good to avoid this ambiguity. The term “severe mental illness” used here seems to do that but is still confusing if you don’t know it’s a term of art. I wish 1) there were a completely different phrase, and 2) there was consensus on where to draw the arbitrary line.
It's funny, my initial thought is that most of the problem is the motte-and-bailey of homelessness definitions, and it's almost an exact mirror. Especially when looking at the relationship between housing costs and homelessness, it seems like it's hopelessly confounded by the difference between someone who can't make rent and is sleeping in their car or on a friend's couch and someone who has been living in a tent for years (I think "chronically homeless" is the term of art).
Under the broadest definitions of "homeless" that I've seen used, you can be "homeless" if you're staying in a hotel for a few weeks while you sort out more permanent accommodation. By those standards I've been homeless several times in my life.
Some federal definitions include people who say had an apartment 9 months, slept on their sister's couch for one night, and then had a new apartment for the next 3 months. Now how often those people actually get counted is another issue, but when organizations are really trying to goose the numbers they loves including or not including such situations depending on what suits them.
The other thing you have to be careful of there is length-biased sampling. The average person who is currently homeless has been homeless for longer than the average person who has ever been homeless.
That's a really excellent point. Even when I was in that situation, it was only... 50 days or so?
Which still wasn't exactly a vacation, but it's not trying to get back out of it after years and years. And I was trying really hard to fix it as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, there is no good definition for severe mental illness that really covers what we mean by it. I think most people talking about homelessness are thinking of psychosis rather than, say, really really bad anxiety.
Right. But even Manageable mental illness can become a severely disabling factor when combined with the mutliple challenges that come from the practical realities of being homeless.'
I wonder about this sort of classification problem often, perhaps related to the irregular verbs: with "i'm a smooth operator, you're a bit forward, he's a creep" being a classic example where instead of the verb is irregular by grammatical person it is irregular by attractiveness of person. Here in mental health it would be "I'm fun and quirky, you're a bit neurotic, he's seriously mentally ill". The verb might conjugate by how inoffensive vs inconvenient the person is.
Your point about the overall utility to a community and the moral cost is the more important point, and one concerning which there is a sad but understandable lack of social honesty. This, i think, is the reason for the soft dishonesty of Shellenberger's work -- he wants the data about housing-first outcomes to do the moral heavy lifting, because even voters who really would like to see anyone dirty or inconvenient tidied away into insane asylums wouldn't admit that to themselves in private or in the voting booth. Perhaps someday we'll have robot-run VR-assisted permanent-stay-if-needed mental hospitals that we can tell ourselves are better than freedom, but we're not there yet.
And they were good in depth, words. I’m just lazy. I feel like long blog post should be written like newspaper articles: Start with the main point and work your way down from there. In other words, don’t bury the leed. Philip Greenspan says in his review of San Fransicko: “I find it tough to believe that the author’s proposed solution, a new massive state bureaucracy, would be effective. Suppose that the new state agency worked precisely as hoped, unlike any of the previous or existing government initiatives described in the book. If California were then to deliver on its promises to its current homeless, why wouldn’t that attract a more or less unlimited supply of new homeless people from other states, other countries (just walk across the border), etc.?” https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2022/01/19/finished-san-fransicko/
I like Greenspun but his whole 'have you heard about sarcasm??' schtick has really started to grate on my nerves. I like some of the flying posts now and mostly skip everything that starts with some 'reverse psychology' joke or whatever it is he's been doing.
I have a hard time even knowing what he thinks about anything. He puts his main point – 'Some people sure are stupid' – right up front, but he also never lets you forget ever either. And the reasoning he shares is generally lazy, superficial, and along the lines of what you quoted.
Scott's doing a whole other thing from that kind of shit-posting.
And I like reading, so having to read a 'long' post to get to the conclusion is fine for me – and it doesn't _spoil_ me about 'what I should think' either.
If you skip to the "Book Review: San Francisicko" section, that pretty much gives all of Scott's conclusions on the book, without having to read the case-by-case breakdown of all the 10 claims Scott goes over.
Tldr; clearing out homeless people would be better for not-homeless people. Unclear if it helps or hurts homeless people. Also when people crap on your front yard your first principle becomes "no human feces."
Scott's conclusion: book is pretty dishonest, lots of words.
My conclusion: make this guy governor, I don't care if he sometimes misrepresents the science. He's way better than the alternative!
The missing (?) data on shoplifting is incredibly spooky. How deep does this incongruity run? How disconnected is the world of legible data from the world of anecdote? And which one do I actually live in?
I can confirm as someone who worked retail for a while in 2021 that we definitely didn't consistently report shoplifting. It was frequent, it was in many cases pretty blatant, but unless it involved repeat offenders or particularly large financial equivalents there was not a great deal of time and effort devoted to mitigation. Our security guy also wasn't allowed to stop shoplifters from exiting the store, stand in their way, etc. in case this caused a possible confrontation.
I should clarify that this was not in San Francisco.
This, and I'll also add some SF retail employers now actively discourage paying any attention to shoplifting at all. Carrot: "you'll never be held responsible, even if you could have feasibly stopped the boost". Stick: "we will censor and possibly outright fire you for even minor confrontations". You can entirely forget about any sort of reporting, even to the mall cops, outside of egregious cases that involve physical injuries. But even those are more likely to be classified as assault etc instead of property crime. (Same trend discourages reporting most muggings here. Possibly a whole other anecdata minefield there. I think car break-in reporting is more accurate mostly because there's hard physical evidence which simply can't be brushed aside - plus insurance.)
The carrot further erodes labour's sense of agency and value. There's a certain freeing aspect in not having responsibilities - but if one has no actual meaningful responsibilities on the job, isn't it just make-work? The "don't care" attitude starts to creep into other areas beyond just shoplifting, creating a perceptible loss of morale and work ethic. It'd be one thing if the solution was simply passing the buck to security or middle management as the "eyes and ears", but their hands are mostly just as tied.
The stick causes additional problems beyond the shoplifting itself. Everyone in retail (ideally) comes in with a certain expectation of being treated like shit and deferring to utility monster customers. But it's above and beyond that baseline to proactively fear for one's job just in case a confrontation is subjectively perceived to have been "excessive". At my work, there's been a suspicious pattern of such firings occurring along totally coincidental racial and gender lines, further contributing to general apprehension. We've also entirely stopped stocking certain high-value items due to how often they get stolen, which isn't fair to the law-abiding legitimate customers who want them too. All to avoid potential conflicts.
Upshot: whether the anecdata or the Official CDC Statistics are more reflective of the territory, *people act like the anecdata are true*, with consequent harmful policy and behaviour modifications. So spending resources to address the perception, if not the underlying (non-)problem, would seem to be a $20 win lying on the ground regardless. Current Nash equilibrium is painful for everyone.
I wonder how long an equilibrium of complete non-response to shoplifting can persist until even well-to-do customers start just taking things because there are no consequences? (After which I presume it will very quickly become unprofitable to leave the store open). If even the nominal owners of the goods can't be bothered do care about whether they're paid for, doesn't that create pressure towards making everyone who pays just a sucker rather than a cooperator?
This actually already de facto happens. As an Upstanding Moral Grocer, my company makes an effort to donate whatever we can't sell, rather than throwing it in a locked Dumpster with a security guard to deter the homeless like Some Other Competitors. But there's sort of an honour system thing of deciding what's donation-worthy vs compost-worthy. Although there has always been some degree of, uh, "spillage" which results in free food for us employees, these days there's hardly any guilt about "accidentally breaking" something that one would otherwise pay for. Even bosses mark things off this way sometimes, instead of using the officially-documented Manager Expense Account process.
As you say, when any schmuck can walk out the door with basically whatever with no repercussions, the Law-Abiding Citizens who pay start to feel like suckers. Sad state of affairs. Why bother putting effort into a job you don't respect and that doesn't respect you right back?
This is a very interesting question. I have the same thoughts about paying for public transportation in SF. When it is clear that a certain percentage are riding for free, and that the consequences for doing so are nil, will a certain portion of currently-paying riders just stop doing paying as well? A tipping point?
"Certain percentage" implies a smaller rather than larger number; although we don't get much of NYC-style "turnstile jumping" in the subway here, there's essentially zero enforcement of fare collection. Would go look up recent MUNI statistics but it'd just be depressing. This predates Summer 2020 too, and I think that tipping point happened long ago. It's more normative to not pay than to pay. Likely for similar reasons as the missing shoplifting reporting data: the courts here just don't bother prosecuting for evading transit fares, and it's not worth anyone's hassle to enforce. Partly on equity grounds, partly on No One Advocates Minor Responsibility, i.e. that particularly San Franciscan libertarian streak. Transit *wants* to be free, man.
I keep paying every time out of honour and civic duty, cause of a few times there were actual fare checks and some of my fellow passengers got $50+ fines...but I notice those are fading memories now. Haven't so much as seen a fare inspector in years.
> Our security guy also wasn't allowed to stop shoplifters from exiting the store, stand in their way, etc.
What *was* the security guy allowed to do, though? I know that sounds flippant, but I’m actually curious, did he have any official task other than “stand near the door in a uniform”?
That anecdote wasn't from SF, so I'd hope it's a little different; but in SF, no, not even that. The official task really was to perform (not even actually do, that'd be invasive and accusatory) Constant Vigilence. Even when actual confrontations happened, security people were placed in the same binds as the retail employee in the comic strip linked somewhere else in thread: can't approach too quickly or threateningly, can't make physical contact, can't be overly verbally aggressive. The only tool in the box is "kill them with kindness", which...pretty much never works, especially from a quasi-cop.
Obviously, in really egregious confrontations, better to have the trained security guy engage vs a store employee. But they risked their jobs in such cases too, so the incentives didn't really align. It's not like they were judged poorly for not stopping shoplifting, since how could they? Better to not even invite that risk, if possible.
I guess that's why my company fired all our security people. Though we'd have preferred to offer them a job instead, they learned enough on the beat and got paid/treated even worse than us. Sad all around.
Anyone with a pas tin big box retail will already be aware of this delta. When the stores first start teaching you about "shrinkage", wow is it eye opening.
~25 years ago in a mid sized American town I worked at a Best Buy. We would have when a hit new rap album came out dozens of copies of the CD would be stolen stolen each day. Dozens. Store just saw it as a loss leader. Not sure rational, but it is what we did. And generally hundreds of incidents of shoplifting, a week of which the Loss prevention guys only noticed and stopped half at best. And police were involved in only a small fraction.
On top of that the store always told us that employee theft was an even LARGER issue. Which is crazy if true, since shoplifting was a pretty serious issue.
I doubt 2% of it got into the town's official crime statistics.
Scott, how is it that every time you determine San Fransicko was wrong or misleading about something, you are absolutely sure about it, but every time it turns out to be right, you're "confused and not sure"? Care to do a follow-up self-analysis showing the correlation between these events and the likely causes thereof?
I'm not sure what this has to do with the point I made. You can agree with it a bunch but attach enough emotional baggage to end up influencing the reader to think less of the book than if you'd disagreed with the whole thing neutrally. And to be honest I only commented because I noticed a trend that you do this consistently in political articles. Somehow all counter-narrative information is suspect no matter how often confirmed. I'm not sure what you intend, but the effect is analyses which are by the letter, less biased than many sources, but in actual nuanced language, rather strongly biased. That may lead to worse outcomes (vis a vis social utility or whatever) than analysis that is openly and unashamedly biased. Better to be more straightforward and more informative by explaining "this looks right but agreeing with any red tribe points is bad for grey tribe because _____".
My model of Scott is that he actually has a counter-narrative bias and he makes this very explicit: “I want to stress that [Shellenberger’s] less bad than the mainstream media he’s criticizing. He is taking swings at an omnipresent orthodoxy of creepily consistent spin and bias, while also telling a couple of fibs himself.”
I think he wants the counter-narrative to be true but he perhaps holds it to a high standard because if you are going to push back against an orthodoxy, you can’t be sloppy.
My impression of the review was that Scott was largely in agreement or neutral with each point, except when he found funky statistics at work, and then disagreed with a tweet about whether or not he mischaracterized the book's argument.
Housing *is* actually the main cause of homelessness though. Seriously, go read "Homelessness is a Housing Issue".
Also, no, dense walkable neighbors are great. We don't have dense walkable areas with mixed middle housing in the states. Look at Amsterdam's great density and wonder if maybe the author missed something vital.
I've lived in two Irish cities, a Japanese city, and a bunch of American cities. Many US cities are dense and walkable, they're just terrible. I didn't really enjoy the dense walkable foreign cities either, but at least they weren't as full of crime and noise and litter.
Scott's also specifically saying that American voters in particular vote against / agitate against policies which would lead to denser and more walkable cities because, unlike in Europe, American cities under the leadership of American progressives are unlikely to do anything to address the obvious failure modes of density; chiefly, the drug use, public disturbances, violent crime / homelessness issues addressed in the book.
That is, increased density would mean something qualitatively different in the US specifically because we have so many fewer examples of the US managing to handle the issues that will also naturally correlate with density. Maybe Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn (and San Fran 50 years ago) compare favorably to European / East Asian cities in terms of capturing the benefits of density while largely mitigating the harms, but that's it.
American cities under the leadership of reactionaries (Cf. Rudi Giuliani) seem to do a good job of "cleaning up the streets", yet reactionaries don't actually pursue this as a political strategy, Shellenberger perhaps excepted. They doubt down on sprawl and car dependency instead, as a form of virtue signaling.
Because most reactionaries don't really care about cities, and at least among the political class, cities being chaotic and violence filled is good politics to run against, especially if you believe due to education polarization, winning in the cities is a thing that's not going to happen - even Eric Adams on many issues is a lot to the left of Bloomberg and Rudy, of course.
>They doubt down on sprawl and car dependency instead, as a form of virtue signaling.
Sprawl is mostly a product of desegregation. Cry all you want, but white people largely left the cities to avoid minority crime and anti-social behavior - obviously once suburbs were built on this basis, it became easier for people to move to the suburbs for other reasons too. Which is also why comparisons to foreign cities without large non-asian minority populations is extraordinarily misleading.
Every major european city has large populations of whatever the local flavor of undesirable is, concentrated in "bad" neighborhoods, yet car dependency and sprawl don't occur. White flight is clearly not a sufficient explanation.
The biggest NIMBY's online are progressives, but in reality, the biggest NIMBY's overall are conservative homeowners who don't want an apartment building in their neighborhood.
America used to have more dense, walkable, non-downtown urban areas. The West Side of Chicago, for instance, used to be a dense, walkable urban area. Not so much anymore.
I would guess that the fraction of Americans that live in dense walkable places is substantially less than the fraction of Irish people that live even just in the walkable neighborhoods of those two cities. The United States is worse than the rest of the anglosphere in providing dense walkable neighborhoods where people can live, and the anglosphere is worse than the rest of Europe and Japan.
If we assume that problems (drug use, homelessness etc.) occur roughly proportionally to total population (urban and otherwise) and they congregate in the cities, this might explain why dense neighbourhoods in the US are worse.
It's all cramming into a much smaller amount of urban area.
Therefore, upzoning will make existing urban areas nicer.
Similarly, if we assume that benefits (jobs, shops, social activities, religious organizations) occur roughly proportionally to total population, then that might also explain why dense neighborhoods in the US are better.
I expect some things grow more than linearly and some grow less than linearly, and different people have different amounts of positive and negative feelings about each of these things, so that different densities will be optimal for different people.
Upzoning is the only way, but very exclusive. No one wants to discuss the real problem, homeless go where the services are. The more a city spends, the more homeless they get. No sane person can report on this because of left-wing reactions (often violent).
I'd say that instead America is too good at providing the rich the suburbs/gated communities to live in and be isolated from all the literal shit. And because the rich wield disproportionate power, the problems that don't concern them directly are simply ignored or get token effort/virtue signalling.
This reminds me of an argument I used to make that everything in this country seems optimized for the upper middle class despite that being an incredibly small percentage of the population.
What do you mean by "incredibly small"? The top quintile minus the top 1% is, by definition, 19% of the population. Do you not consider this group to be upper middle class? Do you consider 19% to be incredibly small?
If the conventional definition for upper middle class is "top quintile" then I guess the problem is that I don't find that to be a useful definition, but we don't have to hash that out here. I'll walk back "incredibly small" but stand by the fact that the influence is massively outsized for that income group relative to their status as a minority of the population (obviously the money is a big source of that influence, just to clarify that I do understand *why* things would be this way).
Why are you talking about the people? What do they have to do with the placement of buildings, the width of streets, and the amount of space given over to parking?
I mean sure, if places allowed people to squat in crackhouses, then no one would be homeless – except people that would rather be homeless than squat in a crackhouse.
I'm personally all for experimenting with _minimally_ cheap housing! But even the fucking 'micro-apartments' have all been basically banned too.
I don't think it'll ever be feasible to literally give anyone that shows up in, e.g. SF or NYC, an apartment for free.
I was thinking setting-up 'rural Hamsterdams' might work – they'd be awful, but possibly contain the misery, and maybe even reduce it. (We could police them surely; at least somewhat.) It might not be _that_ much worse than having a prison nearby.
In this vein: Even if I allow the claim "housing is a human right" to stand unchallenged (which I normally would not), "housing in the most expensive city in the country is a human right" is just absurd.
I don't agree that 'housing is a human right' exactly. I don't think it being a 'right' is fruitful; nor for other 'positive rights' either, generally.
I _suspect_ that, if the relevant people were _willing_, 'we' could just make really cheap housing, e.g. _functionally_ similar to crackhouses, _legal_, then we could mostly solve homelessness.
I cannot, like you apparently, work out anything like how 'anyone can move anywhere in a big country and demand free housing (and 'immediately') wherever they move to' could possibly work. The obvious stupid fix to that disaster would be something worse like 'every place decides who can reside there', which sure seemed like what maybe NYC's former mayor once publicly floated, so there's definitely room for worse than status quo.
Effectively, housing is, somewhat, available on-demand – commit a (sufficiently outlandish) crime, and then be arrested and jailed (for at least some time). It's really really really really really really really TERRIBLE housing, but I would also very much expect that it also greatly decreases people's risks of dying from, e.g. exposure, weather, or excessive temperatures.
I also think cheap-good housing could be provided by private individuals and organizations, voluntarily, if all of the _other_ relevant people wouldn't make it illegal to do so. Mostly all of the cheap options are illegal.
But keep in mind that LOTS of people – millions – are _already_ living in gray/'black' market housing, i.e. varying degrees of illegal. In a lot of places, everyone looks the other way and pretends not to notice; mostly because it's _mostly_ perfectly fine (and thus shouldn't be illegal anyways).
I think, reasonably, the biggest mitigating circumstances for people that can't just 'not live there' is social, i.e. friends and family that live nearby. For a lot of poorer or less wealthy people, the loss of their IRL social network is a HUGE cost and can't be replaced or substituted for (realistically).
But I think most people like that just find a way to, e.g. 'couch surf', or just rent a shitty room in a shitty shared apartment.
But in a sense, the rent will always be 'too high' in SF – even if it were a lot lower than it is now – for most people; and thus they shouldn't live there.
Absolute/universal 'affordability' everywhere in even a small country is impossible – unless you're willing to go Full Totalitarian on everyone (and then this is all moot mostly).
I mean, I will admit that I was being at least partly facetious, though not entirely. From 19 to about 42 years of age, an *enormous* percentage of my friends group was people located in the Bay Area (and outing myself as not particularly counting as "poor or less wealthy", although not living there *is* a factor in that) as the crew I used to attend Burning Man with, among other events, started and even now remains primarily based there. In many years, I made multiple visits out there to hang out with people. Where, yes, I stayed on couches because it's not like I could afford hotels there I'd actually be willing to stay in. Though over that time period, the group grew to encompass reasonably sized "outpost groups", if you will, in other cities. So, probably the folks I spent 80+% of my social time with, even if a large portion of that was online, and they weren't all geographically grouped as tightly any longer.
And I also very much understand what it's like to not have a social circle any longer, having been excommunicated for heresy, since. I dunno. Maybe it's easier to get kicked out than to choose to leave. Or maybe it's not, or maybe it depends on the individual. Given that related commentary from myself regarding the efficacy of ketamine infusion therapy in combating acute and chronic suicidal ideation can be found elsewhere on this Substack, perhaps I should shut my dang pie-hole on the concept of people leaving everything behind. *shrug*
But I am really quite glad that I held fast to that choice to not live there, especially now.
A lot of the "inadvertent creeping requirements" are – _individually_ – pretty sensible 'safety engineering', e.g. building codes pertaining to handling various statistically-expected natural disasters. The sad part about this is that we can't just 'legislate away' all of the 'unsafe' options – we just force lots of people to do without even-partly-decent shelter at all. And of course even the official rules almost never require that anyone retrofit existing buildings, which makes even the somewhat reasonable 'safety' justification pretty obviously at-least-somewhat bullshit.
But there's definitely a lot of 'malice' too – that might be a little too strong of a word, for me, in most cases – maybe 'contempt' would be more accurate? Laws/regulations/rules (effectively) prohibiting, e.g. SROs, 'tiny houses', 'tiny apartments', un-related {room/house/apartment}-mates living together, etc., are definitely _aimed_ at specific people (in specific classes, and, not too long ago, specific races).
It's like extra double sad badness on top that all of the laws/regulations/rules are so lightly enforced too. It wouldn't be _acutely_ good were they enforced (more), but it'd probably also shortly lead to them being repealed or at least everyone having common knowledge that they're stupid and effectively unenforceable. It'd be better of course to get rid of the stupid rules, but the current status quo is a much more insidious muddle, e.g. an extra tool for some people to harass certain other people.
Really really important point: all American crime statistics that come from police departments since at least the early 2000s are almost worthless. Since Bill Bratton and COMPSTAT revolutionized American policing, The careers and day-to-day not getting screamed at and belittled-by-their-bosses of police leadership have highly dependent on low crime statistics in the areas they control.
As we know, "when a metric becomes a goal it ceases to be a useful metric". Every time you see crime statistics from police reports bear in mind that they have been passed through at least one but usually several layers of handlers with intense and explicit personal incentives to downplay any crimes and no loyalty whatsoever to any ideal of scientific neutrality.
Homicide stats are pretty reliable because a body with a hole in it demands bureaucratic attention. Car theft stats seem valid too because you have to report your car being stolen to the police and get a report to file an insurance claim.
I wonder if even homicide statistics relate to human suffering reliably. Maybe if the dead person is upper or middle class. Know someone who was considering working CSI for a city and shadowed someone from the department for a day. Two deaths (overdose of a homeless man and a possible homicide of another homeless man) and a stabbing (again, homeless) on that day that never made it to the news. Possible homicide was probably reported as accidental death, and overdose as natural causes. I have heard of many knife attacks as reduced down to misdemeanors. I think all the stats are garbage.
I would assume that the incentives of coroners are different from the incentives of police. If coroners have any incentive to mislabel drug deaths there is little point in having drug death statistics at all.
As I understand it, there are ways to goalseek homicide stats as well, reclassify murders as manslaughter or accidental deaths, push homicides onto past quarters, etc..
Aren't both murder and manslaughter, while different to the DA, "homicides"? and pushing them temporally presumably only goes so far (weeks? months, at an absolute stretch?), and should smooth out for anything but the most recent reports if you're looking at a multi-decade time series.
"Accidental death" and "suicide" mislabelling could fuck up the stats, though
""Accidental death" and "suicide" mislabelling could fuck up the stats, though"
This calls to mind the classic: Lost a bundle of the mob's money and got so depressed about it that he shot himself. In the back of the head. Three times.
"But a big reason we don’t build dense cities and walkable neighborhoods is that people (correctly) hate and fear them. They accurately predict that if their neighborhood got denser, it would start looking like the dense parts of San Francisco - litter-filled, decaying, disgusting, unsafe, and ambiently miserable to exist"
This seems like the one unexamined claim in the otherwise excellent review.
Like in the essay about high modernism, Scott Alexander wrote about how people don't like hard industrial designed cities like Brasilia and prefer dense, quirky neighborhoods.
Similarly, Europe is filled with dense cities and walkable neighborhoods and they are great! Same with parts of Asia.
It seems like the "accurate prediction" part of the above quote needs to be very heavily qualified.
The cultural and policy differences abroad are hugely important! But if we are going to be bringing in "Dutch solutions to homelessness/rampant drug use", I think it makes sense to also give a shout out to "Dutch/Norwegian/Taiwanese etc. solutions to building dense walkable neighborhoods".
It just seemed like such an absolute statement "obviously, public transit brings crime and terribleness". Scott Alexander studied in Ireland if I remember correctly, he knows that this isn't actually a universal, which is why I was surprised to see it written as if it was.
Why would we pursue a Dutch policy of dense urban development when it is a direct response to population densities that don't exist here?
The reason dense Dutch cities are nice and dense US cities are not as nice is in the US a significant portion of the good tax paying white collar people choose to live out in the land of big lots and low taxes (suburb/exurbs). That simply isn't an option (nearly as much) in the Netherlands.
You don't have the same overall balance of functional versus dysfunctional people in these urban areas. There is a "ballast" of middle and upper middle class people in Dutch/Japanese cities that doesn't exist in American cities and keeps them at a higher standard.
I was intending this to be interpreted as "conditional upon existing urban policies, dense walkable neighborhoods are unpleasant to live in". I agree if you changed existing urban policies, that could change.
Because I think, (though I may be wrong) that you agree that, all things being equal, dense walkable, urban neighborhoods are awesome.
Also, I think a very reliable indicator of how good/nice/"having its shit together" a country is can be seen in whether wealthy people there regularly use public transit.
Billionaires in Zurich still take the tram pretty often.
Wealthy people in Bangladesh have 3 cars and armed guards.
> Because I think, (though I may be wrong) that you agree that, all things being equal, dense walkable, urban neighborhoods are awesome
Dense, walkable urban neighbourhoods have their place, but I'm not convinced that they're the be-all and end-all of everything, as the internet commenter hive mind often seems to think.
Walkability is a trade-off for personal space and peace-and-quiet; when I was young and single I preferred to live in a denser urban area, now I'm older with kids I accept the trade-off of having a quarter acre block with a pool but needing to drive to the shops. Other people prefer a different trade-off, either denser or sparser, and I'm not going to tell them that their preferences are wrong.
There are some issues around externalities and land use that make dense urban neighborhoods better in an actual moral sense as well, but that's more of an issue of the externalities of modern suburbs not being appropriately priced.
If I'm going to be morally judged on my preference not to be squashed cheek-by-jowl on top of other people, hang on a minute while I adjust my horns, tail, cloven hooves and pitchfork.
And it would be even more efficient and create fewer externalities if we all lived in coffin apartments and only ate recycled algae and meditated for our only form of entertainment.
It is all a continuum. The fact that it is more environmental/resources efficient to cram people together is not some end all be all argument.
Dense, walkable urban neighborhoods where attractive women feel safe to walk around at night are great, although I am told that lots of wives are insistent on moving their husbands to the suburbs.
>Walkability is a trade-off for personal space and peace-and-quiet
I don't quite agree on that count. I would say that it is cars that are loud, and walkability allows you to avoid cars. Even in cities, car-free (or mostly car-free, e.g. no through traffic and low speed limits) residential areas can be plenty quiet, and then there's the missing middle of mixed development suburbs that recover effectively all benefits of areas zoned for single-family housing: even if you personally prefer to live in a single-family home, groceries and amenities can still be within easy walking distance if they are mixed together with density-increasing medium-rise housing in the same neighborhood.
Cars make some noise, yes, but neighbours are usually a much bigger worry unless you live next to a highway, especially if the teenager next door decides to take up drumming.....
Zurich had a bad heroin problem in the 80s but the tram riding billionaires and many other citizens seem to have agreed on a policy that helped. Switzerland was one of the first countries to introduce opioid substitution treatment on a large scale. Plus injection rooms, prevention efforts and changes in law enforcement. Sounds pretty much standard approach nowadays and hasn't worked as well everywhere. I guess it is easier when the addicts are swiss cititzens.
"all things being equal, dense walkable, urban neighborhoods are awesome."
It depends! If you like hustle and bustle and are young and have enough disposable income to go out to bars and clubs and the vibrant cultural and nightlife, then that kind of place is great. Sure, maybe you live over a bar and there's a lot of shouting and noise at four in the morning, but it's the Big City Dream!
And maybe you're the kind of person (which I think Scott might be, and I certainly am) for whom 'hustle and bustle' is the ninth circle of Hell and the cultural life can be as vibrant as it likes, I'm not shifting outside my front door. A nice little semi-detached house away from the city centre with a bit of a front and/or back yard is what you like and want 😁
Of course, right now housing prices in Ireland are bananas, even for small semi-ds in the city but not the centre of the city:
I think you're skipping a bit over a middle ground that can and does exist.
I live with my wife and two children in an apartment in a three-story, six-unit building. We have a back yard with a grape vine, two little planter gardens, and enough grass for small barbecue parties in the summer. We don't see our neighbors all that often. When our upstairs neighbor had a kid and a cat we would hear them running up and down the hall sometimes, but that was it.
There is a bar/restaurant around the corner that has live music which we never hear and which closes at a reasonable hour. The one annoying noise is hearing the road from the front room because our street happens to be the sole road out of a nest of one-way roads. Our neighbor streets don't have that same problem.
We can and do walk to: school, the local library, the pool, several parks, several friends' houses, the hardware store, the grocery store (sometimes), the garden store, the doctor's office (sometimes), and the dentist. We don't go to night clubs. Our neighborhood is very walkable, but never feels full of "hustle and bustle." There are parts of town we could live to get "The Big City Dream" and nightclubs and whatnot but we don't want that.
I contrast this to my in-laws' house in Michigan. They have a beautiful backyard that looks onto woods dense enough for deer to pass through, but they have to drive 20 minutes to get anywhere of interest, and they still get noise from cars going down their road.
Back in the 1990s in Sao Paulo, rich people went everywhere by helicopter because on the streets there were so many carjackings and kidnappings. Taking the tram in Zurich sounds better, but other people would like the Sao Paulo helicopter lifestyle.
I once saw a 15 car motorcade go by in D.C. taking Vice President Cheney from his home at the Naval Observatory to the White House. He looked quite comfortable amidst all the hubbub his commute was causing, but I can imagine many other people (maybe Dan Quayle?) feeling it was all too much
It's certainly an important caveat in the review context, but...how often are all other things equal, though? Inertia alone makes redesigning cities pretty hard, and I don't think anyone's seriously advocating for attempting another Prospera. There are serious trade-offs involved with urban walkably dense (UWD*) designs. For some, much profit and little pain; for others, the opposite. Carbon externalities aside - and even there, Researchers Disagree, really depends exactly how one defines terms - I am genuinely not sure it's an ideal model for the median person. (Modal, certainly, almost by definition...) Like, yes, the option should certainly exist for those that want it, many such cases. Less enthusiastic about pushing it, or the component parts, as an apex goal for human living arrangements.
I moved from [a Hicksville that didn't even have a movie theatre] to SF...needed to get away from small minds, excessive parochialism, low diversity (even in 21st century CA, it was weird and awkward being one of a town's lone minorities), lack of economic and social opportunity. All serious quality-of-life issues.
But there are things I've come to miss greatly, largely because I took them for granite and didn't realize how much they cost to access in The City. Green space everywhere. The sound of the tides at night. Unpolluted beaches. Yards and wildlife. Not much traffic. Trustworthy long-term neighbors. And, yes: low levels of public homelessness, drug use, mental disorders.
Most of all, I miss being able to see the stars. Light pollution is severely underrated as a detriment to human flourishing.
So do I regret moving? I don't know, but I'd certainly have some things to say to Past AG about so rashly deciding to leave town.
It's just really hard to do a proper cost-benefit analysis over such a "polygenic" outcome. I think one of the biggest second-order effects of life extension will be having more time to learn such lessons, and still have time left over to adjust one's circumstances accordingly to wiser preferences. It's hard to get high-stakes choices like housing right the first time. That's why we fight so bitterly over it.
(Public transit is beautiful though. One of my favourite inspirations for "can humans solve coordination problems?" Yes, yes we can.)
*Use Walkman Device. Someone else please invent a snappier term, I'm at a loss.
>Most of all, I miss being able to see the stars. Light pollution is severely underrated as a detriment to human flourishing.
I have often wondered what the impact of not being able to see the night sky is on the human psyche. I suspect it is pretty substantial, I'd probably be interested to read up on that if there is any good writing on it.
Come visit New Mexico on a new moon during the winter. Colder air makes for even lower humidity, starting off at 8,000 feet altitude helps, and being able to be 200 miles from any other people all make for some pretty amazing night skies.
"Because I think, (though I may be wrong) that you agree that, all things being equal, dense walkable, urban neighborhoods are awesome."
I agree they are awesome for some people. I personally hate them. "Walkable" usually means "if you are willing to jostle past many people, cross fifty streets to get anywhere, and deal with barely tolerable levels of smell and noise". I used to love walking when I lived in the suburbs! You would walk past parks and nice little streams! I don't have this thing everyone else seems to have where unless I live within five feet of the World's Loudest Nightclub and twelve different trendy restaurants I demand higher density. Some people just like being in green, quiet areas.
I agree that people who like dense cities should be able to have them if they want, but the insistence that everyone secretly desires them drives me crazy.
I think you are giving density an unfair shake here.
For example, Zurich is dense. Most people live in 4 story apartment buildings. But, with the exception of like 3 streets, it is always quiet and really nice nature is accessible quickly.
There are two rivers flowing through the city and both have very well done trails next to them for running.
Similarly, Taipei is a big city that also has a river going through and they have made the entire river for its 35 kilometer length in the city a park with play grounds, ball courts, and a running trail.
Singapore is the single densest city I've ever lived in, but most of it was quiet and the nature trails were actually very managed and accessible. They turned the entire 25 kilometer southeast coast of the island into a park. Going through that on a Sunday was like going through a "before" flashback in a post apocalyptic movie. Just families having picnics and the water and people on bikes and skates. Similarly, the river is a great walking/running trail. They also turned the bed of the old Malaya railroad into one massive green way.
In all of these places, walking wasn't a problem, it wasn't crowded, and they had pretty quick access to nature.
I guess my measure of density has been skewed by being in a couple "just right" cities.
Brother, I lived in Taipei, and unless you made seven figure USD salaries, no one had any green space and traffic was dreadful. The trains were great, but Taipei is not a place I would want to replicate, and I grew up in Chicago.
>"Walkable" usually means "if you are willing to jostle past many people, cross fifty streets to get anywhere, and deal with barely tolerable levels of smell and noise".
That's literally the exact opposite of what walkable means. You've listed problems with walking as a mean of mobility in modern car-centered cities, making them "walkable" implies getting rid of these exact problems.
Secondly, you seem to have this mental model where the density scale goes from "downtown" to "suburb". But here in Europe, suburbs can be green, quiet AND densely populated. Them being densely populated, and therefore able to house most of the things you need in your direct vicinity, merely makes it easier for you to avoid going downtown unless you specifically want to go there.
I have been in "car-free" areas of cities. The absence of cars does not magically remove crowds (quite the opposite), smell, or most noises. It just removes the only alternative to them. The vast majority of areas in European cities, which do have cars and buses, are the worst of both worlds, clearly unable to handle them and intolerable either by car or on foot.
I agree that European suburbs, while better than European cities, are not as good as American suburbs.
Sempai noticed me! I feel honored, and therefore compelled to reply, even if it's four days later than I should have.
Most car-free areas in downtown cities suffer from the same problems as other pedestrian lanes in car-oriented environment, i.e., they're narrow paths channeling pedestrian traffic that is otherwise severely constrained by car infrastructure. This increased traffic, and resulting commercial benefits, are their main selling point from the perspective of, largely conservative and business oriented, establishment city planners, which turns them into the most prominent success stories touted by walkable city proponents. So, I fully understand where your impression comes from, my point is, they're not representative of the end goal of turning cities truly walkable.
The suburbs are. I can't emphasize this enough. The complaint against American-style single-family neighborhoods is not their character, it's the fact that they spread the city so much that individual car travel is the only viable option for most people to reach most destinations. The solution to this is making suburbs densely populated. Now, and I understand this may sound like cheating, I'm not pointing to the majority of actually existing suburbs. But I can vouch for several, I've lived in them, I've walked through them, and at their best, it's exactly like walking in the park (except you see multi-story buildings from behind the trees everywhere around you, as if they were rocky cliffs of a valley). Perhaps even better, because parks are where people gather, whereas you'll rarely encounter anyone at any point in-between the buildings, the traffic just naturally spreads across space and time. (I've also seen some become cautionary tales of how letting cars in is, alone, enough to take up any free walking space and completely destroy the effect.)
I may be missing something in your position that would still make those dense suburbs unappealing to you. But I'm responding to the literal description of "green, quiet ares", where you "walk past parks and nice little streams", and my immediate reaction is - that's what I want too! And I've seen enough to believe it's possible even with sizable population density. (Just not at the current level of car use.)
All of these neighborhoods are considered walkable, too (98-100/100 at https://www.walkscore.com/NY/New_York). And these neighborhoods are definitely not "litter-filled, decaying, disgusting, unsafe, and ambiently miserable to exist in". Pretty much the opposite in fact.
Note that in contrast to what one might guess, the area around Times Square is not particularly dense (in terms of people actually living there). There are just a lot of tourists (and, depending on the time, office workers) in a pretty small area. It has nothing to do with there being a lot of housing there.
I also don't think there are significant NIMBY objections to new subway stations being built (at least not for the same reasons as whatever is going on with BART).
It would be interesting to see if there are any policies that SF could learn from NYC.
America used to have more dense, walkable urban neighborhoods that weren't as exclusive in terms of cost as the Upper West Side. For example, the Austin neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, eight miles west of the Loop, bordering on Oak Park, was a nice place up until the late 1960s.
Then it integrated.
Next door to Austin in Oak Park, however, the city government imposed a surreptitious, illegal quota system on realtors and renters to slow demographic change ... with impressive results at keeping Oak Park from being destroyed by crime and subsequent white flight while still allowing a reasonable degree of integration. (In 2020, Oak Park was 61% white, much of it gay, and 18% black. Next door Austin in Chicago in 2016 was 84% black and 4% white.) What Oak Park did is reminiscent of the ethnic quota system Lee Kwan-Yew set up for Singapore housing projects, but almost nobody has ever heard of Oak Park's black-a-block quota.
Granted, Oak Park had America's most architecturally distinguished housing stock so fighting rather than fleeing was more attractive. (My dad grew up there next door to a Frank Lloyd Wright house). But Austin was pretty decent too, and now it's an urban wasteland. I can recall driving my dad to visit his childhood neighborhood in 1982 through desolate slums, and then the moment we crossed from Chicago's Austin neighborhood to Oak Park, suddenly we were in utopia with tourists walking around with tape recorded architectural tours.
This is a lot like the contrast I noted in 2018 in the homeless problem between Santa Monica (not bad) and Venice Beach-Los Angeles (giant homeless party), where you could see the municipal border to the inch in terms of how bad were the problems caused by the homeless.
I've long suggested that we should look into what Oak Park did to save itself. But because it was likely highly illegal under the 1968 Fair Housing Act, I've only ever been able to find one academic study of Oak Park's successful strategy. But if Scott feels like writing 22,000 words on the policies of Oak Park vs. Chicago, he might bring some attention to this interesting possibility.
If I could, I'd have every American who gets news and ideas from Fox, CNN, NYT, whatever stop and just read Steve Sailer and Scott Alexander, just as a contrast. They might get really mad, but at least they'd be exposed to something different that might make them think.
Yes, few people actually live in Times Square, but the foot traffic there is greater then the neighborhoods you mentioned. Furhtermore, those nieghborhoods may be dense compared to the rest of the country, but I would guess they are not particularly dense relative to other residential neighborhoods in Manhattan which seems like the relevant comparison. The issue with new subway stations not being built in NYC is largely there isnt much space that isnt already filled and wouldn't be massively disruptive. For some time there has been an ongoijng debate about an east side second avenue subwauy being built but many are opposed seeing it as further serving the richest new yorkers while the servive on lines that run to poorer neighborhoods s either poor or such lines are non-existent. From what I have msot recently read, the entire city of San Francisco is similar in area to Manhattan and there might be similar arguments concerning the expansion of BART.
The upper west side and upper east side are actually two of the five densest areas in New York. I suspect they’re denser than Washington heights and the stretch of central Bronx and that only the east village area is denser, but this map doesn’t distinguish among the five areas above 150 residents per acre.
But manually looking for the highest values, it looks like they are:
1) Yorkville (on the Upper East Side)
2) Fordham South (in the Bronx)
3) East Village
4) Upper West Side
5) Lincoln Square (which is also on the UWS)
6) Gramercy
So, to repeat myself: "Some of the densest neighborhoods in NYC (and therefore, the country) are the Upper West Side, (most of) the Upper East Side, and the area around Gramercy Park"
I'd like to know more about this view, I was surprised you felt that way (to me it feels like walkability/density has become almost dogma among intellectuals, but maybe that's my bubble). I personally think they're great goals so would love to be challenged. Maybe it's the definition of dense (is low-rise Brooklyn dense? Walkable suburbs where you can get by without a car?). Also do you think European level urban/suburban density doesn't work in Europe? Or wouldn't work in the US?
I think they are popular among intellectuals because they are better solution if your throw out the messy personal preferences of actual humans. And to be clear I live right in a major American city (though in an area of SFH on tiny lots).
For what a lot of people are looking for the suburbs are a rational choice even accounting for the horrible terrible no good commuting. You generally get better schools, services, QoL, at lower costs, and can still access most of the things the main city has to offer.
America is different to those other countries in a lot of important ways, and protest all you want but one of (if not) the most important ways is demographics.
Anyone who thinks you can compare SF and Houston/PHX weather, go to your airport, buy a SW ticket there and see how long you last in Downtown this week.
I spent some time Googling, and while none of the studies I found looked well-designed at all, it seemed as though there were about fourteen as many deaths to cold as there are to heat in the US?
That sounds very wrong. I live in Chicago, and no one ever dies from the cold, but heat stroke is embarrassingly common every summer. I have never heard of anyone dying from the cold. There are no heating buses in the winter. I assume Texas is far worse.
also apparently there is some controversy over the methodology
But honestly, I trust the hell out of that result... the CDC is pretty political, as we learned from covid, and has a strong tendency to output results aligned with the political winds. It would be very easy for them to have been concerned about people finding benefits from global warming, and therefore wanting to downplay the harm caused by cold weather. the fact that they *didn't* do that feels impressive to me.
With fewer adaptations available to the homeless, and generally worse health outcomes across the board, I'd naively expect "excessive cold" to be extra-fatal in this population due to the exact fatality mechanisms involved. SF used to include infrared heat lamps at bus stops in part to address this, temperate climate be damned.
One thing that jumped out at me: "Murders definitely rose a little after Boudin took office, but that’s because that was also when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, which demoralized police and led to a so-far-permanent spike in murders nationwide" -- the way that this is written implies causality between BLM protests and a spike in murders. Especially in a review that emphasizes being careful about causality, this goes a bit too far. While it's certainly possible that BLM protests led to a spike in murders, it's also possible that it is mainly due to pandemic-induced disruption of moderating influences of community.
Yeah, from what I've read, experts think it's some combination of:
1. Pandemic-induced social disruption.
2. Breakdown between police and communities post-George Floyd + related protests.
3. Huge surge of gun sales starting during the pandemic.
But I don't think it's at all clear yet which if any of those three factors is the *primary* cause--I don't think there's enough data yet that I'd be comfortable declaring any of those the main reason for the spike in homicides, let alone citing just one without considering the others at all.
Looking at the data, I do now think the protests were a major driver of the initial spike. That said, I don't think looking at England or Wales could disprove the "increase in gun sales" hypothesis.
And of course the theories are not mutually exclusive -- I could imagine that pandemic-induced social disruption led to larger and more violent protests (people out of work, feeling disconnected from their communities, etc.), and that the protests contributed to the increase of gun sales as people worried about unrest and violence, which could potentially have a lasting effect on the homicide rate even as the protests themselves fade in the rearview mirror...
There is no correlation between gun sales and murder. That is a big lie. I know guys who traffick guns. Their guns never show up in stats (illegal imports of Chinese copy-cat guns).
I think this is pretty obvious - you can look at a time series and it's very clear that murders didn't rise for the first three months of the pandemic, then rose immediately following the BLM protests. The rise in murders was much greater among black communities compared to white communities, and didn't occur in other countries that had the pandemic but not the BLM protests. I understand why experts would want to muddy this conclusion, but the pattern is pretty clear.
Thanks for the reply! I still don't think it is so clear, though I admit that I'm relying on 2nd hand analysis here and have not looked into it in detail myself -- I'd be curious to see the time series you mention, data I've come across is too coarse-grained.
The main reason for my skepticism however is just that causal identification tends to be notoriously difficult and the pandemic is a generationally disruptive event -- I think it's likely that it's not just experts wanting to muddy the conclusion (though there are surely people who are invested in particular outcomes and we're more likely to hear from them than the careful statisticians), as much a conclusion that is fundamentally muddy. The points you raise here sound plausible, but also societies are complex and one can always think of alternative explanations. Of course it's too much to ask to prove every assertion beyond a shadow of a doubt, but if you're aware of a good analysis that goes in more detail into the data along the lines you mentioned I would be interested to see it.
I went looking for a time series, and found Figure 1 in this report, which does indeed find a break in June 2020 (though it looks like homicide rates were rising before that, just in a way that was more in line with seasonal trends from previous years).
The authors do cite the protests as a probable primary driver, but they also point out other factors (i.e., cell phone data showing that people were obeying lockdowns in the spring and that the murder rate rose as people stopped staying at home all the time, gun sales spiking, etc.). They also suggest other possible protest-related mechanisms in addition to police being demoralized/doing their jobs less, like communities losing trust in the police and resorting to "street justice" instead.
They only look at data through the end of 2020 -- I would be interested to read a more recent analysis.
America has ridiculously slow official crime statistics. My impression is that 2021 saw a slight increase in homicides over 2020, but the year as a whole was slightly lower than during the "racial reckoning" months of 2020. So far, 2022 seems a little lower, but still in the very high Floyd Effect range.
Traffic fatalities went up notably in 2021 over 2020 but down a few percent per mile driven, but still much worse than 2019.
CDC's WONDER database now has deaths by homicide through November 2021, but not through the end of the year. They look similar to 2020. We seem to be in a post-Floyd New Normal for homicides and car crashes.
The traffic fatality data is extremely informative: black deaths in car crashes were 55% higher in June 2020 than in June 2019, which suggests depolicing during the racial reckoning played a major role in black behavior. I've been looking at social science stats for the last 50 years, and that's one of the most striking I've yet seen.
People who get killed in car crashes aren't, generally, homicidal maniacs. They tend to be normal people who think that it would be fun to speed while drunk and high (which, now that I think about it, does sound rather enjoyable) without getting pulled over by the cops.
These folks don't appear to have been out of control during the first 2.5 months of covid -- people were driving worse per mile but driving less -- but then did get out of control in June 2020 as traffic cops retreated to the donut shot and The Establishment announced that lockdown rules didn't apply if you were suitably angry about George Floyd.
I hereby propose a foundation to buy all underprivileged Americans a copy of Grand Theft Auto so that they may drive in a ludicrously unsafe manner to their hearts' content.
After generally falling after the Crack Wars of the 1990s, murders/homicides rose over 20% from 2014 to 2016 due to the Ferguson Effect, which tended to be highly localized where BLM triumphed over local cops, starting in the St. Louis metro area in 2014, then in Baltimore after the Freddie Gray riot on 4/25/15, then in Chicago after the release of the video of a cop murdering Laquan MacDonald on 11/23/2015.
After Trump won in 2016 in part running on the American Carnage theme of BLM supporters assassinating cops, The Establishment lost enthusiasm for BLM.
Homicides stopped rising in 2017 and dropped in 2018. At some point in 2019, though, the secular trend turned around. My reading of the rather muddy data is that homicides were drifting upwards from mid-2019 onward, especially including the pre-pandemic months of January and February 2020. This upward trend continued through the pandemic, then exploded in May 2020. For example, Chicago's all time record of 18 homicides in one day was set on May 31, 2020. The Father's Day Weekend of June 2020 set the all time Chicago record with 113 people being shot, killed or wounded. Homicides, shooting, and especially mass shootings (4 or more struck by bullets) have continued at huge levels ever since. So have traffic fatalities, especially among blacks.
Black traffic fatalities didn't shoot upward until June 2020, but homicides (which are majority black) soared in May 2020, then kept going up and peaked in July 2020 and remained hugely high through November 2020.
I can see two different ways to interpret the time series data. The most straightforward is that the rise of the Second BLM Era and the demonization of cops from 5/25/20 onward drove up homicides and car crash fatalities.
The other is that the black underclass was already in revolt, whether against traditional law-and-order or covid lockdowns, by early May 2020, while the broader car-driving black population was following the rules until after Memorial Day, 2020.
The CDC reports homicide deaths by month, so I can't tell from their data. Criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, who was the leading critic of the Ferguson Effect theory until giving up as the data became clear, has homicide data by day for 2020 for 20 big cities and he sees 5/25/20 as a "structural break." I've looked at Gun Violence Archive's day by day count of homicides and I'm uncertain.
I think that is pretty strongly suggestive of the BLM hypothesis, but the police morale version is not as robustly shown - the obvious other hypothesis is that the BLM protests made community/police relations worse, especially in black areas, and this meant that murderers were more confident they could get away with it because witnesses would be less likely to assist the police.
This isn't a question of police morale, but public confidence in the police - there is a widely believed argument that the police cannot enforce the law without public confidence because they are reliant on witnesses and other members of the public to help them. There are certainly plenty of police who will tell you that they can't do much about crime when the public won't help, though they tend to expect the public to start helping rather than looking at what they need to change to gain (and retain) the public's trust.
Or, you know, police didn't want to risk being put in a situation of having to use potentially deadly force and having their life ruined as a consequence. Obviously, Chauvin didn't need to use the force he used, but most deaths at the hands of police are not at all similar to George Floyd.
This would be great to have a full-length post on. I haven’t dived into the data so I had just chalked the crime rate rise partly to the pandemic and partly to the post-Floyd fallout.
Some potential counterpoints to what you’re saying:
1. The protests happened around the start of summer weather, which is when crime rates normally go up.
2. Lockdowns didn’t cause unrest right away. It took a few months for it to take effect and the Floyd protests just happened to be around then.
3. Comparing across countries isn’t meaningful because all the countries with protests share certain key characteristics.
In so far as the protests were responsible, it would also be interesting to know if anyone’s tried to break that down between the sub-causes of police defunding, less community trust in police, police demoralization, police acting vengefully, criminals feeling more empowered, etc.
How are people ignorant of the fact that the same thing happened following the Mike Brown protests?
1,2 3 do not apply to this instance.
Also, you need to provide evidence for the pandemic increasing crime. This didn't happen in other countries and it can't have been a product of the economic conditions of the pandemic (see: the fall in crime during the 2008 recession).
Black homicide deaths were up the most in 2020 over 2019, 38% IIRC, but Hispanic, American Indian, and white deaths were also up considerably. Asians deaths, however, were pretty flat.
The most spectacular racial change was in traffic fatalities after George Floyd's death.
It was my impression that this was a source of some considerable debate earlier in the COVID timeline, but that that debate has largely been resolved in favor of the argument that the Black Lives Matter movement did in fact have a causal relationship with the subsequent rise in violent crime.
The Unherd article on policing in especially Seattle and other PNW areas is particularly persuasive on that point, albeit pretty uncompromising.
After falling for a couple of decades, homicides rose a record setting amount during the Ferguson Effect years of 2015-2016, then fell when Jeff Sessions was attorney general. Sometime in 2019 they started to drift upward again, but the remarkable number of homicides during the "racial reckoning" following George Floyd's death -- the Floyd Effect -- has been unprecedented.
A strikingly similar pattern has been seen with traffic fatalities. Black traffic fatalities were 36% higher in the last 7 months of 2020 (following George Floyd's death on 5/25/20) than in the same months of 2019. Among nonblacks, traffic deaths were up 9%.
Both homicides and traffic fatalities appear to be related to how confident cops are that they will be supported by The Establishment in stopping motorists and pedestrians, and in searching them for illegal guns.
New York State is *required* by consent decree to provide shelter to all homeless New Yorkers. This originates with Callahan v. Carey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callahan_v._Carey brought in 1979, settled in 1981) plus a few follow-on cases ( https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/our-programs/advocacy/legal-victories/other-coalition-for-the-homeless-legal-victories/ ). The relevant law is Article XVII, Section 1 of the New York Constitution, which states that "The aid, care and support of the needy are public concerns and shall be provided by the state and by such of its subdivisions, and in such manner and by such means, as the legislature may from time to time determine." I don't really know much more about NY's system beyond that, but I would imagine this should be provided as background knowledge whenever anyone compares NY sheltered homeless rates to anywhere else -- of course New York has a higher rate of sheltered homeless than elsewhere if their Constitution mandates that the state provides shelter.
If California wanted to mandate itself to provide shelter to all homeless San Franciscans, I don't see why it couldn't. NYS' constitution isn't a magic bullet to solve homeless, it's just a natural first step towards expecting, demanding, and operating a government that shelters the homeless.
Yeah, San Francisco debated a rule like New York's, but it got shot down by people who were (probably correctly) afraid it would cause the state to focus on shelters rather than permanent housing.
"Murders definitely rose a little after Boudin took office, but that’s because that was also when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, which demoralized police and led to a so-far-permanent spike in murders nationwide."
Obviously it's difficult to attribute this to Boudin when there was a national spike, but attributing it to police demoralisation seems equally speculative. A priori, I find it unlikely that this was the cause. Police don't usually prevent murders, they help investigate them. It seems to me that murderers aren't usually rational actors to the degree that they'll reason "well I'm 20% less likely to be caught after the fact now, so I think I'll commit that murder".
A general sense of despair and anger seems like a more plausible explanation to me for the rise in murder. I grant that's pretty vague and speculative too. I could be wrong, you could be right. But your statement as is seems bald and bold.
It's also perhaps a little too charitable to say that police are "demoralised". It makes them seem like victims rather than perpetrators. After all, only in a handful of places have they actually lost resources. One could just as easily describe police as on an informal strike to punish their political enemies because they think people are being mean to them, especially in California.
Fair enough but let's grant that you're right that it's caused by BLM (I have no strong view on this one way or the other). Why is that incompatible with my alternative hypothesis that it's a result of despair and rage, rather than police demoralisation? Simply establishing it was caused by BLM does not establish that the casual pathway went through police demoralisation.
Also, I have concerns about describing reduced police activity as a result of "demoralisation". A lot of people think it's more like an unofficial, politically motivated strike. Calling politically motivated retaliation for people not being sufficiently obsequious "demoralisation" doesn't seem accurate to me. Or even if it is technically accurate, it seems misleading.
I don't see any evidence of police officers coordinating a strike at any significant scale. Police officers are still people, even if they were trying to keep in secret, someone would brag about it on Facebook and mainstream media would pounce.
The claim that it's a strike shouldn't be confused with the claim that it's a formal strike or there is a conspiracy to achieve it. Instead, it's the claim that a culture of retaliating against perceived political enemies by not doing one's work properly has developed in the police force. It's similar to the demoralisation idea, but the driving force is anger and resentment- at voters, at politicians, at the media and prosecutors, rather than despair.
"even if it is technically accurate, it seems misleading."
Demoralisation calls to mind a bunch of cops sitting around saying "what's the point, awww jeez I feel terrible about this, but there's nothing I can do to help anyway". Almost a kind of occupational depression. The scenario I'm describing is about spite and bile.
Oleg is claiming that it can't be a "strike" because a strike requires organization/conspiracy and nobody can keep that secret so we'd be seeing the police discussing their conspiracy in their social media accounts, etc.
In that respect, demoralization is fundamentally different because demoralization leads to lots of police officers *privately* deciding that, meh, that radio call about a robbery in progress is five blocks away; nobody will yell at me if I finish my donut and get there after it's over, without going on facebook and saying "Hey, we're all agreed that starting tomorrow none of us respond to robbery-in-progress calls, right?"
Whether "strike" is the appropriate term to use for that, it is a thing that can happen and it is fundamentally different from the formally organized version.
"Blue Flu" informal police work slowdowns are not uncommon. For example, cops can insist upon doing everything by the book which reduces their productivity substantially.
For instance, back in late 2014, it looked like BLM was coming to New York City after the death in custody of the guy selling loose cigarettes in Staten Island. Mayor De Blasio saw this as an opportunity to do something about the NYPD, which he'd been unable to do in his first couple of years, even appointing Giuliani's police chief Bill Bratton as his police chief. But then a BLM supporter assassinated two NYPD officers (12/23/14?).
The cops started an informal strike. New York got more chaotic. Both sides looked to Bratton for support. The chief wouldn't support De Blasio so he had to back down in early 2015. That was pretty much the end of BLM as a major force in NYC until 2020.
Or at least that's how I remember it from reading the local news in the New York Times.
I'm not sure what world you live in, but my impression of the world is usually that public servants run the show and usually try to let the elected officials think they're in charge because it makes for less hassle. Cf. Yes Minister (fictional, of course, but like most comedy funny because of the truth it contains)
It might even just be that the result of BLM protests is that protestors and the wider black community lose trust in the police, and that policing is more difficult the less that police are trusted.
At least in principle, it should be possible to distinguish the two effects.
A drop in the number of cooperating witnesses, with no change in anything else, would suggest a community change.
A drop in e.g. the number of routine arrests, with no visible change in anything else, would suggest demoralization/unofficial strike (which might just be two ways of saying the same thing).
I call it "the retreat to the donut shop." It's happened many times over the last 60 years or so.
Cops are very sensitive to politics. My view is that policing is inherently highly political, as the words would suggest. If the politicians and the political attitude-shaping media turn against the police, they have a lot of discretion to reduce their effort. I've read that the biggest accomplish of Giuliani-Bratton in the mid 1990s was getting NYPD officers to double the number of hours of actual policing they put in per shift from two hours to four hours.
Bill Bratton talks about ways he had to improve cop motivation, some of which I'd never think of, such as getting them cooler looking police cars. Even getting them a less lame-looking logo on the side of the cruisers could be a big help in getting them to work harder and subscribe to the new systems.
It would be nice if cops tended to have less political, more heroic and self-sacrificing personalities, but people who are like that are more likely to become firemen than policemen. Firemen tend to have a simple worldview: there is human life and there is fire and we're in favor of human life and against fire.
Cops have a darker worldview: there are good humans and bad humans. We're the good guys, not because we are good all the time, but because we know the bad guys and they are really, really bad. But sometimes the politicians and media forget that and start believing that every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints.
I'm struggling to find where anyone said police don't reduce murders.
Perhaps this is what you're talking about?:
"Police don't usually prevent murders, they help investigate them. It seems to me that murderers aren't usually rational actors to the degree that they'll reason "well I'm 20% less likely to be caught after the fact now, so I think I'll commit that murder"."
The operative sense of "prevent" here is - "directly intervene to stop a murder before it happens". Police don't do much of that. However, no one is denying that police have some sort of deterrence effect on murders and prevent them in that sense. I am dubious about the claim that the elasticity of the murder rate is very high in punishment at the margin, but I'm not even fully committed to that.
Why is the connection then attributable to police demoralization? You have not shown your work here at all. You say "BLM protests demoralized police" and then say that the connection is clear from the time series. Why that particular conclusion as opposed to others, given the data that you're presenting?
How much is police demoralisation and how much is community assistance to the police being withdrawn? That seems to be the key question - if witnesses stop stepping forward then the police are incapable of policing other than as an occupying force (ie applying collective punishments for non-cooperation).
My dispute wouldn't be with the timing/connection to the protests, but referring to that as police demoralization is fairly revealing language. Would you view learning loss as caused by teacher demoralization? Or strikes on worker demoralization?
It's certainly one possible framing. More broadly, it seems far more likely to me that the protests and police inaction share a similar root cause, namely the fairly abrupt shift in view of police.
which finds that if you adjust for how much time people spent outside their homes, public safety declined hugely during the first 2 months of the pandemic and was improving in summer 2020 relative to spring.
Also I think it's worth noting that murder went waaaay up even in conservative rural areas, whose inhabitants presumably were not chomping at the bit to defund the police.
And for all the people who say "look at European countries - they had no BLM protests and didn't see any murder spike" I would respond that hundreds of thousands of people protested in Paris, London, etc, and clashes w/ police and vandalization of monuments took place all across Western Europe.
"murderers aren't usually rational actors to the degree that they'll reason "well I'm 20% less likely to be caught after the fact now, so I think I'll commit that murder"."
In contrast, I 'd say that potential murderers think hard about what are the odds that I'll meet an enemy who will shoot me with his illegal hand gun before I shoot him with my illegal hand hand vs. what are the odds the cops will stop and frisk me and send me to jail for carrying an illegal handguns.
"It seems to me that murderers aren't usually rational actors to the degree that they'll reason "well I'm 20% less likely to be caught after the fact now, so I think I'll commit that murder"."
This conjures up quite an image of someone at a computer poring over time series data of homicide clearance rates just before picking up a deadly weapon... :-)
My impression is that a lot of shootings are impulsive, but what's less impulsive is the decision whether or not to bring your illegal handgun with you. Should I bring my Glock to the block party? Will I need it to defend myself from all the other criminals who will bring their guns? Or will I be more likely to get stopped and searched by the police and sent to prison on a weapons charge?
NYC drove its shootings rate way down by changing the culture away from packing heat toward fearing the NYPD. I'm sure people were still feeling dissed at social events, but they couldn't just pull out their piece and start shooting in the general direction of the guy who dissed them. They'd have to, say, go visit grandma where they'd stashed their gun and maybe she'd cheer them up and they'd stop dwelling on shooting that guy.
"In fact, if you’re a homeless person, why wouldn’t you want to live in a suburb?" -- Because panhandling is a numbers game, and if you sit on the sidewalk in the commuter suburbs, you might talk to one person an hour.
Is there any public space in a typical suburb with the foot traffic of a typical central street?
And even if we ignore panhandling, is there any place in a suburb with as many walkable retail jobs/air conditioned public spaces/food shops/whatever as a city? A suburb is a fine place to be if you aren’t looking to do anything new, but most opportunities for new activity (either social or economic) are easier in a city.
In the DC metro area, suburban panhandlers tend to park themselves on the access roads to and from shopping centers, hoping to get the attention of traffic stopped at a light. You will also occasionally see one on the median at a busy intersection.
If the traffic is all cars, it makes sense that even the panhandlers are drive-thrus.
I don't know how it compares numbers-wise to foot traffic in the city, but I routinely see suburban pan-handlers in North Carolina, usually standing at a corner or median at a light for an Interstate on/off ramp but sometimes just on a corner or median that gets a fair bit of car traffic. I don't know if they live nearby or if they are dropped off there and picked back up later.
I was thinking of the suburbs I've lived in, most of which had no shopping areas, or very small ones a mile apart. But since you counted Palo Alto as a suburb, I should have thought about why places like Palo Alto, Fairfax VA, or Gaithersburg MD, don't have many homeless, despite the fact that they don't fit my image of "suburbs".
If you look at the photo you posted of Palo Alto, I can find 2 small isolated clusters of shopping areas, separated by maybe a quarter mile. I don't think that would be a good hunting ground. I've found it's much easier to avoid people asking for money--say, the Salvation Army Santa--in places with parking lots, where you can see them from far away and circle around them, than on a street in Harlem, where you have to walk right by them. Also, malls have mall cops. Also, suburban malls usually close after 8pm, and small-town malls often close by 6pm and are entirely closed one day a week.
But I'm just guessing.
I once lived with a woman who managed a homeless shelter in, I think, Alexandria, VA, in an area that was definitely more sub-urban than Palo Alto. So there were lots of homeless people in that particular suburb. She also worked at a shelter in Utica, NY, which was even more rural. And the only homeless group home that I've visited was in a very quiet condo in Springfield VA. Group homes are basically invisible. They don't have signs on them saying "Group home". The people in them aren't kicked out every morning (as shelters often do), and have all their needs (other than recreational drugs) supplied, so they don't panhandle.
Maybe a better model would be that homeless population is proportional to the population. I dunno; the cases I mentioned were all cases where some government exported the homeless to suburbs, so that's a distortion.
I don't explicitly, yet Scott manages to teach me new stuff all the time in the course of edutainment. Clearly a mistake has been made somewhere.
But then, that's probably easier when one doesn't know much to begin with and Scott gets first-teacher advantage. "Being empty just means you can be filled without limit".
I think that the canonical reference when talking about a data driven approach to the homeless problem should be "Million Dollar Murray" by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell cites Dennis Culhane's research on homelessness that produced a surprising outcome: the most frequent period of homelessness is a single day. The second most frequent duration? Two days.
Why? Because when you're talking about homelessness you're talking about (at least) two different populations. The first are those individuals who are homeless only briefly--they are often employed and after a night or two of sleeping in a car or on a bench they find shelter on a friend's couch or in the basement of their parents home. In Gladwell's narrative they can be ignored because they can take care of themselves.
The other population is far more problematic. For this group of individuals the average stay on the streets isn't measured in days, it's years. Rates of drug abuse and mental illness are far higher for this group than for the general population, along with the concomitant issues of joblessness and familial isolation. (Culhane in another interview said that they tend to have "tenuous" relations with friends and family. Translation: they can't stay at Mom's house because they pawned the tv to buy crack and are now persona non grata.)
This is not a distinction without a difference. If homelessness has its roots in simple economics than providing housing vouchers or subsidies should be enough to make a difference. If the real issue is addiction and mental illness than those measures will be woefully inadequate.
The same type of interesting statistical artefact arises in unemployment data, which is why we now tend to break down said data by "frictional" unemployment (you're moving from one job to the other, or have quit in order to make some sort of life change etc.) vs "structural" unemployment (you can't get a job).
These days economists also talk about cyclical unemployment, discouraged unemployment, seasonal, long-term, involuntary, you get the picture. There are a lot of different ways you can slice the data which may be appropriate for different analyses.
And obviously if these cohort definitions are suitable for analysis they also lend themselves well to policy. The entire argument of "Million Dollar Murray" is that the population that is homeless only briefly is unmanageably large: Culhane has estimated that it is tens or hundreds or thousands of people in NYC alone over the course of a decade.
But fortunately since these individuals get themselves off the street very quickly government doesn't need to worry about them. It can instead focus its attentions on the tiny subset of the homeless population that is on the streets for years at a time. This is also the segment of the population that produces the greatest costs to society: the titular Million Dollar Murray who drinks to the point of passing out, aspirates their own vomit or spends the night in a snow bank, is revived in an emergency room and then spends days or weeks in hospital, and then upon release promptly gets drunk again and starts the whole cycle over again. That is the rationale behind Housing First which is missing in Scott's review: it is literally cheaper just to give these people a place to live where you can keep an eye on them compared to the costs of an unending routine of visits to either the emergency room or prison that finally terminates in an early death due to overdose, exposure, etc.
> That is the rationale behind Housing First which is missing in Scott's review: it is literally cheaper just to give these people a place to live where you can keep an eye on them compared to the costs of an unending routine of visits to either the emergency room or prison that finally terminates in an early death due to overdose, exposure, etc.
Cheaper to first order yes. The obvious problem is that for every homeless person to whom you give a free house, you incentivise two more marginally-housed people to become homeless to get free housing.
I once tried to figure out where San Francisco's $100K-per-rough-sleeper homeless services budget is going, and as far as I can figure out it is mostly going to providing free housing for previously-homeless people. So all this has already happened.
In Gladwell's narrative though the egg that comes before the chicken is mental illness and drug abuse. The chronically homeless don't choose to become homeless for economic reasons, they literally have no other alternative. And in the economic analysis the decision of who gets a free apartment is pretty clear: Million Dollar Murray was on a first name basis with the nurses and police who dealt with him on a weekly basis--the "Million Dollar" portion of his sobriquet is no accident. The point is society is already paying to keep Murray alive in hospital stays and jail visits and the cost is astronomical. What are the alternatives? Just let him die the next time an emergency call comes in? Or maybe just give him an apartment with a fulltime nurse that checks in on him to make sure that he's not choking to death on his own vomit?
If we can't just let him die, I'd rather an institution where he is confined and can't roam the streets harassing passersby between hospital visits.
Personally I think permanently institutionalizing the shockingly low actual population of chronic homeless who have such an outsize negative impact on the happiness and productivity of society at large would be an excellent use of our tax dollars.
Precisely. The actual percentage could be miniscule, and the yet societal benefits considerable. This is why the "sweeping" institutionalizing critique is pure strawman.
This doesn’t sound like a “two populations” story to me. It sounds compatible with one population, where a factor that increases the growth of the number of people going through a day or two of homelessness at a time, or a factor that increases the duration of average periods of homelessness even a little bit can have a big effect on the number of people that end up long-term homeless with other problems.
Hey Scott, I've read the book (I generally liked it), and one of the ideas in it that felt right to me that you didn't address was the magnet effect of generous aid programs in progressive west coast cities. As a Seattle resident, this feels like an important piece of the puzzle, making west coast cities with warmish weather and liberalized drug laws uniquely attractive to homeless addicts from all over the country, particularly when paired with greater tolerance of "camping" and property crime generally.
This is a popular theory but my understanding is that the data contradict it. I would have liked to see those data here. (I think the fraction of current homeless that lived in a different metro area one year ago or five years ago is not appreciably different from the fraction of current housed people that lived in a different metro area one or five years ago in any of these cities.)
I'd like to see MUCH better data before I reconsider weighing anecdotes more strongly than "the data".
(Also – fuck "the data" – "_the_ data"? That just smacks of Correct Thinking instead of, you know, the plain truth. I'm venting about the phrase – not anything I'm attributing to you personally.)
My impression is that the aid programs do not help everyone, and so this just shifts the recent origin of the fixed number of homeless who do not get aid. Plus it would get shouted down for humanitarian reasons. Plus a lot of the people who want to help, just want to help, and if someone in front of them is asking for food they give the food.
It's like how the tech industry concentrates in cities. Big employer exists, new workers migrate there, leads to more employers, leads to more migration. If you want to help lots of homeless people, cities in general and West Coast cities in particular are your petrie dish.
Also, a lot of the statistics are garbage, biased toward whatever result the collector wanted. I've seen them claim someone as a "long-time resident" who moved here 6 months ago. So a month-denominated cutoff would be needed, and I think a lot of the homeless population don't keep verifiable records. So it would boil down to "lie and sleep inside, tell the truth and sleep outside", which is frankly cruel, and I don't think people who administer homeless programs select for being cruel to homeless people.
Those are all good points. Unfortunately, if e.g. 'Housing First' really _did_ build enough housing for the homeless population currently in one city, and if it was unique, with other cities acting differently, what would prevent enough new homeless people from moving to that one city to overwhelm it? More generally, how do you have a pilot program for _any_ benefit program in any geographic area without it getting overwhelmed?
When getting the correlation between housing costs and homelessness what criteria was used to determine which cities were used? Why exclude Palo Alto or Beverly Hills?
These statistics really should be done at the urban area level for this sort of purpose. The metro area is acceptable if you don’t have statistics on the urban area. Unfortunately some of these statistics are only at the municipality level.
San Francisco seems to be in the exact same place as the rest of the country with regards to rising crime; a bad one. In particular the increase in gun violence from 2019 to 2021 is stunning to me.
"According to the numbers, the city had 56 homicides in 2021, up from 48 in 2020, and 41 in 2019."
"The data also revealed that citywide gun violence is on the rise, with 222 victims of gun violence in 2021, which includes murder victims killed in shootings. That number is up from 167 victims of gun violence in 2020, and 137 in 2019."
IMO the single most disturbing national trend at the moment, besides perhaps the skyrocketing price of housing beyond what local markets can sustain. It's not just liberal areas or cities either; there's a good WSJ article the other week on how violent crime in rural areas has risen 25% in the last couple years as well, suggesting that there's some sort of multicausal explanation that is nevertheless almost ubiquitous nationally.
If this is valid I don't see a decrease in the homicide rate in the foreseeable future.
On a related note crime rates in the US are often described as rising between 1960 and 1990 and then falling between 1990 and 2014. If there is some underlying social dynamic that is driving crime to fluctuate along 30 year cycles then we are at the start of another three decades of rising crime.
Lead.... Seriously, the 1960 to 1990 was the lead poisoned generation getting old enough to do crimes. From 1990 to 2014, the lead people aged out of being criminal. Crime has gone up now, but it's still way below the late 80s
The average US homicide rate now is the worst its been since the early to mid 1990's. That's 25 years of progress in terms of decreasing homicides that have been wiped out.
So the situation is already bad. Is it going to get worse though? Everything I've seen suggests that 2022 so far is worse than 2021 which was worse than 2020. If we are still on the upward swing in terms of violent crime rates a return to the bad old days of the 1980's seems plausible.
My vague impression is that at the moment we are in the Floyd Effect New Normal of about 50 gun homicides per day, compared to 36 per day in 2019, with no strong trends up or down.
There is also some issues with local police departments reporting statistics to the FBI. My guess is that this would result in underreporting, although the specifics are very fuzzy.
As for the Floyd effect obviously I am guessing that police forces are still understaffed and demoralized. But my understanding is that crime rates have still increased dramatically in suburban and rural police forces that have not seen rates of attrition comparable to their big city counterparts, making me wonder if there are additional forces at work.
Kevin Drum admitted that lead has no predictive power on homicides, only violent non-homicides. I don't see how he can believe it has such niche value, but I don't see how he believed any of it in the first place.
While I am generally not in favor of homicides, I do not find that rise stunning.
From Scott's homicide plot (which may have slightly different numbers), it looks as it was around 99 in 2007. Even then, life went on.
Most homicides are probably not committed by murderers working on a fixed yearly quota. For single homicides for personal reasons, the distribution is probably nearly a Poisson distribution. If the expected number of homicides per year is 49 homicides, the standard deviation would be around 7. Getting 56 homicides one year and 41 in another year might be well within normal variation. (Realistically, the variation is likely much higher, as many homicides are likely causally connected. Gang wars, mass shootings etc.)
The increase in the number of gun violence victims is probably significant. But unlike for homicides, the police has a more leeway in counting here. Who counts as a victim of gun violence? Someone threatened with a gun? Someone getting shot at? Someone getting hit by a bullet? What if the bullet gets stuck in a kevlar vest? What about BB guns?
And how are the statistics collected? Probably there are constitutional issues with forcibly inspecting a representative sample of the population for bullet woulds, so you either rely on surviving victims coming forward to the police (which I understand is frowned upon in some gang circles) or forcing hospitals to report bullet wounds. Did these reporting requirements/practices change 2019-2021?
If you wanted to put a statistically irresponsible positive spin on things, you could also claim that while both homicides and gun victims are up, the odds of a victim of gun violence actually getting killed has decreased from about 30% in 2019 to about 25% in 2021 -- so in another decade, we will have 500 gun violence victims, but 0% of them will die.
(Also, 30% death rate in victims of gun violence feels kind of low to me given the availability of semi-automatics? For premeditated murders, I would expect a higher rate. Also for shootouts. "Looks like I hit them. Let's calmly wait if the shot incapacitates them or if they move to return fire and I have to shoot again.")
As other people have pointed out in this thread there is a significant concern regarding underreporting for quality of life crimes such as shoplifting. On the other hand it is tough to undercount a homicide because somebody needs to take care of the body.
On the other hand as that article points out advances in medical science are artificially suppressing the homicide rate as compared to previous decades. To be saved by medical science though you need to be treated by medical science, so it may well be that the most useful metric from year to year is gun violence. If you are suggesting that the change in SF from 2019 to 2021 is an artifact of methodology feel free to provide evidence to back up that assertion.
However the US in general is in the midst of a catastrophic increase in violent crime. The period from 2019 to 2020 saw the largest recorded one year increase in the homicide rate since modern record keeping started, and probably the largest one year increase in at least a century. If SF were somehow the exception to the national trend that would be singularly remarkable. As far as I can tell that is not the case.
>Criminologists believe that they capture virtually all gun homicides and the great majority of shootings in their statistics.
I'm interested what the support for this is. I would assume that at least some gun homicides result in open ended missing persons cases that are never resolved (and that is just the first thought that popped into my head, I imagine there are more such situations).
Great and illuminating essay in general, wondering what you think of various system effects beyond outcomes of various approaches being offered to an isolated homeless person:
- At some point, overgenerous housing problems would lead to people reducing effort to pursue other alternatives to being government housed homeless. For example - work for a horrible boss, move to a place where one absolutely hates to live except for low living costs, beg a relative one is not on good terms with to sleep on the couch. I agree that this point has not been reached in the US, but seems to be a significant problem among immigrants in Sweden. Where do we draw the line.
- To help the most people using finite resources, it's essential for aid to be as small and brief and possible for each individual recipient, so that it can quickly become available again for others. This implies programs that work in a pinch but are not palatable for long term use, or are simply time limited. Permanent private rooms where some might choose to live long term may be too relatively comfortable to ensure that almost everyone who is able to move on does.
- Equity is not the only consideration here. Even among the homeless, there may be one who can become self-sufficient given expensive time limited intervention for each two who are likely to remain long term dependent no matter what. Is it really better to keep all 3 in long term government housing with no way out? Also each housing unit government fully pays for is one less unit available for someone on the verge of homelessness but able to rent the cheapest apartment in town. Also, government provides single occupancy units, but people voluntarily rent with roommates, and even cramped quarters is better than sleeping on the street.
The charge that the only alternative to incarceration is a medieval asylum is an unfortunate straw man I think. Yes, the institutions of the early 20th century were horror shows. So were the prisons. The bulk of modern day prisons are much more humane institutions.
Locking up the mentally ill in jails is a hidden crisis. Not only does it lead to a deterioration in the capabilities of police but it results in great suffering for mentally ill inmates who often receive substandard care. Some intermediate option that includes involuntary confinement but in a setting dedicated to treatment would probably be a huge improvement.
Case in point: the "Mexican Mafia" gang member who stole the prison bus, then went on to kill the grandfather and his four grandsons who were visiting their rural cabin in Leon County, Texas. Was the bus taking the guy to do brutal work in the hot sun? No - it was taking him to the dentist!
Somewhat counterintuitively, I don't think there's a sensible mechanism by which high housing prices cause people to live on the streets.
The obvious mechanism doesn't seem to make sense. The sort of people you see living on the streets of San Francisco aren't the sort of people who can afford $1500 a month in rent but not $4500 a month. The people of San Francisco who got priced out of their $1500-a-month apartments didn't move onto the streets, they moved to Oakland or Sacramento or Cleveland or somewhere; moving to a new city may suck but it's vastly better than sleeping on the street.
The people who sleep on the street are clearly both unemployed and unemployable, so even if you could lower the cost of living in San Francisco to the cost of living in Memphis, it's not going to result in them finding houses.
I think there are plenty of situations -- extended family living in minimum-market-cost unit, tenant refusing to pay rent for a while before getting kicked out, minimum wage worker in a rent-controlled apartment out of luck after it gets purchases by developers -- where continuously rising average housing costs trigger rapid-onset homelessness in individuals who do not end up leaving the community for cheaper areas, at least not immediately. I'm sure there are others.
I don’t think this is accurate. I think people become homeless by losing their home, crashing with a friend for a few days while they try to find a new place still in range of their job, then overstaying their welcome. If you lose your home, you don’t move to a new city so that you have to lose your job too - you try to leverage your existing networks of work and friends to get back on your feet. It takes a lot of broader support to move to a new city and get back on your feet.
I agree. Melvin's argument isn't wrong, it just tracks the effect from the wrong point. High housing costs primarily relate to the generation of homelessness, not to the predicament of those who have become homeless. However, they do relate to the potential to fund fully or partially subsidized housing.
People who aren't addicted to crack can leverage their support networks by sleeping at Mom's house or crashing on a friend's sofa.
People who pawned their mother's television to buy crack or stole money from a friend's purse to buy heroin are no longer able to leverage those support networks.
Perhaps I should have used the word "vagrancy" rather than "homelessness". One of the problems, as others have pointed out, is that definitions of "homeless" wax and wane depending on the point someone is trying to make.
So let me be explicit: I think that housing prices might be a contributing factor in the kind of Type 1 "homelessness" where you're sleeping on a friend's couch or in your car or in a cheap motel while you figure out a better plan. I don't think it contributes to the kind of Type 2 vagrant-homelessness where you're permanently sleeping in UN Plaza and addicted to fentanyl -- which is the kind of homelessness that we actually care about. I furthermore think that the pathway from Type 1 to Type 2 homelessness is fairly narrow, and that Type 2 homelessness is caused almost entirely by madness or drug addiction.
This seems largely sensical to me. It's also hard to find evidence that the people homeless in an area are from that state, let alone that metro area.
I wouldn't ordinarily type up anecdotes, but this connects to Scott's "would this guy lie to his psychiatrist about shoplifting" example: I lived 2010-2020 in an area where the homeless population exploded during that time. Conversations with local LEOs and the homeless themselves indicated that the vast overwhelming majority were from elsewhere. And why wouldn't they be? Every location each of them (those that reported them informally to me, without proof) was from had fewer services and harsher climates.
Social services draw homeless populations. I have seen it personally. I think social scientists never understand this because they have never hopped a train or tried to get a relative off the street.
"The main virtue I cannot ascribe to it is honesty" was more or less my take about Shellenberger the last go round. I notice you softened the language on the website compared to the newsletter version. "Using statistics like a drunk uses a streetlamp" gets it about right though.
> The dream is to be so tough on crime that criminals pre-emptively give up and you never have to deploy your draconian punishments. But the history of the past few decades of mass incarceration show that, although this happens a little, enough people keep doing crime that you very much do have to deploy your draconian punishments and then you end up with millions of people in prison.
I would also like to take issue with this bit, because it seems to me that the US on the whole does _not_ on the whole have draconian punishments, and that its current high crime, high incarceration state is a result of being much too far on the "too lax" rather than "too draconian" side of the sweet spot.
The sweet spot is probably something closer to Singapore.
The thing that tends to get missed here is that there are two factors, one is the severity of punishment, and the other is the likelihood of being punished. The "Bloody Code" - with hundreds of crimes resulting in execution - did not lower crime in the early-nineteenth century UK; introducing police forces (starting with the Met in the 1840s) while lowering punishments resulted in dramatic falls in crime rates by the end of that century.
If people can commit hundreds of crimes before they get caught, then they will not worry about the punishment if they do. Pretty mild punishments can do the trick as long as they are certain.
Singapore has severe punishments, but it also has extremely efficient policing which means that criminals are much more likely to get caught.
Hard to say if the risk of execution in C18 England lowered crime - the ultimate penalty was rarely used - there were at most 60 executions a year and in many years much less than this in the whole of England. Sending the criminals to Australia did have a salutary effect, but this was minimised when stories of how the previously criminal came to Australia ["Botany Bay," as it was known] and prospered, which may have led to more people committing crimes in order to be transported (this, at least, was the opinion of some politicians). Perhaps SF needs a new Botany Bay? Could be a task for Elon Musk and SpaceX?
Nitpick: convicts were never actually transported to Botany Bay.
The First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay in 1788 but found it lacking in fresh water so they chose to build the settlement one bay further north at Port Jackson (now better known as Sydney Harbour).
I am not convinced that settling criminals in space is likely to be cost-effective, but I've sometimes thought about Antarctica.
Several replies saying roughly the same thing so I'll reply to this one.
You are of course correct that the one-dimensional "punishment draconian-ness" model is overly simple and we need to take efficiency of policing into account. If we could increase the number of police (and judges, and prosecutors, and everything) by a factor of ten then we wouldn't need to increase sentences. Alternatively if we could make policing a lot more efficient (e.g. by abolishing courts and giving the police Judge Dredd style powers to convict and sentence people whom they see committing crimes) then we wouldn't need longer sentences either.
But if the size and efficiency of the police force is held roughly constant then I contend that the "draconianness of sentences" knob behaves in the way I've proposed, and that the US is still way on the left hand side of the sweet spot.
The big problem is that police forces in big American cities are simply overwhelmed. If you took the five thousand worst repeat-offenders in San Francisco, decided that they're clearly not going to learn the error of their ways, and locked them up for twenty years, then the vast amount of police resources that is currently being wasted repeatedly processing these repeat offenders could be spent on other things. As you lock up more and more of the repeat offenders, you increase the amount of time that the police have to deal with the remaining crime, which increases the probability of any individual crime getting caught and punished.
Places with red light cameras and speed cameras have people who obey traffic laws, even if the fines are cheap. Places that rely on police to bother catching people are full of traffic scofflaws, almost regardless of how high the fines get.
Yes, this. If you get caught every time / almost every time, then you just obey the law.
If you get caught occasionally, then it doesn't matter how serious the punishment is; the public will not accept "we only catch one in a thousand, so we have to punish them a thousand times what is fair" and even if they would, that's not how psychology works.
This is one of the few positives to improving surveillance technology. Given how many security cameras are in place, and how cheaply more could be added, making most offenses open-and-shut cases should be getting easier. I find the whole ignored-shoplifting thread bizarre. Most stores I go into have a smile-you're-on-camera display.
Do we need to go to the extent of fining stores for _not_ prosecuting shoplifters who were clearly recorded on their security tapes?
As far as I'm aware, the company I work for generally didn't have cameras at all until a few years ago. This only changed after a deeply traumatizing store shooting in Silver Lake, LA - not after egregious shoplifting, not after people OD'd and died in bathrooms, not after bloody altercations, not after horrific work injuries that led to contentious worker's comp litigation. Surveillance just isn't part of the company culture. We also stopped contracting with (unarmed!) security guards, since their presence was considered too Problematic versus the deterrence impact.
But all the cameras at my store only point in/around the management office, with only one actually confirmed to work (looks at the safe, naturally). None on the sales floor, none covering the points of entrance and egress, none on the bathrooms where much smuggling takes place. Clearly of little use for catching shoplifting.
It could be a chicken-and-egg thing, where lack of prosecution encourages corporations to care less about investing in deterrence like surveillance, and lack of in-house deterrence makes prosecution harder. I think there's also a corporate culture element though. We're definitely not the only company that prioritizes a certain "image" way more than boots-on-the-ground efficient operations. It's a nice vision of a gentler world without quality-of-life crimes. Not the one we actually inhabit in <current_year> though.
I'd thought that surveillance was a bit more ubiquitous than it is.
There is a certain 'public good' aspect to deterring shoplifting. I suspect that even quite mild penalties, if they were made probable enough, might be enough to deter most of it (as per Kenny Easwaran's comment re red light cameras - even with cheap fines).
I agree, and have this sense that there used to be a broad consensus among criminal justice reformers that this was the preferred solution.
1. Very consistent enforcement. Reporting and clearance rates are high, police are supported, *no one is above the law* (really important).
2. Penalties which needn't be particularly severe, but do have a price beyond trivial inconvenience. Better to err lower than higher, if only to keep costs down.
3. Actual enforcement of existing laws, rather than reactively creating new ones, to promote cultural norms of conscientiousness and avoid regulatory sprawl.
Singapore does (1) and (3) very well. I seem to remember Norway or Finland being a model of doing (2) right. In the USA, we do...none of these, and now seem to be drifting off in fairly bonkers directions instead. The whole mindset of regarding police authority as fundamentally illegitimate/evil is deeply worrisome. I think the high compassion and empathy of progressives makes it very hard for them to really grapple with the implications that, actually, some people are just bad and need to be dealt with in unfair ways. Swinging really hard the opposite way causes its own problems, but is naturally self-interestedly appealing to the law-abiding. It's a tough nut to crack.
re "2. Penalties which needn't be particularly severe, but do have a price beyond trivial inconvenience. Better to err lower than higher, if only to keep costs down."
I have a suspicion, based on one of the variations in Milgram's "Obedience to Authority" experiment: Simply having someone in a lab coat tell someone sternly "You must continue" was enough to control a lot (tens of percent) of people. I _suspect_ that if minor crimes simply lead to being yelled at by a police officer (but consistently!, as per your (1)) might be enough to deter a lot of those minor crimes.
I think that most drugs should generally be legal. I also think that we should treat homelessness like Singapore. If you have an addiction, whether it is to alcohol, gambling, heroin, meth, or whatever, to the point where you just give up and choose to be homeless, police should arrest you and force you into treatment. Forced treatment centers might not be great (fix them - we don't throw out public schools because some teachers and institutions are bad!), but is the most humane and least suffering solution for the people who live in the city, and for the homeless themselves. I am not opposed to cheap housing for those who can prove they don't have addictions, but if you are homeless, you should have to prove that is not an issue.
As somebody somewhat familiar with the Portuguese situation, and who was born next door to Portugal and has lived in the neighborhood for a long time, let me clarify that Portugal is NOT a very conservative country, not even when it comes to drug use. In fact, it's so not conservative that the usual party switcheroo between conservatives and progressives there literally involves the "social-democratic party" running against the "socialist party" since the early 1970s. In fact, the only actual conservative who was ever president of Portugal in living memory was murdered by state security; they didn't even bother to cover the crime very much, and then the whole country has sort of ignored the matter for decades, as one of those things that sometimes happen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_S%C3%A1_Carneiro. Regarding the specific issue of drug use in Portugal: we should mention this study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31808250/, and put it in whatever context. It looks into all hospitalizations that occurred in Portuguese public hospitals from 2000 to 2015, and finds that the number of hospitalizations with a primary diagnosis of psychotic disorders and schizophrenia associated with cannabis use rose 29.4 times during the study period, from 20 to 588 hospitalizations yearly (2000 and 2015, respectively) with a total of 3,233 hospitalizations.
I'm not sure the 'psychosis' spikes are _that_ bad. Cannabis/marijuana _absolutely_ can trigger or cause (something like or very much like) psychosis, and there is a fairly strong correlation with schizophrenia (AFAIK) in the form of increasing its tendency/expression. I'd guess most 'episodes' are very acute, but it might be more of a long-term problem than I think.
>It was the 80s, and by the time one in 10 people had slipped into the depths of heroin use – bankers, university students, carpenters, socialites, miners – Portugal was in a state of panic.
> In the 1990s, some 5,000 addicts roamed the streets of the hilly neighborhood, searching for their daily fix as dirty syringes piled up in the gutters. Back then, Portugal was in the grip of heroin addiction. An estimated 1% of the population—bankers, students, socialites—were hooked on heroin and Portugal had the highest rate of HIV infection in the entire European Union.
These could both be true. 10% could be heroin users in the 1980s, and 1% could be heroin addicts in the 1990s.
But it seems more likely that something is getting warped in transmission, from {unknown source} to journalist who wasn't there to another journalist who wasn't there.
Which of these statistics seems accurate to you, if either?
Portugal is a tricky one because nobody cares about them. As a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in neighboring Madrid, I sometimes had to write about the country, and it was really hard to find experts to discuss Portuguese stuff, and then nobody cared about the stories. Portuguese people are fantastic and the country is beautiful, but it's still the poorest, least influential nation in all of Western Europe. Stanley Payne, the foremost foreign scholar on Spanish 20th century history, tells in his memoir how he was coopted to write about Portugal in English because nobody else would. So, with this said, my impression is that the whole issue of Portugal drug policy would be a great one for Scott to write, precisely because we have these stories from parachuting correspondents praising local drug policy without getting into many specifics. It's a tough subject. In the 80s, both Spain and Portugal had a massive heroin problem that later died down because of reasons; the consensus explanation, as far as I can tell, is that the addicts died out and weren't replaced by new ones because people growing in the 80s (my generation) were too horrified by their sight to take up hard drugs. That most certainly was my experience, but that's 100% anecdotal and personal. In early 2020 I was in Porto, Portugal's wealthiest city, and it was choke full of addicts and dealers, even pretty close to fancy hotels. Again, anecdotal. What we know is that Portugal's current policy has led to a much higher addiction problem, even if addiction is mostly to marijuana and softer stuff, rather than heroin. As they say, more data is needed for a full assessment.
I am Portuguese and live in Porto metro area. Porto is definitely not the wealthiest city in Portugal: Lisbon has significantly higher average and median wages, as well as a larger share of public investment. Regarding Portuguese drug policy, there is remarkably little public perception here of how it looks like: all info I have read on the foresightedness of our drug policy comes from foreign newspapers/magazines/websites, rather than from pieces in our own newspapers. This does not mean it is not true, since our reporting media are dreadful, averse to research journalism or long-form reporting, and instead drone incessantly on the day-to-day political squabbles, football news, disaster reporting and the opinions of bloviating talking heads who act as resident pundits in every TV/newspaper without any inkling of what they might have done to deserve being listened to. I suspect that, regardless of the excellence of our drug policy, there may be some "bandwagon effect" in foreign coverage (e. g. someone once read a white paper on it, or received a report from Portuguese researchers, etc, and that created a narrative). I will try to find some solid info on our drug policy institution websites
Curated GPT completions for "I've been homeless for three years. I prefer to camp in the densest part of the city because "
"it's easier to find food, shelter, and resources there."
"1) There are more opportunities for scavenging and finding food and resources.
2) There are more people around, which means more potential for begging or bartering for goods.
3) There are more places to hide and sleep without being disturbed."
"I can find more resources there."
"I can blend in more and people are more likely to help me out. I know all the best places to go to get food, clothes, and anything else I might need."
"I like being around people."
"I feel more safe when there are more people around."
You wondered why statistics for shoplifting are going down while everyone with stores says that it is going up. The reason is that it isn't getting enforced. In addition to laws and policies which decriminalize small thefts, retail stores have less willing to confront thieves. I've worked retail once, and I assure you that this comic is totally accurate: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3964886
I knew someone working in high-end retail near the beginning of the pandemic and they reported _some_ particularly brazen/spectacular thefts; definitely NOT all or close to all tho.
It makes sense to me that the reported factors leading to homelessness add up to more than 100% In most cases there's not going to be a single factor, figuring out the relative weight of the factors is difficult but mental illness and drug addiction seem the most likely to be the "but for" casual factors where people might have avoided homelessness if not for them.
I spent a couple of weeks in the summer of 2018 in Santa Monica and walked all over every day. I was struck by how very rich and very liberal Santa Monica seemed to have homelessness under control, which I believe was not always true in the past. Most of the homeless-looking people were solitary individuals doing something not too objectionable, like retrieving aluminum cans from garbage bins. They seemed to mostly be working, rather than socializing with each other. In Santa Monica, I didn't see homeless people harassing pedestrians, doing drugs outdoors, or monopolizing the best public places, the way they used to make the clifftop Ocean Blvd. Park unpleasant.
On the other hand, while walking south on the famous Venice Beach bikepath, the moment I crossed from Santa Monica into Los Angeles (Venice is part of Los Angeles), the density of homeless went up a couple of orders of magnitude. And the homeless were having a blast. One foot over the civic border into Los Angeles, the beachfront roller skating path became a giant homeless party.
The lesson I took from this was that policy matters. The government of Santa Monica was evidently doing things that the government of Los Angeles wasn't doing regarding the homeless.
But what? Unfortunately, I've never been able to find any articles about what Santa Monica was doing to keep its homeless under control. I happened to find myself sitting at lunch soon after with the city manager of Santa Monica, a very competent-appearing man in his 60s. I wanted to ask him what he was doing right, but didn't get around to it. Oh, well ...
This doesn’t obviously sound like a strategy that is replicable. It could well be that this a strategy for a town to sweep its homeless population across the border, but if it doesn’t decrease the total homeless population (and perhaps even increases it) then it wouldn’t be effective if followed by all cities.
I'm curious too. Living in Venice in 2021, I also saw this and wondered about it. I tried googling the cop density and it seemed like Santa Monica has 450+ people in the police department (unclear how many of those are cops) for 8.4 sq mi and Venice has 50 cops for 3.1 sq mi. If that's 3x more cops per sq mi in Santa Monica vs Venice, it makes sense Santa Monica'd have less crimes, etc, but maybe they also have different procedures for what to do with the homeless the cops interact with. I was surprised that a bigger city had fewer homeless (Santa Monica had something like 900, Venice had 2x+ more, which accounting for size is a lot more dense with homeless).
Santa Monica and Venice have a higher density of media people than just about anywhere outside Brooklyn, but comparisons of the two adjoining places seem hard to find.
The homeless in Austin often seem to be having a ball. An addled ball perhaps. Maybe that's unsayable, that they would be content or even pleased. [It is to apply that same, er, insight into human nature that the left does with past people - they never had a happy or pleasant moment, and must not be represented as having had one.] In S. Austin there's a conveniently-located church where these folks can shower and get lunch. This church has no other function or identity than serving them, in fact. Maybe they're grilling on the space under the overpass. or even on it! They've got a rug, a generator, a bunch of chairs, perhaps even a couch or TV, a number of stolen bikes to choose from whenever they want to weave in front of traffic in every direction. They are sitting together and laughing about something. They've got flattering attention from passersby. Music. They appear for all the world to be thumbing their noses at convention.
If this is unsayable, it would be worthwhile to examine why.
The reason I'm saying it is because the thing that makes the homeless so attractive to the left, apart from their being a permanently increasing budget center for entities that hire social science grads, is this very épater le bourgeois quality. And yet it can't even be mooted now, the way it would have been, openly, if this were, say, the 60s. This in turn means you can't notice that the outdoors figures very largely in this. Being outside is really important. You haven't exhausted this topic just by giving weather reports.
This is why the endless "give them a house to care for" stuff is - well, c'mon y'all are so smart, right? (I need somebody on the internet to be smart.)
Tents are sitting there in plain sight. And so, so easy to scale (why look they've done it themselves already! - we like that agency too, don't we?).
If do nothing, and stop all the things you've been doing directly and indirectly, that created this problem over the last few decades - is not an option (we will see about that when this country has a different majority ...) - then how about campgrounds?
And note to all, or some: please do read about what has this past spring transpired at the "Candlewood Suites" hotel that the city of Austin purchased - what transpired there *before it even opened its doors to the homeless*.
is not an option (we will see about that when this country has a different majority ...) - then how about campgrounds?
And note to all, or some: please do read about what has this past spring transpired at the "Candlewood Suites" hotel that the city of Austin purchased - what transpired there *before it even opened its doors to the homeless*.
Someone broke in and damaged/took things? At a vacant site / construction site? What's the point?
And yeah, in traditional hunter/gatherer society, there was a lot more leisure time than in agricultural societies. Of course it left those societies vulnerable to dry spells and catastrophic loss since they couldn't store reserves, but with community you sit around, chat with your tribe, take turns holding up the sign. So? Campgrounds is a great idea, that's why homeless people have been making them out of sight for decades, then in sight for a few years, and now transitioning back to out-of-sight?
Have you been by Community First Village? It may not attract all the homeless/gatherers but it seems like it is doing a pretty good job.
Nah, it wasn't even a construction site yet. They went ahead and made their way up there and gave a taste of what the area can expect - not an affluent area, by the way, but an area full of immigrants (and another immigrant-owned hotel next door, which is suing), not the class of NIMBYs the urbanists find easiest to hate - they camped outside, milled around the neighborhood upsetting people named Garcia and Gonzalez with their nighttime yelling and their strung-out appearance, they broke in and destroyed pretty much the whole hotel apparently, stealing everything not nailed down, including the ice machines, and of course the wiring ...
Community First is run rather like a Boy Scout camp. Or a tidy and well-policed hippie commune funded by the well-to-do of Austin. It's great, if you're okay with that.
Based on these excerpts, I think you're wrong to describe his position as "supporting sweeping institutionalization" - he supports more institutionizing than we have now and thinks we've gone too far to the other side, but doesn't seem to support peak institutionalization (there's a pretty wide gap between what we have now and the my brother Tom era). When you say "sweeping institutionalization"
I imagine "immidiately rounding up all the homeless people and locking them up". His described preferred policy has the option for that for some people, but unless I'm significantly misunderstanding it it's not the default for everyone (I don't think the Netherlands has mass institutionalization?).
This is such an (apparently) stupid problem – trading vague nearly-meaningless catchphrases. Alas, communication is (or can be) Hard, especially when participants are motivated to NOT understand one another.
'Harm reduction' seems similarly confusing; probably because it also kinda means 'various things people proposed as harm reduction'.
> I would also note that “traumatizing the sorts of people who write popular books about politics, in a such a way that they feel compelled as a sort of self-therapy to write page after page telling readers how angry they should be at you and your whole coalition” isn’t great political praxis. I would like people to figure this out and stop doing it.
I dunno. Sounds like it works, to me. Most of the normies won't read the people being harassed complaining about it because they don't read anything, but the people being harassed will give up faster, or just never start, as the anecdotes he gives verify. It doesn't seem like crying is an effective counter to bullying, in general.
This was probably too late to get in your article, but there was a NYT article last week on Houston's success in combatting homeless and it appears to be basically a massive housing first success
Which of course underscores the reason why Houston can have success with Housing First, while San Francisco can't do as well - a lack of available, cheap housing. Finding reasonably priced one bedroom apartments that the gov't can afford is remarkably easier. Now, obviously there are issues w/ Houston sprawl, but there's a way to build more without sprawling into infinity.
Again, I know people will say I'm overstating this, but I'd argue that about 50% of problems or more that appear to be specific policy issues on their own all go down to housing supply, and our decades long backlog of a lack of housing starts. If we'd had continued building housing all around the country at the same rate we had back in 2007, we'd be at somewhere around eight to ten million additional housing starts in the country.
Why does the cheap housing have to be within the city limits of San Francisco? The funds could be used (with the incentivized consent of other municipalities) to "house them first" in Modesto. The money could follow.
For the same reason the fact there are lots of empty houses in Detroit or other dying rust belt cities aren't going to help w/ the homeless problem, despite my fellow leftists using those empty homes when talking about national vacancies as proof it's all capitalist's fault.
Well I suppose that means that it isn't really just a houseless problem, but rather a "take care of me " problem, or "I need an intervention" problem. And that kind of torpedoes the "housing first above all" narrative. Because it would seem to me that someone really committed to housing first would be on board with busing the street population of San Francisco to get housed in Detroit. Or is being on the street in San Francisco somehow preferable to being housed in Detroit, or Modesto?
> The dream is to be so tough on crime that criminals pre-emptively give up and you never have to deploy your draconian punishments. But the history of the past few decades of mass incarceration show that, although this happens a little, enough people keep doing crime that you very much do have to deploy your draconian punishments and then you end up with millions of people in prison.
This ignores the fact that the clearance rate for many crimes in the US is very low, especially in high crime cities. In many high crime cities only 1/3 or less of homicides are solved. It's not surprising that harsh punishment doesn't deter all that much when the actual chance of being punished is fairly low.
>Studies like these don’t show causation. Sure, mental illness can make people homeless. But homelessness can also cause mental illness. One SF study found psych diagnoses among the homeless to be evenly divided among depression, PTSD, and everything else. Homelessness is a depressing and traumatic environment. Just because someone who’s been on the streets for a year has depression or trauma, doesn’t mean that we should attribute their homelessness to mental illness.
This argument was a bit jarring right after you presented the house price - homelessness plot. Neither does showing a scatter plot and linear fit on house prices and homelessness prove causality! It is very well possible there is some third variable which explains *both*. Or maybe the causality runs the other way: average house prices are super high in SF because the rest of the populace is outbidding each other to get the super fancy apartments less affected by homeless camps. (Not super serious about this hypothesis, but if homelessness in SF affects only some districts, one really should look at the district level price data.)
I’m pretty sure that the most expensive housing per square foot in San Francisco is in some of the neighborhoods with the most homelessness. These are the neighborhoods with the most economic opportunities at most points in the income ladder.
As I said, it was unserious example. The point is, it is not a good look complaining about Shellenberger presenting statistics that don't prove causality right after presenting scatterplots, apparently not adjusted or controlled for anything, and arguing that R2 is pretty good ... all of which don't prove causality either. There are many possible covariates to consider. Like, to what extent the homelessness rate follow size of metropolitan area or population density?
And there is stuff like Simpson's paradox [1] consider. Suppose Atlanta, Portland, Long Beach and San Diego are similar to each other according to unknown factor X; LA and Oakland with each other; DC, Boston, NYC and San Jose likewise; and finally, SF sits very own over-the-top level in X. (One can imagine similar levels diagonal band for Baltimore and the rest, but I get tired typing.) If we then stratify the analysis by this unknown factor, within each strata you would show that a *decrease* in housing prices is strongly correlates with increasing rate of homelessness . Again, this is merely to illustrate the paradox, I have hard time imaging what such strata could be.
Simply put, the most expensive neighorhoods in SF (Sea Cliff, St. Francis Wood) have almost no one camping on the street. The Tenderloin, one of the crappiest, has a ton of people camping on the street. Now even a crappy part of SF might be expensive compared to Scranton, PA, but within SF this narrative just doesn't hold water.
The abstract and slogans keep talking about "Housing First", and all the real-world attempts seem to be at best "Apartments First", and usually "Rooms First". Has giving homeless people actual *houses* en masse actually been tried? Not quarters in a larger complex: actual, free-standing houses — albeit small, cheap ones.
It seems to me like that would obviously be less prone to the failure mode of the "apartment building" devolving into basically being a shelter-slash-institution-slash-prison by another name. In addition to the power dynamics, I think this would also be less demoralizing for the homeless. Whether or not the people running it are actually authoritarian control-freaks, being assigned a room will make you *feel* like you're just in an institution — whereas surely part of the hope is that genuinely being given a home of your own will feel like getting control of your own destiny back, and put you back on the path to true independence.
"Housing First" won't work if it's just "dump a homeless person in a hotel room". Some are incapable of independent living, some will do crap like rip out piping to sell.
You have to have supports in place, and yes that means not alone the much-maligned social workers, but medical and other support. And it can't be "fifteen minutes with an overloaded care worker once a fortnight".
That's the real problem: some people have very complex needs that won't be solved easily, and the well-intentioned 'well get them off the streets first' doesn't work if it is left at that. But that takes money, people, and time, and you may well be faced with "we need to build supported living housing for people like this who will be dependent on local government for the rest of their lives" as the treatment, and look at how tough it is to get housing built in SF.
"Has giving homeless people actual *houses* en masse actually been tried? Not quarters in a larger complex: actual, free-standing houses — albeit small, cheap ones."
There is a problem there in that some people will abuse the system; this is why there are policies around "anti-social behaviour" in social housing in all countries, be it housing provided by local government or by housing charities:
"Circle VHA, in line with the Housing Act 1997, defines anti-social behaviour as involvement in activities such as the following:
Drug dealing or activity related to drugs
Criminal activity
Violence toward neighbours
Threats or intimidation of neighbours
Threats or intimidation of Circle VHA staff or contractors
Verbal or physical abuse
Noise pollution – day or night
Nuisance of any sort
Graffiti and vandalism on properties and public areas"
Some formerly homeless people will settle in and be fine. Others... won't be. Those with mental and other problems may reduce their new house to the same state of squalor as their homeless camp, because they are not able to live unsupported. Some are petty criminals and will engage in anti-social behaviour. It's not a *bad* idea, but it's not a "one size fits all" solution.
> Those with mental and other problems may reduce their new house to the same state of squalor as their homeless camp, because they are not able to live unsupported
I suspect they'd still rather live in squalor in a house than live in squalor on the streets, given the option. And the people who have to cross the street every day, whereas they don't actually ever have to set foot in the house, would say the same. "Would it make the entire problem go away" is an unrealistically high bar to clear for any such proposition — I'm more interested in "would it help meaningfully", and I think logically it would.
I'm not saying it's going to single-handedly solve homelessness. I just think that a lot of the "naive" popular support for "housing first" has people imagining something more like this than the "functionally-shelters with somewhat nicer, larger quarters" systems that keep being implemented instead. And I suspect that such a program would indeed have noticeable beneficial effects (without being a cure-all).
To get people to stay in a home that home needs to have easy access to the kinds of jobs that someone without much recent work history can hold down. It’s hard for a bunch of single family homes to all be in easy access to anything, unless you can assume everyone owns a car and can keep it running.
If you're already building/buying a bunch of houses, it doesn't seem much more of an imposition to also set up a decent public transportation system for their inhabitants.
(Also, I notice this line of thought has us making the assumption that we're putting all the houses in one place, rather than disseminating them around the city: in fairness, I was imagining the same thing, I think. But possibly it's not a trivial assumption and a smart urban planner could design something more efficient.)
Also, you can hypothetically pair this with UBI and do away with the assumption that people won't want to/be able to stay in the houses unless they can get a job from there. (Access to jobs remains a question insofar as we want to *encourage* people to get jobs anyway as part of their recovery process, but it becomes less of an immediate, knock-down concern.)
You need a certain level of population density in order to cost-effectively set up a transportation system (and at high enough levels of density, walking is a perfectly usable transportation system). The basic idea is that you've got the following calculations:
a particular transit stop is only going to be useful for origins and destinations within about a ten minute walk (half mile radius, assuming fully usable walking paths/sidewalks in all directions - smaller if there are cul-de-sacs or bad street crossings)
a residence is only going to generate about 4 or 5 origins and destinations per day
a transit line needs to run at least 4 times an hour for most people to find it useful for anything other than an extremely stable 9-to-5 type commute
to operate a transit vehicle, you need to pay the cost of wages and benefits for the driver, plus a bit extra for fuel and maintenance of the vehicle (I'm not sure what the total is, but $30 an hour sounds like a bare minimum)
I think it's *possible* for these factors to come together for a financially feasible transit line with single-family homes, provided that they're at a fairly high density, and there's a little area of shopping and other services near each stop. But it's much easier for transit to pencil out when the neighborhood has a good number of row houses and/or apartments, and you certainly need that if it's going to have any significant areas that have sufficient access to jobs, shops, and services primarily on foot.
> at high enough levels of density, walking is a perfectly usable transportation system
This is tangential to the main point, and it's more venting at a general issue than directed at you personally, but I heavily disagree there. It's "fine"… for the fit and relatively young, provided they're getting enough sleep and don't have too many heavy things to carry. And that the weather's usually nice.
This isn't even mostly a "disability rights" thing — though that seems, in itself, an important concern when proposing to build residential areas for homeless people. It's just a pet peeve of mine that people, mostly people trending towards the centre of the "young/fit/living in a temperate area/shop for small households/don't have a job or hobby requiring them to transport bulky or heavy items or cases" Venn diagram, vastly underestimate the inconvenience of walking-as-default for people who are not them.
I think that just strengthens the main point. When walking is harder for people, they need even higher levels of density in order for walking to be sufficient. And the walksheds of a transit stop are smaller, so higher levels of density are needed in order for cost-effective non-walking transportation to be possible.
I'm not sure that's fully responsive to Edmund's objection, though (granting that we all agree it's tangential to the break-even requirements of public transit). Even with essentially arbitrarily small walksheds there's not really a plausible way to use public transit to handle a substantial Costco run, or to buy a piece of furniture from IKEA, or any number of analogous errands (let alone inclement weather concerns). It's an issue of kind more than degree.
Yes, Amazon et al. help with this a lot (although in a kind of orthogonal way since it's not public transit) but I think the basic point that forgoing ownership (or at least use, but that gets expensive very quickly too) of a private vehicle is going to cause headaches on a semi-regular basis still stands.
ngl: as someone firmly in the centre of that Venn diagram who lives a mere 15-20 minute walk from work, I basically always prefer to commute via public transit instead. Beware Trivial Inconveniences!
Will throw in another overlooked impediment: walking sometimes unavoidably crosses highly dangerous intersections by any reasonable choice of route. The one near me bisects a major highway and a major thoroughfare, and requires 2-4 separate crosswalks on very long lights to navigate sorta safely. This single intersection constitutes about 5 minutes of the total walk. So walking is still "usable", but a much less attractive option than one would naively expect for such a desirable commute.
When I lived in Los Angeles, I was a 15 minute walk from a subway station, which was great, except that 5 of those minutes were crossing the six-way intersection of Sunset Drive, Sunset Boulevard, Virgil Ave, Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood Boulevard, and Hillhurst Ave. I met Mayor Garcetti at an event and told him to pedestrianize that diagonal block of Hollywood Blvd and greatly improve the neighborhood, but he never went for it. (He wanted me to come up with a plan to fix the seven-way intersection of Silver Lake Blvd, Virgil Ave, Temple St, Beverly Blvd, and whatever else merges in what he called "dysfunction junction".)
"Owning your own free standing house" is a pretty big life objective for most people. It took me till age 30 and a cross country move to a low cost great plains town to finally achieve it. Having one that's yours to live in indefinitely without paying for it might be a step down, but it's pretty close.
To say "We're going to give people who do drugs or don't want to work the same sort of apartments that the working poor who scrape toliets for 40 hours a week can just barely afford."
already seems quite unfair.
To then go further and say "We're going to give freestanding houses with yards and gardens to people who do drugs and don't want to work; while the working poor who follow the rules and try to get by on their own still have to deal with apartment living." Seems just completely manifestly unfair.
And giving free single family homes to everyone in the country just seems nuts. On the other hand, giving everyone a lot where they can camp and build whatever sort of home they're able to afford... That sounds more doable. (at least in North America with abundant land.)
I should mention that realistically, we're talking about things like "pods" that The Ancient Geek linked to upthread (https://elmbridgeresidentsgroup.com/pods-for-homeless-people), not the sort of house that ordinary working people might aspire to owning. Still, point taken.
> And giving free single family homes to everyone in the country just seems nuts.
Well, I think that should be a long-term goal, in a "once we hit post-scarcity" sort of sense. (Giving them to everyone in the country who *wants* them, anyway. I am told there are people who actually like living in apartments.) Though obviously not practical in the here-and-now.
Back on Earth:
> On the other hand, giving everyone a lot where they can camp and build whatever sort of home they're able to afford... That sounds more doable.
I really like this. The key to my proposal is to actually give these people some independence, a place they can really call home, as different as possible from being in a patronising/potentially "prison-like" group shelter. If actual houses can't be achieved, this seems like a very decent way to do it. Has anything like that been proposed in official channels as far as you know?
I'm not sure, but every time I've brought it up, the response from the Progressive sorts (and even just rich/middle class normies used to regulations and rules) is something along the lines of "That will develop into a flavela" to which I respond "Yes?" Seems better than what's happening now." and then they go down the whole "No, they need housing that's up to code! You can't let them live in unsafe housing!"
Bear in mind that even people who do own their own land bought and paid for often deal with building inspectors/bylaw officers, ect, forcing them to tear down or modify structures to meet codes and regulations.
> Well, I think that should be a long-term goal, in a "once we hit post-scarcity" sort of sense
Incidentally, this is why I think the idea of "post-scarcity" is rubbish. The things that people want (land close to the centre of nice city) will always be scarce, even if you can print houses to put on them.
A person set up a organization that does that in Austin. Maybe not full homes, but tiny homes. And in a community... it's just hard to convince a local government to let you seed homeless around its city OR put them in a single site, so this guy grabbed land outside of the city's jurisdiction and went to work.
Here's an interview with the guy from a great podcaster:
The problem with giving them homes is owning a home is expensive and requires income to maintain it. The homes rapidly become in need of serious rehab and the outcomes aren't that much better than SROs.
It does for sure help them, but so would giving each of them $50,000, or a Ferrari.
I would note public/HUD housing policy has definitely moved to preferring this distributed housing" approach over "projects", and has found it costs a lot more, but does provide benefits to the participants. They did notably not measure any related costs to the participants new neighbors, when declaring it a net benefit.
Projects had more units and they work everywhere else. They work in NYC to this day. We can have public housing, but we must have firm, unrelenting law enforcement.
Wouldn’t it be a interesting turn if events if “we should do as the Europeans do” started to become something people on the American right wing said as well?
The approach seems to be something like “ensure that each person’s local utility function consistently points out of a direction of them remaining homeless.” And that seems to require some real possibility of a nasty thing happening to a person (ie jail) or else the default may be totally workable.
Have you ever tried reporting a robbery or an assault in San Francisco? I have — tried, that is — twice. The third and fourth times I didn't bother trying. The fifth time I just got the hell out of San Francisco. I have a friend who got literally curb-stomped, has it on video and has the identity of the guy who did it, and eventually gave up on getting anyone to take his report after getting a jurisdictional runaround. The real crime rate is something much higher than the official statistics.
The short conclusion is that there isnt much reliable data on homelessness. The clear anti-drug edge to the book was annoying, and the status of mental hospitald in the not too distant past sounds terifyiing
Peter Thiel has a valid criticism of rationalists - he says they/we have had no impact. I think that's a valid criticism, for all the brainpower in the sphere, little world-changing has taken place.
With that in mind I am more charitable towards people like Shellenberger who arrive at likely beneficial policies, and then do whatever to push them through.
Maybe you can't impassion people to change things by only saying things like "update your priors on this claim by 10%".
I don't see that he's tried any harder than the other rationalists, notably the Effective Altruists, who seem to have managed to at least raise millions for malaria bed nets.
He was a guest on Joe Rogan and Bill Maher. I don't know if the practice of "raising awareness" actually does anything but he definitely got his cause out there.
See Yglesias's concept of the Shadow Congress. In that framework "raising awareness" is actively harmful, as it encourages antibody response and stasis, whereas the most effective people are working on causes or microtweaks nobody has heard of.
The obvious reason homeless live in cities and not suburbs — the economy is powered by shoplifting, social services, or panhandling. More or less all 3 are more (only) successful in the city. Imagine having no car in the suburbs and shoplifting from the one shop you camp next to all the time. Not going to work, they will recognize you. And nowhere to buy drugs, if that’s your thing.
You don’t have to assume that no homeless person does anything economic other than these three. *Any* economic activity is easier in cities than in suburbs.
That would seem to depend on the particular suburb and the particular city area. There are certainly suburbs with a higher density of economic activity than many areas of large American cities.
Agreed, and raises the question why tents on the sidewalks are common in Oakland but not in Palo Alto. Clearly, density of economic activity is not the only factor. Toleration of private appropriation of public spaces (sidewalks, parks, bus stops) seems to be the major difference between these Bay Area municipalities.
Pitching a tent on the sidewalk in many communities brings a response. In others, a shrug. This is true within cities as well. Tents are a no-go in wealthy Sea Cliff but seem to be a-okay in South of Market.
I think I would say no, at least not for central Palo Alto vs the places in Oakland where you see large tent encampments. There's a lot more economic activity, density-wise in Palo Alto.
I think the whole higher home prices = more homelessness only seems to work when we throw out all the exceptions, which is true for any rule.
Beverly Hills just doesn't count for some reason, nor do the St. Francis Wood or Sea Cliff neighborhoods of San Francisco, which have the highest property values but virtually no homeless.
I think Bill Maher recently cited this book on his show uncritically. I've noticed a recent habit of his repeating false or questionable claims as if they were uncontested fact recently. He certainly has repeated the "shoplifting in San farncisco" meme, specifically in the context of a "fact" the left are ignoring at their own electoral peril.
As Scott wrote in the article, there's certainly a perception that shoplifting has grown exponentially but the data doesn't seem to support that or that anything unusual is going on in San Francisco other then car breakins, so it's unclear what's going on
These videos one sees - do the store owners have any particular incentive - beyond "telling" - to report shoplifting?
I mean, one would expect shoplifting to be *way* down with the shift to ordering everything under the sun. Maybe not in SF. Here there are so many empty storefronts. And those that are filled tend to be services of the nail salon type. There are vape stores. Donuts.
>Here there are so many empty storefronts. And those that are filled tend to be services of the nail salon type. There are vape stores. Donuts.
Could the shoplifting per store ratio be going up because of fewer stores rather than more shoplifting? It would be somewhat of a self re-enforcing cycle and would explain why there are anecdotes of people personally observing more of it (since it would be more concentrated).
I think it is more likely that the thefts are just being massively underreported, but this seems like a reasonable possibility as well.
By "the data" you mean official records of crime, whose reporting standards we know have changed (compare to the rising rape cases in sweden), but not tremendous levels of anecdata and surveillance footage?
Like, isn't Walgreens closing due do shoplifting also a sort of evidence?
So, formally reported property crime is flat in every category where there's no benefit to filing a report, but up in the one category where almost every victim has to file a police report to get their insurance company to even consider paying for the repairs. And informally reported property crime is up across the board.
something else occurred to me. In the town I used to live in, the local paper has a relationship with the police where they tell them what to report and what not to report.
Crime rates affect property values which affect taxes. The primary motivation for changing the penalty for shop lifiting to fines instead of jail was economic. California has a budget crisis, and San Francisco gets income one way but probably spends money the other.
It's possible the reported crime rate on that is just ficitional If the quote that was reported somewhere here about police saying they dont bother to officially record it anymore, perhaps the offcial statistics are fiction for similar purposes.
This wouldnt be the case in the one instance you mentioned for the reason you mentioned. Trying to make that one disappear wouldnt work.
"Suburban police departments might be less tolerant of homeless people, either harassing them until they leave or outright telling them to go to cities. Why would suburban departments be less tolerant than urban departments (especially when urban departments, eg the LAPD, are better known for their ruthlessness)? It might just be an entrenched norms thing; suburbs can get rid of their homeless populations, so they do. Or it might be politics; suburbs might be more conservative than cities."
Well, it certainly is a head-scratcher how a suburb of rich people might not have homeless encampments outside their houses. However might it be that this happens? Surely the police in the suburbs are not less tolerant than the inner-city ones?
Whatever about entrenched norms or more conservatism, the answer is probably more cynical and pragmatic; rich Josephine Smyth-Verres-Evans is a close personal friend of the local political and police big wigs and so if she rings up to complain about scruffy smelly bums hanging around the street, action gets taken immediately. The bums get escorted out of the posh parts and end up back in the "nobody gives a damn" parts, where it's easier anyway to beg and buy drugs and the police aren't going to intervene without a direct order to do so because the DA isn't prosecuting "lifestyle crimes".
As to the institutionalisation part, I think there may be a difference of definition; I imagine Shellenberger means "I don't want the cops to sweep up all the homeless and then they get locked up in the looney bin forever, this isn't Soviet Russia and the gulags! But I do think that the guy ranting about aliens eating his brain and dropping his trousers to shit in the middle of the street does need to be treated, and if he won't go voluntarily because that's where the aliens live, what good does it do anyone to leave him ranting and shitting in the streets? Sometimes you do need to involuntarily commit someone for their own good and the good of others, and if he can be succesfully treated, then of course he gets out of the pyschiatric ward (and hopefully gets help and support to get housing so he won't go off his meds and back onto the street)".
Agreed. The "sweeping" allegation seems very straw-man. And of course the status quo in San Francisco is terrible. Sweeping by its very nature implies something broad and indiscriminate. Some people do need an intervention after all.
The guy who used to wear terrible wigs and cart around a basket full of dolls riding the buses all day from town to town when I was a teenager was a harmless eccentric.
The guy who groped me and chased after me when I got off the bus so I had to run down the street was not.
Lots of people think the second example is a "harmless eccentric". Coincidentally, none of these people live in Deiseach's neighborhood or any like it, and they don't have to actually deal firsthand with that sort of "harmless eccentric", but they've got strong opinions on how Deiseach should cope with "harmless eccentricity".
I think it's also just habit and norms. Some of my in-laws are police officers. The rural ones wax quite a bit about protecting their community from bad guys, especially shifty transients, whereas the urban ones still go on about protecting their community, but will also talk about how the homeless are part of their community, or talk about them like they are the weather, they are there, but what'cha gonna do about it?
So if there aren't any/many homeless in the area (or they aren't visible), then a visible one gets the attention of the immune system. An area that has had them regularly sees the immune system shrug and move on. If enough break through such that a community has a regular, visible presence of homeless people, the easiest response for the residents who don't like it isn't to coordinate doing something about it, it is just to move to a new place (or an old place that the homeless had moved on from).
(Note, I don't think that homeless people are an infection, but the concept of foreign body and status quo seems useful to understand what the policers of said communities think.)
It seems an odd notion that a guy who bought a house should be expected to up and move his family rather than having the encampment moved that just took over his local park. The guy in the house has a job, a family, kids in schools, etc. The folks in the encampment are just camping...
Plus, since encampments can appear in most places, where should the guy move to get clear of them?
I live on the South Side of Chicago. My neighborhood often has unofficial collections for a local gang that handles our security. I paid $50 for the BLM protests. I know people who gave $500. Guys I know got paid $1,000 per night to guard, rotating around the perimeter of the neighborhood. When guys tried to camp out nearby they were beaten by the same people.
No one complains about these guys, even though they are all gangsters, but they take care of the place. I know the Chinese and Spanish have the same system. I think the problem is that African-Americans never rose to this level of coexistence with thugs. Even worse, newly rich places lost the moxy of their ethnic neighborhoods. There are no more tough guys around to profit by beating the bad guys up and out of the neighborhood. It is sad to me. Many of these guys cannot do much else.
> As to the institutionalisation part, I think there may be a difference of definition
No kidding. I’m kind of blessing Scott with faint criticism here, but that was the weakest, least reasonable argument I can remember in all of Scott’s essays. It’s literally at the level of “Some people are in horrible incurable pain and want to die, maybe euthanasia should not be quite as illegal — Oh, you mean you want to go back to murdering cripples and old people?”.
Maybe it’s because I’m not a native speaker, or too literal, but in my mind “sweeping institutionalization” brings to mind “clear the desk by sweeping everything on the floor”. It means “lock them all up, God will know His own”. Yet nothing in what Scott quoted seemed inconsistent with “maybe we the current level of institutionalization is not quite the highest value on the Pareto frontier”.
I think Shellenberger is owed even more of an apology just for the lack of charitableness of (those parts) of this review than for the careless statement in the earlier article.
"San Fransicko is the equivalent of that dim blue lighting you sometimes see in nightclub bathrooms: so focused on preventing injection drug use that it sacrifices the ability to illuminate anything at all."
HOW do you think of such clever analogies on such a frequent basis
I thought the philosophical musings at the end about how many people's lives have to be improved to justify making homeless lives worse was maybe the most interesting part of the review... and also the part that people are least likely to make it to. But it also makes me think about if there are ways to mitigate the specific complaints of housed people in walkable cities without such drastic measures. If the number one problem is feces on streets and litter everywhere and homeless people yelling at you, maybe just bring back public restrooms and have a lot more public trash cans and crack down really hard on the specific instances of people yelling at passersby?
Regarding homelessness as an issue, I happen to have just listened to the first episode of "According to Need", a 6 part podcast about homelessness in Oakland. It definitely comes at it from a leftist point of view, but it was also helpful to reset how I think of homelessness as a binary. We're introduced to a woman and her child who are frequently able find a place to stay with friends or family for a while... but not permanently and then sooner or later they're back to sleeping in the car. Who had a psychotic episode... after the stress of being homeless for years, but that doesn't seem to be a primary reason she's homeless. It also does a bit of pushback (with a brief statistical cite) to the idea of homeless people migrating to California by pointing out how much you depend on a support network of friends and family when you're homeless, and how terrifying it is to catch a bus to another city where you don't know anyone or have anyone you can call on when things get very bad.
And yet many people who are quite down-and-out DO migrate to California. It might be a bad idea, but hope springs eternal and there is the idea of starting over in the Golden West. Also, plenty of folks who are down-and-out migrate within California, say from Bakersfield to San Francisco.
And whenever you hear stats on where the homeless are from, you had best ask what the word "from" means. If we go by where someone grew up or went to high school, the percentage of homeless in San Francisco is a heck of a lot lower than the stats you will see quoted. They often use a definition of "from" that could include couch surfing while unemployed for a month in San Francisco, and then becoming homeless, as counting as being "from" San Francisco, despite having grown up and lived in Omaha for 20 years previously.
This gets to the point of homelessness being more of a state or national issue, rather than something that a single city can be expected to tackle.
"maybe just bring back public restrooms and have a lot more public trash cans and crack down really hard on the specific instances of people yelling at passersby?"
I can't speak for America, but you need someone (at least one person and ideally more) employed to keep the public restroom clean and free of loiterers, and that it can be locked up at night, else it turns into a place for drugs and sex (yes, it happened in my own small town) so that the public loos get knocked down and then *nobody* has anywhere to go if they are in town and in need to go.
Public trash cans also need to be regularly emptied, else they become crammed full of rubbish till they overflow and spill onto the street and attract vermin. And sometimes people use them to dump their own domestic rubbish rather than pay the charges for a waste collection service (again, my own town).
So cash-strapped councils give up on having caretakers to look after the public conveniences, which then do turn into places for junkies, prostitutes, and the homeless to hang around. And they don't employ street sweepers to empty the bins, so you get the overflowing rubbish.
And when people complain, the 'solution' is to close/demolish the public conveniences and take away the bins.
"I can't speak for America, but you need someone (at least one person and ideally more) employed to keep the public restroom clean and free of loiterers, and that it can be locked up at night, else it turns into a place for drugs and sex (yes, it happened in my own small town) so that the public loos get knocked down and then *nobody* has anywhere to go if they are in town and in need to go."
How much of a problem was it that they turned into a place for drugs and sex? I've been lucky: I've never lived in an area where the homeless caused much of a problem. I've lived in silicon valley, but not San Francisco. From the descriptions, it _sounds_ as if preventing public defecation would be much more important to the livability of the city to everyone besides the homeless than ensuring that no drug use or sex occurred in public toilets.
"In fact, less than a fifth of prisoners are in for drug-related crimes."
Am I misunderstanding what Scott is saying here? The below government website cites national number of incarcerated for drug offenses accounts for 44.9% of US prison population.
As far as I can tell, the 1/5 number comes from people who are locked specifically for a drug offense. Depending on your definition of a drug-related crime, that seems like it would easily be much higher (and much harder to determine). Speaking about someone I knew: he was homeless because he abused crack cocaine and had untreated bi-polar disorder. He broke into his sister's house because she refused to let him use her shower before a job interview. He was convicted for burglary, which would make him show up as not a drug crime in the chart, but his crime was very strongly linked with his drug abuse.
I mean, in literally this piece, you certainly seem to confess to committing crimes? Unless using "substances I’m not supposed to" means something unusual?
I think he means "harming others" like stealing or attacking people, and not "personal use of substances". Although he might be underestimating how hard it is to be altruistic in arduous circumstances. Scott told a great story of how his will to diet evaporated when donuts were in sight, imagine how hard it would be to not be a package-thief/shoplifter when you are starving.
The changes in SF are indeed depressing to see. A book analyzing this honestly would be good to read. Other cities would learn from it, if nothing else. I hope SF fixes its problems, whatever be the cause/s.
While it is likely to be the factoid the rest of you pass over without comment, the thing that I will remember from this essay is "six million needles a year".
Sometimes people like to play the game of "Imagine comprehending [such-or-other sentence filled with tech neologisms and slang] even just twenty-five years ago!"
For me, "gave out six million needles a year" would be the funny thing to try to explain to the average somebody even as late as the 80s.
I don't think housing prices are the driving factor. Check statistics for Columbia, South Carolina. Very mild/warm weather, fairly cheap cost of living and housing, and a decent job market at the bottom end. Homelessness is a major problem. The city admits to there being several thousand homeless (City population is about 130,000). As typical in the Christian South, there are many "do-gooders" available to provide food, clothing and even shelter. Mental illness and substance abuse are the driving factors. Until we start institutionalizing the mentally ill again, this problem will continue to grow.
Kevin Erdmann would say to look even closer, at the bottom quartile or quintile, since as you go up income tiers in an area, incomes rise faster than home prices, but I don't have the data for that.
And even then, the per-capita of the metro area still seems a lot lower than a lot of other urban areas going through homeless crises.
>This thought experiment pushes me closer to Shellenberger’s side of the aisle. I still want to cling to the hope that there is some way to do this which lets the people who aren’t bothering anyone else be left alone.
Well... like your comment on harmless versus harmful quirks, aren't "those who aren't bothering anyone else" *already* left alone? They are, presumably, not even noticed! The drug-addled equivalent of a hikkikomori, living off their parent's largesse, isn't a "problem" in the way that someone occupying a public space, and often-if-not-always damaging that space, is.
It's an interesting reversal of "We are the 99%"/1% political sloganeering: public parks intended for the use of *everyone* are instead co-opted by a small but unusually powerful (... bear with the metaphor, please) group.
I don't think they're already left alone. The government sometimes (rarely in SF) disperses homeless encampments, ie tells people camping that they have to camp somewhere else. In Europe, laws say it's illegal to "sleep rough" at all, even if you're not causing any problems. See also the discussion of suburban police bussing their homeless into cities.
In Europe? If you are a national citizen, quite often in most EU countries, yes. If you are a citizen from another EU country (equivalent to another US state)? Not so much.
I have some 'libertarian instincts' towards 'allowing' 'camping' and even, e.g. 'allowing shantytowns/favels/etc.', but I also would like some _radical_ de-regulation of housing 'standards' generally – and probably the latter _first_.
I would perfectly with allowing '_campgrounds_' (and not banning things like 'mobile home parks'), but that just doesn't seem feasible. We can't even bring back SROs!
Scott links to a Politico article that claimed that due to zoning obstacles, the state had only received one application for its $100 million program to convert hotels to housing for the homeless.
Turns out that was incorrect: the state had in fact received zero applications.
The post asks why SF and other cities don't just rent apartments for homeless people, if they're so committed to Housing First. After all, the median SF apartment costs just ~$3,000 per month. That's almost *three times less* than what SF currently spends per homeless person per month, by my calculations.
Scott's proposed answer is that zoning makes building apartments for the homeless near-impossible. But this doesn't address the question: it seems like it would be way cheaper to house people by just renting apartments already on the market. It wouldn't take any new building. So why (genuinely) doesn't the city just do it?
The progressive narrative right now (not saying that in a derogatory way, tbh it seems likely that it's true, I just don't know that it's true) is that apartment owners go out of their way not to rent to folks who are receiving government housing assistance. If that's true, your options would be to force owners to rent out some of their units by law, or confiscate the apartments, both of which are going to make pretty huge waves.
Yeah, source of income discrimination against voucher holders definitely exists. But why don't cities just rent tons of apartments themselves and then give them out to homeless people, rather than giving homeless people vouchers?
I'm not sure I see the difference - the landlord still knows that the units will go to the same folks, and still has the same incentives to refuse. In fact, more, because if part of the deal is subletting rights (and if the city is renting it it would have to be), now the landlord has no control over who his tenant is.
If I were a landlord of a nice condo then I definitely wouldn't want this.
But if I were the slumlord of a bunch of shitty apartments in the Tenderloin which are occupied by shady characters anyway then I'd probably be overjoyed to rent to the city government at market rates because the government, unlike my usual clientele, is likely to pay its rent on time. If the government further committed to fixing any damage caused by its tenants, this would be a great deal for slumlord me.
Because someone, somewhere in city government is smart enough to at least partially understand the power of incentives. That giving free apartments to vagrants will just encourage a bunch of marginally-homed people to become vagrants in order to get free apartments.
From what I've heard, this has all already happened, and San Francisco's $billion-per-year homeless budget is primarily spent providing free apartments for people who were homeless at some point in the past.
Bingo. The demand for housing paid for by other people will always exceed the supply of housing paid for by other people.
Also, just giving folks apartments rent-free, doesn't mean that the factors that led them to be in a tent on the street for five years (addiction, mental illness, anti-social behavior, unwilliningness to compromise), just magically disappear.
Is that three times less than what SF currently spends per homeless person per month on housing?
Because there are a lot of other costs than housing.
Plus if the city owns the apartment and it gets trashed enough to affect property values but not safety, the city can shrug and move on. A landlord would likely object and charge the city more to clean it up.
Plus with so many social services being tied to disability status, homeless patients have huge incentive to get diagnosed with serious mental disorders. Plenty of folks in my defense work days would tell me they were on disability for a "mental thing" and have no idea what it was. These were people with more-or-less working faculties, their doctors had just diagnosed them as disabled because that's the only way medicaid pays out.
That's anecdotal, and I'd be very very reluctant to make this case strongly. However, since I'm making a comment on the internet I can just insinuate things and assume other people are smart enough to figure out whether they're true or not. Seems a lot like the institutionalization plan (much like the prison plan) is:
1) Refuse benefits to folks we don't consider deserving due to lack of disability.
2) They get a diagnosis of debilitating mental disorder from a psychiatric complex mostly designed to hand out diagnoses.
3) Now use that diagnosis to declare them unfit to manage their own choices, either through coercing treatment on them with threats of prison time or by involuntary commitment.
4) We're still being a good civil liberties state because we only deny civil liberties to people with debilitating mental disorders, yet somehow we keep locking up all the inconvenient poor people in urban centers.
It seems to me that part of the social contract is that if a person is completely reliant on the community/government/taxpayers for his survival, that the community gets some say in how the help is handed out. That seems a reasonable expectation. And so some point, yes, such an individual accepts at least some limitations in their freedom in order to receive that aid.
It may sound harsh, but it isn't all that different to the kinds of compromises working folks have to make all the time. They don't get to pick their work hours, and may accept living miles away from their job because they can't afford the fancier neighborhoods. Adult life involves trade-offs. If you have a group, whether called the "homeless" or "disabled", that is entitled to free stuff from the working community, but has zero obligations of any kind, you will enable anti-social behavior.
There's at least a nugget of this sentiment that I can agree with. I have no issue at all with the community having some say over what benefits to give out to folks, or placing conditions on receiving those benefits.
The problem with the disability designation is that it robs folks of agency in all parts of their life. I don't have an ethical problem with saying "if we're gonna give you free housing you gotta get off drugs and at least try to find gainful employment." I don't know that that would be effective and I just read a 10,000 word article saying the data is super unclear. But if it would be effective I think we should do that.
I *do* have an ethical problem with saying "once you enter our weird system with perverse incentives, we're allowed to do whatever coercive things we want to you, including locking you up indefinitely."
I don't know your political persuasion, but a parallel that might appeal to conservatives: Block grants. The federal government approves big payouts to the states, but in exchange requires that they pass laws about things like the drinking and smoking age, seat belts, etc. These are controversial, but constitutional - so long as the funds basically pertain to the conditions. So you can tie education funding to drinking age laws, but probably not real estate development funds or whatever.
The federal government is always coming up with new ways to push the envelope on what "related" means, because deep down they don't care about that. If they could they'd condition every penny of federal money on adopting every federal legislative and regulatory priority. They'd use the fact that red states depend on federal funding to turn red states into puppet governments. Republicans rightly object because while accepting tax dollars from the rest of the country should give federal taxpayers some control over the policies that money supports, it should not mean that state governments have no autonomy whatsoever. Same basic concept.
Not conservative by a long shot. I maintain the community gets some say, but certainly with limitations. As a starting point, providing a safe sleeping site (whether shelter or campground), but then forbidding camping out on city streets elsewhere. In other words, you can't camp here, but you can camp there, where the city has set up showers and toilets and access points to social services. Essentially it is a two-way street. Basic free stuff comes with basic sensible obligations.
But the idea that someone has some kind of infinite right to appropriate a public space, like a park, indefinitely, trashing the place, while being supported by working, taxpaying community, is just nuts. That and pretty much sums up the situation in San Francisco presently.
"I have an ethical problem with saying "once you enter our weird system with perverse incentives, we're allowed to do whatever coercive things we want to you, including locking you up indefinitely."
- I do too, but to be clear this is pure strawman.
Yeah, always amazes me that it can be both. Essentially if you're trying to live your best life but literally cannot you'll hit roadblocks everywhere because they'll use the fact that you worked through the pain, that you have people who depend on you, etc. to prove that you don't *really* need disability. But also it gets used as our default safety net so huge portions of the poorest folks get tagged with it essentially with no effort or evidence.
Plus, isn't it still the case that Special Supplementary Income (SSI) is the only federal cash benefit that down-and-out single adults (i.e. those not caring for children) have access to; and to get SSI if you are below pension age you must first get a disability diagnosis. SSI is thus the closest US "functional equivalent" to the universal, tax-financed bottom-floor social assistance schemes you find in many European countries.
Exactly. It's both ethical and in the best interest of doctors to ensure that poor folks get access to those benefits whether they actually meet the "so mentally ill they can't work" criteria or not. Then some nut comes along and says "well since we've diagnosed all the poor people as disabled and they're out on the streets causing a ruckus, maybe we should bring back forced institutionalization."
You lost me at the first turn. Your analysis of the housing cost model is a perfect example of the limitations of correlation in policy analysis.
You could reject the hypothesis that housing costs cause homelessness if there were no correlation between housing costs and homelessness. But showing that there is one does not prove that the model is correct.
Actually, a lack of correlation between the two variables would be an insufficient reason to reject the hypothesis, just as observing a correlation does not confirm it. If X causes Y, but at the same time X is correlated with Z and Z tends to decrease Y, then we may observe no correlation between X and Y, even though X causes Y.
To the actual point, I think Scott is just trying to apply his priors about the likely cause of the correlation. If we don't know what the mysterious variables X and Y stand for, then we can't really conclude much from observing a correlation. If we know that X is housing prices, and Y is rates of homelessness, then the hypothesis that higher prices cause less people to be able to afford housing does sort of jump out at us. But we can't be sure that this is the correct explanation, since there could be other viable explanations for the correlation. So the correlation makes a causal relationship seem more likely, but doesn't prove it.
I appreciate this review very much. My midsize midwestern city has a major homeless problem and learning more about the practical options for addressing it is a civic interest here. I bought and made my way partway through "San Fransicko," but became frustrated by the polemical tone and my own inability to assess the arguments, even though I was open to them and appreciate Shellenberger's personal activism. This review helps, and will lead me back into the book with a better sense of how to try to learn from it in a measured way.
I had vague memories of three patients like this, but when I thought about it I could only remember one who was definitely from San Francisco and had definitely talked about this problem, so I edited it from three to one and missed that sentence.
"But fine, these are also terrible, and they’re only medium-term solutions anyway. What about building real, long-term apartments for homeless people?"
Apart from the spiraling costs, which you correctly noted, have we forgotten so quickly what happened with the public housing projects built with Great Society money back in the '60s? To take one famous example:
Unlike many of the city's other public housing projects such as Rockwell Gardens or Robert Taylor Homes, Cabrini-Green was situated in an affluent part of the city. The poverty-stricken projects were actually constructed at the meeting point of Chicago's two wealthiest neighborhoods, Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast. Less than a mile to the east sat Michigan Avenue with its high-end shopping and expensive housing. Specific gangs "controlled" individual buildings, and residents felt pressure to ally with those gangs in order to protect themselves from escalating violence.
During the worst years of Cabrini-Green's problems, vandalism increased substantially. Gang members and miscreants covered interior walls with graffiti and damaged doors, windows, and elevators. Rat and cockroach infestations were commonplace, rotting garbage stacked up in clogged trash chutes (it once piled up to the 15th floor), and basic utilities (water, electricity, etc.) often malfunctioned and were left in disrepair.
On the exterior, boarded-up windows, burned-out areas of the façade, and pavement instead of green space—all in the name of economizing on maintenance—created an atmosphere of decay and government neglect. The balconies were fenced in to prevent residents from emptying garbage cans into the yard, and from falling or being thrown to their deaths. This created the appearance of a large prison tier, or of animal cages, which further enraged community leaders of the residents.
...
While Cabrini–Green was deteriorating during the postwar era, causing industry, investment, and residents to abandon its immediate surroundings, the rest of Chicago's Near North Side underwent equally dramatic upward changes in socioeconomic status. First, downtown employment shifted dramatically from manufacturing to professional services, spurring increased demand for middle-income housing; the resulting gentrification spread north along the lakefront from the Gold Coast, then pushed west and eventually crossed the river.
Someone want to point me to why something like this wouldn't happen again? Keep in mind that SF already spends a 100 million to clean feces off the streets (only semi-successfully, at that). Frankly, this seems to me like an marker of what Tyler Cowen calls The Great Forgetting.
I can't guarantee it wouldn't happen again, but on the other hand the 1960's are now over a half century ago and the problem that Cabrini-Green was meant to solve hasn't been solved another way in that half century. Seems ripe for a "let's try this again and try not to let it go wrong like it did last time" rather than "this is never going to work, give up on the idea forever".
I mean, we haven't even established whether ultimately Cabrini-Green was a good thing or a bad thing. You gave a long list of problems, and it sounds like it was a miserable place to live, and it hindered economic development for some of the surrounding area... but even the later parts of the wikipedia article you link note how the residents considered it preferable to being homeless (their likely fate without it) and lobbied to keep it standing. I don't know, suppose we did it again and everything happened exactly like it did before, but also 15,000 people had a stable home they could call their own for a few decades (no matter how ill-repaired and unpleasant) instead of being homeless. I think whether that was a success or failure would be a matter of analysis, not obvious, and of comparing against alternative ways the money could have been spent. And maybe with some "lessons learned" everything wouldn't happen exactly the same and there could be an iterative improvement.
I'm not going to try to convince you of the flaws of public housing projects; there's ample literature out there on the subject that you don't need me to summarize. Suffice it to say however, that one of the major problems was simply that creating high-concentrations of poverty tended to create self-reinforcing problems with crime, drug use, etc., due to peer effects in these neighborhoods. Consider that with a group like the homeless, many of whom have, let's say unhealthy personal habits, the effect is likely to be even worse.
I have no opinions on public housing or not, but isn't poverty normally concentrated? Poor neighborhood. Poor school districts. Poor rural towns. Poor parts of cities. For a variety of reasons economic classes tend to congregate, and the higher the population density, wouldn't you have higher density of each of those classes?
One of my key takeaways from Jacob's "Life and Death of Great American Cities" is that such segregation of poor and rich in a city is bad.
That it tends to happen is probably partially the rich buying their way out of problem areas, but in doing so making those areas more problematic. (And policy makes a lot of a difference too.)
My neighbourhood growing up had quite a mixture of rich (some of the richest in our city) single family homes, decent townhouses and fairly affordable apartments. We had very little crime or degeneracy in our end of town. (Someone graffiting under the train bridge was kinda a big deal and when some kids went on a B&E spree of three houses it was the talk of the area for weeks.)
By this logic, seems you should also in favor of forced institutionalization. Would you advocate for trying them out again too, assuming we try not to let it go wrong like last time?
I grew up with family in similar buildings. They were never that bad. It was all blown out of proportion, although I did urinate in the hallways a few times with cousins. That said, those were far better than being a wait list for a housing voucher for 12 years. I will take more units any day. Furthermore, problems could be solved by better policing. This whole defund the police is some seriously silly white people sh^t.
You assume Miami and Houston have moderate climates - they don't. Miami has very high summer heat and humidity. Today in Miami, the wet bulb temperature (that's the important measurement) is 82.9 and the high summer heat and daily rains haven't begun yet.
The high in Houston today is forecast to be 99 - feeling like 104, and the real summer heat hasn't begun there either.
Living on the streets in either city is almost intolerable for a large part of the year. San Francisco, with it's old-fashioned alleys, deep doorways, courtyards and hidden areas is far more livable for those without housing.
I assume someone has mentioned this, but I was surprised that Phoenix and Houston were used as cities with comparable weather, as both get dangerously hot during the summer. That would also have to explain some of the difference. It would be *much* more comfortable to be outside pretty much everywhere on the California coast year around, than in either Phoenix or Houston.
It was mentioned, but I wasn't sure so I didn't include it. It appears that Miami has average summer highs in the upper 80's. I'm sure it's humid, but being on the water probably helps, so I didn't mention it because I wasn't positive that it was as hot as Phoenix and Houston.
Edit: A few comments up, someone mentions Miami being intolerably hot, so I'll take their word for it!
Yeah, you definitely cannot appreciate the significance of the humidity in the southeast until you've spent some time in it. Remember that humans rely on evaporative cooling and high humidity renders that useless.
Still, hundreds of millions of people have survived in tropical areas for thousands of years without air conditioning.
Being out in 38C heat every day in the summer is uncomfortable at first, but it's a way of life for millions of Indians, Brazilians, Indonesians, Thais, many of whom are working hard physical jobs.
Come to think of it, there's many people in Houston and Miami who work hard physical outdoor jobs in 38C heat too.
Yes but the heat death/illness/injury rate will be higher, and the vast majority that don't die will still be much more uncomfortable than someone in a more temperate climate. You don't have to do some rational numbers-based risk assessment of your chance of death to have a preference here, you just have to know you'd rather not be hot and sweaty as often.
The regions in question also tend to have cultural adaptations/practices to mitigate the heat, some random homeless guy may not have that.
Maybe it's just a matter of personal preference. If I had to live outdoors without the ability to light fires then I'd definitely choose Miami or Houston over San Francisco, because I'd much rather deal with being hot during the day than cold at night. Preferably Miami, because you can always cool off at the beach.
But I was born in a place that's hot and humid in summer, someone from a different climate might well feel differently.
I'm sure the data is not great, but Eugene is really nice in the summer and not super cold in the winter, and central Oregon has a big camper van/nomad thing goin on, so could be related?
A friend went to college there and talked about how a lot of the homeless were student-aged or slightly older. Not sure sure what impact that had, or if it was just what she noticed being around campus.
It was late when I read this last night, and I'm sorry if I missed this, but there was a chunk of talk about Amsterdam reducing its homeless population, but Amsterdam is just a city in a country (inside a union that allows free transit). Is there any evidence that the interventions didn't just reallocate homelessness instead of reduce it?
A city doesn't have to be the harshest in its treatment of people, it just has to be harder than the alternatives, or at least less attractive. Of course if people catch on this creates a terrible spiral where each municipality gets slightly tougher than the others until someone says too much or there are summary executions (or something). If the stories of how the cops treat homeless people in suburbs/nicer neighborhoods are true, then something like this is already in play (where the suburbs defect and the cities just suck it up to various levels).
And this is also true on the flip-side. Just as homeless people are rational about choosing locations with good climate, they also choose locations with better support/legal climate. The first city who decides to buckle down and do 100% housing first, no waiting, cost be damned, should expect to see an increase in customers for said housing.
Austin saw that when it eliminated the camping ban. Suddenly the homeless who were already there became more visible, a larger percentage of the snow birds declined to leave as the weather warmed, and there was some new homeless immigration. Camping ban was reinstituted, and now they are seeing a slow migration away again.
Hawaii has a great climate. They are fairly lax in their treatment of homeless people (and drug use), they have a large homeless population for how rural many parts of it are. They start doing more round-ups and camp evictions over the last few years, people start looking for greener pastures.
So when we talk about solutions for San Francisco homlessness, or whether Amsterdam's programs solved its problems (even temporarily), the question that keeps running through my head is, "Did it actually solve any problems, or did it just move them around?" (at scale, of course, I'm sure there were individuals who benefited from housing and support and whose life was improved)
Semi-related, but I'm not really talking about bussing above. But I thought this article was an interesting read, particularly the section about how half of the claimed "ended homelessness" cases in SF were actually just bussed out.
I lived in Amsterdam for seven years. Other Dutch cities seemed to have even less of an issue with homelessness than Amsterdam. Amsterdam is probably the most liberal place in the country and has been for a very long time. It’s where you go to do fun and sometimes shady things, and it naturally aggregates the kinds of people who tend to become homeless. Sleeping on the sidewalk and panhandling are illegal. My Dutch friends were fine with this, because as they saw it their taxes had paid for housing and services, and nobody had an actual right to be a nuisance while refusing to use those things.
What I observed was a relatively robust network of social services that the police could call upon to get people who were camping or panhandling off the street. I once saw a crazy guy pee on the tram tracks while shouting at cops to arrest him. The cops pulled him aside and kept him there until a different van, from a health facility, took him away. I’m not sure if this was typical, but it was possible.
The point I like to make is that there was a place for most homeless or unstable people to go, and the authorities could compel them to go there.
If you’re Dutch, you have to work pretty hard not to be “in the system”, cradle to grave. You have health care and subsidies for certain housing. If you break the law, pass out drunk/high in an alley, or have a mental breakdown, the appropriate institutions have a file on you.
If you’re a kind of marginally functional person and you get older/sicker/more addicted, someone will probably have you moved out of your centrally-located apartment before you burn the place down (something that happened to a friend’s elderly alcoholic neighbor.) I’m not sure what the technical term is for the “washout villages”, but there are communities of small apartments for people with various issues out in the burbs. I’m hazy on the details here, but I get the sense there are levels of niceness and freedom depending on your problems and history.
Everything in NL is required to be a certain distance from transportation, so you can still get places. It’s not a prison or a camp, but if police find you doing anything weird downtown, my understanding is they’ll send you home and you’ll be getting a visit from some kind of counselor.
I found some of the metrics for success in this book and review sort of confusing. I feel like success in this area would be better measured with something like “nights spent safely watching TV in modest housing” vs. “nights publicly urinating and screaming at police.” The Dutch system does a good job of maximizing the former and minimizing the latter, so I applaud it.
How many free public toilets does SF have? Make everything from riveted sheet steel so it's hard to vandalise and use those horrible blue lights.
I think a number of aspects of American urban life (inner cities, public transport) have a kind of evaporative cooling vicious cycle where Respectable People don't live somewhere/use a service, therefore all the people there are 'Disrespectable' therefore Respectable people stay away. Thus they get stuck in suboptimal equilibria.
Do we have testimonies from anybody who's been both imprisoned and institutionalised regarding which is worse?
>Do we have testimonies from anybody who's been both imprisoned and institutionalised regarding which is worse?
My suspicion is that both are pretty bad and not entirely in the same way. I would guess some people probably prefer jail/prison and some probably prefer the institution. Experiences at prisons and institutions can vary wildly from facility to facility so any one person's anecdote is unlikely to generalize.
Edit: added a quote to make it clear which part I was replying to
Not too many anymore. Used to have several along the public transit lines, most (all?) got shut down post-9/11 and essentially never re-opened. It's an open secret that Turrism fears were a convenient cover to deny the homeless another small bit of publically-financed dignity.
So now they just evacuate in and around the stations. Clearly a superior equilibrium for everyone.
There are still relatively hassle-free restrooms in malls, libraries, etc. and they're kept moderately nice, though of course located in more desirable parts of town. Sometimes they don't even need a key or code. "Free" ones tied to private businesses can be...unfriendly at best, dangerous at worst, depending who you are. There are a few truly public ones built out on the street (not sure if still operational, haven't been downtown since covid started). Those are surprisingly nice if they've recently been cleaned, like a fancy airplane lavatory. If not, they're...about what you'd expect. Better than nothing, but harrowing.
People in SF just sorta become accustomed to "free public toilets" not being a reliable thing, if they had that expectation at all to begin with. But, yes, they were once a thing. The North Remembers.
"Maybe I could clarify. “THIS VIOLENCE I’M DOING IS BECAUSE OF THE BOOK YOU WROTE. I’M ATTACKING YOU ON ACCOUNT OF YOUR POLITICAL BELIEFS!”"
That would actually be a hate crime, since California is one of four states in the U.S. where political affiliation is considered a protected category for the purposes of hate crime laws.
"So as time goes on and more and more people try drugs but “un-trying” drugs isn’t a thing, the percent of the population who have tried drugs inevitably goes up."
Not sure how that works. At any given moment, a part of the population (who may or may not have tried drugs) is dying and therefore is no longer counted, and a part of the population (who haven't voluntarily tried drugs) is being born.
I was saying this within the context of drugs being relatively new to Portugal, a conservative country, so the implication was that the old people who are dying hadn't tried drugs.
afaik there's a very strong correlation between high housing costs and progressive policies so the strong correlation between the former and homelessness doesn't absolve the latter.
Yes, I'd be interested in seeing a plot of homeless rate vs fraction of the last 50 years spent under a Republican mayor to see what the correlation is there.
Just a couple of data points for "Number of years out of the last 50 with a Republican mayor" for the highest homeless rate cities:
San Francisco: 0 years
Washington DC: 0 years
Boston: 0 years
New York: 20 years (interesting outlier)
Atlanta: 0 years (last Republican mayor was 1879)
Now looking at cities on the other end of the spectrum:
Houston: 5 years
Virginia Beach: 17 years
Milwaukee: 0 years
El Paso: (wikipedia doesn't have a convenient colour-coded list of Mayors and I'm not going to check each one individually, but the number is nonzero)
Fort Worth: 26 years
That's enough work for now but I suspect that this particular number is at least as strongly correlated with homeless rate as house prices is.
Speculating on many mechanisms that might contribute to the strong correlation between high housing costs and leftism:
1. Progressive cities more likely to block construction due to being more pro-regulation in general.
2. High housing prices prevent having children, and having children makes people more conservative. It's hard to keep blank slatist notions after you have several kids and they turn out completely different despite your best efforts to treat them the same, and the more extreme progressive policies are based on blank slatism.
3. Not having kids leads to seeking meaning from participating in causes, which usually means leftist causes. People who just want to grill and provide for their families are conservative by default. It takes some effort and engagement to stay ahead of the Current Year's political zeitgeist.
4. People who already have an antinatal memeplex (which in my experience is always on the left) are more likely to acquiesce to living places where housing is too expensive to have kids.
5. highly educated people more likely to be able to afford to live in expensive areas because of the signaling value of a degree, but higher education is a hostile environment for non-leftists so conservatives are underrepresented among degree holders relative to merit.
"I do believe that people in LA jail have a higher rate of mental illness than the general population. But I’m less sure if they have a higher rate of mental illness than eg graduate students, who have depression at 6x the rate of the general population. And if someone argued that it was a waste to shut down the old mental institutions, because we’re just “trans-institutionalizing” all the mentally ill from psych wards to graduate schools, then people would notice the flaws in that argument right away."
Seriously? You don't see any difference between "mental difficulties but I'm in grad school" and "mental difficulties but I'm in jail"? If everyone who had mental problems was ending up in grad school and not the old looney bins (which were as terrible as everyone claims), we wouldn't be having this discussion at all. But people are not ending up in jail merely because "well doc, I'm depressed but I was told I didn't need anti-depressants because I wasn't suicidal and that's why I'm doing time instead of completing my PhD".
Scott, you've worked in hospitals. Coincidentally, I just had a family member telling me of their experiences in an institution (after a suicide attempt) and about the crisis care ward and the locked wards and being amongst bipolar people who when they were cycling between phases of mania and depression were VERY DAMN DISTURBED. That family member said "Honestly, I can see now why the male psych nurses were all big, tall, strong guys". EDIT: And these were people from respectable backgrounds with good jobs, not the street homeless. If they were threatening, imagine what the street crazies are like!
'Depressed' meaning you need therapy and a prescription for anti-depressants and you have periods where you want to do nothing but stay in bed all day is one thing.
'Depressed' meaning 'on the down cycle of bipolar' where you are literally screaming yourself hoarse at the (female) nurses about "don't come near me, don't touch me, you have no idea how I am suffering, you don't know how I feel" and then cycling back up to the mania stage where "I'm secretly married to that (male) nurse, I'm pregnant with his baby, and you (fellow patient) are my guardian angel", and then the in-between state of being zombified is another thing.
Modern psychiatric wards are *something* better than the old mental asylums. State-provision is probably terrible because nobody wants to pay public money to make them as good as the private insurance hospitals, but they're not entirely snakepits any more. And people that end up with screaming hallucinations about boxes of dead babies on their doorstep (another anecdote from fambly time in mental ward) are not going to stay in grad school very long unless they get treatment.
Would anyone say it was worse to put someone in a (locked) ward than to let them have screaming hallucinations on the street? That may be the problem here: the disconnect between lay people whose experience of the mentally troubled is "PhD student with depression" - and so "involuntary committment" sounds like the worst of the bad old days of the snakepits - and the lay people whose experience of the mentally troubled is "guy or gal with crazed zombie expression screaming in the street" - and so "the jail population aren't any worse than the grad school population for rates of mental illness" sounds like complete out-of-touch with reality.
Agreed, and furthermore for anyone who doesn't live near an encampment, it is easy to see homelessness and the question of what to do as an abtract issue. After all, the homeless are already "somewhere else" and it feels good to advocate for their freedom, such as it is. But then when the encampment shows up on their block, or takes over their neighborhood park, then it becomes a real issue.
Suppose SF decided to pony up the $250 million/year to house 7,000 homeless people in free housing. Why are we forecasting that 7,000 number as static after the announcement of free SF apartments to any and all?
I was also surprised that what appears to be a perverse incentive wasn't addressed. Does anyone know of arguments for why this isn't a perverse incentive?
It would have the upside of making San Francisco affordable for artists again.
It's funny, I haven't seen many people acknowledge it let alone address it. I do vaguely remember research years ago purporting to show that the homeless do not move cities for better services, but I was not persuaded.
Anyone telling you that is lying. Just go and ask homeless people where they grew up. When I was in NYC I never met a single homeless kid who was from NYC.
Suppose you came upon a small town of 600 adults. The mayor tells you that while the large majority of the town's people are kind and decent, 6 of them are complete scumbags who just have to be locked up or else the town would be in flames. Everyone knows everyone, and he can personally vouch for this being true, he says. Does this seem like a mass incarceration crisis?
What if it were 2 million, in a nation of 200 million adults?
Quantity has a quality of its own. The situation does not scale well. In a small town, the jail wouldn’t be as nightmarish. And of course the whole “trust the system “ part does not hold at all.
The tricky part is, if the mayor is personally vouching for this, how do you know if all 6 are indeed scumbags who would set the town in flames - or 4 indeed would, and the other 2 had a personal squabble with the mayor, or had a different religion or sexual tastes or economic ideology than he had?
There is a place for due process (though it is something of a flimsy reed itself, unfortunately).
Scott says the cause in the murder spike was the BLM protests demotivating the police. However, I would point out that the same summer was the first time since the start of the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns the weather was warm and people were going out, so the crime spike could be partially attributable to that.
I haven't seen any evidence that the protests had anything to do with crime spikes other then a pro police talking point that was uncritically accepted and repeated.
"However, I would point out that the same summer was the first time since the start of the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns the weather was warm and people were going out, so the crime spike could be partially attributable to that."
Did this happen outside the United States?
"I haven't seen any evidence that the protests had anything to do with crime spikes other then a pro police talking point that was uncritically accepted and repeated."
Could you imagine any evidence changing your mind?
I wish this were in the book review contest so I could vote for it. My one complaint is the opening, where you say "It builds off the kind of stories familiar to most Bay Area residents:", when even in your very review you point out that the homeless thing is primarily an issue in specific parts of SF, not even the whole city, let alone the bay area.
Still, most Bay Area residents visit San Francisco from time to time (or else they'll tell you "I don't visit San Francisco any more, the homeless problem has got too bad").
I live in the East Bay and this is familiar to me. I think downtown Berkeley and Oakland are pretty similar to this, and I think most Bay Area residents often visit at least one of downtown Oakland, Berkeley, or SF.
Concur. I'm 45 minutes from SF, don't work there, and still consider myself significantly impacted by the homeless situation as it restricts my ability/desire to take my kids to the theater downtown, to walk around lake Merritt, etc.
1. We really need to figure out a way to _allow cheaper housing_, but the details, e.g. where, how much, what's a good new 'minimum cheapness', etc., are Hell (where The Devil lives).
2. Could police departments just keep dedicate patrol officers at 'cheap housing buildings'? If there's no need or desire for policing, then they could be re-allocated. But a commitment to dedicated policing, if it's required/wanted, might assuage the (legitmate) concerns of existing residents where this housing is built/developed.
3. I think there's a *considerable* 'premium' to be had in NOT housing the homeless, or drug addicts (with a 'disorder'), or even just poor people, all together in very concetrated areas. I think making 'cheap housing' *legal*, for everyone basically, and cities/townse/etc. just buying/renting 'regular housing' as needed, would be WAY better than any other proposed policies I've encountered.
4. Can we *please* just sell drugs, manufactured by, e.g. Pfizer, in "would be banned" stores already? Black markets are just fucking terrible, for rule of law; as a consumer, they *can* be perfectly fine (if at least a *little* scary).
Policing thoughts this made me think of:
1. I think we should encourage police officers to *want* to be recorded.
2. I think 'resisting' the police, let alone fleeing, should be punished severely. Some people seem to get away with inflicting a LOT of at-any-one-time low-level misery on others around them, but any individual instance of bad behavior isn't 'profitable' to police. I'm thinking of things like the 'dirt bike gangs' in NYC.
3. I think 'being bad while fucked up' should result in both: (a) being charged/prosecuted/punished for 'being bad'; (b) a *short-term* mandatory 'detox'/'sobering-up' (that's also safe, e.g. includes careful, gradual cessation because of dangerous withdrawal effects). I would *happily* include alcohol among the substances that qualify, while under their influence, as someone being 'fucked up'.
This seems 'wrong':
> a so-far-permanent spike in murders nationwide
Wouldn't it be a so-far-permanent scaling of a steep cliff leading to a mostly flat plateau?
... and I've now read more of your review and noted that all of the above in the numbered lists are basically mentioned.
It does seem like 'political vocabulary' is (almost?) deliberately confusing, e.g. 'harm reduction, 'de-institutionalization', or "sweeping institutionalization". Bleh
> But on the Outside View, wanting to institute a law I fully intend to break, where I would get enraged if it were applied against me personally, seems somewhat hypocritical.
I think [policing-3] above is the way to square this circle: you're fine because you're NOT getting 'fucked up' in public (or really fucked up at all), or otherwise committing _victimful_ crimes while fucked up; the other people who ARE getting fucked in public, or committing crimes, are the ones for whom these laws should apply.
But I think there absolutely should be a clear, consistent, and as simple as possible, standard for being released from involuntary commitment. Not having this is horrifying.
And, sure, if some municipality _wants_ to allow 'long term camping', then sure, they should be able to go ahead and live with the consequences. (Maybe they should consider [thought-2] tho?) We seem to agree on this anyways.
>2. Could police departments just keep dedicate patrol officers at 'cheap housing buildings'? If there's no need or desire for policing, then they could be re-allocated. But a commitment to dedicated policing, if it's required/wanted, might assuage the (legitmate) concerns of existing residents where this housing is built/developed.
People want to feel safe, but not many want the police to be actually right there at all times.
If there are police officers at all times at the cheap housing building, there are effectively police officers at all times at all of the surrounding buildings as well. I more meant that this would be an issue for the people in the area who are *not* living in the cheap housing themselves, but reports also seem to indicate (based on Scott's article and various comments) that the homeless themselves would probably reject an offer of cheap housing if it came coupled with being constantly monitored by the police.
Edit: Upon writing that "out loud" I realize that "cheap housing with constant police surveillance" sounds suspiciously similar to jail.
Having a police officer stationed or patrolling an apartment complex doesn't seem anything like "being constantly monitored by the police".
And I guess they wouldn't _have_ to be literally in the building either; just dedicated to responding for that area.
I don't understand what I'm failing to convey that's resulting in you thinking this is at all comparable to jail/prison.
All of the residents would have their own private/shared rooms/apartments. The police wouldn't be able to enter without standard justifications. How is that anything like jail/prison?
Well if we're just talking about one officer taking a nap in his patrol car in the parking lot outside I would agree that isn't very much like jail
In general any situation that involves armed agents of the state monitoring people just in case is more like jail than not even if it isn't directly equivalent (reminder that I said "suspiciously similar" not identical or equivalent).
Thanks very much for presenting the absolute numbers for the Portugal Opiate Deaths, and not just scaled numbers!
The absolute numbers are really small. If the deaths are independent, and presumably follow Poisson statistics, a _single_ standard deviation for a typical year with about 25 deaths is already 5. Very few of the year-to-year changes are statistically significant at the 3sigma level: The 26->10 drop from 2010->2011 and the 37->54 rise from 2014->2015. All else is plausibly noise.
One thing I've been wondering lately is whether there have been attempts to create rural homeless shelters, and if they would be any more effective. I don't have any strong reasons to think this would work better, and it's possible that it's really just manifesting an instinctive desire for out of sight out of mind. But urban concentration of the homeless seems very consistently to line up with bad outcomes, and I wonder if creating a separate space could help.
Certainly, it would be the wrong solution for anyone who's been reduced to homelessness solely or mostly due to poverty. But maybe better for the ones in that situation because of drugs or mental illness?
If anyone knows of something like this, I'd be really interested to read about how it turned out.
For centuries, the rural homeless person was a basic social archetype -- the "tramp" or (in somewhat later usage) "hobo."
It may even be the case that the problem of urban homelessness as a social irritant reflects the imperfect adaptation to new circumstances of a far older stratum of homeless customs that were much more functional in rural settings.
For instance, and to your specific question, there really is no lack of available *shelter* in the countryside, a fact that is fundamental to the tramping life. Why? Because country folk are constantly erecting cheap, unguarded structures for the purpose of housing (or transporting, in the hobo/train case) livestock. If you're conscientious, you can always knock at the house and ask to sleep in the barn; people will often say yes. Mary and Joseph did this, etc., etc. If not, or if you've gotten word that the owner is a cantankerous guy with a shotgun, you just bed down with the sheep and none's the wiser.
tl;dr, a "rural homeless shelter" doesn't really make sense, because the concept of a homeless shelter corresponds to the need to address the specific ways homelessness becomes problematic when it leaves the rural context.
This is actually something that's been on my mind a little. My idea goes like this;
My region in the plains has many small abandoned ghost towns where the houses are for sale for like, $10,000 - $20,000. What if we bought one of those towns entirely, made the buildings habitable, made it a "Dry town" and then offered 2-3 week stays for free there for those looking to detox before entering a rehab program? (Right now, detox is the bottleneck I'm told, few enter the rehab program because they can't do the 2 week detox.) but if it were out in the country in a little town with no drugs, some walking trails ect, maybe it would be easier to stay sober in that environment?
I was gentle on the subject of American cultural memory apparently having forgotten the hobo. I'd like to remain gentle now. Still, the mind boggles at the suggestion that prohibition is easily enforced in poor rural communities with ramshackle housing. Moonshiners, anyone?
Your region in the plains has "many small abandoned ghost towns" full of unused but basically functional structures. You want to turn one of these into "a little town with no drugs," to which you plan to send a cohort of drug addicts. On day one, one of your residents walks eight hours and covers three ghost towns, assessing the most promising location for a meth lab. By day seven, he's fully operational, selling to the rest of the cohort, and completely indifferent to your permission structure for getting into the rehab program.
And yet... If there is one technology that has advanced most strikingly since those days, it is electronics - with communication, sensors, and computation.
What if the synthetic "dry town" had cameras all over the place and (gritting my teeth) ankle bracelets on all the residents - not _forbidding_ them to leave, or to come into contact with the guy setting up the meth lab, but noticing if they do, and setting up a quiet chat about it?
Yeah, we could stipulate that maybe the technological capacity exists to monitor drug users who volunteer for detox in the way you describe.
But at that point, what's the use of sending them out to the country? The nice thing about the country is the availability of open space, the feeling that you can take a walk in any direction. Either your plan is to shut that down by requiring everyone to stay in range of the cameras, or else they can just wander off and meet up with their meth dealer, ankle bracelets or not.
"Either your plan is to shut that down by requiring everyone to stay in range of the cameras, or else they can just wander off and meet up with their meth dealer, ankle bracelets or not."
A third possibility is that the ankle bracelets (including the one on the meth dealer) can transmit locations, so the authorities can notice the meetings - without anyone being prevented from taking a solo walk in the woods. Come to think of it - are fitbits or similar technologies good enough to notice recreational drug use?
That's an interesting question about fitbits, etc. But I think you're sort of assuming an unrealistically depopulated setting, where the dealer can't just use runners unaffiliated with the program. Or where other locals won't themselves entrepreneurially notice the existence of Camp Detox and go into business supplying the residents.
Eh, yeah, that'd certainly be the main risk. However, even that failure mode doesn't seem that bad. Now instead of having a detox town to get people clean we just have a little country town they can go get high in without bothering others.
Is the flavor of high that they typically get one where they don't bother others?
My point of view is that, for drugs that are _just_ damaging to the person taking them, the drug war was a bad idea from day 1. We don't apply comparable legal penalties to tobacco users. We provide some assistance to people trying to quit smoking, but not the sort of thing that turns a city upside down.
Now, if their high of choice makes them belligerent, that is a much stickier problem (albeit alcohol does that to some people, and alcohol prohibition was one of the very rare examples of a law that was such a spectacular failure that it actually got repealed).
"The researchers do not use the terms “local policy” or “social attitudes” in the paper itself."
But in the paper it states:
"To account for these unobserved local covariates, we include a CoC-level dynamic latent factor F 0 iβi,t, allowing for small departures from the cluster-level regression that may be due to local policies, cultural attitudes toward homelessness, affordable housing initiatives, and many other difficult to observe local factors."
Doesn't take away from your main point, but they do mention local policy, and "cultural" attitudes seems like a reasonable proxy for "social" attitudes.
" I cannot find this report anywhere, the methodology does not seem to be public, and when people give a link to it, it’s always to this Google document which assumes there are exactly 4000 people in this category and then breaks them down further - 100% have psychosis, 95% have alcoholism, etc. "
"Through an in-depth data analysis, conducted in collaboration with the DPH Whole Person Care team, the Mental Health Reform team found that approximately 18,000 adults experienced homelessness in San Francisco in fiscal year 2018-19. These individuals were identified by the Coordinated Care Management System (CCMS), a DPH-operated system integrating 15 separate databases from DPH, HSH and the Human Services Agency (HSA). CCMS defines people as experiencing homelessness in the fiscal year if they either: 1) utilize a City service that indicates housing instability, for example, a City shelter, or 2) self-report homelessness while accessing health care services.
While the DPH estimate of 18,000 people experiencing homelessness in FY1819 may appear to conflict with San Francisco’s Point-in-Time Count (8,035 people counted in January 2019)1, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) details in its Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress that the full-year number is generally 2.5 times greater than the single-night count.
Using the CCMS-defined 18,000 people experiencing homelessness as the base, the Mental Health Reform team analyzed the population’s diagnostic epidemiology to understand the associated burden of behavioral health issues. The team found nearly 4,000 adults experiencing homelessness who also suffer with cooccurring mental health and substance use disorders. Specifically, in addition to homelessness, this group of 4,000 has a history of both psychosis and substance use disorder."
Shellenberger I believe makes the mistake of using the one-point-in-time number (8035) as his denominator as opposed to the CCMS number (18,000), which the authors use in their report.
"15 separate databases from DPH, HSH and the Human Services Agency (HSA)."
I mean, that's part of the entire problem right there. 15 separate databases that probably don't communicate with each other, so who knows if John Smith is homeless or not when generating this week's report on "how many emergency accommodation places do we need to access?" Easy for John to slip between the cracks.
One joined-up body would be better, but of course in practice that would mean yet *another* agency being set up to handle Homelessness Inter-agency Co-ordination, so now we have *16* separate databases that don't communicate with each other.
“They hoped to build ~10,000 units for the homeless, at a projected price of $140,000 each.”
This might be a bit misleading; I think Proposition HHH’s contribution of ~$140,000 was always meant to be a *partial* subsidy of per-unit costs. Here’s the text of the proposition in question:
See page 23 of that PDF, which shows the subsidy allocation. Also if you "ctrl f" for "subsidy" you'll note other places where it's made clear.
A more readable version of the same point comes from the city’s controller, who writes:
“Funds from Proposition HHH make up only a portion of total development costs. Across all projects in the LAHD/HHH pipeline, the HHH subsidy per unit is approximately $134,000, or 23% of the total development cost of a project.”
“But in fact, five years later, LA has completed only 700 units, and the cost per unit has spiralled to $531,000 each. Nobody has a good explanation for what happened, with Shellenberger quoting one local service provider who said a lot of it was “bullshit costs”. “
a. On only completing 700 units, I have some evidence here from the comptroller that’s a bit more nuanced:
“the total number of completed units (1,142) is wholly inadequate in the context of the ongoing homelessness emergency”
And
“...there are almost 4,400 units in construction.”
So – about +400 on where you were (still “wholly inadequate” per the comptroller’s editorializing), but there are also thousands more in construction per the controller’s same report.
I think the ~400 discrepancy might be that the *Reason* article is from 2021, and the comptroller's report from 2022.
B. As to “bullshit costs,” there are a couple of other, perhaps complementary, explanations.
-One is just context from above: the HHH funds were always only meant to be a subsidy.
-Two is the city is guilty of overconfident modeling, according to the controller, and that overconfidence was taxed very heavily by the pandemic and its consequences in the construction markets. He writes:
“Even before the pandemic, a study by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation found that construction costs for multifamily buildings across the State were rising due to factors such as gaps in the construction workforce and higher materials costs. The unprecedented disruption brought on by the pandemic and other factors accelerated these trends. Existing labor shortages in the construction industry became more pronounced and the cost of some construction materials—such as lumber—skyrocketed. While these costs have somewhat stabilized from their record highs, they remain markedly higher than their pre-pandemic levels.”
The controller’s solution here, fwiw, is in part to reallocate much of the remaining HHH funding to “acquisition, rehabilitation, or adaptive reuse opportunities,” which seems in line with your suggestion around short- and medium-term mediocre solutions being more achievable and practical than idealistic HF-ish ones.
“Larceny, which is shoplifting and other petty theft, rose 50 percent, from roughly 3,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to about 4,500 in 2019.”
Short version is that I think he's correct, but that he complicated his correctness somewhat by describing "shoplifting" as an example of "larceny."
2. The source you show that compares Kern to San Francisco is found here:
And it's the California’s DOJ site. And here’s it where Shellenberger is I think on pretty firm ground, and where some of the anecdotes you’ve heard from your friends and patient *do in fact* match up with the data.
The primary challenge with the graph from your essay is that it uses only SHOPLIFTING for its comparisons. Shellenberger is talking about LARCENY (and again then complicates that somewhat by stating shoplifting as an example of larceny).
But the DOJ separates out "larceny" from "shoplifting." They are two different classifications, and have different data attached to them.
And, within that classification framework, it’s true that shoplifting follows the pattern of the graph in your essay. But larceny almost perfectly matches onto Shellenberger’s description. Source is here --
-- though you will have to input "San Francisco" to check.
According to that site: There were 24,304 reported larcenies in 2011 in SF. There were 39,687 in 2019 in SF. This tracks very nicely with Shellenberger’s per 100,000 claims.
But shoplifting barely moves at all, and has very few reported incidences, as you discussed.
3. How to resolve this?
Under the CA penal code, shoplifting is “entering a commercial establishment, during business hours, with the *intent to steal,* where value does not exceed $950.”
So one guess is this is kind of “niche” charge. Once “intent to steal” becomes “actual stealing” it gets reclassified as larceny, of which there has been the steep rise that your friends have described (and which, in absolute terms, is more than 10x as common as shoplifting). That's speculation, though. What seems clearer is that Shellenberger's claim of larceny appears to be sound, empirically, according to CA DOJ.
"San Fransicko’s description of Amsterdam solving its drug and crime problems matches the other sources I found, although I’m confused about how much harm reduction was involved."
I'd dissent with your and Shellenberger's description of the trends here.
(That's the central bureau of statistics for the Netherlands.) It brings you to the underlying cause of death, broken out by subtopic, for the whole country.
And then if you filter "topic" by "5.2 -- due to use of drugs" you'll see a pretty steep rise in drug-related deaths from about 2012 to now.
Here's one account of many in the popular press describing the phenomenon --
3. This corresponds (at least in theory) to the more-than-doubling of homelessness in that same period.
i.e., One reasonable prior is that increased homelessness is associated with increased drug use, and that increased drug use is associated with increased deaths due to use of drugs. That seems to be borne out in the official Dutch data. As homelessness has gotten worse, so too have drug-related deaths. What I can't square is your ACS data which shows overall declining drug use. I have to look into that some more.
"This probably means Shellenberger and I agree on most real-world cases, but I remain invested in the tiny sliver of moral difference between our positions."
This is such a beautiful description of most political arguments.
So I'll have to come back to this read. But as it begins with a lot of agonizing over why rich cities have homeless but not so much the suburbs, let me share some rather simple insights:
1. Pre-pandemic, I once debated with someone who asserted San Fran. was seeing a rise in homeless because they had passed a min. wage increase. I spent quite some time getting the data, homeless reports love to say things like "40% increase from last year" but never tell you what the base was in actual numbers. But when the dust settled, I found for each new homeless person, the city had added about 60 jobs. Keep that ratio in mind, 1 homeless person per 60 new jobs.
2. My mother-in-law supposedly once did 30 jobs in 30 days in Newark NJ. How does one do that? Well you waitress one night, bar tend another, check coats at a nightclub, help a store doing its inventory. This story was no doubt exaggerated and the 60's was no doubt a less formal time, these weren't let's set you up on direct deposit and a 401K type jobs, but you can still do this sort of thing.
3. Why no homeless in the suburbs? Because they are a social desert. Cities generate a lot of interaction which means a lot of opportunities, esp. if all you're asking is pocket money, some food, etc.
60 formal, on the books, here's your 401K, select your health insurance plan, you made it through 3 interviews, types of jobs seem about right to generate 1 informal job. By informal job, though, I mean a homeless person can support themselves. Maybe it's a series of small cash jobs, maybe it's collecting bottles and cashing them in, maybe its begging or stealing, but that can work. It can work even if you have mental or drug problems.
In contrast in the suburbs, 60 new jobs doesn't yield that sort of dynamic. Everyone is locked in their homes. What that might yield, though, is your kids moving their friends into your basement. Various types of couch surfers. But when that wears out or just doesn't work, the city is where it can assuming you are able to tolerate adjustments to your social dignity.
Ha! Unsurprisingly we see yet another cheap ideologue trying to claim the victories of the 'other side' as their own victories. First famous openly gay politician Harvey Milk does something...decades later some conservative hack will pretend like that was a win for 'his side'.
Then he made the incredible mistake of challenging Scott to a statistics and sociological phenomenon argument...bad move Shellenberger, bad move. A few cherry picked highly specific numbers and folksy stories is almost always a sign of a poorly formed narrative whose goal is to manipulate rather than inform or understand.
Not to mention the highly diverse and historically broad set of policies to run city governments are not well suited to being shoved into the tiny boxes of currently trending political baskets.
What has been done and by whom in various local governments in diverse states, climates, and nations will vary too greatly to fit into anything other than 'good polices that work are good and bad policies that don't work are bad'.
A point I often make is 'anything can be done badly'. This covers most problems in most places when people want to assert that some specific thing that isn't working well is very easy to globalise into a broad principle. This sort of intentional attribution and correlations processes are usually done intentionally in the political arena and are classic tools of manipulators.
The sometimes fun Bret Weinstein on a recent episode of his podcast had a line "Conservatives celebrate and defend the victories of the progressives of the prior era as their own".
Claim 3 and the Interlude seem to be very poorly performed/tried seriously by cities and fall into the 'anything can be done badly' camp of approaches.
Hotels are obviously dumb and are the opposite of 'Housing First' in that they come with lots of conditions to the point that people felt like they were in prison being there. That sure sounds like conditional help to me if you have to accept prison like conditions before you accept housing. Housing First is said often, but they are empty hollow words almost everywhere. Shelters and hotels and other prison like environments are highly highly conditional and nothing like the free conditions which those in regular housing experience.
Building new buildings or finding ways to concentrate the homeless into hotels and such are all really bad ideas that are obviously bad and had bad outcomes. No surprises there. Newsome tried nothing and now he's all out of ideas! Go figure!
Taking approaches like trying a long term plan to solve 1/3 of the problem and never finishing it due to what was probably corruption and cost disease in construction...is also a really bad idea with obviously bad outcomes. Again, another non-surprise bad faith attempt which succeed in loading up their corrupt construction friends. Help the poor? How about a handout to the rich instead? It didn't work? Colour me surprised.
The label on the sticker might say 'Housing First' but as you noted...none of these cities have tried you know... ACTUALLY provided housing for all of the homeless people at the same time and in an immediate sense with no conditions which did not concentrate them in their own ghetto. Who knew it was tough to get to sleep in a hotel room or a shelter or a crappy apartment when all of your neighbours are crazy and howling and screaming all night every night?
The clearcut and obvious easy solution of just renting large numbers of apartments which are NOT clustered together idiotically to create horrible high concentration brand new sudden ghettos around hotels or housing developments....is the obvious thing everyone says they want to do which somehow has NEVER happened!!!?!?!?
We had one idea, so we tried it out badly in half-baked ways over and over again for 30 years and it didn't' work. So the original idea was never actually tried? Yep!
It makes me think...all those bad people who want to do bad things to set goals, barriers, and whatever are real and the NIMBY triggering dumb concentration ideas and half-measures don't even begin to count as real Housing First initiatives.
Does housing solve why someone became homeless or what happened to them while they were homeless or their health or drug problems? Of course not, we don't need studies for this! How can smart people talk themselves soo stupid that they think 4 walls and a roof might impact health or addiction? Those are their own problems with their own solutions, but stable housing and getting people fed and off the streets is a LOT better than having them on the streets!
Do we want to solve homelessness or not? The answer is staring us in the face, everyone pretends they are doing it already, and yet in no place has it actually been tried on 100% of the entire homeless population in an even halfway decent attempt.
I really hope one of those mayors wins and uses 3% of the city budget to end homelessness overnight. Or at least give the real housing first approach a fair go.
When I see 7,000 flats rented for 7,000 formerly homeless people in SF, then we'll see if housing solves homelessness....or at least the crisis aspect of it being really bad, obvious, and annoyingly in the fact of CBD workers and Tourists. Spoiler! It does work and very few people will choose to sleep on the street if they have an apartment, though a small number will or will some of the time as their transportation and pan handling tactics are not solved by housing either.
Wait, is the idea behind housing first that there should be literally 0 strings attached to the housing provided? Give them a place to stay and let them do whatever they want indefinitely? I don't see any possibility that could be effective, not to mention the perverse incentives.
>It does work and very few people will choose to sleep on the street if they have an apartment, though a small number will or will some of the time as their transportation and pan handling tactics are not solved by housing either.
Has anyone ever been annoyed by a homeless person *sleeping*? (obviously the answer is technically yes, hyperbole.) the public nuisance part is 99% what they do while they're awake though.
And after we've done this; why should anyone in a cheap apartment keep paying rent? Move your stuff into a storage locker, live on the street for a night, get a free apartment, move your stuff back in; have free housing; have several hundred dollars a month more to spend on whatever you want.
Claim 5 on drug use - this seems very strange to me and is a highly narrow way of viewing the issue. Granted the original topic is homelessness and indeed drug use is higher in the homeless population than the general population and is obviously not a great thing if one is trying to get their life in order.
But if we talk about the criminality of drug use and the difficulty in getting jobs when one has a prison record in the USA....how would putting drug addict homeless people in actual prisons help? I guess that is one way to give them housing? But it makes life harder for them forevermore? Though many of them will have already been in prison for other reasons or have criminal records, so it may be neither here nor there as their lives are hard and fallen apart for many other reasons already.
But the humane aspect of the argument should have a place and is a glaring omission. Cost, cost, cost, money, money, money....is that realllllly how we should think of government like some kind of business? Or do whatever is the cheapest thing always without any other considerations?
Is it not a higher moral goal and outcome to see homeless people put into rented homes and offered treatment rather than measuring policing costs and throwing them in jail from time to time?
We can look at these on paper and in dollars...but are they in any way equivalent outcomes?
Not to mention, there is a very strong argument drug use should not be criminalised for anyone and the half-assed attempt in Portugal failed to solve the violence and QUAITY problem by leaving the supply of drugs in the hands of criminals! Many overdoses and drug deaths are due to low quality and variable quality drugs causing accidental deaths.
Portugal is yet another half-measure and you see people dying on accident from drugs which might be 3 times stronger or weaker at any given time or might contain more or less fentanyl. Full legalisation and a clean reliable supply would avoid many deaths, but certainly not all.
But the moral and humane choices seem completely absent when we talk about what kind of society we want to be and how we treat each other.
> Cost, cost, cost, money, money, money....is that realllllly how we should think of government like some kind of business?
This money money money was expropriated by the state from those who earned it by the sweat of their brow. That is not inherently unjust, but it is *presumptively* unjust. The presumption of injustice may be overcome only by showing that the taxpayers as a whole are made better off by the government's use of their money than they would've been had they retained it to use for themselves.
I heartily disapprove of putting "drug addict homeless people" into "actual prisons" for the simple fact of being drug addict homeless people. If for no other reason, because the US Supreme Court has clearly stated that the criminalization of that status is flatly unconstitutional.
Insofar as drug addict homeless people wind up in prisons for committing, e.g., assault or larceny, I think this "helps" to the extent it makes clear that society deems these crimes sufficiently serious to not offer a "drug addict homeless person" free pass to commit them.
Punishment of conduct (e.g., possession, consumption) is not unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court declared criminal punishment for the status of *being* a drug addict unconstitutional in Robinson v. California (1962).
As for homelessness, the classic case invalidating a traditional vagrancy statute as unconstitutionally vague as to the conduct proscribed is Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville (1972).
Well, sure. Realistically, if you're addicted to a banned substance, it's very likely you've handled said substance within the statute of limitations for possession. In that sense, you're probably guilty of a crime.
But are you guilty of a crime the state can prove beyond a reasonable doubt? In Robinson, the defendant was charged with being a heroin addict on the basis of "tracks" on his arms. Insofar as those "tracks" were an indicator of anything at all, they were an indicator of past drug use at some time.
But the state didn't charge Robinson with possession or consumption of any particular substance on any particular occasion. Instead, he was charged with the crime of being "addicted to the use of narcotics." That's what the Supreme Court said was an unconstitutional criminalization of status as opposed to conduct.
I don't think putting the addicts in jail helps (qua drugs, not qua robbing, stealing, violent offences) unless they get treatment to get sober.
And part of the problem seems to be relapses: in jail it's harder to get drugs, they are on programmes which support them, there is someone there to make sure they are progressing.
They get out, go back to their community, fall back into the same circumstances, and start using again. Rinse and repeat.
It's a very tricky, very hard to get right, balance between respecting the rights of people (including the criminal and the derelict and the hapless) so the state can't force them to live here not there and other personal matters, and punishing breaking of laws and offences against the rest of the community. Addicts need support, but that also means "don't stand there being non-judgemental when you see them doing stupid shit, stand there enabling them to continue on with stupid shit, just because you're chock-full of social theory about the repressive institutional system".
I'm fully in support of jail for drug dealers, even minor ones, even "but I was just growing weed to treat my poor sick dad" ones. Make the game not worth the candle for selling drugs, and the supply will dry up or at least be much scarcer.
>And part of the problem seems to be relapses: in jail it's harder to get drugs, they are on programmes which support them, there is someone there to make sure they are progressing.
This strikes me as an awfully rosy picture of what is happening in jails, but it may be accurate for Ireland. Specifically "someone there to make sure they are progressing" struck me as probably not quite right at least in the US. I suppose it is probably harder to get drugs in jail, but it doesn't exactly seem to be a problem for the prison drug trade and I'm not entirely sure it is true either.
Because money does not come out of thin air. The government gets money from the people, and if people see more and more of their income being snapped up and nothing perceptible coming out of it, then they vote out that government and vote in one which reverses taking such a big bite.
And that means less money for the services. So the services *have* to be efficient in spending the money, which means producing results. If you're throwing money at the problem and it's not helping reduce homelessness or treating the problems of the homeless, then it's useless.
"Drug use should not be criminalised for anyone" sounds lovely. It's not so lovely when it means people freely, openly dealing and using drugs in public, then going on to commit offences when high as kites, including 'stealing to buy drugs, assaulting people in the streets, smashing up things, being dangers to themselves'.
One way of dealing with the problem is "sure, no criminal offences anymore. you want to use as much heroin or meth or fent as you like? go right ahead! you want to use so much you kill yourself? not our problem!"
Interesting review. But did Shellenberger check (or has anyone else checked) if San Francisco’s homeless-problem might be due to a Tiebout effect? You can get a rough check on that, if you can find data on the percentage of the Bay Area homeless that are native to the area and how many that have moved in from other parts of the US, compared to (say) New York, or Huston, or Des Moines, or wherever. My hunch is that not only the percentage of the homeless, but also their composition (how many who have mental health problems for example) might at least partly be due to Tiebout-effect.
Tiebout suggested that the population in a country sort themselves into different local communities by “voting with their feet” (digression: a phrase first used by Lenin). This results in a Tiebout equilibrium (Wiki it). In that equilibrium, everyone has sorted themselves into communities which corresponds to their cultural, local-political, and other preferences (digression II: libertarians tend to like that idea).
When I was at UC Berkeley back in the days, I noticed the saying “everything that has a screw loose, rolls down to California”. Sayings often have some empirical backing, otherwise they would not be sayings. That could be a sign of a Tiebout effect, but real data is needed of course.
The old hippie/cult/any odd behavior goes/ image of the Bay Area, combined with a left-activist public welfare system & liberal drug policy, should attract not only homeless people as such, but homeless people of a particular type. (Side note: If that image of the Bay Area is correct, is not important. The important thing is if mentally frail homeless people in the rest of the US believe it is. “If people believe that a situation is real, then it is real, in its consequences” - the good old sociological Thomas-theorem; I am in quoting mode.)
A further digression/thought on US welfare politics, while at it: A major difference between the US and the EU is that in the US, people can move across state borders, while in the EU only labor can. In the EU, EU citizens can be forced to go back to where they came from, if they are found to represent an “unacceptable burden on the national welfare system”. (For those with an interest in comparative welfare policies, check out the European Court in Luxembourg, the closest EU equivalent to the US supreme court, Case C-333/13, 2014, for the legal bite of this principle.)
If my memory does not fail me (it has been some years since I studied US welfare policy history), the US had a similar practice until the 1930s, when the US supreme court ruled that it violated the constitution if states denied tax-financed state welfare to US citizens migrating from other states.
…before that Supreme Court ruling (undoubtedly hailed by progressives at the time), some US states had something akin to European-style, tax-financed bottom-floor universal welfare systems. If I remember correctly, some US historians have argued that this court ruling led to a race to the bottom between states, and these state systems were watered down or abandoned. They could otherwise have been the embryos of a federal social welfare system for everybody; one of the main pieces of federal US welfare legislation missing compared to other high-income countries, if not counting federal food stamps and federal welfare for poor parents with children. (Well, ok, other historians – Jill Quadagno at least- has argued that a US federal tax-financed universal social welfare system would probably not have arrived in the US anyway, thanks to opposition in the Southern States for federal provision for people of all colors. But that is another story.)
Sorry for all the digressions, but comparative health & welfare policy is my field of research, making it hard not to go off on tangents... To get back to the main point: Did Shellenberger (or has anyone else) investigated the percentage of native versus non-native homeless people in the Bay Area, compared to elsewhere in the US? If not, that is a major piece missing from the book.
My experience with almost daily encounters with the California long term homeless (I surf every day and they are all around the beaches for the mild weather and free facilities) is that pretty much none of them are from the community they camp in. That is probably not the case for families which have recently lost their house, but I go along with those who see these as two separate problems — those who need shelter and those who are what we used to call "derelicts."
My take on the issue is that the current framing of the problem by those living in places like San Francisco is iatrogenic. It is more likely to make the problem worse than better. That said, my advice and considering the nomadic nature of addicts and the mentally disturbed is NHIMBY (No Homeless in My Back Yard). My version of voting with my feet is that I get to choose which beach to drive to each morning. And I know which communities ensure the homeless don’t take over and which ones can’t control the issue. In Del Mar, there is an occasional lone homeless person walking around, but no open camping and no visible crime (I have left my convertible parked with the top down for the last two years without any issue). In Pacific Beach or Ocean Beach, I would be crazy to do so as there are addicts and disturbed people everywhere (the stories I can tell!)
I guess my point is that considering some communities are actively subsidizing homelessness, my local solution is to allow them to continue to do so. All the police and other authorities need to do is make sure being homeless is less rewarding in their community than the one down the road. The homeless vote with their feet, I vote with mine, and local businesses vote with theirs.
"This results in a Tiebout equilibrium (Wiki it). In that equilibrium, everyone has sorted themselves into communities which corresponds to their cultural, local-political, and other preferences "
To an extent: if all the jobs and opportunities are in the big cities, then people move there even if they would, everything else being equal, prefer to stay in their local areas. So you get people living in less than ideal circumstances in the cities, which leads to crowding, high rents and house purchase prices, etc. and the hollowed-out rust belt communities which are dying since the big industrial employers left and nothing came in to replace them.
I might prefer to live in my small rural town, but if the only employment is in the city fifty to two hundred miles away, I have to go there, even if I'm not happy in a concrete jungle and it does *not* match my cultural, political, and other preferences.
Great review. I don't that it would be remotely possible, but what I think needs to be done is:
1. Raise billions of of public and private dollars to build high-rise market-rate housing in all of the industrial waterfront areas of the State from north to south. Like serious high-rises, 50,000 people a square mile, with new parks along the water and new transit stops on the inland side, along the SF Bay shoreline, along the LA river, etc. There are hundreds of square miles of that kind of waterfront, a hundred square miles of high-rise neighborhoods would house 5 million people. Stop arguing over whether to bulid 4-plexes and stumpy wood-frame apartments in single-family neighborhods, it doesn't fucking matter.
2. Set up tent camps out in the Central Valley and Deserts, maybe on military bases, and hire thousands of drug counselers, psychiatric professionals, nurses, job trainers, etc. Use the minimal coercion possible to remove homeless drug addicts and mentally ill people from city streets to these places, dry 'em out, heal them, train them, provide them a path to a productive and meaningful role in society. Accept that some of them might stay there for a very long time, make them decent enough that that is not a horrific outcome.
Both of those solutions are very expensive, but would also bring very high returns (revenue from the market-rate high rise rents and savings from avoided urban social services and policing costs). The currnet budget surplus in California would be more than sufficient to go a long ways towards funding these two efforts.
"Set up tent camps out in the Central Valley and Deserts, maybe on military bases, and hire thousands of drug counselers, psychiatric professionals, nurses, job trainers, etc. Use the minimal coercion possible to remove homeless drug addicts and mentally ill people from city streets to these places, dry 'em out, heal them, train them, provide them a path to a productive and meaningful role in society. Accept that some of them might stay there for a very long time, make them decent enough that that is not a horrific outcome."
Congratulations, that is the "sweeping institutionalistion" of Scott's objections and the "death camps" of Machine Interface. See the opposition that you face on this? I am not opposed to having people be involutarily committed if that's the last resort, and while I do think that state aid will be very much 'cheapest government contract crap', even - or especially - if it is farmed out to places like whatever the American version of Capita is, which *will* penny-pinch in every way to boost profits, like hiring unqualified staff so they pay minimum wage, not enough of them, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capita
Bad as it is, however, it is not as bad as the Bad Old Days and there are more regulations, more rights, and more advocacy groups protecting people using such services. So while tent camps in the desert will have the likes of Machine Interface hyperventilating about "locking up anyone who can remotely be called "insane", for life, without recourse, in filthy hovels where they'll have less rights than prison inmates and'll slowly die of manutrition, neglect and abuse", some kind of set of locations for that purpose isn't in principle a bad idea.
The big stumbling-block will be the expense. I've seen it in social housing - millions and millions promised and indeed paid out, yet somehow those sums never trickled down to the customer-facing part of the service, where it was "yeah that announcement about millions more for local government housing? you'll get a fraction of that, and only next year, if at all". I foresee a lot of the hundreds of millions going on task forces, committees, consultants, reports, etc. into the entire top-heavy edifice of provision agencies, and only a small amount getting paid out to actual "hire nurses, hire doctors, build facilities, support the homeless being treated".
And because the taxpayers see all this money being paid out, yet no difference being made, they will cut back on paying it out. Which leaves "cheapest crap" provisions that the homeless don't want to access, and the private services companies creaming off more and more for profits and less and less to the homeless, which only makes things worse.
Yes, that is maybe the biggest reason why essentially "we can't have nice things" with respect to the welfare state in America, we're too corrupt. Even if there's a clearly majority that might want something like universal health care or social housing or easily-obtainable and aggressive treatment for drug addiction and mental illness, and would gladly tax themselves to pay for it, the problem is that the funds will just go to corrupt "friends" of those in power, not to the intended beneficiaries.
We should form a committee to deliver a detailed report and a national action plan on getting more of our tax dollars to go towards actual service delivery. Naturally this Action plan will need a bureaucracy to oversee it and ensure that everyone is filling out the correct forms to avoid any corruption, and to issue periodic reports on how well the project is going.
"This is the question many of the California gubernatorial candidates asked. California has lots of money. There aren’t that many homeless people. Everyone is already committed to Housing First. So why don’t they have houses already?"
If California ever starts giving $3000/month housing to all homeless people, no questions asked, the first thing I'm doing is declaring myself homeless. That way I'll save myself $3000/month, which I'll use to take expensive vacations every month.
One small thing we could do to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place is giving people an attorney at housing court. Right now landlords hold a lot of power over their tenants since a lot of them simply can't afford to fight injustices in court (and since court battles are publicly registered going to court could cause you to have trouble renting new homes, even if you win).
I am still reading. Stopped to write a comment. I appreciate your trust of in-person reports about shoplifting. We live part-time in Seattle. We do see flagrant, open shoplifting, where the thieves just wheel out carts of stuff in front of security guards. This is a new thing. We asked why the guards don't stop it and they say a combination of the risk of crazy, violent response combined with no legal consequence is why. I guarantee most of it is not being reported. The remaining police are overwhelmed. Unless one is filing an insurance claim and a case number is required, there is no point in calling them to report theft. It is a waste of time.
Lots of people living in tents in public spaces. Appalling for a first world country. Impression here, anecdotal: lots of these folks seem to be post-incarceration. No social security income, no resumés, no ability to work or interest in it. Definitely in need of a more structured environment.
Great post scott, read all of it even though I live on the other side of the world. My only problem is the book's name: it always makes me think about that meme with the "sicko" standing next to a window going "ha ha ha! yes! yes!". It was kind of distracting.
To be fair, it's not just progressives or only progressives who ruin cities. I don't like a lot of the stuff that has been done to the capital city of my county, and we're not particularly 'progressive' politically. Conservatives and liberals can muck up cities, too.
This certainly sounds intuitively plausible (cities represent truly astounding levels of externality generation and coordination problems so presumably you would expect them to be ill-suited to pure laissez faire, the trouble being that government is more than capable of its own screw-ups in trying to fix things), but I'd be interested in hearing what Dublin dysfunction in particular you think can be laid at the feet of more conservative government?
(Not trying to be tendentious here, I know jack-all about Dublin and have no dog whatsoever in this fight, just interested.)
Portland Oregon is generally acknowledged to have a significant homeless population. The cities Joint Office of Homeless Services 2021 - 2022 Budget Review is interesting reading: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/cbo/article/781913.
"Portland City Council first declared a State of Emergency on Housing and Homelessness in October 2015. Since that time, the City has spent over half a billion dollars on housing and homeless services..."
500 million dollars in 5 years (the total is for 2015 -2016 through 2019 - 2020). It's good to understand how much money is involved.
The chart on Page 3 shows that the "HUD-defined houseless population" has been relatively constant over that time period at about 4000. I think the HUD definition is widely criticized as undercounting the homeless population, but I think the rate of change is what's important. We can probably trust the HUD definition for that, and what it shows is that spending half a billion dollars has had no significant effect on the homeless population.
Where does the money go? Part of the answer is in the same chart: "The total number of people provided with homeless services annually has increased by 40% since 2016." This number is approximately 8X the number counted in the HUD census. An uncharitable conclusion is JOHS has expanded the definition of homeless to include people suffering from "housing anxiety" so they can show a need to expand their budget.
It could be argued that if Portland had not spent that 500 million, the problem would be even worse. On the other hand, I suspect few Portlanders would agree with the statement "Portland is doing a good job of addressing homelessness." From this recent LA Times article, it seems that even a few homeless people would agree: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-06-21/portland-liberal-support-lags-homeless-services-drugs.
"San Francisco has about 7,000 homeless people. The median SF apartment costs about $3,000 per month (presumably the government officials in charge would be trying to buy cheaper-than-median apartments for this project, but they seem bad at that, so let’s stick with median as a high-end estimate). So that’s $250 million/year to rent every homeless person an apartment. "
That's $250 million *this year*.
But the 7,000 homeless people San Francisco has this year, aren't the same 7,000 homeless people it had last year or the 7,000 it will have next year. If the mean turnover time for a "homeless" person is one year, then you pay $250 million this year, and $500 million next year, and $750 million the year after that. And, OK, you probably reach a stable equilibrium where the number of new homeless people every year is balanced by the number of formerly-homeless people who age out and die every year, before you're spending *all* of SF's $14 billion annual budget on free apartments, but I think it's still going to be intolerably expensive. Maybe the mean turnover time for homeless people is two years rather than one; would be interesting to know but I really doubt it's going to be long enough to make this plan affordable.
If you're assuming the formerly-homeless people in the free apartments, who would have moved from the streets to a cheap rented apartment next year when they got their life semi-straightened out, will just as quickly move from a free apartment to a cheap rented apartment just because they can, then I think probably not. The marginal homeless person who finally gets a job and can barely manage to afford an apartment, is probably spending half their pay on rent. Which is probably better than sleeping on the street. But if it's a choice between free apartment and keep all your money, or spend half your money for an apartment that's probably no better than the free one...
Is the plan for the free apartments to be *really really crappy*, substantially worse than the cheapest apartments on the market right now? If so, you kind of need to make that part explicit. If the plan is to automatically throw people out of the free apartments as soon as they get a decent job, that's an obvious perverse incentive. And "...as soon as the bureaucracy determines that they no longer need it" is going to have a whole lot of perverse incentives.
As someone who has, on occasion, been homeless (and being 195 cm and 125 kg and sleeping in a '99 Camry is not an experience I can recommend) and also only having read the first section, I have a feeling that there may very well be different "classes" (?) of homeless.
I will admit that I was fortunate enough to not be faced with the prospect, and fair warning, this is basically just "gut feeling" levels of rigor, but I simply feel that there is likely a distinction to be made between "people who are currently homeless because they lost their housing due to recent misfortune or price increases" and "people who are currently homeless and shoot drugs and defecate on the sidewalk". To call back a few weeks, just describing all of these people as "homeless" strikes me as akin to (and likely as effective for "solving the problem") as calling everyone from the person with mild Aspergers and the truly severely 24/7 care require disabled person with autism, "Autistic".
"Homelessness is a spectrum", etc.
And perhaps I am absolutely, completely wrong, and I might well have also ended up using the sidewalk as a restroom and doing hard drugs if it had gone on longer than it did. I'm also probably significantly more able to quickly find *some* job doing *something* that pays decently than your average homeless person, and thus that may also color my views on the topic.
I don't know, and hell, maybe you even address all of this in the, uh, 90% of the article I haven't actually read yet, but it seems as though simply trying to treat this as a monolithic problem isn't going to actually be effective.
I dunno. I understand that you disagree with Shellenberger about the "drugs and mental illness" driving factor versus housing costs, but... why couldn't it be *both* in this case?
That is to say, yes, the general levels of homelessness in SF may well be primarily driven by housing prices. But perhaps the thing that makes SF seem so particularly bad is the proportion of the homeless population there with a serious addiction and / or mental health issue. (Epistemological status: Total ass-pull. I have no research or numbers to back any of that up, I'm basically just brainstorming at this point.)
I don't usually comment, but I came to the comment section to make exactly this point - I hope Scott addresses it. I think (though I also don't have any data) that there's a potential for some sort of homelessness subcategory analysis that looks at these data broken down along the "down on their luck" to "completely abandoned social contract, street shitting" spectrum. I suspect different metro areas with similar total levels of homelessness, but different concentrations along that spectrum explains a huge degree of the differences in subjective experiences.
Important to recognize also that even some homeless people with addiction issues aren't all in the "hopelessly and permanently homeless category" and don't even necessarily have a "severe" addiction* that requires intensive treatment and a long term housing program. Some of these people, even the ones that would be considered addicts or mentally ill, just need a small hand back up to resume their prior productive lives.
*severe in terms of the extent of usage and difficulty stopping, I hate the method of defining addiction severity solely by the outcomes
Sure, there's definitely a lot more nuance to it than I got into in my relatively brief comment. But I think that the concept of needing to consider that there are actually multiple -- in some ways very different -- problems that are being lumped as just "homelessness" might be key to solving any portion of it. Or we'll just end up with one big diffuse monolithic solution that doesn't actually solve any of the problem for anyone.
Sure, likewise. Text is hard without vocal inflection, at times. We're all good. :D
Indeed, I would probably have *been* somewhere in one of those "in between" states during my stint with homelessness. It certainly didn't help that being that poor at that point made it rather difficult to remain medication compliance. And that's just with depression and ADD. When it's necessary, even completely unmedicated, I am... at least half the time, capable of pushing through it if I really make an effort. (Which, yes, is definitely much harder at that point.) I would imagine (though I am also in no way an expert) that a person who had (severe enough?) schizophrenia and found themselves in that situation would potentially have an even more difficult time managing that.
And yes, I'm hedging that a lot because I've never had schizophrenia, don't know what it's like having schizophrenia, and don't really even have a good idea if there *is* a severity continuum there. Though I am sort of presuming there is, like with most mental health concerns.
I've also been, uh, fortunate(?) enough to have had irregular access to medical care for long enough that it's taught me to keep a fairly healthy supply of the *most* important of my meds squirreled away. And it was of short enough duration that I only had to do a couple of (to me) really unpleasant jobs to manage to stay fed and medicated for the most part. I'm a computer nerd, in the end. Even as a really *large* one, I still don't enjoy digging ditches. Yes, I'm almost certainly being... I dunno. Elitist, or something.
The lot next to my house had a giant three story tree which formed a dome around its base. Shortly after moving into my house a camp of 5 - 15 homeless people (depending on the day) moved into the tree. They yelled, fought, had fires, used power tools, and behaved in various undesirable ways. I called the police on them for various offenses ~5 times without ever having even a single officer or official appear on site. About 8 months after they had moved in (I found the backstory out in retrospect) the lot was purchased by a developer. Construction workers came and told the homeless people they should leave because the tree was being cut down tomorrow. Per said construction workers the response was "over our dead bodies, we will burn it down first!" to which the construction workers, who were planning to cut the tree down anyways, responded with a shrug. Mind you the edge of this giant tree was ~15 feet from my house. That day/night the homeless people gathered >20 propane tanks and strapped them to the tree, then lit it on fire.
I woke at ~2 am to rattling bangs shaking my house, a weird bright red glow shining through my kitchen window, baking heat emanating from the windows, and my wife and six day old child screaming. We fled the house naked with our child, injuring my wife who had just given birth. I went back in once for some documents and clothes after determining the house was not actively on fire. After maybe 5 minutes the fire department showed up and put out the fire. The next day the construction workers cut down a sooty and much reduced tree. One cop spoke to me on the phone once and never followed up. All the same homeless people still roam the area and now live in a wash ~150 feet away.
I've now moved to a fancy expansive HOA community that costs more than twice as much. I used to think homelessness was a hard problem with no good solutions. I no longer think that, I'm now in favor of basically anything that results in fewer homeless people.
This story does not pass the sniff test. It's strange that you'd complain about things like neighbors yelling, fighting, and using power tools, when these are also not uncommon occurrences in all sorts of upper-middle-class suburban neighborhoods (In fact, I'm willing to bet that the average upper-middle-class suburban household has a much more extensive power tool collection than the average homeless camp under a tree). It's strange that the construction workers are giving you, an uninvolved third party, details about their conversations with the homeless camp, to the point where you're able to give exact quotes. It's strange that you know how many propane tanks were involved, especially since as you later claim the police didn't get involved and never investigated. It's strange that homeless people would choose to expend resources on ">20 propane tanks" with which to light a tree on fire for no reason, when everyone involved knows it won't make much of a difference. Even if the propane tanks weren't legally purchased, even if they were stolen, it still takes time/effort/risk to steal them and transport them, and to use them to burn down a tree is simply wasteful. Aren't homeless people supposed to be monomaniacally focused on getting their next drug hit? How much drugs do you think you could get for ">20" propane tanks? A quick google search puts the price of a 20lb propane tank at $60. 20 propane tanks at $60 apeice is $1200. I'd be willing to believe that a homeless camp of people might not be perfectly rational Bayesians, but surely one of those 5-15 people (depending on the day) must have had the thought "Hey, instead of blowing up a tree and accomplishing nothing except giving the neighbor a story to retell on the internet, let's barter this pile of stuff worth $1200 for some drugs instead".
It's really helpful to your story that the homeless camp gave such an incriminating quote right before doing their crime, just like they promised! Although the "over our dead bodies" part didn't come true, so it seems like homeless camps are only 50/50 on truthfulness. It's also really helpful to your story that there was no property or bodily damage; If there had been, there might be the risk of having a newspaper article or police report, etc cover the incident. It's really helpful for your story that all the damage was psychological, what with the fleeing naked and your newborn child. These kinds of details really increase the sympathy, while conveniently being completely unverifiable. It's really helpful for your story that the police did nothing; everyone knows the police famously disbelieve land-owning taxpayers and frequently side with homeless arsonists living in a wash, especially when those homeless arsonists give a verbal confession the day before, and triply so when the arson involves $1200 of stolen goods.
Even assuming your story is all completely true and accurate (Which, to be absolutely clear, I don't believe at all), let's apply some of our Rationalist Community Brand Consequentialism™ and examine the results of this situation. You and your family now live in a fancy expansive HOA community, which I'm going to assume is an upgrade. Meanwhile the homeless people live in a wash, which sounds even less pleasant than living under a tree. Am I supposed to be pitying you here? Am I supposed to believe that, from the heights of your fancy expansive HOA community, you envy the homeless people living in a wash? I understand that your fancy expansive HOA community costs more than twice as much, but obviously you can afford it (as evidenced by the fact that you did move in).
Scott gave this story a "Most Dramatic" award, and I agree it's very dramatic. Very befitting the theater. I don't know Scott was so willing to uncritically completely believe a story on the internet so carefully tuned for maximum sympathy with minimum verifiability and zero evidence. The best I can come up with is bias, but after so many years as a self-avowed rationalist I still expect better.
"Shellenberger hits all the right beats here. Like many people, he tries to undo the damage done by The New Jim Crow, a book which convinced millions of people that mass incarceration was driven by a racist War On Drugs. In fact, less than a fifth of prisoners are in for drug-related crimes."
I'll expand on this a bit.
First, in the USA, we have our system divided into state prisons (about 55% of the prison population), local jails (about 30%), federal prisons & jails (about 10%), and other (about 5%). These systems hold quite different sorts of prisoners, who are in for different types of crimes. The DOJ source you cited shows that 16% of the 5x larger state prison is in for drugs, while almost 50% of the much smaller federal system is in for drugs as their most serious offense.
Many of the racism claims are not that drug crimes make up an overwhelming percentage of the total US incarcerated population, but rather that drug enforcement is a force that is biased to move Black, Asian, and Hispanic people. It puts them into prison at higher rates than white people.
This is complex. Only 14% of the 5x larger *state* prison population is in for drugs, and whites are actually disproportionately in for drugs here. 16.6% of whites, 12.2% of Blacks, 11.7% of Hispanics, 10.9% of American Indian/Alaska Natives, and 11% of Asians are in for drugs as their most serious offense (table 14).
By contrast, 46.7% of the 5x smaller *federal* prison population is in for drugs, mostly drug trafficking, and here the pattern is somewhat reversed. 39.2% of whites are in for drugs, as compared to 42.1% of Blacks, 62% of Hispanics, 16.3% of American Indian/Alaska Natives, and 45.7% of Asians.
Based on these numbers, there's not an obvious case to be made that drug crimes function to incarcerate people of color at higher rates than white people.
However, another story about how drug crimes fuel the prison system is what we might call the Drug Gateway. They expose people to their first arrests and shorter prison stints, leading to an escalation into more serious offenses later.
The VOX article you cited does show that drug crimes are the largest fraction of share of inmates admitted from 1993-2011 in federal and state systems combined. This doesn't show that the Drug Gateway hypothesis is true, but it is consistent with it. If we're skeptical about "gateway drugs," then we might also want to be skeptical of the Drug Gateway.
I think if we were determined to keep "sweeping" in the description you would need to qualify it with both. He is arguably in favor of sweeping institutionalization of the mentally ill homeless. I did not get the impression from Scott's review that Schellenberger was advocating for every homeless person with any mental illness to be institutionalized so I think even that is too far.
I was surprised Scott concluded by defending the "sweeping" comment to be honest, it seems to me he was "directionally correct" and Schellenberger is certainly more in favor of institutionalization than Scott, but sweeping was much to strong a characterization. In fact, who does doubling down on an exaggerated claim even though your *own* analysis doesn't appear to support it remind people of?
Some thoughts below. My background: SF Bay Area resident for 20 years, frequent visitor for 10 years before that. Spent 3-4 years from 1998-2003 doing weekly food distribution to homeless in southern California.
There are (at least) three "sub-classes" of homeless and confusing or conflating them results in total confusion regarding solutions.
A. Subclass A are the "lifestyle homeless". Vagabonds, drifters, gutter punks, street musicians, beach bums, craft stall vendors, "van lifers". A number of these folks I know by name, and consider to be friends. They could hold straight jobs in theory, and often come from more conventional backgrounds. The tradeoffs inherent in living the straight-and-narrow are too much, and they cannot or will not do it. Sometimes drugs and mental illness are an issue, but not overwhelmingly so.
B. Subclass B are the "down on their luck homeless". Living in car, van, or RV temporarily due to job loss, bills, bad luck, or poor choices coupled to above. Will actively seek out shelter, come to social services and adhere to plans to improve the situation. Aiming to get back on their feet. Overwhelmingly working class and not happy or proud of their current condition.
C. Subclass C are the "wretched homeless". Sorry about the moniker but it fits. Extreme mental illness or drug addiction. Limited ability or agency. Suffering in many dimensions. Selling body for drugs. Crime and violence -- both perpetrators and victims. Passed out on street in own fluids. These cases are extremely sad, and my heart breaks for them. A test: if you ask them their name or their story, you most often cannot get any kind of comprehensible reply.
The wretched homeless are the ones that are most obvious in many ways, and seemingly what the book focuses on. They will not be helped by marginal changes in housing markets: rents dropping from $1500/mo to $1250/mo are not their issue. On the other hand, the "down on their luck" *WILL* be helped, and mightily so, by more affordable housing and/or social programs. NIMBY and 30 years of working class job offshoring are reasonable causes.
Class C cannot be divorced, in any way, from changes in mental health policies, nor from the flood of ever-stronger drugs in the last decade. Drug induced psychosis and/or willingness to do almost anything for the next hit create a massive hole that is very very very hard to pull out of. Many (most?) die in that condition. Jail seems to be the only circuit breaker we have in the current system, and it does a poor job of interrupting the cycle.
In the 30 years of my experience, the problem in SF Bay has gotten much worse. Some areas have improved (as I recall Mission district was very intense with heroin on the street in the 90s). Both classes B and C seem to be much larger overall.
A major concern is preventing lifestyle and down-on-their-luck from becoming wretched. That is, how can we stop class A and B from becoming class C? Another major concern is tailoring programs and help to fit the person. A wretched homeless selling their body and dignity for the next hit is NOT going to fill out your paperwork, and will scare or harm others in a shelter.
I think this review is too hard on Shellenberger. He seems to grasp realities of the problem that are glossed over by the homeless-industrial-complex.
Certainly possible. Some of this is "having a hammer, seeing only nails". But some of it could be indeed be purposely conflating things due to self-interest or ideology.
Thanks. This trichotomy makes a lot of sense, also outside the US.
But looking at this from afar, the puzzle is why category C seems to be so large – and growing - in the US.
Maybe it simply is that the US is a very big place, and it is easy for the 328+ million of you to travel across state lines. You by and large speak and understand the same language (which tremendously lowers the costs of moving elsewhere), and you can move across state borders & still claim (limited) public welfare, even if you do not work (which is less the case in Europe/EU).
Also, you have a large NGO-based welfare sector (probably larger than many EU countries), which to an even less extent care if you are an out-of-stater. The result: Category C becomes larger wherever it settles, reaching a “critical mass” that overwhelms local welfare efforts, plus is large enough to form a viable sub-culture on its own.
In Europe, where cross-border migration of the homeless is more difficult both culturally and politically, you get smaller, national concentrations of “Category C”, which makes it somewhat easier to handle. (Not easy, but easier.)
There is also another possibility, more speculative: Perhaps European countries are better at doing early intervention. So that Category C is smaller overall. “Early intervention” in this context means: catch them as toddlers. Get all toddlers into high-enough quality kindergartens, in particular toddlers from poor single-parent families. Then create early warning systems from kindergartens to the child protection agency, and let the agency move in with supplementary help (and foster care if everything else you throw at poor families do not help), early.
Far from all European countries do this – it is most widespread in the North. But the tendency for the last 20 years has been to redesign the welfare state toward an “social investment welfare state”, cutting back on old age pensions and channeling more resources to care for children in every possible way. A version of the Gary Becker - idea to do human capital investments (broadly defined) - from as early a life stage as possible.
I believe it is a leaders-laggards scenario: The tendency has been strongest so far in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany and France, but we now see the same increased focus on public resources spent on child welfare also in Southern Europe. If it really is a leaders-laggards scenario, and if “early intervention” really will be a way to limit category C, is still an empirical & open question, but at least I an pretty certain it is an almost hegemonic welfare policy idea among present-day ruling elites in EU countries.
Anyway, these are just some late-night reflections from abroad. Thanks again for sharing your practical experience; worth more than a ton of theory...
Anecdotally, the flood of opiods and meth into west coast USA in recent years has been a major contributor. I personally know multiple people from "way back when" who have spiraled into addiction and chaos. Meth got big in my hometown and caught my cousin for example. Another former friend got into opiods and was later murdered in his sleep. So it is not just the drugs themselves, but the chaos that accompanies them that causes disintegration.
I would guess that some is due to lack of early social support, as you say. I am not sure how big of a contributor this is, but seems hard to imagine that it would not contribute.
Also, clearly from the other comments, there some difference in the ability and/or willingness of different countries to institutionalize the mentally ill. Scott probably knows this in great detail given his profession, but my understanding is that it is very hard in the US to get someone off the street if they do not want to go.
Thanks for these reflections. I am aware of the importance of the US opiod crisis, but still....
I do not think European countries on average are significantly more willing to institutionalize the mentally ill. De-institutionalization has been the main trend here as well, for something like 30 years. There are national variations, but we are generally not locking people up against their will, and if so not for a long time. Full-time institutionalized mental care is very expensive also in Europe, and for that reason as well it has been very severely scaled down.
So I guess the difference to the US remains a puzzle.
They aren't growing. The number of homeless people in the US is going down, and the US has lower homeless rates than Europe.
What's actually going on is pretty simple: the cities have actively stopped enforcing anti-homeless laws which kept them out of sight previously, resulting in a massive upsurge in their visibility.
Simultaneously, some cities have become very homeless friendly, which has attracted a lot of homeless people from all over the place to those places.
Government released homelessness numbers. It's not any one source, it's going through and looking at each one. You can look at the Wikipedia article about it (list of countries by homeless population) as a starter and go through the sources there, but not all of the numbers are directly comparable (for example, the way Spain counts the homeless leads to an undercount compared to the US/France/Germany/The UK).
Thanks for the reply. I admit I am a bit skeptical of Wiki, and as you point out comparing "raw" government statistics is also difficult since the definitions of homelessness vary between countries (and in federal states they can also vary within countries). And then there is the question of how you actually walk around, to do the counting...There is no recent peer-reviewed comparative study of homelessness you are aware of?
...assuming you are right, that homelessness rates are actually higher in many European countries than in the US, there would then be the puzzle of why it appears much more visible, at least in (some) large US cities than in many/most(all?) large European cities. At least compared to the Los Angeles area and Bay Area. My hypothesis - which may be similar to yours - is that crossing EU country borders if you are homeless (to set up residence in another EU country), is less of a legal right than it is a legal right for a US citizens to cross a state border. In the EU, it is primarily labor that has a clear right to set up residency in another EU country; while in the US, it is a citizen right (rather than mainly/primarily a labor right). Implying that homelessness may be more "spread out" across EU countries compared to the distribution across US states.
The US heavily decriminalized homelessness, making it much more visible to people. US homeless numbers have been going down even as the visibility has been going up because of these policies.
These policies also attracted a lot of homeless people to certain places, because they are friendly to the homeless. This increased the numbers locally in some places, as well as the visibility of the pre-existing homeless population.
There's tons of homeless people in Europe, the Europeans are just better at shuffling them off to the sides and more remote areas. If you know where the homeless camps are in, say, France, you can find tons of them.
Interesting that the “facts” cited in the book Scott (it looks rightly) disputes, but the *conclusions* of what-is-to-be-done it looks like Scott mostly agrees with.
On "Interlude: Why Can’t We Just House All The Homeless?"
Am I missing something obvious, is this not just downward sloping demand curves?
If SF currently has 7,000 homeless people, that's the number of homeless at the current price of being homeless (which seems to me quite high, though not paid in dollars, obviously). But if you give homeless people apartments, the price of being homeless goes down, demand goes up, and all of a sudden you have far more than 7,000 homeless.
The linked capradio article basically says as much, highlighting how the Roomkey motel "has drawn family and friends of Roomkey residents who haven’t been housed but 'camp close to that hotel,' some with the goal of gaining a room."
Are you including San Francisco in the model (in-sample) and then using the mode to say how much that explains about San Francisco (should be an out-of-sample)?
Really enjoyed this. To say I appreciate the depth Scott went into here is an understatement; I have a hard time reading other articles on topics like this because there’s so little rigor, I have to wonder if I’m wasting my time.
Shellenberger, I hope, is the kind of guy who will appreciate it, too. If someone with a platform like ACX put this kind of earnest effort into dissecting a book I wrote, I’d find that quite an honor.
"In the spring of 2021, a team of Harvard medical experts published the results of a fourteen-year-long study of chronic homeless placed into permanent supportive housing in Boston. Most studies of permanent supportive housing, including the Kushel study conducted in Santa Clara, only study the newly housed homeless for a span of around two years. The study found that 86 percent of the homeless, who were referred based on length of time living on the streets, suffered from “trimorbidity”—a combination of medical illness, mental illness, and substance abuse. The authors found that after ten years, just 12 percent of the homeless remained housed. During the study period, 45 percent died. "
I saw that there was no control group for the study :-(
Is there an analysis of mortality in at least an age-matched group?
Having a 14 year study where almost half the people died seems alarming to me.
Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood is historically gay, not historically black. (The nearby Central District neighborhood, one of several neighborhoods located on the hill named Capitol Hill, is historically black, as are a few other neighborhoods.)
Hi Scott, one strange thing that stood out to me was the section on NIMBYism (quoted below). You mentioned elsewhere in the comments that you live in the East Bay, so you must have a certain amount of familiarity with BART stations outside of San Francisco. While there is no doubt that “litter-filled, decaying, disgusting, unsafe, and ambiently miserable to exist in” does describe the very worst areas of San Francisco, do you really believe that it accurately describes the area around, for example, North Berkeley BART, or El Cerrito Plaza BART? And since you mentioned this in the context of NIMBYs protesting new BART stations, it’s relevant to look at some of the newer expansions. Have you been to Dublin-Pleasanton or West Dublin-Pleasanton BART? Your description bears no resemblance to reality. If BART was expanded to, say, Livermore (to take one specific proposal), the new BART station would surely look more like Dublin-Pleasanton than Civic Center. This is an argument that proceeds by picking the very worst, most extreme example of something, and then pretending it’s not only representative, but an inevitable (or at least very likely) outcome. In a different comment, you said that you didn’t enjoy living in dense, walkable neighborhoods in Europe or Japan — that’s fine, it’s your personal preference, not everybody needs to like dense areas, and density does of course come with its trade-offs. But it would be a huge stretch to conclude that it is therefore “correct” for people to “hate and fear” walkable neighborhoods.
Quoting Scott’s review: “But a big reason we don’t build dense cities and walkable neighborhoods is that people (correctly) hate and fear them. They accurately predict that if their neighborhood got denser, it would start looking like the dense parts of San Francisco - litter-filled, decaying, disgusting, unsafe, and ambiently miserable to exist in. The reason we don’t have better public transportation in the Bay Area is that people protest every time someone tries to build a BART station in their area - and the reason people protest every time someone tries to build a BART station in their area is that they weren’t born yesterday, and they’ve seen what other BART stations and the areas around them are like.”
1. Your framing of the NIMBY position may be correct, but it's usually not expressed quite so explicitly in those terms, perhaps because it's not very politically palatable.
2. I don't particularly agree with the object-level claim (the causal effect of LRT stations on criminality), and suspect that the evidence for it is fairly poor.
3. Personally I find this point of view quite bad — reducing criminal behavior doesn't necessitate eliminating public transit (which has a number of benefits (environmental, economic, etc.), not only to poorer people). Additionally, I think the knock-on effects of punishing poor people as a class in the name of safety will generally be deleterious for society as a whole.
4. Most importantly, I was referring to Scott's claim that in the Bay Area, people oppose BART stations because they *accurately* predict that their neighborhoods would become "litter-filled, decaying, disgusting, unsafe, and ambiently miserable to exist in". You can just look at, for example, the Orinda, Lafayette, Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill BART stations. These stations have existed since basically the beginning of the BART system (they opened almost 50 years ago in 1973), and they are nothing at all like that description. These areas are your typical upper-income suburbs, with good schools, low crime, clean neighborhoods, etc. The actual effect of the BART stations has not been to enable an inflow of criminality and drugs, but rather to provide a more efficient and sustainable method of commuting for the (typically wealthier, upper class) residents of these neighborhoods.
An idea that I'll posit related to CA Prop 47 and shoplifting in San Francisco:
California's threshold for misdemeanor vs. felony theft (including shoplifting) isn't particularly low compared to other states. As of 2017, the national range was ~$300 to ~$2,500 - https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/08/09/what-s-the-punishment-for-theft-depends-on-what-state-you-re-in . (These thresholds also don't, by the way, intuitively line up with what people might expect based on states' political reputations. The two highest are TX and WI - both $2,500 - and the 4 lowest - $300 or less - are FL, MA, VA, and NJ.)
And, from what I can tell, the statutory punishment for misdemeanor theft in CA similarly isn't wildly out of line with other states: up to 6 months in county jail and a fine of up to $1,000 ( https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/defense/penal-code/459-5/ ). Based on a non-exhaustive search, the penalty for misdemeanor shoplifting in other states is (by statute) similar or in some cases incarceration for up to 1 year.
Even taking into account other comments (from people outside San Francisco / CA) that observed shoplifters are far from always apprehended by store personnel and then arrested/prosecuted, I'll submit a hypothesis that a key difference in San Francisco could be that arrests/prosecutions essentially *never* happen. And that, unsurprisingly, repeat offenders plus induced crime become an issue as this lack of arrest/prosecution becomes widely known.
In short, there are two separate questions. One is whether the theft in question is a felony or misdemeanor. But the other - probably more meaningful one - is whether it leads to arrest or prosecution at all. That includes repeat offenders observed at particular stores.
I admittedly don't claim to be broadly knowledgeable about this subject, in San Francisco or elsewhere. The anecdotal reports about shoplifting in San Francisco, however, suggest that this is less a question of "felony vs. misdemeanor" vs. "arrest at all or not". Because, of course, people can be (and regularly are) arrested and prosecuted for misdemeanors (e.g., DUI/DWI in the vast majority of places in the US).
I have told my left-wing friends for years that fixing American urban dysfunction (crime, public nuisance, garbage everywhere, etc.) would be a big step forwards in fighting climate change.
Why would people take public transit when people are consistently disruptive?
In this context, San Fransicko strikes me as an immensely useful and mostly accurate corrective, and any minor factual issues are unimportant.
Somehow I don't see the tradeoff that this seems to entail becoming popular on the left. It seems to privilege the safety and comfort of those who have an alternative to public transport, i.e. people who are already privileged. Have you had any positive response at all?
I think that's a fair point. The authors of the paper attempt to adjust for this selection effect (i.e. people who live more dangerous neighborhoods, are younger, black, etc being potentially less likely to stay inside) and they say their results are robust to these effects. But they choose what adjustments to make based on victimization risk not perpetration risk - in practice these are almost synonymous wrt violent crime but not quite. So the criticism that they didn't adjust for perpetrators being outside more makes sense.
Ultimately the reason I bring up this study is that it implies an interesting theory about the murder surge. Which is that the propensity of people to commit violent crimes rose at the start of the pandemic, but because they were inside more (leading to fewer opportunities to kill) this higher propensity was not fully reflected in official murder stats (murder was up a lot in the first months of 2020 but not as much as in later months). Then, the lockdowns start to formally and informally lift, huge numbers of people (disproportionately black and in big cities) start pouring into the streets to protest, and suddenly people are interacting with each other and getting the chance to kill more than they would before. Even if police behavior was totally unchanged, I think you could still see a rise in murders in summer 2020 due to this effect.
I appreciate that an increase in propensity-for-violence preceding May 25th would be the strongest evidence against BLM causation. The protests were the de facto end of lockdowns, so a rise in absolute murder would be due to people going outside again, as you suggest. That might explain the time-series data Scott mentioned.
It’s interesting to speculate on what might have caused a higher propensity toward violence during the pandemic. It would have to be something that persisted throughout the year and into the next.
My best guess is masks. Having one’s face covered might lead to a greater sense of anonymity. Again, speculation only.
Still, I think the increase in per hour violence during early lockdown was probably a selection effect, with criminals less likely to honor the lockdown and a resulting higher predation on the fewer people outside.
I'm always somewhat confused when people talk about "mental illness" in the context of homelessness.
I have PTSD and am on the autism spectrum. If I ever become homeless, I will be counted among the mentally-ill homeless, and my mental health conditions will undoubtedly be a contributing factor in my situation. They will also be the main reason I'll refuse to stay in a shelter (I can't sleep in a room with other people).
I can see some ways that the existence of people like me on the streets is relevant to public policy. For example, we shouldn't expect everyone to sleep in congregate shelters, and we shouldn't penalize people just because they can't. We *definitely* shouldn't forcibly institutionalize them without at least some kind of individualized evaluation to see whether it's more likely to help or harm them. (Long-term forced institutionalization would be disastrous for someone like me, even in a nice humane modern facility.) If you wanted to get someone like me off the streets without driving them to suicide, you would offer them the kind of private, secure, sanitary, autonomy-respecting housing that you yourself would prefer to camping.
But that's never the conclusion people want you to draw when they point out the prevalence of mental illness in the homeless population. They always seem to be arguing for the exact opposite: these people need to be forced into shelters, and if they won't go, we should involuntarily institutionalize them, and offering permanent independent housing in the community is a waste of time and money.
Which might make sense if "mental illness" were a synonym for "severe, treatment-resistant psychotic disorder." But it's not. 20% of Americans have a history of mental illness. The prevalence of severe treatment-resistant psychotic disorders is vanishingly small. They might be overrepresented in the homeless population, but they're still a small minority.
I don't think most of the people making this argument are unaware of that reality, so I've never understood why they tend to ignore it.
Thank you for writing this excellent piece. It pulled me over the edge to finally become a paid subscriber.
The part of the book that resulted in the biggest change to my worldview was the discussion of the scope of drug addiction in the USA. You mention briefly that it seems like mandatory drug treatment doesn't work. I would be very interested in an article on the topic of the problem and possible solutions.
'The main virtue I cannot ascribe it is evenness. The old saying talks about the man who “uses statistics the way a drunk uses a streetlight; for support rather than illumination”. San Fransicko is the equivalent of that dim blue lighting you sometimes see in nightclub bathrooms: so focused on preventing injection drug use that it sacrifices the ability to illuminate anything at all.'
> The government often announces plans to buy defunct regular hotels and convert them into these structures, which would indeed be a medium-term solution for housing the homeless, except that they usually get bogged down in fights about code.
Gosh. How could anyone ever turn to libertarianism or even anarchism in despair over the potential of the government being able to solve everything. I just can't possibly imagine.
Other than, even the government won't get out of the government's way to let the government solve a problem the government created.
Scott, you admit that the data used to refute claims 1 and 2 is not good quality, so why is this crappy data alone enough to refute MS’s claims? Do you really believe that a drug/psychiatric test given to a random group of SF homeless would find over half sober and mentally healthy?
If we all know the data sucks, then anecdotes and common sense have to get more consideration. Why not more heavily weight the many anecdotes such as Tom Wolf’s on the hotel where nearly 100 percent of occupants are on hard drugs?
And common sense: Why would the number of mentally well, sober individuals living on the streets be rising during a time of massive unskilled job demand and rising wages? You could say friction to move where the jobs are, but I doubt it (when the alternative to moving is sleeping on the streets).
"But a big reason we don’t build dense cities and walkable neighborhoods is that people (correctly) hate and fear them."
I think you probably know this, but I want to emphasise that the world doesn't have to be like this. I currently live in a dense, car-free neighbourhood in inner London, close to a tube station and it's very pleasant. It is clean almost to the point of sterility. Nobody steals my packages because the building has package lockers, but I doubt they would if it didn't.
I've read the book too, and Scott was wrong to characterize it as supporting "sweeping institutionalization of the mentally ill." That phrase implies institutionalizing all or at least a lot of mentally ill people. Shellenberger clearly thinks there should be MORE institutionalization, and in particular more people given lengthy treatment, as opposed to the standard 7 days in the psych ward, 30 days in rehab. But the population he is targeting is not mentally ill people in general, it's the small fraction of them who are so dysfunctional that they live on the streets with no income source other than shoplifting and breaking into cars. He is convincing enough that I shifted my view on involuntary institutionalization *for this population.* I agree with Scott that Shellenberger should have said more on how to ensure that his proposed forced treatment would only apply to this population, instead of spilling over to the much greater proportion of mentally ill people who can basically take care of themselves. But Shellenberger never advocates for institutionalization of more than a small fraction of mentally ill people.
I submit that it is hardly possible for sweeping institutionalization to happen. Everyone is aware as part of the deep culture that institutionalization was a mass tragedy in terms of like the Top 10 list of things we are historically ashamed of
Any system of increased institutionalizing would have say three professionals signing off on it. All would be aware of the history and - at least in California - systematically tend towards not institutionalizing where it seems feasible. No matter how easy it were made to make someone a candidate the sign off process would be a tight filter under the cultural conditions that are endemic in Blue America at least
Shellenberger would have to be advocating for a process with no checkpoint like that or a very weak one for the results to approach sweeping institutionalization. I think he's aware of this and supports increased institutionalization with plenty of confidence that it is unlikely to ever swing back too far except under some kind of intentionally poorly designed process
I don't know if I agree with substantially increasing the ability to do so as your comments are very persuasive. Just as it was once easy to look at institutions and say 'they're better off out of there no matter what' it is now easy to look at encampments and say 'they're better off out of there no matter what'. But your description of the past reminds me of the fact that there can be no happy solution that involves using force against someone indefinitely. I would say I do support Schellenberger's position in general but would be wary of that in particular, and update to thinking NIMBYism may be a bigger priority than his main solutions
This was great- my mother is utterly in love with this man and now I can go back to reading science papers instead of the badly written gladwellian books she insists I read.
Can someone provide me with the data from the "That regression line looks suspicious, but I hear computers are never wrong." figure, I would like to write a short LW post about "how to regression" and use it as an example.
the TLDR for why it looks weird is the regression y~x means all the y's are perfect, use the x'es to explain them, thus the errors are only measured vertically not horizontally, the regression x~y gives the opposite line where you only measure horizontal errors, you can try to put your fingers at a random point and see that most likely it is closer to the line if you travel horizontally instead of vertically, the "correct solution" is to model the errors jointly, but nobody does that, so for mortals the second best thing is drawing both lines (will look like a butterfly) and say the real best line is somewhere between them.
of course sometimes you want to predict one variable from another and then simple regression is (mostly) the correct thing to do, but when you simply want to understand their relationship between two variables then it is not :), and you should instead fit a 2D gausian :)
I would have said it was because of the assumption that the line has to intersect the horizontal axis at 0 - the assumption makes total sense, because there does have to be a meaningful answer to "how many people would be homeless at 0 degrees" and it can't be a negative number - but that just clearly isn't where the data are pointing. I don't know how to put that into formal statistical terms.
The thing is, there's actually a much more obvious reason why cities with very high cost of living have such a huge homelessness problem.
What do DC, Boston, New York City, and San Francisco all have in common?
They're leftist cities with massive services for the homeless and pro-homeless policies.
Overall in the US, homelessness has been going *down*, not up, even as housing prices have gone up.
The actual cause of the homelessness problems in these big cities is that they *attract* homeless people.
Moreover, it should be remembered that the homeless people who are the biggest problem are specifically the chronically homeless. Most homeless people are not chronically homeless, and looking at the homeless population as a whole will give you misleading results.
This makes most arguments over homeless populations pretty much worthless, because as it turns out, the entire notion of "the homeless" is actually wrong.
The homeless population is really composed of a number of groups. Two groups' problems are basically solved by housing first policies:
1) Temporarily displaced persons as a result of their house being destroyed by some sort of disaster (wildfire victims, earthquake victims, hurricane victims, etc.). These people are basically like everyone else, just unlucky enough to be in the way of a disaster. Housing first policies are basically 100% effective on these people because their problem is literally that their house was destroyed.
2) People who go somewhere to seek out work without having a permanent dwelling place set up there. Housing first programs solves almost all of this problem, too.
There's another group whose problems are mostly solved by housing first:
3) People who are marginally indigent, who lost their houses because they fell on economic hard times. Housing first programs solves a lot of these problems with housing.
Then you have these groups:
4) Drug addicts.
5) Mentally ill homeless.
6) People with wanderlust who literally just walk off.
These groups' problems are rarely if ever solved by Housing First.
As the chronically homeless are the people who cause most of the worst problems, you can thus effectively treat the first three groups and look like things are working really really well, and indeed, the temporarily unhoused make up the vast majority of the homeless population, and yet these policies will utterly fail to adequately deal with the chronically homeless and people will continue to poop on the sidewalks.
This explains why both the abstinence enforced housing efforts and the housing first efforts give similar results - both of these programs will house pretty much all of the first two groups, a lot of the third group, and basically not work on the chronically homeless.
> "In fact, if you’re a homeless person, why wouldn’t you want to live in a suburb? Quieter (so probably easier to sleep at night) more places out of sight to pitch tents, less crime (important if you’re living on the street!), and potentially lower cost of living in terms of food and good"
I suspect there are many, potentially better explanations to consider. Eg - what about the cost of transportation to/from downtown, combined w density and availability and quality of services for homeless folk? Including informal (eg. access to cheap or free food, incidence of cash only or black market materials and jobs to be done, etc...).
I suspect it makes more sense for homeless folk to concentrate somewhere central, and go to suburbs occasionally as warranted by eg. access to food, shelter or temporary employment.
Obviously not much chance you'll see this... but...
This...
> Like many people, he tries to undo the damage done by The New Jim Crow, a book which convinced millions of people that mass incarceration was driven by a racist War On Drugs.
Might be excused as hyperbole but I'd say it's just silly. Millions of people convinced of a great sociological misconception by one book?
More likely, imo, is that (1) many people think that racism plays a part and (2) they think that for a variety of reasons such as discrepancies in crack vs. powder cocaine sentencing and factors such as John Ehrlichman's statements about the "design" of the ear in drugs to have a particular impact in the black community.
Clearly you have a bone to pick with The New Jim Crow, in which case you should make your argument in a more comprehensive manner.
A very deep dive, I appreciate, regarding the actual complexities of current socioeconomic crises, as opposed to the strident stances advocacy groups take - often, neither camp shows earnest concern for the human beings involved, instead seeking advantage in the abstract world of political strategy.
Fresh out of college, but full of indecision, I moved to Boulder, CO fifty years ago, and spent a few years working odd jobs, never related to my education; I lived for many months out of my car, hand to mouth, and in that era the State Employment offices had a sign-up list for day labor jobs. Vets had first priority, and every day a group would hang out, socializing, and mostly derisively rejecting each listing as it came up, for a stock set of excuses. I usually lucked out. A young man showed up one day, and after the vets passed, he'd jump to the job, regardless of how menial or bad it sounded. Around the third day, he jumped, and never came in again; I believe he'd landed an offer, because he seemed so eager and gung ho.
Other vets also passed through, but the hardcore cynics who thought they deserved more, played their game, mostly passed on work prospects, and that attitude is too apparent in the homeless ranks, I fear. One thinks of "entitlement" in terms of privileged, but the vets I watched were victims of that same delusion.
Most people make many poor decisions, along the timeline before being chronically homeless, and very few suffer a single immediate loss that is so large they directly end up on the streets. And even fewer then take to substance abuse to ameliorate their pain, physical or emotional. Abuse is likely the cause, for lost jobs, lost housing, not the result; sober homeless have priorities, and getting off the streets and employed is imperative.
The underappreciated factor, as I witnessed, is one of basic self-respect, and the social pressure, that makes some refuse to live with feeling the ostracism of a community. Disrespecting the community is a terribly dysfunctional coping strategy, and at the same time, having the community enable the homeless as victims of modern society does them a serious disservice. Just like the vets I watched, prolonged victimhood becomes a terminal condition.
For better or worse, the reality is that the world owes no one a living; interestingly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes a right to work, and own property, but no guarantee of a job or shelter. Assisting those who are unable to be responsible for themselves is a fair and benevolent action; those who are, need to be fairly held accountable for their situation. Progressive attitudes that conflate the significantly different scenarios actually confuse efforts to remedy problems, while impinging on other basic Human Rights, of those living responsibly.
Interesting review. Albeit a bit long. My Goodness! It might even be longer than the book itself!
Despite all those words, in your analysis of Housing First, you failed to consider a significant cost: damage! Many naïve landlords enter into Housing First leases thinking: "I get to help the homeless and get guaranteed rent from the government? hWhat could possibly go wrong?" Only to see their properties absolutely rekt by (now formerly) homeless people hwho haven't got their shit together. Sure... There's (now) compensation funds, but there's tonnes of bureaucracy involved in accessing them. I'm sure you know all about annoying bureaucracy, sir... And that doesn't really eliminate the cost. Just shifts it.
I believe that including damages shifts the needle slightly against Housing First in your cost-benefit analysis. Did any of the studies you read or data you came across mention anything about that??
Well stated
Many Thanks!
Question:
I was under the impression that there is only _partial_ overlap between chronic public nuisance people and drug users. In particular, I've read comments that "Alcoholics go home and beat their wives. Opiate users go home and their wives beat them".: I also have a vague memory that stimulant users tend to be more of a hazard to people around them.
Can anyone suggest better (but hopefully somewhat compact) information?
"but would be irrelevant for determining *if* they are chronic public nuisances. "
Fair enough. My suspicion (if the quoted rule of thumb about opiate users is true) is that that class of drug users is probably not a chronic public nuisance - but this is a guess.
> I find it very, very hard to believe that the increased unhappiness of ~5000 people being put in some "meh" warehouse outweighs the increased happiness of probably tens to hundreds of thousands of people in San Francisco who don't have to deal with chronic public nuisances anymore.
Utility Monster v. Shut Up And Multiply, <current_year>'s most consequential court case. I can already see the picketers outside the courthouse, hoisting their "No One Is Happy Until Everyone Is Happy!" signs.
(If I were selected for that jury, I'd probably find in favour of the defendant...but, wow, what acrimonious proceedings so far. Most of the evidence is only barely admissible. Surely we can do better.)
Sorry, my legibility is declining the longer I stay up, really should check myself for clarity and "is there actually any real value in writing this reply?"
Utility Monster would be the opposing position, that the obligation to alleviate individual suffering doesn't diminish, even for large values of obligation and suffering. Failure mode is the perfect becoming the enemy of the marginally better. Shut Up And Multiply is an old kinda-deprecated LessWrong saying about the correct way to think of unfathomably large numbers, part of the logic for your proposition. Failure mode* is, uh... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs-dust-specks
A less snarky, more useful reply woulda been that I generally agree with your reasoning, with specifics negotiable. I seem to remember Scott's post about the 26 gubernational candidates mentioning one who wanted to, like, build high-rise parking structures to warehouse the homeless. Seems obviously kinda farcical at first, but it's the same sort of necessary evil; if it's good enough to be a Serious Policy Proposal for a state governor's campaign, then it's not totally outside the Overton Window. Properly pricing externalities is really important for accurate cost-benefit analysis; this is one of many tricky issues where morality frequently impedes empirical quantification. Like, it's noble and idealistic to say we ought to judge a society by how it treats the least among them...but, like climate change, the average person doesn't actually want to sacrifice terribly much to improve the lot. So something like warehousing is likely within the feasible-solution distribution.
*Ongoing disagreement as to whether this is indeed a failure mode.
How would this keep people off the streets? It seems like it would keep people dispersed, but still on the streets. And if anything, the loss of accumulated capital (social and otherwise) might keep people on the street.
Which runs back into the problem of there aren't enough shelter beds, shelters are closed during day hours, they often have policies that make them less helpful, and now you've got a large concentration of poverty again.
Plus it sounds like the plan is going from "busting up large camps" to "busting up camps of more than 1-2-3 people".
Why not just round people up at that point? Unless the goal isn't solving the problem but instead just encouraging people to move on to the next jurisdiction/city.
You are never going to solve the problem, or even improve it, by promoting a model in which people are free to pitch a tent, claim public space, dump trash, etc., wherever and whenever they want. There are some basic social norms that have to exist.
If folks don't like the rules at the shelters, then the public is just somehow obligated to have no rules for these folks at all?
This _is_ what's done to a large extent.
With fairly good reason... I'm renting my spare room to a fellow on social assistance. He takes his meds and is always very nice and pleasant with me; but he's utterly destroyed the carpet in his bedroom in only 4 months and it will need to be ripped out and replaced before I use that room for anything else. (Oh, and he brought cockroaches with him.) If I were renting out the room for financial gain, taking him as a tenant would have been stupid.
And this guy is a very stable, just relatively low functioning dude who doesn't have any addiction issues besides nicotine (which I smoke more of than he does.) The vast majority of the "Riff-Raff" (as he calls people permanently on government assistance) are far harder on their homes.
I'd sooner just making renting out space illegal than refuse to let a landlord choose his tenants. Because the only rational response to "I have to rent out my units to anyone, including people who will trash them" is to raise prices to compensate for the additional repairs.
Or alternately "I'm not going to bother ripping out that carpet and exterminating the cockroches since the next guy will be just as bad" so you do have people living in squalor; the prices may be low, but the street might seem more appealing if the room is dirty, infested, and rundown and needs repairs to leaking roof etc.
When my wife and I were in the process of moving from a condo to a house in the same city, we considered renting out the condo, since it was going to take considerable time and effort to sell it. This was in New York State, which has some protections for tenants. We decided not to rent it, partially because of this, and partially because we were concerned about the possibility that we might get a bad tenant who would trash the place. The end result was that it was unoccupied for about a year. C'est la vie.
We had a tenant who flooded the basement with several feet of water and then didn't tell anyone until winter came (it had ruined all the mechanicals washer/dryer/furnace). That was great! Rented out the place for 7 years and lost money overall due to that and one other negligent tenant.
Gaa! I sympathize. Yup, that sort of scenario gave me nightmares. And I'll bet the "lost money overall" is before counting the value of your time.
Discrimination is difficult to prove. Also, landlords then have incentives to act in ways when they search for tenants that makes it (even) more difficult to prove.
There are lots of mental illnesses that are chronic, i.e. NOT treatable; only manageable. It seems VERY reasonable to expect that they're over-represented among the 'visibly homeless' people.
How does the "attract homeless people to the area" part work exactly, though? Are they reading about how great being homeless is on a message board? Are there hobo signs? Is there a strong homeless gossip network? I know it seems like I'm ribbing you, and I am a bit, but I think it's worth taking the time to consider how exactly this works and how far homeless people are going to be willing to travel to get to a place that is "better for being homeless". Most people want to stay in neighborhoods where they know where everything is and know the people and have contacts they can call on. The poorer you are, the more that's true. If you have $10K in the bank you can take a chance on moving, and you have a buffer to simply buy assistance in your new location. If you're homeless and you get on a bus and travel 100 miles, you don't know where it's safe to sleep, where it's safe to eat, or anyone who will let you crash on their floor for a night. You better be real, real confidence about how strong the homeless community is in that new location. (Not to mention that if you stop being homeless, which is the goal, you're now not homeless 100 miles from the places you know.)
Agreed. Homeless people actually make decisions on where to move and are not just sort of blown around by the wind. And yeah, people still get knowledge by talking to other people. The open air drug market in the Tenderloin in San Francisco may not have a billboard or a website, but just about everyone knows where it is and how to find it.
My roommate moved in with me from living in a homeless shelter. He's 60 and has told me a lot of stories.
One of the things I've heard from him and many hitchhikers I've picked up, is that "homeless" folks and the general "Riff-raff" as he calls them like to travel just as much as anyone else. And being unemployed, they have lots of time to do it, but little money.
So people take buses or hitchhike to different cities just to visit them, same as any other tourist. (But since they don't have a home or a job to go back to, "Just stay" is a much more viable option once they're there than it would be for you or me; so part of it is right there) And while they're travelling, they're exchanging word of mouth info with other people.
So some mixture of "I went to San Francisco for a visit and decided not to leave" and "I heard from another dude that San Francisco is a great place to be homeless/get drugs/meet people/ect." seems to be the main information vectors.
And nowadays people can read things on the internet; many "Riff-Raf" who can't afford a cell phone plan will still keep an old phone to connect to the internet at McDonalds or elsewhere with open wifi.
> How does the "attract homeless people to the area" part work exactly, though? Are they reading about how great being homeless is on a message board? Are there hobo signs? Is there a strong homeless gossip network?
Absolutely
Even among people that are 'long-term homeless', some still find, e.g. an occasional couch to crash on for a few days. And lots of homeless know lots of 'nearly homeless' people, if only because they both do the same kinds of drugs. And lots of them have cell phones and call/text their friends, of which some are likely to be homeless too.
I knew two people – that I have in mind in particular – and they were both 'basically homeless'; they basically squatted in illegal 'housing'. They had friends all over the neighborhood, some of whom would squat where they could, or sleep on the literal streets. I had several conversations with one of the two people I'm thinking of about how they might fare if they moved 'back home' in another state. I am VERY certain that homeless people are absolutely sharing the same kind of info about their conditions.
I would be very surprised if people AREN'T/WEREN'T sharing things along the lines of "It's great out here! Drugs are cheap; lots of shit to steal and sell right away. You should come visit! Take the bus; it sucks, but it'll be worth it."
Historical anthropologists have mapped all the different types of signs (sort-of pictograms) tramps of old discreetely skratched on farmwalls to inform other tramps of things like: Friendly or unfriendly farmer, whether you can expect to be allowed to sleep in the hayloft, if the dog is dangerous, etc. A lot of relevant, fine-grained information captured through a shared "sign culture". This information exchange has been made much, much easier through the mobile phone revolution. It has really revolutionized hobo life.
There's that kind of thing too! Thanks for { pointing that out / reminding of it } :)
It's almost like almost everyone is actually fairly intelligent, and creative, about solving their own problems!
Jack London's writings on homelessness & tramp life anno 1894, is still a great inside view on homelessness. Do not underestimate the homeless. They have agency, like everybody else.
Maybe – Austin gets plenty hot like this too. Houston isn't _that_ far from it.
Someone I know in NYC tho claims that a lot of 'drug addict homeless' where he lives – East Village – are seasonal/migratory and _most_ of them are 'snowbirds', i.e. leave in the winter for 'warmer climes'.
Used to work in a shelter in Illinois, got to know the homeless there fairly well. In the fall, a common goal of panhandling was a bus ticket to Key West. Lots of snowbirds among the homeless, yeah. A bus ticket costs so much less than housing.
Living in a left area, I had only heard the Reagan-as-villain version of the story before (and from many people).
"The US might not be so polarized after all, if both the left and the right agree that the solution is to round up all the homeless, strip them of human rights, and lock them for life out of sight into death camps."
Come come, Machine Interface, this is the sort of mealy-mouthed bleeding-heart-liberalism soft do-goodery that created the problem in the first place. The corpses, man, the corpses! You forget that this only makes sense if a profit can be turned out of it, and what better than using the death camp as large-scale human trials and blood donation centres. Probably you can't get any usable parts from the raddled wretches when they do die, but you can at least process the bodies into something like fertiliser and so forth. Plus, the 'testing to destruction' medical trials means that "for life" isn't going to be very long, so expenses can be cut down as much as possible. A bowl of gruel and a pannier of water a day can be done economically.
Dream bigger, man!
This is ... not helpful or kind or particularly true?
I don't think Shellenberger, or Scott, are of 'the intolerant right'. Jails/prisons can be bad, and along similar dimensions, and yet not be _usefully_ described as "death camps". It sure seems like everyone is not trying to punish the homeless worse than jails/prisons.
These are helpful for understanding what you meant by the original comment; thanks.
What I think Scott did differently was use the 'imagery' to describe the way this worked in the _past_, whereas you seemed to be claiming that people _consciously_, and deliberately, wanted to bring that kind of thing back.
I think a REALLY important component of any new policies/solutions is a clear, standard way for people to 'test OUT of' involuntary commitment. I'd hope that people, e.g. the ACLU, would monitor any new system too to, hopefully, ensure that everyone is being tested fairly.
But it's not like there aren't _other_ places that already fit your description of "filthy hovels where they'll have less rights than prison inmates and'll slowly die of manutrition, neglect and abuse.", e.g. 'retirement homes'.
Trying to be charitable, it really is a hard and expensive problem to take care of people that can't take care of themselves, especially in a way that's 'up to' our modern standards/sensibilities.
It's possible to institutionalize people in non-gulag conditions.
It won't be great but it will be better than what's going on now.
Lol they're going to get ruined by proggies if they do anything
I don't think he left it out, I think (can't remember how explicitly the book made this connection) that they know the justice system won't press charges, so why bother bringing them in?
For once, we fully agree: SF's problems lie squarely at the feet of the NIMBYs.
I'm not sure why you're saying one doesn't cause the other. Isn't the pathway not building houses -> high housing prices -> homelessness? Yes, the particular way high housing prices cause homelessness is that the upper class can afford the prices and the lower class can't, but that's part of the causal pathway.
I was linked to a blog recently (maybe a link on Zvi's blog?) that hypothesized that there are two homeless groups. One that swells and dissipates with housing prices, and one that is largely insensitive to those changes, and when it comes to negatively affecting others quality of life, it is the latter group that is the primary source.
Don't know if that is accurate. I hung out with some panhandle for a few months and that wasn't enough info to say one way or another, but it did seem plausible.
If so, fixing housing supply would help a lot of individuals, but wouldn't have much impact in solving the homelessness problem people normally talk about.
A lot of people go through some economic hard times, but many have relatives and friends who will put them up for awhile on the couch until they are back on their feet financially. These people are more or less homeless for awhile, but they aren't The Homeless.
The people camping under overpasses tend to have alienated everybody who let them in their front door.
Jazz legend Miles Davis tells a memorable story about when he moved to NYC in 1945 at age 18 and his affluent dentist dad paid for his rental of a nice apartment. Much to his surprise, his hero Charlie Parker asked if he could move in with him for a little while because he was having trouble with his old lady. But one day he came home and found Charlie had sold all of Miles' suits to buy heroin. Another day he came home and Charlie was sitting on the floor because Charlie had sold all of Miles' furniture to buy more heroin.
You can sort of get away with this kind of predation on your friends if you are the world's greatest musician. But if you aren't ...
I'm not so sure that there is a *group* that is actually insensitive to these changes, though there might be a *state* people can get into that is harder to get out of. A simple model that might make sense is that for every person, they can be housed, or in short-term homelessness, or in long-term homelessness. When you're in short-term homelessness, there's a certain difficulty of getting housed when you find an available home, but when you're in long-term homelessness it becomes a lot harder. Different people might have different lengths of short-term homelessness that push them into long-term homelessness, perhaps based on pre-existing levels mental health or education or executive function or whatever it is. Under this sort of model, if there's a small number of people in short-term homelessness at any point, and homes are abundant enough, then most of them are likely to find a home before ending up in long-term homelessness. But if the number of people in short-term homelessness swells for any reason, then the average duration of short-term homelessness will likely swell too, and this will mean there's a greater flow of people into long-term homelessness. It might be that the city recovering to a level of housing abundance doesn't do much to shrink the long-term homeless population, but it does drastically slow the growth of this population on that model. It might be that different things are needed to get people out of long-term homelessness, but housing abundance would still have a big effect on the rate at which people enter it.
Good to see you around again Kenny.
I am concerned calling it "short-term" vs "long-term" makes it seem like people will naturally bleed from one to the other after a period of time. A lot of the documents I've been reading lately have stopped using those phrases and instead use a Transitional/Episodic/Chronic framework. While I can see some mechanisms for time spent transitioning someone from short- to long-term (increased comfort with homelessness, exposure to health/legal problems, dwindling reserves, increasing reliance on / beginning addictions) these don't seem as strong as it instead it sorting out those that have pre-existing difficulties (poor social skills, impulse control, psychosis, physical impairments, lack of social safety net, addictions).
(found the link I was thinking about earlier, it was from Zvi's blog on his Talent book review https://www.econlib.org/who-are-the-homeless/ )
So, for the example of the four panhandlers I hung out with for ~6 months: One actually had an apartment, they were just supplementing their income. One (allegedly) had a doctor as a father, but was not willing to move home (and accept the rules of being home) and lived in a camp. One was a snow bird and was currently living in a camp but was having sex with my housemate (refused to sleep indoors). One alternated between shelter and camp, admitted to a crack addiction he was trying to get clean from, was diagnosed bi-polar, and was trying to transition back into the restaurant industry (that chapter of his story ended sadly when he asked his sister to use her shower so he could be nice for an interview, she refused, so he broke into her house and trashed her stuff and he ended up in the legal system). For none of that group was the length of time they had spent homeless affecting whether or not they were going to be housed, and the cost of housing really only impacted 3/4 of them (well, who knows if free housing would have kept the bi-polar guy together or not, I still think about him a lot) and these are 4 people selected as safe/together enough that I spent a significant amount of time with them, not the kind of people walking down the street yelling obscenities at passerby.
There's a housing assocation called Focus in my country that provides emergency, short-term, and long-term accommodation to homeless people. There is a housing project run by them in my town.
https://www.focusireland.ie/
Most of the people who avail of their services are in genuine need and respond well. There is, however, a minority who may be in need but abuse the services. They don't pay their rent. They cause trouble - getting in fights with other people living in the buildings, petty crime, drugs, alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, and so on. Eventually they have to be evicted, and then the cycle of "need emergency accommodation - get housed - fuck that up again' repeats.
Cheap housing is not the solution here, because while lack of access to cheap housing is part of the problem for them, they have a lot of other problems which make them homeless.
Absolutely lack of housing and emergency accommodation does make things worse, as you say; a swell in short-term homelessness does go on to become long-term homelessness and that gets worse the longer it goes on. But the unhappy truth is that there is, and always will be, a small core of people whose lives are a mess not because of homelessness but because they can't live a life that is beneficial to themselves.
I think that is the problem. The most visible homelessness is the most chronic; the people who are visibly mentally ill and/or criminal.
So if there were more cheap housing, the person who is homeless because "I got out of an abusive relationship but I haven't the resources to rent/buy housing" or "I lost my job and my debts ate my savings" or the like will be best served.
The person who is homeless because of mental illness and so on won't benefit if housing cost ten dollars, because they'd sell that house to pay for their fix. And it's the second group which may well be smaller but is the one most disturbing ordinary people trying to walk down the streets between their job and getting back to their own apartment.
If you're assuming that chronic homelessness is an intrinsic state, insensitive to environmental factors like housing affordability, and you're also assuming that the 'homelessness problem' (in the sense of unpleasantness/inconvenience to housed people) is due mostly/entirely to the chronically homeless, then how do you explain the fact that the problem is getting worse?
It seems to me that you can't have it both ways. One of the following has to be true:
a) It's possible for transitionally/situationally homeless people to become chronically homeless under certain conditions, probably involving the prolonged inability to secure housing and the mental/physical stress of prolonged homelessness.
b) Some of the community problems associated with high rates of homelessness are attributable to transitionally/situationally homeless people, probably because some of those problems are a result of behaviours that are situationally-rational in the context of homelessness.
If there are 20,000 bedrooms in a city and 30,000 disjoint sets of people who can share a bedroom, 10,000 of those sets will be not in a bedroom. If you gave everyone a billion dollars, 10,000 sets would still be not in a bedroom as long as those dollars couldn't be spent on constructing additional bedrooms or moving out of the city.
There's a direct causal linkage there, at least to the extent that "no houses" is the problem at all (if there are houses not being used, well, that's a different issue).
That would be the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle
Of course, in real life, there is likely some demand elasticity. While price hikes push everyone down a few steps on the housing ladder, they will also decrease demand as people tend to move elsewhere.
It's strongly related, and I did think of mentioning the PHP, although the way the PHP is usually stated isn't quite strong enough for this application.
One responsible response to high housing prices in California is to move out of state. I've known plenty of working people who have.
Are the homeless in California Californians who don't like working, so they don't move out of state?
Alternatively, many in California suspect that a lot of the homeless moved to California to be homeless: for the nice weather, panhandling and petty crime opportunities, and lax enforcement. A big investigative article in the Orange County Register blamed the explosion of white people living in tents along the Santa Ana River a few years ago on the recent explosion in the drug rehab business in California: some addict in Kentucky gets 3 months of rehab from insurance, so why not go out to sunny California for 3 months? But after 3 months he still likes drugs and his old lady back in Kentucky moved in with his best friend so he can't crash with her anymore while spending his rent money on meth, so he doesn't see much reason to go home, so he heads over to the camping section in Walmart and is soon camping under a freeway overpass. (By the way the homeless sure own more stuff than they used to in the late 20th Century.)
The homeless industry is adamant that that's NOT what's happening.
Of course, like in the semi-fictional scenario I outlined above, it's arguable whether the drug rehabber turned homeless is a Californian or an out-of-stater. Lots of people move around the United States all the time. It appears that California tends to drive out Americans in the middle ranks of society and collects Americans of the most irresponsible stratum.
> Of course, like in the semi-fictional scenario I outlined above, it's arguable whether the drug rehabber turned homeless is a Californian or an out-of-stater
It seems astounding that we don't have any information about this. With all the money going around for homeless programs haven't we sent some sociology grad student around to _ask_ them where they're from? Sure, they won't always tell the truth, but their answers might be illuminating.
I don't think the part your quoting is about knowledge, but definition. If you move to California for rehab and decide you like the environment and policies enough to stay, whether to count you as Californian is a definitional issue.
One could get around this by asking them for the last state where they had a residential address.
I think the part of the causal relationship that (and thank you Scott for getting at this) is that "open air drug markets and people yelling GRAGH at you on the street" *creates NIMBYs* because The Voter(TM) does not want to live in a feces and needle infested miserable block of dilapidated buildings that no one can afford to fix because the *next* person is going to set them on fire or cook meth in them and condemn the building.
So when "building more housing and density" has a causal relationship with those problems, The Voter(TM) wasn't born yesterday and will activate to stop you.
An uncharitable reading of “if their neighborhood got denser, it would start looking … litter-filled, decaying, disgusting, unsafe, and ambiently miserable to exist in” makes it sound like the density is the cause of all of the problems.
But it’s also plausible that high land prices lead to both high density and high housing costs.
If housing costs are the problem, then part of the solution is to build more housing, which necessarily leads to more density somewhere.
But if density is the root of the problem then the NIMBYs are right and we should not build more housing and just let prices rise to the stratosphere.
Density without disorder definitely exists in places (mostly outside North America), so I lean toward the YIMBY explanation.
The density *is* the cause of the problems, because our current urban policy status quo is incapable of mitigating the downsides of density. That isn't *required* to be the case by any respect, but it is the situation as the Voter in a United States city sees it.
I think the obvious solution here for SF at least, where they want the density, is to build an enormous arcology at the far west end of Golden Gate Park. Replace the golf course, they'd have that nice little lake there, and SF could easily have a whole lot more urban density housing. Might need to extend the underground BART line out there, though. Conveniently, they could just build the BART station directly into the arcology. Make it as tall as the Burj Khalifa, section it into 500 square foot apartments (though, I dunno, maybe that's too big in SF) and I bet you could easily house another 100,000 people.
Homeless problem solved, and they'd have a nice new landmark. And being that large, I bet it'd look amazing lit up in Pride colors.
Part of the distinction is that even if you rent controlled all the apartments down to a level many homeless people could afford, if there just aren't _enough_ they will still go to the wealthy and connected first. So the distinction makes it clear you can't just subsidize individuals housing costs, you just gotta make more houses.
A SF with more houses and lower housing costs is goin to be a magnet for more people moving in. I am guessing each affordable housing unit maybe decreases the homeless population by .05 homeless, less?
Build more houses -> house prices fall -> more people move to the city -> house prices rise - > new equillibrium established
Those all sound plausible.
I guess the question then is: why don't cities like San Francisco apply the same policies?
Bangor, Maine seems like a better option.
Because the type of person who lives in the cities may not like homeless people, but they don't want to treat homeless people as basically lepers who need to be tossed out of the city.
https://www.ppic.org/blog/whos-leaving-california-and-whos-moving-in/
Clearly this isn't the case.
The issue is that homeless services bring homeless congregations, and while a single homeless person or the abstracted "the homeless" are sympathetic - large congregations of homeless people bring all of the social ills commonly associated with Urban Decay. Suburbanites moved out of the city to escape urban decay, why should they let the failures of the progressive, nice , moral urban dwellers spill over into their town? City dwellers have volunteered to deal with these problems for you for no other reason than to write morally superior posts on the internet about suburbanites - let them deal with it!
Perhaps if there were actual breaking up of open air drug markets and police did something about crimes on public transportation and prevented them from being a direct pipeline to the surrounding area becoming a blight - there'd be more support for suburbs to actually house the homeless and provide services.
As it stands, there isn't - and the path from A to B is difficult, criticizing people for having a morally inferior amount of political willpower to Do the Right Thing(TM) does not convince large congregations of voters to Do the Right Thing when every time in the past they have done the right thing, the exact same, abominable results occur without fail.
You need to *innovate* in the policy arena.
*applause*
It also helps that there’s nothing for a homeless person in a suburb. Cities have things for everyone, and that’s why people of all sorts go there. But suburbs have nothing for you unless you are accepted into a private space like a home or office.
The suburb is cheaper precisely because it has less demand for the space, because there is less economic activity going on. Once you have a job it's fine to move to a suburb, but it's harder to find a job when there are fewer jobs near you.
Substack says this is a "104-minute read." This is good value for the money.
Every time I think of spending a week or two writing a long post, I get nervous that people will get angry that I haven't posted anything else that week or two. But nobody seemed to notice the gap this time, and I conclude all of you are very forgiving.
This was an excellent, old-fashioned longform review in the SSC style and I'm very grateful for it. Exactly the kind of content wherein I think your comparative advantage is strongest (especially given the breadth and specific types of topics the book in question touches on).
Agreed, Scott Alexander with depth is the best.
Here here!
Are you aware that it's 'Hear hear'?
Daniel's sig says "Writes adventures in English". Maybe that was one.
I was not aware! Thank you
On the old-time internet, we used to write "read, read" because that was what people were doing, not hearing.
i enjoy these but the length does make them hard to share because unfortunately for most people on the social media anything longer then twitter length is considered rude to even share.
The examples of charts, “reproducing the method on this other data”, for example. Those are so obviously good and correct that they are shocking by way of highlighting just how rare they are.
I fully agree. Love the old school, long form stuff. It really gets me thinking deeply and I genuinely come away feeling like I've learnt something.
I was captivated reading this - it is my favourite kind of ACT / SSC post.
The shorter posts are a joy. But when you find time to chew on a subject, you are something really special.
The wait was bearable.
I did *notice* the gap, but I'm not angry about it! You can write what you want to write.
This short innocent 500 page essay on city planning, ethics, praxis, the universe and other funny topics was so well hidden among the other book reviews nobody noticed it anyway :)
Don’t exaggerate. It’s only novella length. :)
I would be fine with an article every two weeks indefinitely. Quantity is overrated.
(But who keeps track? Whether by email or RSS, we will see it when it's done.)
Surely having more excellent posts in the archives would be better for readership in the long run anyways.
Naw, longer is much better. Having the guest book reviews also really helps fill the interlude.
I didn’t notice. I would probably notice if it had been months, but 1-2 weeks barely registers. Your output is already sometimes difficult to keep up with if you try to read all of it.
I noticed it, it made me feel better about not blogging for a month.
These kinds of posts are why some of us are reading you! :)
We noticed. How dare you decide independently when to write?! We all strongly support sweeping de-waitization!
LOL
I noticed, but I much prefer 1 high quality post over 4 meh posts
Some content every week is important, but fortunately your book review contest does a great job of filling in the gaps. This is the perfect time to right something meatier, and you succeeded with this post.
Agree with many of the other commenters: I really appreciate the deep dive, and even though I don't care personally about Shellenberger or the book per se, the stats and analysis are worth 104 minutes on their own merits. A worthy addition to the ACX pantheon!
I've been missing seeing this kind of content. Thanks!
I started reading this by email and didn't see that note. Now it's two hours after I meant to go to bed. Ugh.
Definitely not to be read while sitting on a bench waiting for the next barber to be available. That’s what “Rolling Stone” is for.
Huh. It took me about 60 minutes. Good to know
Want to get this out there early, rather than a couple hours later after I'm done reading: Scott, this review likely would have changed how I voted in the recent midterm elections. I didn't have the luxury of reading Shellenberger's book (retroactive campaign apologia?) before filling out the ballot, and casual perusal of commentariat characterizations were...not as trustworthy as I'd have liked. Thank you for this public service.
(For whatever it's worth, living in the same region, I do extra-appreciate your more local takes.)
"a combination of law enforcement and social services" would solve a lot of America's problems
Unfortunately, half the country doesn't trust law enforcement and the other half doesn't trust social services.
I trust neither
There's a Venn diagram with you in the middle somewhere
well, I have my own thoughts on ethics, but it occurs to me that as a broad political group libertarians (I don't exactly identify as one but I have libertarianish leanings and will sometimes ise the label for the sake of convenience as its the closest thing that people who are big on such labels will understand that explains somewhat many of my perspectives) would distrust both groups as agents of the state. That seems like a significant, if comparatively small, logical demographic response that somewhat reflects a different viewpoint then neatly dividing people's responses to said groups in half.
of topic, but this Horns problem is the worst.
I rapidly oscillate between not trusting centralized authority and not trusting the mob. Shit is just hard.
Like, I don't want to live under a Soviet style state capitalist "Communist" hellhole regime; I also don't want to live under a 1800's-today style railroad baron small business tyrant defacto authoritarian society.
The solution seems to be unions; but then those can degrade into actually the mafia really easy to.
But also, our current federal noncentralization means that we cannot accomplish a god damn thing, compared to the actually pretty tyrannical monoculture days of the 1940's-1970'sish.
The solution is clearly to declare me absolute immortal god king with power over the heavens and the earth. Simply place your lives into my hands it'll be fine lol
AFAICT, most systems can be made to work tolerably well, to the extent that they are run by non-sociopaths.
The problem is that power selects strongly for sociopathy.
I think of political ethics very differently then most. I'm not worried about god's eye view sandbox models, my ethics are personally applicable and in some sense "better or worse" if there is an idel alternative, but I feel the sandox idea "as if i could change society myself" seems silly because you cant so why not have your ideal society be actually ideal?
As such, I would point out that my highest principle is non-violence (or rather thats where I draw the line between one person's freedom or another, tech that could directly alter the brain would be similary because the idea is actions have consequences but violence literally prevents the exercise of freee choice)
If one is against the iniation of coercivie force and doesnt bother mking the dubious distinction of whether its "government" one sees the robber baron era was very authoritarian as it was full of coercive violence, it just wasnt always "official government violence" although sometimes it was.
Yikes, you nailed it.
The trouble seems to be they send in law enforcement when social services are needed, and social services when law enforcement is needed.
There's no good answer anywhere. The old days when you could get a troublesome relative committed for life with (basically) a snap of the fingers were bad, there's no denying. The new days when a combination of "anti-psychiatry" movement and government penny-pinching meant the old Victorian asylums were closed down (and generally sold off to property developers) while the former inmates were left for 'care in the community' (which never eventuated as funding for social services to support them didn't appear) aren't much better.
"which never eventuated as funding for social services to support them didn't appear"
Unfortunately, that is my best guess for what would happen here (usa) if we tried to implement the Amsterdam solution.
What this book partially advocates to do seems to be send both police and social services to everything. This will probably be nearly twice as expensive, but if it's effective, that'd be great.
I mean... do we spend less per capita on the mentally ill now than we did when we had asylums?
It seems like we pour millions and millions into "Social Services" that largely just amount to some college grad getting paid to spout (good but) cliched advice at people once a week or so. Like, our social services budget in my city is huge, but... I have zero confidence these social workers are actually fixing any problems.
"I have zero confidence these social workers are actually fixing any problems. "
Knee-jerk response: RCT
Take a random half of the cases that social workers respond to and omit their response. Pre-register the outcomes to be examined, and compare outcomes in the cases with and without the social workers' responses after some period of time (a year?).
Know of any that have been done?
I suspect that it would be hard to convince anyone in my country to allow this study to take place, as the general belief seems to be that these workers are very needed; and that hiring more of them would solve all our problems. And if that's true, then denying access to their services to a control group would be bad.
"And if that's true, then denying access to their services to a control group would be bad. "
Quite true - but that "if" is exactly the open question.
I think Ian's point is that people these days are not scientists-first-seemingly-obvious-ethics-later and moreover that they call people who still are that thing "mad scientists" and arrest them.
And here's a weird potential confounder: if social workers are supposed to be so overworked they can't help anyone, then cutting their caseload in half for the RCT might allow them to better focus on the remaining half, which would make them actually able to do their jobs properly for once. This would lead to an over-estimated effect size, relative to what you'd see in the current baseline. I'm not sure how to account for this.
So is the claim here that:
- Mental illness and drug abuse are not important contributors to the homeless being unable to follow shelter rules, find a job, rent a place and make payments on time?
- Concentration of homeless and attendant mental illness/public drug use/use of streets as toilets does not depress local economy and make even more people homeless through lack of opportunity?
Otherwise, it doesn't really matter if homelessness or addiction/mental illness came first, the point is that it's trapping the homeless and everyone else in vicious circle until these issues are addressed.
See Part d of the concluding section.
The Amsterdam model, sure, my point is that it doesn't matter in a big picture if mental illness or addiction is not the biggest initial cause of homelessness so long as it's a huge factor in not being able to escape it / lack of opportunities to do so in the neighborhood. On one hand, high housing prices are an obvious most direct driver of homelessness. Even drug users and mentally ill can often do some basic work, which might be enough to rent an apartment with roommates in an expensive area. Same goes for other cases like physical illness or losing a job, where small savings or help from family might tide one over with low cost of living. On the other hand, someone with a clear mind can almost always save for a Greyhound ticket to a more affordable place with basic jobs available. But one can't just move away from an addiction or mental illness.
You might think so, but I think the claims made in the book which seemed to suggest homelessness was very much just a product of addiction and mental illness are not strongly supported by the data like the book suggests.
In terms of what you imagine, there are structural factors that make things much more difficult then you sre suggesting. Many jobs today assume and require basic status and info that a person lacking a home just doesn't have. It seems like you are imagining what you might do if you suddenly found yourself without a place to live, but this is a case where likely you are not fully comprehending the degree to which people can find themselves in circular traps that dont allow for easy escape. On the other hand, presumably you could find ways to fulfill the requirements of having a job if you suddenly lost your home.
You are probably correct in the sense that whatever factors caused a person to be homeless in the first place are likely serious impediments to re-integrating into sociaty (that you don;t have)
For example, I was born with a genetic auto-i mmune disease, and I am very aware I am only ever a few steps away from being in that situation which if I were in it, given the realities Ive encontered with help for my illness, it would be very unlikely I could extricate myself from the situation.
I am not saying most people live perfectly settled lives, then get into cocaine and end up on the streets, although there are well known hit the bottom stories to that effect. Say it's much more common that people miss one rental payment because of unforeseen expenses, end up on the street and understandably use drugs to take the edge off otherwise unbearable situation. The point is that addiction than becomes the most important and difficult thing to overcome in order for such a person to get back on their feet. Otherwise even if money/housing is provided, one is going to spend money on dope, or get kicked out of housing for breaking drug or other rules, or get in trouble with the law and end up in jail. And tolerating petty crimes and bad public behavior like San Francisco does has too much of a cost on the rest of society.
In terms of other factors, consider that undocumented immigrants manage to support themselves despite lack of skills, language barrier and legal risks to self and employer. As a legal immigrant, I spent some time sleeping in someone's basement in exchange for helping them with basic repairs. And I have generally happy memories of that time period, but it was only possible because I was sober and reasonable and the family was not scared to have me around.
"Say it's much more common that people miss one rental payment because of unforeseen expenses, end up on the street and understandably use drugs to take the edge off otherwise unbearable situation. " Is it so in the USA? The most common (maybe 60%, my estimate) life history of the many opioid addicts I've met in Germany includes really bad childhoods and substance abuse from the early teens on. Homeless people here are to some extent immigrants without access to much welfare, also some addicts whose substance or mental health problem got so bad that the welfare system was not sufficient any more to provide them with a place to live. The latter sometimes get back into the system when their physical health deteriorates.
Addiction and mental health issues also often cause one to be enough of a nuisance to their family and close friends that such people are unwilling to let one live with them in the medium-to-long-term.
Having someone respectable to live with, store basic possessions with, use the shower of, and get your mail at the address of, is a pretty big step towards not being homeless.
I think part of the issue is that the review of the literature that Scott undertook is not comprehensive. I don't see Dennis Culhane mentioned anywhere in the review and he is very prominent in the field, one of the pioneers of the Housing First model.
I think you would be surprised what percentage of homeless people (high single digits at least)? are homeless simply because they lack/(lacked) the imagination to look for roommates at their moment of crisis, or see it as beneath their dignity. Particularly the working homeless (which is a population people love to talk about, but when interviewed are often very weird people making bizarre life choices).
Then once you have been on the street a while it becomes very hard to get off without support for the type of person who finds themselves there.
That doesnt appear to be what Scott is saying. Rather that the statistics just arent reliable, and he was "fact checking" the claims in the book. As far as alcohol/drug use goes, many people are homeless turn to those because time has a way of really dragging when there is nothing to do and nowhere to go.
Some thoughts on claim 1 (going to take quite a while to read through the rest):
As for why the rates of homeless are higher in dense/rich compared to sparse/rich, a dense and rich area provides more expected value for petty crime and panhandling, two major sources of income for the homeless. Higher general crime rates in the city also could cause the police to have less of an ability/will to persecute the petty crimes that the homeless usually commit, leading to an even higher risk-adjusted expected value.
Additionally, suburbs are probably going to have a higher rate of upper-middle class families with young children, and I suspect parents/police are going to be less tolerable of crazy homeless people yelling/chasing their kids around, which might explain why suburbs are also less tolerant.
I think this ascribes waaaay too much to homeless people loving to commit crime, and people wanting the cops to beat them up and throw them in jail.
Imagine that you are very poor. You can live out in the suburbs, where rows and rows of houses are only interrupted by the occasional convenience store (overpriced everyday goods in small quantities) and restaurant (expensive to eat at - a loaf of bread costs less than basically anything at McDonald's). Or you can live in the dense city center, where all the places you might buy anything are all right next to each other, and all the Walmarts and other places to buy cheap goods in mass are.
I know if I was so poor that I was forced to live out of my car, I'd park in the Walmart parking lot, not outside my house that's ten minutes drive down the highway from the grocery store. While San Francisco, presumably, is not a car-heavy environment, I'd imagine the same basic principle applies.
EDIT: My brother lived out of his car for a bit, asked him where he parked it - churches and Walmart.
I think you're typical-minding towards people who's complaint against them is they shit on the sidewalk and bellow nonsense at passers-by.
People who shit on the sidewalk and bellow nonsense at passers-by *also* need to eat food, have blankets, have clothes, etc, despite being very poor, so no, I don't think I am.
You can watch countless videos of the "soft white underbelly" variety of homeless people describing retail theft for drugs. There are no Walmarts in any dense city center I've been in, which is many of them, and even the occasional Target is usually on the outskirts. Last work trip to NYC in 3 visits to the bodega I paid $10 for a 10 load (or so) container of laundry detergent, $3.50 for a gallon jug of water in milky #2 plastic, and $5 for a can of Modelo, which at only 2x the normal suburban price was actually the best deal of the 3. The slummy areas of Brooklyn and Bronx are cheaper but still usually more expensive than any nearby suburbs, and isn't where the homeless hang anyway. Homeless people aren't buying bread, they regularly beg outside takeout restaurants. Every pizza place in midtown NYC has one by the door. Cheap prepared food like pizza and sandwiches are usually comparable to suburbia, NYC does have it beat with the $1pizza though. About the only thing I've found to be cheaper in the cities is hard drugs - by far.
Economic activity of *all* sorts is easier in the city than elsewhere. It’s why the richest people and the poorest people flock to cities. If you’ve already got a stable set of work and social activities and aren’t looking for anything more, then the suburbs have some advantages (particularly since you don’t have to pay for the ease of access to economic opportunity that rich and poor people will pay for).
A few observations:
1. I don't see how we can have this conversation about homelessness in California without noting that San Francisco's budget for homeless services, in one year, is $676 million. LA's is apparently close a billion. This is why many of us are not sympathetic to pleas that we're 'not helping the homeless'.
2. Related to 1- this doesn't address allegations that many of California's homeless are from elsewhere, but deliberately moved to a few metro areas due to nice weather and generous social services. (Or, I've heard stories that their local town put them on a bus to SF). If .2% of the population everywhere is basically OK with a lifestyle of camping on the street and doing drugs, and then they all cluster in one area- that area will likely end up a mecca of homelessness.
3. In terms of law enforcement and comparisons with Europe, it's worth noting that they have vagrancy and loitering laws there, and we kinda really don't. US courts struck most of these down as unconstitutional in the 70s. If you want to camp or openly defecate on the streets of London, Paris, Berlin etc., the police will clear you out with force. I know Scott tackles law enforcement issues in this piece, but vagrancy is a pretty big one. You can't commit a crime if you're not physically present in the area to begin with! Europe combines social services with a firmer hand and less of a civil liberties culture than we have here.
4. Speaking of Europe's firmer hand, I'm fairly sure that they have a lower bar to forced institutionalization for the loudly mentally ill than we do. (Again, in cases like O'Connor v Donaldson in the 70s the SC raised the bar to lock someone away). Is 21st century Germany's asylums like Scott's dramatic description of 1950s America? I would lean towards no. There has to be some kind of middle ground to force treatment on the severely ill. Three different doctors who can't be in the same practice all have to sign off? A separate non-hospital employee doctor is required to check patients every few months and issue an opinion?
This would match the observation that most homeless in a metro area became homeless in that same metro area, but would add a mechanism whereby a metro area's homeless are even more concentrated in the downtown core than they otherwise would be. Suburbs are successfully expelling homeless people and urban cores are not (because they have no-where to send them without institutions except to prison would would be paid for by the urban core anyways).
These numbers are from 2019, but you might enjoy them:
Houston Texas has reduced its homeless population from ~7,000 to ~4,000 in the last 10 years even as the metro area's population increased from 5.8 million to 7.0 million, and they did it by doing a housing-first solution that was viable and scaleable because housing costs were low. They housed 17,000 formerly homeless people during that decade (notice that 17,000 >> 3,000, so a lot of homeless people are transiently homeless). Houston's funding to homeless programs was $38 million in 2019, compared to LA's $619 million, and LA's homeless population went from ~25,000 in 2009 to ~55,000 in 2019 while the LA metro area* went from a population of 12.9 million in 2009 to 13.3 million in 2019.
So to compare those 2 cities:
Both have about 1/3 of the population of their metro area in the city proper.
Houston provides $12,700 in funding per 2019 homeless person
LA provides $11,254 in funding per 2019 homeless person
Houston's metro area increased in population by 21% in the last decade
LA's metro area increased in population by 3% in the last decade
Houston's homeless population FELL by 42% in the last decade
LA's homeless population ROSE by 120% in the last decade
It's all about housing affordability, not Texans being better about things than Californians. Dallas is struggling to get its homeless population down partially because its real estate is getting less affordable than Houston:
https://www.texastribune.org/2019/07/02/why-homelessness-going-down-houston-dallas/
>It's all about housing affordability, not Texans being better about things than Californians. Dallas is struggling to get its homeless population down partially because its real estate is getting less affordable than Houston:
CA is not as affordable to Texas in large part due to state regulations - labor, permits, zoning, etc. Something that CA and TX both have control over and TX is pretty clearly better at.
The thing is, as Crimson Wool points out, building cheap housing out in the middle of nowhere with no other amenities and no means of transport isn't much of a solution. Some people *will* prefer to be 'transiently homeless' and stay in the city centre where they have access to amenities, or be near their friends/family.
There are a scale of reasons people become homeless, and it really can be that someone who did have a home but is suddenly out of it for whatever reason (landlord sold up, they moved out because of abusive relationship, they lost their job) and needs emergency accommodation while they get back on their feet can't get it, because the social services don't have any free space. Those are the people who will be the success stories for projects like "Housing First".
What does seem to be the new problem that Shellenberger's book is highlighting is the apparent large increase in the worst kind of homelessness - the mentally ill, the criminal, the junkies, etc. People who don't want to go into shelters because they won't be allowed drink/take drugs or that the shelters are too dangerous, or that the person in question is so far gone they can't handle anything other than a hobo camp or sleeping on the street. *That's* the question to be answered - how did this happen, if it happened; what can be done about it; if ordinary people genuinely feel unsafe, are they unreasonable to ask for police intervention, etc.
"The thing is, as Crimson Wool points out, building cheap housing out in the middle of nowhere with no other amenities and no means of transport isn't much of a solution."
It is if the housing is cheap enough that people can afford the housing + a (second-hand, decrepit) car on a minimum wage, which many people in Texas can do (sub-minimum wage, in the case of many of the illegal immigrants in Texas).
"What does seem to be the new problem that Shellenberger's book is highlighting is the apparent large increase in the worst kind of homelessness - the mentally ill, the criminal, the junkies, etc."
2019 America's drug overdose death rate is massively higher than 2001 America's. The difference is 14.6 per 100,000 per year, or (using 2019 population) 48,579 deaths per year.
https://drugabusestatistics.org/drug-overdose-deaths/
The total American homeless population is roughly 552,830
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States
Of which ??? are in "the worst kind of homelessness" (almost certainly less than 1/3 since 2/3s are in shelters, probably more like 1/10th but I have no firm data for that guess).
Since people in "the worst kind of homelessness" would be people we would expect to stay homeless until they die (barring extraordinary interventions), the fact that the ratio of "extra overdose deaths" : "total people in the worst kind of homelessness" is 1:3 suggests that the phenomenon of expansion of "the worst kind of homeless" (if it is happening) could be easily explained as an outgrowth of the opioid crisis.
The follow-up question is, are all cities with homeless populations experiencing an increase in "the worst kind of homelessness", or is California's policy mix causing its homeless problem to be much worse than Houston?
(I don't know how to answer this question, because "are those 4,000 homeless in Houston in 2019 more disruptive than the 7,000 homeless in Houston in 2009?" is a question that official statistics are unlikely to capture accurately)
So I do think housing affordability does matter, but
>It is if the housing is cheap enough that people can afford the housing + a (second-hand, decrepit) car on a minimum wage, which many people in Texas can do (sub-minimum wage, in the case of many of the illegal immigrants in Texas).
Doesn't this only hold for people who can hold down a minimum wage job?
>Of which ??? are in "the worst kind of homelessness" (almost certainly less than 1/3 since 2/3s are in shelters, probably more like 1/10th but I have no firm data for that guess).
Why would you assume that none of the worst kind of homeless are in shelters when one of the reasons people give for avoiding shelters is the desire to avoid the worst kind of homeless?
Probably also worth remembering that some of the worst cases of homelessness are currently in jail or prison (I don't think such people count as homeless) but will be homeless again when they get out. Given the population sizes involved this probably doesn't move the numbers much but I think it is worth remembering.
The rest of your post just feels like fuzzy math supported by wild assumptions (and just looking at overdose deaths strikes me as inadvertent cherry picking, people in such conditions can survive that way for years/decades, not every homeless addict is addicted to opioids and not every mentally ill homeless person is an addict).
"Doesn't this only hold for people who can hold down a minimum wage job?"
It holds for people who can hold down a minimum wage job a % of the time that exceeds (1 - their savings rate while employed), yes.
"Why would you assume that none of the worst kind of homeless are in shelters when one of the reasons people give for avoiding shelters is the desire to avoid the worst kind of homeless?"
(1) Shelters have a variety of rules that make it much harder to maintain an active drug habit
(2) It can be extremely unpleasant to be around a large number of homeless people in a setting without any locked doors without any of those homeless people being in "the worst kind of homelessness"
(3) Shelters have rules like curfews that would tend to expel people experiencing "the worst kind of homelessness" if said homelessness was a major mental health problem (since they would struggle to consistently be back in time for curfew)
"Probably also worth remembering that some of the worst cases of homelessness are currently in jail or prison (I don't think such people count as homeless) but will be homeless again when they get out. Given the population sizes involved this probably doesn't move the numbers much but I think it is worth remembering."
Yes, this is a fair point since the prison population at ~2M is ~4X the size of the national homeless population, so a relatively small %age change in the composition of the prison population could result in a large shift in the composition of the homeless population, especially the smaller category "experiencing the worst kind of homelessness"
"The rest of your post just feels like fuzzy math"
Yes
"supported by wild assumptions"
I was offering simplifying assumptions to try to estimate the size of the problem. It's easy to lie with statistics but it's much easier to lie without statistics. Where are the errors in my numbers? Do you have different, less wild assumptions, or a different framework that would be useful?
I was trying to sketch out the case for "the increase in the size of the US drug problem is easily large enough to explain a significant increase in the number of people experiencing the worst kind of homelessness", but I acknowledge that this is a sketch rather than a clear proof
"and just looking at overdose deaths strikes me as inadvertent cherry picking, people in such conditions can survive that way for years/decades, not every homeless addict is addicted to opioids and not every mentally ill homeless person is an addict"
The increase in the number of people addicted to various drugs would be massively higher than the increase in the number of additional drug overdose deaths per year (unless there was a background condition of collapse of available services for preventing overdose death, and in fact the opposite of this happened, we got various drugs that administered in a timely fashion can save someone from dying of a previously fatal opioid overdose and then distributed those drugs to nearly every EMT / firefighter in the country).
Since the increase in the number of additional people addicted to various drugs is much much larger than the overall homeless population, an increase in "number of people experiencing the worst kind of homelessness" could be parsimoniously explained purely by this phenomenon, and it is reasonable to think the two are connected given that many people experiencing the worst kind of homelessness are observed to be addicted to hard drugs.
Causes of "people experiencing the worst kind of homelessness" appear to be (mostly) severe mental health problems and/or drug addiction. A massive increase in the addict population & the availability of certain kinds of very strong drugs could then explain nearly all of the change in the "people experiencing the worst kind of homelessness" population without needing any other factors.
Here are other factors that might increase the population of "people experiencing the worst kind of homelessness":
Reduced mental health in the general population (also observed)
Reduced state coercion to prevent homeless misbehavior (also observed in California)
Increased housing costs (also observed in California)
New drugs specifically causing mental health problems at a higher rate than old hard drugs (sometimes claimed but not clearly observed)
There are several other factors on that list that might have contributed, but I would suggest that the change in the rate of overdose deaths (useful proxy for rate of hard drug use) has increased more dramatically than anything else on that list (with the possible exception of the provision of policing services in SF and LA).
> 2019 America's drug overdose death rate is massively higher than 2001 America's.
Well, of course it is. The Feds incentivized the heroin dealers to sell poorly cut carfentanyl instead.
"poorly cut carfentanyl"
Is there any study of what fraction of overdose deaths are from inconsistent dosages from drug dealers?
My personal bias is against the drug war as a whole. I'd rather not have our rulers edict what we are and are not allowed to have in our bloodstreams. That said, the number of overdose deaths in the usa per year (~90,000) is above the number of vehicular fatalities (~40,000), which is the threshold that I use for when I count something as a real problem.
My impression is that drug overdose deaths have at least three components:
1) deaths from inconsistent dosages
2) suicides
3) deaths from the drug habit itself
Presumably (1) would go away if the drug war went away and recreational drugs were supplied through reputable pharmacies.
Depending on the causes of the suicides, those might be unchanged (though presumably switching to different means) even if recreational drugs were to magically vanish.
(3) is part of the 'justification' for the drug war - though we don't ban tobacco or alcohol on similar grounds.
Can anyone point to an approximate breakdown of the overdose deaths between these categories?
Texas's package of housing regulations resulted in much more affordability, yes, but that's different from "the Texas administrative state's ability to implement Housing First is better than the California administrative state's ability to implement Housing First", which is the claim I was (implicitly) trying to rule out.
It is not different. The administrative state is writing the housing regulations. Housing First is directly impacted by housing regulations. The admin state in Texas can implement housing first because of their conscious policy decisions, they have not tied their own hands.
Maybe you can argue that the individual offices that are in charge of implementing the housing first policy are largely the same. But those offices are only a small part of the larger admin state.
If I'm understanding you correctly, we both agree with the statement "The ability of a municipality to implement a Housing First approach to homelessness is largely determined by the cost of housing in that municipality", and we both agree that "Housing costs in a municipality are largely determined by the governments that govern that municipality [city + state]".
Taken together, I agree that the failure of Housing First in California is the fault of Californians and the success of Housing First in Texas is to the credit of Texans, but I disagree that the difference is only due to the "administrative state"
(1) I would refer to the administrative state in this case specifically being the policy-makers involved in crafting homelessness-addressing programs
(2) Even if you defined the administrative state as all non-elected officials, those non-elected officials do not have the power to change California's housing regulations to match the Texan standard. Many of the cost-increasing regulations are state-wide laws like CEQA, and other things at the municipal level that increase property costs are so locally popular with Californian voters that if the administrative state tried to unilaterally overturn them they were be overruled by local voters. California YIMBYs are focusing on the state legislature as the actor with the power to actually make changes large enough to affect housing prices.
Summary: there is a large difference between Texas and California, but the fault is in Californians not just California's administrative state.
>If I'm understanding you correctly, we both agree with the statement "The ability of a municipality to implement a Housing First approach to homelessness is largely determined by the cost of housing in that municipality", and we both agree that "Housing costs in a municipality are largely determined by the governments that govern that municipality [city + state]".
Yes
>Taken together, I agree that the failure of Housing First in California is the fault of Californians and the success of Housing First in Texas is to the credit of Texans, but I disagree that the difference is only due to the "administrative state"
Ok then don't know why you said the below unless you narrowly meant the homeless response / Housing First only. Which I mean isn't exactly clear. Not to be a dick
>It's all about housing affordability, not Texans being better about things than Californians. Dallas is struggling to get its homeless population down partially because its real estate is getting less affordable than Houston:
Any clue how much of that decrease in Houston was migration? Such as away from hurricanes or to places like Austin when it ended its camping ban?
I don't think that's covered in the study, but AFAIK the supermajority of homeless populations of most metros studied became homeless in that metro area. The homeless don't seem to migrate between metros very much.
Plus, by quantity the fact that the # of people linked up to substantial housing assistance is ~5x the size of the reduction of the homeless population is consistent with the Housing First approach having a big enough impact to move the supply/demand curve of homelessness in Houston, but to confirm that w.r.t. California I guess you'd need to try to find an equivalent number for the number of homeless people in the LA region who received equivalent substantial housing assistance (scaled by metro pop difference) during that time, plus an adjustment for the fact that LA's housing costs increased much more than Houston's over that decade (from a higher starting point).
> Speaking of Europe's firmer hand, I'm fairly sure that they have a lower bar to forced institutionalization for the loudly mentally ill than we do.
I'm not sure of that. I don't have a source any more then you do, but I think I remember reading a complaint that institutionalization is too hard in germany, and should be easier, like in the US.
In Germany this is state law, so there are differences. In my state, one physician can get someone locked up until next noon with a convincing formal notice to the judge in charge. Next day, a judge has to see the patient and decide for how long or if at all the lockup continues, seldom more than two weeks. When, later, hospital staff thinks, it should take longer or shorter, they notice the court again.
That is broadly true.
It's not sth lightly done but it can help with immidiate crises.
German law says that in the event of acute danger to self or others, persons deemed mentally ill can be admitted to a psychiatric hospital by relatives, guardians, the social psychiatric service, a local court or the police - even without their consent.
After being admitted involuntarily, the patient has the right to speak to a doctor within 24 hours. Either then they are discharged, the person voluntarily consents to treatment, or - if the psychiatrist and patient disagree - a judge must be called in within the next 24 hours. The judge makes the decision based on a conversation with the patient and the assessment of the doctor. Upon judicial referral, individuals who are deemed to be an acute danger to themselves or others must remain in the closed psychiatric ward for the duration of the judicial order. They may also have to undergo compulsory treatment. The aim is to stabilize the patient and prevent further escalation of the crisis.
The biggest thing in this area that I'd like to see the USA import from Germany (all of Europe? I dunno, only ever hung out in Berlin) is the hard separation between the "call the police" and the "call an ambulance" emergency numbers.
I mean, there might be lots of other great stuff too, but I would absolutely adore that one.
>Or, I've heard stories that their local town put them on a bus to SF
I've heard claims along these lines, too. When I looked into them via poking around on Google, it sounded like what's actually going on is that one of the tools in the standard "social services for the homeless" toolbox is to identify people who are stuck somewhere with no local personal support network but have friends or family somewhere else in the country who could help them out, and to offer to buy these people a bus ticket to wherever their friends or family are. When used as intended, this seems like it'd be almost trivially low-hanging fruit: for a couple hundred dollars worth of bus fare and maybe half a day of a social worker's time, you get a situationally homeless person off the street and into the care of a private citizen who already knows them and is willing to help them get back on their feet.
On the other hand, it isn't always going to work as intended. Maybe the friends or family are already sick of trying to help them (which would explain why they haven't already sprung for bus fare for their homeless friend or relative on their own initiative). Maybe they're willing to try help at first but it doesn't work out and our homeless guy winds up back on the streets again. Or maybe the program sometimes gets abused by homeless people who just want a bus ticket to somewhere that seems like a better place to be homeless, and overworked and under-resourced social workers don't scrutinize their claims too closely when believing them means both less work now and a reduced local homeless population once their clients get on the bus.
One item I think is relevant to the end of 1: Suburbs are by and large designed for cars. If you don't have one it's hard to get to the suburbs, hard to leave them, and hard to buy food and etc.
The best way to avoid homeless may just be to move slightly further from public transportation. I would be very curious if there are any studies on the relationship between public transit access and homeless population within a metro area rather than between them.
Big If True...but I'd hope the real problem, or at least the eventual actual policy changes, would be something else. As someone both financially and physically (okay, probably more like psychosomatically) incapable of car ownership*, my quality of life is strongly tied to public transit access. The more a city gets towards dense, walkable, car-optional design, the more people like me end up living there - sometimes specifically moving for that reason alone. It'd be regressive to put the squeeze on us in order to reduce homelessness. Can't necessarily speak for others, but it'd make it much harder for me to keep a job as well. Seems important for preventing homelessless.
(OTOH, as an unabashed public transit hawk, I openly admit to being biased. "Check your priors!")
(Also incidentally, your user icon pleases me, as a fellow Mola mola fan.)
*And principally opposed to rideshare on economic grounds, nevermind <vast litany of other indignities not involving Softbank>. I seem to remember that Scott disagrees with this characterization, or at least claimed that rideshare frequently passed a cost-benefit analysis for employing his former (SSC-era) patients, but am having a damned hard time finding a citation. At any rate, it's a suboptimal kludge solution to bridge the gap between the public transit-dependent and suburb-like homelessness rates.
You don't need to oppose rideshare, rideshare economics itself opposes rideshare and now that we're entering a bear cycle I don't expect rideshare to last very long.
I, too, dream of a day when over-financialized equity printers stop getting VC life infusions. Profits are supposed to matter at some point - eventually Somebody Else's Money means Your Money.
It was more a last-minute throwaway proactive defense against an imagined argument that the carless will be okay with reduced public transit, since rideshare can pick up the slack, and therefore Shut Up And Multiply means reducing homelessness is the greater good. But on re-read that really isn't implied by your comment, so it was an unnecessary reaction on my part. I apologize.
This is what it comes down to… people like me would like transit connected walkable urbanism, homeless activists accuse us of pushing “playgrounds for the rich” at the expense of homeless and poor people’s freedom, they mostly win, and consequently most middle class people live in sprawl.
I'd love to take public transportation, but you need to make sure it's nice to take instead of some moral obligation. And "nice to take" means no homeless on it.
Yeah in Minneapolis/Saint Paul they spent all this time/money starting a light rail system. The activists ensured that the homeless were allowed to use it for shelter, and now very few people who have an option use it.
It is two parts of progressive policy that is in very grave conflict.
Exactly. Like all people, homeless people have a preference for places where it is easy to access all the things they need to do for their current life and for their life aspirations. If you make it harder to get around, then you will discourage people of all sorts, including homeless people, from living there. For people who don’t have as strong a desire for new economic and social opportunities as others (already in a stable job, already with a family) that isn’t as much of a cost as it is for other people, so those kinds of people flock to suburbs.
Scott actually mentions this in the conclusion section, subsection d:
> Also, what about NIMBYism? People have cogently argued that many of our worst problems - from high housing prices to declining technological progress - are downstream of our decision to stop building dense cities and walkable neighborhoods. But a big reason we don’t build dense cities and walkable neighborhoods is that people (correctly) hate and fear them. They accurately predict that if their neighborhood got denser, it would start looking like the dense parts of San Francisco - litter-filled, decaying, disgusting, unsafe, and ambiently miserable to exist in. The reason we don’t have better public transportation in the Bay Area is that people protest every time someone tries to build a BART station in their area - and the reason people protest every time someone tries to build a BART station in their area is that they weren’t born yesterday, and they’ve seen what other BART stations and the areas around them are like.
I agree with Scott that this leads to all sorts of bad outcomes. Even though this is California and everyone living in the suburbs is probably driving a Tesla anyhow, I can't help but think that public transportation has some important scale advantages over individual mobility, so anything which turns it into a net negative is bad?
By contrast, when the suburb of Munich I was living in was connected to the municipal rail network, there was generally much rejoicing. Of course, it did not exactly lower the rents, but the ability to take a train downtown was a net positive for basically everyone living there. While there is always something to complain about the rail network (more expensive than driving by car, frequently late (esp. S-Bahn), sometimes crowded, other people generally), I find it generally tolerable.
Do want to emphasize that this is an issue where transit agencies Have Noticed The Skulls, and it's a genuinely hard problem from inside the system too. Most easier fixes that *might* discourage the homeless also *definitely* discourage the regular ridership, the burden of which falls hardest on those non-homeless who need it most. They also discourage transit employees and lower their reputation with the public, so say goodbye to easy funding. Everything from hostile station architecture, more transit cops (BART police are infamously trigger-happy), higher/better enforced fares, cutting service routes and times...
Here's one particularly infamous local example. I used to do a bit of work with this agency's union, can confirm veracity. Very Sad: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-23/elizabeth-lo-s-short-sundance-film-hotel-22-shows-the-plight-of-silicon-valley-s-homeless
> Most easier fixes that *might* discourage the homeless also *definitely* discourage the regular ridership
"Better enforced fares" doesn't harm regular ridership unless they're regularly jumping the turnstiles.
If you can't have cops that don't kill people, then it's time to move to a city that has their cops under control.
I occasionally ride BART. The rampant fare evasion makes me resentful of other riders and somewhat fearful because of the general sense of lawlessness.
Yeah, I'm always sus of "enforcing the community's norms will harm the community" arguments. Like everyone is a slacker.
yet another book whose central premise is "_______________ is the fault of progressives / libs / environmentalists". the genre must make some serious $$$.
Yes, there is a market for honest examinations of reality
This is unsurprising when you realize that progressives/libs/environmentalist have had a 30-year run of governing the entire West Coast and--unsurprisingly--there are still many problems, and many new ones.
Ideologies can and should be criticized for their failures, and the response of those ideologies should be to adapt.
Exactly. The sardonic implication above of this "genre" as being surprisingly active to the point that there must be some sort of uniquely sinister ideological/financial factors at play is at odds with a basic grasp of two-party politics. For every book about "_______" being the fault of progressives/liberals/environmentalists", there are plenty of books which claim that __________ is the fault of conservatives/neoliberals/religious people.
There are a lot of politically motivated authority figures in the US, and there are a lot of problems. Thus, there is plenty of criticism on the basis of [insert proxy for one party or the other], and some of these criticisms will even be largely true and valuable.
Are they failing worse than, say, Texas or Florida? The review points out that SF has about the level of homelessness we should expect for its housing prices and climate.
If you reserve all criticism for only those who are failing the worst, then I'm afraid we'll all be stuck discussing Malawi for the rest of our lives.
As for whether San Francisco's particular approach to homelessness is worse than that of Houston or Miami, my takeaway from this review is that it might well be. After all, even in your question, you implicitly removed and responsibility San Francisco might have for its housing prices.
The book doesn’t seem to focus on housing prices, which seems to be the main driver here.
No argument from me on that point. I remain rather unconvinced on most of the premises, though I find the idea SA implies that "housing first" is a poor idea in San Francisco because of its high housing prices to be intriguing.
My main concern in this thread is just to defend the idea that liberals are deserving of criticism.
I actually reject the entire notion in this book that housing first was tried in a meaningful way. There is a monumental difference between a housing first label being applied by politicians, and like - actually passing YIMBY policies, building lots of actual housing, and rezoning.
This book argues (convincingly in my opinion) that the homeless population is homeless largely due to drug abuse, mental illness, and overall inability to productively and effectively survive and thrive independently within modern society. Housing prices have nothing to do with that.
...kind of seems like they do, given the R-squared values shown in the first paragraphs of this article. You can try to explain that homelessness is a combination of these factors, but you cannot entirely dismiss the fact that housing costs are empirically highly correlated with homelessness.
This notion has already been staunchly refuted in the literature. House prices explain homelessness, mental illness rates do not.
This book doesn't even engage with the mountain of evidence against it's claims.
Texas/florida criticism has its own publications, examples include the new york times and Vox.com
I particularly enjoyed the latest handwringing over Chesa Boudin getting the boot because San Francisco is a reactionary, right-wing, conservative city.
Such a pity the sole brave liberal political officer was done down by the iron grip of the Republicans and other conservatives on city politics!
Personally know several voters who treated that as a Single-Issue Emergency and voted no recall solely because a bit of the Wrong Kind of Money backed the campaign. Without doing any other research. So it's definitely a ridiculous post-hoc rationalization, but seems to have been effective pre-hoc too. "Reversed conservatism is not progressivism!" Except in SF, where there's always some Shadowy Neoliberal Cabal to blame for intra-coalition failures if no Foreign Republicans can be found to scapegoat.
The heavy racial skew of the final vote tally went curiously unremarked in my (almost all-white) local circles as well. Surely an oversight and not at all related to the earlier school board recall, whose results weren't remotely similar and definitely didn't have any of the same Wrong Kind of Money backing that campaign. Strange time to be an Asian in SF.
I think the counterpoint would be that a huge portion of the "normal" policy books are basically the inverted argument, but it doesn't need to be in the title because it is implicit.
Okay, and the hegemonic establishment media is the exact opposite. You gonna take pot shots at them? Or just the small players opposed to them?
What book would you recommend about the un-housed homeless issue on the US West Coast ?
From Youtube videos and from my partners recent experience in the US it seems that it has really changed for the worse recently.
I've read San Francsicko and as an outsider thought it was a really interesting book.
I don't live there, but again from reports it appears that Seattle has similar issues as San Francisco, Portland and LA but Bellevue does not despite having a substantial downtown.
Would anyone who lives in that area be able to comment ?
Bellevue is not a substantial downtown in the same way as these others. It has a cluster of office buildings, but my understanding is that it doesn’t have the walkable access to many other things that downtown Seattle does. My understanding is that not many metros in the United States have the true multiple nearly equal centers that Los Angeles and Dallas/Fort Worth and Oakland/San Francisco have.
Seattle is actually a good case study for this, because the way I commonly describe it is "lots of different cities wearing a trenchcoat" - the geography makes both car travel and transit travel between center locales pretty cursed, and there have been a lot of different primary industries that employ a *lot* of people that are located in each of these cities. Bellevue/Redmond is where Microsoft is situated, downtown Seattle is where Amazon is situated, Boeing is both north and south of the city itself for access to industrial level footprints.
The downtown of Seattle *looks* really big and dense, but it doesn't take that many blocks before you're in a neighborhood full of midrises and SFH. But there are lots of "Centers" like this in the metro area over all.
A recurring theme in this post is problems caused by a sort of motte-and-bailey of mental illness definitions, where sometimes someone is implicitly talking about only the most extreme cases, but quotes statistics that include all cases of depression and anxiety.
It would be good to avoid this ambiguity. The term “severe mental illness” used here seems to do that but is still confusing if you don’t know it’s a term of art. I wish 1) there were a completely different phrase, and 2) there was consensus on where to draw the arbitrary line.
It's funny, my initial thought is that most of the problem is the motte-and-bailey of homelessness definitions, and it's almost an exact mirror. Especially when looking at the relationship between housing costs and homelessness, it seems like it's hopelessly confounded by the difference between someone who can't make rent and is sleeping in their car or on a friend's couch and someone who has been living in a tent for years (I think "chronically homeless" is the term of art).
Under the broadest definitions of "homeless" that I've seen used, you can be "homeless" if you're staying in a hotel for a few weeks while you sort out more permanent accommodation. By those standards I've been homeless several times in my life.
Some federal definitions include people who say had an apartment 9 months, slept on their sister's couch for one night, and then had a new apartment for the next 3 months. Now how often those people actually get counted is another issue, but when organizations are really trying to goose the numbers they loves including or not including such situations depending on what suits them.
The other thing you have to be careful of there is length-biased sampling. The average person who is currently homeless has been homeless for longer than the average person who has ever been homeless.
That's a really excellent point. Even when I was in that situation, it was only... 50 days or so?
Which still wasn't exactly a vacation, but it's not trying to get back out of it after years and years. And I was trying really hard to fix it as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, there is no good definition for severe mental illness that really covers what we mean by it. I think most people talking about homelessness are thinking of psychosis rather than, say, really really bad anxiety.
Right. But even Manageable mental illness can become a severely disabling factor when combined with the mutliple challenges that come from the practical realities of being homeless.'
I wonder about this sort of classification problem often, perhaps related to the irregular verbs: with "i'm a smooth operator, you're a bit forward, he's a creep" being a classic example where instead of the verb is irregular by grammatical person it is irregular by attractiveness of person. Here in mental health it would be "I'm fun and quirky, you're a bit neurotic, he's seriously mentally ill". The verb might conjugate by how inoffensive vs inconvenient the person is.
Your point about the overall utility to a community and the moral cost is the more important point, and one concerning which there is a sad but understandable lack of social honesty. This, i think, is the reason for the soft dishonesty of Shellenberger's work -- he wants the data about housing-first outcomes to do the moral heavy lifting, because even voters who really would like to see anyone dirty or inconvenient tidied away into insane asylums wouldn't admit that to themselves in private or in the voting booth. Perhaps someday we'll have robot-run VR-assisted permanent-stay-if-needed mental hospitals that we can tell ourselves are better than freedom, but we're not there yet.
Wow, 22,845 words including quotes. What does it all mean?
All those words mean things :)
And they were good in depth, words. I’m just lazy. I feel like long blog post should be written like newspaper articles: Start with the main point and work your way down from there. In other words, don’t bury the leed. Philip Greenspan says in his review of San Fransicko: “I find it tough to believe that the author’s proposed solution, a new massive state bureaucracy, would be effective. Suppose that the new state agency worked precisely as hoped, unlike any of the previous or existing government initiatives described in the book. If California were then to deliver on its promises to its current homeless, why wouldn’t that attract a more or less unlimited supply of new homeless people from other states, other countries (just walk across the border), etc.?” https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2022/01/19/finished-san-fransicko/
Meh – I don't read newspapers!
I like Greenspun but his whole 'have you heard about sarcasm??' schtick has really started to grate on my nerves. I like some of the flying posts now and mostly skip everything that starts with some 'reverse psychology' joke or whatever it is he's been doing.
I have a hard time even knowing what he thinks about anything. He puts his main point – 'Some people sure are stupid' – right up front, but he also never lets you forget ever either. And the reasoning he shares is generally lazy, superficial, and along the lines of what you quoted.
Scott's doing a whole other thing from that kind of shit-posting.
And I like reading, so having to read a 'long' post to get to the conclusion is fine for me – and it doesn't _spoil_ me about 'what I should think' either.
I feel like this isnt the blog for you.
If you skip to the "Book Review: San Francisicko" section, that pretty much gives all of Scott's conclusions on the book, without having to read the case-by-case breakdown of all the 10 claims Scott goes over.
Tldr; clearing out homeless people would be better for not-homeless people. Unclear if it helps or hurts homeless people. Also when people crap on your front yard your first principle becomes "no human feces."
Scott's conclusion: book is pretty dishonest, lots of words.
My conclusion: make this guy governor, I don't care if he sometimes misrepresents the science. He's way better than the alternative!
Good point, but sadly that’s setting the bar pretty low. I guess the bar is low wherever you look these days.
The missing (?) data on shoplifting is incredibly spooky. How deep does this incongruity run? How disconnected is the world of legible data from the world of anecdote? And which one do I actually live in?
I can confirm as someone who worked retail for a while in 2021 that we definitely didn't consistently report shoplifting. It was frequent, it was in many cases pretty blatant, but unless it involved repeat offenders or particularly large financial equivalents there was not a great deal of time and effort devoted to mitigation. Our security guy also wasn't allowed to stop shoplifters from exiting the store, stand in their way, etc. in case this caused a possible confrontation.
I should clarify that this was not in San Francisco.
This, and I'll also add some SF retail employers now actively discourage paying any attention to shoplifting at all. Carrot: "you'll never be held responsible, even if you could have feasibly stopped the boost". Stick: "we will censor and possibly outright fire you for even minor confrontations". You can entirely forget about any sort of reporting, even to the mall cops, outside of egregious cases that involve physical injuries. But even those are more likely to be classified as assault etc instead of property crime. (Same trend discourages reporting most muggings here. Possibly a whole other anecdata minefield there. I think car break-in reporting is more accurate mostly because there's hard physical evidence which simply can't be brushed aside - plus insurance.)
The carrot further erodes labour's sense of agency and value. There's a certain freeing aspect in not having responsibilities - but if one has no actual meaningful responsibilities on the job, isn't it just make-work? The "don't care" attitude starts to creep into other areas beyond just shoplifting, creating a perceptible loss of morale and work ethic. It'd be one thing if the solution was simply passing the buck to security or middle management as the "eyes and ears", but their hands are mostly just as tied.
The stick causes additional problems beyond the shoplifting itself. Everyone in retail (ideally) comes in with a certain expectation of being treated like shit and deferring to utility monster customers. But it's above and beyond that baseline to proactively fear for one's job just in case a confrontation is subjectively perceived to have been "excessive". At my work, there's been a suspicious pattern of such firings occurring along totally coincidental racial and gender lines, further contributing to general apprehension. We've also entirely stopped stocking certain high-value items due to how often they get stolen, which isn't fair to the law-abiding legitimate customers who want them too. All to avoid potential conflicts.
Upshot: whether the anecdata or the Official CDC Statistics are more reflective of the territory, *people act like the anecdata are true*, with consequent harmful policy and behaviour modifications. So spending resources to address the perception, if not the underlying (non-)problem, would seem to be a $20 win lying on the ground regardless. Current Nash equilibrium is painful for everyone.
I wonder how long an equilibrium of complete non-response to shoplifting can persist until even well-to-do customers start just taking things because there are no consequences? (After which I presume it will very quickly become unprofitable to leave the store open). If even the nominal owners of the goods can't be bothered do care about whether they're paid for, doesn't that create pressure towards making everyone who pays just a sucker rather than a cooperator?
This actually already de facto happens. As an Upstanding Moral Grocer, my company makes an effort to donate whatever we can't sell, rather than throwing it in a locked Dumpster with a security guard to deter the homeless like Some Other Competitors. But there's sort of an honour system thing of deciding what's donation-worthy vs compost-worthy. Although there has always been some degree of, uh, "spillage" which results in free food for us employees, these days there's hardly any guilt about "accidentally breaking" something that one would otherwise pay for. Even bosses mark things off this way sometimes, instead of using the officially-documented Manager Expense Account process.
As you say, when any schmuck can walk out the door with basically whatever with no repercussions, the Law-Abiding Citizens who pay start to feel like suckers. Sad state of affairs. Why bother putting effort into a job you don't respect and that doesn't respect you right back?
This is a very interesting question. I have the same thoughts about paying for public transportation in SF. When it is clear that a certain percentage are riding for free, and that the consequences for doing so are nil, will a certain portion of currently-paying riders just stop doing paying as well? A tipping point?
"Certain percentage" implies a smaller rather than larger number; although we don't get much of NYC-style "turnstile jumping" in the subway here, there's essentially zero enforcement of fare collection. Would go look up recent MUNI statistics but it'd just be depressing. This predates Summer 2020 too, and I think that tipping point happened long ago. It's more normative to not pay than to pay. Likely for similar reasons as the missing shoplifting reporting data: the courts here just don't bother prosecuting for evading transit fares, and it's not worth anyone's hassle to enforce. Partly on equity grounds, partly on No One Advocates Minor Responsibility, i.e. that particularly San Franciscan libertarian streak. Transit *wants* to be free, man.
I keep paying every time out of honour and civic duty, cause of a few times there were actual fare checks and some of my fellow passengers got $50+ fines...but I notice those are fading memories now. Haven't so much as seen a fare inspector in years.
This is a fantastic comment!
> Our security guy also wasn't allowed to stop shoplifters from exiting the store, stand in their way, etc.
What *was* the security guy allowed to do, though? I know that sounds flippant, but I’m actually curious, did he have any official task other than “stand near the door in a uniform”?
I guess that in case some confrontation already started anyway, he would be allowed/expected to intervene.
That anecdote wasn't from SF, so I'd hope it's a little different; but in SF, no, not even that. The official task really was to perform (not even actually do, that'd be invasive and accusatory) Constant Vigilence. Even when actual confrontations happened, security people were placed in the same binds as the retail employee in the comic strip linked somewhere else in thread: can't approach too quickly or threateningly, can't make physical contact, can't be overly verbally aggressive. The only tool in the box is "kill them with kindness", which...pretty much never works, especially from a quasi-cop.
Obviously, in really egregious confrontations, better to have the trained security guy engage vs a store employee. But they risked their jobs in such cases too, so the incentives didn't really align. It's not like they were judged poorly for not stopping shoplifting, since how could they? Better to not even invite that risk, if possible.
I guess that's why my company fired all our security people. Though we'd have preferred to offer them a job instead, they learned enough on the beat and got paid/treated even worse than us. Sad all around.
BTW, isn't it weird how reporting around this never seems to interview retail employees?
Thanks for commenting on this post! I love seeing you here :)
Yeah. Exactly. Especially when so much politics are involved.
To give you a sense of how useless the official statistics are: _one_ Target store in downtown San Francisco accidentally started reporting every instance of shoplifting and doubled the entire city's overall shoplifting rate overnight: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/shoplifting-data-Target-Walgreens-16647769.php.
Anyone with a pas tin big box retail will already be aware of this delta. When the stores first start teaching you about "shrinkage", wow is it eye opening.
~25 years ago in a mid sized American town I worked at a Best Buy. We would have when a hit new rap album came out dozens of copies of the CD would be stolen stolen each day. Dozens. Store just saw it as a loss leader. Not sure rational, but it is what we did. And generally hundreds of incidents of shoplifting, a week of which the Loss prevention guys only noticed and stopped half at best. And police were involved in only a small fraction.
On top of that the store always told us that employee theft was an even LARGER issue. Which is crazy if true, since shoplifting was a pretty serious issue.
I doubt 2% of it got into the town's official crime statistics.
Scott, how is it that every time you determine San Fransicko was wrong or misleading about something, you are absolutely sure about it, but every time it turns out to be right, you're "confused and not sure"? Care to do a follow-up self-analysis showing the correlation between these events and the likely causes thereof?
It's easier to exclude bad info than to confirm correct info, because correctness is a much smaller target to hit.
I think if you re-read the post you'll find I say it's right pretty often, this might just be easier to miss because it doesn't sound as exciting.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the point I made. You can agree with it a bunch but attach enough emotional baggage to end up influencing the reader to think less of the book than if you'd disagreed with the whole thing neutrally. And to be honest I only commented because I noticed a trend that you do this consistently in political articles. Somehow all counter-narrative information is suspect no matter how often confirmed. I'm not sure what you intend, but the effect is analyses which are by the letter, less biased than many sources, but in actual nuanced language, rather strongly biased. That may lead to worse outcomes (vis a vis social utility or whatever) than analysis that is openly and unashamedly biased. Better to be more straightforward and more informative by explaining "this looks right but agreeing with any red tribe points is bad for grey tribe because _____".
Counterpoint: I didn't get the impression that this review was
> by the letter, less biased than many sources, but in actual nuanced language, rather strongly biased
Might be interesting to see if I'm in the minority.
My model of Scott is that he actually has a counter-narrative bias and he makes this very explicit: “I want to stress that [Shellenberger’s] less bad than the mainstream media he’s criticizing. He is taking swings at an omnipresent orthodoxy of creepily consistent spin and bias, while also telling a couple of fibs himself.”
I think he wants the counter-narrative to be true but he perhaps holds it to a high standard because if you are going to push back against an orthodoxy, you can’t be sloppy.
My impression of the review was that Scott was largely in agreement or neutral with each point, except when he found funky statistics at work, and then disagreed with a tweet about whether or not he mischaracterized the book's argument.
Housing *is* actually the main cause of homelessness though. Seriously, go read "Homelessness is a Housing Issue".
Also, no, dense walkable neighbors are great. We don't have dense walkable areas with mixed middle housing in the states. Look at Amsterdam's great density and wonder if maybe the author missed something vital.
I've lived in two Irish cities, a Japanese city, and a bunch of American cities. Many US cities are dense and walkable, they're just terrible. I didn't really enjoy the dense walkable foreign cities either, but at least they weren't as full of crime and noise and litter.
I am genuinely confused! A big value difference I suppose. Fair enough though. =)
Scott's also specifically saying that American voters in particular vote against / agitate against policies which would lead to denser and more walkable cities because, unlike in Europe, American cities under the leadership of American progressives are unlikely to do anything to address the obvious failure modes of density; chiefly, the drug use, public disturbances, violent crime / homelessness issues addressed in the book.
That is, increased density would mean something qualitatively different in the US specifically because we have so many fewer examples of the US managing to handle the issues that will also naturally correlate with density. Maybe Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn (and San Fran 50 years ago) compare favorably to European / East Asian cities in terms of capturing the benefits of density while largely mitigating the harms, but that's it.
American cities under the leadership of reactionaries (Cf. Rudi Giuliani) seem to do a good job of "cleaning up the streets", yet reactionaries don't actually pursue this as a political strategy, Shellenberger perhaps excepted. They doubt down on sprawl and car dependency instead, as a form of virtue signaling.
Because most reactionaries don't really care about cities, and at least among the political class, cities being chaotic and violence filled is good politics to run against, especially if you believe due to education polarization, winning in the cities is a thing that's not going to happen - even Eric Adams on many issues is a lot to the left of Bloomberg and Rudy, of course.
>They doubt down on sprawl and car dependency instead, as a form of virtue signaling.
Sprawl is mostly a product of desegregation. Cry all you want, but white people largely left the cities to avoid minority crime and anti-social behavior - obviously once suburbs were built on this basis, it became easier for people to move to the suburbs for other reasons too. Which is also why comparisons to foreign cities without large non-asian minority populations is extraordinarily misleading.
Every major european city has large populations of whatever the local flavor of undesirable is, concentrated in "bad" neighborhoods, yet car dependency and sprawl don't occur. White flight is clearly not a sufficient explanation.
Well then Scott is wrong in his analysis. The problem with homelessness spawns from NIMBY, not progressives.
NIMBY's are progressives though.
I have found it's definitely bipartisan stupidity, and generally well-argued YIMBY has appeal to both red and blue tribes if they are apt to listen.
The biggest NIMBY's online are progressives, but in reality, the biggest NIMBY's overall are conservative homeowners who don't want an apartment building in their neighborhood.
Scott is saying that NIMBYs are a thing because progressive policies make YIMBY self-punishing.
That's incoherent though. NIMBYs are everywhere throughout the US. If anything there is a large budding group of YIMBY's in SF.
Boston and dc are also highly walkable and dense, and don’t have nearly the problems San Fran seems to have
America used to have more dense, walkable, non-downtown urban areas. The West Side of Chicago, for instance, used to be a dense, walkable urban area. Not so much anymore.
I would guess that the fraction of Americans that live in dense walkable places is substantially less than the fraction of Irish people that live even just in the walkable neighborhoods of those two cities. The United States is worse than the rest of the anglosphere in providing dense walkable neighborhoods where people can live, and the anglosphere is worse than the rest of Europe and Japan.
If we assume that problems (drug use, homelessness etc.) occur roughly proportionally to total population (urban and otherwise) and they congregate in the cities, this might explain why dense neighbourhoods in the US are worse.
It's all cramming into a much smaller amount of urban area.
Therefore, upzoning will make existing urban areas nicer.
Similarly, if we assume that benefits (jobs, shops, social activities, religious organizations) occur roughly proportionally to total population, then that might also explain why dense neighborhoods in the US are better.
I expect some things grow more than linearly and some grow less than linearly, and different people have different amounts of positive and negative feelings about each of these things, so that different densities will be optimal for different people.
Upzoning is the only way, but very exclusive. No one wants to discuss the real problem, homeless go where the services are. The more a city spends, the more homeless they get. No sane person can report on this because of left-wing reactions (often violent).
I'd say that instead America is too good at providing the rich the suburbs/gated communities to live in and be isolated from all the literal shit. And because the rich wield disproportionate power, the problems that don't concern them directly are simply ignored or get token effort/virtue signalling.
This reminds me of an argument I used to make that everything in this country seems optimized for the upper middle class despite that being an incredibly small percentage of the population.
What do you mean by "incredibly small"? The top quintile minus the top 1% is, by definition, 19% of the population. Do you not consider this group to be upper middle class? Do you consider 19% to be incredibly small?
If the conventional definition for upper middle class is "top quintile" then I guess the problem is that I don't find that to be a useful definition, but we don't have to hash that out here. I'll walk back "incredibly small" but stand by the fact that the influence is massively outsized for that income group relative to their status as a minority of the population (obviously the money is a big source of that influence, just to clarify that I do understand *why* things would be this way).
Yes, please continue comparing American cities to foreign cities without large non-asian minority populations.
Why are you talking about the people? What do they have to do with the placement of buildings, the width of streets, and the amount of space given over to parking?
Funny, but I have had almost the same experience, only Taiwan instead of Japan.
I mean sure, if places allowed people to squat in crackhouses, then no one would be homeless – except people that would rather be homeless than squat in a crackhouse.
I'm personally all for experimenting with _minimally_ cheap housing! But even the fucking 'micro-apartments' have all been basically banned too.
I don't think it'll ever be feasible to literally give anyone that shows up in, e.g. SF or NYC, an apartment for free.
I was thinking setting-up 'rural Hamsterdams' might work – they'd be awful, but possibly contain the misery, and maybe even reduce it. (We could police them surely; at least somewhat.) It might not be _that_ much worse than having a prison nearby.
In this vein: Even if I allow the claim "housing is a human right" to stand unchallenged (which I normally would not), "housing in the most expensive city in the country is a human right" is just absurd.
I don't agree that 'housing is a human right' exactly. I don't think it being a 'right' is fruitful; nor for other 'positive rights' either, generally.
I _suspect_ that, if the relevant people were _willing_, 'we' could just make really cheap housing, e.g. _functionally_ similar to crackhouses, _legal_, then we could mostly solve homelessness.
I cannot, like you apparently, work out anything like how 'anyone can move anywhere in a big country and demand free housing (and 'immediately') wherever they move to' could possibly work. The obvious stupid fix to that disaster would be something worse like 'every place decides who can reside there', which sure seemed like what maybe NYC's former mayor once publicly floated, so there's definitely room for worse than status quo.
Effectively, housing is, somewhat, available on-demand – commit a (sufficiently outlandish) crime, and then be arrested and jailed (for at least some time). It's really really really really really really really TERRIBLE housing, but I would also very much expect that it also greatly decreases people's risks of dying from, e.g. exposure, weather, or excessive temperatures.
I also think cheap-good housing could be provided by private individuals and organizations, voluntarily, if all of the _other_ relevant people wouldn't make it illegal to do so. Mostly all of the cheap options are illegal.
But keep in mind that LOTS of people – millions – are _already_ living in gray/'black' market housing, i.e. varying degrees of illegal. In a lot of places, everyone looks the other way and pretends not to notice; mostly because it's _mostly_ perfectly fine (and thus shouldn't be illegal anyways).
Yeah, I've just heard that line a lot from folks in that area. I mean, I agree that the rent is too high in San Francisco.
I solve that issue for myself by *not living there*.
I think, reasonably, the biggest mitigating circumstances for people that can't just 'not live there' is social, i.e. friends and family that live nearby. For a lot of poorer or less wealthy people, the loss of their IRL social network is a HUGE cost and can't be replaced or substituted for (realistically).
But I think most people like that just find a way to, e.g. 'couch surf', or just rent a shitty room in a shitty shared apartment.
But in a sense, the rent will always be 'too high' in SF – even if it were a lot lower than it is now – for most people; and thus they shouldn't live there.
Absolute/universal 'affordability' everywhere in even a small country is impossible – unless you're willing to go Full Totalitarian on everyone (and then this is all moot mostly).
I mean, I will admit that I was being at least partly facetious, though not entirely. From 19 to about 42 years of age, an *enormous* percentage of my friends group was people located in the Bay Area (and outing myself as not particularly counting as "poor or less wealthy", although not living there *is* a factor in that) as the crew I used to attend Burning Man with, among other events, started and even now remains primarily based there. In many years, I made multiple visits out there to hang out with people. Where, yes, I stayed on couches because it's not like I could afford hotels there I'd actually be willing to stay in. Though over that time period, the group grew to encompass reasonably sized "outpost groups", if you will, in other cities. So, probably the folks I spent 80+% of my social time with, even if a large portion of that was online, and they weren't all geographically grouped as tightly any longer.
And I also very much understand what it's like to not have a social circle any longer, having been excommunicated for heresy, since. I dunno. Maybe it's easier to get kicked out than to choose to leave. Or maybe it's not, or maybe it depends on the individual. Given that related commentary from myself regarding the efficacy of ketamine infusion therapy in combating acute and chronic suicidal ideation can be found elsewhere on this Substack, perhaps I should shut my dang pie-hole on the concept of people leaving everything behind. *shrug*
But I am really quite glad that I held fast to that choice to not live there, especially now.
(Substack needs a preview button. ;) )
"Mostly all of the cheap options are illegal."
Does these laws look more like inadvertent creeping requirements or more like malice towards anyone below some income?
Sadly, it's definitely a combination of the two.
A lot of the "inadvertent creeping requirements" are – _individually_ – pretty sensible 'safety engineering', e.g. building codes pertaining to handling various statistically-expected natural disasters. The sad part about this is that we can't just 'legislate away' all of the 'unsafe' options – we just force lots of people to do without even-partly-decent shelter at all. And of course even the official rules almost never require that anyone retrofit existing buildings, which makes even the somewhat reasonable 'safety' justification pretty obviously at-least-somewhat bullshit.
But there's definitely a lot of 'malice' too – that might be a little too strong of a word, for me, in most cases – maybe 'contempt' would be more accurate? Laws/regulations/rules (effectively) prohibiting, e.g. SROs, 'tiny houses', 'tiny apartments', un-related {room/house/apartment}-mates living together, etc., are definitely _aimed_ at specific people (in specific classes, and, not too long ago, specific races).
It's like extra double sad badness on top that all of the laws/regulations/rules are so lightly enforced too. It wouldn't be _acutely_ good were they enforced (more), but it'd probably also shortly lead to them being repealed or at least everyone having common knowledge that they're stupid and effectively unenforceable. It'd be better of course to get rid of the stupid rules, but the current status quo is a much more insidious muddle, e.g. an extra tool for some people to harass certain other people.
Many Thanks!
I love it when American leftists compare US cities to foreign citites that don't have huge populations of non-Asian minorities.
Really really important point: all American crime statistics that come from police departments since at least the early 2000s are almost worthless. Since Bill Bratton and COMPSTAT revolutionized American policing, The careers and day-to-day not getting screamed at and belittled-by-their-bosses of police leadership have highly dependent on low crime statistics in the areas they control.
As we know, "when a metric becomes a goal it ceases to be a useful metric". Every time you see crime statistics from police reports bear in mind that they have been passed through at least one but usually several layers of handlers with intense and explicit personal incentives to downplay any crimes and no loyalty whatsoever to any ideal of scientific neutrality.
Homicide stats are pretty reliable because a body with a hole in it demands bureaucratic attention. Car theft stats seem valid too because you have to report your car being stolen to the police and get a report to file an insurance claim.
I wonder if even homicide statistics relate to human suffering reliably. Maybe if the dead person is upper or middle class. Know someone who was considering working CSI for a city and shadowed someone from the department for a day. Two deaths (overdose of a homeless man and a possible homicide of another homeless man) and a stabbing (again, homeless) on that day that never made it to the news. Possible homicide was probably reported as accidental death, and overdose as natural causes. I have heard of many knife attacks as reduced down to misdemeanors. I think all the stats are garbage.
I would assume that the incentives of coroners are different from the incentives of police. If coroners have any incentive to mislabel drug deaths there is little point in having drug death statistics at all.
As I understand it, there are ways to goalseek homicide stats as well, reclassify murders as manslaughter or accidental deaths, push homicides onto past quarters, etc..
Aren't both murder and manslaughter, while different to the DA, "homicides"? and pushing them temporally presumably only goes so far (weeks? months, at an absolute stretch?), and should smooth out for anything but the most recent reports if you're looking at a multi-decade time series.
"Accidental death" and "suicide" mislabelling could fuck up the stats, though
Both are homicides. I mentioned this as an example to show how crimes stats can be gamed.
Your concluding paragraph is a better example.
""Accidental death" and "suicide" mislabelling could fuck up the stats, though"
This calls to mind the classic: Lost a bundle of the mob's money and got so depressed about it that he shot himself. In the back of the head. Three times.
"But a big reason we don’t build dense cities and walkable neighborhoods is that people (correctly) hate and fear them. They accurately predict that if their neighborhood got denser, it would start looking like the dense parts of San Francisco - litter-filled, decaying, disgusting, unsafe, and ambiently miserable to exist"
This seems like the one unexamined claim in the otherwise excellent review.
Like in the essay about high modernism, Scott Alexander wrote about how people don't like hard industrial designed cities like Brasilia and prefer dense, quirky neighborhoods.
Similarly, Europe is filled with dense cities and walkable neighborhoods and they are great! Same with parts of Asia.
It seems like the "accurate prediction" part of the above quote needs to be very heavily qualified.
The cultural and policy differences abroad are hugely important! But if we are going to be bringing in "Dutch solutions to homelessness/rampant drug use", I think it makes sense to also give a shout out to "Dutch/Norwegian/Taiwanese etc. solutions to building dense walkable neighborhoods".
It just seemed like such an absolute statement "obviously, public transit brings crime and terribleness". Scott Alexander studied in Ireland if I remember correctly, he knows that this isn't actually a universal, which is why I was surprised to see it written as if it was.
Wouldn't the Dutch solution to building safe dense walkable neighborhoods just be to apply the Dutch solution to homelessness/rampant drug use?
Partly, but I think there would also be a bunch about transit policy. (Bike lanes, congestion pricing, trams)
Why would we pursue a Dutch policy of dense urban development when it is a direct response to population densities that don't exist here?
The reason dense Dutch cities are nice and dense US cities are not as nice is in the US a significant portion of the good tax paying white collar people choose to live out in the land of big lots and low taxes (suburb/exurbs). That simply isn't an option (nearly as much) in the Netherlands.
You don't have the same overall balance of functional versus dysfunctional people in these urban areas. There is a "ballast" of middle and upper middle class people in Dutch/Japanese cities that doesn't exist in American cities and keeps them at a higher standard.
I was intending this to be interpreted as "conditional upon existing urban policies, dense walkable neighborhoods are unpleasant to live in". I agree if you changed existing urban policies, that could change.
I think that is a hugely important caveat.
Because I think, (though I may be wrong) that you agree that, all things being equal, dense walkable, urban neighborhoods are awesome.
Also, I think a very reliable indicator of how good/nice/"having its shit together" a country is can be seen in whether wealthy people there regularly use public transit.
Billionaires in Zurich still take the tram pretty often.
Wealthy people in Bangladesh have 3 cars and armed guards.
> Because I think, (though I may be wrong) that you agree that, all things being equal, dense walkable, urban neighborhoods are awesome
Dense, walkable urban neighbourhoods have their place, but I'm not convinced that they're the be-all and end-all of everything, as the internet commenter hive mind often seems to think.
Walkability is a trade-off for personal space and peace-and-quiet; when I was young and single I preferred to live in a denser urban area, now I'm older with kids I accept the trade-off of having a quarter acre block with a pool but needing to drive to the shops. Other people prefer a different trade-off, either denser or sparser, and I'm not going to tell them that their preferences are wrong.
There are some issues around externalities and land use that make dense urban neighborhoods better in an actual moral sense as well, but that's more of an issue of the externalities of modern suburbs not being appropriately priced.
I think that's very dependent on which externalities you choose to take into account.
"Dense and walkable" is probably pretty awesome for people who are always physically capable of actually walking.
If I'm going to be morally judged on my preference not to be squashed cheek-by-jowl on top of other people, hang on a minute while I adjust my horns, tail, cloven hooves and pitchfork.
Don't be selfish, live in the pod and eat the bugs.
"hang on a minute while I adjust my horns, tail, cloven hooves and pitchfork."
Mine too!
And it would be even more efficient and create fewer externalities if we all lived in coffin apartments and only ate recycled algae and meditated for our only form of entertainment.
It is all a continuum. The fact that it is more environmental/resources efficient to cram people together is not some end all be all argument.
Dense, walkable urban neighborhoods where attractive women feel safe to walk around at night are great, although I am told that lots of wives are insistent on moving their husbands to the suburbs.
I have nothing whatsoever to add to the above comment, just want to call it out as brilliant, hilarious, and hitherto-unthought-of (by me). Bravo.
>Walkability is a trade-off for personal space and peace-and-quiet
I don't quite agree on that count. I would say that it is cars that are loud, and walkability allows you to avoid cars. Even in cities, car-free (or mostly car-free, e.g. no through traffic and low speed limits) residential areas can be plenty quiet, and then there's the missing middle of mixed development suburbs that recover effectively all benefits of areas zoned for single-family housing: even if you personally prefer to live in a single-family home, groceries and amenities can still be within easy walking distance if they are mixed together with density-increasing medium-rise housing in the same neighborhood.
Cars make some noise, yes, but neighbours are usually a much bigger worry unless you live next to a highway, especially if the teenager next door decides to take up drumming.....
Zurich had a bad heroin problem in the 80s but the tram riding billionaires and many other citizens seem to have agreed on a policy that helped. Switzerland was one of the first countries to introduce opioid substitution treatment on a large scale. Plus injection rooms, prevention efforts and changes in law enforcement. Sounds pretty much standard approach nowadays and hasn't worked as well everywhere. I guess it is easier when the addicts are swiss cititzens.
"all things being equal, dense walkable, urban neighborhoods are awesome."
It depends! If you like hustle and bustle and are young and have enough disposable income to go out to bars and clubs and the vibrant cultural and nightlife, then that kind of place is great. Sure, maybe you live over a bar and there's a lot of shouting and noise at four in the morning, but it's the Big City Dream!
And maybe you're the kind of person (which I think Scott might be, and I certainly am) for whom 'hustle and bustle' is the ninth circle of Hell and the cultural life can be as vibrant as it likes, I'm not shifting outside my front door. A nice little semi-detached house away from the city centre with a bit of a front and/or back yard is what you like and want 😁
Of course, right now housing prices in Ireland are bananas, even for small semi-ds in the city but not the centre of the city:
https://www.daft.ie/property-for-sale/cork-city/semi-detached-houses
And some of us don't actually get the option of being capable of walking every day. But I can usually make it to the car with the help of my cane.
I think you're skipping a bit over a middle ground that can and does exist.
I live with my wife and two children in an apartment in a three-story, six-unit building. We have a back yard with a grape vine, two little planter gardens, and enough grass for small barbecue parties in the summer. We don't see our neighbors all that often. When our upstairs neighbor had a kid and a cat we would hear them running up and down the hall sometimes, but that was it.
There is a bar/restaurant around the corner that has live music which we never hear and which closes at a reasonable hour. The one annoying noise is hearing the road from the front room because our street happens to be the sole road out of a nest of one-way roads. Our neighbor streets don't have that same problem.
We can and do walk to: school, the local library, the pool, several parks, several friends' houses, the hardware store, the grocery store (sometimes), the garden store, the doctor's office (sometimes), and the dentist. We don't go to night clubs. Our neighborhood is very walkable, but never feels full of "hustle and bustle." There are parts of town we could live to get "The Big City Dream" and nightclubs and whatnot but we don't want that.
I contrast this to my in-laws' house in Michigan. They have a beautiful backyard that looks onto woods dense enough for deer to pass through, but they have to drive 20 minutes to get anywhere of interest, and they still get noise from cars going down their road.
Back in the 1990s in Sao Paulo, rich people went everywhere by helicopter because on the streets there were so many carjackings and kidnappings. Taking the tram in Zurich sounds better, but other people would like the Sao Paulo helicopter lifestyle.
I once saw a 15 car motorcade go by in D.C. taking Vice President Cheney from his home at the Naval Observatory to the White House. He looked quite comfortable amidst all the hubbub his commute was causing, but I can imagine many other people (maybe Dan Quayle?) feeling it was all too much
It's certainly an important caveat in the review context, but...how often are all other things equal, though? Inertia alone makes redesigning cities pretty hard, and I don't think anyone's seriously advocating for attempting another Prospera. There are serious trade-offs involved with urban walkably dense (UWD*) designs. For some, much profit and little pain; for others, the opposite. Carbon externalities aside - and even there, Researchers Disagree, really depends exactly how one defines terms - I am genuinely not sure it's an ideal model for the median person. (Modal, certainly, almost by definition...) Like, yes, the option should certainly exist for those that want it, many such cases. Less enthusiastic about pushing it, or the component parts, as an apex goal for human living arrangements.
I moved from [a Hicksville that didn't even have a movie theatre] to SF...needed to get away from small minds, excessive parochialism, low diversity (even in 21st century CA, it was weird and awkward being one of a town's lone minorities), lack of economic and social opportunity. All serious quality-of-life issues.
But there are things I've come to miss greatly, largely because I took them for granite and didn't realize how much they cost to access in The City. Green space everywhere. The sound of the tides at night. Unpolluted beaches. Yards and wildlife. Not much traffic. Trustworthy long-term neighbors. And, yes: low levels of public homelessness, drug use, mental disorders.
Most of all, I miss being able to see the stars. Light pollution is severely underrated as a detriment to human flourishing.
So do I regret moving? I don't know, but I'd certainly have some things to say to Past AG about so rashly deciding to leave town.
It's just really hard to do a proper cost-benefit analysis over such a "polygenic" outcome. I think one of the biggest second-order effects of life extension will be having more time to learn such lessons, and still have time left over to adjust one's circumstances accordingly to wiser preferences. It's hard to get high-stakes choices like housing right the first time. That's why we fight so bitterly over it.
(Public transit is beautiful though. One of my favourite inspirations for "can humans solve coordination problems?" Yes, yes we can.)
*Use Walkman Device. Someone else please invent a snappier term, I'm at a loss.
>Most of all, I miss being able to see the stars. Light pollution is severely underrated as a detriment to human flourishing.
I have often wondered what the impact of not being able to see the night sky is on the human psyche. I suspect it is pretty substantial, I'd probably be interested to read up on that if there is any good writing on it.
Come visit New Mexico on a new moon during the winter. Colder air makes for even lower humidity, starting off at 8,000 feet altitude helps, and being able to be 200 miles from any other people all make for some pretty amazing night skies.
"Because I think, (though I may be wrong) that you agree that, all things being equal, dense walkable, urban neighborhoods are awesome."
I agree they are awesome for some people. I personally hate them. "Walkable" usually means "if you are willing to jostle past many people, cross fifty streets to get anywhere, and deal with barely tolerable levels of smell and noise". I used to love walking when I lived in the suburbs! You would walk past parks and nice little streams! I don't have this thing everyone else seems to have where unless I live within five feet of the World's Loudest Nightclub and twelve different trendy restaurants I demand higher density. Some people just like being in green, quiet areas.
I agree that people who like dense cities should be able to have them if they want, but the insistence that everyone secretly desires them drives me crazy.
I think you are giving density an unfair shake here.
For example, Zurich is dense. Most people live in 4 story apartment buildings. But, with the exception of like 3 streets, it is always quiet and really nice nature is accessible quickly.
There are two rivers flowing through the city and both have very well done trails next to them for running.
Similarly, Taipei is a big city that also has a river going through and they have made the entire river for its 35 kilometer length in the city a park with play grounds, ball courts, and a running trail.
Singapore is the single densest city I've ever lived in, but most of it was quiet and the nature trails were actually very managed and accessible. They turned the entire 25 kilometer southeast coast of the island into a park. Going through that on a Sunday was like going through a "before" flashback in a post apocalyptic movie. Just families having picnics and the water and people on bikes and skates. Similarly, the river is a great walking/running trail. They also turned the bed of the old Malaya railroad into one massive green way.
In all of these places, walking wasn't a problem, it wasn't crowded, and they had pretty quick access to nature.
I guess my measure of density has been skewed by being in a couple "just right" cities.
Brother, I lived in Taipei, and unless you made seven figure USD salaries, no one had any green space and traffic was dreadful. The trains were great, but Taipei is not a place I would want to replicate, and I grew up in Chicago.
>"Walkable" usually means "if you are willing to jostle past many people, cross fifty streets to get anywhere, and deal with barely tolerable levels of smell and noise".
That's literally the exact opposite of what walkable means. You've listed problems with walking as a mean of mobility in modern car-centered cities, making them "walkable" implies getting rid of these exact problems.
Secondly, you seem to have this mental model where the density scale goes from "downtown" to "suburb". But here in Europe, suburbs can be green, quiet AND densely populated. Them being densely populated, and therefore able to house most of the things you need in your direct vicinity, merely makes it easier for you to avoid going downtown unless you specifically want to go there.
I have been in "car-free" areas of cities. The absence of cars does not magically remove crowds (quite the opposite), smell, or most noises. It just removes the only alternative to them. The vast majority of areas in European cities, which do have cars and buses, are the worst of both worlds, clearly unable to handle them and intolerable either by car or on foot.
I agree that European suburbs, while better than European cities, are not as good as American suburbs.
Sempai noticed me! I feel honored, and therefore compelled to reply, even if it's four days later than I should have.
Most car-free areas in downtown cities suffer from the same problems as other pedestrian lanes in car-oriented environment, i.e., they're narrow paths channeling pedestrian traffic that is otherwise severely constrained by car infrastructure. This increased traffic, and resulting commercial benefits, are their main selling point from the perspective of, largely conservative and business oriented, establishment city planners, which turns them into the most prominent success stories touted by walkable city proponents. So, I fully understand where your impression comes from, my point is, they're not representative of the end goal of turning cities truly walkable.
The suburbs are. I can't emphasize this enough. The complaint against American-style single-family neighborhoods is not their character, it's the fact that they spread the city so much that individual car travel is the only viable option for most people to reach most destinations. The solution to this is making suburbs densely populated. Now, and I understand this may sound like cheating, I'm not pointing to the majority of actually existing suburbs. But I can vouch for several, I've lived in them, I've walked through them, and at their best, it's exactly like walking in the park (except you see multi-story buildings from behind the trees everywhere around you, as if they were rocky cliffs of a valley). Perhaps even better, because parks are where people gather, whereas you'll rarely encounter anyone at any point in-between the buildings, the traffic just naturally spreads across space and time. (I've also seen some become cautionary tales of how letting cars in is, alone, enough to take up any free walking space and completely destroy the effect.)
I may be missing something in your position that would still make those dense suburbs unappealing to you. But I'm responding to the literal description of "green, quiet ares", where you "walk past parks and nice little streams", and my immediate reaction is - that's what I want too! And I've seen enough to believe it's possible even with sizable population density. (Just not at the current level of car use.)
Some of the densest neighborhoods in NYC (and therefore, the country) are the Upper West Side, (most of) the Upper East Side, and the area around Gramercy Park (https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/nyc-population/census2010/m_pl_p2_nta.pdf).
All of these neighborhoods are considered walkable, too (98-100/100 at https://www.walkscore.com/NY/New_York). And these neighborhoods are definitely not "litter-filled, decaying, disgusting, unsafe, and ambiently miserable to exist in". Pretty much the opposite in fact.
Note that in contrast to what one might guess, the area around Times Square is not particularly dense (in terms of people actually living there). There are just a lot of tourists (and, depending on the time, office workers) in a pretty small area. It has nothing to do with there being a lot of housing there.
I also don't think there are significant NIMBY objections to new subway stations being built (at least not for the same reasons as whatever is going on with BART).
It would be interesting to see if there are any policies that SF could learn from NYC.
America used to have more dense, walkable urban neighborhoods that weren't as exclusive in terms of cost as the Upper West Side. For example, the Austin neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, eight miles west of the Loop, bordering on Oak Park, was a nice place up until the late 1960s.
Then it integrated.
Next door to Austin in Oak Park, however, the city government imposed a surreptitious, illegal quota system on realtors and renters to slow demographic change ... with impressive results at keeping Oak Park from being destroyed by crime and subsequent white flight while still allowing a reasonable degree of integration. (In 2020, Oak Park was 61% white, much of it gay, and 18% black. Next door Austin in Chicago in 2016 was 84% black and 4% white.) What Oak Park did is reminiscent of the ethnic quota system Lee Kwan-Yew set up for Singapore housing projects, but almost nobody has ever heard of Oak Park's black-a-block quota.
Granted, Oak Park had America's most architecturally distinguished housing stock so fighting rather than fleeing was more attractive. (My dad grew up there next door to a Frank Lloyd Wright house). But Austin was pretty decent too, and now it's an urban wasteland. I can recall driving my dad to visit his childhood neighborhood in 1982 through desolate slums, and then the moment we crossed from Chicago's Austin neighborhood to Oak Park, suddenly we were in utopia with tourists walking around with tape recorded architectural tours.
This is a lot like the contrast I noted in 2018 in the homeless problem between Santa Monica (not bad) and Venice Beach-Los Angeles (giant homeless party), where you could see the municipal border to the inch in terms of how bad were the problems caused by the homeless.
I've long suggested that we should look into what Oak Park did to save itself. But because it was likely highly illegal under the 1968 Fair Housing Act, I've only ever been able to find one academic study of Oak Park's successful strategy. But if Scott feels like writing 22,000 words on the policies of Oak Park vs. Chicago, he might bring some attention to this interesting possibility.
If I could, I'd have every American who gets news and ideas from Fox, CNN, NYT, whatever stop and just read Steve Sailer and Scott Alexander, just as a contrast. They might get really mad, but at least they'd be exposed to something different that might make them think.
Steve and Scott are probably the 2 most insightful bloggers along with maybe Tanner Greer and Razib Khan. I'd add Matt Stoller to the mix.
Yes, few people actually live in Times Square, but the foot traffic there is greater then the neighborhoods you mentioned. Furhtermore, those nieghborhoods may be dense compared to the rest of the country, but I would guess they are not particularly dense relative to other residential neighborhoods in Manhattan which seems like the relevant comparison. The issue with new subway stations not being built in NYC is largely there isnt much space that isnt already filled and wouldn't be massively disruptive. For some time there has been an ongoijng debate about an east side second avenue subwauy being built but many are opposed seeing it as further serving the richest new yorkers while the servive on lines that run to poorer neighborhoods s either poor or such lines are non-existent. From what I have msot recently read, the entire city of San Francisco is similar in area to Manhattan and there might be similar arguments concerning the expansion of BART.
The upper west side and upper east side are actually two of the five densest areas in New York. I suspect they’re denser than Washington heights and the stretch of central Bronx and that only the east village area is denser, but this map doesn’t distinguish among the five areas above 150 residents per acre.
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/nyc-population/census2010/m_pl_p2_nta.pdf
Yeah, exactly, I think that person didn't read my comment carefully.
I also found this, which is annoyingly a PDF rather than a spreadsheet: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/nyc-population/census2010/t_pl_p5_nta.pdf
But manually looking for the highest values, it looks like they are:
1) Yorkville (on the Upper East Side)
2) Fordham South (in the Bronx)
3) East Village
4) Upper West Side
5) Lincoln Square (which is also on the UWS)
6) Gramercy
So, to repeat myself: "Some of the densest neighborhoods in NYC (and therefore, the country) are the Upper West Side, (most of) the Upper East Side, and the area around Gramercy Park"
Admittedly I didnt look up data, I was just talking about my impressions based on foot traffic and perceptions of urban density from walking around
I'd like to know more about this view, I was surprised you felt that way (to me it feels like walkability/density has become almost dogma among intellectuals, but maybe that's my bubble). I personally think they're great goals so would love to be challenged. Maybe it's the definition of dense (is low-rise Brooklyn dense? Walkable suburbs where you can get by without a car?). Also do you think European level urban/suburban density doesn't work in Europe? Or wouldn't work in the US?
I think they are popular among intellectuals because they are better solution if your throw out the messy personal preferences of actual humans. And to be clear I live right in a major American city (though in an area of SFH on tiny lots).
For what a lot of people are looking for the suburbs are a rational choice even accounting for the horrible terrible no good commuting. You generally get better schools, services, QoL, at lower costs, and can still access most of the things the main city has to offer.
The main downside is the commute to work.
I read it that way, FWIW - as a statement about how SF specifically is governed
No, it's exactly right actually: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/01/steelmanning-the-nimbys/
America is different to those other countries in a lot of important ways, and protest all you want but one of (if not) the most important ways is demographics.
"The outlier below is DC"
It would be helpful if you would specify which outlier, given that there are several (and two obvious ones).
Anyone who thinks you can compare SF and Houston/PHX weather, go to your airport, buy a SW ticket there and see how long you last in Downtown this week.
Apples and Winnebagos.
I was also going to comment on this--who on earth forgets that there are two different directions in which weather can be bad?!
Thirded!
The two directions are extremely asymmetrical though. Cold kills orders of magnitude more than heat.
In fact in the United States this is not true.
I spent some time Googling, and while none of the studies I found looked well-designed at all, it seemed as though there were about fourteen as many deaths to cold as there are to heat in the US?
That sounds very wrong. I live in Chicago, and no one ever dies from the cold, but heat stroke is embarrassingly common every summer. I have never heard of anyone dying from the cold. There are no heating buses in the winter. I assume Texas is far worse.
the cdc in 2014 said 1300 from cold, 670 from heat
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25073563/
perhaps changed by now?
also apparently there is some controversy over the methodology
But honestly, I trust the hell out of that result... the CDC is pretty political, as we learned from covid, and has a strong tendency to output results aligned with the political winds. It would be very easy for them to have been concerned about people finding benefits from global warming, and therefore wanting to downplay the harm caused by cold weather. the fact that they *didn't* do that feels impressive to me.
Am reminded of a Scott from last year: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chilling-effects
With fewer adaptations available to the homeless, and generally worse health outcomes across the board, I'd naively expect "excessive cold" to be extra-fatal in this population due to the exact fatality mechanisms involved. SF used to include infrared heat lamps at bus stops in part to address this, temperate climate be damned.
One thing that jumped out at me: "Murders definitely rose a little after Boudin took office, but that’s because that was also when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, which demoralized police and led to a so-far-permanent spike in murders nationwide" -- the way that this is written implies causality between BLM protests and a spike in murders. Especially in a review that emphasizes being careful about causality, this goes a bit too far. While it's certainly possible that BLM protests led to a spike in murders, it's also possible that it is mainly due to pandemic-induced disruption of moderating influences of community.
Yeah, from what I've read, experts think it's some combination of:
1. Pandemic-induced social disruption.
2. Breakdown between police and communities post-George Floyd + related protests.
3. Huge surge of gun sales starting during the pandemic.
But I don't think it's at all clear yet which if any of those three factors is the *primary* cause--I don't think there's enough data yet that I'd be comfortable declaring any of those the main reason for the spike in homicides, let alone citing just one without considering the others at all.
Looking at other countries which had a pandemic but no George Floyd seems like it would be instructive.
In England and Wales for instance the pandemic seems to have had a mildly negative effect on the murder rate https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/homicideinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2021
Looking at the data, I do now think the protests were a major driver of the initial spike. That said, I don't think looking at England or Wales could disprove the "increase in gun sales" hypothesis.
And of course the theories are not mutually exclusive -- I could imagine that pandemic-induced social disruption led to larger and more violent protests (people out of work, feeling disconnected from their communities, etc.), and that the protests contributed to the increase of gun sales as people worried about unrest and violence, which could potentially have a lasting effect on the homicide rate even as the protests themselves fade in the rearview mirror...
The guns sales spike was directly related to the protests.
An almost identical spike in homicides followed BLM protests/riots in Ferguson, absent any pandemics or recessions.
The 2008 recession (and all the disruptions associated with it) saw a decrease in crime.
There is no correlation between gun sales and murder. That is a big lie. I know guys who traffick guns. Their guns never show up in stats (illegal imports of Chinese copy-cat guns).
I think this is pretty obvious - you can look at a time series and it's very clear that murders didn't rise for the first three months of the pandemic, then rose immediately following the BLM protests. The rise in murders was much greater among black communities compared to white communities, and didn't occur in other countries that had the pandemic but not the BLM protests. I understand why experts would want to muddy this conclusion, but the pattern is pretty clear.
Thanks for the reply! I still don't think it is so clear, though I admit that I'm relying on 2nd hand analysis here and have not looked into it in detail myself -- I'd be curious to see the time series you mention, data I've come across is too coarse-grained.
The main reason for my skepticism however is just that causal identification tends to be notoriously difficult and the pandemic is a generationally disruptive event -- I think it's likely that it's not just experts wanting to muddy the conclusion (though there are surely people who are invested in particular outcomes and we're more likely to hear from them than the careful statisticians), as much a conclusion that is fundamentally muddy. The points you raise here sound plausible, but also societies are complex and one can always think of alternative explanations. Of course it's too much to ask to prove every assertion beyond a shadow of a doubt, but if you're aware of a good analysis that goes in more detail into the data along the lines you mentioned I would be interested to see it.
I went looking for a time series, and found Figure 1 in this report, which does indeed find a break in June 2020 (though it looks like homicide rates were rising before that, just in a way that was more in line with seasonal trends from previous years).
https://context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/documents/57ee2ac5-10d1-4854-aa65-e6e768bdbede/note/f79e08b0-2d2a-48b9-bf8e-9672dde2169a.
The authors do cite the protests as a probable primary driver, but they also point out other factors (i.e., cell phone data showing that people were obeying lockdowns in the spring and that the murder rate rose as people stopped staying at home all the time, gun sales spiking, etc.). They also suggest other possible protest-related mechanisms in addition to police being demoralized/doing their jobs less, like communities losing trust in the police and resorting to "street justice" instead.
They only look at data through the end of 2020 -- I would be interested to read a more recent analysis.
America has ridiculously slow official crime statistics. My impression is that 2021 saw a slight increase in homicides over 2020, but the year as a whole was slightly lower than during the "racial reckoning" months of 2020. So far, 2022 seems a little lower, but still in the very high Floyd Effect range.
Traffic fatalities went up notably in 2021 over 2020 but down a few percent per mile driven, but still much worse than 2019.
CDC's WONDER database now has deaths by homicide through November 2021, but not through the end of the year. They look similar to 2020. We seem to be in a post-Floyd New Normal for homicides and car crashes.
The traffic fatality data is extremely informative: black deaths in car crashes were 55% higher in June 2020 than in June 2019, which suggests depolicing during the racial reckoning played a major role in black behavior. I've been looking at social science stats for the last 50 years, and that's one of the most striking I've yet seen.
People who get killed in car crashes aren't, generally, homicidal maniacs. They tend to be normal people who think that it would be fun to speed while drunk and high (which, now that I think about it, does sound rather enjoyable) without getting pulled over by the cops.
These folks don't appear to have been out of control during the first 2.5 months of covid -- people were driving worse per mile but driving less -- but then did get out of control in June 2020 as traffic cops retreated to the donut shot and The Establishment announced that lockdown rules didn't apply if you were suitably angry about George Floyd.
I hereby propose a foundation to buy all underprivileged Americans a copy of Grand Theft Auto so that they may drive in a ludicrously unsafe manner to their hearts' content.
After generally falling after the Crack Wars of the 1990s, murders/homicides rose over 20% from 2014 to 2016 due to the Ferguson Effect, which tended to be highly localized where BLM triumphed over local cops, starting in the St. Louis metro area in 2014, then in Baltimore after the Freddie Gray riot on 4/25/15, then in Chicago after the release of the video of a cop murdering Laquan MacDonald on 11/23/2015.
After Trump won in 2016 in part running on the American Carnage theme of BLM supporters assassinating cops, The Establishment lost enthusiasm for BLM.
Homicides stopped rising in 2017 and dropped in 2018. At some point in 2019, though, the secular trend turned around. My reading of the rather muddy data is that homicides were drifting upwards from mid-2019 onward, especially including the pre-pandemic months of January and February 2020. This upward trend continued through the pandemic, then exploded in May 2020. For example, Chicago's all time record of 18 homicides in one day was set on May 31, 2020. The Father's Day Weekend of June 2020 set the all time Chicago record with 113 people being shot, killed or wounded. Homicides, shooting, and especially mass shootings (4 or more struck by bullets) have continued at huge levels ever since. So have traffic fatalities, especially among blacks.
Black traffic fatalities didn't shoot upward until June 2020, but homicides (which are majority black) soared in May 2020, then kept going up and peaked in July 2020 and remained hugely high through November 2020.
I can see two different ways to interpret the time series data. The most straightforward is that the rise of the Second BLM Era and the demonization of cops from 5/25/20 onward drove up homicides and car crash fatalities.
The other is that the black underclass was already in revolt, whether against traditional law-and-order or covid lockdowns, by early May 2020, while the broader car-driving black population was following the rules until after Memorial Day, 2020.
The CDC reports homicide deaths by month, so I can't tell from their data. Criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, who was the leading critic of the Ferguson Effect theory until giving up as the data became clear, has homicide data by day for 2020 for 20 big cities and he sees 5/25/20 as a "structural break." I've looked at Gun Violence Archive's day by day count of homicides and I'm uncertain.
I think that is pretty strongly suggestive of the BLM hypothesis, but the police morale version is not as robustly shown - the obvious other hypothesis is that the BLM protests made community/police relations worse, especially in black areas, and this meant that murderers were more confident they could get away with it because witnesses would be less likely to assist the police.
This isn't a question of police morale, but public confidence in the police - there is a widely believed argument that the police cannot enforce the law without public confidence because they are reliant on witnesses and other members of the public to help them. There are certainly plenty of police who will tell you that they can't do much about crime when the public won't help, though they tend to expect the public to start helping rather than looking at what they need to change to gain (and retain) the public's trust.
Or, you know, police didn't want to risk being put in a situation of having to use potentially deadly force and having their life ruined as a consequence. Obviously, Chauvin didn't need to use the force he used, but most deaths at the hands of police are not at all similar to George Floyd.
This would be great to have a full-length post on. I haven’t dived into the data so I had just chalked the crime rate rise partly to the pandemic and partly to the post-Floyd fallout.
Some potential counterpoints to what you’re saying:
1. The protests happened around the start of summer weather, which is when crime rates normally go up.
2. Lockdowns didn’t cause unrest right away. It took a few months for it to take effect and the Floyd protests just happened to be around then.
3. Comparing across countries isn’t meaningful because all the countries with protests share certain key characteristics.
In so far as the protests were responsible, it would also be interesting to know if anyone’s tried to break that down between the sub-causes of police defunding, less community trust in police, police demoralization, police acting vengefully, criminals feeling more empowered, etc.
How are people ignorant of the fact that the same thing happened following the Mike Brown protests?
1,2 3 do not apply to this instance.
Also, you need to provide evidence for the pandemic increasing crime. This didn't happen in other countries and it can't have been a product of the economic conditions of the pandemic (see: the fall in crime during the 2008 recession).
I understand why lots of people don't want to believe this :(
Black homicide deaths were up the most in 2020 over 2019, 38% IIRC, but Hispanic, American Indian, and white deaths were also up considerably. Asians deaths, however, were pretty flat.
The most spectacular racial change was in traffic fatalities after George Floyd's death.
It was my impression that this was a source of some considerable debate earlier in the COVID timeline, but that that debate has largely been resolved in favor of the argument that the Black Lives Matter movement did in fact have a causal relationship with the subsequent rise in violent crime.
The Unherd article on policing in especially Seattle and other PNW areas is particularly persuasive on that point, albeit pretty uncompromising.
https://unherd.com/2022/03/the-fall-of-seattle/?=refinnar
I offer month-by-graphs from 2013-2020 for homicide deaths and traffic deaths here:
https://www.takimag.com/article/it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time/
After falling for a couple of decades, homicides rose a record setting amount during the Ferguson Effect years of 2015-2016, then fell when Jeff Sessions was attorney general. Sometime in 2019 they started to drift upward again, but the remarkable number of homicides during the "racial reckoning" following George Floyd's death -- the Floyd Effect -- has been unprecedented.
A strikingly similar pattern has been seen with traffic fatalities. Black traffic fatalities were 36% higher in the last 7 months of 2020 (following George Floyd's death on 5/25/20) than in the same months of 2019. Among nonblacks, traffic deaths were up 9%.
Both homicides and traffic fatalities appear to be related to how confident cops are that they will be supported by The Establishment in stopping motorists and pedestrians, and in searching them for illegal guns.
It's weird that an almost identical spike in homicides followed BLM protests/riots in Ferguson, absent any pandemics or recessions.
New York State is *required* by consent decree to provide shelter to all homeless New Yorkers. This originates with Callahan v. Carey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callahan_v._Carey brought in 1979, settled in 1981) plus a few follow-on cases ( https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/our-programs/advocacy/legal-victories/other-coalition-for-the-homeless-legal-victories/ ). The relevant law is Article XVII, Section 1 of the New York Constitution, which states that "The aid, care and support of the needy are public concerns and shall be provided by the state and by such of its subdivisions, and in such manner and by such means, as the legislature may from time to time determine." I don't really know much more about NY's system beyond that, but I would imagine this should be provided as background knowledge whenever anyone compares NY sheltered homeless rates to anywhere else -- of course New York has a higher rate of sheltered homeless than elsewhere if their Constitution mandates that the state provides shelter.
If California wanted to mandate itself to provide shelter to all homeless San Franciscans, I don't see why it couldn't. NYS' constitution isn't a magic bullet to solve homeless, it's just a natural first step towards expecting, demanding, and operating a government that shelters the homeless.
Yeah, San Francisco debated a rule like New York's, but it got shot down by people who were (probably correctly) afraid it would cause the state to focus on shelters rather than permanent housing.
"Murders definitely rose a little after Boudin took office, but that’s because that was also when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, which demoralized police and led to a so-far-permanent spike in murders nationwide."
Obviously it's difficult to attribute this to Boudin when there was a national spike, but attributing it to police demoralisation seems equally speculative. A priori, I find it unlikely that this was the cause. Police don't usually prevent murders, they help investigate them. It seems to me that murderers aren't usually rational actors to the degree that they'll reason "well I'm 20% less likely to be caught after the fact now, so I think I'll commit that murder".
A general sense of despair and anger seems like a more plausible explanation to me for the rise in murder. I grant that's pretty vague and speculative too. I could be wrong, you could be right. But your statement as is seems bald and bold.
It's also perhaps a little too charitable to say that police are "demoralised". It makes them seem like victims rather than perpetrators. After all, only in a handful of places have they actually lost resources. One could just as easily describe police as on an informal strike to punish their political enemies because they think people are being mean to them, especially in California.
Police stop people who commit lesser crimes before circumstances or growing sense of impunity leads them to murder.
See my comment at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7301613 . I'm pretty confident in this and will spin it off into its own post if enough people want (and if I feel up to dealing with the inevitable blowback).
I think you should. The posts where you go at an idea in depth and bring up weighed evidence are the best.
Fair enough but let's grant that you're right that it's caused by BLM (I have no strong view on this one way or the other). Why is that incompatible with my alternative hypothesis that it's a result of despair and rage, rather than police demoralisation? Simply establishing it was caused by BLM does not establish that the casual pathway went through police demoralisation.
Also, I have concerns about describing reduced police activity as a result of "demoralisation". A lot of people think it's more like an unofficial, politically motivated strike. Calling politically motivated retaliation for people not being sufficiently obsequious "demoralisation" doesn't seem accurate to me. Or even if it is technically accurate, it seems misleading.
I don't see any evidence of police officers coordinating a strike at any significant scale. Police officers are still people, even if they were trying to keep in secret, someone would brag about it on Facebook and mainstream media would pounce.
The claim that it's a strike shouldn't be confused with the claim that it's a formal strike or there is a conspiracy to achieve it. Instead, it's the claim that a culture of retaliating against perceived political enemies by not doing one's work properly has developed in the police force. It's similar to the demoralisation idea, but the driving force is anger and resentment- at voters, at politicians, at the media and prosecutors, rather than despair.
Is that fundamentally different to demoralisation?
If you're refusing to do your job properly because of how you feel about the people in charge, that sounds like a morale problem to me.
As I said above:
"even if it is technically accurate, it seems misleading."
Demoralisation calls to mind a bunch of cops sitting around saying "what's the point, awww jeez I feel terrible about this, but there's nothing I can do to help anyway". Almost a kind of occupational depression. The scenario I'm describing is about spite and bile.
Oleg is claiming that it can't be a "strike" because a strike requires organization/conspiracy and nobody can keep that secret so we'd be seeing the police discussing their conspiracy in their social media accounts, etc.
In that respect, demoralization is fundamentally different because demoralization leads to lots of police officers *privately* deciding that, meh, that radio call about a robbery in progress is five blocks away; nobody will yell at me if I finish my donut and get there after it's over, without going on facebook and saying "Hey, we're all agreed that starting tomorrow none of us respond to robbery-in-progress calls, right?"
Whether "strike" is the appropriate term to use for that, it is a thing that can happen and it is fundamentally different from the formally organized version.
"Blue Flu" informal police work slowdowns are not uncommon. For example, cops can insist upon doing everything by the book which reduces their productivity substantially.
For instance, back in late 2014, it looked like BLM was coming to New York City after the death in custody of the guy selling loose cigarettes in Staten Island. Mayor De Blasio saw this as an opportunity to do something about the NYPD, which he'd been unable to do in his first couple of years, even appointing Giuliani's police chief Bill Bratton as his police chief. But then a BLM supporter assassinated two NYPD officers (12/23/14?).
The cops started an informal strike. New York got more chaotic. Both sides looked to Bratton for support. The chief wouldn't support De Blasio so he had to back down in early 2015. That was pretty much the end of BLM as a major force in NYC until 2020.
Or at least that's how I remember it from reading the local news in the New York Times.
We would not tolerate that behaviour, to that degree, from any other category of public servant.
I was under the impression that teachers' unions did similar things to cities that tried to force them back to the classroom without protective measures for covid. Certainly teachers' unions have had official strikes in the past https://www.educationnext.org/rolling-national-teacher-strike-is-why-schools-are-closed/
What do you mean by "would not tolerate"? Striking teachers are generally not e.g. jailed, AFAIK.
I'm not sure what world you live in, but my impression of the world is usually that public servants run the show and usually try to let the elected officials think they're in charge because it makes for less hassle. Cf. Yes Minister (fictional, of course, but like most comedy funny because of the truth it contains)
Are you kidding? It happens all the time.
It might even just be that the result of BLM protests is that protestors and the wider black community lose trust in the police, and that policing is more difficult the less that police are trusted.
At least in principle, it should be possible to distinguish the two effects.
A drop in the number of cooperating witnesses, with no change in anything else, would suggest a community change.
A drop in e.g. the number of routine arrests, with no visible change in anything else, would suggest demoralization/unofficial strike (which might just be two ways of saying the same thing).
The cops were already working less by the second half of March 2020 as they social distanced themselves from making as many stops.
Another Covid-related factor is that a lot of criminals and crazy people were let out of custody for fear of their dying in lock-up.
But that also coincided with the way The Establishment already wanted to go toward less of Carceral State.
Good points!
I call it "the retreat to the donut shop." It's happened many times over the last 60 years or so.
Cops are very sensitive to politics. My view is that policing is inherently highly political, as the words would suggest. If the politicians and the political attitude-shaping media turn against the police, they have a lot of discretion to reduce their effort. I've read that the biggest accomplish of Giuliani-Bratton in the mid 1990s was getting NYPD officers to double the number of hours of actual policing they put in per shift from two hours to four hours.
Bill Bratton talks about ways he had to improve cop motivation, some of which I'd never think of, such as getting them cooler looking police cars. Even getting them a less lame-looking logo on the side of the cruisers could be a big help in getting them to work harder and subscribe to the new systems.
It would be nice if cops tended to have less political, more heroic and self-sacrificing personalities, but people who are like that are more likely to become firemen than policemen. Firemen tend to have a simple worldview: there is human life and there is fire and we're in favor of human life and against fire.
Cops have a darker worldview: there are good humans and bad humans. We're the good guys, not because we are good all the time, but because we know the bad guys and they are really, really bad. But sometimes the politicians and media forget that and start believing that every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints.
And then the cops work less.
Good writing
You cannot say that police do not reduce murders, and then claim that the police informally striking is increasing murders.
I'm struggling to find where anyone said police don't reduce murders.
Perhaps this is what you're talking about?:
"Police don't usually prevent murders, they help investigate them. It seems to me that murderers aren't usually rational actors to the degree that they'll reason "well I'm 20% less likely to be caught after the fact now, so I think I'll commit that murder"."
The operative sense of "prevent" here is - "directly intervene to stop a murder before it happens". Police don't do much of that. However, no one is denying that police have some sort of deterrence effect on murders and prevent them in that sense. I am dubious about the claim that the elasticity of the murder rate is very high in punishment at the margin, but I'm not even fully committed to that.
I think you should and that it would be useful.
Yes, please. Very interesting.
Why is the connection then attributable to police demoralization? You have not shown your work here at all. You say "BLM protests demoralized police" and then say that the connection is clear from the time series. Why that particular conclusion as opposed to others, given the data that you're presenting?
How much is police demoralisation and how much is community assistance to the police being withdrawn? That seems to be the key question - if witnesses stop stepping forward then the police are incapable of policing other than as an occupying force (ie applying collective punishments for non-cooperation).
My dispute wouldn't be with the timing/connection to the protests, but referring to that as police demoralization is fairly revealing language. Would you view learning loss as caused by teacher demoralization? Or strikes on worker demoralization?
Calling strikes a result of worker demoralisation seems like it's technically correct, albeit not an entirely neutral framing
It's certainly one possible framing. More broadly, it seems far more likely to me that the protests and police inaction share a similar root cause, namely the fairly abrupt shift in view of police.
Would love to see that post.
I was intrigued by that bit in the review and I'd definitely be curious to read a post on this.
I also think the blowback might be huge, so, hm, I don't know. I think it'd be fully legitimate to make this the key element in the decision.
I think that would be interesting, but since you mention the blowback I understand why you wouldn't.
Please do. I can't link Sailer. Mom would disown me.
I think you probably also have a more nuanced take.
I agree with you on this, but I still would enjoy reading such a post.
Please spin this off into its own post!
I agree with you on this already, but I'd love to read your own detailed reasoning too.
And it would probably be helpful for many others.
Please do.
If you do write a post please consider this paper: http://maximmassenkoff.com/papers/victimization_rate.pdf
which finds that if you adjust for how much time people spent outside their homes, public safety declined hugely during the first 2 months of the pandemic and was improving in summer 2020 relative to spring.
Also I think it's worth noting that murder went waaaay up even in conservative rural areas, whose inhabitants presumably were not chomping at the bit to defund the police.
And for all the people who say "look at European countries - they had no BLM protests and didn't see any murder spike" I would respond that hundreds of thousands of people protested in Paris, London, etc, and clashes w/ police and vandalization of monuments took place all across Western Europe.
People in Europe also don't have guns... Like the availability of murder sticks makes Americans so much more dangerous to one another.
"murderers aren't usually rational actors to the degree that they'll reason "well I'm 20% less likely to be caught after the fact now, so I think I'll commit that murder"."
In contrast, I 'd say that potential murderers think hard about what are the odds that I'll meet an enemy who will shoot me with his illegal hand gun before I shoot him with my illegal hand hand vs. what are the odds the cops will stop and frisk me and send me to jail for carrying an illegal handguns.
"It seems to me that murderers aren't usually rational actors to the degree that they'll reason "well I'm 20% less likely to be caught after the fact now, so I think I'll commit that murder"."
This conjures up quite an image of someone at a computer poring over time series data of homicide clearance rates just before picking up a deadly weapon... :-)
My impression is that a lot of shootings are impulsive, but what's less impulsive is the decision whether or not to bring your illegal handgun with you. Should I bring my Glock to the block party? Will I need it to defend myself from all the other criminals who will bring their guns? Or will I be more likely to get stopped and searched by the police and sent to prison on a weapons charge?
NYC drove its shootings rate way down by changing the culture away from packing heat toward fearing the NYPD. I'm sure people were still feeling dissed at social events, but they couldn't just pull out their piece and start shooting in the general direction of the guy who dissed them. They'd have to, say, go visit grandma where they'd stashed their gun and maybe she'd cheer them up and they'd stop dwelling on shooting that guy.
That sounds plausible. Many Thanks!
"In fact, if you’re a homeless person, why wouldn’t you want to live in a suburb?" -- Because panhandling is a numbers game, and if you sit on the sidewalk in the commuter suburbs, you might talk to one person an hour.
Suburbs have shopping centers with lots of foot traffic going through them!
Malls are private spaces from which panhandlers can be removed; city streets are public spaces where trespass does not apply.
Is there any public space in a typical suburb with the foot traffic of a typical central street?
And even if we ignore panhandling, is there any place in a suburb with as many walkable retail jobs/air conditioned public spaces/food shops/whatever as a city? A suburb is a fine place to be if you aren’t looking to do anything new, but most opportunities for new activity (either social or economic) are easier in a city.
Not public, but there are private spaces: inside a mall, between the stores.
But mall cops will stop you panhandling there in a way that street cops won't in the city.
In the DC metro area, suburban panhandlers tend to park themselves on the access roads to and from shopping centers, hoping to get the attention of traffic stopped at a light. You will also occasionally see one on the median at a busy intersection.
If the traffic is all cars, it makes sense that even the panhandlers are drive-thrus.
I don't know how it compares numbers-wise to foot traffic in the city, but I routinely see suburban pan-handlers in North Carolina, usually standing at a corner or median at a light for an Interstate on/off ramp but sometimes just on a corner or median that gets a fair bit of car traffic. I don't know if they live nearby or if they are dropped off there and picked back up later.
I was thinking of the suburbs I've lived in, most of which had no shopping areas, or very small ones a mile apart. But since you counted Palo Alto as a suburb, I should have thought about why places like Palo Alto, Fairfax VA, or Gaithersburg MD, don't have many homeless, despite the fact that they don't fit my image of "suburbs".
If you look at the photo you posted of Palo Alto, I can find 2 small isolated clusters of shopping areas, separated by maybe a quarter mile. I don't think that would be a good hunting ground. I've found it's much easier to avoid people asking for money--say, the Salvation Army Santa--in places with parking lots, where you can see them from far away and circle around them, than on a street in Harlem, where you have to walk right by them. Also, malls have mall cops. Also, suburban malls usually close after 8pm, and small-town malls often close by 6pm and are entirely closed one day a week.
But I'm just guessing.
I once lived with a woman who managed a homeless shelter in, I think, Alexandria, VA, in an area that was definitely more sub-urban than Palo Alto. So there were lots of homeless people in that particular suburb. She also worked at a shelter in Utica, NY, which was even more rural. And the only homeless group home that I've visited was in a very quiet condo in Springfield VA. Group homes are basically invisible. They don't have signs on them saying "Group home". The people in them aren't kicked out every morning (as shelters often do), and have all their needs (other than recreational drugs) supplied, so they don't panhandle.
Maybe a better model would be that homeless population is proportional to the population. I dunno; the cases I mentioned were all cases where some government exported the homeless to suburbs, so that's a distortion.
One of your best articles in a while. Well researched, entertaining, contained some fact, did largely reinforce my priors. 10/10
No, no, no – no points are given for reinforcing/'weakening' priors :)
Do you genuinely believe that anyone comes here to learn anything new? Heaven help us.
I don't explicitly, yet Scott manages to teach me new stuff all the time in the course of edutainment. Clearly a mistake has been made somewhere.
But then, that's probably easier when one doesn't know much to begin with and Scott gets first-teacher advantage. "Being empty just means you can be filled without limit".
Yes!
Don't be _too_ cynical :)
Be _accurately_ cynical!
Ooof. If serious, this is one of the saddest comments I've seen here. I _absolutely_ learn things and update my opinions from Scott.
I think that the canonical reference when talking about a data driven approach to the homeless problem should be "Million Dollar Murray" by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell cites Dennis Culhane's research on homelessness that produced a surprising outcome: the most frequent period of homelessness is a single day. The second most frequent duration? Two days.
Why? Because when you're talking about homelessness you're talking about (at least) two different populations. The first are those individuals who are homeless only briefly--they are often employed and after a night or two of sleeping in a car or on a bench they find shelter on a friend's couch or in the basement of their parents home. In Gladwell's narrative they can be ignored because they can take care of themselves.
The other population is far more problematic. For this group of individuals the average stay on the streets isn't measured in days, it's years. Rates of drug abuse and mental illness are far higher for this group than for the general population, along with the concomitant issues of joblessness and familial isolation. (Culhane in another interview said that they tend to have "tenuous" relations with friends and family. Translation: they can't stay at Mom's house because they pawned the tv to buy crack and are now persona non grata.)
This is not a distinction without a difference. If homelessness has its roots in simple economics than providing housing vouchers or subsidies should be enough to make a difference. If the real issue is addiction and mental illness than those measures will be woefully inadequate.
The same type of interesting statistical artefact arises in unemployment data, which is why we now tend to break down said data by "frictional" unemployment (you're moving from one job to the other, or have quit in order to make some sort of life change etc.) vs "structural" unemployment (you can't get a job).
These days economists also talk about cyclical unemployment, discouraged unemployment, seasonal, long-term, involuntary, you get the picture. There are a lot of different ways you can slice the data which may be appropriate for different analyses.
And obviously if these cohort definitions are suitable for analysis they also lend themselves well to policy. The entire argument of "Million Dollar Murray" is that the population that is homeless only briefly is unmanageably large: Culhane has estimated that it is tens or hundreds or thousands of people in NYC alone over the course of a decade.
But fortunately since these individuals get themselves off the street very quickly government doesn't need to worry about them. It can instead focus its attentions on the tiny subset of the homeless population that is on the streets for years at a time. This is also the segment of the population that produces the greatest costs to society: the titular Million Dollar Murray who drinks to the point of passing out, aspirates their own vomit or spends the night in a snow bank, is revived in an emergency room and then spends days or weeks in hospital, and then upon release promptly gets drunk again and starts the whole cycle over again. That is the rationale behind Housing First which is missing in Scott's review: it is literally cheaper just to give these people a place to live where you can keep an eye on them compared to the costs of an unending routine of visits to either the emergency room or prison that finally terminates in an early death due to overdose, exposure, etc.
> That is the rationale behind Housing First which is missing in Scott's review: it is literally cheaper just to give these people a place to live where you can keep an eye on them compared to the costs of an unending routine of visits to either the emergency room or prison that finally terminates in an early death due to overdose, exposure, etc.
Cheaper to first order yes. The obvious problem is that for every homeless person to whom you give a free house, you incentivise two more marginally-housed people to become homeless to get free housing.
I once tried to figure out where San Francisco's $100K-per-rough-sleeper homeless services budget is going, and as far as I can figure out it is mostly going to providing free housing for previously-homeless people. So all this has already happened.
In Gladwell's narrative though the egg that comes before the chicken is mental illness and drug abuse. The chronically homeless don't choose to become homeless for economic reasons, they literally have no other alternative. And in the economic analysis the decision of who gets a free apartment is pretty clear: Million Dollar Murray was on a first name basis with the nurses and police who dealt with him on a weekly basis--the "Million Dollar" portion of his sobriquet is no accident. The point is society is already paying to keep Murray alive in hospital stays and jail visits and the cost is astronomical. What are the alternatives? Just let him die the next time an emergency call comes in? Or maybe just give him an apartment with a fulltime nurse that checks in on him to make sure that he's not choking to death on his own vomit?
Why not just let him die?
Of course that's an option. It's up to society at large to decide which course should be pursued and what the acceptable costs are.
If we can't just let him die, I'd rather an institution where he is confined and can't roam the streets harassing passersby between hospital visits.
Personally I think permanently institutionalizing the shockingly low actual population of chronic homeless who have such an outsize negative impact on the happiness and productivity of society at large would be an excellent use of our tax dollars.
Precisely. The actual percentage could be miniscule, and the yet societal benefits considerable. This is why the "sweeping" institutionalizing critique is pure strawman.
This doesn’t sound like a “two populations” story to me. It sounds compatible with one population, where a factor that increases the growth of the number of people going through a day or two of homelessness at a time, or a factor that increases the duration of average periods of homelessness even a little bit can have a big effect on the number of people that end up long-term homeless with other problems.
Like mental illness? Or drug addiction? That is kind of the point.
Hey Scott, I've read the book (I generally liked it), and one of the ideas in it that felt right to me that you didn't address was the magnet effect of generous aid programs in progressive west coast cities. As a Seattle resident, this feels like an important piece of the puzzle, making west coast cities with warmish weather and liberalized drug laws uniquely attractive to homeless addicts from all over the country, particularly when paired with greater tolerance of "camping" and property crime generally.
This is a popular theory but my understanding is that the data contradict it. I would have liked to see those data here. (I think the fraction of current homeless that lived in a different metro area one year ago or five years ago is not appreciably different from the fraction of current housed people that lived in a different metro area one or five years ago in any of these cities.)
The data seem generally _awful_ for all of this.
I'd like to see MUCH better data before I reconsider weighing anecdotes more strongly than "the data".
(Also – fuck "the data" – "_the_ data"? That just smacks of Correct Thinking instead of, you know, the plain truth. I'm venting about the phrase – not anything I'm attributing to you personally.)
Could the aid programs add a residency requirement? Must have been in Seattle so many months to qualify?
My impression is that the aid programs do not help everyone, and so this just shifts the recent origin of the fixed number of homeless who do not get aid. Plus it would get shouted down for humanitarian reasons. Plus a lot of the people who want to help, just want to help, and if someone in front of them is asking for food they give the food.
It's like how the tech industry concentrates in cities. Big employer exists, new workers migrate there, leads to more employers, leads to more migration. If you want to help lots of homeless people, cities in general and West Coast cities in particular are your petrie dish.
Also, a lot of the statistics are garbage, biased toward whatever result the collector wanted. I've seen them claim someone as a "long-time resident" who moved here 6 months ago. So a month-denominated cutoff would be needed, and I think a lot of the homeless population don't keep verifiable records. So it would boil down to "lie and sleep inside, tell the truth and sleep outside", which is frankly cruel, and I don't think people who administer homeless programs select for being cruel to homeless people.
Those are all good points. Unfortunately, if e.g. 'Housing First' really _did_ build enough housing for the homeless population currently in one city, and if it was unique, with other cities acting differently, what would prevent enough new homeless people from moving to that one city to overwhelm it? More generally, how do you have a pilot program for _any_ benefit program in any geographic area without it getting overwhelmed?
When getting the correlation between housing costs and homelessness what criteria was used to determine which cities were used? Why exclude Palo Alto or Beverly Hills?
These statistics really should be done at the urban area level for this sort of purpose. The metro area is acceptable if you don’t have statistics on the urban area. Unfortunately some of these statistics are only at the municipality level.
San Francisco seems to be in the exact same place as the rest of the country with regards to rising crime; a bad one. In particular the increase in gun violence from 2019 to 2021 is stunning to me.
"According to the numbers, the city had 56 homicides in 2021, up from 48 in 2020, and 41 in 2019."
"The data also revealed that citywide gun violence is on the rise, with 222 victims of gun violence in 2021, which includes murder victims killed in shootings. That number is up from 167 victims of gun violence in 2020, and 137 in 2019."
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/sf-mayor-police-chief-discuss-citys-crime-over-the-last-year/2790381/
IMO the single most disturbing national trend at the moment, besides perhaps the skyrocketing price of housing beyond what local markets can sustain. It's not just liberal areas or cities either; there's a good WSJ article the other week on how violent crime in rural areas has risen 25% in the last couple years as well, suggesting that there's some sort of multicausal explanation that is nevertheless almost ubiquitous nationally.
One interesting theory:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-26/why-is-the-u-s-murder-rate-spiking
If this is valid I don't see a decrease in the homicide rate in the foreseeable future.
On a related note crime rates in the US are often described as rising between 1960 and 1990 and then falling between 1990 and 2014. If there is some underlying social dynamic that is driving crime to fluctuate along 30 year cycles then we are at the start of another three decades of rising crime.
Lead.... Seriously, the 1960 to 1990 was the lead poisoned generation getting old enough to do crimes. From 1990 to 2014, the lead people aged out of being criminal. Crime has gone up now, but it's still way below the late 80s
The average US homicide rate now is the worst its been since the early to mid 1990's. That's 25 years of progress in terms of decreasing homicides that have been wiped out.
So the situation is already bad. Is it going to get worse though? Everything I've seen suggests that 2022 so far is worse than 2021 which was worse than 2020. If we are still on the upward swing in terms of violent crime rates a return to the bad old days of the 1980's seems plausible.
My vague impression is that at the moment we are in the Floyd Effect New Normal of about 50 gun homicides per day, compared to 36 per day in 2019, with no strong trends up or down.
It is tough to say so far for 2022 but my impression is that the first six months before the big summer crime surge look pretty bad.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/six-cities-pace-pass-violent-crime-2022
There is also some issues with local police departments reporting statistics to the FBI. My guess is that this would result in underreporting, although the specifics are very fuzzy.
https://www.newsy.com/stories/thousands-of-police-depts-stop-reporting-crime-data-to-fbi/
https://www.axios.com/2022/06/14/fbi-crime-data-2021-police-reporting-failures
As for the Floyd effect obviously I am guessing that police forces are still understaffed and demoralized. But my understanding is that crime rates have still increased dramatically in suburban and rural police forces that have not seen rates of attrition comparable to their big city counterparts, making me wonder if there are additional forces at work.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/bloomberg-did-political-polarization-lead-to-the-2020-murder-surge/
;)
Kevin Drum came up with a lot of interesting suggestive data on the lead stuff, but has it held up through the recent increases in crime?
I think so. Now we are back up to where we were in that crime filled year of ... 1996
Isn't the peak of crime 1992, so that back up to 1996 is actually pretty bad?
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?locations=US
That is not a good part of the curve to be on.
And again, why the huge increase in homicides now? Did lead paint get reintroduced somehow?
Kevin Drum admitted that lead has no predictive power on homicides, only violent non-homicides. I don't see how he can believe it has such niche value, but I don't see how he believed any of it in the first place.
Where did he say this? I have read him for a while and I've never seen him pull back on the lead crime theory
While I am generally not in favor of homicides, I do not find that rise stunning.
From Scott's homicide plot (which may have slightly different numbers), it looks as it was around 99 in 2007. Even then, life went on.
Most homicides are probably not committed by murderers working on a fixed yearly quota. For single homicides for personal reasons, the distribution is probably nearly a Poisson distribution. If the expected number of homicides per year is 49 homicides, the standard deviation would be around 7. Getting 56 homicides one year and 41 in another year might be well within normal variation. (Realistically, the variation is likely much higher, as many homicides are likely causally connected. Gang wars, mass shootings etc.)
The increase in the number of gun violence victims is probably significant. But unlike for homicides, the police has a more leeway in counting here. Who counts as a victim of gun violence? Someone threatened with a gun? Someone getting shot at? Someone getting hit by a bullet? What if the bullet gets stuck in a kevlar vest? What about BB guns?
And how are the statistics collected? Probably there are constitutional issues with forcibly inspecting a representative sample of the population for bullet woulds, so you either rely on surviving victims coming forward to the police (which I understand is frowned upon in some gang circles) or forcing hospitals to report bullet wounds. Did these reporting requirements/practices change 2019-2021?
If you wanted to put a statistically irresponsible positive spin on things, you could also claim that while both homicides and gun victims are up, the odds of a victim of gun violence actually getting killed has decreased from about 30% in 2019 to about 25% in 2021 -- so in another decade, we will have 500 gun violence victims, but 0% of them will die.
(Also, 30% death rate in victims of gun violence feels kind of low to me given the availability of semi-automatics? For premeditated murders, I would expect a higher rate. Also for shootouts. "Looks like I hit them. Let's calmly wait if the shot incapacitates them or if they move to return fire and I have to shoot again.")
"Did these reporting requirements/practices change 2019-2021?"
That is completely speculative. Have they?
As for your statistically irresponsible spin that is something that criminologists have been talking about for decades:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1124155/
As other people have pointed out in this thread there is a significant concern regarding underreporting for quality of life crimes such as shoplifting. On the other hand it is tough to undercount a homicide because somebody needs to take care of the body.
On the other hand as that article points out advances in medical science are artificially suppressing the homicide rate as compared to previous decades. To be saved by medical science though you need to be treated by medical science, so it may well be that the most useful metric from year to year is gun violence. If you are suggesting that the change in SF from 2019 to 2021 is an artifact of methodology feel free to provide evidence to back up that assertion.
However the US in general is in the midst of a catastrophic increase in violent crime. The period from 2019 to 2020 saw the largest recorded one year increase in the homicide rate since modern record keeping started, and probably the largest one year increase in at least a century. If SF were somehow the exception to the national trend that would be singularly remarkable. As far as I can tell that is not the case.
A shooting victim is somebody who has been struck by a bullet. There's not a lot of grey area in the definition.
Doctors and hospitals have been obligated to report gunshot wounds for generations: it was a big plot point in 1930s gangster movies.
Criminologists believe that they capture virtually all gun homicides and the great majority of shootings in their statistics.
>Criminologists believe that they capture virtually all gun homicides and the great majority of shootings in their statistics.
I'm interested what the support for this is. I would assume that at least some gun homicides result in open ended missing persons cases that are never resolved (and that is just the first thought that popped into my head, I imagine there are more such situations).
"at least some gun homicides result in open ended missing persons cases that are never resolved"
That was my thought as well.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-go-missing-in-the-U-S-yearly-and-how-many-are-never-found
About 2700 missing people per year remain missing
Also, NIJ "estimates that 40,000 bodies or partial human remains are unidentified. "
Great and illuminating essay in general, wondering what you think of various system effects beyond outcomes of various approaches being offered to an isolated homeless person:
- At some point, overgenerous housing problems would lead to people reducing effort to pursue other alternatives to being government housed homeless. For example - work for a horrible boss, move to a place where one absolutely hates to live except for low living costs, beg a relative one is not on good terms with to sleep on the couch. I agree that this point has not been reached in the US, but seems to be a significant problem among immigrants in Sweden. Where do we draw the line.
- To help the most people using finite resources, it's essential for aid to be as small and brief and possible for each individual recipient, so that it can quickly become available again for others. This implies programs that work in a pinch but are not palatable for long term use, or are simply time limited. Permanent private rooms where some might choose to live long term may be too relatively comfortable to ensure that almost everyone who is able to move on does.
- Equity is not the only consideration here. Even among the homeless, there may be one who can become self-sufficient given expensive time limited intervention for each two who are likely to remain long term dependent no matter what. Is it really better to keep all 3 in long term government housing with no way out? Also each housing unit government fully pays for is one less unit available for someone on the verge of homelessness but able to rent the cheapest apartment in town. Also, government provides single occupancy units, but people voluntarily rent with roommates, and even cramped quarters is better than sleeping on the street.
The charge that the only alternative to incarceration is a medieval asylum is an unfortunate straw man I think. Yes, the institutions of the early 20th century were horror shows. So were the prisons. The bulk of modern day prisons are much more humane institutions.
Locking up the mentally ill in jails is a hidden crisis. Not only does it lead to a deterioration in the capabilities of police but it results in great suffering for mentally ill inmates who often receive substandard care. Some intermediate option that includes involuntary confinement but in a setting dedicated to treatment would probably be a huge improvement.
Case in point: the "Mexican Mafia" gang member who stole the prison bus, then went on to kill the grandfather and his four grandsons who were visiting their rural cabin in Leon County, Texas. Was the bus taking the guy to do brutal work in the hot sun? No - it was taking him to the dentist!
Thank you Scott! That was a really great article to read.
Somewhat counterintuitively, I don't think there's a sensible mechanism by which high housing prices cause people to live on the streets.
The obvious mechanism doesn't seem to make sense. The sort of people you see living on the streets of San Francisco aren't the sort of people who can afford $1500 a month in rent but not $4500 a month. The people of San Francisco who got priced out of their $1500-a-month apartments didn't move onto the streets, they moved to Oakland or Sacramento or Cleveland or somewhere; moving to a new city may suck but it's vastly better than sleeping on the street.
The people who sleep on the street are clearly both unemployed and unemployable, so even if you could lower the cost of living in San Francisco to the cost of living in Memphis, it's not going to result in them finding houses.
I think there are plenty of situations -- extended family living in minimum-market-cost unit, tenant refusing to pay rent for a while before getting kicked out, minimum wage worker in a rent-controlled apartment out of luck after it gets purchases by developers -- where continuously rising average housing costs trigger rapid-onset homelessness in individuals who do not end up leaving the community for cheaper areas, at least not immediately. I'm sure there are others.
I don’t think this is accurate. I think people become homeless by losing their home, crashing with a friend for a few days while they try to find a new place still in range of their job, then overstaying their welcome. If you lose your home, you don’t move to a new city so that you have to lose your job too - you try to leverage your existing networks of work and friends to get back on your feet. It takes a lot of broader support to move to a new city and get back on your feet.
I agree. Melvin's argument isn't wrong, it just tracks the effect from the wrong point. High housing costs primarily relate to the generation of homelessness, not to the predicament of those who have become homeless. However, they do relate to the potential to fund fully or partially subsidized housing.
People who aren't addicted to crack can leverage their support networks by sleeping at Mom's house or crashing on a friend's sofa.
People who pawned their mother's television to buy crack or stole money from a friend's purse to buy heroin are no longer able to leverage those support networks.
I suppose that would be the interesting question - see if those people have moved to new cities at a higher rate than others.
Perhaps I should have used the word "vagrancy" rather than "homelessness". One of the problems, as others have pointed out, is that definitions of "homeless" wax and wane depending on the point someone is trying to make.
So let me be explicit: I think that housing prices might be a contributing factor in the kind of Type 1 "homelessness" where you're sleeping on a friend's couch or in your car or in a cheap motel while you figure out a better plan. I don't think it contributes to the kind of Type 2 vagrant-homelessness where you're permanently sleeping in UN Plaza and addicted to fentanyl -- which is the kind of homelessness that we actually care about. I furthermore think that the pathway from Type 1 to Type 2 homelessness is fairly narrow, and that Type 2 homelessness is caused almost entirely by madness or drug addiction.
This seems largely sensical to me. It's also hard to find evidence that the people homeless in an area are from that state, let alone that metro area.
I wouldn't ordinarily type up anecdotes, but this connects to Scott's "would this guy lie to his psychiatrist about shoplifting" example: I lived 2010-2020 in an area where the homeless population exploded during that time. Conversations with local LEOs and the homeless themselves indicated that the vast overwhelming majority were from elsewhere. And why wouldn't they be? Every location each of them (those that reported them informally to me, without proof) was from had fewer services and harsher climates.
Social services draw homeless populations. I have seen it personally. I think social scientists never understand this because they have never hopped a train or tried to get a relative off the street.
Cementing Scott as the granddaddy of all bloggers for eternity my God (Allah) you've got a insane talent like good Lord how do you do it
You wrote it your self – the "good Lord" :)
"The main virtue I cannot ascribe to it is honesty" was more or less my take about Shellenberger the last go round. I notice you softened the language on the website compared to the newsletter version. "Using statistics like a drunk uses a streetlamp" gets it about right though.
Very sad!
> The dream is to be so tough on crime that criminals pre-emptively give up and you never have to deploy your draconian punishments. But the history of the past few decades of mass incarceration show that, although this happens a little, enough people keep doing crime that you very much do have to deploy your draconian punishments and then you end up with millions of people in prison.
I would also like to take issue with this bit, because it seems to me that the US on the whole does _not_ on the whole have draconian punishments, and that its current high crime, high incarceration state is a result of being much too far on the "too lax" rather than "too draconian" side of the sweet spot.
The sweet spot is probably something closer to Singapore.
The thing that tends to get missed here is that there are two factors, one is the severity of punishment, and the other is the likelihood of being punished. The "Bloody Code" - with hundreds of crimes resulting in execution - did not lower crime in the early-nineteenth century UK; introducing police forces (starting with the Met in the 1840s) while lowering punishments resulted in dramatic falls in crime rates by the end of that century.
If people can commit hundreds of crimes before they get caught, then they will not worry about the punishment if they do. Pretty mild punishments can do the trick as long as they are certain.
Singapore has severe punishments, but it also has extremely efficient policing which means that criminals are much more likely to get caught.
Hard to say if the risk of execution in C18 England lowered crime - the ultimate penalty was rarely used - there were at most 60 executions a year and in many years much less than this in the whole of England. Sending the criminals to Australia did have a salutary effect, but this was minimised when stories of how the previously criminal came to Australia ["Botany Bay," as it was known] and prospered, which may have led to more people committing crimes in order to be transported (this, at least, was the opinion of some politicians). Perhaps SF needs a new Botany Bay? Could be a task for Elon Musk and SpaceX?
Nitpick: convicts were never actually transported to Botany Bay.
The First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay in 1788 but found it lacking in fresh water so they chose to build the settlement one bay further north at Port Jackson (now better known as Sydney Harbour).
I am not convinced that settling criminals in space is likely to be cost-effective, but I've sometimes thought about Antarctica.
Or just Alaska. We could colonize the tundra of Alaska with convicts instead of Mars? A lot cheaper.
Several replies saying roughly the same thing so I'll reply to this one.
You are of course correct that the one-dimensional "punishment draconian-ness" model is overly simple and we need to take efficiency of policing into account. If we could increase the number of police (and judges, and prosecutors, and everything) by a factor of ten then we wouldn't need to increase sentences. Alternatively if we could make policing a lot more efficient (e.g. by abolishing courts and giving the police Judge Dredd style powers to convict and sentence people whom they see committing crimes) then we wouldn't need longer sentences either.
But if the size and efficiency of the police force is held roughly constant then I contend that the "draconianness of sentences" knob behaves in the way I've proposed, and that the US is still way on the left hand side of the sweet spot.
The big problem is that police forces in big American cities are simply overwhelmed. If you took the five thousand worst repeat-offenders in San Francisco, decided that they're clearly not going to learn the error of their ways, and locked them up for twenty years, then the vast amount of police resources that is currently being wasted repeatedly processing these repeat offenders could be spent on other things. As you lock up more and more of the repeat offenders, you increase the amount of time that the police have to deal with the remaining crime, which increases the probability of any individual crime getting caught and punished.
Places with red light cameras and speed cameras have people who obey traffic laws, even if the fines are cheap. Places that rely on police to bother catching people are full of traffic scofflaws, almost regardless of how high the fines get.
Yes, this. If you get caught every time / almost every time, then you just obey the law.
If you get caught occasionally, then it doesn't matter how serious the punishment is; the public will not accept "we only catch one in a thousand, so we have to punish them a thousand times what is fair" and even if they would, that's not how psychology works.
That is certainly how we handle punishments for some crimes, though.
This is one of the few positives to improving surveillance technology. Given how many security cameras are in place, and how cheaply more could be added, making most offenses open-and-shut cases should be getting easier. I find the whole ignored-shoplifting thread bizarre. Most stores I go into have a smile-you're-on-camera display.
Do we need to go to the extent of fining stores for _not_ prosecuting shoplifters who were clearly recorded on their security tapes?
As far as I'm aware, the company I work for generally didn't have cameras at all until a few years ago. This only changed after a deeply traumatizing store shooting in Silver Lake, LA - not after egregious shoplifting, not after people OD'd and died in bathrooms, not after bloody altercations, not after horrific work injuries that led to contentious worker's comp litigation. Surveillance just isn't part of the company culture. We also stopped contracting with (unarmed!) security guards, since their presence was considered too Problematic versus the deterrence impact.
But all the cameras at my store only point in/around the management office, with only one actually confirmed to work (looks at the safe, naturally). None on the sales floor, none covering the points of entrance and egress, none on the bathrooms where much smuggling takes place. Clearly of little use for catching shoplifting.
It could be a chicken-and-egg thing, where lack of prosecution encourages corporations to care less about investing in deterrence like surveillance, and lack of in-house deterrence makes prosecution harder. I think there's also a corporate culture element though. We're definitely not the only company that prioritizes a certain "image" way more than boots-on-the-ground efficient operations. It's a nice vision of a gentler world without quality-of-life crimes. Not the one we actually inhabit in <current_year> though.
Many Thanks! I'll update my priors. :-)
I'd thought that surveillance was a bit more ubiquitous than it is.
There is a certain 'public good' aspect to deterring shoplifting. I suspect that even quite mild penalties, if they were made probable enough, might be enough to deter most of it (as per Kenny Easwaran's comment re red light cameras - even with cheap fines).
I agree, and have this sense that there used to be a broad consensus among criminal justice reformers that this was the preferred solution.
1. Very consistent enforcement. Reporting and clearance rates are high, police are supported, *no one is above the law* (really important).
2. Penalties which needn't be particularly severe, but do have a price beyond trivial inconvenience. Better to err lower than higher, if only to keep costs down.
3. Actual enforcement of existing laws, rather than reactively creating new ones, to promote cultural norms of conscientiousness and avoid regulatory sprawl.
Singapore does (1) and (3) very well. I seem to remember Norway or Finland being a model of doing (2) right. In the USA, we do...none of these, and now seem to be drifting off in fairly bonkers directions instead. The whole mindset of regarding police authority as fundamentally illegitimate/evil is deeply worrisome. I think the high compassion and empathy of progressives makes it very hard for them to really grapple with the implications that, actually, some people are just bad and need to be dealt with in unfair ways. Swinging really hard the opposite way causes its own problems, but is naturally self-interestedly appealing to the law-abiding. It's a tough nut to crack.
Many Thanks!
re "2. Penalties which needn't be particularly severe, but do have a price beyond trivial inconvenience. Better to err lower than higher, if only to keep costs down."
I have a suspicion, based on one of the variations in Milgram's "Obedience to Authority" experiment: Simply having someone in a lab coat tell someone sternly "You must continue" was enough to control a lot (tens of percent) of people. I _suspect_ that if minor crimes simply lead to being yelled at by a police officer (but consistently!, as per your (1)) might be enough to deter a lot of those minor crimes.
I think that most drugs should generally be legal. I also think that we should treat homelessness like Singapore. If you have an addiction, whether it is to alcohol, gambling, heroin, meth, or whatever, to the point where you just give up and choose to be homeless, police should arrest you and force you into treatment. Forced treatment centers might not be great (fix them - we don't throw out public schools because some teachers and institutions are bad!), but is the most humane and least suffering solution for the people who live in the city, and for the homeless themselves. I am not opposed to cheap housing for those who can prove they don't have addictions, but if you are homeless, you should have to prove that is not an issue.
As somebody somewhat familiar with the Portuguese situation, and who was born next door to Portugal and has lived in the neighborhood for a long time, let me clarify that Portugal is NOT a very conservative country, not even when it comes to drug use. In fact, it's so not conservative that the usual party switcheroo between conservatives and progressives there literally involves the "social-democratic party" running against the "socialist party" since the early 1970s. In fact, the only actual conservative who was ever president of Portugal in living memory was murdered by state security; they didn't even bother to cover the crime very much, and then the whole country has sort of ignored the matter for decades, as one of those things that sometimes happen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_S%C3%A1_Carneiro. Regarding the specific issue of drug use in Portugal: we should mention this study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31808250/, and put it in whatever context. It looks into all hospitalizations that occurred in Portuguese public hospitals from 2000 to 2015, and finds that the number of hospitalizations with a primary diagnosis of psychotic disorders and schizophrenia associated with cannabis use rose 29.4 times during the study period, from 20 to 588 hospitalizations yearly (2000 and 2015, respectively) with a total of 3,233 hospitalizations.
I'm not sure the 'psychosis' spikes are _that_ bad. Cannabis/marijuana _absolutely_ can trigger or cause (something like or very much like) psychosis, and there is a fairly strong correlation with schizophrenia (AFAIK) in the form of increasing its tendency/expression. I'd guess most 'episodes' are very acute, but it might be more of a long-term problem than I think.
Based on your knowledge of Portugal, can you please evaluate two excerpts from articles I've read?
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radical-drugs-policy-is-working-why-hasnt-the-world-copied-it
>It was the 80s, and by the time one in 10 people had slipped into the depths of heroin use – bankers, university students, carpenters, socialites, miners – Portugal was in a state of panic.
https://time.com/longform/portugal-drug-use-decriminalization/ (August 1, 2018)
> In the 1990s, some 5,000 addicts roamed the streets of the hilly neighborhood, searching for their daily fix as dirty syringes piled up in the gutters. Back then, Portugal was in the grip of heroin addiction. An estimated 1% of the population—bankers, students, socialites—were hooked on heroin and Portugal had the highest rate of HIV infection in the entire European Union.
These could both be true. 10% could be heroin users in the 1980s, and 1% could be heroin addicts in the 1990s.
But it seems more likely that something is getting warped in transmission, from {unknown source} to journalist who wasn't there to another journalist who wasn't there.
Which of these statistics seems accurate to you, if either?
Portugal is a tricky one because nobody cares about them. As a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in neighboring Madrid, I sometimes had to write about the country, and it was really hard to find experts to discuss Portuguese stuff, and then nobody cared about the stories. Portuguese people are fantastic and the country is beautiful, but it's still the poorest, least influential nation in all of Western Europe. Stanley Payne, the foremost foreign scholar on Spanish 20th century history, tells in his memoir how he was coopted to write about Portugal in English because nobody else would. So, with this said, my impression is that the whole issue of Portugal drug policy would be a great one for Scott to write, precisely because we have these stories from parachuting correspondents praising local drug policy without getting into many specifics. It's a tough subject. In the 80s, both Spain and Portugal had a massive heroin problem that later died down because of reasons; the consensus explanation, as far as I can tell, is that the addicts died out and weren't replaced by new ones because people growing in the 80s (my generation) were too horrified by their sight to take up hard drugs. That most certainly was my experience, but that's 100% anecdotal and personal. In early 2020 I was in Porto, Portugal's wealthiest city, and it was choke full of addicts and dealers, even pretty close to fancy hotels. Again, anecdotal. What we know is that Portugal's current policy has led to a much higher addiction problem, even if addiction is mostly to marijuana and softer stuff, rather than heroin. As they say, more data is needed for a full assessment.
I am Portuguese and live in Porto metro area. Porto is definitely not the wealthiest city in Portugal: Lisbon has significantly higher average and median wages, as well as a larger share of public investment. Regarding Portuguese drug policy, there is remarkably little public perception here of how it looks like: all info I have read on the foresightedness of our drug policy comes from foreign newspapers/magazines/websites, rather than from pieces in our own newspapers. This does not mean it is not true, since our reporting media are dreadful, averse to research journalism or long-form reporting, and instead drone incessantly on the day-to-day political squabbles, football news, disaster reporting and the opinions of bloviating talking heads who act as resident pundits in every TV/newspaper without any inkling of what they might have done to deserve being listened to. I suspect that, regardless of the excellence of our drug policy, there may be some "bandwagon effect" in foreign coverage (e. g. someone once read a white paper on it, or received a report from Portuguese researchers, etc, and that created a narrative). I will try to find some solid info on our drug policy institution websites
Curated GPT completions for "I've been homeless for three years. I prefer to camp in the densest part of the city because "
"it's easier to find food, shelter, and resources there."
"1) There are more opportunities for scavenging and finding food and resources.
2) There are more people around, which means more potential for begging or bartering for goods.
3) There are more places to hide and sleep without being disturbed."
"I can find more resources there."
"I can blend in more and people are more likely to help me out. I know all the best places to go to get food, clothes, and anything else I might need."
"I like being around people."
"I feel more safe when there are more people around."
Absolutely!
"It's easier to buy heroin and crack."
You wondered why statistics for shoplifting are going down while everyone with stores says that it is going up. The reason is that it isn't getting enforced. In addition to laws and policies which decriminalize small thefts, retail stores have less willing to confront thieves. I've worked retail once, and I assure you that this comic is totally accurate: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3964886
I knew someone working in high-end retail near the beginning of the pandemic and they reported _some_ particularly brazen/spectacular thefts; definitely NOT all or close to all tho.
It makes sense to me that the reported factors leading to homelessness add up to more than 100% In most cases there's not going to be a single factor, figuring out the relative weight of the factors is difficult but mental illness and drug addiction seem the most likely to be the "but for" casual factors where people might have avoided homelessness if not for them.
I spent a couple of weeks in the summer of 2018 in Santa Monica and walked all over every day. I was struck by how very rich and very liberal Santa Monica seemed to have homelessness under control, which I believe was not always true in the past. Most of the homeless-looking people were solitary individuals doing something not too objectionable, like retrieving aluminum cans from garbage bins. They seemed to mostly be working, rather than socializing with each other. In Santa Monica, I didn't see homeless people harassing pedestrians, doing drugs outdoors, or monopolizing the best public places, the way they used to make the clifftop Ocean Blvd. Park unpleasant.
On the other hand, while walking south on the famous Venice Beach bikepath, the moment I crossed from Santa Monica into Los Angeles (Venice is part of Los Angeles), the density of homeless went up a couple of orders of magnitude. And the homeless were having a blast. One foot over the civic border into Los Angeles, the beachfront roller skating path became a giant homeless party.
The lesson I took from this was that policy matters. The government of Santa Monica was evidently doing things that the government of Los Angeles wasn't doing regarding the homeless.
But what? Unfortunately, I've never been able to find any articles about what Santa Monica was doing to keep its homeless under control. I happened to find myself sitting at lunch soon after with the city manager of Santa Monica, a very competent-appearing man in his 60s. I wanted to ask him what he was doing right, but didn't get around to it. Oh, well ...
This doesn’t obviously sound like a strategy that is replicable. It could well be that this a strategy for a town to sweep its homeless population across the border, but if it doesn’t decrease the total homeless population (and perhaps even increases it) then it wouldn’t be effective if followed by all cities.
I'm curious too. Living in Venice in 2021, I also saw this and wondered about it. I tried googling the cop density and it seemed like Santa Monica has 450+ people in the police department (unclear how many of those are cops) for 8.4 sq mi and Venice has 50 cops for 3.1 sq mi. If that's 3x more cops per sq mi in Santa Monica vs Venice, it makes sense Santa Monica'd have less crimes, etc, but maybe they also have different procedures for what to do with the homeless the cops interact with. I was surprised that a bigger city had fewer homeless (Santa Monica had something like 900, Venice had 2x+ more, which accounting for size is a lot more dense with homeless).
Santa Monica and Venice have a higher density of media people than just about anywhere outside Brooklyn, but comparisons of the two adjoining places seem hard to find.
The homeless in Austin often seem to be having a ball. An addled ball perhaps. Maybe that's unsayable, that they would be content or even pleased. [It is to apply that same, er, insight into human nature that the left does with past people - they never had a happy or pleasant moment, and must not be represented as having had one.] In S. Austin there's a conveniently-located church where these folks can shower and get lunch. This church has no other function or identity than serving them, in fact. Maybe they're grilling on the space under the overpass. or even on it! They've got a rug, a generator, a bunch of chairs, perhaps even a couch or TV, a number of stolen bikes to choose from whenever they want to weave in front of traffic in every direction. They are sitting together and laughing about something. They've got flattering attention from passersby. Music. They appear for all the world to be thumbing their noses at convention.
If this is unsayable, it would be worthwhile to examine why.
The reason I'm saying it is because the thing that makes the homeless so attractive to the left, apart from their being a permanently increasing budget center for entities that hire social science grads, is this very épater le bourgeois quality. And yet it can't even be mooted now, the way it would have been, openly, if this were, say, the 60s. This in turn means you can't notice that the outdoors figures very largely in this. Being outside is really important. You haven't exhausted this topic just by giving weather reports.
This is why the endless "give them a house to care for" stuff is - well, c'mon y'all are so smart, right? (I need somebody on the internet to be smart.)
Tents are sitting there in plain sight. And so, so easy to scale (why look they've done it themselves already! - we like that agency too, don't we?).
If do nothing, and stop all the things you've been doing directly and indirectly, that created this problem over the last few decades - is not an option (we will see about that when this country has a different majority ...) - then how about campgrounds?
And note to all, or some: please do read about what has this past spring transpired at the "Candlewood Suites" hotel that the city of Austin purchased - what transpired there *before it even opened its doors to the homeless*.
is not an option (we will see about that when this country has a different majority ...) - then how about campgrounds?
And note to all, or some: please do read about what has this past spring transpired at the "Candlewood Suites" hotel that the city of Austin purchased - what transpired there *before it even opened its doors to the homeless*.
Someone broke in and damaged/took things? At a vacant site / construction site? What's the point?
And yeah, in traditional hunter/gatherer society, there was a lot more leisure time than in agricultural societies. Of course it left those societies vulnerable to dry spells and catastrophic loss since they couldn't store reserves, but with community you sit around, chat with your tribe, take turns holding up the sign. So? Campgrounds is a great idea, that's why homeless people have been making them out of sight for decades, then in sight for a few years, and now transitioning back to out-of-sight?
Have you been by Community First Village? It may not attract all the homeless/gatherers but it seems like it is doing a pretty good job.
Nah, it wasn't even a construction site yet. They went ahead and made their way up there and gave a taste of what the area can expect - not an affluent area, by the way, but an area full of immigrants (and another immigrant-owned hotel next door, which is suing), not the class of NIMBYs the urbanists find easiest to hate - they camped outside, milled around the neighborhood upsetting people named Garcia and Gonzalez with their nighttime yelling and their strung-out appearance, they broke in and destroyed pretty much the whole hotel apparently, stealing everything not nailed down, including the ice machines, and of course the wiring ...
Community First is run rather like a Boy Scout camp. Or a tidy and well-policed hippie commune funded by the well-to-do of Austin. It's great, if you're okay with that.
I keep being afraid the answer is just "be slightly crueler than Los Angeles".
Based on these excerpts, I think you're wrong to describe his position as "supporting sweeping institutionalization" - he supports more institutionizing than we have now and thinks we've gone too far to the other side, but doesn't seem to support peak institutionalization (there's a pretty wide gap between what we have now and the my brother Tom era). When you say "sweeping institutionalization"
I imagine "immidiately rounding up all the homeless people and locking them up". His described preferred policy has the option for that for some people, but unless I'm significantly misunderstanding it it's not the default for everyone (I don't think the Netherlands has mass institutionalization?).
This is such an (apparently) stupid problem – trading vague nearly-meaningless catchphrases. Alas, communication is (or can be) Hard, especially when participants are motivated to NOT understand one another.
'Harm reduction' seems similarly confusing; probably because it also kinda means 'various things people proposed as harm reduction'.
> I would also note that “traumatizing the sorts of people who write popular books about politics, in a such a way that they feel compelled as a sort of self-therapy to write page after page telling readers how angry they should be at you and your whole coalition” isn’t great political praxis. I would like people to figure this out and stop doing it.
I dunno. Sounds like it works, to me. Most of the normies won't read the people being harassed complaining about it because they don't read anything, but the people being harassed will give up faster, or just never start, as the anecdotes he gives verify. It doesn't seem like crying is an effective counter to bullying, in general.
This was probably too late to get in your article, but there was a NYT article last week on Houston's success in combatting homeless and it appears to be basically a massive housing first success
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html
Which of course underscores the reason why Houston can have success with Housing First, while San Francisco can't do as well - a lack of available, cheap housing. Finding reasonably priced one bedroom apartments that the gov't can afford is remarkably easier. Now, obviously there are issues w/ Houston sprawl, but there's a way to build more without sprawling into infinity.
Again, I know people will say I'm overstating this, but I'd argue that about 50% of problems or more that appear to be specific policy issues on their own all go down to housing supply, and our decades long backlog of a lack of housing starts. If we'd had continued building housing all around the country at the same rate we had back in 2007, we'd be at somewhere around eight to ten million additional housing starts in the country.
Seconded
Why does the cheap housing have to be within the city limits of San Francisco? The funds could be used (with the incentivized consent of other municipalities) to "house them first" in Modesto. The money could follow.
For the same reason the fact there are lots of empty houses in Detroit or other dying rust belt cities aren't going to help w/ the homeless problem, despite my fellow leftists using those empty homes when talking about national vacancies as proof it's all capitalist's fault.
Well I suppose that means that it isn't really just a houseless problem, but rather a "take care of me " problem, or "I need an intervention" problem. And that kind of torpedoes the "housing first above all" narrative. Because it would seem to me that someone really committed to housing first would be on board with busing the street population of San Francisco to get housed in Detroit. Or is being on the street in San Francisco somehow preferable to being housed in Detroit, or Modesto?
Are you using two different accounts to comment?
> The dream is to be so tough on crime that criminals pre-emptively give up and you never have to deploy your draconian punishments. But the history of the past few decades of mass incarceration show that, although this happens a little, enough people keep doing crime that you very much do have to deploy your draconian punishments and then you end up with millions of people in prison.
This ignores the fact that the clearance rate for many crimes in the US is very low, especially in high crime cities. In many high crime cities only 1/3 or less of homicides are solved. It's not surprising that harsh punishment doesn't deter all that much when the actual chance of being punished is fairly low.
Defund Police Tanks & SWAT Teams, then Fund Police Detectives
>Studies like these don’t show causation. Sure, mental illness can make people homeless. But homelessness can also cause mental illness. One SF study found psych diagnoses among the homeless to be evenly divided among depression, PTSD, and everything else. Homelessness is a depressing and traumatic environment. Just because someone who’s been on the streets for a year has depression or trauma, doesn’t mean that we should attribute their homelessness to mental illness.
This argument was a bit jarring right after you presented the house price - homelessness plot. Neither does showing a scatter plot and linear fit on house prices and homelessness prove causality! It is very well possible there is some third variable which explains *both*. Or maybe the causality runs the other way: average house prices are super high in SF because the rest of the populace is outbidding each other to get the super fancy apartments less affected by homeless camps. (Not super serious about this hypothesis, but if homelessness in SF affects only some districts, one really should look at the district level price data.)
I’m pretty sure that the most expensive housing per square foot in San Francisco is in some of the neighborhoods with the most homelessness. These are the neighborhoods with the most economic opportunities at most points in the income ladder.
As I said, it was unserious example. The point is, it is not a good look complaining about Shellenberger presenting statistics that don't prove causality right after presenting scatterplots, apparently not adjusted or controlled for anything, and arguing that R2 is pretty good ... all of which don't prove causality either. There are many possible covariates to consider. Like, to what extent the homelessness rate follow size of metropolitan area or population density?
And there is stuff like Simpson's paradox [1] consider. Suppose Atlanta, Portland, Long Beach and San Diego are similar to each other according to unknown factor X; LA and Oakland with each other; DC, Boston, NYC and San Jose likewise; and finally, SF sits very own over-the-top level in X. (One can imagine similar levels diagonal band for Baltimore and the rest, but I get tired typing.) If we then stratify the analysis by this unknown factor, within each strata you would show that a *decrease* in housing prices is strongly correlates with increasing rate of homelessness . Again, this is merely to illustrate the paradox, I have hard time imaging what such strata could be.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
Simply put, the most expensive neighorhoods in SF (Sea Cliff, St. Francis Wood) have almost no one camping on the street. The Tenderloin, one of the crappiest, has a ton of people camping on the street. Now even a crappy part of SF might be expensive compared to Scranton, PA, but within SF this narrative just doesn't hold water.
Regarding institutionalisation, I think describing mental hospitals up until mass deinstitutionalisation as "death camps" is firmly exaggeration.
The abstract and slogans keep talking about "Housing First", and all the real-world attempts seem to be at best "Apartments First", and usually "Rooms First". Has giving homeless people actual *houses* en masse actually been tried? Not quarters in a larger complex: actual, free-standing houses — albeit small, cheap ones.
It seems to me like that would obviously be less prone to the failure mode of the "apartment building" devolving into basically being a shelter-slash-institution-slash-prison by another name. In addition to the power dynamics, I think this would also be less demoralizing for the homeless. Whether or not the people running it are actually authoritarian control-freaks, being assigned a room will make you *feel* like you're just in an institution — whereas surely part of the hope is that genuinely being given a home of your own will feel like getting control of your own destiny back, and put you back on the path to true independence.
"Housing First" won't work if it's just "dump a homeless person in a hotel room". Some are incapable of independent living, some will do crap like rip out piping to sell.
You have to have supports in place, and yes that means not alone the much-maligned social workers, but medical and other support. And it can't be "fifteen minutes with an overloaded care worker once a fortnight".
That's the real problem: some people have very complex needs that won't be solved easily, and the well-intentioned 'well get them off the streets first' doesn't work if it is left at that. But that takes money, people, and time, and you may well be faced with "we need to build supported living housing for people like this who will be dependent on local government for the rest of their lives" as the treatment, and look at how tough it is to get housing built in SF.
"Has giving homeless people actual *houses* en masse actually been tried? Not quarters in a larger complex: actual, free-standing houses — albeit small, cheap ones."
There is a problem there in that some people will abuse the system; this is why there are policies around "anti-social behaviour" in social housing in all countries, be it housing provided by local government or by housing charities:
https://circlevha.ie/tenant-assistance/anti-social-behaviour/
"Circle VHA, in line with the Housing Act 1997, defines anti-social behaviour as involvement in activities such as the following:
Drug dealing or activity related to drugs
Criminal activity
Violence toward neighbours
Threats or intimidation of neighbours
Threats or intimidation of Circle VHA staff or contractors
Verbal or physical abuse
Noise pollution – day or night
Nuisance of any sort
Graffiti and vandalism on properties and public areas"
Some formerly homeless people will settle in and be fine. Others... won't be. Those with mental and other problems may reduce their new house to the same state of squalor as their homeless camp, because they are not able to live unsupported. Some are petty criminals and will engage in anti-social behaviour. It's not a *bad* idea, but it's not a "one size fits all" solution.
""Has giving homeless people actual *houses* en masse actually been tried? "
It's been tried, but not on a large scale AFAIK
https://elmbridgeresidentsgroup.com/pods-for-homeless-people
Interesting, thank you.
> Those with mental and other problems may reduce their new house to the same state of squalor as their homeless camp, because they are not able to live unsupported
I suspect they'd still rather live in squalor in a house than live in squalor on the streets, given the option. And the people who have to cross the street every day, whereas they don't actually ever have to set foot in the house, would say the same. "Would it make the entire problem go away" is an unrealistically high bar to clear for any such proposition — I'm more interested in "would it help meaningfully", and I think logically it would.
I'm not saying it's going to single-handedly solve homelessness. I just think that a lot of the "naive" popular support for "housing first" has people imagining something more like this than the "functionally-shelters with somewhat nicer, larger quarters" systems that keep being implemented instead. And I suspect that such a program would indeed have noticeable beneficial effects (without being a cure-all).
To get people to stay in a home that home needs to have easy access to the kinds of jobs that someone without much recent work history can hold down. It’s hard for a bunch of single family homes to all be in easy access to anything, unless you can assume everyone owns a car and can keep it running.
If you're already building/buying a bunch of houses, it doesn't seem much more of an imposition to also set up a decent public transportation system for their inhabitants.
(Also, I notice this line of thought has us making the assumption that we're putting all the houses in one place, rather than disseminating them around the city: in fairness, I was imagining the same thing, I think. But possibly it's not a trivial assumption and a smart urban planner could design something more efficient.)
Also, you can hypothetically pair this with UBI and do away with the assumption that people won't want to/be able to stay in the houses unless they can get a job from there. (Access to jobs remains a question insofar as we want to *encourage* people to get jobs anyway as part of their recovery process, but it becomes less of an immediate, knock-down concern.)
You need a certain level of population density in order to cost-effectively set up a transportation system (and at high enough levels of density, walking is a perfectly usable transportation system). The basic idea is that you've got the following calculations:
a particular transit stop is only going to be useful for origins and destinations within about a ten minute walk (half mile radius, assuming fully usable walking paths/sidewalks in all directions - smaller if there are cul-de-sacs or bad street crossings)
a residence is only going to generate about 4 or 5 origins and destinations per day
a transit line needs to run at least 4 times an hour for most people to find it useful for anything other than an extremely stable 9-to-5 type commute
to operate a transit vehicle, you need to pay the cost of wages and benefits for the driver, plus a bit extra for fuel and maintenance of the vehicle (I'm not sure what the total is, but $30 an hour sounds like a bare minimum)
I think it's *possible* for these factors to come together for a financially feasible transit line with single-family homes, provided that they're at a fairly high density, and there's a little area of shopping and other services near each stop. But it's much easier for transit to pencil out when the neighborhood has a good number of row houses and/or apartments, and you certainly need that if it's going to have any significant areas that have sufficient access to jobs, shops, and services primarily on foot.
> at high enough levels of density, walking is a perfectly usable transportation system
This is tangential to the main point, and it's more venting at a general issue than directed at you personally, but I heavily disagree there. It's "fine"… for the fit and relatively young, provided they're getting enough sleep and don't have too many heavy things to carry. And that the weather's usually nice.
This isn't even mostly a "disability rights" thing — though that seems, in itself, an important concern when proposing to build residential areas for homeless people. It's just a pet peeve of mine that people, mostly people trending towards the centre of the "young/fit/living in a temperate area/shop for small households/don't have a job or hobby requiring them to transport bulky or heavy items or cases" Venn diagram, vastly underestimate the inconvenience of walking-as-default for people who are not them.
I think that just strengthens the main point. When walking is harder for people, they need even higher levels of density in order for walking to be sufficient. And the walksheds of a transit stop are smaller, so higher levels of density are needed in order for cost-effective non-walking transportation to be possible.
I'm not sure that's fully responsive to Edmund's objection, though (granting that we all agree it's tangential to the break-even requirements of public transit). Even with essentially arbitrarily small walksheds there's not really a plausible way to use public transit to handle a substantial Costco run, or to buy a piece of furniture from IKEA, or any number of analogous errands (let alone inclement weather concerns). It's an issue of kind more than degree.
Yes, Amazon et al. help with this a lot (although in a kind of orthogonal way since it's not public transit) but I think the basic point that forgoing ownership (or at least use, but that gets expensive very quickly too) of a private vehicle is going to cause headaches on a semi-regular basis still stands.
ngl: as someone firmly in the centre of that Venn diagram who lives a mere 15-20 minute walk from work, I basically always prefer to commute via public transit instead. Beware Trivial Inconveniences!
Will throw in another overlooked impediment: walking sometimes unavoidably crosses highly dangerous intersections by any reasonable choice of route. The one near me bisects a major highway and a major thoroughfare, and requires 2-4 separate crosswalks on very long lights to navigate sorta safely. This single intersection constitutes about 5 minutes of the total walk. So walking is still "usable", but a much less attractive option than one would naively expect for such a desirable commute.
When I lived in Los Angeles, I was a 15 minute walk from a subway station, which was great, except that 5 of those minutes were crossing the six-way intersection of Sunset Drive, Sunset Boulevard, Virgil Ave, Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood Boulevard, and Hillhurst Ave. I met Mayor Garcetti at an event and told him to pedestrianize that diagonal block of Hollywood Blvd and greatly improve the neighborhood, but he never went for it. (He wanted me to come up with a plan to fix the seven-way intersection of Silver Lake Blvd, Virgil Ave, Temple St, Beverly Blvd, and whatever else merges in what he called "dysfunction junction".)
So, the big objection to this is a fairness one.
"Owning your own free standing house" is a pretty big life objective for most people. It took me till age 30 and a cross country move to a low cost great plains town to finally achieve it. Having one that's yours to live in indefinitely without paying for it might be a step down, but it's pretty close.
To say "We're going to give people who do drugs or don't want to work the same sort of apartments that the working poor who scrape toliets for 40 hours a week can just barely afford."
already seems quite unfair.
To then go further and say "We're going to give freestanding houses with yards and gardens to people who do drugs and don't want to work; while the working poor who follow the rules and try to get by on their own still have to deal with apartment living." Seems just completely manifestly unfair.
And giving free single family homes to everyone in the country just seems nuts. On the other hand, giving everyone a lot where they can camp and build whatever sort of home they're able to afford... That sounds more doable. (at least in North America with abundant land.)
I should mention that realistically, we're talking about things like "pods" that The Ancient Geek linked to upthread (https://elmbridgeresidentsgroup.com/pods-for-homeless-people), not the sort of house that ordinary working people might aspire to owning. Still, point taken.
> And giving free single family homes to everyone in the country just seems nuts.
Well, I think that should be a long-term goal, in a "once we hit post-scarcity" sort of sense. (Giving them to everyone in the country who *wants* them, anyway. I am told there are people who actually like living in apartments.) Though obviously not practical in the here-and-now.
Back on Earth:
> On the other hand, giving everyone a lot where they can camp and build whatever sort of home they're able to afford... That sounds more doable.
I really like this. The key to my proposal is to actually give these people some independence, a place they can really call home, as different as possible from being in a patronising/potentially "prison-like" group shelter. If actual houses can't be achieved, this seems like a very decent way to do it. Has anything like that been proposed in official channels as far as you know?
I'm not sure, but every time I've brought it up, the response from the Progressive sorts (and even just rich/middle class normies used to regulations and rules) is something along the lines of "That will develop into a flavela" to which I respond "Yes?" Seems better than what's happening now." and then they go down the whole "No, they need housing that's up to code! You can't let them live in unsafe housing!"
Bear in mind that even people who do own their own land bought and paid for often deal with building inspectors/bylaw officers, ect, forcing them to tear down or modify structures to meet codes and regulations.
> Well, I think that should be a long-term goal, in a "once we hit post-scarcity" sort of sense
Incidentally, this is why I think the idea of "post-scarcity" is rubbish. The things that people want (land close to the centre of nice city) will always be scarce, even if you can print houses to put on them.
A person set up a organization that does that in Austin. Maybe not full homes, but tiny homes. And in a community... it's just hard to convince a local government to let you seed homeless around its city OR put them in a single site, so this guy grabbed land outside of the city's jurisdiction and went to work.
Here's an interview with the guy from a great podcaster:
https://politicalorphanage.libsyn.com/the-best-tiny-house-village-in-america
(Or you can google Community First Village)
Then there was also the guy building tiny homes in LA for the homeless, but LA went along behind and destroyed them....
The problem with giving them homes is owning a home is expensive and requires income to maintain it. The homes rapidly become in need of serious rehab and the outcomes aren't that much better than SROs.
It does for sure help them, but so would giving each of them $50,000, or a Ferrari.
I would note public/HUD housing policy has definitely moved to preferring this distributed housing" approach over "projects", and has found it costs a lot more, but does provide benefits to the participants. They did notably not measure any related costs to the participants new neighbors, when declaring it a net benefit.
Projects had more units and they work everywhere else. They work in NYC to this day. We can have public housing, but we must have firm, unrelenting law enforcement.
Wouldn’t it be a interesting turn if events if “we should do as the Europeans do” started to become something people on the American right wing said as well?
The approach seems to be something like “ensure that each person’s local utility function consistently points out of a direction of them remaining homeless.” And that seems to require some real possibility of a nasty thing happening to a person (ie jail) or else the default may be totally workable.
I enjoyed this, thank you.
Have you ever tried reporting a robbery or an assault in San Francisco? I have — tried, that is — twice. The third and fourth times I didn't bother trying. The fifth time I just got the hell out of San Francisco. I have a friend who got literally curb-stomped, has it on video and has the identity of the guy who did it, and eventually gave up on getting anyone to take his report after getting a jurisdictional runaround. The real crime rate is something much higher than the official statistics.
The short conclusion is that there isnt much reliable data on homelessness. The clear anti-drug edge to the book was annoying, and the status of mental hospitald in the not too distant past sounds terifyiing
Peter Thiel has a valid criticism of rationalists - he says they/we have had no impact. I think that's a valid criticism, for all the brainpower in the sphere, little world-changing has taken place.
With that in mind I am more charitable towards people like Shellenberger who arrive at likely beneficial policies, and then do whatever to push them through.
Maybe you can't impassion people to change things by only saying things like "update your priors on this claim by 10%".
Has Shellenberger had *any* impact at all other than getting a bunch of heterodox rationalists to nod along with him?
At least he tried
I don't see that he's tried any harder than the other rationalists, notably the Effective Altruists, who seem to have managed to at least raise millions for malaria bed nets.
He was a guest on Joe Rogan and Bill Maher. I don't know if the practice of "raising awareness" actually does anything but he definitely got his cause out there.
See Yglesias's concept of the Shadow Congress. In that framework "raising awareness" is actively harmful, as it encourages antibody response and stasis, whereas the most effective people are working on causes or microtweaks nobody has heard of.
This was an absolutely phenomenal read. It felt well-balanced and very informative.
The obvious reason homeless live in cities and not suburbs — the economy is powered by shoplifting, social services, or panhandling. More or less all 3 are more (only) successful in the city. Imagine having no car in the suburbs and shoplifting from the one shop you camp next to all the time. Not going to work, they will recognize you. And nowhere to buy drugs, if that’s your thing.
You don’t have to assume that no homeless person does anything economic other than these three. *Any* economic activity is easier in cities than in suburbs.
That would seem to depend on the particular suburb and the particular city area. There are certainly suburbs with a higher density of economic activity than many areas of large American cities.
Yeah, I should have said "dense areas" and "low-density areas" rather than "cities" and "suburbs".
Agreed, and raises the question why tents on the sidewalks are common in Oakland but not in Palo Alto. Clearly, density of economic activity is not the only factor. Toleration of private appropriation of public spaces (sidewalks, parks, bus stops) seems to be the major difference between these Bay Area municipalities.
Pitching a tent on the sidewalk in many communities brings a response. In others, a shrug. This is true within cities as well. Tents are a no-go in wealthy Sea Cliff but seem to be a-okay in South of Market.
Isn't Oakland a higher-density area of activity than Palo Alto, for basically anyone who isn't in a specialized line of work?
I think I would say no, at least not for central Palo Alto vs the places in Oakland where you see large tent encampments. There's a lot more economic activity, density-wise in Palo Alto.
I think the whole higher home prices = more homelessness only seems to work when we throw out all the exceptions, which is true for any rule.
Beverly Hills just doesn't count for some reason, nor do the St. Francis Wood or Sea Cliff neighborhoods of San Francisco, which have the highest property values but virtually no homeless.
What are the colored squares at the bottom of the DALL-E 2 statue image?
That is Dall-E’s signature, meant to mildly discourage posting without attribution.
I think Bill Maher recently cited this book on his show uncritically. I've noticed a recent habit of his repeating false or questionable claims as if they were uncontested fact recently. He certainly has repeated the "shoplifting in San farncisco" meme, specifically in the context of a "fact" the left are ignoring at their own electoral peril.
This has been Maher’s MO for decades.
Thankfully my own Gell-Mann amnesia lifted and I no longer derive much satisfaction from him even when he's 'right'.
I don't think he's an _idiot_. I'd imagine it's mostly just very hard to produce a show on a weekly schedule.
People are not shoplifting in San Francisco?
As Scott wrote in the article, there's certainly a perception that shoplifting has grown exponentially but the data doesn't seem to support that or that anything unusual is going on in San Francisco other then car breakins, so it's unclear what's going on
These videos one sees - do the store owners have any particular incentive - beyond "telling" - to report shoplifting?
I mean, one would expect shoplifting to be *way* down with the shift to ordering everything under the sun. Maybe not in SF. Here there are so many empty storefronts. And those that are filled tend to be services of the nail salon type. There are vape stores. Donuts.
>Here there are so many empty storefronts. And those that are filled tend to be services of the nail salon type. There are vape stores. Donuts.
Could the shoplifting per store ratio be going up because of fewer stores rather than more shoplifting? It would be somewhat of a self re-enforcing cycle and would explain why there are anecdotes of people personally observing more of it (since it would be more concentrated).
I think it is more likely that the thefts are just being massively underreported, but this seems like a reasonable possibility as well.
this is actually an excellent point
Fuck that data! I defy it! :)
By "the data" you mean official records of crime, whose reporting standards we know have changed (compare to the rising rape cases in sweden), but not tremendous levels of anecdata and surveillance footage?
Like, isn't Walgreens closing due do shoplifting also a sort of evidence?
its not though, that was a misreport. there are closures but nothing to do with shoplifting
So, formally reported property crime is flat in every category where there's no benefit to filing a report, but up in the one category where almost every victim has to file a police report to get their insurance company to even consider paying for the repairs. And informally reported property crime is up across the board.
This one isn't hard to figure out.
something else occurred to me. In the town I used to live in, the local paper has a relationship with the police where they tell them what to report and what not to report.
Crime rates affect property values which affect taxes. The primary motivation for changing the penalty for shop lifiting to fines instead of jail was economic. California has a budget crisis, and San Francisco gets income one way but probably spends money the other.
It's possible the reported crime rate on that is just ficitional If the quote that was reported somewhere here about police saying they dont bother to officially record it anymore, perhaps the offcial statistics are fiction for similar purposes.
This wouldnt be the case in the one instance you mentioned for the reason you mentioned. Trying to make that one disappear wouldnt work.
I like the length. I had a 2-hour bus ride today and this article kept me entertained throughout.
As a contrast to this book, I think it would be interesting to see Scott review Drug Use for Grown-Ups by Carl Hart next.
Seems intriguing! What's your own short summary of it?
"Suburban police departments might be less tolerant of homeless people, either harassing them until they leave or outright telling them to go to cities. Why would suburban departments be less tolerant than urban departments (especially when urban departments, eg the LAPD, are better known for their ruthlessness)? It might just be an entrenched norms thing; suburbs can get rid of their homeless populations, so they do. Or it might be politics; suburbs might be more conservative than cities."
Well, it certainly is a head-scratcher how a suburb of rich people might not have homeless encampments outside their houses. However might it be that this happens? Surely the police in the suburbs are not less tolerant than the inner-city ones?
Whatever about entrenched norms or more conservatism, the answer is probably more cynical and pragmatic; rich Josephine Smyth-Verres-Evans is a close personal friend of the local political and police big wigs and so if she rings up to complain about scruffy smelly bums hanging around the street, action gets taken immediately. The bums get escorted out of the posh parts and end up back in the "nobody gives a damn" parts, where it's easier anyway to beg and buy drugs and the police aren't going to intervene without a direct order to do so because the DA isn't prosecuting "lifestyle crimes".
https://moneyinc.com/richest-neighborhoods-san-francisco/
As to the institutionalisation part, I think there may be a difference of definition; I imagine Shellenberger means "I don't want the cops to sweep up all the homeless and then they get locked up in the looney bin forever, this isn't Soviet Russia and the gulags! But I do think that the guy ranting about aliens eating his brain and dropping his trousers to shit in the middle of the street does need to be treated, and if he won't go voluntarily because that's where the aliens live, what good does it do anyone to leave him ranting and shitting in the streets? Sometimes you do need to involuntarily commit someone for their own good and the good of others, and if he can be succesfully treated, then of course he gets out of the pyschiatric ward (and hopefully gets help and support to get housing so he won't go off his meds and back onto the street)".
Agreed. The "sweeping" allegation seems very straw-man. And of course the status quo in San Francisco is terrible. Sweeping by its very nature implies something broad and indiscriminate. Some people do need an intervention after all.
One person's mental illness is another person's harmless eccentric.
Until they attack you, defecate on your steps, or pitch a tent in front of your house. Then it's no longer an abstract issue.
The guy who used to wear terrible wigs and cart around a basket full of dolls riding the buses all day from town to town when I was a teenager was a harmless eccentric.
The guy who groped me and chased after me when I got off the bus so I had to run down the street was not.
But, apparently, someone _might_ still think your second example was _also_ just a "harmless eccentric" :)
Lots of people think the second example is a "harmless eccentric". Coincidentally, none of these people live in Deiseach's neighborhood or any like it, and they don't have to actually deal firsthand with that sort of "harmless eccentric", but they've got strong opinions on how Deiseach should cope with "harmless eccentricity".
Precisely.
Huh – I don't have any direct evidence of people like this (that I know of).
I think it's also just habit and norms. Some of my in-laws are police officers. The rural ones wax quite a bit about protecting their community from bad guys, especially shifty transients, whereas the urban ones still go on about protecting their community, but will also talk about how the homeless are part of their community, or talk about them like they are the weather, they are there, but what'cha gonna do about it?
So if there aren't any/many homeless in the area (or they aren't visible), then a visible one gets the attention of the immune system. An area that has had them regularly sees the immune system shrug and move on. If enough break through such that a community has a regular, visible presence of homeless people, the easiest response for the residents who don't like it isn't to coordinate doing something about it, it is just to move to a new place (or an old place that the homeless had moved on from).
(Note, I don't think that homeless people are an infection, but the concept of foreign body and status quo seems useful to understand what the policers of said communities think.)
It seems an odd notion that a guy who bought a house should be expected to up and move his family rather than having the encampment moved that just took over his local park. The guy in the house has a job, a family, kids in schools, etc. The folks in the encampment are just camping...
Plus, since encampments can appear in most places, where should the guy move to get clear of them?
I live on the South Side of Chicago. My neighborhood often has unofficial collections for a local gang that handles our security. I paid $50 for the BLM protests. I know people who gave $500. Guys I know got paid $1,000 per night to guard, rotating around the perimeter of the neighborhood. When guys tried to camp out nearby they were beaten by the same people.
No one complains about these guys, even though they are all gangsters, but they take care of the place. I know the Chinese and Spanish have the same system. I think the problem is that African-Americans never rose to this level of coexistence with thugs. Even worse, newly rich places lost the moxy of their ethnic neighborhoods. There are no more tough guys around to profit by beating the bad guys up and out of the neighborhood. It is sad to me. Many of these guys cannot do much else.
> As to the institutionalisation part, I think there may be a difference of definition
No kidding. I’m kind of blessing Scott with faint criticism here, but that was the weakest, least reasonable argument I can remember in all of Scott’s essays. It’s literally at the level of “Some people are in horrible incurable pain and want to die, maybe euthanasia should not be quite as illegal — Oh, you mean you want to go back to murdering cripples and old people?”.
Maybe it’s because I’m not a native speaker, or too literal, but in my mind “sweeping institutionalization” brings to mind “clear the desk by sweeping everything on the floor”. It means “lock them all up, God will know His own”. Yet nothing in what Scott quoted seemed inconsistent with “maybe we the current level of institutionalization is not quite the highest value on the Pareto frontier”.
I think Shellenberger is owed even more of an apology just for the lack of charitableness of (those parts) of this review than for the careless statement in the earlier article.
"San Fransicko is the equivalent of that dim blue lighting you sometimes see in nightclub bathrooms: so focused on preventing injection drug use that it sacrifices the ability to illuminate anything at all."
HOW do you think of such clever analogies on such a frequent basis
My first reaction was that the last time I saw the dim blue lighting it was in the bathroom of a grocery store, not a nightclub.
Honestly, reading Unsong kinda ruined 'regular Scott' for me :) [jk]
I thought the philosophical musings at the end about how many people's lives have to be improved to justify making homeless lives worse was maybe the most interesting part of the review... and also the part that people are least likely to make it to. But it also makes me think about if there are ways to mitigate the specific complaints of housed people in walkable cities without such drastic measures. If the number one problem is feces on streets and litter everywhere and homeless people yelling at you, maybe just bring back public restrooms and have a lot more public trash cans and crack down really hard on the specific instances of people yelling at passersby?
Regarding homelessness as an issue, I happen to have just listened to the first episode of "According to Need", a 6 part podcast about homelessness in Oakland. It definitely comes at it from a leftist point of view, but it was also helpful to reset how I think of homelessness as a binary. We're introduced to a woman and her child who are frequently able find a place to stay with friends or family for a while... but not permanently and then sooner or later they're back to sleeping in the car. Who had a psychotic episode... after the stress of being homeless for years, but that doesn't seem to be a primary reason she's homeless. It also does a bit of pushback (with a brief statistical cite) to the idea of homeless people migrating to California by pointing out how much you depend on a support network of friends and family when you're homeless, and how terrifying it is to catch a bus to another city where you don't know anyone or have anyone you can call on when things get very bad.
And yet many people who are quite down-and-out DO migrate to California. It might be a bad idea, but hope springs eternal and there is the idea of starting over in the Golden West. Also, plenty of folks who are down-and-out migrate within California, say from Bakersfield to San Francisco.
And whenever you hear stats on where the homeless are from, you had best ask what the word "from" means. If we go by where someone grew up or went to high school, the percentage of homeless in San Francisco is a heck of a lot lower than the stats you will see quoted. They often use a definition of "from" that could include couch surfing while unemployed for a month in San Francisco, and then becoming homeless, as counting as being "from" San Francisco, despite having grown up and lived in Omaha for 20 years previously.
This gets to the point of homelessness being more of a state or national issue, rather than something that a single city can be expected to tackle.
"maybe just bring back public restrooms and have a lot more public trash cans and crack down really hard on the specific instances of people yelling at passersby?"
I can't speak for America, but you need someone (at least one person and ideally more) employed to keep the public restroom clean and free of loiterers, and that it can be locked up at night, else it turns into a place for drugs and sex (yes, it happened in my own small town) so that the public loos get knocked down and then *nobody* has anywhere to go if they are in town and in need to go.
Public trash cans also need to be regularly emptied, else they become crammed full of rubbish till they overflow and spill onto the street and attract vermin. And sometimes people use them to dump their own domestic rubbish rather than pay the charges for a waste collection service (again, my own town).
So cash-strapped councils give up on having caretakers to look after the public conveniences, which then do turn into places for junkies, prostitutes, and the homeless to hang around. And they don't employ street sweepers to empty the bins, so you get the overflowing rubbish.
And when people complain, the 'solution' is to close/demolish the public conveniences and take away the bins.
"I can't speak for America, but you need someone (at least one person and ideally more) employed to keep the public restroom clean and free of loiterers, and that it can be locked up at night, else it turns into a place for drugs and sex (yes, it happened in my own small town) so that the public loos get knocked down and then *nobody* has anywhere to go if they are in town and in need to go."
How much of a problem was it that they turned into a place for drugs and sex? I've been lucky: I've never lived in an area where the homeless caused much of a problem. I've lived in silicon valley, but not San Francisco. From the descriptions, it _sounds_ as if preventing public defecation would be much more important to the livability of the city to everyone besides the homeless than ensuring that no drug use or sex occurred in public toilets.
> crack down really hard on the specific instances of people yelling at passersby
What do you think that should look like? Wouldn't the only effective "crack down" be just basically housing them in jail/prison?
As the lawyers say, homeless people seem pretty 'judgement proof'.
My favorite criminologist _kinda_ seriously proposed bring back corporal punishment – that might work! (I'm actually undecided myself.)
"In fact, less than a fifth of prisoners are in for drug-related crimes."
Am I misunderstanding what Scott is saying here? The below government website cites national number of incarcerated for drug offenses accounts for 44.9% of US prison population.
https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp
Wild guess would be we're missing a 'solely' or 'drug-use' rather than drug-related.
I think your link only looks at federal prisoners, who are a much smaller population than state prisoners.
As far as I can tell, the 1/5 number comes from people who are locked specifically for a drug offense. Depending on your definition of a drug-related crime, that seems like it would easily be much higher (and much harder to determine). Speaking about someone I knew: he was homeless because he abused crack cocaine and had untreated bi-polar disorder. He broke into his sister's house because she refused to let him use her shower before a job interview. He was convicted for burglary, which would make him show up as not a drug crime in the chart, but his crime was very strongly linked with his drug abuse.
Bingo, thanks Scott.
"I would simply not commit crimes."
I mean, in literally this piece, you certainly seem to confess to committing crimes? Unless using "substances I’m not supposed to" means something unusual?
Boo
I think he means "harming others" like stealing or attacking people, and not "personal use of substances". Although he might be underestimating how hard it is to be altruistic in arduous circumstances. Scott told a great story of how his will to diet evaporated when donuts were in sight, imagine how hard it would be to not be a package-thief/shoplifter when you are starving.
I don't think so, as the comment is on why he couldn't put himself in the shoes of a criminal who wants to not go to jail for their crimes.
Now, I think, based on format and tone, that it's probably intended to be a joke, but the contrast jumped out at me.
The changes in SF are indeed depressing to see. A book analyzing this honestly would be good to read. Other cities would learn from it, if nothing else. I hope SF fixes its problems, whatever be the cause/s.
While it is likely to be the factoid the rest of you pass over without comment, the thing that I will remember from this essay is "six million needles a year".
Sometimes people like to play the game of "Imagine comprehending [such-or-other sentence filled with tech neologisms and slang] even just twenty-five years ago!"
For me, "gave out six million needles a year" would be the funny thing to try to explain to the average somebody even as late as the 80s.
I don't think housing prices are the driving factor. Check statistics for Columbia, South Carolina. Very mild/warm weather, fairly cheap cost of living and housing, and a decent job market at the bottom end. Homelessness is a major problem. The city admits to there being several thousand homeless (City population is about 130,000). As typical in the Christian South, there are many "do-gooders" available to provide food, clothing and even shelter. Mental illness and substance abuse are the driving factors. Until we start institutionalizing the mentally ill again, this problem will continue to grow.
Median housing prices there seem to be going up a lot faster than median income:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS17900Q
Kevin Erdmann would say to look even closer, at the bottom quartile or quintile, since as you go up income tiers in an area, incomes rise faster than home prices, but I don't have the data for that.
And even then, the per-capita of the metro area still seems a lot lower than a lot of other urban areas going through homeless crises.
Why would Columbia have more homeless people than other Southern cities?
>This thought experiment pushes me closer to Shellenberger’s side of the aisle. I still want to cling to the hope that there is some way to do this which lets the people who aren’t bothering anyone else be left alone.
Well... like your comment on harmless versus harmful quirks, aren't "those who aren't bothering anyone else" *already* left alone? They are, presumably, not even noticed! The drug-addled equivalent of a hikkikomori, living off their parent's largesse, isn't a "problem" in the way that someone occupying a public space, and often-if-not-always damaging that space, is.
It's an interesting reversal of "We are the 99%"/1% political sloganeering: public parks intended for the use of *everyone* are instead co-opted by a small but unusually powerful (... bear with the metaphor, please) group.
I don't think they're already left alone. The government sometimes (rarely in SF) disperses homeless encampments, ie tells people camping that they have to camp somewhere else. In Europe, laws say it's illegal to "sleep rough" at all, even if you're not causing any problems. See also the discussion of suburban police bussing their homeless into cities.
They also receive resources from the public, including checks, so that is another way in which they are not being left alone.
In Europe? If you are a national citizen, quite often in most EU countries, yes. If you are a citizen from another EU country (equivalent to another US state)? Not so much.
I have some 'libertarian instincts' towards 'allowing' 'camping' and even, e.g. 'allowing shantytowns/favels/etc.', but I also would like some _radical_ de-regulation of housing 'standards' generally – and probably the latter _first_.
I would perfectly with allowing '_campgrounds_' (and not banning things like 'mobile home parks'), but that just doesn't seem feasible. We can't even bring back SROs!
Scott links to a Politico article that claimed that due to zoning obstacles, the state had only received one application for its $100 million program to convert hotels to housing for the homeless.
Turns out that was incorrect: the state had in fact received zero applications.
https://www.nysfocus.com/2022/04/19/honda-hotel-conversions-affordable-housing-kavanagh-cymbrowitz-adams/
The post asks why SF and other cities don't just rent apartments for homeless people, if they're so committed to Housing First. After all, the median SF apartment costs just ~$3,000 per month. That's almost *three times less* than what SF currently spends per homeless person per month, by my calculations.
Scott's proposed answer is that zoning makes building apartments for the homeless near-impossible. But this doesn't address the question: it seems like it would be way cheaper to house people by just renting apartments already on the market. It wouldn't take any new building. So why (genuinely) doesn't the city just do it?
The progressive narrative right now (not saying that in a derogatory way, tbh it seems likely that it's true, I just don't know that it's true) is that apartment owners go out of their way not to rent to folks who are receiving government housing assistance. If that's true, your options would be to force owners to rent out some of their units by law, or confiscate the apartments, both of which are going to make pretty huge waves.
Yeah, source of income discrimination against voucher holders definitely exists. But why don't cities just rent tons of apartments themselves and then give them out to homeless people, rather than giving homeless people vouchers?
I'm not sure I see the difference - the landlord still knows that the units will go to the same folks, and still has the same incentives to refuse. In fact, more, because if part of the deal is subletting rights (and if the city is renting it it would have to be), now the landlord has no control over who his tenant is.
If I were a landlord of a nice condo then I definitely wouldn't want this.
But if I were the slumlord of a bunch of shitty apartments in the Tenderloin which are occupied by shady characters anyway then I'd probably be overjoyed to rent to the city government at market rates because the government, unlike my usual clientele, is likely to pay its rent on time. If the government further committed to fixing any damage caused by its tenants, this would be a great deal for slumlord me.
win-win, then...
Because someone, somewhere in city government is smart enough to at least partially understand the power of incentives. That giving free apartments to vagrants will just encourage a bunch of marginally-homed people to become vagrants in order to get free apartments.
From what I've heard, this has all already happened, and San Francisco's $billion-per-year homeless budget is primarily spent providing free apartments for people who were homeless at some point in the past.
Bingo. The demand for housing paid for by other people will always exceed the supply of housing paid for by other people.
Also, just giving folks apartments rent-free, doesn't mean that the factors that led them to be in a tent on the street for five years (addiction, mental illness, anti-social behavior, unwilliningness to compromise), just magically disappear.
Is that three times less than what SF currently spends per homeless person per month on housing?
Because there are a lot of other costs than housing.
Plus if the city owns the apartment and it gets trashed enough to affect property values but not safety, the city can shrug and move on. A landlord would likely object and charge the city more to clean it up.
Plus with so many social services being tied to disability status, homeless patients have huge incentive to get diagnosed with serious mental disorders. Plenty of folks in my defense work days would tell me they were on disability for a "mental thing" and have no idea what it was. These were people with more-or-less working faculties, their doctors had just diagnosed them as disabled because that's the only way medicaid pays out.
That's anecdotal, and I'd be very very reluctant to make this case strongly. However, since I'm making a comment on the internet I can just insinuate things and assume other people are smart enough to figure out whether they're true or not. Seems a lot like the institutionalization plan (much like the prison plan) is:
1) Refuse benefits to folks we don't consider deserving due to lack of disability.
2) They get a diagnosis of debilitating mental disorder from a psychiatric complex mostly designed to hand out diagnoses.
3) Now use that diagnosis to declare them unfit to manage their own choices, either through coercing treatment on them with threats of prison time or by involuntary commitment.
4) We're still being a good civil liberties state because we only deny civil liberties to people with debilitating mental disorders, yet somehow we keep locking up all the inconvenient poor people in urban centers.
It seems to me that part of the social contract is that if a person is completely reliant on the community/government/taxpayers for his survival, that the community gets some say in how the help is handed out. That seems a reasonable expectation. And so some point, yes, such an individual accepts at least some limitations in their freedom in order to receive that aid.
It may sound harsh, but it isn't all that different to the kinds of compromises working folks have to make all the time. They don't get to pick their work hours, and may accept living miles away from their job because they can't afford the fancier neighborhoods. Adult life involves trade-offs. If you have a group, whether called the "homeless" or "disabled", that is entitled to free stuff from the working community, but has zero obligations of any kind, you will enable anti-social behavior.
There's at least a nugget of this sentiment that I can agree with. I have no issue at all with the community having some say over what benefits to give out to folks, or placing conditions on receiving those benefits.
The problem with the disability designation is that it robs folks of agency in all parts of their life. I don't have an ethical problem with saying "if we're gonna give you free housing you gotta get off drugs and at least try to find gainful employment." I don't know that that would be effective and I just read a 10,000 word article saying the data is super unclear. But if it would be effective I think we should do that.
I *do* have an ethical problem with saying "once you enter our weird system with perverse incentives, we're allowed to do whatever coercive things we want to you, including locking you up indefinitely."
I don't know your political persuasion, but a parallel that might appeal to conservatives: Block grants. The federal government approves big payouts to the states, but in exchange requires that they pass laws about things like the drinking and smoking age, seat belts, etc. These are controversial, but constitutional - so long as the funds basically pertain to the conditions. So you can tie education funding to drinking age laws, but probably not real estate development funds or whatever.
The federal government is always coming up with new ways to push the envelope on what "related" means, because deep down they don't care about that. If they could they'd condition every penny of federal money on adopting every federal legislative and regulatory priority. They'd use the fact that red states depend on federal funding to turn red states into puppet governments. Republicans rightly object because while accepting tax dollars from the rest of the country should give federal taxpayers some control over the policies that money supports, it should not mean that state governments have no autonomy whatsoever. Same basic concept.
Not conservative by a long shot. I maintain the community gets some say, but certainly with limitations. As a starting point, providing a safe sleeping site (whether shelter or campground), but then forbidding camping out on city streets elsewhere. In other words, you can't camp here, but you can camp there, where the city has set up showers and toilets and access points to social services. Essentially it is a two-way street. Basic free stuff comes with basic sensible obligations.
But the idea that someone has some kind of infinite right to appropriate a public space, like a park, indefinitely, trashing the place, while being supported by working, taxpaying community, is just nuts. That and pretty much sums up the situation in San Francisco presently.
"I have an ethical problem with saying "once you enter our weird system with perverse incentives, we're allowed to do whatever coercive things we want to you, including locking you up indefinitely."
- I do too, but to be clear this is pure strawman.
I thought so too, but the whole point of the article was critiquing a plan to bring back easier involuntary commitment so
'Disability' in the U.S. is _both_ a massive grift _AND_ a fucking gauntlet of horror and tragedy for people that really 'deserve' it.
Yeah, always amazes me that it can be both. Essentially if you're trying to live your best life but literally cannot you'll hit roadblocks everywhere because they'll use the fact that you worked through the pain, that you have people who depend on you, etc. to prove that you don't *really* need disability. But also it gets used as our default safety net so huge portions of the poorest folks get tagged with it essentially with no effort or evidence.
Worse, lots of (relatively) _rich_ people get it as part of institutional corruption, e.g. the LI railroad workers (LIRR).
There's lots of people just collecting some extra money beyond those really relying on it.
Plus, isn't it still the case that Special Supplementary Income (SSI) is the only federal cash benefit that down-and-out single adults (i.e. those not caring for children) have access to; and to get SSI if you are below pension age you must first get a disability diagnosis. SSI is thus the closest US "functional equivalent" to the universal, tax-financed bottom-floor social assistance schemes you find in many European countries.
Exactly. It's both ethical and in the best interest of doctors to ensure that poor folks get access to those benefits whether they actually meet the "so mentally ill they can't work" criteria or not. Then some nut comes along and says "well since we've diagnosed all the poor people as disabled and they're out on the streets causing a ruckus, maybe we should bring back forced institutionalization."
Maybe needs-based testing was a bad idea after all.
You lost me at the first turn. Your analysis of the housing cost model is a perfect example of the limitations of correlation in policy analysis.
You could reject the hypothesis that housing costs cause homelessness if there were no correlation between housing costs and homelessness. But showing that there is one does not prove that the model is correct.
Yes. "Correlation is not causation" is a cliché for a reason.
True, but as there is another one as well: "Correlation is nature winking and saying, "Look over here"."
...that may be the case for society, too.
Sure, as long as we remember that often times the next thing that happens is that nature yells "Psych!" and you fall flat on your face.
Precisely.
Actually, a lack of correlation between the two variables would be an insufficient reason to reject the hypothesis, just as observing a correlation does not confirm it. If X causes Y, but at the same time X is correlated with Z and Z tends to decrease Y, then we may observe no correlation between X and Y, even though X causes Y.
To the actual point, I think Scott is just trying to apply his priors about the likely cause of the correlation. If we don't know what the mysterious variables X and Y stand for, then we can't really conclude much from observing a correlation. If we know that X is housing prices, and Y is rates of homelessness, then the hypothesis that higher prices cause less people to be able to afford housing does sort of jump out at us. But we can't be sure that this is the correct explanation, since there could be other viable explanations for the correlation. So the correlation makes a causal relationship seem more likely, but doesn't prove it.
I appreciate this review very much. My midsize midwestern city has a major homeless problem and learning more about the practical options for addressing it is a civic interest here. I bought and made my way partway through "San Fransicko," but became frustrated by the polemical tone and my own inability to assess the arguments, even though I was open to them and appreciate Shellenberger's personal activism. This review helps, and will lead me back into the book with a better sense of how to try to learn from it in a measured way.
More than just reading the book, I would advise a walking tour of the neighborhoods in question of San Francisco, or perhaps your own midwestern city.
« My patients who work in loss prevention in SF stores are all lying to me? »
All... one? I'm confused.
I was wondering about that, too. Maybe the one has multiple personality disorder...
I had vague memories of three patients like this, but when I thought about it I could only remember one who was definitely from San Francisco and had definitely talked about this problem, so I edited it from three to one and missed that sentence.
"But fine, these are also terrible, and they’re only medium-term solutions anyway. What about building real, long-term apartments for homeless people?"
Apart from the spiraling costs, which you correctly noted, have we forgotten so quickly what happened with the public housing projects built with Great Society money back in the '60s? To take one famous example:
Unlike many of the city's other public housing projects such as Rockwell Gardens or Robert Taylor Homes, Cabrini-Green was situated in an affluent part of the city. The poverty-stricken projects were actually constructed at the meeting point of Chicago's two wealthiest neighborhoods, Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast. Less than a mile to the east sat Michigan Avenue with its high-end shopping and expensive housing. Specific gangs "controlled" individual buildings, and residents felt pressure to ally with those gangs in order to protect themselves from escalating violence.
During the worst years of Cabrini-Green's problems, vandalism increased substantially. Gang members and miscreants covered interior walls with graffiti and damaged doors, windows, and elevators. Rat and cockroach infestations were commonplace, rotting garbage stacked up in clogged trash chutes (it once piled up to the 15th floor), and basic utilities (water, electricity, etc.) often malfunctioned and were left in disrepair.
On the exterior, boarded-up windows, burned-out areas of the façade, and pavement instead of green space—all in the name of economizing on maintenance—created an atmosphere of decay and government neglect. The balconies were fenced in to prevent residents from emptying garbage cans into the yard, and from falling or being thrown to their deaths. This created the appearance of a large prison tier, or of animal cages, which further enraged community leaders of the residents.
...
While Cabrini–Green was deteriorating during the postwar era, causing industry, investment, and residents to abandon its immediate surroundings, the rest of Chicago's Near North Side underwent equally dramatic upward changes in socioeconomic status. First, downtown employment shifted dramatically from manufacturing to professional services, spurring increased demand for middle-income housing; the resulting gentrification spread north along the lakefront from the Gold Coast, then pushed west and eventually crossed the river.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes#Problems_develop
Someone want to point me to why something like this wouldn't happen again? Keep in mind that SF already spends a 100 million to clean feces off the streets (only semi-successfully, at that). Frankly, this seems to me like an marker of what Tyler Cowen calls The Great Forgetting.
I can't guarantee it wouldn't happen again, but on the other hand the 1960's are now over a half century ago and the problem that Cabrini-Green was meant to solve hasn't been solved another way in that half century. Seems ripe for a "let's try this again and try not to let it go wrong like it did last time" rather than "this is never going to work, give up on the idea forever".
You and I must have different definitions for the word "ripe."
I mean, we haven't even established whether ultimately Cabrini-Green was a good thing or a bad thing. You gave a long list of problems, and it sounds like it was a miserable place to live, and it hindered economic development for some of the surrounding area... but even the later parts of the wikipedia article you link note how the residents considered it preferable to being homeless (their likely fate without it) and lobbied to keep it standing. I don't know, suppose we did it again and everything happened exactly like it did before, but also 15,000 people had a stable home they could call their own for a few decades (no matter how ill-repaired and unpleasant) instead of being homeless. I think whether that was a success or failure would be a matter of analysis, not obvious, and of comparing against alternative ways the money could have been spent. And maybe with some "lessons learned" everything wouldn't happen exactly the same and there could be an iterative improvement.
I'm not going to try to convince you of the flaws of public housing projects; there's ample literature out there on the subject that you don't need me to summarize. Suffice it to say however, that one of the major problems was simply that creating high-concentrations of poverty tended to create self-reinforcing problems with crime, drug use, etc., due to peer effects in these neighborhoods. Consider that with a group like the homeless, many of whom have, let's say unhealthy personal habits, the effect is likely to be even worse.
I have no opinions on public housing or not, but isn't poverty normally concentrated? Poor neighborhood. Poor school districts. Poor rural towns. Poor parts of cities. For a variety of reasons economic classes tend to congregate, and the higher the population density, wouldn't you have higher density of each of those classes?
One of my key takeaways from Jacob's "Life and Death of Great American Cities" is that such segregation of poor and rich in a city is bad.
That it tends to happen is probably partially the rich buying their way out of problem areas, but in doing so making those areas more problematic. (And policy makes a lot of a difference too.)
My neighbourhood growing up had quite a mixture of rich (some of the richest in our city) single family homes, decent townhouses and fairly affordable apartments. We had very little crime or degeneracy in our end of town. (Someone graffiting under the train bridge was kinda a big deal and when some kids went on a B&E spree of three houses it was the talk of the area for weeks.)
By this logic, seems you should also in favor of forced institutionalization. Would you advocate for trying them out again too, assuming we try not to let it go wrong like last time?
I grew up with family in similar buildings. They were never that bad. It was all blown out of proportion, although I did urinate in the hallways a few times with cousins. That said, those were far better than being a wait list for a housing voucher for 12 years. I will take more units any day. Furthermore, problems could be solved by better policing. This whole defund the police is some seriously silly white people sh^t.
Good article - I shall devote some time to it.
On reading 1st 1/4 of it:
You assume Miami and Houston have moderate climates - they don't. Miami has very high summer heat and humidity. Today in Miami, the wet bulb temperature (that's the important measurement) is 82.9 and the high summer heat and daily rains haven't begun yet.
The high in Houston today is forecast to be 99 - feeling like 104, and the real summer heat hasn't begun there either.
Living on the streets in either city is almost intolerable for a large part of the year. San Francisco, with it's old-fashioned alleys, deep doorways, courtyards and hidden areas is far more livable for those without housing.
Yep, I had the same thought.
Great review. The final four paragraphs of this review are perfect and representative of how clever Scott's writing can be.
I assume someone has mentioned this, but I was surprised that Phoenix and Houston were used as cities with comparable weather, as both get dangerously hot during the summer. That would also have to explain some of the difference. It would be *much* more comfortable to be outside pretty much everywhere on the California coast year around, than in either Phoenix or Houston.
Miami was mentioned too, wasn't it? I wouldn't exactly call that a temperate summer climate.
It was mentioned, but I wasn't sure so I didn't include it. It appears that Miami has average summer highs in the upper 80's. I'm sure it's humid, but being on the water probably helps, so I didn't mention it because I wasn't positive that it was as hot as Phoenix and Houston.
Edit: A few comments up, someone mentions Miami being intolerably hot, so I'll take their word for it!
Yeah, you definitely cannot appreciate the significance of the humidity in the southeast until you've spent some time in it. Remember that humans rely on evaporative cooling and high humidity renders that useless.
Still, hundreds of millions of people have survived in tropical areas for thousands of years without air conditioning.
Being out in 38C heat every day in the summer is uncomfortable at first, but it's a way of life for millions of Indians, Brazilians, Indonesians, Thais, many of whom are working hard physical jobs.
Come to think of it, there's many people in Houston and Miami who work hard physical outdoor jobs in 38C heat too.
Yes but the heat death/illness/injury rate will be higher, and the vast majority that don't die will still be much more uncomfortable than someone in a more temperate climate. You don't have to do some rational numbers-based risk assessment of your chance of death to have a preference here, you just have to know you'd rather not be hot and sweaty as often.
The regions in question also tend to have cultural adaptations/practices to mitigate the heat, some random homeless guy may not have that.
Maybe it's just a matter of personal preference. If I had to live outdoors without the ability to light fires then I'd definitely choose Miami or Houston over San Francisco, because I'd much rather deal with being hot during the day than cold at night. Preferably Miami, because you can always cool off at the beach.
But I was born in a place that's hot and humid in summer, someone from a different climate might well feel differently.
What's so nice about Eugene?
http://www.citymayors.com/society/usa-cities-homelessness.html
(Actually, what's wrong with the data? Hawaii isn't listed at all when it does have very a very high homeless population per capita.)
I'm sure the data is not great, but Eugene is really nice in the summer and not super cold in the winter, and central Oregon has a big camper van/nomad thing goin on, so could be related?
A friend went to college there and talked about how a lot of the homeless were student-aged or slightly older. Not sure sure what impact that had, or if it was just what she noticed being around campus.
It was late when I read this last night, and I'm sorry if I missed this, but there was a chunk of talk about Amsterdam reducing its homeless population, but Amsterdam is just a city in a country (inside a union that allows free transit). Is there any evidence that the interventions didn't just reallocate homelessness instead of reduce it?
A city doesn't have to be the harshest in its treatment of people, it just has to be harder than the alternatives, or at least less attractive. Of course if people catch on this creates a terrible spiral where each municipality gets slightly tougher than the others until someone says too much or there are summary executions (or something). If the stories of how the cops treat homeless people in suburbs/nicer neighborhoods are true, then something like this is already in play (where the suburbs defect and the cities just suck it up to various levels).
And this is also true on the flip-side. Just as homeless people are rational about choosing locations with good climate, they also choose locations with better support/legal climate. The first city who decides to buckle down and do 100% housing first, no waiting, cost be damned, should expect to see an increase in customers for said housing.
Austin saw that when it eliminated the camping ban. Suddenly the homeless who were already there became more visible, a larger percentage of the snow birds declined to leave as the weather warmed, and there was some new homeless immigration. Camping ban was reinstituted, and now they are seeing a slow migration away again.
Hawaii has a great climate. They are fairly lax in their treatment of homeless people (and drug use), they have a large homeless population for how rural many parts of it are. They start doing more round-ups and camp evictions over the last few years, people start looking for greener pastures.
So when we talk about solutions for San Francisco homlessness, or whether Amsterdam's programs solved its problems (even temporarily), the question that keeps running through my head is, "Did it actually solve any problems, or did it just move them around?" (at scale, of course, I'm sure there were individuals who benefited from housing and support and whose life was improved)
Semi-related, but I'm not really talking about bussing above. But I thought this article was an interesting read, particularly the section about how half of the claimed "ended homelessness" cases in SF were actually just bussed out.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/20/bussed-out-america-moves-homeless-people-country-study
I lived in Amsterdam for seven years. Other Dutch cities seemed to have even less of an issue with homelessness than Amsterdam. Amsterdam is probably the most liberal place in the country and has been for a very long time. It’s where you go to do fun and sometimes shady things, and it naturally aggregates the kinds of people who tend to become homeless. Sleeping on the sidewalk and panhandling are illegal. My Dutch friends were fine with this, because as they saw it their taxes had paid for housing and services, and nobody had an actual right to be a nuisance while refusing to use those things.
What I observed was a relatively robust network of social services that the police could call upon to get people who were camping or panhandling off the street. I once saw a crazy guy pee on the tram tracks while shouting at cops to arrest him. The cops pulled him aside and kept him there until a different van, from a health facility, took him away. I’m not sure if this was typical, but it was possible.
The point I like to make is that there was a place for most homeless or unstable people to go, and the authorities could compel them to go there.
If you’re Dutch, you have to work pretty hard not to be “in the system”, cradle to grave. You have health care and subsidies for certain housing. If you break the law, pass out drunk/high in an alley, or have a mental breakdown, the appropriate institutions have a file on you.
If you’re a kind of marginally functional person and you get older/sicker/more addicted, someone will probably have you moved out of your centrally-located apartment before you burn the place down (something that happened to a friend’s elderly alcoholic neighbor.) I’m not sure what the technical term is for the “washout villages”, but there are communities of small apartments for people with various issues out in the burbs. I’m hazy on the details here, but I get the sense there are levels of niceness and freedom depending on your problems and history.
Everything in NL is required to be a certain distance from transportation, so you can still get places. It’s not a prison or a camp, but if police find you doing anything weird downtown, my understanding is they’ll send you home and you’ll be getting a visit from some kind of counselor.
I found some of the metrics for success in this book and review sort of confusing. I feel like success in this area would be better measured with something like “nights spent safely watching TV in modest housing” vs. “nights publicly urinating and screaming at police.” The Dutch system does a good job of maximizing the former and minimizing the latter, so I applaud it.
How many free public toilets does SF have? Make everything from riveted sheet steel so it's hard to vandalise and use those horrible blue lights.
I think a number of aspects of American urban life (inner cities, public transport) have a kind of evaporative cooling vicious cycle where Respectable People don't live somewhere/use a service, therefore all the people there are 'Disrespectable' therefore Respectable people stay away. Thus they get stuck in suboptimal equilibria.
Do we have testimonies from anybody who's been both imprisoned and institutionalised regarding which is worse?
>Do we have testimonies from anybody who's been both imprisoned and institutionalised regarding which is worse?
My suspicion is that both are pretty bad and not entirely in the same way. I would guess some people probably prefer jail/prison and some probably prefer the institution. Experiences at prisons and institutions can vary wildly from facility to facility so any one person's anecdote is unlikely to generalize.
Edit: added a quote to make it clear which part I was replying to
Not too many anymore. Used to have several along the public transit lines, most (all?) got shut down post-9/11 and essentially never re-opened. It's an open secret that Turrism fears were a convenient cover to deny the homeless another small bit of publically-financed dignity.
So now they just evacuate in and around the stations. Clearly a superior equilibrium for everyone.
There are still relatively hassle-free restrooms in malls, libraries, etc. and they're kept moderately nice, though of course located in more desirable parts of town. Sometimes they don't even need a key or code. "Free" ones tied to private businesses can be...unfriendly at best, dangerous at worst, depending who you are. There are a few truly public ones built out on the street (not sure if still operational, haven't been downtown since covid started). Those are surprisingly nice if they've recently been cleaned, like a fancy airplane lavatory. If not, they're...about what you'd expect. Better than nothing, but harrowing.
People in SF just sorta become accustomed to "free public toilets" not being a reliable thing, if they had that expectation at all to begin with. But, yes, they were once a thing. The North Remembers.
"Maybe I could clarify. “THIS VIOLENCE I’M DOING IS BECAUSE OF THE BOOK YOU WROTE. I’M ATTACKING YOU ON ACCOUNT OF YOUR POLITICAL BELIEFS!”"
That would actually be a hate crime, since California is one of four states in the U.S. where political affiliation is considered a protected category for the purposes of hate crime laws.
It wouldn't be a love crime, considered Scott's position on our Strategic Optimism Reserve?
"So as time goes on and more and more people try drugs but “un-trying” drugs isn’t a thing, the percent of the population who have tried drugs inevitably goes up."
Not sure how that works. At any given moment, a part of the population (who may or may not have tried drugs) is dying and therefore is no longer counted, and a part of the population (who haven't voluntarily tried drugs) is being born.
I was saying this within the context of drugs being relatively new to Portugal, a conservative country, so the implication was that the old people who are dying hadn't tried drugs.
afaik there's a very strong correlation between high housing costs and progressive policies so the strong correlation between the former and homelessness doesn't absolve the latter.
Yes, I'd be interested in seeing a plot of homeless rate vs fraction of the last 50 years spent under a Republican mayor to see what the correlation is there.
Just a couple of data points for "Number of years out of the last 50 with a Republican mayor" for the highest homeless rate cities:
San Francisco: 0 years
Washington DC: 0 years
Boston: 0 years
New York: 20 years (interesting outlier)
Atlanta: 0 years (last Republican mayor was 1879)
Now looking at cities on the other end of the spectrum:
Houston: 5 years
Virginia Beach: 17 years
Milwaukee: 0 years
El Paso: (wikipedia doesn't have a convenient colour-coded list of Mayors and I'm not going to check each one individually, but the number is nonzero)
Fort Worth: 26 years
That's enough work for now but I suspect that this particular number is at least as strongly correlated with homeless rate as house prices is.
Speculating on many mechanisms that might contribute to the strong correlation between high housing costs and leftism:
1. Progressive cities more likely to block construction due to being more pro-regulation in general.
2. High housing prices prevent having children, and having children makes people more conservative. It's hard to keep blank slatist notions after you have several kids and they turn out completely different despite your best efforts to treat them the same, and the more extreme progressive policies are based on blank slatism.
3. Not having kids leads to seeking meaning from participating in causes, which usually means leftist causes. People who just want to grill and provide for their families are conservative by default. It takes some effort and engagement to stay ahead of the Current Year's political zeitgeist.
4. People who already have an antinatal memeplex (which in my experience is always on the left) are more likely to acquiesce to living places where housing is too expensive to have kids.
5. highly educated people more likely to be able to afford to live in expensive areas because of the signaling value of a degree, but higher education is a hostile environment for non-leftists so conservatives are underrepresented among degree holders relative to merit.
"I do believe that people in LA jail have a higher rate of mental illness than the general population. But I’m less sure if they have a higher rate of mental illness than eg graduate students, who have depression at 6x the rate of the general population. And if someone argued that it was a waste to shut down the old mental institutions, because we’re just “trans-institutionalizing” all the mentally ill from psych wards to graduate schools, then people would notice the flaws in that argument right away."
Seriously? You don't see any difference between "mental difficulties but I'm in grad school" and "mental difficulties but I'm in jail"? If everyone who had mental problems was ending up in grad school and not the old looney bins (which were as terrible as everyone claims), we wouldn't be having this discussion at all. But people are not ending up in jail merely because "well doc, I'm depressed but I was told I didn't need anti-depressants because I wasn't suicidal and that's why I'm doing time instead of completing my PhD".
Scott, you've worked in hospitals. Coincidentally, I just had a family member telling me of their experiences in an institution (after a suicide attempt) and about the crisis care ward and the locked wards and being amongst bipolar people who when they were cycling between phases of mania and depression were VERY DAMN DISTURBED. That family member said "Honestly, I can see now why the male psych nurses were all big, tall, strong guys". EDIT: And these were people from respectable backgrounds with good jobs, not the street homeless. If they were threatening, imagine what the street crazies are like!
'Depressed' meaning you need therapy and a prescription for anti-depressants and you have periods where you want to do nothing but stay in bed all day is one thing.
'Depressed' meaning 'on the down cycle of bipolar' where you are literally screaming yourself hoarse at the (female) nurses about "don't come near me, don't touch me, you have no idea how I am suffering, you don't know how I feel" and then cycling back up to the mania stage where "I'm secretly married to that (male) nurse, I'm pregnant with his baby, and you (fellow patient) are my guardian angel", and then the in-between state of being zombified is another thing.
Modern psychiatric wards are *something* better than the old mental asylums. State-provision is probably terrible because nobody wants to pay public money to make them as good as the private insurance hospitals, but they're not entirely snakepits any more. And people that end up with screaming hallucinations about boxes of dead babies on their doorstep (another anecdote from fambly time in mental ward) are not going to stay in grad school very long unless they get treatment.
Would anyone say it was worse to put someone in a (locked) ward than to let them have screaming hallucinations on the street? That may be the problem here: the disconnect between lay people whose experience of the mentally troubled is "PhD student with depression" - and so "involuntary committment" sounds like the worst of the bad old days of the snakepits - and the lay people whose experience of the mentally troubled is "guy or gal with crazed zombie expression screaming in the street" - and so "the jail population aren't any worse than the grad school population for rates of mental illness" sounds like complete out-of-touch with reality.
Agreed, and furthermore for anyone who doesn't live near an encampment, it is easy to see homelessness and the question of what to do as an abtract issue. After all, the homeless are already "somewhere else" and it feels good to advocate for their freedom, such as it is. But then when the encampment shows up on their block, or takes over their neighborhood park, then it becomes a real issue.
Suppose SF decided to pony up the $250 million/year to house 7,000 homeless people in free housing. Why are we forecasting that 7,000 number as static after the announcement of free SF apartments to any and all?
I was also surprised that what appears to be a perverse incentive wasn't addressed. Does anyone know of arguments for why this isn't a perverse incentive?
It would have the upside of making San Francisco affordable for artists again.
It's funny, I haven't seen many people acknowledge it let alone address it. I do vaguely remember research years ago purporting to show that the homeless do not move cities for better services, but I was not persuaded.
Anyone telling you that is lying. Just go and ask homeless people where they grew up. When I was in NYC I never met a single homeless kid who was from NYC.
Suppose you came upon a small town of 600 adults. The mayor tells you that while the large majority of the town's people are kind and decent, 6 of them are complete scumbags who just have to be locked up or else the town would be in flames. Everyone knows everyone, and he can personally vouch for this being true, he says. Does this seem like a mass incarceration crisis?
What if it were 2 million, in a nation of 200 million adults?
Quantity has a quality of its own. The situation does not scale well. In a small town, the jail wouldn’t be as nightmarish. And of course the whole “trust the system “ part does not hold at all.
I had the exact same thought. Not everything is scalable.
Well said.
The tricky part is, if the mayor is personally vouching for this, how do you know if all 6 are indeed scumbags who would set the town in flames - or 4 indeed would, and the other 2 had a personal squabble with the mayor, or had a different religion or sexual tastes or economic ideology than he had?
There is a place for due process (though it is something of a flimsy reed itself, unfortunately).
Scott says the cause in the murder spike was the BLM protests demotivating the police. However, I would point out that the same summer was the first time since the start of the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns the weather was warm and people were going out, so the crime spike could be partially attributable to that.
I haven't seen any evidence that the protests had anything to do with crime spikes other then a pro police talking point that was uncritically accepted and repeated.
"However, I would point out that the same summer was the first time since the start of the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns the weather was warm and people were going out, so the crime spike could be partially attributable to that."
Did this happen outside the United States?
"I haven't seen any evidence that the protests had anything to do with crime spikes other then a pro police talking point that was uncritically accepted and repeated."
Could you imagine any evidence changing your mind?
I wish this were in the book review contest so I could vote for it. My one complaint is the opening, where you say "It builds off the kind of stories familiar to most Bay Area residents:", when even in your very review you point out that the homeless thing is primarily an issue in specific parts of SF, not even the whole city, let alone the bay area.
Still, most Bay Area residents visit San Francisco from time to time (or else they'll tell you "I don't visit San Francisco any more, the homeless problem has got too bad").
I live in the East Bay and this is familiar to me. I think downtown Berkeley and Oakland are pretty similar to this, and I think most Bay Area residents often visit at least one of downtown Oakland, Berkeley, or SF.
Concur. I'm 45 minutes from SF, don't work there, and still consider myself significantly impacted by the homeless situation as it restricts my ability/desire to take my kids to the theater downtown, to walk around lake Merritt, etc.
This is a great review – thanks!
Some thoughts:
1. We really need to figure out a way to _allow cheaper housing_, but the details, e.g. where, how much, what's a good new 'minimum cheapness', etc., are Hell (where The Devil lives).
2. Could police departments just keep dedicate patrol officers at 'cheap housing buildings'? If there's no need or desire for policing, then they could be re-allocated. But a commitment to dedicated policing, if it's required/wanted, might assuage the (legitmate) concerns of existing residents where this housing is built/developed.
3. I think there's a *considerable* 'premium' to be had in NOT housing the homeless, or drug addicts (with a 'disorder'), or even just poor people, all together in very concetrated areas. I think making 'cheap housing' *legal*, for everyone basically, and cities/townse/etc. just buying/renting 'regular housing' as needed, would be WAY better than any other proposed policies I've encountered.
4. Can we *please* just sell drugs, manufactured by, e.g. Pfizer, in "would be banned" stores already? Black markets are just fucking terrible, for rule of law; as a consumer, they *can* be perfectly fine (if at least a *little* scary).
Policing thoughts this made me think of:
1. I think we should encourage police officers to *want* to be recorded.
2. I think 'resisting' the police, let alone fleeing, should be punished severely. Some people seem to get away with inflicting a LOT of at-any-one-time low-level misery on others around them, but any individual instance of bad behavior isn't 'profitable' to police. I'm thinking of things like the 'dirt bike gangs' in NYC.
3. I think 'being bad while fucked up' should result in both: (a) being charged/prosecuted/punished for 'being bad'; (b) a *short-term* mandatory 'detox'/'sobering-up' (that's also safe, e.g. includes careful, gradual cessation because of dangerous withdrawal effects). I would *happily* include alcohol among the substances that qualify, while under their influence, as someone being 'fucked up'.
This seems 'wrong':
> a so-far-permanent spike in murders nationwide
Wouldn't it be a so-far-permanent scaling of a steep cliff leading to a mostly flat plateau?
... and I've now read more of your review and noted that all of the above in the numbered lists are basically mentioned.
It does seem like 'political vocabulary' is (almost?) deliberately confusing, e.g. 'harm reduction, 'de-institutionalization', or "sweeping institutionalization". Bleh
> But on the Outside View, wanting to institute a law I fully intend to break, where I would get enraged if it were applied against me personally, seems somewhat hypocritical.
I think [policing-3] above is the way to square this circle: you're fine because you're NOT getting 'fucked up' in public (or really fucked up at all), or otherwise committing _victimful_ crimes while fucked up; the other people who ARE getting fucked in public, or committing crimes, are the ones for whom these laws should apply.
But I think there absolutely should be a clear, consistent, and as simple as possible, standard for being released from involuntary commitment. Not having this is horrifying.
And, sure, if some municipality _wants_ to allow 'long term camping', then sure, they should be able to go ahead and live with the consequences. (Maybe they should consider [thought-2] tho?) We seem to agree on this anyways.
>2. Could police departments just keep dedicate patrol officers at 'cheap housing buildings'? If there's no need or desire for policing, then they could be re-allocated. But a commitment to dedicated policing, if it's required/wanted, might assuage the (legitmate) concerns of existing residents where this housing is built/developed.
People want to feel safe, but not many want the police to be actually right there at all times.
I was thinking an explicit tradeoff – cheap housing _but with_ a dedicated police presence.
IF people can keep whatever they're doing to themselves, the police don't need to do anything.
If there are police officers at all times at the cheap housing building, there are effectively police officers at all times at all of the surrounding buildings as well. I more meant that this would be an issue for the people in the area who are *not* living in the cheap housing themselves, but reports also seem to indicate (based on Scott's article and various comments) that the homeless themselves would probably reject an offer of cheap housing if it came coupled with being constantly monitored by the police.
Edit: Upon writing that "out loud" I realize that "cheap housing with constant police surveillance" sounds suspiciously similar to jail.
Having a police officer stationed or patrolling an apartment complex doesn't seem anything like "being constantly monitored by the police".
And I guess they wouldn't _have_ to be literally in the building either; just dedicated to responding for that area.
I don't understand what I'm failing to convey that's resulting in you thinking this is at all comparable to jail/prison.
All of the residents would have their own private/shared rooms/apartments. The police wouldn't be able to enter without standard justifications. How is that anything like jail/prison?
Well if we're just talking about one officer taking a nap in his patrol car in the parking lot outside I would agree that isn't very much like jail
In general any situation that involves armed agents of the state monitoring people just in case is more like jail than not even if it isn't directly equivalent (reminder that I said "suspiciously similar" not identical or equivalent).
One knee-jerk comment:
Thanks very much for presenting the absolute numbers for the Portugal Opiate Deaths, and not just scaled numbers!
The absolute numbers are really small. If the deaths are independent, and presumably follow Poisson statistics, a _single_ standard deviation for a typical year with about 25 deaths is already 5. Very few of the year-to-year changes are statistically significant at the 3sigma level: The 26->10 drop from 2010->2011 and the 37->54 rise from 2014->2015. All else is plausibly noise.
One thing I've been wondering lately is whether there have been attempts to create rural homeless shelters, and if they would be any more effective. I don't have any strong reasons to think this would work better, and it's possible that it's really just manifesting an instinctive desire for out of sight out of mind. But urban concentration of the homeless seems very consistently to line up with bad outcomes, and I wonder if creating a separate space could help.
Certainly, it would be the wrong solution for anyone who's been reduced to homelessness solely or mostly due to poverty. But maybe better for the ones in that situation because of drugs or mental illness?
If anyone knows of something like this, I'd be really interested to read about how it turned out.
For centuries, the rural homeless person was a basic social archetype -- the "tramp" or (in somewhat later usage) "hobo."
It may even be the case that the problem of urban homelessness as a social irritant reflects the imperfect adaptation to new circumstances of a far older stratum of homeless customs that were much more functional in rural settings.
For instance, and to your specific question, there really is no lack of available *shelter* in the countryside, a fact that is fundamental to the tramping life. Why? Because country folk are constantly erecting cheap, unguarded structures for the purpose of housing (or transporting, in the hobo/train case) livestock. If you're conscientious, you can always knock at the house and ask to sleep in the barn; people will often say yes. Mary and Joseph did this, etc., etc. If not, or if you've gotten word that the owner is a cantankerous guy with a shotgun, you just bed down with the sheep and none's the wiser.
tl;dr, a "rural homeless shelter" doesn't really make sense, because the concept of a homeless shelter corresponds to the need to address the specific ways homelessness becomes problematic when it leaves the rural context.
I always thought tramp/hobo was a UK/US divide.
I always thought that a tramp was a homeless who peregrinated by foot, while hobos peregrinated by rail.
This is actually something that's been on my mind a little. My idea goes like this;
My region in the plains has many small abandoned ghost towns where the houses are for sale for like, $10,000 - $20,000. What if we bought one of those towns entirely, made the buildings habitable, made it a "Dry town" and then offered 2-3 week stays for free there for those looking to detox before entering a rehab program? (Right now, detox is the bottleneck I'm told, few enter the rehab program because they can't do the 2 week detox.) but if it were out in the country in a little town with no drugs, some walking trails ect, maybe it would be easier to stay sober in that environment?
I was gentle on the subject of American cultural memory apparently having forgotten the hobo. I'd like to remain gentle now. Still, the mind boggles at the suggestion that prohibition is easily enforced in poor rural communities with ramshackle housing. Moonshiners, anyone?
Your region in the plains has "many small abandoned ghost towns" full of unused but basically functional structures. You want to turn one of these into "a little town with no drugs," to which you plan to send a cohort of drug addicts. On day one, one of your residents walks eight hours and covers three ghost towns, assessing the most promising location for a meth lab. By day seven, he's fully operational, selling to the rest of the cohort, and completely indifferent to your permission structure for getting into the rehab program.
"Moonshiners" Good point!
And yet... If there is one technology that has advanced most strikingly since those days, it is electronics - with communication, sensors, and computation.
What if the synthetic "dry town" had cameras all over the place and (gritting my teeth) ankle bracelets on all the residents - not _forbidding_ them to leave, or to come into contact with the guy setting up the meth lab, but noticing if they do, and setting up a quiet chat about it?
Despite what acymetric said in
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko/comment/7335503
this differs from a jail in that no one is locked in.
Yeah, we could stipulate that maybe the technological capacity exists to monitor drug users who volunteer for detox in the way you describe.
But at that point, what's the use of sending them out to the country? The nice thing about the country is the availability of open space, the feeling that you can take a walk in any direction. Either your plan is to shut that down by requiring everyone to stay in range of the cameras, or else they can just wander off and meet up with their meth dealer, ankle bracelets or not.
"Either your plan is to shut that down by requiring everyone to stay in range of the cameras, or else they can just wander off and meet up with their meth dealer, ankle bracelets or not."
A third possibility is that the ankle bracelets (including the one on the meth dealer) can transmit locations, so the authorities can notice the meetings - without anyone being prevented from taking a solo walk in the woods. Come to think of it - are fitbits or similar technologies good enough to notice recreational drug use?
That's an interesting question about fitbits, etc. But I think you're sort of assuming an unrealistically depopulated setting, where the dealer can't just use runners unaffiliated with the program. Or where other locals won't themselves entrepreneurially notice the existence of Camp Detox and go into business supplying the residents.
Eh, yeah, that'd certainly be the main risk. However, even that failure mode doesn't seem that bad. Now instead of having a detox town to get people clean we just have a little country town they can go get high in without bothering others.
Hamsterdam! But with prairie dogs! ;-)
Is the flavor of high that they typically get one where they don't bother others?
My point of view is that, for drugs that are _just_ damaging to the person taking them, the drug war was a bad idea from day 1. We don't apply comparable legal penalties to tobacco users. We provide some assistance to people trying to quit smoking, but not the sort of thing that turns a city upside down.
Now, if their high of choice makes them belligerent, that is a much stickier problem (albeit alcohol does that to some people, and alcohol prohibition was one of the very rare examples of a law that was such a spectacular failure that it actually got repealed).
Hi Scott,
You write:
"The researchers do not use the terms “local policy” or “social attitudes” in the paper itself."
But in the paper it states:
"To account for these unobserved local covariates, we include a CoC-level dynamic latent factor F 0 iβi,t, allowing for small departures from the cluster-level regression that may be due to local policies, cultural attitudes toward homelessness, affordable housing initiatives, and many other difficult to observe local factors."
Doesn't take away from your main point, but they do mention local policy, and "cultural" attitudes seems like a reasonable proxy for "social" attitudes.
Hi Scott,
(Another small thing.)
1. You write:
" I cannot find this report anywhere, the methodology does not seem to be public, and when people give a link to it, it’s always to this Google document which assumes there are exactly 4000 people in this category and then breaks them down further - 100% have psychosis, 95% have alcoholism, etc. "
2. I think this is the report:
https://www.sfdph.org/dph/files/MHR/Mental_Health_Reform_Update_Report_FINAL.pdf
3. And this the methodology:
"Through an in-depth data analysis, conducted in collaboration with the DPH Whole Person Care team, the Mental Health Reform team found that approximately 18,000 adults experienced homelessness in San Francisco in fiscal year 2018-19. These individuals were identified by the Coordinated Care Management System (CCMS), a DPH-operated system integrating 15 separate databases from DPH, HSH and the Human Services Agency (HSA). CCMS defines people as experiencing homelessness in the fiscal year if they either: 1) utilize a City service that indicates housing instability, for example, a City shelter, or 2) self-report homelessness while accessing health care services.
While the DPH estimate of 18,000 people experiencing homelessness in FY1819 may appear to conflict with San Francisco’s Point-in-Time Count (8,035 people counted in January 2019)1, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) details in its Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress that the full-year number is generally 2.5 times greater than the single-night count.
Using the CCMS-defined 18,000 people experiencing homelessness as the base, the Mental Health Reform team analyzed the population’s diagnostic epidemiology to understand the associated burden of behavioral health issues. The team found nearly 4,000 adults experiencing homelessness who also suffer with cooccurring mental health and substance use disorders. Specifically, in addition to homelessness, this group of 4,000 has a history of both psychosis and substance use disorder."
Shellenberger I believe makes the mistake of using the one-point-in-time number (8035) as his denominator as opposed to the CCMS number (18,000), which the authors use in their report.
"15 separate databases from DPH, HSH and the Human Services Agency (HSA)."
I mean, that's part of the entire problem right there. 15 separate databases that probably don't communicate with each other, so who knows if John Smith is homeless or not when generating this week's report on "how many emergency accommodation places do we need to access?" Easy for John to slip between the cracks.
One joined-up body would be better, but of course in practice that would mean yet *another* agency being set up to handle Homelessness Inter-agency Co-ordination, so now we have *16* separate databases that don't communicate with each other.
Thanks, I'll correct that! I just CTRL+Fd "local policy" and "social attitudes" and tried to skim for proxies, but seems like I missed these.
Thank you, Scott.
Just making my way through here, if interesting:
1. On Proposition HHH –
You write:
“They hoped to build ~10,000 units for the homeless, at a projected price of $140,000 each.”
This might be a bit misleading; I think Proposition HHH’s contribution of ~$140,000 was always meant to be a *partial* subsidy of per-unit costs. Here’s the text of the proposition in question:
https://cao.lacity.org/homeless/PropHHHCOC-20181109d.pdf
See page 23 of that PDF, which shows the subsidy allocation. Also if you "ctrl f" for "subsidy" you'll note other places where it's made clear.
A more readable version of the same point comes from the city’s controller, who writes:
“Funds from Proposition HHH make up only a portion of total development costs. Across all projects in the LAHD/HHH pipeline, the HHH subsidy per unit is approximately $134,000, or 23% of the total development cost of a project.”
That’s from:
https://lacontroller.org/audits-and-reports/problems-and-progress-of-prop-hhh/
2. You write:
“But in fact, five years later, LA has completed only 700 units, and the cost per unit has spiralled to $531,000 each. Nobody has a good explanation for what happened, with Shellenberger quoting one local service provider who said a lot of it was “bullshit costs”. “
a. On only completing 700 units, I have some evidence here from the comptroller that’s a bit more nuanced:
“the total number of completed units (1,142) is wholly inadequate in the context of the ongoing homelessness emergency”
And
“...there are almost 4,400 units in construction.”
So – about +400 on where you were (still “wholly inadequate” per the comptroller’s editorializing), but there are also thousands more in construction per the controller’s same report.
I think the ~400 discrepancy might be that the *Reason* article is from 2021, and the comptroller's report from 2022.
B. As to “bullshit costs,” there are a couple of other, perhaps complementary, explanations.
-One is just context from above: the HHH funds were always only meant to be a subsidy.
-Two is the city is guilty of overconfident modeling, according to the controller, and that overconfidence was taxed very heavily by the pandemic and its consequences in the construction markets. He writes:
“Even before the pandemic, a study by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation found that construction costs for multifamily buildings across the State were rising due to factors such as gaps in the construction workforce and higher materials costs. The unprecedented disruption brought on by the pandemic and other factors accelerated these trends. Existing labor shortages in the construction industry became more pronounced and the cost of some construction materials—such as lumber—skyrocketed. While these costs have somewhat stabilized from their record highs, they remain markedly higher than their pre-pandemic levels.”
The controller’s solution here, fwiw, is in part to reallocate much of the remaining HHH funding to “acquisition, rehabilitation, or adaptive reuse opportunities,” which seems in line with your suggestion around short- and medium-term mediocre solutions being more achievable and practical than idealistic HF-ish ones.
Hope springs eternal on that one!
Shoplifting
1. Shellenberger’s claim is:
“Larceny, which is shoplifting and other petty theft, rose 50 percent, from roughly 3,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to about 4,500 in 2019.”
Short version is that I think he's correct, but that he complicated his correctness somewhat by describing "shoplifting" as an example of "larceny."
2. The source you show that compares Kern to San Francisco is found here:
http://www.cjcj.org/news/13219
*That* site’s source is here:
https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/exploration/crime-statistics/crimes-clearances
And it's the California’s DOJ site. And here’s it where Shellenberger is I think on pretty firm ground, and where some of the anecdotes you’ve heard from your friends and patient *do in fact* match up with the data.
The primary challenge with the graph from your essay is that it uses only SHOPLIFTING for its comparisons. Shellenberger is talking about LARCENY (and again then complicates that somewhat by stating shoplifting as an example of larceny).
But the DOJ separates out "larceny" from "shoplifting." They are two different classifications, and have different data attached to them.
And, within that classification framework, it’s true that shoplifting follows the pattern of the graph in your essay. But larceny almost perfectly matches onto Shellenberger’s description. Source is here --
https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/exploration/crime-statistics/crimes-clearances
-- though you will have to input "San Francisco" to check.
According to that site: There were 24,304 reported larcenies in 2011 in SF. There were 39,687 in 2019 in SF. This tracks very nicely with Shellenberger’s per 100,000 claims.
But shoplifting barely moves at all, and has very few reported incidences, as you discussed.
3. How to resolve this?
Under the CA penal code, shoplifting is “entering a commercial establishment, during business hours, with the *intent to steal,* where value does not exceed $950.”
So one guess is this is kind of “niche” charge. Once “intent to steal” becomes “actual stealing” it gets reclassified as larceny, of which there has been the steep rise that your friends have described (and which, in absolute terms, is more than 10x as common as shoplifting). That's speculation, though. What seems clearer is that Shellenberger's claim of larceny appears to be sound, empirically, according to CA DOJ.
Drug Use in Amsterdam
1. You write:
"San Fransicko’s description of Amsterdam solving its drug and crime problems matches the other sources I found, although I’m confused about how much harm reduction was involved."
I'd dissent with your and Shellenberger's description of the trends here.
2. If you go here:
https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/en/dataset/7052eng/barv?ts=1656160323471
(That's the central bureau of statistics for the Netherlands.) It brings you to the underlying cause of death, broken out by subtopic, for the whole country.
And then if you filter "topic" by "5.2 -- due to use of drugs" you'll see a pretty steep rise in drug-related deaths from about 2012 to now.
Here's one account of many in the popular press describing the phenomenon --
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2018/01/dutch-drugs-deaths-including-prescription-drugs-double-in-two-years/
3. This corresponds (at least in theory) to the more-than-doubling of homelessness in that same period.
i.e., One reasonable prior is that increased homelessness is associated with increased drug use, and that increased drug use is associated with increased deaths due to use of drugs. That seems to be borne out in the official Dutch data. As homelessness has gotten worse, so too have drug-related deaths. What I can't square is your ACS data which shows overall declining drug use. I have to look into that some more.
"This probably means Shellenberger and I agree on most real-world cases, but I remain invested in the tiny sliver of moral difference between our positions."
This is such a beautiful description of most political arguments.
So I'll have to come back to this read. But as it begins with a lot of agonizing over why rich cities have homeless but not so much the suburbs, let me share some rather simple insights:
1. Pre-pandemic, I once debated with someone who asserted San Fran. was seeing a rise in homeless because they had passed a min. wage increase. I spent quite some time getting the data, homeless reports love to say things like "40% increase from last year" but never tell you what the base was in actual numbers. But when the dust settled, I found for each new homeless person, the city had added about 60 jobs. Keep that ratio in mind, 1 homeless person per 60 new jobs.
2. My mother-in-law supposedly once did 30 jobs in 30 days in Newark NJ. How does one do that? Well you waitress one night, bar tend another, check coats at a nightclub, help a store doing its inventory. This story was no doubt exaggerated and the 60's was no doubt a less formal time, these weren't let's set you up on direct deposit and a 401K type jobs, but you can still do this sort of thing.
3. Why no homeless in the suburbs? Because they are a social desert. Cities generate a lot of interaction which means a lot of opportunities, esp. if all you're asking is pocket money, some food, etc.
60 formal, on the books, here's your 401K, select your health insurance plan, you made it through 3 interviews, types of jobs seem about right to generate 1 informal job. By informal job, though, I mean a homeless person can support themselves. Maybe it's a series of small cash jobs, maybe it's collecting bottles and cashing them in, maybe its begging or stealing, but that can work. It can work even if you have mental or drug problems.
In contrast in the suburbs, 60 new jobs doesn't yield that sort of dynamic. Everyone is locked in their homes. What that might yield, though, is your kids moving their friends into your basement. Various types of couch surfers. But when that wears out or just doesn't work, the city is where it can assuming you are able to tolerate adjustments to your social dignity.
Ha! Unsurprisingly we see yet another cheap ideologue trying to claim the victories of the 'other side' as their own victories. First famous openly gay politician Harvey Milk does something...decades later some conservative hack will pretend like that was a win for 'his side'.
Then he made the incredible mistake of challenging Scott to a statistics and sociological phenomenon argument...bad move Shellenberger, bad move. A few cherry picked highly specific numbers and folksy stories is almost always a sign of a poorly formed narrative whose goal is to manipulate rather than inform or understand.
Not to mention the highly diverse and historically broad set of policies to run city governments are not well suited to being shoved into the tiny boxes of currently trending political baskets.
What has been done and by whom in various local governments in diverse states, climates, and nations will vary too greatly to fit into anything other than 'good polices that work are good and bad policies that don't work are bad'.
A point I often make is 'anything can be done badly'. This covers most problems in most places when people want to assert that some specific thing that isn't working well is very easy to globalise into a broad principle. This sort of intentional attribution and correlations processes are usually done intentionally in the political arena and are classic tools of manipulators.
The sometimes fun Bret Weinstein on a recent episode of his podcast had a line "Conservatives celebrate and defend the victories of the progressives of the prior era as their own".
Claim 3 and the Interlude seem to be very poorly performed/tried seriously by cities and fall into the 'anything can be done badly' camp of approaches.
Hotels are obviously dumb and are the opposite of 'Housing First' in that they come with lots of conditions to the point that people felt like they were in prison being there. That sure sounds like conditional help to me if you have to accept prison like conditions before you accept housing. Housing First is said often, but they are empty hollow words almost everywhere. Shelters and hotels and other prison like environments are highly highly conditional and nothing like the free conditions which those in regular housing experience.
Building new buildings or finding ways to concentrate the homeless into hotels and such are all really bad ideas that are obviously bad and had bad outcomes. No surprises there. Newsome tried nothing and now he's all out of ideas! Go figure!
Taking approaches like trying a long term plan to solve 1/3 of the problem and never finishing it due to what was probably corruption and cost disease in construction...is also a really bad idea with obviously bad outcomes. Again, another non-surprise bad faith attempt which succeed in loading up their corrupt construction friends. Help the poor? How about a handout to the rich instead? It didn't work? Colour me surprised.
The label on the sticker might say 'Housing First' but as you noted...none of these cities have tried you know... ACTUALLY provided housing for all of the homeless people at the same time and in an immediate sense with no conditions which did not concentrate them in their own ghetto. Who knew it was tough to get to sleep in a hotel room or a shelter or a crappy apartment when all of your neighbours are crazy and howling and screaming all night every night?
The clearcut and obvious easy solution of just renting large numbers of apartments which are NOT clustered together idiotically to create horrible high concentration brand new sudden ghettos around hotels or housing developments....is the obvious thing everyone says they want to do which somehow has NEVER happened!!!?!?!?
We had one idea, so we tried it out badly in half-baked ways over and over again for 30 years and it didn't' work. So the original idea was never actually tried? Yep!
It makes me think...all those bad people who want to do bad things to set goals, barriers, and whatever are real and the NIMBY triggering dumb concentration ideas and half-measures don't even begin to count as real Housing First initiatives.
Does housing solve why someone became homeless or what happened to them while they were homeless or their health or drug problems? Of course not, we don't need studies for this! How can smart people talk themselves soo stupid that they think 4 walls and a roof might impact health or addiction? Those are their own problems with their own solutions, but stable housing and getting people fed and off the streets is a LOT better than having them on the streets!
Do we want to solve homelessness or not? The answer is staring us in the face, everyone pretends they are doing it already, and yet in no place has it actually been tried on 100% of the entire homeless population in an even halfway decent attempt.
I really hope one of those mayors wins and uses 3% of the city budget to end homelessness overnight. Or at least give the real housing first approach a fair go.
When I see 7,000 flats rented for 7,000 formerly homeless people in SF, then we'll see if housing solves homelessness....or at least the crisis aspect of it being really bad, obvious, and annoyingly in the fact of CBD workers and Tourists. Spoiler! It does work and very few people will choose to sleep on the street if they have an apartment, though a small number will or will some of the time as their transportation and pan handling tactics are not solved by housing either.
Sounds like a prescription for getting 14,000 new homeless people moving in the next week all asking "where's my house"?
Wait, is the idea behind housing first that there should be literally 0 strings attached to the housing provided? Give them a place to stay and let them do whatever they want indefinitely? I don't see any possibility that could be effective, not to mention the perverse incentives.
>It does work and very few people will choose to sleep on the street if they have an apartment, though a small number will or will some of the time as their transportation and pan handling tactics are not solved by housing either.
Has anyone ever been annoyed by a homeless person *sleeping*? (obviously the answer is technically yes, hyperbole.) the public nuisance part is 99% what they do while they're awake though.
And after we've done this; why should anyone in a cheap apartment keep paying rent? Move your stuff into a storage locker, live on the street for a night, get a free apartment, move your stuff back in; have free housing; have several hundred dollars a month more to spend on whatever you want.
Claim 5 on drug use - this seems very strange to me and is a highly narrow way of viewing the issue. Granted the original topic is homelessness and indeed drug use is higher in the homeless population than the general population and is obviously not a great thing if one is trying to get their life in order.
But if we talk about the criminality of drug use and the difficulty in getting jobs when one has a prison record in the USA....how would putting drug addict homeless people in actual prisons help? I guess that is one way to give them housing? But it makes life harder for them forevermore? Though many of them will have already been in prison for other reasons or have criminal records, so it may be neither here nor there as their lives are hard and fallen apart for many other reasons already.
But the humane aspect of the argument should have a place and is a glaring omission. Cost, cost, cost, money, money, money....is that realllllly how we should think of government like some kind of business? Or do whatever is the cheapest thing always without any other considerations?
Is it not a higher moral goal and outcome to see homeless people put into rented homes and offered treatment rather than measuring policing costs and throwing them in jail from time to time?
We can look at these on paper and in dollars...but are they in any way equivalent outcomes?
Not to mention, there is a very strong argument drug use should not be criminalised for anyone and the half-assed attempt in Portugal failed to solve the violence and QUAITY problem by leaving the supply of drugs in the hands of criminals! Many overdoses and drug deaths are due to low quality and variable quality drugs causing accidental deaths.
Portugal is yet another half-measure and you see people dying on accident from drugs which might be 3 times stronger or weaker at any given time or might contain more or less fentanyl. Full legalisation and a clean reliable supply would avoid many deaths, but certainly not all.
But the moral and humane choices seem completely absent when we talk about what kind of society we want to be and how we treat each other.
> Cost, cost, cost, money, money, money....is that realllllly how we should think of government like some kind of business?
This money money money was expropriated by the state from those who earned it by the sweat of their brow. That is not inherently unjust, but it is *presumptively* unjust. The presumption of injustice may be overcome only by showing that the taxpayers as a whole are made better off by the government's use of their money than they would've been had they retained it to use for themselves.
> how would putting drug addict homeless people in actual prisons help?
Mostly, by discouraging other people from taking drugs.
I heartily disapprove of putting "drug addict homeless people" into "actual prisons" for the simple fact of being drug addict homeless people. If for no other reason, because the US Supreme Court has clearly stated that the criminalization of that status is flatly unconstitutional.
Insofar as drug addict homeless people wind up in prisons for committing, e.g., assault or larceny, I think this "helps" to the extent it makes clear that society deems these crimes sufficiently serious to not offer a "drug addict homeless person" free pass to commit them.
When has the Supreme Court stated that the criminalisation of drug possession/use is unconstitutional?
Punishment of conduct (e.g., possession, consumption) is not unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court declared criminal punishment for the status of *being* a drug addict unconstitutional in Robinson v. California (1962).
As for homelessness, the classic case invalidating a traditional vagrancy statute as unconstitutionally vague as to the conduct proscribed is Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville (1972).
I am confused as to how one could possibly be a drug addict without ever possessing or consuming drugs.
Well, sure. Realistically, if you're addicted to a banned substance, it's very likely you've handled said substance within the statute of limitations for possession. In that sense, you're probably guilty of a crime.
But are you guilty of a crime the state can prove beyond a reasonable doubt? In Robinson, the defendant was charged with being a heroin addict on the basis of "tracks" on his arms. Insofar as those "tracks" were an indicator of anything at all, they were an indicator of past drug use at some time.
But the state didn't charge Robinson with possession or consumption of any particular substance on any particular occasion. Instead, he was charged with the crime of being "addicted to the use of narcotics." That's what the Supreme Court said was an unconstitutional criminalization of status as opposed to conduct.
I don't think putting the addicts in jail helps (qua drugs, not qua robbing, stealing, violent offences) unless they get treatment to get sober.
And part of the problem seems to be relapses: in jail it's harder to get drugs, they are on programmes which support them, there is someone there to make sure they are progressing.
They get out, go back to their community, fall back into the same circumstances, and start using again. Rinse and repeat.
It's a very tricky, very hard to get right, balance between respecting the rights of people (including the criminal and the derelict and the hapless) so the state can't force them to live here not there and other personal matters, and punishing breaking of laws and offences against the rest of the community. Addicts need support, but that also means "don't stand there being non-judgemental when you see them doing stupid shit, stand there enabling them to continue on with stupid shit, just because you're chock-full of social theory about the repressive institutional system".
I'm fully in support of jail for drug dealers, even minor ones, even "but I was just growing weed to treat my poor sick dad" ones. Make the game not worth the candle for selling drugs, and the supply will dry up or at least be much scarcer.
>And part of the problem seems to be relapses: in jail it's harder to get drugs, they are on programmes which support them, there is someone there to make sure they are progressing.
This strikes me as an awfully rosy picture of what is happening in jails, but it may be accurate for Ireland. Specifically "someone there to make sure they are progressing" struck me as probably not quite right at least in the US. I suppose it is probably harder to get drugs in jail, but it doesn't exactly seem to be a problem for the prison drug trade and I'm not entirely sure it is true either.
Because money does not come out of thin air. The government gets money from the people, and if people see more and more of their income being snapped up and nothing perceptible coming out of it, then they vote out that government and vote in one which reverses taking such a big bite.
And that means less money for the services. So the services *have* to be efficient in spending the money, which means producing results. If you're throwing money at the problem and it's not helping reduce homelessness or treating the problems of the homeless, then it's useless.
"Drug use should not be criminalised for anyone" sounds lovely. It's not so lovely when it means people freely, openly dealing and using drugs in public, then going on to commit offences when high as kites, including 'stealing to buy drugs, assaulting people in the streets, smashing up things, being dangers to themselves'.
One way of dealing with the problem is "sure, no criminal offences anymore. you want to use as much heroin or meth or fent as you like? go right ahead! you want to use so much you kill yourself? not our problem!"
Is that more humane?
Interesting review. But did Shellenberger check (or has anyone else checked) if San Francisco’s homeless-problem might be due to a Tiebout effect? You can get a rough check on that, if you can find data on the percentage of the Bay Area homeless that are native to the area and how many that have moved in from other parts of the US, compared to (say) New York, or Huston, or Des Moines, or wherever. My hunch is that not only the percentage of the homeless, but also their composition (how many who have mental health problems for example) might at least partly be due to Tiebout-effect.
Tiebout suggested that the population in a country sort themselves into different local communities by “voting with their feet” (digression: a phrase first used by Lenin). This results in a Tiebout equilibrium (Wiki it). In that equilibrium, everyone has sorted themselves into communities which corresponds to their cultural, local-political, and other preferences (digression II: libertarians tend to like that idea).
When I was at UC Berkeley back in the days, I noticed the saying “everything that has a screw loose, rolls down to California”. Sayings often have some empirical backing, otherwise they would not be sayings. That could be a sign of a Tiebout effect, but real data is needed of course.
The old hippie/cult/any odd behavior goes/ image of the Bay Area, combined with a left-activist public welfare system & liberal drug policy, should attract not only homeless people as such, but homeless people of a particular type. (Side note: If that image of the Bay Area is correct, is not important. The important thing is if mentally frail homeless people in the rest of the US believe it is. “If people believe that a situation is real, then it is real, in its consequences” - the good old sociological Thomas-theorem; I am in quoting mode.)
A further digression/thought on US welfare politics, while at it: A major difference between the US and the EU is that in the US, people can move across state borders, while in the EU only labor can. In the EU, EU citizens can be forced to go back to where they came from, if they are found to represent an “unacceptable burden on the national welfare system”. (For those with an interest in comparative welfare policies, check out the European Court in Luxembourg, the closest EU equivalent to the US supreme court, Case C-333/13, 2014, for the legal bite of this principle.)
If my memory does not fail me (it has been some years since I studied US welfare policy history), the US had a similar practice until the 1930s, when the US supreme court ruled that it violated the constitution if states denied tax-financed state welfare to US citizens migrating from other states.
…before that Supreme Court ruling (undoubtedly hailed by progressives at the time), some US states had something akin to European-style, tax-financed bottom-floor universal welfare systems. If I remember correctly, some US historians have argued that this court ruling led to a race to the bottom between states, and these state systems were watered down or abandoned. They could otherwise have been the embryos of a federal social welfare system for everybody; one of the main pieces of federal US welfare legislation missing compared to other high-income countries, if not counting federal food stamps and federal welfare for poor parents with children. (Well, ok, other historians – Jill Quadagno at least- has argued that a US federal tax-financed universal social welfare system would probably not have arrived in the US anyway, thanks to opposition in the Southern States for federal provision for people of all colors. But that is another story.)
Sorry for all the digressions, but comparative health & welfare policy is my field of research, making it hard not to go off on tangents... To get back to the main point: Did Shellenberger (or has anyone else) investigated the percentage of native versus non-native homeless people in the Bay Area, compared to elsewhere in the US? If not, that is a major piece missing from the book.
My experience with almost daily encounters with the California long term homeless (I surf every day and they are all around the beaches for the mild weather and free facilities) is that pretty much none of them are from the community they camp in. That is probably not the case for families which have recently lost their house, but I go along with those who see these as two separate problems — those who need shelter and those who are what we used to call "derelicts."
My take on the issue is that the current framing of the problem by those living in places like San Francisco is iatrogenic. It is more likely to make the problem worse than better. That said, my advice and considering the nomadic nature of addicts and the mentally disturbed is NHIMBY (No Homeless in My Back Yard). My version of voting with my feet is that I get to choose which beach to drive to each morning. And I know which communities ensure the homeless don’t take over and which ones can’t control the issue. In Del Mar, there is an occasional lone homeless person walking around, but no open camping and no visible crime (I have left my convertible parked with the top down for the last two years without any issue). In Pacific Beach or Ocean Beach, I would be crazy to do so as there are addicts and disturbed people everywhere (the stories I can tell!)
I guess my point is that considering some communities are actively subsidizing homelessness, my local solution is to allow them to continue to do so. All the police and other authorities need to do is make sure being homeless is less rewarding in their community than the one down the road. The homeless vote with their feet, I vote with mine, and local businesses vote with theirs.
...indicating that the Tiebout process is ongoing...
"This results in a Tiebout equilibrium (Wiki it). In that equilibrium, everyone has sorted themselves into communities which corresponds to their cultural, local-political, and other preferences "
To an extent: if all the jobs and opportunities are in the big cities, then people move there even if they would, everything else being equal, prefer to stay in their local areas. So you get people living in less than ideal circumstances in the cities, which leads to crowding, high rents and house purchase prices, etc. and the hollowed-out rust belt communities which are dying since the big industrial employers left and nothing came in to replace them.
I might prefer to live in my small rural town, but if the only employment is in the city fifty to two hundred miles away, I have to go there, even if I'm not happy in a concrete jungle and it does *not* match my cultural, political, and other preferences.
But you can do as I did and move to a relatively small concrete jungle in the most culturally rural part of your country with low housing prices.
It's nowhere near perfect; but it beats where I was.
Great review. I don't that it would be remotely possible, but what I think needs to be done is:
1. Raise billions of of public and private dollars to build high-rise market-rate housing in all of the industrial waterfront areas of the State from north to south. Like serious high-rises, 50,000 people a square mile, with new parks along the water and new transit stops on the inland side, along the SF Bay shoreline, along the LA river, etc. There are hundreds of square miles of that kind of waterfront, a hundred square miles of high-rise neighborhoods would house 5 million people. Stop arguing over whether to bulid 4-plexes and stumpy wood-frame apartments in single-family neighborhods, it doesn't fucking matter.
2. Set up tent camps out in the Central Valley and Deserts, maybe on military bases, and hire thousands of drug counselers, psychiatric professionals, nurses, job trainers, etc. Use the minimal coercion possible to remove homeless drug addicts and mentally ill people from city streets to these places, dry 'em out, heal them, train them, provide them a path to a productive and meaningful role in society. Accept that some of them might stay there for a very long time, make them decent enough that that is not a horrific outcome.
Both of those solutions are very expensive, but would also bring very high returns (revenue from the market-rate high rise rents and savings from avoided urban social services and policing costs). The currnet budget surplus in California would be more than sufficient to go a long ways towards funding these two efforts.
"Set up tent camps out in the Central Valley and Deserts, maybe on military bases, and hire thousands of drug counselers, psychiatric professionals, nurses, job trainers, etc. Use the minimal coercion possible to remove homeless drug addicts and mentally ill people from city streets to these places, dry 'em out, heal them, train them, provide them a path to a productive and meaningful role in society. Accept that some of them might stay there for a very long time, make them decent enough that that is not a horrific outcome."
Congratulations, that is the "sweeping institutionalistion" of Scott's objections and the "death camps" of Machine Interface. See the opposition that you face on this? I am not opposed to having people be involutarily committed if that's the last resort, and while I do think that state aid will be very much 'cheapest government contract crap', even - or especially - if it is farmed out to places like whatever the American version of Capita is, which *will* penny-pinch in every way to boost profits, like hiring unqualified staff so they pay minimum wage, not enough of them, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capita
Bad as it is, however, it is not as bad as the Bad Old Days and there are more regulations, more rights, and more advocacy groups protecting people using such services. So while tent camps in the desert will have the likes of Machine Interface hyperventilating about "locking up anyone who can remotely be called "insane", for life, without recourse, in filthy hovels where they'll have less rights than prison inmates and'll slowly die of manutrition, neglect and abuse", some kind of set of locations for that purpose isn't in principle a bad idea.
The big stumbling-block will be the expense. I've seen it in social housing - millions and millions promised and indeed paid out, yet somehow those sums never trickled down to the customer-facing part of the service, where it was "yeah that announcement about millions more for local government housing? you'll get a fraction of that, and only next year, if at all". I foresee a lot of the hundreds of millions going on task forces, committees, consultants, reports, etc. into the entire top-heavy edifice of provision agencies, and only a small amount getting paid out to actual "hire nurses, hire doctors, build facilities, support the homeless being treated".
And because the taxpayers see all this money being paid out, yet no difference being made, they will cut back on paying it out. Which leaves "cheapest crap" provisions that the homeless don't want to access, and the private services companies creaming off more and more for profits and less and less to the homeless, which only makes things worse.
Yes, that is maybe the biggest reason why essentially "we can't have nice things" with respect to the welfare state in America, we're too corrupt. Even if there's a clearly majority that might want something like universal health care or social housing or easily-obtainable and aggressive treatment for drug addiction and mental illness, and would gladly tax themselves to pay for it, the problem is that the funds will just go to corrupt "friends" of those in power, not to the intended beneficiaries.
We should form a committee to deliver a detailed report and a national action plan on getting more of our tax dollars to go towards actual service delivery. Naturally this Action plan will need a bureaucracy to oversee it and ensure that everyone is filling out the correct forms to avoid any corruption, and to issue periodic reports on how well the project is going.
(How any attempt to fix this would go in Canada.)
Ha!
"Transparency" in government spending is REALLY expensive.
--Guy who works in Purchasing for a government agency
"This is the question many of the California gubernatorial candidates asked. California has lots of money. There aren’t that many homeless people. Everyone is already committed to Housing First. So why don’t they have houses already?"
If California ever starts giving $3000/month housing to all homeless people, no questions asked, the first thing I'm doing is declaring myself homeless. That way I'll save myself $3000/month, which I'll use to take expensive vacations every month.
This was great.
I am an AI hardliner who believes we're all doomed.
But it's still nice to read about other things.
I think excessive worry over AI risk is silly but that we're all doomed for other reasons so at least there is some common ground there.
That whole being mortal beings thing is tough to get around. I agree with the excessive worry about runaway AI though.
One small thing we could do to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place is giving people an attorney at housing court. Right now landlords hold a lot of power over their tenants since a lot of them simply can't afford to fight injustices in court (and since court battles are publicly registered going to court could cause you to have trouble renting new homes, even if you win).
I love this idea (not just for evictions either) but suspect that more than 100% of the cost of this would end up passed along to the tenants.
Outstanding. Thank you for your research!!!
I am still reading. Stopped to write a comment. I appreciate your trust of in-person reports about shoplifting. We live part-time in Seattle. We do see flagrant, open shoplifting, where the thieves just wheel out carts of stuff in front of security guards. This is a new thing. We asked why the guards don't stop it and they say a combination of the risk of crazy, violent response combined with no legal consequence is why. I guarantee most of it is not being reported. The remaining police are overwhelmed. Unless one is filing an insurance claim and a case number is required, there is no point in calling them to report theft. It is a waste of time.
Lots of people living in tents in public spaces. Appalling for a first world country. Impression here, anecdotal: lots of these folks seem to be post-incarceration. No social security income, no resumés, no ability to work or interest in it. Definitely in need of a more structured environment.
Back to reading.
Brilliant article.
OK. I subscribed for money, and I pitched on Twitter. Fantastic article. How does Alexander do it all? Amazing.
Great post scott, read all of it even though I live on the other side of the world. My only problem is the book's name: it always makes me think about that meme with the "sicko" standing next to a window going "ha ha ha! yes! yes!". It was kind of distracting.
To be fair, it's not just progressives or only progressives who ruin cities. I don't like a lot of the stuff that has been done to the capital city of my county, and we're not particularly 'progressive' politically. Conservatives and liberals can muck up cities, too.
This certainly sounds intuitively plausible (cities represent truly astounding levels of externality generation and coordination problems so presumably you would expect them to be ill-suited to pure laissez faire, the trouble being that government is more than capable of its own screw-ups in trying to fix things), but I'd be interested in hearing what Dublin dysfunction in particular you think can be laid at the feet of more conservative government?
(Not trying to be tendentious here, I know jack-all about Dublin and have no dog whatsoever in this fight, just interested.)
Dublin is beautiful though.
Portland Oregon is generally acknowledged to have a significant homeless population. The cities Joint Office of Homeless Services 2021 - 2022 Budget Review is interesting reading: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/cbo/article/781913.
"Portland City Council first declared a State of Emergency on Housing and Homelessness in October 2015. Since that time, the City has spent over half a billion dollars on housing and homeless services..."
500 million dollars in 5 years (the total is for 2015 -2016 through 2019 - 2020). It's good to understand how much money is involved.
The chart on Page 3 shows that the "HUD-defined houseless population" has been relatively constant over that time period at about 4000. I think the HUD definition is widely criticized as undercounting the homeless population, but I think the rate of change is what's important. We can probably trust the HUD definition for that, and what it shows is that spending half a billion dollars has had no significant effect on the homeless population.
Where does the money go? Part of the answer is in the same chart: "The total number of people provided with homeless services annually has increased by 40% since 2016." This number is approximately 8X the number counted in the HUD census. An uncharitable conclusion is JOHS has expanded the definition of homeless to include people suffering from "housing anxiety" so they can show a need to expand their budget.
It could be argued that if Portland had not spent that 500 million, the problem would be even worse. On the other hand, I suspect few Portlanders would agree with the statement "Portland is doing a good job of addressing homelessness." From this recent LA Times article, it seems that even a few homeless people would agree: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-06-21/portland-liberal-support-lags-homeless-services-drugs.
"San Francisco has about 7,000 homeless people. The median SF apartment costs about $3,000 per month (presumably the government officials in charge would be trying to buy cheaper-than-median apartments for this project, but they seem bad at that, so let’s stick with median as a high-end estimate). So that’s $250 million/year to rent every homeless person an apartment. "
That's $250 million *this year*.
But the 7,000 homeless people San Francisco has this year, aren't the same 7,000 homeless people it had last year or the 7,000 it will have next year. If the mean turnover time for a "homeless" person is one year, then you pay $250 million this year, and $500 million next year, and $750 million the year after that. And, OK, you probably reach a stable equilibrium where the number of new homeless people every year is balanced by the number of formerly-homeless people who age out and die every year, before you're spending *all* of SF's $14 billion annual budget on free apartments, but I think it's still going to be intolerably expensive. Maybe the mean turnover time for homeless people is two years rather than one; would be interesting to know but I really doubt it's going to be long enough to make this plan affordable.
If you're assuming the formerly-homeless people in the free apartments, who would have moved from the streets to a cheap rented apartment next year when they got their life semi-straightened out, will just as quickly move from a free apartment to a cheap rented apartment just because they can, then I think probably not. The marginal homeless person who finally gets a job and can barely manage to afford an apartment, is probably spending half their pay on rent. Which is probably better than sleeping on the street. But if it's a choice between free apartment and keep all your money, or spend half your money for an apartment that's probably no better than the free one...
Is the plan for the free apartments to be *really really crappy*, substantially worse than the cheapest apartments on the market right now? If so, you kind of need to make that part explicit. If the plan is to automatically throw people out of the free apartments as soon as they get a decent job, that's an obvious perverse incentive. And "...as soon as the bureaucracy determines that they no longer need it" is going to have a whole lot of perverse incentives.
As someone who has, on occasion, been homeless (and being 195 cm and 125 kg and sleeping in a '99 Camry is not an experience I can recommend) and also only having read the first section, I have a feeling that there may very well be different "classes" (?) of homeless.
I will admit that I was fortunate enough to not be faced with the prospect, and fair warning, this is basically just "gut feeling" levels of rigor, but I simply feel that there is likely a distinction to be made between "people who are currently homeless because they lost their housing due to recent misfortune or price increases" and "people who are currently homeless and shoot drugs and defecate on the sidewalk". To call back a few weeks, just describing all of these people as "homeless" strikes me as akin to (and likely as effective for "solving the problem") as calling everyone from the person with mild Aspergers and the truly severely 24/7 care require disabled person with autism, "Autistic".
"Homelessness is a spectrum", etc.
And perhaps I am absolutely, completely wrong, and I might well have also ended up using the sidewalk as a restroom and doing hard drugs if it had gone on longer than it did. I'm also probably significantly more able to quickly find *some* job doing *something* that pays decently than your average homeless person, and thus that may also color my views on the topic.
I don't know, and hell, maybe you even address all of this in the, uh, 90% of the article I haven't actually read yet, but it seems as though simply trying to treat this as a monolithic problem isn't going to actually be effective.
I dunno. I understand that you disagree with Shellenberger about the "drugs and mental illness" driving factor versus housing costs, but... why couldn't it be *both* in this case?
That is to say, yes, the general levels of homelessness in SF may well be primarily driven by housing prices. But perhaps the thing that makes SF seem so particularly bad is the proportion of the homeless population there with a serious addiction and / or mental health issue. (Epistemological status: Total ass-pull. I have no research or numbers to back any of that up, I'm basically just brainstorming at this point.)
I don't usually comment, but I came to the comment section to make exactly this point - I hope Scott addresses it. I think (though I also don't have any data) that there's a potential for some sort of homelessness subcategory analysis that looks at these data broken down along the "down on their luck" to "completely abandoned social contract, street shitting" spectrum. I suspect different metro areas with similar total levels of homelessness, but different concentrations along that spectrum explains a huge degree of the differences in subjective experiences.
>"Homelessness is a spectrum", etc.
Important to recognize also that even some homeless people with addiction issues aren't all in the "hopelessly and permanently homeless category" and don't even necessarily have a "severe" addiction* that requires intensive treatment and a long term housing program. Some of these people, even the ones that would be considered addicts or mentally ill, just need a small hand back up to resume their prior productive lives.
*severe in terms of the extent of usage and difficulty stopping, I hate the method of defining addiction severity solely by the outcomes
Sure, there's definitely a lot more nuance to it than I got into in my relatively brief comment. But I think that the concept of needing to consider that there are actually multiple -- in some ways very different -- problems that are being lumped as just "homelessness" might be key to solving any portion of it. Or we'll just end up with one big diffuse monolithic solution that doesn't actually solve any of the problem for anyone.
I was just building off your point, not disagreeing or criticizing, sorry if it came across otherwise.
Sure, likewise. Text is hard without vocal inflection, at times. We're all good. :D
Indeed, I would probably have *been* somewhere in one of those "in between" states during my stint with homelessness. It certainly didn't help that being that poor at that point made it rather difficult to remain medication compliance. And that's just with depression and ADD. When it's necessary, even completely unmedicated, I am... at least half the time, capable of pushing through it if I really make an effort. (Which, yes, is definitely much harder at that point.) I would imagine (though I am also in no way an expert) that a person who had (severe enough?) schizophrenia and found themselves in that situation would potentially have an even more difficult time managing that.
And yes, I'm hedging that a lot because I've never had schizophrenia, don't know what it's like having schizophrenia, and don't really even have a good idea if there *is* a severity continuum there. Though I am sort of presuming there is, like with most mental health concerns.
I've also been, uh, fortunate(?) enough to have had irregular access to medical care for long enough that it's taught me to keep a fairly healthy supply of the *most* important of my meds squirreled away. And it was of short enough duration that I only had to do a couple of (to me) really unpleasant jobs to manage to stay fed and medicated for the most part. I'm a computer nerd, in the end. Even as a really *large* one, I still don't enjoy digging ditches. Yes, I'm almost certainly being... I dunno. Elitist, or something.
Agree 100% with this. See my comment below.
Oh, I had. I'd have "liked" it if those existed here. :D
The lot next to my house had a giant three story tree which formed a dome around its base. Shortly after moving into my house a camp of 5 - 15 homeless people (depending on the day) moved into the tree. They yelled, fought, had fires, used power tools, and behaved in various undesirable ways. I called the police on them for various offenses ~5 times without ever having even a single officer or official appear on site. About 8 months after they had moved in (I found the backstory out in retrospect) the lot was purchased by a developer. Construction workers came and told the homeless people they should leave because the tree was being cut down tomorrow. Per said construction workers the response was "over our dead bodies, we will burn it down first!" to which the construction workers, who were planning to cut the tree down anyways, responded with a shrug. Mind you the edge of this giant tree was ~15 feet from my house. That day/night the homeless people gathered >20 propane tanks and strapped them to the tree, then lit it on fire.
I woke at ~2 am to rattling bangs shaking my house, a weird bright red glow shining through my kitchen window, baking heat emanating from the windows, and my wife and six day old child screaming. We fled the house naked with our child, injuring my wife who had just given birth. I went back in once for some documents and clothes after determining the house was not actively on fire. After maybe 5 minutes the fire department showed up and put out the fire. The next day the construction workers cut down a sooty and much reduced tree. One cop spoke to me on the phone once and never followed up. All the same homeless people still roam the area and now live in a wash ~150 feet away.
I've now moved to a fancy expansive HOA community that costs more than twice as much. I used to think homelessness was a hard problem with no good solutions. I no longer think that, I'm now in favor of basically anything that results in fewer homeless people.
This story does not pass the sniff test. It's strange that you'd complain about things like neighbors yelling, fighting, and using power tools, when these are also not uncommon occurrences in all sorts of upper-middle-class suburban neighborhoods (In fact, I'm willing to bet that the average upper-middle-class suburban household has a much more extensive power tool collection than the average homeless camp under a tree). It's strange that the construction workers are giving you, an uninvolved third party, details about their conversations with the homeless camp, to the point where you're able to give exact quotes. It's strange that you know how many propane tanks were involved, especially since as you later claim the police didn't get involved and never investigated. It's strange that homeless people would choose to expend resources on ">20 propane tanks" with which to light a tree on fire for no reason, when everyone involved knows it won't make much of a difference. Even if the propane tanks weren't legally purchased, even if they were stolen, it still takes time/effort/risk to steal them and transport them, and to use them to burn down a tree is simply wasteful. Aren't homeless people supposed to be monomaniacally focused on getting their next drug hit? How much drugs do you think you could get for ">20" propane tanks? A quick google search puts the price of a 20lb propane tank at $60. 20 propane tanks at $60 apeice is $1200. I'd be willing to believe that a homeless camp of people might not be perfectly rational Bayesians, but surely one of those 5-15 people (depending on the day) must have had the thought "Hey, instead of blowing up a tree and accomplishing nothing except giving the neighbor a story to retell on the internet, let's barter this pile of stuff worth $1200 for some drugs instead".
It's really helpful to your story that the homeless camp gave such an incriminating quote right before doing their crime, just like they promised! Although the "over our dead bodies" part didn't come true, so it seems like homeless camps are only 50/50 on truthfulness. It's also really helpful to your story that there was no property or bodily damage; If there had been, there might be the risk of having a newspaper article or police report, etc cover the incident. It's really helpful for your story that all the damage was psychological, what with the fleeing naked and your newborn child. These kinds of details really increase the sympathy, while conveniently being completely unverifiable. It's really helpful for your story that the police did nothing; everyone knows the police famously disbelieve land-owning taxpayers and frequently side with homeless arsonists living in a wash, especially when those homeless arsonists give a verbal confession the day before, and triply so when the arson involves $1200 of stolen goods.
Even assuming your story is all completely true and accurate (Which, to be absolutely clear, I don't believe at all), let's apply some of our Rationalist Community Brand Consequentialism™ and examine the results of this situation. You and your family now live in a fancy expansive HOA community, which I'm going to assume is an upgrade. Meanwhile the homeless people live in a wash, which sounds even less pleasant than living under a tree. Am I supposed to be pitying you here? Am I supposed to believe that, from the heights of your fancy expansive HOA community, you envy the homeless people living in a wash? I understand that your fancy expansive HOA community costs more than twice as much, but obviously you can afford it (as evidenced by the fact that you did move in).
Scott gave this story a "Most Dramatic" award, and I agree it's very dramatic. Very befitting the theater. I don't know Scott was so willing to uncritically completely believe a story on the internet so carefully tuned for maximum sympathy with minimum verifiability and zero evidence. The best I can come up with is bias, but after so many years as a self-avowed rationalist I still expect better.
"Shellenberger hits all the right beats here. Like many people, he tries to undo the damage done by The New Jim Crow, a book which convinced millions of people that mass incarceration was driven by a racist War On Drugs. In fact, less than a fifth of prisoners are in for drug-related crimes."
I'll expand on this a bit.
First, in the USA, we have our system divided into state prisons (about 55% of the prison population), local jails (about 30%), federal prisons & jails (about 10%), and other (about 5%). These systems hold quite different sorts of prisoners, who are in for different types of crimes. The DOJ source you cited shows that 16% of the 5x larger state prison is in for drugs, while almost 50% of the much smaller federal system is in for drugs as their most serious offense.
Many of the racism claims are not that drug crimes make up an overwhelming percentage of the total US incarcerated population, but rather that drug enforcement is a force that is biased to move Black, Asian, and Hispanic people. It puts them into prison at higher rates than white people.
This is complex. Only 14% of the 5x larger *state* prison population is in for drugs, and whites are actually disproportionately in for drugs here. 16.6% of whites, 12.2% of Blacks, 11.7% of Hispanics, 10.9% of American Indian/Alaska Natives, and 11% of Asians are in for drugs as their most serious offense (table 14).
By contrast, 46.7% of the 5x smaller *federal* prison population is in for drugs, mostly drug trafficking, and here the pattern is somewhat reversed. 39.2% of whites are in for drugs, as compared to 42.1% of Blacks, 62% of Hispanics, 16.3% of American Indian/Alaska Natives, and 45.7% of Asians.
Based on these numbers, there's not an obvious case to be made that drug crimes function to incarcerate people of color at higher rates than white people.
However, another story about how drug crimes fuel the prison system is what we might call the Drug Gateway. They expose people to their first arrests and shorter prison stints, leading to an escalation into more serious offenses later.
The VOX article you cited does show that drug crimes are the largest fraction of share of inmates admitted from 1993-2011 in federal and state systems combined. This doesn't show that the Drug Gateway hypothesis is true, but it is consistent with it. If we're skeptical about "gateway drugs," then we might also want to be skeptical of the Drug Gateway.
Maybe he supports sweeping institutionalization of the homeless, not the mentally ill?
I think if we were determined to keep "sweeping" in the description you would need to qualify it with both. He is arguably in favor of sweeping institutionalization of the mentally ill homeless. I did not get the impression from Scott's review that Schellenberger was advocating for every homeless person with any mental illness to be institutionalized so I think even that is too far.
I was surprised Scott concluded by defending the "sweeping" comment to be honest, it seems to me he was "directionally correct" and Schellenberger is certainly more in favor of institutionalization than Scott, but sweeping was much to strong a characterization. In fact, who does doubling down on an exaggerated claim even though your *own* analysis doesn't appear to support it remind people of?
Some thoughts below. My background: SF Bay Area resident for 20 years, frequent visitor for 10 years before that. Spent 3-4 years from 1998-2003 doing weekly food distribution to homeless in southern California.
There are (at least) three "sub-classes" of homeless and confusing or conflating them results in total confusion regarding solutions.
A. Subclass A are the "lifestyle homeless". Vagabonds, drifters, gutter punks, street musicians, beach bums, craft stall vendors, "van lifers". A number of these folks I know by name, and consider to be friends. They could hold straight jobs in theory, and often come from more conventional backgrounds. The tradeoffs inherent in living the straight-and-narrow are too much, and they cannot or will not do it. Sometimes drugs and mental illness are an issue, but not overwhelmingly so.
B. Subclass B are the "down on their luck homeless". Living in car, van, or RV temporarily due to job loss, bills, bad luck, or poor choices coupled to above. Will actively seek out shelter, come to social services and adhere to plans to improve the situation. Aiming to get back on their feet. Overwhelmingly working class and not happy or proud of their current condition.
C. Subclass C are the "wretched homeless". Sorry about the moniker but it fits. Extreme mental illness or drug addiction. Limited ability or agency. Suffering in many dimensions. Selling body for drugs. Crime and violence -- both perpetrators and victims. Passed out on street in own fluids. These cases are extremely sad, and my heart breaks for them. A test: if you ask them their name or their story, you most often cannot get any kind of comprehensible reply.
The wretched homeless are the ones that are most obvious in many ways, and seemingly what the book focuses on. They will not be helped by marginal changes in housing markets: rents dropping from $1500/mo to $1250/mo are not their issue. On the other hand, the "down on their luck" *WILL* be helped, and mightily so, by more affordable housing and/or social programs. NIMBY and 30 years of working class job offshoring are reasonable causes.
Class C cannot be divorced, in any way, from changes in mental health policies, nor from the flood of ever-stronger drugs in the last decade. Drug induced psychosis and/or willingness to do almost anything for the next hit create a massive hole that is very very very hard to pull out of. Many (most?) die in that condition. Jail seems to be the only circuit breaker we have in the current system, and it does a poor job of interrupting the cycle.
In the 30 years of my experience, the problem in SF Bay has gotten much worse. Some areas have improved (as I recall Mission district was very intense with heroin on the street in the 90s). Both classes B and C seem to be much larger overall.
A major concern is preventing lifestyle and down-on-their-luck from becoming wretched. That is, how can we stop class A and B from becoming class C? Another major concern is tailoring programs and help to fit the person. A wretched homeless selling their body and dignity for the next hit is NOT going to fill out your paperwork, and will scare or harm others in a shelter.
I think this review is too hard on Shellenberger. He seems to grasp realities of the problem that are glossed over by the homeless-industrial-complex.
Most that conflate these sub-classes seem to do so purposefully.
Certainly possible. Some of this is "having a hammer, seeing only nails". But some of it could be indeed be purposely conflating things due to self-interest or ideology.
Thanks. This trichotomy makes a lot of sense, also outside the US.
But looking at this from afar, the puzzle is why category C seems to be so large – and growing - in the US.
Maybe it simply is that the US is a very big place, and it is easy for the 328+ million of you to travel across state lines. You by and large speak and understand the same language (which tremendously lowers the costs of moving elsewhere), and you can move across state borders & still claim (limited) public welfare, even if you do not work (which is less the case in Europe/EU).
Also, you have a large NGO-based welfare sector (probably larger than many EU countries), which to an even less extent care if you are an out-of-stater. The result: Category C becomes larger wherever it settles, reaching a “critical mass” that overwhelms local welfare efforts, plus is large enough to form a viable sub-culture on its own.
In Europe, where cross-border migration of the homeless is more difficult both culturally and politically, you get smaller, national concentrations of “Category C”, which makes it somewhat easier to handle. (Not easy, but easier.)
There is also another possibility, more speculative: Perhaps European countries are better at doing early intervention. So that Category C is smaller overall. “Early intervention” in this context means: catch them as toddlers. Get all toddlers into high-enough quality kindergartens, in particular toddlers from poor single-parent families. Then create early warning systems from kindergartens to the child protection agency, and let the agency move in with supplementary help (and foster care if everything else you throw at poor families do not help), early.
Far from all European countries do this – it is most widespread in the North. But the tendency for the last 20 years has been to redesign the welfare state toward an “social investment welfare state”, cutting back on old age pensions and channeling more resources to care for children in every possible way. A version of the Gary Becker - idea to do human capital investments (broadly defined) - from as early a life stage as possible.
I believe it is a leaders-laggards scenario: The tendency has been strongest so far in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany and France, but we now see the same increased focus on public resources spent on child welfare also in Southern Europe. If it really is a leaders-laggards scenario, and if “early intervention” really will be a way to limit category C, is still an empirical & open question, but at least I an pretty certain it is an almost hegemonic welfare policy idea among present-day ruling elites in EU countries.
Anyway, these are just some late-night reflections from abroad. Thanks again for sharing your practical experience; worth more than a ton of theory...
Good question. Not sure that I have an answer.
Anecdotally, the flood of opiods and meth into west coast USA in recent years has been a major contributor. I personally know multiple people from "way back when" who have spiraled into addiction and chaos. Meth got big in my hometown and caught my cousin for example. Another former friend got into opiods and was later murdered in his sleep. So it is not just the drugs themselves, but the chaos that accompanies them that causes disintegration.
I would guess that some is due to lack of early social support, as you say. I am not sure how big of a contributor this is, but seems hard to imagine that it would not contribute.
Also, clearly from the other comments, there some difference in the ability and/or willingness of different countries to institutionalize the mentally ill. Scott probably knows this in great detail given his profession, but my understanding is that it is very hard in the US to get someone off the street if they do not want to go.
Thanks for these reflections. I am aware of the importance of the US opiod crisis, but still....
I do not think European countries on average are significantly more willing to institutionalize the mentally ill. De-institutionalization has been the main trend here as well, for something like 30 years. There are national variations, but we are generally not locking people up against their will, and if so not for a long time. Full-time institutionalized mental care is very expensive also in Europe, and for that reason as well it has been very severely scaled down.
So I guess the difference to the US remains a puzzle.
They aren't growing. The number of homeless people in the US is going down, and the US has lower homeless rates than Europe.
What's actually going on is pretty simple: the cities have actively stopped enforcing anti-homeless laws which kept them out of sight previously, resulting in a massive upsurge in their visibility.
Simultaneously, some cities have become very homeless friendly, which has attracted a lot of homeless people from all over the place to those places.
Interesting. What are your references when you compare European and US homeless rates?
Government released homelessness numbers. It's not any one source, it's going through and looking at each one. You can look at the Wikipedia article about it (list of countries by homeless population) as a starter and go through the sources there, but not all of the numbers are directly comparable (for example, the way Spain counts the homeless leads to an undercount compared to the US/France/Germany/The UK).
Thanks for the reply. I admit I am a bit skeptical of Wiki, and as you point out comparing "raw" government statistics is also difficult since the definitions of homelessness vary between countries (and in federal states they can also vary within countries). And then there is the question of how you actually walk around, to do the counting...There is no recent peer-reviewed comparative study of homelessness you are aware of?
...assuming you are right, that homelessness rates are actually higher in many European countries than in the US, there would then be the puzzle of why it appears much more visible, at least in (some) large US cities than in many/most(all?) large European cities. At least compared to the Los Angeles area and Bay Area. My hypothesis - which may be similar to yours - is that crossing EU country borders if you are homeless (to set up residence in another EU country), is less of a legal right than it is a legal right for a US citizens to cross a state border. In the EU, it is primarily labor that has a clear right to set up residency in another EU country; while in the US, it is a citizen right (rather than mainly/primarily a labor right). Implying that homelessness may be more "spread out" across EU countries compared to the distribution across US states.
The US heavily decriminalized homelessness, making it much more visible to people. US homeless numbers have been going down even as the visibility has been going up because of these policies.
These policies also attracted a lot of homeless people to certain places, because they are friendly to the homeless. This increased the numbers locally in some places, as well as the visibility of the pre-existing homeless population.
There's tons of homeless people in Europe, the Europeans are just better at shuffling them off to the sides and more remote areas. If you know where the homeless camps are in, say, France, you can find tons of them.
Very good review!
Interesting that the “facts” cited in the book Scott (it looks rightly) disputes, but the *conclusions* of what-is-to-be-done it looks like Scott mostly agrees with.
Mr. Plumber, I am a long-time reader of both SSC and ACX, though I didn't engage in comments back then. But I missed you as a commenter. Welcome back!
On "Interlude: Why Can’t We Just House All The Homeless?"
Am I missing something obvious, is this not just downward sloping demand curves?
If SF currently has 7,000 homeless people, that's the number of homeless at the current price of being homeless (which seems to me quite high, though not paid in dollars, obviously). But if you give homeless people apartments, the price of being homeless goes down, demand goes up, and all of a sudden you have far more than 7,000 homeless.
The linked capradio article basically says as much, highlighting how the Roomkey motel "has drawn family and friends of Roomkey residents who haven’t been housed but 'camp close to that hotel,' some with the goal of gaining a room."
Are you including San Francisco in the model (in-sample) and then using the mode to say how much that explains about San Francisco (should be an out-of-sample)?
Really enjoyed this. To say I appreciate the depth Scott went into here is an understatement; I have a hard time reading other articles on topics like this because there’s so little rigor, I have to wonder if I’m wasting my time.
Shellenberger, I hope, is the kind of guy who will appreciate it, too. If someone with a platform like ACX put this kind of earnest effort into dissecting a book I wrote, I’d find that quite an honor.
What did you find rigorous about this review?
"In the spring of 2021, a team of Harvard medical experts published the results of a fourteen-year-long study of chronic homeless placed into permanent supportive housing in Boston. Most studies of permanent supportive housing, including the Kushel study conducted in Santa Clara, only study the newly housed homeless for a span of around two years. The study found that 86 percent of the homeless, who were referred based on length of time living on the streets, suffered from “trimorbidity”—a combination of medical illness, mental illness, and substance abuse. The authors found that after ten years, just 12 percent of the homeless remained housed. During the study period, 45 percent died. "
I saw that there was no control group for the study :-(
Is there an analysis of mortality in at least an age-matched group?
Having a 14 year study where almost half the people died seems alarming to me.
Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood is historically gay, not historically black. (The nearby Central District neighborhood, one of several neighborhoods located on the hill named Capitol Hill, is historically black, as are a few other neighborhoods.)
Tongue in cheek, but if it gets wrong that one detail I don't even need to look up, what's the liklihood about the rest of it?
Hi Scott, one strange thing that stood out to me was the section on NIMBYism (quoted below). You mentioned elsewhere in the comments that you live in the East Bay, so you must have a certain amount of familiarity with BART stations outside of San Francisco. While there is no doubt that “litter-filled, decaying, disgusting, unsafe, and ambiently miserable to exist in” does describe the very worst areas of San Francisco, do you really believe that it accurately describes the area around, for example, North Berkeley BART, or El Cerrito Plaza BART? And since you mentioned this in the context of NIMBYs protesting new BART stations, it’s relevant to look at some of the newer expansions. Have you been to Dublin-Pleasanton or West Dublin-Pleasanton BART? Your description bears no resemblance to reality. If BART was expanded to, say, Livermore (to take one specific proposal), the new BART station would surely look more like Dublin-Pleasanton than Civic Center. This is an argument that proceeds by picking the very worst, most extreme example of something, and then pretending it’s not only representative, but an inevitable (or at least very likely) outcome. In a different comment, you said that you didn’t enjoy living in dense, walkable neighborhoods in Europe or Japan — that’s fine, it’s your personal preference, not everybody needs to like dense areas, and density does of course come with its trade-offs. But it would be a huge stretch to conclude that it is therefore “correct” for people to “hate and fear” walkable neighborhoods.
Quoting Scott’s review: “But a big reason we don’t build dense cities and walkable neighborhoods is that people (correctly) hate and fear them. They accurately predict that if their neighborhood got denser, it would start looking like the dense parts of San Francisco - litter-filled, decaying, disgusting, unsafe, and ambiently miserable to exist in. The reason we don’t have better public transportation in the Bay Area is that people protest every time someone tries to build a BART station in their area - and the reason people protest every time someone tries to build a BART station in their area is that they weren’t born yesterday, and they’ve seen what other BART stations and the areas around them are like.”
1. Your framing of the NIMBY position may be correct, but it's usually not expressed quite so explicitly in those terms, perhaps because it's not very politically palatable.
2. I don't particularly agree with the object-level claim (the causal effect of LRT stations on criminality), and suspect that the evidence for it is fairly poor.
3. Personally I find this point of view quite bad — reducing criminal behavior doesn't necessitate eliminating public transit (which has a number of benefits (environmental, economic, etc.), not only to poorer people). Additionally, I think the knock-on effects of punishing poor people as a class in the name of safety will generally be deleterious for society as a whole.
4. Most importantly, I was referring to Scott's claim that in the Bay Area, people oppose BART stations because they *accurately* predict that their neighborhoods would become "litter-filled, decaying, disgusting, unsafe, and ambiently miserable to exist in". You can just look at, for example, the Orinda, Lafayette, Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill BART stations. These stations have existed since basically the beginning of the BART system (they opened almost 50 years ago in 1973), and they are nothing at all like that description. These areas are your typical upper-income suburbs, with good schools, low crime, clean neighborhoods, etc. The actual effect of the BART stations has not been to enable an inflow of criminality and drugs, but rather to provide a more efficient and sustainable method of commuting for the (typically wealthier, upper class) residents of these neighborhoods.
North East Bay BARTs ranked:
Worst: Ashby, MacArthur
Questionable: Downtown Berkeley, Richmond, Rockridge
Fine: Anything east of the mountains, maybe North Berkeley and El Cerrito, I can't remember
Closest to my house is Ashby and I hate it.
An idea that I'll posit related to CA Prop 47 and shoplifting in San Francisco:
California's threshold for misdemeanor vs. felony theft (including shoplifting) isn't particularly low compared to other states. As of 2017, the national range was ~$300 to ~$2,500 - https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/08/09/what-s-the-punishment-for-theft-depends-on-what-state-you-re-in . (These thresholds also don't, by the way, intuitively line up with what people might expect based on states' political reputations. The two highest are TX and WI - both $2,500 - and the 4 lowest - $300 or less - are FL, MA, VA, and NJ.)
And, from what I can tell, the statutory punishment for misdemeanor theft in CA similarly isn't wildly out of line with other states: up to 6 months in county jail and a fine of up to $1,000 ( https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/defense/penal-code/459-5/ ). Based on a non-exhaustive search, the penalty for misdemeanor shoplifting in other states is (by statute) similar or in some cases incarceration for up to 1 year.
Even taking into account other comments (from people outside San Francisco / CA) that observed shoplifters are far from always apprehended by store personnel and then arrested/prosecuted, I'll submit a hypothesis that a key difference in San Francisco could be that arrests/prosecutions essentially *never* happen. And that, unsurprisingly, repeat offenders plus induced crime become an issue as this lack of arrest/prosecution becomes widely known.
In short, there are two separate questions. One is whether the theft in question is a felony or misdemeanor. But the other - probably more meaningful one - is whether it leads to arrest or prosecution at all. That includes repeat offenders observed at particular stores.
I admittedly don't claim to be broadly knowledgeable about this subject, in San Francisco or elsewhere. The anecdotal reports about shoplifting in San Francisco, however, suggest that this is less a question of "felony vs. misdemeanor" vs. "arrest at all or not". Because, of course, people can be (and regularly are) arrested and prosecuted for misdemeanors (e.g., DUI/DWI in the vast majority of places in the US).
I have told my left-wing friends for years that fixing American urban dysfunction (crime, public nuisance, garbage everywhere, etc.) would be a big step forwards in fighting climate change.
Why would people take public transit when people are consistently disruptive?
In this context, San Fransicko strikes me as an immensely useful and mostly accurate corrective, and any minor factual issues are unimportant.
Somehow I don't see the tradeoff that this seems to entail becoming popular on the left. It seems to privilege the safety and comfort of those who have an alternative to public transport, i.e. people who are already privileged. Have you had any positive response at all?
I think that's a fair point. The authors of the paper attempt to adjust for this selection effect (i.e. people who live more dangerous neighborhoods, are younger, black, etc being potentially less likely to stay inside) and they say their results are robust to these effects. But they choose what adjustments to make based on victimization risk not perpetration risk - in practice these are almost synonymous wrt violent crime but not quite. So the criticism that they didn't adjust for perpetrators being outside more makes sense.
Ultimately the reason I bring up this study is that it implies an interesting theory about the murder surge. Which is that the propensity of people to commit violent crimes rose at the start of the pandemic, but because they were inside more (leading to fewer opportunities to kill) this higher propensity was not fully reflected in official murder stats (murder was up a lot in the first months of 2020 but not as much as in later months). Then, the lockdowns start to formally and informally lift, huge numbers of people (disproportionately black and in big cities) start pouring into the streets to protest, and suddenly people are interacting with each other and getting the chance to kill more than they would before. Even if police behavior was totally unchanged, I think you could still see a rise in murders in summer 2020 due to this effect.
I appreciate that an increase in propensity-for-violence preceding May 25th would be the strongest evidence against BLM causation. The protests were the de facto end of lockdowns, so a rise in absolute murder would be due to people going outside again, as you suggest. That might explain the time-series data Scott mentioned.
It’s interesting to speculate on what might have caused a higher propensity toward violence during the pandemic. It would have to be something that persisted throughout the year and into the next.
My best guess is masks. Having one’s face covered might lead to a greater sense of anonymity. Again, speculation only.
Still, I think the increase in per hour violence during early lockdown was probably a selection effect, with criminals less likely to honor the lockdown and a resulting higher predation on the fewer people outside.
I'm always somewhat confused when people talk about "mental illness" in the context of homelessness.
I have PTSD and am on the autism spectrum. If I ever become homeless, I will be counted among the mentally-ill homeless, and my mental health conditions will undoubtedly be a contributing factor in my situation. They will also be the main reason I'll refuse to stay in a shelter (I can't sleep in a room with other people).
I can see some ways that the existence of people like me on the streets is relevant to public policy. For example, we shouldn't expect everyone to sleep in congregate shelters, and we shouldn't penalize people just because they can't. We *definitely* shouldn't forcibly institutionalize them without at least some kind of individualized evaluation to see whether it's more likely to help or harm them. (Long-term forced institutionalization would be disastrous for someone like me, even in a nice humane modern facility.) If you wanted to get someone like me off the streets without driving them to suicide, you would offer them the kind of private, secure, sanitary, autonomy-respecting housing that you yourself would prefer to camping.
But that's never the conclusion people want you to draw when they point out the prevalence of mental illness in the homeless population. They always seem to be arguing for the exact opposite: these people need to be forced into shelters, and if they won't go, we should involuntarily institutionalize them, and offering permanent independent housing in the community is a waste of time and money.
Which might make sense if "mental illness" were a synonym for "severe, treatment-resistant psychotic disorder." But it's not. 20% of Americans have a history of mental illness. The prevalence of severe treatment-resistant psychotic disorders is vanishingly small. They might be overrepresented in the homeless population, but they're still a small minority.
I don't think most of the people making this argument are unaware of that reality, so I've never understood why they tend to ignore it.
Thank you for writing this excellent piece. It pulled me over the edge to finally become a paid subscriber.
The part of the book that resulted in the biggest change to my worldview was the discussion of the scope of drug addiction in the USA. You mention briefly that it seems like mandatory drug treatment doesn't work. I would be very interested in an article on the topic of the problem and possible solutions.
Thanks again!
'The main virtue I cannot ascribe it is evenness. The old saying talks about the man who “uses statistics the way a drunk uses a streetlight; for support rather than illumination”. San Fransicko is the equivalent of that dim blue lighting you sometimes see in nightclub bathrooms: so focused on preventing injection drug use that it sacrifices the ability to illuminate anything at all.'
This analogy is beautiful and made me chuckle.
> The government often announces plans to buy defunct regular hotels and convert them into these structures, which would indeed be a medium-term solution for housing the homeless, except that they usually get bogged down in fights about code.
Gosh. How could anyone ever turn to libertarianism or even anarchism in despair over the potential of the government being able to solve everything. I just can't possibly imagine.
Other than, even the government won't get out of the government's way to let the government solve a problem the government created.
Best comment yet! Particularly the last line. Might nick it tbh!
Please do, I feel my wit does not generally receive as broad an audience as I feel it deserves. ;)
Of course, maybe that's just a commentary on how witty I actually am, but... :D
Scott, you admit that the data used to refute claims 1 and 2 is not good quality, so why is this crappy data alone enough to refute MS’s claims? Do you really believe that a drug/psychiatric test given to a random group of SF homeless would find over half sober and mentally healthy?
If we all know the data sucks, then anecdotes and common sense have to get more consideration. Why not more heavily weight the many anecdotes such as Tom Wolf’s on the hotel where nearly 100 percent of occupants are on hard drugs?
And common sense: Why would the number of mentally well, sober individuals living on the streets be rising during a time of massive unskilled job demand and rising wages? You could say friction to move where the jobs are, but I doubt it (when the alternative to moving is sleeping on the streets).
Favourite quote from this article.
"but I remain invested in the tiny sliver of moral difference between our positions."
May not? I am not a social scientist, just happen to be living in Columbia and aware of our situation.
"But a big reason we don’t build dense cities and walkable neighborhoods is that people (correctly) hate and fear them."
I think you probably know this, but I want to emphasise that the world doesn't have to be like this. I currently live in a dense, car-free neighbourhood in inner London, close to a tube station and it's very pleasant. It is clean almost to the point of sterility. Nobody steals my packages because the building has package lockers, but I doubt they would if it didn't.
I've read the book too, and Scott was wrong to characterize it as supporting "sweeping institutionalization of the mentally ill." That phrase implies institutionalizing all or at least a lot of mentally ill people. Shellenberger clearly thinks there should be MORE institutionalization, and in particular more people given lengthy treatment, as opposed to the standard 7 days in the psych ward, 30 days in rehab. But the population he is targeting is not mentally ill people in general, it's the small fraction of them who are so dysfunctional that they live on the streets with no income source other than shoplifting and breaking into cars. He is convincing enough that I shifted my view on involuntary institutionalization *for this population.* I agree with Scott that Shellenberger should have said more on how to ensure that his proposed forced treatment would only apply to this population, instead of spilling over to the much greater proportion of mentally ill people who can basically take care of themselves. But Shellenberger never advocates for institutionalization of more than a small fraction of mentally ill people.
I submit that it is hardly possible for sweeping institutionalization to happen. Everyone is aware as part of the deep culture that institutionalization was a mass tragedy in terms of like the Top 10 list of things we are historically ashamed of
Any system of increased institutionalizing would have say three professionals signing off on it. All would be aware of the history and - at least in California - systematically tend towards not institutionalizing where it seems feasible. No matter how easy it were made to make someone a candidate the sign off process would be a tight filter under the cultural conditions that are endemic in Blue America at least
Shellenberger would have to be advocating for a process with no checkpoint like that or a very weak one for the results to approach sweeping institutionalization. I think he's aware of this and supports increased institutionalization with plenty of confidence that it is unlikely to ever swing back too far except under some kind of intentionally poorly designed process
I don't know if I agree with substantially increasing the ability to do so as your comments are very persuasive. Just as it was once easy to look at institutions and say 'they're better off out of there no matter what' it is now easy to look at encampments and say 'they're better off out of there no matter what'. But your description of the past reminds me of the fact that there can be no happy solution that involves using force against someone indefinitely. I would say I do support Schellenberger's position in general but would be wary of that in particular, and update to thinking NIMBYism may be a bigger priority than his main solutions
This was great- my mother is utterly in love with this man and now I can go back to reading science papers instead of the badly written gladwellian books she insists I read.
Can someone provide me with the data from the "That regression line looks suspicious, but I hear computers are never wrong." figure, I would like to write a short LW post about "how to regression" and use it as an example.
the TLDR for why it looks weird is the regression y~x means all the y's are perfect, use the x'es to explain them, thus the errors are only measured vertically not horizontally, the regression x~y gives the opposite line where you only measure horizontal errors, you can try to put your fingers at a random point and see that most likely it is closer to the line if you travel horizontally instead of vertically, the "correct solution" is to model the errors jointly, but nobody does that, so for mortals the second best thing is drawing both lines (will look like a butterfly) and say the real best line is somewhere between them.
of course sometimes you want to predict one variable from another and then simple regression is (mostly) the correct thing to do, but when you simply want to understand their relationship between two variables then it is not :), and you should instead fit a 2D gausian :)
It would be Alyssa Vance who has the data - you can reach her at https://www.lesswrong.com/users/alyssavance.
I would have said it was because of the assumption that the line has to intersect the horizontal axis at 0 - the assumption makes total sense, because there does have to be a meaningful answer to "how many people would be homeless at 0 degrees" and it can't be a negative number - but that just clearly isn't where the data are pointing. I don't know how to put that into formal statistical terms.
The thing is, there's actually a much more obvious reason why cities with very high cost of living have such a huge homelessness problem.
What do DC, Boston, New York City, and San Francisco all have in common?
They're leftist cities with massive services for the homeless and pro-homeless policies.
Overall in the US, homelessness has been going *down*, not up, even as housing prices have gone up.
The actual cause of the homelessness problems in these big cities is that they *attract* homeless people.
Moreover, it should be remembered that the homeless people who are the biggest problem are specifically the chronically homeless. Most homeless people are not chronically homeless, and looking at the homeless population as a whole will give you misleading results.
This makes most arguments over homeless populations pretty much worthless, because as it turns out, the entire notion of "the homeless" is actually wrong.
The homeless population is really composed of a number of groups. Two groups' problems are basically solved by housing first policies:
1) Temporarily displaced persons as a result of their house being destroyed by some sort of disaster (wildfire victims, earthquake victims, hurricane victims, etc.). These people are basically like everyone else, just unlucky enough to be in the way of a disaster. Housing first policies are basically 100% effective on these people because their problem is literally that their house was destroyed.
2) People who go somewhere to seek out work without having a permanent dwelling place set up there. Housing first programs solves almost all of this problem, too.
There's another group whose problems are mostly solved by housing first:
3) People who are marginally indigent, who lost their houses because they fell on economic hard times. Housing first programs solves a lot of these problems with housing.
Then you have these groups:
4) Drug addicts.
5) Mentally ill homeless.
6) People with wanderlust who literally just walk off.
These groups' problems are rarely if ever solved by Housing First.
As the chronically homeless are the people who cause most of the worst problems, you can thus effectively treat the first three groups and look like things are working really really well, and indeed, the temporarily unhoused make up the vast majority of the homeless population, and yet these policies will utterly fail to adequately deal with the chronically homeless and people will continue to poop on the sidewalks.
This explains why both the abstinence enforced housing efforts and the housing first efforts give similar results - both of these programs will house pretty much all of the first two groups, a lot of the third group, and basically not work on the chronically homeless.
> "In fact, if you’re a homeless person, why wouldn’t you want to live in a suburb? Quieter (so probably easier to sleep at night) more places out of sight to pitch tents, less crime (important if you’re living on the street!), and potentially lower cost of living in terms of food and good"
I suspect there are many, potentially better explanations to consider. Eg - what about the cost of transportation to/from downtown, combined w density and availability and quality of services for homeless folk? Including informal (eg. access to cheap or free food, incidence of cash only or black market materials and jobs to be done, etc...).
I suspect it makes more sense for homeless folk to concentrate somewhere central, and go to suburbs occasionally as warranted by eg. access to food, shelter or temporary employment.
Scott -
Obviously not much chance you'll see this... but...
This...
> Like many people, he tries to undo the damage done by The New Jim Crow, a book which convinced millions of people that mass incarceration was driven by a racist War On Drugs.
Might be excused as hyperbole but I'd say it's just silly. Millions of people convinced of a great sociological misconception by one book?
More likely, imo, is that (1) many people think that racism plays a part and (2) they think that for a variety of reasons such as discrepancies in crack vs. powder cocaine sentencing and factors such as John Ehrlichman's statements about the "design" of the ear in drugs to have a particular impact in the black community.
Clearly you have a bone to pick with The New Jim Crow, in which case you should make your argument in a more comprehensive manner.
A very deep dive, I appreciate, regarding the actual complexities of current socioeconomic crises, as opposed to the strident stances advocacy groups take - often, neither camp shows earnest concern for the human beings involved, instead seeking advantage in the abstract world of political strategy.
Fresh out of college, but full of indecision, I moved to Boulder, CO fifty years ago, and spent a few years working odd jobs, never related to my education; I lived for many months out of my car, hand to mouth, and in that era the State Employment offices had a sign-up list for day labor jobs. Vets had first priority, and every day a group would hang out, socializing, and mostly derisively rejecting each listing as it came up, for a stock set of excuses. I usually lucked out. A young man showed up one day, and after the vets passed, he'd jump to the job, regardless of how menial or bad it sounded. Around the third day, he jumped, and never came in again; I believe he'd landed an offer, because he seemed so eager and gung ho.
Other vets also passed through, but the hardcore cynics who thought they deserved more, played their game, mostly passed on work prospects, and that attitude is too apparent in the homeless ranks, I fear. One thinks of "entitlement" in terms of privileged, but the vets I watched were victims of that same delusion.
Most people make many poor decisions, along the timeline before being chronically homeless, and very few suffer a single immediate loss that is so large they directly end up on the streets. And even fewer then take to substance abuse to ameliorate their pain, physical or emotional. Abuse is likely the cause, for lost jobs, lost housing, not the result; sober homeless have priorities, and getting off the streets and employed is imperative.
The underappreciated factor, as I witnessed, is one of basic self-respect, and the social pressure, that makes some refuse to live with feeling the ostracism of a community. Disrespecting the community is a terribly dysfunctional coping strategy, and at the same time, having the community enable the homeless as victims of modern society does them a serious disservice. Just like the vets I watched, prolonged victimhood becomes a terminal condition.
For better or worse, the reality is that the world owes no one a living; interestingly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes a right to work, and own property, but no guarantee of a job or shelter. Assisting those who are unable to be responsible for themselves is a fair and benevolent action; those who are, need to be fairly held accountable for their situation. Progressive attitudes that conflate the significantly different scenarios actually confuse efforts to remedy problems, while impinging on other basic Human Rights, of those living responsibly.
Interesting review. Albeit a bit long. My Goodness! It might even be longer than the book itself!
Despite all those words, in your analysis of Housing First, you failed to consider a significant cost: damage! Many naïve landlords enter into Housing First leases thinking: "I get to help the homeless and get guaranteed rent from the government? hWhat could possibly go wrong?" Only to see their properties absolutely rekt by (now formerly) homeless people hwho haven't got their shit together. Sure... There's (now) compensation funds, but there's tonnes of bureaucracy involved in accessing them. I'm sure you know all about annoying bureaucracy, sir... And that doesn't really eliminate the cost. Just shifts it.
I believe that including damages shifts the needle slightly against Housing First in your cost-benefit analysis. Did any of the studies you read or data you came across mention anything about that??