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.
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.