Some of the longer running encampments will sometimes start to do this on their own. In places like skid row in LA with a large, dense population of homeless living on the streets, people may tap into an electrical line somewhere and run extension cords for lighting. Or they may find scrap wood and building materials and use that to create stronger structures.
Given enough time the encampments would likely start to resemble favelas or slums.
It's easy for us to forget but this was a very common form of housing development across the world until the past 2 to 300 years. A city may have a wall outside of which people would construct shacks, those shacks would slowly be built up and soon be real structures.
I think they have a quite different role, not because of some specific factors of living conditions (electricity, plumbing) but of the social factors - the residents of slums do expect their homes to stay there, that is their long-term home instead of a temporary spot, and they are creating and raising new families there; there is a large set of favela-born-and-raised kids but not a proportionally equivalent set of babies born and raised in the homeless encampments; there are some but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule, probably due to some state support helping get babies out of homeless encampments but a lack of similar support to get babies out of favelas.
Agreed. I think that if we wanted to substantially reduce homelessness in America a big part of it would be working out how to regulate the creation of private-sector $100-a-month housing units, which probably would be some combination of subsidized, tiny, and lacking "basics" like electricity/heat/water.
Not sure how seriously intended, and YMMV, but: it's part of the cultural mythos here, which partly fuels the self-selection of people in or out of the city. The hippie hangover, (social) libertarian vibes, everyone happy to denounce The Man (including The Man himself, there's always a bigger Man elsewhere to kvetch about). City of misfits, where all non-normies can find a niche. A strong narrative that people convince themselves into internalizing, about peace and love and generally just leaving others alone. Heaven forbid anyone ever Appeal to an Authority, that's such a Karen thing! Can't we all just get along peacefully without speaking to the mananger? Unlike Outgroup, whom we all know to be Hateful Bigots. Good thing none of them live here! They aren't welcome even if they did!
Obviously, revealed preferences show this narrative is often a crock of shit, but cognitive dissonance is a hard trap to break out of. Speaking of: Big 5 psychological factors. High on empathy and openness to experience, low on conscientiousness. Dunno about Xanax, but "everyone" is anxious and/or depressed and/or on some sort of meds. Homeless in particular are seen as like, a maximally high score in Victim Card Poker (Equity Expansion), so they get outsize outpourings of sympathy and Calls to Do Something (directed to someone else with power, I don't have power, power is evil, etc, etc.)
I live on the West Coast and I often feel like a pariah when I bring up libertarian talking points with locals. I blame the local school system for employing far too many hyper-liberal teachers who brainwash the kids. If I have kids I'm sending them to a religious school to try and avoid any hyper-liberal from having access to my child.
Could be beneficial to expose them to bunch of different conflicting value systems. Could nudge them to think about the principles on meta level instead of adopting the default mindset.
13-year old in y-tribe school: "Mr y-tribe Math Teacher is too strict and assigns way too much homework".
31-year old in x-tribe city: "Don't badmouth y-tribe, my math teacher was a respectable person and good teacher too!".
They won't, but they won't teach them hyper-liberalism either. One example is masks: my friends kids are still voluntarily wearing them even though its not a thing adults do anymore in Seattle, all because of the brainwashing by hyper-liberal teachers. If they instead went to a Catholic school, they wouldn't be masking up.
I too have seen police relocate homeless people across the border of the nice suburb near me to my less-nice-bigger suburb. The common knowledge that this happens, and that the police in nice suburbs are willing and able to continue doing this with the support of the self-selected nice suburb residents feels like a trivial explanation for the question of "why are there no homeless people in the nice suburbs."
I agree with your three bullets, but would argue those add up to "neutral impact on all people" BUT "cost money and resources to do," which is net negative. I generally don't like my tax dollars to be spent on dumping problems elsewhere. But the history of cities fighting each other shows that most people are willing to ignore this concern.
In the initial post, one commenter mentioned that we have a bit of a Tiebout Model or competition between city jurisdictions. I agree, and see it as a long term positive sum process. An arms race which longer term will lead to a race to the top more so than to the bottom.
My argument is that the progressive framing of the problem (compassion and housing first) enables and encourages both more homelessness and more bad behavior. The appropriate response is stern control for lawful, safe and clean conditions along with shelters for the truly destitute. Thus I see the current "solutions" being supplied by the most progressive cities as being iatrogenic in nature. They make the problem worse even as they try to make it better. We will never solve homelessness until progressives wake up and realize that they are part of the problem (when you subsidize something you tend to get more of it)
As such, it is important that non progressive cities stop the absurdity at their town limits. I don’t think this requires shipping the homeless into the city (though in all honesty I support doing so), but it does require making sure that your suburb is the least attractive place for itinerant homeless people. My experience is that the cops of the pleasant suburbs in my county (San Diego) are great at doing this by using the laws to discourage homelessness. As such the homeless willingly go off to the less conservative communities. The tourists are happy, the merchants are happy, the suburban families are happy.
The problem is indeed worse in the progressive cities, but bad ideas have consequences, and it isn’t like we haven’t warned them that they are promoting both homelessness, hepatitis and social chaos. Eventually the hope is that they will want to reclaim their cities and clean up the (literal) mess they are making.
Locally, homelessness is entirely solvable. We don’t have to outrun the bear, we only have to outrun progressive cities, at least until they stop hiking in the woods with pork chops tied around their necks.
What Turok's post highlights (and the reason the numbers make it more uncomfortable), is that the word "institutionalisation" is being used to conflate two very different things.
At present, the law allows people to be detained because:
1. They're awaiting trial for/convicted of crimes (imprisonment)
2. They're mentally ill and treating them is necessary to prevent them from harming themselves/others (involuntary commitment) or
3. They're mentally ill and so dangerous to other people that they can't be allowed on the street (occasionally involuntary commitment, often court-ordered hospitalisation after someone is found not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity).
Indefinitely detaining people to prevent them from causing negative externalities in the future (defecating in public, shouting at people, some risk of lunging at/robbing random passers-by, starting fires etc) isn't the same as either 2 or 3 above, because treatment will often be impossible and there's not that much risk of them seriously injuring/killing someone. Pretending that the purpose of this is in order to help them is broadly intellectually dishonest. The purpose of this is to stop them causing problems (in this case, being an unbearable nuisance) to everyone else, on a prospective basis.
In other words, it's a form of internment.
That doesn't mean it's "basically the holocaust," can't be done humanely, and isn't the right course of action. I think it's probably justified. But pretending this is an extension of the mental health system is wrong, and doing it in that way will only result in having to rope psychiatrists in to sign off that these people have "dysfunctional vagrant personality disorder." There's also something slightly unpleasant about pretending this is for these people's own good - they'd probably be happier, if not more flourishing, being allowed to defecate in the streets and shout at people. The justification for it is that no-one else should have to deal with them, and Scott's burdens-type argument doesn't apply because they've specifically sought out an urban centre built and maintained by the civilized population, rather than just roaming the woods in Montana.
"Indefinitely" is doing a lot of work here. These negative externalities are already on the books as crimes, and they carry proportionate custodial sentences. You don't need internment or indefinite detention or any of that. You do however need the police and the DAs and the courts to diligently and consistently keep arresting and making cases and incarcerating quality-of-life offenders in a way that keeps them incapacitated for a reasonable amount of time. It's true that the public will have to put up with them in between their release and their next due process, but that's much more manageable than totally lassiez faire and IMO a reasonable price to pay for living in a rule-of-law democracy.
How long are you planning on making the prison sentences for public urination/public drunkenness/drug possession/shouting on a public highway? Normally these sorts of things land you with a fine.
These kinds of crimes already provide for jail time, “not to exceed 30 days” or “not to exceed one year” or whatever. Rarely if ever seeking them is an administrative choice.
Fines against indigents are a ridiculous: normally they will never have the money, but if they do at some point get back on track enough to have the money, then good for them.
Mainly I am pointing out here that you do not need some new extraordinary power of indefinite detention, or to launder everything through mental health. We already have an enumerated set of behaviors we don’t want to deal with, and proportionate amounts of time for which we are not going to deal with you after you commit those behaviors.
Not sure if this system already exists or not, but in my opinion the best solution would be gradually increasing punishments. Which would require keeping a database.
Drunk or urinating on the street for the first time, $5 fine. Second time, $10. Third time, $15. Twenty times, a day in jail. Etc. If you don't break the rule for the entire year, the severity goes one step down. If you don't break the rule for consecutive three or five years, your start from step zero again.
This would mean that no one goes to jail for doing a stupid thing once, but people who just can't stop being a public nuisance despite repeated punishments will ultimately be removed from the streets. The law would understand the difference between breaking a rule exceptionally, and doing it all the time.
This exists of course, with varying levels of informality. But these kinds of incentives work only for basically normal people, not the ones who cause the majority of problems, like career criminals or "wretched homeless". Society has to commit to understanding that these people need in fact to be locked up indefinitely, and when time in prison is essentially torture for the vast majority of inmates, such commitment is difficult.
My third party perspective is that the cops in beach communities already do this. In Encinitas Ca, I see them taking pictures of homeless offenders and filling out some kind of minor report. My assumption is that they are building up a data base on repeat offenders and thus driving itinerants out of their communities to places where it is less well policed.
I don't think a definition of mental health that permits defecating on streets and shouting at people to be very useful, much like a definition of physical health that permits not being able to go up a flight of stairs.
Like it or not, societies and stairs are features of the modern world and a basic ability to navigate both is required, otherwise you will have a bad time.
Option #3 is that we lean harder on their friends and family to step up and take care of them already. Or offer them positive incentives to do so. That's a tall order, but it's not entirely off the table.
It's easier if there are actual mechanisms to help the friends and family with the burden. Many of the wretched homeless don't really have family or friends through.
Yep. Scott imposes some weird requirement on Shellenberger that he must condemn 1950s style institutionalization in order to get a fair hearing on his current suggestions. Why? He's clearly not proposing a return to that mid 20th century style. Nor, as far I can tell, is anyone else in California advocating anything like that. It just seems oddly irrational to use this as a point of contention.
I would expect that as a working psychiatrist, Scott is fairly familiar with what these institutions are like today. And would also have been socialized into psychiatry's understanding of its own history, which perhaps regards this period as an atrocity never to be repeated.
And yet so matter how much Scott knows about X, if Shellenberger isn't proposing X, then it is completely beside the point. It's a stunningly irrational take from a supposed rationialist.
The policy outcome you get by accepting proposal X isn't necessarily what the proposer has in mind. Your prior about what will happen should be informed by what happened last time.
Even if last time was decades ago and there have been massive improvements since? Nah. Why stop there? Why not invoke the 19th century? Or medieval barber surgeons?
The current situation is horrible for all. Scott ends up coming off as oddly reactionary. Can’t do anything? Well then status quo it is! Great…
And Shellenberger doesn’t propose X anyway. The only sweeping institutionalization in this debate is in Scott’s head.
Is that what I did? Scott appears to be defining "sweeping" however he needs to for him to be able to claim he is still correct. If he is going to define *any* institutionalization as "sweeping" I guess that's fine, but doesn't strike me as very useful or rationalist-like (and it certainly isn't the standard Scott holds his opponents to when it comes to accuracy or rigor). Is it not ok to point that out? Do I need to write a full length dissertation on the matter to offer comment on it?
A relevant discouraging story about massive homelessness:
Back in the 1980s, Environmentalists pointed at Mexico City to prove that we were all going to strangle in our own shit and pollution. The population had exploded, and crime, homelessness, poverty, pollution, and everything bad was skyrocketing.
But today, people aren't roaming the streets of Mexico City in hazmat suits killing and eating each other, which was the expectation in the 1980s. After their 2017 earthquake, it struck me as odd that I'd never heard how Mexico City got better. So I searched, but found nothing in any book or website explaining how Mexico City had escaped what had seemed to everyone like certain doom.
I was hoping to find an inspiring story about the power of humans to overcome adversity, but instead I came across a survey of poor indigenous households in Mexico City showing a distribution of arrival year among them which was constant back until 1985, then fell to nearly zero before that. Almost none of the poor indigenous people there today had arrived before 1985, despite the fact that the population of poor indigenous people there was much higher before 1985 than it is today. That suggests that the city kicked out or relocated the poor and homeless after the earthquake, or that they left on their own.
This book: [Environment and Urbanization--Environmental problems in third world cities, V1 N1 Apr 1989, Nottingham UK: Russell Press, ISSN 0956-2478] says there were 242,000 homeless families in Mexico City in 1970 [p. 42], and that in 1975 there were 1.3 million squatters living in shantytowns on a dry lake bed on the edge of the city [earlier on p. 42]. That's the same area of unstable ground devastated by the 1985 earthquake.
The number of homeless in Mexico City when I wrote this in 2017 was only about 15,000-30,000.
So, Mexico City wasn't saved by human determination and ingenuity, but by the 1985 earthquake, which gave them the excuse to get rid of perhaps two million homeless people. I found nothing indicating how they got rid of them. But they aren't there now.
The 1985 8.1M earthquake was over 10x stronger than the 2017 7.1M earthquake.
Plus, the earlier earthquake had culled out the weaker older buildings. Better safety standards were likely placed making the later earthquake that much less troublesome.
I removed the part of my comment that you're replying to, because I realized leading with 2 paragraphs about the 1985 earthquake could cause people to think it wasn't related to homelessness, and skip on to the next comment.
[For others: What I deleted was mostly this: "After the 2017 earthquake in Mexico City, I began to wonder with remarkably few fatalities, considering that the 1985 earthquake had "5000 - 45,000 fatalities" (Wikipedia). I wondered how they'd improved an entire city's stability so much in so little time.]"
Wouldn't explain why there aren't any poor indigenous people who where there before 1985, unless the jobs were so good none of them are poor anymore. And also none of the people showing up after 1985 where able to get these good jobs.
I didn't get this in, but I thought the entire review was problematic because it was based on SF through 2019 rather than through 2022. It seems like the entire situation tipped over into catastrophe post-2019. The book was published today rather than in 2019, partially in response to the worsening of crime and homelessness in 2020-2021. You can't just write that off to the pandemic and Floyd riots, because the cultural rot existing before 2020 was revealed under pressure, during those events.
All of your "senses" or "feelings" are nice but they may not be true. At least according to the SF Gov stats, unsheltered homelessness has decreased by 15% and overall homelessness has decreased 3.5% since 2019.
Okay – but this post, the comments on it, other posts, etc., have all pointed out good reasons to NOT trust the 'official stats' over other's 'lying eyes'.
"In June, 2020, Mayor Breed announced a Homelessness Recovery Plan that focused on expanding housing options for people experiencing homelessness, including investing in the largest expansion of permanent, supportive housing in 20 years. Since that date, just over 1,490 new units of permanent supportive housing that have opened. An additional 1,054 units will be open or under contract by July 2022, exceeding the goal of the plan by 70%"
I guess "the government buys all of them a house" is one way to solve homelessness.
I note that, two years into this plan, homelessness does not appear to have been solved in San Francisco. Nobody is denying that "the government buys all of them a house" is a thing governments can *try* to do to solve homelessness, we're just skeptical that it would actually *work*
An interesting analysis would be to ask if the very real problems of that development simply move elsewhere? The projects were an easy target as it was concentrated and highly visible - did dispersing the population also just disperse the related squalor and gang activity?
If the limiting factor in property crime reporting is police time/ability/willingness to take reports, then it could make sense for the level to remain constant despite increasing crime.
That was mentioned in The Wire I think and, IIRC, backed up by my previous favorite 'cop blogger', Peter Moskos, who worked as a Baltimore police officer for several years.
Yeah, if the cop shop has 10 people who answer the phones to take reports, and they are working at 100% capacity; any overflow just doesn't get recorded. People calling get busy signals or put on hold till they hang up.
I was thinking that there might be some kind of bias in terms of _who_ police accept reports from, e.g. 'serious' or 'important' businesses/organizations/individuals, and _some_ of those people aren't having any problems, now or in the past, reporting crimes.
But I think your idea might be an even bigger part of the apparent puzzle.
These six posts above (at time of writing this) are just the kind of thinking-out-loud we come to this comment section to read. Really excellent points.
Also seems plausible that the probability someone will bother to report a property crime is proportional to the perceived likelihood that the police will do anything about it. Which, given constant policing, would result in consequent reported rates.
Say the police have enough people to investigate 100 burglaries every month (in addition to everything else they have to do), but there are 1000 burglaries. Everybody pretty much knows that there's only a 10% chance that the police will investigate a burglary. Some people will figure it's worth it, some won't, so say it's 50-50 at that level and we get 500 *reported* burglaries.
A year later, the community is at 2000 burglaries/month, but the police can still only investigate 100. Now everybody knows the odds of the police doing anything are only 5%, half what they were before, so they're only half as willing to bother with a report. So, 0.25 * 2000 = the same 500 reported burglaries.
A lot of this seems to be separating the homeless into a mostly unproblematic group and a smaller very problematic group who are the ones people notice, alongside an argument that reduced rents will only help the former. However, I think it's worth asking whether housing costs are what's creating the problematic group as well. For example, it seems entirely plausible to me that although the down on their luck homeless mostly find their way out of their situation, a small minority keep getting bad breaks and transition into the hopelessly mentally ill kind. In which case, YIMBY policy would be a very important part of that solution long-term, but it would take a while for it to bear fruit. I guess that's similar to how restricting access to prescription opioids to those not already on them prevents abuse, but if you cut off an abuser them they will likely find an alternative means of accessing opioids.
Seems likely to an extent, but I think you have to look a little more broadly; it's not just "I can't pay my rent." it's "I can't follow all these damn rules" one of which is "Pay your rent."
With your libertarian bias what should be done with oppositional defiant disorder who can’t follow all these damn rules.
Keeping in mind these are people on the street in NYC in February many of whom eventually freeze to death. They are so disordered no amount of misery will get them to function in society.
Umm, my (obviously biased) take would be to reduce the number of rules.
For housing, that looks like "let people build themselves a shanty hut on the edge of town if they can't live as a normal tenant or homeowner." For employment it looks like "Stop trying to make every job meet "Professional standards" both in terms of what the employee is expected to do, and what the employer is expected to provide."
Employers want employees to meet professional standards because someone who is incapable of meeting professional standards is likely to be incapable of performing a job. In order to be able to do a job, you need to follow rules. Hiring someone who is incapable of following rulesis just throwing away money.
It's not about hiring somebody. It's about short-term labor. There are people who could sweep out a storeroom or unload a truck for a couple of hours for $25 but aren't going to show up every day on time. That's how drunks used to prevent themselves from becoming homeless. Casual labor and cheap flophouses. But we've decided that these things are demeaning and exploitatitve. So they get to panhandle and sleep on the street instead.
Agreed, things like HOAs and typical landlord rules can be onerous for someone who is fine with or prefers the kind of environment that has garage door murals and loud midnight birthday parties.
I think this definitely happens. In my comment quoted by Scott above, I mentioned the need to keep folks from falling into group C from groups A and B.
In some parts of the Bay there are streets with cars, vans, and RVs parked and people living in a seemingly reasonable way without lighting things on fire (for example, in light-industrial SJ by the recycling and waste transfer stations). My guess is that some of these folks have at least minor issues with mental health or addiction. But the bigger issue is how to help these folks on the edge before habits get worse or they become so hopeless that they spiral into lying strung out on the street or lighting things on fire.
So yes, YIMBY seems like it is part of the solution, in as much as the wretched might start as down-on-their luck. Clearly there are folks who don't take this path as well.
" it's worth asking whether housing costs are what's creating the problematic group as well"
I think its worth remembering, that there's a certain level of responsibility for maintaining a home regardless of your income/worth. Its important to remember, that even J Lo fell below this threshold, and she ain't anywhere near poor.
Homelessness is also an obvious cause of drug addiction. To give just one mechanism, if you can't find anywhere safe to sleep, or you're just exhausted from sleeping on benches, and you have to keep moving around... there's an increasingly cheap, widely available, and extremely effective stimulant that can temporarily help you with those problems, as well as make you feel better in a miserable time.
That may be true in some cases, but mental illness and drug addiction are the cause of homelessness for more people. A great many of the problems confronting us today result from the current fashion of believing whatever we choose without looking for any evidence. Everyone's brain is different, and so will react in different ways to any psychotropic drug. Just today I saw an article where a Danish researcher asserted that up to 25% of cases of schizophrenia are linked to marijuana (and who knows what else is mixed in with it). It is not compassionate to sympathize with the mentally ill and addicted but not deal with the issues.
If it's about Dunbar's number like Doug suggested below, every small town in history is already past it. Quite a few hunter gatherer tribes are past it as well.
And otherwise I don't see why it wouldn't scale, except from a purely subjective perception PoV: 1 million people is more than 6 people, so it looks like a bigger problem even if it's a smaller percentage.
There can be limits far greater than Dunbar’s number which are still imposed by Dunbar’s number.
For example, suppose Dunbar’s number limits the size of an elite network. As long as someone is know by the elite network, they’ll get decent treatment. The elite network runs the show and when there are problems, someone who isn’t in the elite network contacts their friend who is, and that friend advocates on their behalf.
This kind of system works just fine up until a limit of 150*150 = 22,500 people. That assumes there’s no overlap between friend networks of elites, and 22,500 is quite small.
We can fudge that model by allowing a “friend of a friend” mechanic and then lowering the network size. So maybe you can have human-style norms prevail at 75*75*75 people, which is around half a million.
Of course these numbers are all hand wavy ballpark figures. I still think there’s a real intuition under them that is at least worth considering. I’d do a decent amount for a neighbor or weak tie. For one of their weak ties, I’d do something similar, as a service to my friend. But for a friend of a friend of a friend? I don’t think I’d go nearly as far. Would you?
For everybody beyond a friend, or at most a friend of a friend, we get into how normal societal rules function: you treat people decently because they're people and that's how you're used to treating them. TBH I can't right now remember how it's supposed to be called, but the concept is pretty simple. And this is a solved problem for a very very long time.
It's called the Golden Rule - "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Which is more or less a preemptive measure. Jesus went further, saying (in effect) that we have a responsibility to care for those who need help.
There are things that people do for friends, but don't do for strangers.
Our capacity to do things is limited, so we need to prioritize. Sometimes you need to know people before you can help them efficiently. (The problem they report to you may be just a consequence of something they don't want to admit or don't consider important.) Sometimes you need to trust people, for example I wouldn't let a stranger sleep over in my house.
Merely treating a stranger decently doesn't solve their homelessness.
"Merely treating a stranger decently doesn't solve their homelessness." A point I made in an earlier comment. And no, I wouldn't let a stranger sleep over in my house, particularly if there were children in the house as well. Yet arranging for the stranger to have a place to sleep other than my house would still be possible.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is a good distillation of the behavior Jesus has called us to perform. Part of the lesson is that Samaritans were looked down on by many Jews (kind of like Gypsies and former slaves, perhaps?) but rose to the occasion. The injured traveler was a stranger to the Samaritan. The priest and the Levite were not indifferent to the stranger's plight; had the stranger been dead rather than injured, they would have had to spend a week in ritual cleansing, leaving their responsibilities unmet or foisted off onto others. But the Samaritan saw a need, and rather than rationalizing all the reasons it wasn't his problem, he met it.
So I agree that our first responsibility is to think clearly and dispassionately about what the problem actually is. Too many people seem to think their responsibility ends with expressions of sympathy, as in "Bring back our girls". And in many cases, the homelessness is not the fundamental problem, it's mental illness, drug addiction, and sometimes the person has just given up. There is an organization in my city dedicated to helping the homeless. They raise money by having their clients (those recovered enough to do so) sell a periodical on the streets called "The Curbside Chronicle". Every single person I've talked with who is selling the magazine - and I've talked to quite a few - has said their first step was to get clean and sober. This program does not come near to addressing our homeless population, but people must take responsibility for themselves and acknowledge their problems before they can be helped.
I kind of agree, living in NM now (population: 2M ish) compared to CA or even OH, there's a certain degree of "everyone knows everyone". At least among the politically connected, PMC class, which I have loose associations with. In larger states there are multiple regional power clusters. CA has the north/south divide; OH has three big main metro agglomerations, even in IL, which only has one real big city, it's *so* big that there are factions within it. Multiple hierarchical systems in competition, perhaps, vs one hierarchy to work through.
The east-west divide in California is much more profound than the north-south divide. The north-south divide is mostly about style and consumer preferences. The east-west divide is poverty versus wealth. Eastern California would be the poorest state in the union, poorer than Mississippi and just ahead of Puerto Rico, if it were on its own.
I've lived many places including downtown Seattle, LA koreatown, Austin, and various Bay Area. In 2019 I lived in San Jose near one of the big encampments that used to spill over into the road. Someone from that encampment overdosed in the park and we found them under the slide when we took our toddler daughter to play. Someone else set fire to our condo building, thankfully very little damage. Someone else broke into our car. Twice. I am aware that the police wanted to do something, and sometimes did sweeps, but had limited options and no ability to stop the encampment from reforming.
We moved back to Austin, far north suburbs, and in mid 2020 when a tent appeared on the property of the progressive church on the other side of my backyard wall, I went over in the middle of the day and tore down the tent and just threw it in the garbage.
I also used to think homelessness was a hard problem with no good solutions. I used to volunteer in kitchens on the regular. I threw my first software paycheck at one of those kitchens and I was happy about it.
This reminds me of an second-degree acquaintance's approach to reducing homelessness in his neighborhood: he didn't appreciate being hassled by homeless druggies, and really didn't want them hanging around in his (quite poor) neighborhood.
So he'd wait until it was bad weather, and go to the abandoned factory where homeless people tended to congregate and just run people off--a big construction worker with a gun yelling at you when you're half-asleep will get most people running--and then destroy everything he could that had been left behind.
His neighborhood had minimal persistent homelessness.
I mean, is the revelation that you can mold human geography through dehumanization and the crude application of force? That's a pretty well-established motif in human history, just... one that the Anglosphere mostly agrees should be excluded from our institutions, right?
Mr. Carlin and the big construction worker with the gun aren't institutions. They're individuals, just like the folks who they had these interactions with. I'm sure they would have preferred for the appropriate institutions to have intervened.
No, I think that the crude application of force needs to be reintroduced to some of our institutions. I think the main takeaway from this article is that taking away the crude application of force was a huge, naive mistake.
The takeaway from this in my view seems to be that the whole legitimacy of institutions, the rule of law, state monopoly on violence, etc is conditional on them fulfilling certain duties expected from society, a key one of them being maintaining "social order" (however the society of the time defines it) - and if the institutions fail in these duties, then it's inevitable that the society will consider these institutions as not reliable and self-organize (starting with such individual activists, but escalating to larger organizations) to do that job themselves, often in a worse, more violent, more indiscriminate, more discriminatory and unfair way.
If the prosecution of violent crimes is too ineffective, you get mob "justice" that will lynch people that seem guilty - and you won't solve that by fighting the lynch mobs without fixing actual policing.
If the prosecution of petty property crimes is too ineffective, you'll get behind-the-scenes beatings of suspected thieves and/or "private security" taking over the role, together with mass prejudicial discrimination of people who look underprivileged i.e. poorer i.e. more likely to commit petty property crimes; and you won't solve that without tackling petty property crimes.
And if the institutions can't solve homelessness in the country/state/city, then local neighborhoods will try to solve them at least locally and they will be willing to use approaches that the larger institutions won't. As in the "More policing, less law enforcement" article quoted by others that I read just now (https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/more-policing-less-law-enforcement), essentially a key duty of the institutions is to resolve social conflict before it escalates to violence; and they refuse to apply institutional violence when necessary then that does *not* result in less violence, it devolves to chaotic non-institutional violence instead.
I would add that one layer of the social fabric is individual and group enforcement of norms; deleting tents is a bit shocking in the current social milieu but it's very human.
Community / relational cohesion will do a lot of work when functioning. Giving everything to institutions is fraught and I think that's part of what we're seeing.
Ultimate source of social decay is religious (in a non-denominational sense) in my opinion, but these aspects of institutional limitation and community / relational failure are probably a good middle ground / secondary layer, more important than anything on the level of policy.
I'm tempted to make a 'City-Planners Hate Him! Local Man Solves Homelessness With This One Weird Trick!" joke but also make a joke about how he has literally reinvented early 20th-century policing. Unfortunately this topic is too sad to support so many jokes, so I'll leave it alone.
That has always been the unstated option, and the one that was used until a few decades ago. The problem is finding a way of getting rid of homelessness instead of just getting rid of the homeless.
I can't blame people for trying to drive vagrants away from their towns and property. As Eledex demonstrates their are very real risks involved. However that is ultimately a temporary measure.
Let's play Devil's Advocate for a moment. If everyone drove away any vagrants that couldn't prove that they were from that particular hyper-local community, that would at least make the problems more granular.
Of course, and most thought experiments are. It's interesting because it brings into focus part of how CMHCs failed -- in theory if every community were both so compassionate as to run a community health center for its own mentally ill AND so draconian as to drive away those who belong to other communities, the CMHC system might have had some success. Obviously large cities present a complex set of challenges and there was never any chance of creating enough CMHCs to make this thought experiment work even hypothetically.
Are you sure? Making homeless life more difficult would produce incentives to reduce homelessness. If there are no permanent homeless encampments it could prevent some people from joining that lifestyle.
Uh... maybe the laws on not illegally occupying another person's land? Or illegally appropriating public land for your own private use? I mean, I get the ethical difficulties here, but let's not be deliberately obtuse. If a guy pitches a tent on the sidewalk in front of your house or apartment tomorrow, what would you do? I'd imagine you'd call the city to have it removed. And if the city did nothing, what would you do then?
The story expressly states that the tent was not on the poster's property or on city property. And while I have not had homeless tents on the sidewalk directly in front of my residence, I have had them nearby. I have somehow managed to avoid waging a campaign of property destruction.
Again, the story states that the tent was on the property of another who did not, as far as we know, ask for the poster's help in removing it. Not the poster's own property, not public property.
True enough, but the poster was clearly reacting to prior episodes in which he saw which way things can go. Regarding the church property, it is still not clear to me that they are allowed to open a campground without dealing with zoning first. Otherwise we could all do the same.
"Nearby" is not quite the same thing. I am not defending the poster, and he shouldn't have "deleted" the tent, but I would say that I understand where he is coming from.
You continue to change both the facts at issue and the goalposts. Not immediately removing one tent is not "opening a campground". And the proper response to a zoning violation is not to go in and destroy property.
I understand the dislike, much as I understand why someone might strike out in anger, but understanding the underlying emotion is not the same as endorsing the behavior.
ETA
Nearby is not the same thing as your hypothetical, but then again your hypothetical is not the same as the story that was given.
I'm changing and moving neither, just pointing out that Matthew has a set of experiences with encampments that you do not. He laid out how it completely changed his perspective on this issue.
He had lived next to an encampment before in San Jose and suffered for it. Later, he saw the first tent show up next to his house in Austin and took action. Was he right to do so? No, he was not. So I agree with you on that one. . But lots of folks without his experience seem quite content to judge him harshly and have nothing but a shrug of the shoulders for what happened to him in San Jose. That is what I took from his post.
Thad, communities do have some moral standing to control who plops down into their neighborhood, especially if they are doing so in a way that clearly violates existing norms, present safety and quality of life issues, and sometimes violates laws.
I technically agree with your statement, but it is so vague that it doesn't really help here. While I assume that it is not your intent, as written it applies equally to the current case as it does to restricting private sales on the basis of race. The moral standing may exist, but it is subject to a great many restraints.
Bringing it back to the example at hand, that moral standing does not extend to individuals unilaterally destroying the possessions of others on the property of others.
I have to agree that it is vague. I'm not an expert here on moral frameworks, like others here will be. And I have to acknowledge that the extreme version of what I'm saying justifies all sorts of horrible stuff. Maybe I need to turn in my libertarian card, but I have come to believe that communities are justified in enforcing norms. And not even for extreme stuff like encampments: I think communities are justified in restricting AirBnBs if they feel it is harming their community by contributing to a housing crisis.
This is picking on the guy who spoke up, who did something. "unilaterally destroying (stealing) the possessions (peace, public space)" of others is exactly what the wild homeless are on the radar for. Matthew did not initiate this game, it was thrust upon him and he is playing the field as he sees it.
Your story is sad but true. I think what separates you from Scott is your first-hand experience. Once you've got an encampment next to the house you bought or the apartment you rent, this is no longer a "somewhere else" problem. At that point, you want directional progress more than a nitpicking at anyone (e.g., Shellenberger) who at least proposes positive change. The thing is, as widespread as encampments are, they still only affect a small percentage of the population directly as they did for you. Therefore you have lots of people with opinions without real first-hand experience, without really being stakeholders. Those folks tend to drive the narrative.
You mentioned mentally ill homeless in terms of psychosis. I’m interested in your (and others) thoughts about personality disorders leading to homelessness. Things like borderline personality disorder, low functioning sociopathy, oppositional defiant disorder, etc.
I would _guess_ that those other disorders are 'over-represented' among the "wretched" homeless, but much less so than people with psychosis (or a disorder that routinely/regularly causes/triggers it to any degree).
Hmmm – I think "can’t function in society without substantial assistance" applies to basically everyone!
But I think I know what you meant :)
I think 'long-term homeless' _mostly_ covers the group you're referring to. There _are_ some deliberate 'lifestyle homeless' who probably _could_ "function in society" without '_substantially more than usual_' assistance, but I suspect they're a small proportion relative to the 'needs help' group.
"Society" IS substantial assistance. The phrase "can’t function in society without substantial assistance" means "without much more substantial assistance than most people need.
If an organization's _new_ hires are all for 'make work' jobs it can be both true that the organization's budget is growing but that it's providing less (efficient/effective) services too.
The kind of depolicing that cops describe doesn't seem like the kind of thing that _would_ be reflected in smaller budgets. They're still doing their jobs; the jobs are just _more_ bullshit. And a lot of newer 'bullshit' seems like the kind of thing that 'needs' to be managed by more admins too.
We're paying just as much, or a little more, for _worse_ service.
Could you give me an actual link to budget analysis if such thing exists there?
I've checked some of the posts and I don't think anything that I've seen so far updates me. It's completely expectable that police officers would want to do more exciting things and less boring ones. Of course they would want to be more proactive and consider all the statisticians and burocrats to be ignorant and useless. And of course they would have lots of anecdotal evidence which brought them positive reinforcement. Not that it's all without any merit, but I believe my model already acknowledges it all.
I've spoken to some Russian FSB officers and guess what - exactly the same sentiment. They treat any restriction in their line of work as stupid bullshit, as a result want to dicard them, including any due process. And it's not that Russia has a lot of going in terms of due proccess, in the first place. These people views are not completely ungrounded, though.. They have to do absurdly ridiculous amount of paperwork. It's a completely broken equilibrium. But fixing it according to their interests won't get you a Pareto optimum.
Sorry – don't know of any detailed budget analysis that would suffice for you.
Does your model weight, e.g. official crime stats in SF over the anecdotal reports of residents about minor crimes increasing recently? If it does, you might not want/be-able to update until the stats are fixed (or at least improved) and that seems unlikely anytime soon.
One possibly important difference, e.g. between Graham and people like him and Russian FSB officers, is that Graham definitely does NOT want to discard due process.
But I've found quite a bit of evidence that in fact many/several U.S. cities have a below-normal/expected number of police officers and that they're also struggling to recruit new officers. That seems like it should be orthogonal to any evidence you might gain/glean from a detailed budget analysis. One piece of evidence of this is that I've seen ads on the NYC subway recruiting officers for (Washington) D.C.. That sure implies quite a bit of 'desperate effort' on the part of the D.C. police to me.
Toy example: police gets budget increase and spends all of that on Impact Officer that has job to ensure that cops follow all regulations, especially incredibly dumb ones that everyone sane ignored.
The issue with policing in America seems to be about priorities, if you are spending all your money on ex-military vehicles and SWAT teams you never use that's not going to help much. And if your workforce is mostly assigned to driving around pulling people over for minor infractions rather than investigating violent crime you're going to get less benefit. (How Do the Police Actually Spend Their Time? from NYT is interesting stats on this https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/upshot/unrest-police-time-violent-crime.html )
Apparently "pulling people over for minor infractions" IS very beneficial. There's – apparently – a big difference between _knowing_ that someone is a criminal, or even committed a specific crime, versus being able to 'prove' that they are, but 'hassling' the criminals imposes on cost on them and their criminal behavior.
And sometimes the police can luck out and what _seemed_ like a minor infraction can lead to a significant charge or some other 'break' that can be 'escalated' into some kind of 'real' punishment.
There's also the big problem with people generally not cooperating with investigations much, especially people living or working in the areas with the most crime (or violent crime).
"Sometimes they get lucky and accidentally stop a real criminal amongst all the pointless revenue generation" doesn't sound like a great defense of the practice.
It totally does seem like a great defense to me tho?
The idea is that it _does_ in fact have a significant impact on crime rates.
And, aside from the stupidity of relying on _crime_ as a source of revenue – holy fuck the misaligned incentives! – why would revenue generation, and mild punishment of bad behavior, be a bad thing either?
If they pull someone over for, e.g. a broken taillight, at least that person definitely knows that it's broken, even if no revenue is generated.
I'm all for doing away with stupid laws/rules/regulations, but I don't in fact have a problem with enforcing them in general.
What kind of alternative are you imagining? The police just not enforcing anything at all? Or only investigating 'serious' violence after the fact? Do you think enforcing littering laws/rules is similarly "pointless"?
(Also, please don't use double quotes to paraphrase me – however well, or badly, you do it. Single quotes are more clearly 'not literal' but double quotes implies that, e.g. I, said or wrote something that you in fact have written.)
I think society would be collectively better off if police stopped enforcing many (most?) traffic laws that do not result in harm to others, yes. I certainly think we would be better off if police stopped using minor traffic violations as an excuse to conduct unmotivated searches and needlessly delay/harass generally law abiding individuals, especially if they used some of that time to investigate crimes that actually have harmed others. Assuming stopping motorists for things like moderate speeding and having a broken tail light actually significantly impacts more serious crime, I sincerely doubt whether that tradeoff is worth it, and I am far from convinced that it actually does have a significant impact.
I have never heard of such a single quote/double quote convention, but will consider adopting it in the future.
My rough understanding is that a lot of criminals – the serious or professional ones – basically are too sophisticated to generally be caught, i.e. sufficient to be charged, for their (many) serious crimes.
It seems to be an extremely common misunderstanding that cops can in fact just "investigate crimes". Per "Graham", a lot of times perpetrators are caught, for serious crimes, because of seemingly innocuous report of some minor crime, or even something that's not even a crime, and that low-level 'traffic stop' style police interaction is one of the main ways that cops acquire any actionable intel at all.
And even given all of that, the murder clearance rates in a lot of places are _dismally_ low.
AFAIK, again based on people like Graham, it's mostly NOT the case that the police are "using minor traffic violations as an excuse to conduct unmotivated searches and needlessly delay/harass generally law abiding individuals". They should, and supposedly mostly are, using additional info gained _from_ stops because of minor traffic violations to possibly conduct searches – so very much (mostly) motivated, not unmotivated 'dragnets'.
And personally, I find that I very much would like the laws/rules against relatively mundane and minor offenses such as, e.g. littering or excessive noise, _to_ be enforced. I don't think it's reasonable to just give up entirely on ever being able to enforce anything like that just because the people involved could, e.g. resist arrest. I suspect that existing dynamic is going to continue to escalate until we're in a much worse equilibrium than we already are.
> Why is it so hard to solve the problem through competent and responsive police? Years of depolicing probably haven’t helped
"Years of depolicing"???
Why are you stating that as if it were a fact? It is not a fact. Police budgets just keep going up. Giving more money to cops is one of the only bipartisan positions in America.
Here's how it looks locally to me, using the Denver Police Department budget for illustration:
In fairness, no, not exactly. I do think it must be correlated with some mix of a drop in police *headcount*, and police *activity*. The Westword and Denver Post articles (plus one City of Denver budget PDF) I lifted these numbers from all spoke about *increasing* headcount. And over the last few years, major sweeps of homeless camps have been the DPD's favorite hobby, so it's not like they've all been on vacation or whatever.
(Also all of this should really be population-adjusted, but the best figures I can find suggest a pretty steady ~1% annual growth so I think we can disregard that over a short period.)
A more rigorous analysis would look at arrest counts, SWAT deployments, "number of people murdered by police", and so on. But on the surface all I see is more cops and more money for cops, along with an intensification of the Warrior Cop phenomenon (cf. Radley Balko), year after year after year, forever. Maybe they decided to do a little less because of Ferguson and George Floyd? I really doubt it, but in any case that's not "years of depolicing".
Denver might be weird – I think all the things you mention are, in other cities, trending in the opposite direction, e.g. police "headcount" and "activity".
The commenter "Graham" has a great blog covering all of this.
I wasn't sure yesterday how the drop in traffic stops and arrests caused the spike in murders, and I'm not sure I see the point here. I asked an ex-cop in the comments for some follow up.
My strong suspicion is that these things are not measured well enough to draw conclusions, and that if you ask a DA and a public defender, you would get two different stories.
You might find this article interesting: How Do the Police Actually Spend Their Time? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/upshot/unrest-police-time-violent-crime.html. Plasusibly the problem isn't number or funding of police but how they are assigned, I think most people would agree its poor prioritizaton to spend 5x time on traffic as violent crime
246M today is 118M in 1992 dollars, so there has been a drop in funding. Subtract cost disease as well and the actual amount of policing you'd get will have decreased markedly
Also presumably the Denver area's population has increased significantly during that time, further resulting in decreased per-capita policing (assuming inflation-adjusted salaries for officers have not gone down such that there are more actual officers).
And, apparently, cops are being required to write a LOT more reports, so, e.g. every traffic stop, now requires a LOT more time for cops, when they _haven't_ already been ordered not to do them at all.
"This is a great thought experiment / example of a cognitive bias / whatever it is. I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more."
600 is a ridiculously small population for a town. That is about the size of one graduating class in a large high school, or the population of an elementary school. It would be shocking if 6 kids in my graduating class were locked up.
I grew up in a village of 1,200, and if 12 people were arrested then it would certainly be a topic of conversation, but it wouldn't be shocking. It would be shocking if 12 people were indefinitely detained as being unfit to participate in a civilized existence that would be shocking, because that's not something that really happens at the moment. The number wouldn't be shocking though.
Wouldn't sound at all out of place for 17th-19th century Swedish fattigstuga ("poors' house") [1]. Every town / municipality would have one for poor and infirm without other recourse (= would-be beggars). As vagrancy and begging was forbidden, the inhabitants were kind of forced to live there if they couldn't live on their own or with relatives.
Out of my high school class of 104, I recall 104 made it through without being arrested. This was a public school in New Hampshire in the 1980s. I am ignoring minor events like police confiscating beer or detaining skinny dippers until their parents could pick them up. It wasn’t a class of angels, but I don’t think there was anyone in school or town (5000) who was incapable of participating in a civilized existence. By all accounts opioid addiction has made the situation far worse in the intervening years.
I have no idea what the actual state of my graduating class was, but I am an introverted autistic gamer, so I'm the wrong person to ask. The example was hypothetical, and remains true: if I had known about 6 people in my class being sent to jail for an extended period of time, I would have been shocked and appalled. Whether or not there actually were 6 cohort members in jail at any given time is immaterial.
Also, there is a big difference between 1% of the population being arrested in any given year and the imprisoned population being 1% of the total.
I've heard somewhere that the minimum population for a town was 10,000 (I think this was in Pennsylvania, many years ago). You could make it "lock up 100 people in a town of 10,000".
After a night's sleep, I think it may have something to do with the famous "Dunbar number". When the number of people in the "lock them up" portion gets to be a fairly large percentage of the number of people one can know personally, the idea of locking them up (or isolating them from the rest) becomes less comfortable. The reaction seems to be "Well, how do you know they deserve it?"
Yes this was a dumb thought experiment especially because it concluded we should lock people up, not for their actions, but just because they were undesirable.
"I’m surprised cities co-operate in this game while suburbs defect. Why don’t cities bus their homeless back to suburbs? Why don’t they eliminate their shelters? Obviously this would be pretty anti-social, but why are the suburbs selfish in this game and the cities altruistic? Is it just that there’s so much established precedent that cities believe it’s their problem and suburbs believe it isn’t?"
I think the most straightforward reason is that cities are big and suburbs are small. In the game between jurisdictions, homeless services are a public good. What you typically get with selfish investments in public goods is that the largest player invests and everyone else free-rides.
More concretely, it's harder for cities to push all the homeless people out because, since cities are big, a city that effectively excluded homeless people would massively overtax homeless services in surrounding suburbs, making them terrible places to be, and requiring cities to ratchet up the terribleness even further. On the other hand, each individual suburb can become a little worse than the city, encourage people to leave, and, have very little effect on the overall situation of homeless people in the city (and thus on the amount of aggression/enforcement needed to remain undesirable).
Even more concretely, let's say that it costs $1000 to send cops to an encampment and break it up. If you do this, the encampment will re-form somewhere relatively nearby. If you're, say, Glendale, CA, the odds of the encampment re-forming in Glendale are pretty low, because most nearby places are _not_ Glendale. If you're Los Angeles, CA, the odds of the encampment re-forming somewhere in Los Angeles are really high, because most nearby places _are_ Los Angeles.
I'd wager suburbs push homeless to cities more than vice versa because people are much more strongly against homeless loitering around their--and their family's--homes than around city centers, transit hubs, underpasses, etc. The latter aren't pleasant, but they aren't Eledex-anecdote level of frightening, either, and the city homeless encounters are usually brief and public.
(I know some people do live in cities, but suburbs tend to be primarily residences rather than a mix of zones and infrastructure you can more easily hide in).
This is interesting! And it squares with the concentration of homeless people being lower in residential parts of big cities, as Scott noted in San Francisco.
I guess the question would be whether the concentration is still higher in residential parts of cities than equally residential parts of neighboring suburbs. If so, you'd have to argue that the political process in cities is less responsive to residents than it is in suburbs, which very well might be true.
I think this is probably over-complicating things. Cities tend to elect progressive mayors/councillors, who "oppose the criminalisation of homelessness." If an interviewer asked them, I'm about 80% confident they'd say that shunting homeless people off to some other city was morally wrong. They have no real incentive to do anything about the homeless, they're opposed to doing anything about the homeless, and they don't do anything about the homeless.
Also (linked to this) do American suburbs but not cities directly elect their law enforcement (eg. sheriffs vs police commissioners)? Because that might also be part of the answer.
I don't think the second point holds. Sheriffs are county level, and suburbs generally have their own municipal police forces with a hired (not elected) chief of police.
But, I think that you are on to something by bringing up political responsiveness. Suburbs are, of course, typically lower population than cities.
So, if a group of 10 or 20 people (homeowners, business owners, etc.) raises the issue of a specific homeless encampment, they have more political relevance in a lower population polity. It's more notable to elected officials if that many people concerned about a specific issue show up at a city council meeting. It's more likely in a lower population area that someone in the group will have personal ties (e.g., friends with the mayor or a city council member) that can informally escalate the situation as a matter of police concern.
Probably the best way to see whether this is about the political stance of city vs suburban voters would be to see if suburbs still use tactics that push homeless people out when their voters are relatively left-leaning. In Los Angeles County, Santa Monica is a small independent city that gave a higher vote share to the more progressive prosecutor in the last election than did Los Angeles. So potentially similar political views but a different strategic position--since they're small enough to be able to push homeless people out into Los Angeles.
Another reason is that many cops, including 'city' cops, often actually live in the suburbs. They'd rather keep homeless in the city where they work than move them out to where they live.
My preferred solution to homelessness is vocational boarding schools. 8 hours every day of vocational education including some actual apprentice-level work on the side which defrays the cost. Instruction in manners and correct speech. Tight discipline. Tight security so no one can bring in alcohol or drugs. Mandatory intense exercise, because needs to be unfun enough to not incentivize people to become homeless, but unfun in productive ways and better than camping on the street. Field trips allowed during leisure hours but people who test positive for drugs upon return will lose those privileges. Three healthy meals a day and free healthcare including mental health services. Small dorm rooms. Teach a man to fish instead of just maintaining a life questionably worth living. I think this could all be done for less than the cost of furnishing homeless people with standard excessively large housing in expensive cities. People have gotten used to living solo in apartments that waste 7 times more sqft per person than dorms. The average for US housing is 700sqft/person. Dorms use only 100sqft/person but are a zillion times preferable to homeless shelters. I wouldn't mind going back to a dorm. It's extremely convenient to have a free buffet in the same building where you live and lots of like-minded people around. People who choose the same trade would be housed in the same wing of the dorm. Children would be housed together with their parents in the dorms and receive age appropriate instruction on-site. I suppose as people gain more skill they could gradually transition to getting more hours of actual work and fewer hours of instruction while still living on-site and helping to teach the novices. I miss college (except for some required off-topic classes and being poor). I think these vocational boarding schools could also be a good substitute for some of the welfare programs for non-homeless.
For incentive purposes it would need to be calibrated to be more pleasant than camping on the street or being in jail, but less pleasant than being poor and housed in a low-cost area.
1. It would be a dorm full of homeless people, not college students.
2. This is basically just bringing back workhouses, but accepting that they're never going to self-fund. That's not a criticism, just an indication that there's mounds of info on what this would be like.
3. The down-on-their-luck don't need this. The insane/stupid core of the homeless aren't going to learn anything because of the whole insane/stupid thing. Something like this *might* benefit the chunk of the housed population who are basically un-parented and uneducated, but wouldn't need to be residential and is a faintly pointless substitute for just educating them properly while they're still in school (if that's non-primitive, then so is educating them properly in the workhouses).
1. Homeless people who have something in common (they chose the same trade and are working to improve themselves) makes it probably much less socially awkward than completely random homeless people.
2. It's vaguely similar to workhouses, but vastly better conditions and emphasis on instruction. I don't think workhouses were focused on vocational education. I was going to mention that in the OP but I don't want to remind people of dubiously-relevant baggage about workhouses.
3. Almost every IQ level can find something useful to do. The 10th percentile of Janitors have an IQ of 72. I expect most homeless people have an IQ above 72. https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/occupations.aspx
I don't know if there's anyone too stupid/insane to do anything useful, but not stupid/insane enough to need either guardianship by a family member or institutionalization.
“ I don't know if there's anyone too stupid/insane to do anything useful, but not stupid/insane enough to need either guardianship by a family member or institutionalization.”
Then you won’t have solved the wretched homeless problem. And that’s the one the public cares about most.
I suppose the few who are so stupid/insane that they need either guardianship by a family member or institutionalization should get either guardianship by a family member or institutionalization as a last resort when all their relatives refuse guardianship. So when the vocational boarding school notices that one of its students is like that, it would try to contact all the relatives and get one of them to be a guardian. If that fails, assisted suicide should also be available for free if they don't want to go to an institution.
I mean living with a family member who takes care of you and has legal guardianship over you and claims you as a dependent on her tax return. So not only legal guardianship.
What if you give them the choice "assisted suicide or institution" and they don't want either? You do realize that unwanted "assisted suicide" is MURDER, right?
If they're too stupid/insane to live alone, but none of their friends/relatives will take them in, and they don't want to go to an institution, and they don't want assisted suicide, I guess move them into VR pods while they're sleeping. They can do all the same stuff they would have done on the street but without harassing real people.
I think everyone everywhere should have the option of free assisted suicide unless the reason for the decision is only a fixable depression.
I'd assume that the hypothetical system of the parent post would consider all the "wretched homeless" as needing institutionalization of guardianship.
I mean, if the proposal is to effectively institutionalize the vast majority of the homeless (though in a perhaps limited form of institution), then the notion of institutionalizing the "wretched homeless" is obviously not taboo.
Homeless people who follow the law wouldn't be put into the vocational boarding schools against their will. Homeless people who break the law would sometimes get an option to go to vocational boarding school instead of jail. Some others would volunteer. They can quit whenever they like unless they're there by court order.
1. I didn't think this was voluntary, so I don't see that it would be different to a prison but with an even more dysfunctional population. "Social awkwardness" isn't the issue - screaming 24 hours a day and shitting in the middle of the floor is.
2. I think it's very optimistic that you could make the conditions good or instruction effective, given the population you're dealing with. Public schools seem to be the direct analogy - however much money you throw at them, you're left with a couple of shabby rooms where no-one learns anything.
3. Ha hahaha haha ha haha ha haha. 1 person in 30 has an IQ below 72 (so roughly 10 million Americans, vastly outnumbering the population we're talking about), and janitors are going to be drawn from a disproportionately functional subset of them; the insane/stupid homeless are near-tautologically the least functional.
4. Most of them won't have family members, at least who have any interest in involvement. So this just boils down to mass institutionalisation anyway.
0: It would be sort of voluntary in that when homeless people get caught breaking minor laws they could choose to go to the vocational boarding school in lieu of prison. Others would sign up of their own accord because it's better than camping in the street.
1: The subset who are too disruptive even after getting meds+abstinence would be sent elsewhere. That's probably less than 1% of the homeless. I used to walk past a large homeless encampment in Venice CA every day for several years on the way to work. Almost all of them were quiet and didn't harass me. And these were "wild" homeless without the meds or abstinence. The harassers are a very visible tiny minority. (but maybe my appearance makes me get harassed less than other people would in the same situation, ymmv)
2: I learned a lot in public schools but but the experience really sucked before I had any choice in what to study. I got bullied a lot by low IQ disruptive students in elementary but the problem went away after I got the opportunity to take all honors classes in 7th grade. If there's a strong correlation between being low IQ and being an asshole, then yeah it's probably going to be horrible at the vocational boarding school. But the school will try to mitigate this problem with a lot of indoctrination+enforcement on manners and how to behave oneself. Shelters don't do that and don't have 2-3 person dorms for privacy either.
3. The raw unemployment in the US is only 6 million so most of those under IQ 72 probably found jobs. I don't have data on IQ percentiles below 10 by profession but the range probably goes way below the 10th percentile on the chart.
4. The phrase "Mass institutionalization" tends to conjure up the bad old days of horribly dysfunctional psychiatric institutions imprisoning lots of people who didn't need to be there. But my institution is very different and better, so collapsing this into the bad-karma-having category of "mass institutionalization" would be tantamount to the noncentral fallacy (or as Scott calls it, the Worst Argument in the World).
I think proper diet, exercise, abstinence from drugs, and medication could make a whole lot of mentally ill homeless people functional enough to self-support. Not all of them, but most.
Because being fully functional on the outside is more fun than becoming homeless again? Maybe indoctrinate people to avoid people and situations that might have drugs, to reduce the likelihood of relapse. Maybe when people get clean again after the third relapse, send them to a charter city that has border security so tight that no one can bring drugs.
Sure. That's why some people would need to live in an environment that offers them fewer temptations. People construct their own environments through choices about whom to befriend, where to live, and what to do.
They can't keep drugs out of prisons, which are literally the most heavily secured and guarded environments in existence. I don't think there is a level of border security short of a Berlin Wall-like setup of "nothing and nobody gets in or out, ever, and anyone who tries is killed on sight" that can stop drug smuggling.
This is a good point and I am not sure how drugs could be completely eliminated in a charter city. But the price could be increased and ease of access reduced, and this would deter many people.
> Why is it so hard to solve the problem through competent and responsive police? Years of depolicing probably haven’t helped, but also, I’m imagining being the police officer who shows up here, and - what? Eledex says “Officer, these people are generally annoying, they yell a lot and start fires and stuff”. ...
This paragraph and the following are extremely revealing, and I think go to the heart of the problem. Societies have historically viewed public order (by which I straightforwardly mean "People can't harass you in ways that physically endanger you in public places") as a pretty important public good.
Scott, in contrast, kind of shrugs his shoulders and says, I don't know man, what could the cops do, can you show the homeless encampment was really doing anything horrible, wouldn't want them to get hassled if they weren't.
The question is about the social default. Should it be a default that public order (again, in a completely straightforward sense) is maintained? My claim is that there is no good equilibrium elsewhere.
The criminal justice system in English-speaking countries is terrible at maintaining public order, because:
1. Some of it is covered by freedom of speech/expression
2. The law has to criminalise clear, specific things as opposed to just being vaguely obnoxious/a nuisance
3. The police have very few powers to solve problems other than arresting people for a crime, which eventually has to go for a trial
This has historically been fine, as when it came to the fairly small sectors of the population that caused these kind of problems, the police could just ignore the law and crack skulls, and everyone turned a blind eye. There's been a lot of pushback to that sort of thing, largely because people didn't clock that it wasn't just an undesired side-effect of policing but a load-bearing part of the system. Take it away and you end up where we are. Leave it in place and you accept the slightly weird and dubious principle that, "Sometimes the police can just ignore the law and some people don't really have rights but we pretend we do and that's fine." Try to bring that back and God alone knows what would happen, as you'd shift it from being implicit to explicit.
Historical correction: it's not that the police were just ignoring the law. It's that, prior to 1972, there were laws in most states and localities against vagrancy. These laws usually expressly referenced harassment, drunkenness, solicitation, and related behaviors. Police would act under these laws to make arrests. Habeas corpus still applied, and judges could and did order people released.
In 1972, the Supreme Court (Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville) struck down most such laws.
"Papachristou did not strike down loitering and vagrancy laws altogether. Rather, by declaring Jacksonville's ordinance unconstitutionally vague, the decision imposed clarity requirements on future laws of this type."
The suburbs who kick homeless people out presumably have stricter laws than the cities with large homeless populations.
According to Wikipedia, the laws that were struck down in "Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville", were against being unemployed, and walking at night. This seems reasonable to me, and it forced cities to be more specific about what exactly is forbidden.
But then came "City of Chicago v. Morales", where gang members staying at one place with no apparent purpose and refusing to disperse after the cops told them to, was also considered technically a constitutional right by a close majority of judges.
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding of their reasoning is the following: 1) You can't make mere "standing somewhere" a crime, because it is too vague. 2) But then you can't also make "standing somewhere, after the cops told you to go away" a crime, because if it was *legal* to stay there *before* they told you to go away, then they had no business telling you to go away.
In other words, being a public nuisance is legal, because it is too difficult to provide an exact mathematical definition of being a public nuisance, and cops using their common sense is unconstitutional.
I don't know so much about American law so forgive me if this is naïve/silly, but: the issue of police inability to [something like-] create/maintain spaces wherein the population feels safe/comfortable/etc. doesn't seem so much to involve the law itself having changed..
This isn't really a reasoned/empirical argument, but I simply think that the critical problem is exactly what you address Stephen, namely why are the police incapable of handling 'minor' problems (which in fact disrupt the social 'peace' etc.), and the answer is more to do with population size, or police inefficiency, or a slow legal system... etc
But more specifically, that, for whatever reason, it feels like we're in a new situation where the choice is suddenly 'aggressive policing' or 'laissez faire gradually rising disorder and unrest' -- and that this choice is only necessary because something underlying has pushed us to this point. At least where I live I feel the main issue is population size, but again, I'm not familiar with the American legal/police system except through reading the occasional article like this.
I have several European friends who have commented that nothing like homeless encampments exist, or would be allowed to exist, in the cities where they live. They have high population densities and are not free of problems with drugs, crime, etc. But anyone who hung around a place bothering people, much less put a tent, would just be quickly whisked away. Not treated roughly (unless they refused to cooperate), but definitely moved along.
On my vacation to (northern) Italy about 20 years ago, I went on day trips to a some touristy cities (Verona, Padova, Mantua etc.) There were a number of people hanging out in parks, and others selling stuff on sidewalks.
However, a couple of times they all vanished quite suddenly. If you looked around, you would see one or more police officers soon after.
Oh, I suspect a lot of them are treated quite roughly. In most European countries police are more vicious than American cops in my experience, and there are no bills of rights. It helps with public perception that the people being roughed up generally look like the majority population.
I have the opposite impression, and persons arrested / subject to a police intervention do have a lot of rights. On the other hand I'd be legitimately scared of the police in the US.
I've been to a police station a few times, including once as a perpetrator of property destruction (I was young and drunk, had funny ideas, some guy's boat suffered), the cops were way more courteous and friendly than I'd expect from people paid minimum wage to deal with assholes all day.
That is correct. In Poland homeless people who chill in public spaces are routinely visited by the police, though they'll be left alone (aside from a suggestion to visit social services) if they're not disruptive. I can't imagine someone setting up a tent in the middle of a city and just not being bothered, they can fuck off to a forest if they really want to (technically illegal without permission, but nobody cares).
If a homeless person was aggressive towards a passerby that'd certainly end with an arrest, with or without a topping of police brutality once the cameras are off. Everyone knows this, so they don't cause problems.
Here in Austria for a while we had a lot of apparently alcoholic homeless people hanging around train stations who were clearly Polish. The rumor was that the Polish government was giving “hopeless” individuals one way tickets to Vienna. The number of Polish speaking homeless seemed to shrink to zero once COVID hit, which maybe supports that rumor.
Exactly! In Europe there is a certain level of BS that is just not tolerated. You can get help, at the community's expense, but you get help on the community's terms. There are public spaces but they have basic public rules. From what I have seen, the European way seems preferable to the chaos we have here in San Francisco. Here, we have people who are somehow "below the law". Leaving them alone doesn't seem to be going too well, either for them or the rest of the city.
What I find fascinating to wonder is if policing will ever get so thin that vigilantes who torch homeless camps and crack skulls will get the same blind eye the police themselves did in the not-so-distant past.
Nope. In turns out that such "blind eyes" are not turned symmetrically or generically. Rather, there is a strong political element to them. Vigilante action against homeless camps, even of a restrained sort (i.e., not torching anything but just pushing people to move out) would lead to a media uproar and demands for arrests.
There might not be any law enforcement solution to this problem. But there could be a good policing solution. Eledex calls the police, the police show up, and threaten to arrest them. They scatter and so aren't a concentrated source of nuisance for the night. And maybe the police arrest one or two of the worst, before releasing them in a few hours because nothing they've done is worth taking to court. After this has happened a couple of times, groups of homeless people probably wouldn't congregate on that lot and be a public nuisance to Eledex anymore.
I'm no expert on policing, so don't trust me too much, but here's some factors that I expect contribute:
(1) Not enough police officers to cover the complaints. Solving serious crimes should take precedent over nuisance, even if the nuisance compounds into arson in the longer term.
(2) Increasing bureaucratization. When every incident needs an increasingly complicated report, with the outcome ideally proscribed by police regulations, the police get more tied into law enforcement. The work gets pointed more at the regulations instead of solving the problem as easily as possible. It also uses more time.
(3) Influence from activists. Some of this is valid criticism. This sort of policing involves a lot of personal judgments, which could have various forms of bias. Some of this is from people who want to abolish the police, or at least eliminate this sort of policing.
When police officers believe that doing this sort of thing is more hassle than it's worth, or when they're constrained by police regulations on what things they should or should not intervene in, or when they're overworked, they are less likely to respond to nuisance calls.
#3 mostly. Plus there are numerous folks who are more than just activists, but make a living with the homeless as their "clients". The Homeless Industrial Complex is a real thing. A stable (or growing) list of clients means more income.
Incentive structure issue? If you are ranked by "number of arrests" you have no incentive to actually reduce overall crime, just to get as much of the low hanging fruit of easy to arrest people as possible
But of course as long as the encampment is not right next to Scott's house, or in his front yard, it is easy for him to shrug his shoulders. They aren't going to burn HIS house down, so no big deal, right? That's the whole problem with his analysis. You can't begin by dismissing the problem as no big deal, just because it doesn't affect you personally. There are good and sound reasons why municipalities have traditionally banned public camping outside of designated areas, and it is not just because the people can be "annoying". Fire risk and public health come to mind.
I think the genesis of the policy in Portugal since 2001 does not depend on the country being less conservative than others. The country was conservative by default during Salazar's dictatorship, which lasted until the 1974 revolution. At that time, the population was ~20% illiterate (or up to 40% functionally illiterate), e.g. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000029874 but I've seen similar numbers in other sources. The country evolved rapidly after that, in many colourful ways, but I think this is a cultural inertia that can't be shrugged off quickly. With regards to drug use during that period, the highlights from this report are a good summary (page 13 "Portugal before 2001" onwards)
- "drug use, or, to be precise, cannabis use, started to become more visible in Portugal when Portuguese citizens returned from colonies where marijuana was grown and used openly."
- " They possessed no common knowledge about drugs, especially the distinction between hard and soft drugs, what problems different drugs carried, what health risks they presented to individuals, or what kindof social problems they caused."
(censorship during the dictatorship means that this was a problem that would not be discussed)
- "In the early 1980s, the most commonly used drugs in Portugal were hashish and marijuana, but heroin had already appeared by the late 1970s."
- "In the late 1980s, and especially in the early 1990s, drug consumption in Portugal became a subject of social concern. (...) A likely contributing factor to these impressions was that drug consumption in some districts of Lisbon and other bigger cities had become more open and visible."
The specific area mentioned here was "Casal Ventoso" in Lisbon, demolished in 2000
- "The first comprehensive study on drug use in Portugal conducted in 2001, however, showed that, contrary to popular belief, the level of drug consumption in the country was among the lowest in Europe at that time. Barely 8 percent of the Portuguese surveyed admitted to using drugs at some point in their lives. (...) Although Portugal had one of Europe’s lowest levels of illicit drug consumption among the general population, experts agree that during the 1980s and 1990s, it was one of the highest prevalence countries for problematic drug use, particularly heroin use. The 2001 survey found that0.7 percent of the population had used heroin at least once in their lives, the second highest rate in Europe after England and Wales (1 percent)"
And that number leads me to the anecdotal part of my comment. By the late 80s, heroin use was so widespread that most people knew of people in one's own or other families who were addicted. Two important aspects here are that people are closer to their families than average in the US (they typically live with their parents until they get married), and peak addiction often led to horror stories of people stealing from their parents and, eventually, being evicted in despair. If people ended up in jail, either for consumption or for theft, it was quite likely they would share needles, and this happened in tandem with the AIDS epidemic... All of this happened to "kids of good families" (as our idiom goes), as much as to poor people, which helped in downplaying explanations about poor personal choices, versus the alternative of viewing it as a medical problem. Portugal was a much more classist society then, especially in the light of the education issues, so I think this is also an important factor. So, if anything, the policy did emerge in a country that was more conservative than most of Western Europe, at that time, and also at the bottom of most EU rankings of wealth, development, etc once it joined.
This was the setting where the decriminalization policy was proposed. This was under a government led by the large center-left party ("socialist party"); it worked well and visibly enough that, when there was an alternation to the large center-right party ("social democrat party"), the policy was continued. There have been administrative and practical changes over time but, broadly, the main thrust is still to fine people for consumption, and refer them to a "Commission for Dissuasion of Drug Dependence". They will then be referred to counselling, rehab, or social work support, and/or be fined.
This is called Scattered Site Housing, NYC started doing it in 2017? possibly a bit earlier, and it is wildly unpopular everywhere the sites have been scattered.
"I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more."
I suspect this is because you believe they could accurately identify the 6 people in town of 600 that need to be locked up, but don't believe a nation of 200 million could precisely identify the exact 2 million they need to lock up. If they weren't perfect with all those identifications, and 2 million seems a lot easier to mess up than 6, then a bunch of innocent people would be locked up while the situation isn't even made much better because the "scumbags" who weren't caught would still be wrecking things outside.
Personally, I doubt the first situation of 6 out 600 would ever occur either. It seems almost certain to me that at least one of those six would be innocent and imprisoned because it was easier than the alternative, or just be inconvenient somehow to those in charge of the town, and then the town is really more Omelas than ideal.
Interestingly, I found my intuition even on the small town example to be doubtful of being able to accurately ID the 6 problem people. Having been a resident of a small town, I am very suspicious that one man's scumbag is another man's "guy who doesn't follow the rules of my religion or mow his front lawn and annoys you with his fringe political ideas."
Yeah, this is my basic problem - because a lot of people say they just want to institutionalize the actually violent homeless person, but don't want to do anything to the eccentric, but weirdly, in the past, the eccentric guy has also been unjustly prisoned in the past by the state, and no, I don't think that guy should get institutionalized so you feel more safe.
Well, you could just focus on the ones who are already repetitively breaking numerous laws. I think you could accurately identify those. Cities already do, they simply catch and release ad nauseum. You could, for the worst of the worse, just stop the release part.
"So I take the opposite position here: if the government wants people to be able to live in places long-term when they don’t have the money to pay, they should give those people rent vouchers, or pay the landlord directly, or something - not invent a legal doctrine which is basically “if people don’t want to pay you then you still need to provide the service indefinitely” and give people as many lawyers as it takes to enforce that."
This is not what I argued. I don't want that "if people don’t want to pay you then you still need to provide the service indefinitely and give people as many lawyers as it takes to enforce that.", if people simply don't want to pay they won't win the court case and I'm not arguing for infinite lawyers, just one. To counter your other points I'll show some studies rather than throwing anecdotes back and forth. A study in Denver found that in the case of eviction; 89% of landlords had lawyers while less than 1% of tenants had: https://www.coloradocoalition.org/sites/default/files/2017-09/Facing%20Eviction%20Alone%209-11-17.pdf Since a court case can prevent you from gaining housing in the future (even if you're right), this power imbalance leads to people not wanting to stand up for their rights and being evicted without due process. A study in Milwaukee found this happens twice as much as evictions that do have due process: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/BLUU3U
Now we could create more rental vouchers, but even if we can somehow get the landlords to accept them, adding them to the supply-constrained housing markets will only cause prices to rise. If there aren't enough houses (and none are being added anytime soon) landlords can easily raise prices to capture the value of the new vouchers without fear that they'll lose renters. I predict that people that don't receive a voucher will see their rents go up and we will have to perpetually increase voucher funding to try and stay ahead of the higher rents they're causing.
A few different points mentioned that I don't think were fully played against each other.
1. You originally stated Schellenberger supported "sweeping" institutionalization. He countered that while he does support institutionalization, he is not pushing for "sweeping" institutionalization.
2. After this point, it seems there is a consensus that "Homeless people" is a meaningless generalization of heavily varying degrees of independence. An example is given that "Autistic People" can range from socially awkward but fully functioning members of society, to those who need to be institutionalized with 24/7 care to not harm themselves.
3. The number of 'mentally ill permanently homeless people' is likely quite low compared to the entire homeless population. At the same time, they do cause an incredibly outsize negative impact on the quality of life of the areas they inhabit, along with crime and tremendous city expenditure to no end.
Possibly semantic, but I would not consider institutionalizing say ~4000 people in a few major cities to be remotely "sweeping" institutionalization. I think, as you did consider later, a few people locked up can be a reasonable price to pay for a significantly healthier society.
You've mentioned sweeping institutionalization in the 1950s several times, I imagine this is particularly meaningful to you as psychiatry was involved in this back then, and you may be sensitive to encouraging bringing it back. Per the 1950 US Census of institutionalized people, there were in 747817 in Mental Hospitals or Homes & Schools for the mentally handicapped, or 0.494% of a population of 151M. Current US population is 330M, and based on the data you've shown I am skeptical that this 'institutionalization of mentally ill permanently homeless people' would institutionalize close to 30k people nationwide - and that would be an order of magnitude lower than we had in the 50s!
I think that your original statement, that Schellenberger favors sweeping "sweeping institutionalization of the mentally ill" is in fact a mischaracterization of the size of the homeless population for which Schellenberger favors institutionalization as a solution. That said, he may not have been clear enough.
And this is flaw that undercuts Scott's review. Scott is more concerned about the boogeyman of returning to 1950s mental asylums than he is about the current dystoptian nightmare that exists in many parts of San Francisco. That's his perogative, but it makes no sense to throw it at Shellenberger. He might as well have just said that he doesn't really feel affected by the homeless problem to any great extent, and have been done with it.
Regarding #9, I do think the book did a good job explaining how horrible institutionalization is. Nevertheless, unlike bygone eras, putting addicts in rehab past the time they physiologically crave the drug the post makes sense. I do agree with the dangers of institutionalization. All I can think, and maybe someone has data to support or refute this, is a feeling that even good ideas that seem to work well do so for about a decade before bad actors game the system and what was genuinely helpful is no longer. I would be in favor of a type of institutionalization that had this baked in and was able to be broken apart when it stopped working. I readily concede that would be almost impossible.
> But the stats I found were that 70% of SF homeless lived in SF before becoming homeless, 22% were elsewhere in California, and 8% were from other states
It's critical to point out that this is *survey data*. The source in the Wikipedia article for that claim is this:
I wish you would spell it out because I don't think I get it. Are you suggesting that a significant number of the people surveyed lied about where they are from, in some correlated way? If so what is your theory about why they would do that? (Maybe there is some fact I am missing that would make this obvious if I only I knew it. Is there some benefit you get if e.g. you say you are from SF that you don't get otherwise?)
"Two years ago, a Seattle Times reporter, Daniel Beekman, spent four hours with me as I showed him how people arriving from other cities are processed to become “locals.” I explained how soon after landing, they are assigned a local zip code with an address (of a post office, church, or intake center). City officials actually pay people to wait at the Greyhound bus terminal to process fresh arrivals. But the editors chose not to publish this exposé, and I never heard from Beekman again."
Thanks for the link. The author seems to have an axe to grind but taking them at their word their quote just says that some organization (funded by the city of Seattle?) seems to be arranging services for new arrivals. The quote doesn't seem to be claiming that this service includes coaching people to lie if a survey-taker ever asks them where they came from but maybe there is more context I am lacking. Are there people claiming to have received such coaching?
"He gets his directive from the editors—who reveal their own agenda when printing periodic updates on homelessness, including a report stating that 86 percent of all homeless people in Seattle are locals and that in-migration is a myth. The report pulled data from providers of services to the homeless. The bureaucrats build careers off homelessness, and they have devised techniques to hide ugly and frightening realities."
I saw that, and read it carefully. There is innuendo but it doesn't actually claim that these bureaucrats actually coach people to lie, just that they have "devised techniques."
Then there was that Guardian piece I linked in the last article which talked about migration and had a (brief) bit about SF being a majorly net importer.
Everyone involved in the data collection process wants them to say that they're from SF. The homeless know that being from the local area is better for them, and is more likely to get them treated sympathetically. I think there are lots of reasons people like this would lie.
Yes. The Homeward Bound program tries to repatriate homeless back to the where they are from. If you don't want that, but instead want to stay in San Francisco and continue to get public support, and get placed on the list for free housing, you say that you are "from" San Francisco. Given that the "from" is ill-defined, it isn't exacly a lie so much as a misrepresentation. If you visited Hawaii and rented a place for a month, then ran out of cash and got evicted, you would meet the definition of having "lived in Hawaii before becoming homeless", but most people wouldn't call that being "from" Hawaii.
I don't think there's any large incentive to lie here. However, what makes someone "from" somewhere?
"Seventy percent (70%) of respondents reported living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless. Of those, over half (55%) reported living in San Francisco for 10 or more years. Six percent (6%) reported living in San Francisco for less than one year. This is similar to survey findings in 2017."
So only 37%(ish) have lived in San Francisco for more than 10 years.
One working definition of being "from" a place is where you were born or spent your childhood. Another might be moving to a place, then holding down a job and participating in the economy for a set length of time, although that time would of course vary according to opinions. Probably at least a few years, in my estimation, would be needed to count as "from-ness". A lot fewer than 70% would meet even this defintion in San Francisco.
Yep. Show up in San Francisco, economically desperate, possibly mentally ill, and possibly addicted to drugs, and couch surf for a few weeks, then become homeless, and you count in the 70%. Did you grow up in SF? Did you go to school in SF? Did you ever work a full-time job in SF? Doesn't matter apparently. The 70% is pure propaganda from the Homeless Industrial Complex.
Your logic in the first section is 100% incorrect. You cannot accept self report answers to the “where are your from?” Because people lie intentionally and think they will get sent back the city they came from. You are so smart so surprised you fell for this. Also there is typically no checking on them - e.g. looking them up online or in databases to cross check it with known addresses
"Seventy percent (70%) of respondents reported living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless. Of those, over half (55%) reported living in San Francisco for 10 or more years. Six percent (6%) reported living in San Francisco for less than one year. This is similar to survey findings in 2017."
So only 37%(ish) have lived in San Francisco for more than 10 years.
That 32%(ish) who moved to SF within the last ten years and then got homeless were probably not doing that great when they moved there to begin with; and it's entirely possible that a big portion of those 8% "out of state homeless" get an apartment for a few months at some point before winding up back on the street and now get counted as "Homeless from San Francisco."
right. again, all self report data. people living on the streets know not to generally say they are from out of state b/c they fear being sent back or losing services. so we should not accept these stats at face value. all you need to do is get a real name/ID and run a background check, medical record search, etc. it would be very very very very easy to get better data on this. I think this fake data serves the goals of homeless "advocates" b/c their narrative is always that it is due to housing being too high, etc. and they become quite dogmatic in this thinking. they do this to garner sympathy b/c if it happened to them then it could happen to you vs. them being mentally ill/drug users.
Julian my background is in psychology (Ph.D Clinical Psychology). It is common for people with chronic mental illness or drug addiction to DENY their symptoms or to minimize them. So there is that observation that anyone who works with patients understands. Also, there is no significant evaluation beyond this question which is administered by people with clipboards. I don't think people understand this which is the only reason I took the time to add this comment. So if you went to a homeless encampment of 100 for example, today they would have some likely minimally trained person asking these questions and the patients self report of "mental illness" becomes the data point. they don't google search, do a background check, do a psychological evaluation. As a psychologist, if I said someone was not mentally ill b/c I asked them if they were and they denied it, I would be committing medical malpractice.
but in the context this is basically the typical way this data is derived.
and then it gets political by those that want to say the homeless are not mentally ill. it goes like this. this is how the data is edited down to being headlines in the news that people scan and then are given a narrative.
"It is estimated that 20–25% of homeless people, compared with 6% of the non-homeless, have severe mental illness."
it's a political manipulation of sorts by homeless "activists/advocates" because the only actual data point is that that percentage is the % of homeless that self-report that.
Lots of commenters are echoing Shellenberger's point:
"One word, “homeless,” entails an entire, insidious discourse that acts unconsciously and subliminally on our hearts and minds, rendering us unable to understand the reality before us."
Huge differences between different types of homeless people, and using the same word for the down-on-their luck and the "wretched" person who is not capable of holding down a job or even having an apartment without trashing it just obscures our thinking.
A bum becoming a hobo would be a personal improvement, right? "A hobo travels and is willing to work; a tramp travels, but avoids work if possible; and a bum neither travels nor works."
Anyway, I'd like to read the Carlin piece you mentioned. Can you supply a link?
I was certain it was part of his bit about language that conceals the truth. He did a variety of versions of this routine, and the one that includes language about bums isn't on youtube. You can watch these two clips and imagine it, though:
I may have hallucinated the line, but i remember it as him saying that we used to call people "bums", then "hobos", then "winos" and eventually "homeless people", with each layer of softening language obscuring the reality further.
Precisely. I would prefer to specify what we mean. If we mean, tent encampments taking over sidewalks with widespread fentanyl and meth abuse, we should just focus on that.
I wish we could. Discourse appears to have broken down to such an extent that this is not possible. Just as not all illegal immigrants are rapists and also not all immigrants become functioning members of society, not all homeless people are psychotic bums and not all are down-on-their-luck artists or pianists.
Also this is INCORRECT. This is self-report. This is NOT based on psychological evaluation, psychiatric diagnosis or any medical history.
The manipulation here is that they ask people if the reason they are homeless is b/c they are mentally ill or substance problem.
“This is another really good catch, and means the percent of the homeless with mental illness + drug abuse is only about 22%, not the stated ~50% - although considering only the chronic homeless separately might blunt this change.
Is there any homeless research that investigates their background? There are a lot of survey results and reports on what they said to social worked, therapists, psychiatrists, etc. do they ever then go out and talk to parents, siblings, the boss at the last job he held, people they knew in high school, etc.
Maybe part of the problem is an over reliance on self reported information?
> I'm still confused that reporting varies in exactly the right way to keep the reported level constant regardless of the real level,...
To me, this just screams parallels with induced demand, the Jevons paradox, and/or buffered chemical equilibrium: Criminals have some upper bound on the risk of real consequences that they will accept. Shopkeepers conversely have an lower bound on what probability of inflicting real consequences justifies reporting. The consequences equilibrium point is thus stable against environmental changes that assign consequences differently unless you can exhaust the buffered (non-participating) portion of one side or the other.
This is analogous to a freeway widening project having zero effect on traffic: people have a upper bound on traffic pain, and the width of the freeway is merely a lower bound on the number of people needed to inflict a given level of traffic pain in that location.
It might depend a bit on who is doing the reporting, in the sense of what kind of shops and owners. I can imagine small businesses run by the owners doing more reporting than chain type stores or stores run by a manager only. The stores run by managers are staffed by people facing all the disincentives (both carrots and sticks) towards not reporting.
Now, the question is how shoplifters decide which stores to steal from when there is an increase in shoplifting: do they pick the readily identifiable small businesses that give them problems, or do they simply steal more from the chain stores where they won't face repercussions?
My guess would be that only new or inexperienced shoplifters would steal from those stores likely to give them problems, whereas experienced shoplifters target those that don't. If the creation of new shoplifters is fairly steady regardless of amount of shoplifting (the population of shoplifters changes less than the amount they shoplift) then reports should stay flat as all the increase in shoplifting tends to happen in the stores that don't report.
I think of this in a similar, but technically distinct manner -- the reported statistic is a thresholded and smoothed measure (transfer function) of the underlying reality. The police have a limited amount of capacity to take reports and follow up on low level crime like shoplifting, especially in light of official deprioritization of that specific crime, so even if it goes to by orders of magnitude the reported number won’t without the number of police resources going up in proportion. And that feeds back into the decision of employees and shopkeepers to call them at all. This all quickly settles to equilibrium.
I recently read "Evicted" which is probably a housing-first rallying cry. First, the book is excellent and vivid. Secondly, the people it follows don't really fit into any of the categories of homeless described here. They have homes, sometimes, but are constantly pushed out. They're sorta the (b) types. They'd definitely be helped by a Housing First approach. But they're also, frankly, pretty bad. You wouldn't really want them moving in next door. Heroin addictions. Attacked the person who they had been staying with, stomping on her face and hitting her with a hammer. Most of these people really need help. But these aren't the "wretched homeless" groups either; they're in and out of housing and don't want to be in the situation they're in. But it seems like they've been stuck there too long and it's rubbed off on them. I don't know what the relevance is here, but it's not like (a)'s and (b)'s and "the good ones" and the (c)'s are "the bad ones" causing all the problems.
Re: getting tenants lawyers. That idea might actually started from "Evicted" since it's one of the proposals in the back of the book. It's hard to square your ideas with the depictions there: most tenants don't bother showing up to court. Courts fight back the landlords on the amount of money owed but the evictions were granted without exception if the tenant owed rent. The sheriff and movers show up and remove the people forcibly if necessary (one of the movers comments he's evicted his own daughter). Now this was in 2008ish and the book was influential so the system might have changed too far in the opposite direction in the mean time.
The book also contests the idea that landlords never want poor renters. The landlords in the book specialized in it: a poor tenant can be evicted at any time since they're always behind in rent. That means that they can't report you to the city for violations; you can ignore their repair requests and cut costs. And rents in poor parts of the city are only slightly behind rents in the rich part of the city (even though the house would sell for 3x as much in the rich part). But you have to be a tough landlord to put up with it.
Heroin addicts can and should be institutionalized (rehab initially) if they find themselves homeless. If the temptation of heroin is so intense for them then they need to go somewhere they can be kept away from heroin. They will get quite a few stints in rehab before they are declared incorrigible - but that will be on the table.
That’s a good point. I think most people understand that you can get cancer and sometimes the doctors will do all they can but eventually they will say - there is nothing we can do. People don’t seem to understand that it’s also true for addiction and mental health.
Sometimes people are so addicted or so mentally ill that saying “therapy” and “rehab” is like telling someone with end stage metastatic cancer, who has been through 5 rounds of chemo, you should try chemo. They tried it. It didn’t work.
One possible non-institutionalization response to "where should the heroin addicts go" is that the federal government could (on federal land somewhere) build "Heroinville", a new open-air community of several square miles where people who are heroin addicts who are about to be sent to prison / rehab / an institution may choose to move to instead.
Once someone documented as having an addiction to heroin chooses to move to "Heroinville", they cannot leave unless they pass a drug test every day for 2 months, and if caught outside of Heroinville, they will be automatically bussed back to Heroinville unless they choose to go to rehab/prison instead. Heroinville would be a town like any other that could engage in various industries in exchange for imports from the outside world, which the inhabitants could choose to participate in or not to gain increased access to dollars to exchange for goods and services like tents, drugs, and food.
Upside: More choice for addicts, a mechanism for getting homeless drug addicts away from the rest of the population, very cost effective compared to current homelessness budgets
Downside: Heroinville would have severe public order problems up to and including murder
Whether or not Heroinville existing is better or worse than the status quo depends on the relative weights a person puts on:
The effectiveness of the existing rehab system
Public order of non-Heroinville American cities
The ability of addicts to avoid institutionalization
The importance of avoiding murders of addicts by addicts
Have you seen "Escape from New York"? Your proposition reminded me of that movie. The idea of leaving outsiders/criminals/addicts on their own apart from civil society has been mulled before, even tried and tested, see deportations from Britain to Australia. I think a society can flourish better with the whole range of human personalities and behavior. If one tries to have only nice people around one risks to set oneself up for predation.
I fail to see how fentanyl addicts pooping in the street and on our beaches and stealing whatever they can is contributing to the flourishing of society. Seems to me to be the exact opposite, actually.
Australia, notably, was an experiment that worked well, producing a much better outcome for the people deported than them being maimed, killed, or kept in workhouses (the competing options in Britain at that time).
My question would be if it also worked well for British society. It looks like it did, I admit. The deported persons seemed not to have been a deeply relevant loss where they came from (although "Fields of Athenrye" reliably moves me to tears) and they could still contribute to the Commonwealth. Maybe there could be a workable mobel of different jurisdictions with different demands to conscentiousness and risk-taking, like charter cities, but I would expect it to get messy when people have children.
>I think a society can flourish better with the whole range of human personalities and behavior.
Does that include active pedophiles, serial killers, literal terrorists, literal Nazis, etc?
The homeless, or the worst large subgroup of the homeless, may be less individually destructive to human or societal flourishing than the aforementioned groups, but I'm not buying the argument that they *must* be a net *benefit* to societal flourishing because every sort of person is a net benefit to societal flourishing.
You'd probably get better results with, "they're harmful but not so much so that we can't tolerate them, and there but for the grace of God go any of us".
Including problematic, even outright dangerous, personalities in your group provides practice in dealing with those for the more cooperative and altruistic majority. They have to be dealt with, of course, and there surely are a few who cannot be integrated. We probably only disagree over their percentages.
I think the author would say that they would have been helped immensely from a Housing First approach like that that would have stopped the problems from spiraling out of control in the first place. He also acknowledges that some of the people he followed needed serious help, not just a roof over their heads. That’s basically his argument why it can’t come from the church or charity: their needs are beyond what those can provide and they often have already depleted such sources of support.
>If we want to deal with homelessness, I think people will just have to get used to having shitty neighbors, and landlords will have to get used to having shitty tenants (as long as they can pay government-subsidized rent).
If the solution to homelessness involves making everyone miserable it isn't a solution.
"If we want to deal with homelessness, I think people will just have to get used to having shitty neighbors, and landlords will have to get used to having shitty tenants."
Absolutely not. My solution isn’t to outrun the bear, it is to outrun people believing that we just need to put up with derelicts. That is why the solution is local. I just need to live in and shop in neighborhoods with strong institutional disincentives to uncivility. Yes, that means the fentanyl addicts and street poopers will all go to YOUR neighborhood, indeed I will strongly encourage them to do so, at least until you realize that you are enabling and subsidizing dysfunctional behavior.
I am sorry for sounding like a jerk, but we are seeing two totally incompatible views of effective institutions. You probably view me as the problem for failing to play along with your righteous compassion. However I view you as promoting and feeding the problem you think you are helping to address.
You don’t solve a vermin infestation by leaving out free rat chow or recommending that "people just get used to having" rats in the kitchen.
The goal isn’t to get you to kick them out, it is to get you to quit enabling their bad habits. I doubt every neighborhood will wise up, but I certainly wish they all would.
So, where would the hard core go? They could go to the shelters which we should build for them, or they could live out in the woods or desert somewhere. I am aware that many won’t, in which case they either obey the local laws or face the consequences. Fentanyl addicts won’t be obeying the laws though, so they will probably end up incarcerated.
I am well aware that I am not convincing you of anything, nor am I really trying. I am just clarifying how some of us (with extensive daily exposure to hard core destitute homeless) view the problem and the solution. They aren’t going to be pooping where I surf. I will make sure of that. Sometimes, imperfect as it is, that is solution enough. You can make the call for your neighborhood. Choose wisely, as hepatitis is serious.
I largely agree with you that tolerating terrible behavior (on the margin) increases the rate of "hardcore" homelessness (fentanyl addiction / street pooping).
I also agree that we need to make it easier for landlords to run low-cost housing that is decent, which means permitting dense, small, multi-family residences that can be easily built and maintained and which are very easy to evict someone from if they fall behind on rent.
However, in our current system we have two majors "gaps" that make it very hard to have well-aligned incentives for good behavior on the bottom end of the income scale:
The first is a massive gap in the housing market between ~$500 / month rent (the worst housing still existing in most American cities) and ~$0 / month rent (being homeless).
If we want to give people a ladder of opportunity to incentivize people who aren't entirely gone to try to become more functional, we need to fill in those missing rungs in cost-space. This would probably look like shanty-towns with no electricity and/or plumbing, or Hong Kong style micro apartments, or something. This is solvable with fairly simple public policy tweaks (re-legalize forms of housing that used to be legal).
The second massive gap is the lack of "high-behavior"/"low-behavior" distinctions at the low end of the cost scale. That is, we bundle "neighbourhood public order quality" with "price" quite tightly. If you want to incentivize good behavior for people who are only making minimum wage and likely will never make more than minimum wage, you need to have different communities that are all affordable at minimum wage with different standards of cleanliness, public order, etc. That is, you need to have $200 / month residences in a neighbourhood that is "good" and $200 / month residences in a neighbourhood that is "bad" and the ability to kick people out of the "good" neighbourhood if they misbehave. This is a much harder problem to solve with public policy because an individual landlord is totally indifferent between getting $200 / month for an apartment in a "good" neighbourhood and getting $200 / month for an apartment in a "bad" neighbourhood, so the incentive structure would need to be constructed carefully through public policy.
I can't think of a way to do this easily at a governmental level, since most of the naive implementations of this system would be very easily gamed. For one part of a system at the ultra-low-end of the scale, ctrl-f for my proposal on a different branch of this thread for "Heroinville"
In the Bay Area, with the tents, you are talking about a population that does not work at all, minimum wage or otherwise. I am talking about the hard core homeless of the encampments referenced by Swami. Kvetching about housing prices is utterly beside the point. Besides, why be in the one of the most expensive housing markets in the country if it's all about cheap rent? If that's the real issue, why not relocate to a very low-cost housing area, where a governmental support check can cover the rent?
It's about easy access to drugs, and a cultural and legal attitude of not enforcing basic social norms. Folks aren't migrating in from the sticks because it's too expensive out there. Swami is right on. I am getting the sense that you are not one of us (those with "extensive daily exposure to hard core destitute homeless"). That's fine, but just realize how it may limit your perspective.
Landlords can do this if you aren't poor too. Moving is an expensive hassle. I'm looking forward to moving in about a year and hopefully landing somewhere with a fridge that consistently stays under temp.
Sure, there are certainly fuzzy boundaries. A lot of the working class "down on their luck" may have alcohol issues for example. And one can bleed into the other, with the wrong influence and continuing bad luck, folks can spiral into addiction for example.
My original point was that there are clearly folks who are able and willing to work on getting out of their mess, and some who are very far gone. Pretending these are the same problem is not helping anyone.
Strongly agree that housing costs and lack of job security push people into this slope and into bad situations where bad things happen.
Nah. High housing costs in San Francisco are certainly a problem, but they cause displacement not homelessness. You might have to settle for living way out in the boonies if you can't afford a place in San Francisco, but it isn't going to cause you to just pitch a tent on the sidewalk. There's way more going on in that case.
Hmmm that's a good point. Homeless encampments certainly are a different problem altogether from disparate homeless population. I agree that public disruption is handled much more swiftly (not necessarily roughly, as you say) in parts of Europe I am familiar with, I guess I think that just that fact alone already points to a deeper situation/cohesion which allows it, and which is not there in certain American places. I'm not sure exactly what the precise difference would be, I'm just saying I don't think it's only a difference in the written laws; these anecdotes about the security not getting involved because of slow/unresponsive legal systems or complainants not filing reports for similar issues seems to be along the same lines-- it would broadly be about some kind of social cohesion (in a city of fastidious/legally-hygenic people, a public crime would be an enormous disruption, and the surrounding populace would intervene/request police intervention -- but in many American cases it seems like the public attitude is one of deliberate ignorance of public crime/disruption).
I mean 'social cohesion' is a kind of non-answer, but I don't really want to say homogeneity, or something like that. I'm not being very clear but I want to view police inability to deal with fairly obvious social-disruption as a symptom of a deeper loss of power, and not something caused by a weakness of written law (which should anyway seek to follow closely behind reparative _actions_).
Dedicate an undeveloped area as a "shanty town" hand out lots to anyone who wants to live on one. Let them build whatever shelter they want. Get volunteer groups out to build tiny homes.
"Together with the model showing housing prices predicted homelessness well, I find this really convincing."
The elephant in the room no one among the activist circle wants to talk about is that it makes ZERO sense to house a single homeless person in a place like SF or LA or NYC where housing prices are some of the highest in the entire world. In America we've got dozens of second-tier cities with modest land prices and *that's* where the homeless should be moved. If our federal government was smart, they'd take the top-20 cities in America by housing price per square foot, draw a 50 mile circle around them, and ban any federal support for the homeless from going to any organizations within that circle. Then in a few years all the homeless organizations would move outside these "circles of crazy prices" and the problem would self-resolve.
I live in Seattle and it blows my mind that we're trying to house our homeless right here in the city instead of moving them to (say) Spokane where land is 4x cheaper.
How would you make them go - and make sure they stay there? If they're not provided with work - and finding work in Spokane, I would guess, might be harder than in a bigger city, - and if there is not enough people with money to pan-handle (or mug!), they will probably abandon those houses, because a house is important, but you also have to eat?
One may argue that this will work for down-on-their-luck types who lost their house due to economics or something, and now only need a little boost to get back on their feet, but once again - finding a stable employment would be harder in a smaller city. I recently read a statistic about Moscow (Russia) homeless, for example, and the vast majority seem to be people who actually have a home in another city, but there is no work there at all for them, so they flock to the capital city in hopes to find at least something - of course, the kind of jobs they can get do not allow these people to rent a flat even on the outskirts, but at least they have something to eat. Maybe in America this is not a common case, but such people would strongly object to being transported to ass-end of nowhere, because they just came out of there.
> How would you make them go - and make sure they stay there?
Using big men with big guns, aka the "monopoly on violence". It won't be a choice - either you find a place to sleep in or you get moved to a designated homeless location.
> but you also have to eat?
You'll provide the homeless with food, water, decent shelter and basic medical care. Plus subsidize some local employers to hire the homeless.
> but such people would strongly object to being transported to ass-end of nowhere
They could object all they want, who cares? We're living in a society, which sometimes means doing things you don't like to avoid getting beaten up by other members of said society.
I, ah, suspect this approach won't fly in the current political climate, at the very least. Practically, It would require changing a few things in the good old US of A. Specifically - limiting the freedom of movement for certain persons without actually putting them in prisons. At the very least, it would require a new kind of document which would contain the address to which the subject of these measures is "bound" (so he could be returned there forcefully if caught without permission to travel).
It kind of worked that way in USSR, but whether you're a fan of Soviet-style solutions or not, it should be mentioned that whatever degree of "worked" we're talking about, it worked alongside a host of socialist policies, which are also unacceptable/unapplicable in the modern USA.
It obviously won't work in modern-day USA but the question is about the future, which can go in any direction. Its kind of similar to complaints like "well the law doesn't allow this!" which forget that laws are just a human construct and can be changed at any time, not some immutable law of nature.
I think that eventually the homeless crisis will escalate to the point where the right laws will be changed and society will accept that sleeping on the street will not be tolerated.
If you ran for governor on this platform I would vote for you. Heck, I would join your campaign staff. The homeless need tough love and teepees not free needles and half million dollar urban condos.
Since the municipality of Seattle doesn't have a monopoly on force outside of the confines of Seattle [except when overridden by the state or federal government], you'd presumably need the government of the state of Washington to use its state-wide monopoly on force to move those homeless people from Seattle to Spokane.
Why would the state of Washington do that? Right now extreme homelessness is a problem that heavily concentrated in the cities that also contain the voters most tolerant of it. That's a natural political equilibrium that's very unlikely to change anytime soon, since any state government that moved homeless people from Seattle to Spokane would be heavily punished by voters in Spokane and probably not rewarded by voters in Seattle.
Seattle could also significantly reduce the severity of its homeless problem by making housing in the city more affordable (which is under Seattle's control) or by enforcing its own laws against disorderly conduct in public (which is also under Seattle's control).
But then you're back to trying to find a solution for the rest of them. A solution that is not "housing first" (because you already spent money on those houses in OK).
Also, I wonder if the percentage is going to be even lower than 10%. I know it would be in Moscow, because of pride - you just DON'T leave the capital if you managed to be born there, or get there somehow. SF, while not the country's capital, have a certain fleur of a "dream city" to it, so unlike Julius Caesar, many homeless might actually choose to be last in the city, rather than first in the village.
Yes, but according to the Homeless Industrial Complex, they have a gods-given right to live in the most expensive city in the US, on 100% public support. Suggesting that they have to make any compromise at all is just unfathomable. Not liking working people....
Why is the land cheaper? Because there's fewer jobs and its more expensive to get other services. Shipping people somewhere doesn't mean they'll be able to meaningfull live there
SF is an unusual case, but when I ran the numbers on this using 2019 data LA & Houston spent the same amount per person per year on services for homeless people (~$12,000). Homeless people are expensive and hard to manage, and they themselves likely wouldn't stay in North Dakota because there are more amenities available in big cities.*
*These amenities are a combination of public services, public transportation, panhandling opportunities, lax police enforcement, and inherent big city anonymity. Only some of these are things that big cities could change if they wanted to [public services for homeless people could be reduced, police enforcement could be increased], which means that big cities will likely remain the natural attraction points for homeless people even with a municipal governance change. The problem can be improved but unless you put in place a federal/state system for coercing homeless people to move, it'll be hard to get them out of big cities.
It's pretty expensive to get services in SF relative to most of the country, so I don't think that holds water. Regarding "meaningful lives", that's subjective, but the degree to which fentanyl addicts living in tents on SF streets are living meaningful lives is debatable to put it mildly.
>"I would be more sympathetic to this fair criticism if he was more willing to criticize the mass institutionalization era and less willing to criticize everyone who was ever against it."
"Claim that the first two groups are only temporarily homeless and don’t bother anyone, and that all the problems people consider linked to homelessness are caused by the severely mentally ill."
So let me write a short defense of the "wretched" and point the finger at the “beach bums”. Without going into personal details, I've seen someone become wretched. Over the course of five years, they had a complete psychotic break, alienated all their friends and family, were given a mobile home which they barricaded and defecated in until it had to be replaced, and eventually got lost in the homeless world, to the point where private investigators by the family haven't been able to locate them. Think, very literally, someone who would become extremely agitated and paranoid within sight of power lines. Completely lost their mind.
And I think the implicit critique of the wretched, that they're the real problem, is kinda true. They, very genuinely, need more help than even a loving and prosperous family can provide. They're a screaming black hole of time, money, and energy. Honestly, I think the figures from the CA Department of State Hospitals is fairly accurate on what these people require. DSH spends about $1.4 billion on ~12k patients or $150k per patient per year. And yeah, for a room of 12 of these people, you do genuinely need 4-5 trained staff members per shift because, in a violent altercation, you do genuinely want 3-4 staff members subduing the patient in a controlled manner (for their safety and the patient's) plus an additional staff member to watch the other patients. $150k per patient per year is a pretty fair price. And, quite frankly, these places are...not a place you'd ever send a loved one. The staff tries, god some of them try, but no one wants family in DSH Napa or DSH Atascadero. At a certain point you hope the person can achieve some equilibrium anywhere. If he's camping down by the river in an out of the way spot and the local food bank workers recognize him and the cops know him and how to handle him...that's genuinely the best that can be made of a horrific situation. That’s the best life some of these people can lead.
But, in their defense, the wretched have a real claim on us. In any society a certain number of people will be born just broken. So broken that it is genuinely a full time job for 3-4 adults to care for them. And that’s fine, it’s a perfect situation for insurance in the social contract, the unspoken agreement that if you or a loved one is born so broken that badly that society will expend an undue amount of resources to make your life as comfortable as possible. That not only the government but each of us owes these people a certain amount of grace and pity “for there but for grace go I”.
I think the vibe I get from Scott here is wrong. The problem isn’t that 20% of the homeless population needs 80% of the time and energy, the problem is that they aren’t getting it because all these “beach bums” are taking it. One homeless guy down by the river, even a real crazy one, is something most of us have enough patience and grace to handle. Put a homeless camp down by the river and pretty soon people just want something done. At a really core level, people have a limited amount of empathy, especially for strangers. There’s an inherent competition for that empathy, for patience and handouts and social programs, between those who genuinely, absolutely need it and the beach bums who just don’t fit into society.
People aren’t just tired of the mentally ill homeless, they’re tired of tent cities everywhere, even at gas stops like Lodi on the I5, and they’re tired of feces on the streets and they’re tired of panhandlers. And, to be extremely unfair, the best solution the current homelessness crisis may indeed be the reinstitutionalization of the mentally ill homeless but it will be at the expense of the most vulnerable in our society to the benefit of a bunch of bums who have options in their life.
PS. Let me carve out an exception for the “car homeless” here, not because they deserve it, but because their problems can actually, practically, be solved. All the “car homeless” I’ve met are basically functional adults in bad financial circumstances where $10k would solve 80% of their problems, so, ya know, let’s just give them $10k in rental subsidies or something and be happy we found an easy problem for once. Like, I’ve past the point where I care whether you deserve a handout, I’m just grateful when a handout actually solves the problem.
PPS. Since numbers matter, my priors are that the actually “wretched” mentally ill population is a pretty constant baseline, probably somewhere around 20-50 people per 100,000 population like in Houston from the original post, whereas the big homeless epicenters have 100-500 per 100,000. I think, for many of these “wretched”, that homeless life is the best solution and dramatically better than being institutionalized and I think most people would not have a problem with the homeless if there were 80-90% less of them, no matter how bad the remainder were.
Agree with most all of this, and think it strikes at the heart of something important. We will always have folks with severe mental issues. We loose patience and will if the group becomes too large.
Fatigue at helping folks who could likely help themselves was why I stopped volunteering in homeless feeding after some years. I wanted to help the truly bad off, but a number of the folks were clearly more into the lifestyle...
San Francisco rented a bunch of hotels that were sitting idle during the pandemic, to provide emergency shelter to the homeless during the pandemic (because there was a time when "get them inside, that will stop the spread of COVID was a thing). Now those hotels are giving the city a bill for the damages these "tenants" caused. And if I read correctly, at one of these hotels it came to $42,000 per room.
Presumably they're padding the bill at least a bit, but I doubt they're making it all up. Housing is not a Thing That Exists just because you paid for it once upon a time; it needs constant maintenance, and it can be destroyed by neglect or carelessness. And that probably happens a lot more when you give it to people who maybe weren't particularly functional in the first place and have no skin in the game.
If we have to budget even $20K/person/year to repair the damage associated with otherwise-homeless tenants, that's going to be a significant economic hit.
It does kinda depend on how you build. Hotels build nice-looking and fragile because this usually works for them. On the other hand, nobody can punch holes in a brick or concrete wall without some serious equipment. There are a few options for windows; there are a few ways to prevent people having easy access to scratch/break the glass, or you could use corundum.
There's no such thing as indestructible, but "not easily destructible" is quite possible. You want to use wall hangings and rugs and stuff to make this kind of building pleasant to live in, of course, but those are mobile so you get the tenants to provide their own (which brings skin in the game).
Totally tangential point to your actual substantive comment (and my apologies therefor), but as a side not I think think you underestimate the costs of using corundum even in sizes dramatically smaller than "window" (again, I know this was just a throwaway reference and not a load-bearing part of you comment, sorry!) I have some relevant (albeit several levels removed) experience here and corundum processing for use as a transparent optical medium is fucking *hard.*
I've seen the counterargument made that living on the street is dangerous enough that on average*, they'd end up costing the government more than that in emergency care costs.
*bearing in mind that the cost distributions on both sides will be long-tailed.
I find the story of being "robbed or assaulted" five times, and having a friend be "literally curb-stomped" to be, uh... extremely implausible, or possibly confused about the meaning of words, to put it charitably.
Robbery specifically means to take by force or threat of force, ie, mugging not car break ins, and is quite rare - plus aggravated assault, there were 5866 total in 2019. Spread over 800,000 residents, that's a yearly risk of 0.7%. Five times in a row would be... 2 in a hundred billion? Check my math?
Anecdotally, I've lived in SF proper for 10 years, in some pretty rough areas, and I've never been robbed or assaulted. I also know many people who live in SF (funny how that works), and among them all, I know of one mugging (that actually occurred in West Oakland) and one (technical) assault (being spat on by a crazed homeless person). The idea that one relatively normal person could be robbed or assaulted five times in rapid succession is winning-the-lotto level improbable.
Also, literal curb-stomping as depicted most gruesomely in American History X is, unsurprisingly, fatal. If someone was actually literally curb-stomped and survived, I would certainly expect them to at least be hospitalized, need reconstructive surgery, etc. It would be straightforward attempted murder, and the idea that the cops wouldn't want to hear about attempted murder is pretty ridiculous. In my years here, I've called the police multiple times (mostly reporting traffic incidents, once for a homeless person laying face down in the road where they could be run over, once after catching someone attempting to steal my motorcycle) and they've always been prompt in responding. After the motorcycle incident, they took a report. I'm not denying that some people have bad experiences with lazy cops, but I find the idea that they would ignore attempted murder to be... uh, extremely implausible.
>Robbery specifically means to take by force or threat of force, ie, mugging not car break ins, and is quite rare - plus aggravated assault, there were 5866 total in 2019. Spread over 800,000 residents, that's a yearly risk of 0.7%. Five times in a row would be... 2 in a hundred billion? Check my math?
1) He didn't say it was in a single year.
2) He didn't say he was the sole victim in all of them, or even a direct victim at all.
3) Robberies aren't independent in location or victim type; they cluster (the location should be fairly self-explanatory; the victim type is that some people are easier and more lucrative to mug than others and some of this is detectable by muggers). So multiplying probabilities is naïve.
An obvious explanation would be his house overlooking an area with a lot of muggings.
Also 4) when someone's whole claim is that the police stats are unrepresentative, quoting the police stats in reply without some kind of defence of their veracity is... not especially relevant?
The 1 in 50 billion number is for once per year, for five years. Five times in one year would be even lower.
Also, beyond quoting statistics, you'll note I also provided my own anecdata, which also substantially contradicts his. Does that meet your bar for relevance, since we're not allowed to use statistics?
2) Rolling 0.7% five times in *ten* rolls is 1 in 250 million instead of 1 in 50 billion.
3) And of course the more pertinent points are that he claims it to *not* be 0.7% and that naïve multiplication doesn't work anyway.
4) I didn't criticise your anecdote.
5) I didn't say you're not allowed to use statistics. I said that if someone says "X stats are wrong", quoting X stats is not really relevant. Quoting independent Y stats could be useful. Providing a defence of X stats could be useful.
Gosh, I didn't expect to experience the Notice Me, Senpai effect so early in Substack commenting career. I'm flattered, thanks Scott!
A couple other recent-post-relevant things I wanna append to my comment, now that it's semi-Canonized:
1) Used to date a semi-professional "booster". Not like organized crime, I mean the sort of M:tG Black amoral opportunist who figures out the informal rules for what gets you caught and what doesn't, then ruthlessly exploits that as part of balancing the household budget. This also includes knowing individual stores' refund policies well. Around 5-6 years ago when SF was seeing record summer heatwaves and AC units were selling out everywhere, she made the rational choice to purchase one for 3 months, then return the much-abused-and-still-leaking unit in the original packaging for a full refund come fall.
So I feel like I've got a decent sense for this kind of person and know several of the tricks of the trade...and this isn't the profile of the sort of shoplifter my store regularly gets. It's mostly the sorts I'd classify as Young Punks with Nothing To Lose. They don't do it for lack of money, they do it for the lulz and because flouting authority/norms is just part of the youth zeitgeist. (Hence why they make so many idiotic mistakes and we're well aware of the problem as it happens, not only afterwards through inventory discrepancies.) What they have in common, though, is that if you don't respect The Man anyway, it becomes easier to rationalize a "harmless" six-finger discount. Which leads into...
2) BLM protests during summer 2020. People get hung up a lot on the effects they had on policing, the racial angle, the boredom angle, and so on. But outside of the frequently-mentioned (and rightly so!) disingenuousness of Mostly Peaceful Protests...I wanna emphasize that there very much was a vibe shift around the legitimacy of capitalist businesses, especially among the young and politically active. <s>Ancap</s> [EDIT: Anti-capitalist] sentiment has always been ambient in SF, but after the Political Establishment and MSM pushed pretty hard on the narrative that There Was No Looting (And Even If There Was, Is That Really So Bad?)...well, surprise surprise, lotsa otherwise mostly-armchair disaffecteds started making this same justification in real life. To their friends, neighbors, and coworkers - including those who worked for Evil White Supremacist Corporations.
Suddenly it became a lot more normalized to handwave looting and other "mere" property crime: because the perpetrators were the real victims of systemic _____ism, because capitalist wealth is illegitimately stolen, because corporations are rich and who cares about their billionaire profits, because Materialist Consumerism Bad, because the poor should take any means on offer to get ahead. It was The Revolution, man, and you don't wanna look like a __scab__ during a society-wide strike.
I don't know why this angle hasn't gotten much coverage outside right-media. It was a very real phenomenon on the ground...businesses that cut hours/closed continue to have reduced hours/not be open. Those jobs aren't coming back...(and they were disproportionately held by the poor and minorities.) I'll never forget the period when all the shop windows around where I work were boarded up and there was a police-enforced curfew, out of fear of wanton property crime. It was shocking precisely because I work in one of the *tamer* parts of town, a mostly-residential area next to one of the colleges. You just don't see a lot of crime out here, and yet everyone was still running scared. It's so easy to break community norms of propriety and law-abidingness; much harder to bring them back after they're gone. So the fact that none of this shows up in Official Shoplifting (Larceny?) Data just makes it more gaslight-y, because now those same people who handwaved looting can point at statistics and say, see, look, I told you it was all okay. But it's not, and we're not.
>Ancap sentiment has always been ambient in SF, but after the Political Establishment and MSM pushed pretty hard on the narrative that There Was No Looting (And Even If There Was, Is That Really So Bad?)...well, surprise surprise, lotsa otherwise mostly-armchair disaffecteds started making this same justification in real life.
Fair, I think the characterization could go either way for the Median Disaffected (and I definitely know some in that former more stringent category, now that you point out the distinction). Was sorta gesturing at the background radiation-esque support for vaguely-defined Socialism(tm) that's as much part of SF's weather as Carl the Fog; "ancap" was the term that sprung to mind as best fitting the writing flow and ground truth. Mostly going off the principle that optimizing for X and not Y means necessarily optimizing against Y at some point[1].
Simultaneously, I plead the same as Freddie deBoer[2] that it's hard for me to keep track of academic labels which overlap in concept-space, especially if they're not from "my side", so the bright line between "anti-capitalist" and "anarcho-communist" in my mind isn't as clear as Jacobin Magazine would prefer. I am reminded of all the many times I've been upbraided for assuming "Democrat", "liberal", "left", and "progressive" were remotely fungible terms. Maybe there's some broader epistemic impetus behind adding yet another Trivial Inconvenience on top of difficult discourse, but it's always felt kinda like a semantic stop sign to me. (To a conservative, nearly everything will be "left"!) Apologizes if that's a mischaracterization of your intent, bit of a sore spot for me after repeated rhetorical reprimands.
At any rate: I claim the mindset that leads a whole region to loudly denounce and ban e.g. Walmart and <s>Hate Chicken</s> Chick-Fil-A, but not the sundry other popular corporate chains found in local abundance (nevermind not patronizing them, so much for supporting local business), is full of armchair-disaffecteds. How exactly one defines their malaise towards Capitalism, Inc. doesn't really change the underlying argument about irl norm shifts, of taking "no ethical consumption under capitalism" to its repugnant conclusion.
[1] Which I'm dead certain was an EY LessWrong post, but I can't seem to find it anymore. The distilled version of "The Hidden Complexity of Wishes".
Huh, don't think I've seen "ancap" used for "anti-capitalist", I've only seen it for "anarcho-capitalist" (which is of course much more distinct from "anarcho-communist"). Perhaps that is what magic9mushroom thought as well?
Edited to update, I'll take n = 3 ACXers all pointing out the same confusion of terms as a good enough p-value that it's probably Fully General Confusion. Thank you for the clarifications, we regret the error!
(If I were Scott I'd append a Google n-gram graph or something, curious how the "opposite" association seems so firmly lodged in my brain's lookup table.)
Regarding point 13 (6 in 600 vs 2M in 200M): this is not a cognitive bias, this is correct application of the law of big numbers.
I expect the base rate of “people who need to be locked up or everything bursts in flames” to be somewhere around 1 in 1000. Given this rate, the probability that a 600-person town has at least 6 of them is 1 in 26260. So our hypothetical town is indeed unfortunate, but it’s not surprising that a few towns like that would exist. But given the same base rate, the probability of having 2M such people in a 200M country is less than 1 in 10^1000000 (that’s a million-digits number).
Regarding the "town of 600 that locks up 6 disruptive citizens": I would like to point out that it paints a wrong mental picture.
The correct picture would not be "Imagine you came to a town of 600...". It would be "Imagine there would be residents locked up in every single town. 2 in a village of 200. 100 in a small town of 10.000. No matter where you went, everyone would know people locked up from their hometown."
600 inhabitants are not a town where I come from, it's a village. Town is Stadt in german, and even Kleinstadt (literally "small town") is defined as 5.000+, and that definition is from 1887. So the mental picture may paint the wrong size.
But especially, the framing makes the town an isolated case, so we subconsciously accept a more extreme variation.
That's why mental framing like this is problematic: It paints a picture and literally paints over other facts. I prefer a data-driven approach, where you compare e.g. rates of incarceration between countries to judge whether a certain number is okay or excessive.
David Roman writes "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", regarding Francisco de Sá Carneiro, which is one of the wrongest sentences I've ever read?
- Sá Carneiro never was President; he was Prime Minister.
- The matter was not "ignored for decades" -- in fact, the opposite? It has been an ongoing political, and police, topic of discussion ever since: there were 10 (!) parliamentary inquiry commissions on the matter, with different theories and conclusions, and the case was periodically reopened by the State's attorneys. You can absolutely say that the whole matter was dealt with completely ineffectually, but this vague conspiratorial "... and it was never mentioned again" BS is the opposite of what actually happened.
- Sá Carneiro was.. not particularly conservative? He was one of the founders of the "Social Democratic Party" (and there is a never-ending tradition for every leader of the party to claim that they are the true heir of Sá Carneiro and will restore the party to its founder's vision), which was always the country's "center-right" party, whatever that meant at the time (and especially in 1980 that didn't mean very right-wing at all -- the Portuguese political mainstream has always been leftward of that of other European countries because of the post-Revolution context). Noticeably he governed in coalition with the actual right-wing party. But maybe the best source for this claim is... this actual interview of him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzGvhfbCoio where he says he doesn't want his party to be a conservative party and identifies with the German SPD (the social-democratic party, center-left).
'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.”'
$950 is still good money and you can come back for more. That's why there are all these videos on 'shop lifting san francisco' etc.
Then again, the talking point is obviously 'actually, that's not shoplifting'.
> This is a great thought experiment / example of a cognitive bias / whatever it is. I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more.
I'd think 600 person towns with 6 people locked up at a given time are extremely rare; in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if no such town ever existed.
Considering that five members of the Gypsy family Grönfors were sentenced to prison after feuding with their neighbours in the village of Vojakkala, which has 62 inhabitants, my intuition differs quite a bit from yours on this matter.
Well, it's not quite that small, but Tulia, TX has a population of about 5,000 and imprisoned about 10% of its entire black population, resulting in 38 drug convictions. All convictions were eventually thrown out "because they were based on questionable testimony from a single undercover agent accused of racial prejudice" (https://www.aclu.org/other/racist-arrests-tulia-texas)
Now what should that tell us about this thought experiment? In particular, about the stipulated assumption that the mayor can "personally vouch" for exactly who does and doesn't need to be locked up?
I think the thought experiment could also be extended by noting that there are a bunch of other towns in the region, and for some reason every single other town gets by with only locking up one or two people; why does this town need to lock up several times more than that? Are its people uniquely violent or sociopathic or something?
Someone can personally vouch for 6 people being complete scumbags who just have to be locked up, but in the real world nobody could possibly vouch for anything about 2 million people, so the second part of the thought experiment is not at all a fair description of the real-world US.
No, but half a million different somebodies in a thousand different neighborhoods, cities, towns, etc. could. (Realistically, a large fraction are from concentrated areas in a few urban centers with massively-disproportionate criminality, so its more like one person vouching for a couple hundred).
> So that leaves some kind of law targeting all homeless people and demanding they go in shelters or something. I dunno, seems unfair.
Many countries have laws against sleeping in public spaces, some (including mine) forbid drinking alcohol there. On one hand, both are an absurd violation of personal freedom. On the other, the kind of people who run afoul of these laws most often need to be liable for _something_ because they are a huge pain in the ass for the surrounding community.
I'm disgusted with the solution and I'd like a better one, as a person who slept on park benches sometimes and drank on them often.
"Claim that the first two groups are only temporarily homeless and don’t bother anyone, and that all the problems people consider linked to homelessness are caused by the severely mentally ill" -- selfishly yeah, but selflessly the fact that at any given point in time certain people don't have a place to stay sounds like a problem even if they don't bother anyone else, and if we're talking about policy proposals rather than about individual actions a selfish perspective doesn't sound particularly relevant to me.
Regarding #8: it contains a few basic mistakes (Sá Carneiro was NOT President) and casually asserts conspiracy theories as fact (his death was a matter of debate and investigations for decades, but no strong evidence of foul play was ever uncovered).
One thing I don't understand from these comments and from the original essay: how do these homeless people survive? How do they get enough food to eat? Do they flock to cities because there are more opportunities for begging? If giving money to the homeless was made illegal, what would happen to them?
Regulations against begging that are enforced by removing beggars from the "good spots" do not fully prevent giving money to the homeless but do reduce the total quantity of money given that way.
America is a very rich country and so there's a lot of food floating around. I have never been homeless so I don't know the details of how the average homeless person acquires food, but between churches, soup kitchens, other food-oriented charities, passerby, and dumpster diving, acquiring enough calories to survive does not appear difficult (based on the number of times I've seen homeless people throw food on the ground and the general fact that homeless people in NYC might be slightly thinner than American average but aren't emaciated).
Contrast this to the Great Depression (when America was 1/5th as rich per person, in theory) and a lot more people froze/starved to death.
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, 1 of them is a complete scumbag who just has to be locked up or else the town would be in flames. However he doesn't know exactly who it is so they have locked up the 6 most likely people. Does this seem like a mass incarceration crisis?
Given relative incarceration rates of other developed countries this seems like an alternative scenario to consider.
Regarding shoplifting: surely there are ways that a rising rate of shoplifting could cause a proportionately dropping rate of reports. For instance, consider a "willingness-to-report" model where reporting is mostly driven by new employees or newly promoted managers, each of whom becomes jaded and stops reporting after n shoplifting incidents. More shoplifting would just lead to each employee burning through the same n reports earlier in their career. I have no confidence that it's the right model, but feedback mechanisms are common enough in life that a constant number of shoplifting reports doesn't seem too surprising.
So... I guess I'll be the one to make the stupid, naive, lib comment about Eledex's story. He says he called the police on these people multiple times and the police didn't show. At no point does he mention walking 100 feet and trying to talk to any of them and see if something could be worked out. Maybe, even probably, it wouldn't have worked! But who knows, 5 to 15 people isn't a lot and maybe there was some kind of community leader over there who had some influence over the rest of the camp and they could have worked out a "I could do you some minor favor if you could be more pleasant neighbors," type deal. Seems worth a shot. I know the story isn't very long so maybe Eledex is eliding details, but he doesn't refer to any of them by name or description, just as "the camp" and one gets the impression he never got any closer to them than staring out his window.
Again, I get that there's some nativity and gosh I understand social anxiety and a reluctance to engage with people who are scary, but... You know, one doesn't always get to choose one's neighbors whether they own the property legally or not, and sometimes people can be reasonable when you don't expect.
Sometimes people can also stab you for looking at them the wrong way though. And any conversation where you're trying to ask people to follow (some of) the rules of polite society when they clearly don't want to is going to be a lot more tense than just "looking at somebody".
So; I think the most likely outcomes of this scenario in descending order are:
A. Eledex asks nicely, they tell him to suck a dick.
B. Eledex asks nicely, they agree on some sort of condition, but don't fulfill their end of the bargain.
C. Eledex asks nicely, they stab him.
D. Eledex asks nicely and their behaviour actually improves say, 10%; but when the construction workers come to cut down the tree they still burn it. Maybe they give him more warning.
I would probably reorder that as B -> D -> A -> C, dependent on Eledrex's interpersonal skills, but surely the risk of being stabbed is pretty low. As was discussed in the original book review thread, being homeless doesn't make you stupid and violence against the normies is the one thing likely to actually bring the police around (as well as not actually getting them anything). Where on the other hand, homeless people always need stuff even if it's as simple as permission to fill up a water can from his garden hose whenever they please.
My roommate has described trying to help other street people after his mother bought a house for him to live in. The problem was, the asks would just keep coming, and coming and coming. Eventually, all these sketchy people knowing where he lived and coming to his door to ask him for: food, money, weed, booze, place to sleep, ect. made him feel so uncomfortable in that house that he ended up living in a homeless shelter instead; just so those people wouldn't be knocking on his door asking for things.
And refusing a drugged up or drunk person something that they think they're entitled to can certainly be a trigger for violent behaviour.
These are all certainly risks, but when I described my approach as the "lib" comment that was both "liberal" and "libertarian". It's not always fun, but when you have issues in life with people, especially your neighbors, I think it's incumbent on an individual to at least make a good faith effort to try and work them out rather than immediately going to the state to adjudicate things. Even if you're pretty sure you're in the right. Are the people in the encampment the sort to make increasing demands? Are they drugged out? Are they drunk? Are the leaderless or organized? You aren't going to find out without walking over to check things out. Impossible to know how things would have gone, but I think coming into it with the assumption that people are some "other" that can't be dealt with in good faith is a bad idea. Yeah, there's risks, but there are also risks getting into a beef with your home-owning property-deed-having neighbor about some issue. (Just ask Rand Paul.) It sounds like it was a very uncomfortable situation, but such is life.
My experience with the homeless/mentally ill in SF says the expected value is very negative and there is a good chance of getting threats of violence if not violence. If they have shown they aren't going to abide by societies rules in other ways, they may not abide with rules to use violence against people who ask nicely. My experiences:
1) Guy on bus starts yelling how "All Mexicans need to get out of the country". Mexican guy says "You mess with the wrong Mexicano, you'll be in trouble". Screaming guy pulls out a knife, says he is "The Hitler of the Streets", and threats to stab the Mexican guy.
2) Separate occasion guy on bus starts yelling at a particular Chinese person all the Chinese need to get out of the country. My friend tells the yelled at Chinese person in Chinese to "ignore that man he is crazy". Crazy guy follows my friend off the bus on Market Street and the guy starts grabbing her and is chased away by bystanders.
3) My neighbors and their young children are inside their garage with the garage door open. Crazy homeless guy walks up to them and says he's going to start bitchslapping their kids.
4) Finding that many homeless are armed as I've encountered homeless people brandishing machettes, axes, a gun (may have been a replica), and numerous people with knives.
In his Eledex's situation he also would be outnumbered. He may be safer if he brings a weapon for protection, but when it gets to that level, he is much much better off letting the police take care of it.
5) Friend is stoped at a stop sign on a bike. Crazy guy starts crossing the street then starts kicking him and his bike but then leaves. Friend flags down a passing police car shortly after, who tells him he can file a report, but nothing will probably happen, and then the police is interrupted to go respond to a stabbing. After that he made a pepper spray holder for his bike for easy access.
6) I've nearly encountered stabbings multiple times. One stop before I was about to get on the bus, there was a stabbing. The bus never came so I took another route home and saw about this on the news. The Walgreens that I normally go to had a cashier get stabbed when trying to stop.
7) My friend twice has had to intervene to talk down a crazy person with a knife out threatening to stab someone.
When you encounter violence more often, you tend to be more careful at things that can plausibly lead to it.
I've also seen that asking nicely tends not to work. In SF and NYC the law says that 24 hours before removing a homeless encampment they have to ask them to leave and post a notice.
Nearly every time, they come back 24 hours later, everyone is still there and it leads to a confrontation, and thats for the police not a random person.
I know you're trying to engage in good faith here, and I appreciate that, but I also think that a lot of folks' experience indicates that this is just not a reasonable way to approach this type of situation. The advantage of the state to adjudicate this is that, *if* you're in the right, and the other party tells you to go piss off, in theory there are jackbooted thugs ready to remedy that. Without that threat, your leverage over people who have already shown that they're not the type to abide by the social contract is more or less nil.
Whenever this type of situation comes up on public transit (and it does, a lot), I'm always reminded of the principle of "demand futility" in corporate law, in which (roughly speaking - this is not legal advice but only half-remembered doctrine from class in an area I don't practice in) as a shareholder you're excused from requesting that the board refrain from some action[1] as a precondition to bringing a derivative suit if a majority of the board is self-dealing with respect to the transaction -- the idea being that since ex ante a self-interested board majority would always tell you get stuffed[2] if you asked them not to self-deal, it's pointless to ask them in the first place. Hence, "demand futility."
There's an analogous way that I view with obvious social defection (like ranting, loud music or street performance on a crowded subway car of people who just want to get form point A to point B with a minimum of fuss). The very fact that someone is breaking the norms that everyone else is manifestly aware of and abiding by--in short, being an asshole--is prima facie evidence that they don't believe themselves bound by such norms and perceive no risk in flouting them (short of violent force, at least--which is why it would be great to have the entity with a monopoly on violence around at times like this). Rather than get into a shouting match with an unhinged and/or heavily muscled interlocutor (or often both) that *at best* will result in you getting told to go fuck yourself and quite plausibly could escalate, the dominant strategy for everyone is to just grin, bear it, and regret that we have a shortage of cops to put a stop to it. The proof of the pudding here is that in practice no one actually *does* confront social defectors because, as Fluorescent Kneepad observes below, it's nothing but negative EV and will *at best* result in you being called rude names while the objectional behavior remains uncorrected.
[1] In response to which you will in approximately 100% of cases be told to go fuck yourself if you get in any response at all; business judgment rules wins, too bad, so sad. "Voice" is a pretty fucking useless part of the Voice / Exit / Loyalty trifecta of shareholder entitlements, your best best is "Exit."
[2] In practice, so would a non-self interested board (See [1]) but this is about theory.
No, not surely. The risk of being assaulted is not pretty low. It's considerable. They did burn down the tree after all, only for spite. They clearly didn't care if his house burned down, and he wasn't even the one pushing them to move at the end. Being homeless may not make you stupid, but the kinds of folks in the (presumably true) story clearly aren't regular folks like you.
You have got to be kidding me. I mean, I am sorry, but you have just got to be kidding me. Have you ever been in a situation even remotely like this? The kinds of folks in the story truly DGAF about your social niceties. "Excuse me, you seem to be illegally camping next to my house and threatening to burn the tree (and my house) down... can we talk?"
I think you should try it in a much less dramatic situation and see what you think. It's not impossible that interacting with them could have good effects, but would require a lot of wisdom, good sense, probably confidence and a low arousal in the face of potential or actual conflict.
And those qualities might lead you to abort the mission before it begins.
> I’m not really optimistic about our current ability to solve this the perfect world way where police are responsive to Eledex’s complaints and able to deal with these people in particular, while leaving other innocent homeless people alone.
You can have a system where various sub-crime nuisances add up and trigger an intervention.
Why do people write "ctrl f" when you can use the word "search"?
I am highly skeptical of that tree story. 20 propane tanks strapped to a tree? Running out of the house naked with a 6 day old baby? Sounds like a Rush Limbaugh fever dream.
I'm assuming it was the big white ones, but these are homeless people and they probably didn't go buy 20 full propane tanks. 18 of them might have been empty. I also suspect "20" is just a hand-waved substitute for "a lot" but have no basis for that, just how I read it.
"Search" can imply that you searched the document yourself (and thus should have seen the same thing expressed with different words) "ctrl-f" specifies that you did an automated search that would only pick up exact matches.
"Search" can imply that you searched the document yourself (and thus should have seen the same thing expressed with different words) "ctrl-f" specifies that you did an automated search that would only pick up exact matches.
"Explain that the 1950s system of institutionalization was genuinely pretty terrible in a lot of ways, that the people who campaigned for it to be ended had lots of good points, but that the current system is also failing people. You support some specific loosening of the current laws around commitment, and the way you would ensure that people’s rights are still respected is [some paragraph that demonstrates you have thought about this question for five minutes]."
Well, problems regarding involuntary commitment were a relatively small part of the problems with the mental health system pre-mass deinstitutionalisation, though a lot of its problems probably could be traced back to too many patients/not enough resources.
> So that leaves some kind of law targeting all homeless people and demanding they go in shelters or something. I dunno, seems unfair. Probably there are gradations of unfairness and you could figure out some way to minimize the impact, but I don’t know, Eledex sure does have a valid gripe here.
Anyone else getting Matt Levine vibes from this paragraph?
Levine started writing Money Stuff in 2013. Scott started writing SSC in... 2013. Huh.
I was going to say that it's more the opposite - when I read Levine, I get Scott vibes (I started reading Money Stuff only about a year ago). But now I'm wondering if they had the same teacher at some point.
>>This has been the opposite of my experience (and the experience of some friends with experience here who I talked to). The stories I hear are all about how nightmare tenants don’t pay rent for months or years, smash everything in the apartment, and when landlords try to get rid of them the courts just say they won’t evict them because making people homeless is mean.
This says a lot more about you and your friends than it does about the ground truth.
>>The stories I’ve heard are that a lot of landlords straight out try to figure out how to avoid renting to poor people because if their tenants ever choose to stop paying rent it’s several years of nightmarish court cases to get 50-50 odds of the government ever doing anything.
"Try to figure out how", as if this is at all a difficult thing. Landlords have all the power in these situations. Renters can't even afford a place to live, and you think they can afford lawyers for years of nightmarish court cases???
Compared to opening a jar of pickles that's stuck really tight? Yeah.
Compared to evicting in states with even fewer protections? Sure, probably.
Compared to solving the Reimann hypothesis? No, of course not
Compared to being homeless? No, not even close.
Even in CA, where it's """"hard"""", let's not lose perspective; We're still talking about a situation in which one party has all the power and the money and the lawyers, and the other party is destitute to the point of being on the verge of homelessness.
There is a big difference between large landlords and homeowners who rent out a home. I know of two cases personally - in great detail - where the home was essentially damaged to the tune of 100s of thousands of dollars over the course of months to years while eviction proceedings dragged along. One became a haven for dealers and was essentially a complete loss.
There's pretty much no such thing as a complete loss in terms of real estate. "Location location location", etc. Most of the value of a home isn't in the building but in the land itself. The house that I currently live in is pretty much a shithole, and it continues to be a only-mostly-cleaned-up shithole, but it's nevertheless jumped in valuation, just because it happens to be in a bay area town and prices are completely absurd.
Even a homeowner who just happens to rent out a home are still in a financial position to have purchased at least two homes, which is at least two more homes than a renter.
Not fair. Back in social housing here in Ireland, the new rent allowance scheme wasn't taken up by some landlords (despite it being what you imagine would be easy money) because they didn't want those kinds of tenants. Some tenants are great, some less so.
And when you've convinced a landlord to take on a low-income/formerly homeless tenant, who then does proceed to trash the place and cause trouble, it poisons the whole relationship. That landlord is never again going to trust local government bodies urging him to take on social tenants, and the decent tenants get the same bad name.
There are plenty of bad landlords out there, that is true. But there are bad tenants, too, and some of them will abuse legal protections to make the entire process as long drawn out and bothersome as possible, and you end up with a landlord deciding they'd rather sell the property than deal with that hassle ever again, and so one more source of rental housing is taken away from people most in need.
>>Not fair. Back in social housing here in Ireland, the new rent allowance scheme wasn't taken up by some landlords (despite it being what you imagine would be easy money) because they didn't want those kinds of tenants. Some tenants are great, some less so.
All this tells me is that these landlords are in a position to refuse that scheme because the amount of "easy money" is a pittance to them, that they're in no need of "easy money", because the entire scheme of being a landlord is "easy money".
>>There are plenty of bad landlords out there, that is true. But there are bad tenants, too, and some of them will abuse legal protections to make the entire process as long drawn out and bothersome as possible, and you end up with a landlord deciding they'd rather sell the property than deal with that hassle ever again, and so one more source of rental housing is taken away from people most in need.
When a landlord sells a rental property, it doesn't disappear into the ether. The house is still there, whoever bought it is presumably doing something with it. Maybe they're renting it out, in which case you've just substituted one landlord for another. Maybe they're living in it, in which case that's great because that's one less renter who doesn't have to deal with having a landlord. As the meme goes, landlords provide housing the same way scalpers provide tickets.
As a response to the general message of your comment ("Not fair", "There are plenty of bad landlords, but there are bad tenants too", etc); Okay, fine. Sometimes people in all different kinds of socioeconomic positions can be abusive jerks. None of that changes that at the end of the "long drawn out and bothersome" process, one party is going to be homeless and the other party is, at worse, going to end up with a nice fat check from selling their spare property at a time of record high housing costs. I mean, you're basically complaining that poor people won't just shut up and accept their homelessness! I'm trying very hard to be charitable, but I can't find myself sympathizing with people who are complaining about all the lip they're getting from the poors as they're booting said poors on the street, especially in the same article that talks about how much human excrement is on said streets. And I absolutely cannot fathom looking at this situation and concluding that we need fewer of those pesky legal protections.
You have to think about it this way: if within some group of tenants, landlords can easily evict the ones who bother the neighbors, damage the property, don't pay rent, or so on, the landlords are much more likely to rent to that group. If it's hard to evict anyone in the group, then no one in the group--even if they'd be a good tenant--is worth renting to: the higher rent doesn't offset the risk of having the wiring stolen or the walls smashed.
The rent clearly offsets the risks. If it didn't, then people wouldn't become landlords. Nobody is forced at gunpoint to buy second (and third and fourth and fifth) properties and rent them out. I'm willing to concede that having the wiring stolen (??? What does one do with stolen wiring? If it's just a case of causing damage, wouldn't it be easier to destroy the wiring without stealing it?) and walls smashed is inconvenient. It's less inconvenient than losing your one primary place of residence and becoming homeless. "You have to think of it this way": Someone being evicted is losing the wiring and walls, regardless of whether or not they smash it.
If the rent did not offset the risks, people would stop being landlords (And then perhaps all those second and third and fourth and fifth properties would be on the market, and drive prices down, and people could actually afford a place of their own to live instead of having to put up with a (possibly abusive) landlord.
If we did go along with your scheme, all we would end up with is more power to landlords (literal rent-seekers). I don't think that outcome is worth stripping away legal protections.
You can sell stolen wiring as scrap metal. The older the better, apparently, since copper is valuable. I went cold at work one winter in a particular city because somebody stole the wiring out of our heating system.
Interesting. I hadn't considered this, but now that you mention it I have heard of rising copper prices, mostly in the context of explaining the rising prices of electronic equipment. Still, a quick google search suggests the price of copper is still <$4.00 a pound (I'm sure the street price for obviously-used scrap copper is much lower, but whatever), and the average house having about 100 pounds of wiring in it total (not all of which is copper, but again whatever). Still, it seems like a lot of effort to go through for _at most_ $400. It seems like anyone who is doing this must be truly desperate. I wonder how many winters they've gone cold?
Wire and a lot of pipes are made of copper. Copper is worth a lot more doing what it's supposed to do than in a heap somewhere, but it doesn't buy drugs if it's doing what it's supposed to do, and it's not your copper anyway.
I think your thinking on the landlord's risk is a little off. You are talking entirely about the risk of being a landlord in general, but the topic is very much about different things that affect that risk. You can't separate the two - the reason landlords do credit checks/income checks/rental history checks and why they have to be stopped from looking at a dozen other factors is all about that risk, and mitigating it.
Rent does not help a ton when things go bad. If someone bio-hazards a house, or rips out the wiring, or rips out the pipes, or floods it, you are in a 5-6 digit damage situation. It's far from impossible for them to take a loss.
A lot of landlords do a thing where they take the rent check from one property and use that to pay the mortgage on another property. Then the rent from that one, they use to pay the mortgage on a third, and so on, until the last rent check pays the mortgage on the property they themselves are living in. If it works, then by the time all those mortgages are paid off, they've made a ton of money. But it's super dangerous, because if one tenant stops paying rent, they could end up behind on multiple different mortgages. This is also why a lot of landlords themselves live in the least expensive property they own.
>>Wire and a lot of pipes are made of copper. Copper is worth a lot more doing what it's supposed to do than in a heap somewhere, but it doesn't buy drugs if it's doing what it's supposed to do, and it's not your copper anyway.
I hadn't considered this. Still, the price of copper isn't that high, and there isn't that much wiring in a house. Based off of some quick googling I'd estimate the potential profit of ripping out all the wiring in a house at a couple of hundred dollars. Not nothing, but not an earth-shattering amount either. I'm not saying it's never happened, but I'm saying most people, even those faced with homelessness, have a better use for their time and bodily effort than selling scrap copper out of a house. It does seem like an effective "fuck you" though, same as "bio-hazarding" as you put it.
The question then becomes how do you get people to not "bio hazard" a house? In my non-expert opinion, people are much less likely to destroy a house they have some kind of personal stake in, and more likely to destroy a house they're about to be evicted from by a landlord. Therefore to stop wire theft and "bio-hazarding", we should structure the economy to encourage people to own their own propery instead of encouraging the wealthy (You can quibble about this if you want, but anyone who can afford even one property is wealthy compared to a renter and especially the homeless) to buy up multiple properties to rent out.
Re: "if it didn't, then people wouldn't become landlords"
Arguably there are lots of people who could theoretically become landlords (lot of single-family homes with a spare bedroom or two out there), but don't, in part because of the risks described.
Speaking as a reluctant landlord in the parenthetical situation, there's definitely room on the spectrum for negative-value tenants short of "they loot the house for drug money". They could, for instance, rely on you entirely for groceries, transportation, and internet, double your dishwashing-chore accumulation and required fridge space (or grocery-visit frequency), move household items without telling anyone, fail to get along with existing pets or other tenants... and still not be able to pay the rent, because they can't hold down a job (or spend down their paycheck too quickly, or accidentally wire the check to some rando with the same name).
Do I wish they were homeless? No. But there's definitely an element of "I wish they weren't *my* problem to deal with, I don't get paid enough ($0) to deal with this on top of my day job".
>>Arguably there are lots of people who could theoretically become landlords (lot of single-family homes with a spare bedroom or two out there), but don't, in part because of the risks described.
I'm fine with this.
>>Speaking as a reluctant landlord in the parenthetical situation, there's definitely room on the spectrum for negative-value tenants short of "they loot the house for drug money". They could, for instance, rely on you entirely for groceries, transportation, and internet, double your dishwashing-chore accumulation and required fridge space (or grocery-visit frequency), move household items without telling anyone, fail to get along with existing pets or other tenants... and still not be able to pay the rent, because they can't hold down a job (or spend down their paycheck too quickly, or accidentally wire the check to some rando with the same name).
I recognize that this situation isn't ideal for you, and I don't want to dismiss your troubles as _literally_ nothing (although I would still maintain that they round off to "nothing" in the face of the suffering of the homeless, but that's not germane to point you're making). For what it's worth, and I recognize it's not worth much, I applaud you for not evicting your tenant and adding to the sum of human misery. There are definitely people in your situation who would evict, and it's a net-positive thing (in my opinion) that you aren't.
Having said all that, it sounds like your situation strays a bit from the central example of the landlord/tenant relationship. It sounds kind of like you're housing an elderly relative, or something, or have a teenaged child.
If that is the extent of your objections to my comment, then sure, I'll take it.
This username is an obvious throwaway. I haven't commented in this community under my usual username since the SSC->ACX switch, on the off chance that I get recognized as someone who reads this blog; it's become increasingly embarrassing to do so since 2017 or so.
This is such a strange line of reasoning to me. Scott describes how his friends have been in a situation where somebody has the power to abuse them and they have no legal recourse -- and your response is to tell him that actually, his friends have all the power?
This happened to my parents when I was a kid. The property was supposed to be a retirement investment. Their tenants did much of what Scott describes. My parents finally sold the place, at a big loss, which was a blow to their retirement savings, and washed their hands of it. Now that neighborhood is a slum full of ruined houses. You probably saw it on The Wire.
I don't know, man. I think you have a funny idea of what power is.
They have a legal recourse. It's just that the legal recourse is annoying / takes too long, and it would really be a lot more convenient (to the landlords) if it would be less of a hassle to deprive people of the roof over their head.
The same way your parents had a legal recourse, and nobody forced them to sell the place. I don't know how they managed to sell the place at a big loss, real estate prices have basically been going in one direction. I currently live in a >100 year old house with no heating (except a small space heater), no cooling (except for a pair of fans), and even if I were to add those things, it has no insulation in the walls or floor or ceiling. At the time I moved in it didn't even have a kitchen; for years I would eat meals out of a small microwave and toaster oven, until I got an instant pot and eventually got the money together for a proper (if DIY) kitchen renovation. The house has nevertheless somehow over-doubled in value and is >$1,000,000, and it isn't because I've put $600,000 of improvements into it.
I don't want to be rude to your parents, but it takes a true kind of financial ineptitude to not make money as a landlord. Why did they sell at a loss? Who did they sell at a loss to? Surely not the tenants who couldn't afford their rent? What did the people that they sold the house to do? (I'm willing to bet it was use their legal recourses)
I don't know if you're in the US, but I've lived in several US cities. Places where such values could have crashed include e.g. Detroit, Baltimore, lots of former steel cities.
Where I live at least, you have legal standing as a tenant to complain and subject your landlord to a lot of grief if they fail to provide certain amenities, heating and hot water among them. A lot of places I've rented or lived with my family didn't have cooling; we had window AC units, which seems to be standard in a lot of places.
I am indeed in the US. There are places where values have crashed yeah, but a home in such places isn't a good retirement investment anyway, on account of how the values have crashed.
Good grief. “When I was a kid.” It was the nineties. The property had extensive smoke damage, and wasn’t worth much to begin with. Whoever bought it from them had to pay five figures to get it up to code so it would be legal to rent it again. Insurance wouldn’t pay, the college student tenants wouldn’t pay… maybe eventually gentrification hit that neighborhood and somebody could make money on it or safely live there. I dunno.
I’m just trying to tell you these legal protections you like have trade-offs. One of the trade-offs is that sometimes landlords get unjustly stuck with huge financial losses. Maybe that’s worth it! But if you deny that something happens, your argument is not very strong with people it has happened to.
>>Good grief. “When I was a kid.” It was the nineties.
House prices increasing is not a (solely) recent phenomenon. The unadjusted median house price in the 1950s was $7,354. In the 1960s it was $11,900. In the 70s it was $17,000. In the 80s it was $47,200. 90s: $79,100. 2000s: $119,600. You can adjust all of those for inflation and it might flatten the curve at certain times but the trend is clear and unambiguous.
>>The property had extensive smoke damage, and wasn’t worth much to begin with.
If it wasn't worth much to begin with, then it doesn't sound like much of a retirement investment, unless they were just hoping to randomly win big (Which is not a sound investment strategy). Still, one of the most oft-repeated investment adages is "time in the market beats timing the market". If they hadn't sold, they probably wouldn't have lost as much or lost at all, and none of the tenant protections can force them to sell.
Also, if it wasn't worth much to begin with, it makes it all the more curious how they were able to lose huge by selling it. The more details you give, the less sense your story makes.
>>Whoever bought it from them had to pay five figures to get it up to code so it would be legal to rent it again.
Okay, but why would they do this? Either it's profitable to do so, or your parents have found a greater fool. Personally, I think it's likely that _even with a five figure cost to get it up to code_ that whoever bought it still made their money back. Or at least they thought they could, which I'm taking as weak evidence in favor of that they could make their money back.
>>Insurance wouldn’t pay
This is insurance's one job. Why are we mad at legal protections for tenants and not at insurance companies doing their one job that they get paid for?
>>the college student tenants wouldn’t pay…
Wouldn't? Or couldn't?
>>I’m just trying to tell you these legal protections you like have trade-offs. One of the trade-offs is that sometimes landlords get unjustly stuck with huge financial losses. Maybe that’s worth it! But if you deny that something happens, your argument is not very strong with people it has happened to.
It's absolutely worth it. Legal protections exist to protect the meek from the powerful, and whether you want to admit it or not, in the renter-landlord relationship the landlords are absolutely the "powerful" ones. The occasional anecdote about occasional financial loses doesn't mean a thing in the face of the huge financial gains made by landlords as a whole. Occasional huge financial losses are a characteristic of any investment in any kind of market, and I see no reason why house-scalpers should be exempt.
It's the same sort of "power" that the "colonizers" have over the "oppressed " that are machine-gunning them in a deli reefer.
"Punching up" is totes kewl, whether it's along class, race, religion, wealth or income lines. Just pick which axis makes you the oppressed and you can do whatever you want!
It surely could not have escaped your notice that the way to get power in America is to Own Things. If you're in the Owning Things class, you can leverage the Things you Own to get what you want (usually the Ownership of more Things). If you have an alternative read on the situation, I'm open to hearing it.
My immediate reaction to this is that the "problem" homeless are the kind that ignore eviction notices and squat. The kind of people that are just temporarily down on their luck are likely the kind of people who get served their eviction papers and quietly move out without a big fuss because that is what is expected of them.
Possibly true, but I've heard the same kind of "horror stories" about people who lost their houses in the sub-prime mortgage debacle, and I'm hesitant to write off such a large group of people as "problem" types. It seems more likely to me that people strike back in whatever small way they can when being chewed up and evicted from their homes, be it by bank or by landlord, for financial reasons beyond their ability to affect or understand. The shit always rolls downhill and the poorest and most powerless suffer the most. In comparison, some missing wires and turds on the floor are pretty trivial.
Powdered concrete poured down the toilet also isn't typical, and it's disingenuous to pretend like it is.
Aren't you the guy who objected to tenants who can't pay rent not being able to afford house repairs? But now all of a sudden every tenant can afford powdered concrete to pour down a toilet to no benefit of their own? Pick a lane and stick to it.
The costs piling on the next tenant is literally my point. Like I said, the shit rolls downhill. those in power (landlords) will avoid eating the costs if they can, and they often can. Instead they'll pass them down to literally anyone they can. This makes me _less_ sympathetic to landlords who have concrete poured in their toilets, not more.
No, I'm the gal who pointed out that people who don't have sufficient economic capability to pay rent on a regular basis don't have the economic capability nor the discipline to keep up with the repairs necessary to prevent the dwelling from falling apart.
You don't understand the upkeep necessary, you don't grasp that rents are higher than mortgages because the mortgages have to be paid every month, whether or not the landlord is making repairs, or is in court to get a destructive or non paying tenant out or not.
You don't even know how cheap powdered 'crete is.
I don't care where your sympathies lie, your grasp of reality is too poor to make your emotional assessments dependable.
>>No, I'm the gal who pointed out that people who don't have sufficient economic capability to pay rent on a regular basis don't have the economic capability nor the discipline to keep up with the repairs necessary to prevent the dwelling from falling apart.
That's a sweeping indictment of a large and diverse group of people that you're in no position to make. "Discipline" isn't the problem. People can't "discipline" their way out of the rent trap, and to suggest otherwise too loudly is an excellent way to find spit in your onion rings, deservedly.
>>You don't understand the upkeep necessary,
I'm a homeowner, of a >100 year old house in the famously expensive bay area. I do understand the upkeep necessary, so I know you're blowing it way way out of proportion. It is expensive, yeah, but it's nothing compared to rent.
>>you don't grasp that rents are higher than mortgages because the mortgages have to be paid every month, whether or not the landlord is making repairs, or is in court to get a destructive or non paying tenant out or not.
Yeah, I'm sure _thats_ the problem, and not that there's a middleman literal-rent-seeker taking a cut off the top for doing basically fuck all.
Rent will always be higher than mortgages, no matter how docile and "disciplined" the tenant, because rent will always be the costs plus profit for the landlord, and approximately zero landlords in the history of ever set their rents such as to make zero or negative profit. This is not a difficult concept to grasp.
>>You don't even know how cheap powdered 'crete is.
Okay, you got me. I don't know. But I'm probably going to survive just fine because of I ever did need to know, that information is a Google search away. I'm willing to bet it's not free, though, and any money spent on toilet concrete is...flushed down the toilet. So I guess it really comes down to how badly the landlord has pissed the tenant for how much budget they're willing to allocate to their "fuck you".
>>I don't care where your sympathies lie, your grasp of reality is too poor to make your emotional assessments dependable.
You live in a fantasy world of poor starving landlords who are driven to destitution by their chosen profession. You don't get to talk to me about grasps of reality. Emotional assessments, huh? Because your plea bringing up concrete in the first place was pure logos and no pathos, right? Please.
I'll direct your attention to the fact that in spite of the cheapness of concrete and the existence of non-paying and destructive tenants, landlords keep landlording. Not only do they keep landlording but they keep landlording profitably. How do you square that with your grasp on reality? It's almost as if all this bullshit with the concrete and stolen wiring doesn't matter and is a just a pathetic attempt to garmer pity.
Ree: why don't cities ship homeless back to the suburbs, to me it feels like the obvious answer is that the people living in the suburb are also the richest and most influential people working in the city during the day, and city officials have more to lose by offending them than by hurting the poor people that actually live in most of the city.
I don't know if that dynamic holds for all cities, but it feels right for the cities I grew up around.
My experience as a small-scale landlord (lived in the middle of a 3-flat and rented out the other two apartments) taught me that the U.S.'s legal processes related to rent-paying assume that most tenants won't show up to contest eviction. What I learned the hard way as a rookie landlord, and then heard from veteran landlords, was that it takes only one "motivated tenant" to crash the whole balance.
In my and my wife's case it wasn't even technically an eviction, we were just declining to renew a lease because the renter had been violating the written lease. We made the rookie mistake of explaining that (way too late an attorney explained to me why "you never give a reason"); and the renter took offense and found free legal assistance; and long story short we had to pay her to go away (and pay our attorney to help us pay her to go away).
And thus ended our interest in ever again being landlords at any scale. At small scale the annual returns when it goes well can't justify the level of loss and stress when it occasionally doesn't.
The Cabrini-Green saga in Chicago has a key twist which seems relevant to this discussion. Originally the complex was built as public housing for people who were in the workforce; a family could not be assigned a unit unless somebody in the household could prove they had a paying job. At some point during the Great Society years that requirement was dropped. I first heard this firsthand from someone who'd spent his childhood living in Cabrini and remembered when "the rules changed", but you can google it.
What my friend remembered was that it was after the rule change that Cabrini devolved into the gang-controlled disaster that it certainly was by the late 1970s. And I think that is more or less established wisdom among Chicagoans of that era....if correct then it has an obvious consequence for the concept of building public housing to house people who are unhoused. Brings us back I guess to the uncomfortable need to accurately diagnose _why_ they are unhoused.
Yep. Free stuff without any obligation (employment, attempt to get employment, or even just obeying the law) is just a set-up for enabling bad behavior.
Yes the projects mostly started out mixed income, and trying to completely keep out the indigent, though I think a close reading of the history showed that even from the start they kind of bent the rules and started letting in people who could not in any way support themselves, and that you basically started to see flight from the lower middle class almost immediately.
I think the reason you only hear stories about bad tenants is because you don't know many renters. I think that part of the problem is that good landlords mostly get bad tenants and good tenants mostly get bad landlords.
Another question: what percentage of the security deposit do these landlords keep on average with the tenants who leave of their own accord? That seems to be the biggest issue for some tenants, that their landlords keep the security deposit for no good reason.
Something that has always stuck with me is the last apartment I rented -- I moved out about 10 years ago. I had been there, I don't know, 5 years or so. It was a not-terribly-luxurious small (like 8 units?) apartment build into Palo Alto. The landlady was an individual who lived in the building.
I told her that I was moving, and she expressed great sorrow and said I was a "walks-on-water" tenant.
I mean, I didn't do anything crazy. I paid my rent on time, I didn't trash the apartment, and I didn't, like... cook meth. I had parties sometimes that went late into the night (but weren't super wild), I asked her to handle it whenever I had problems with the plumbing or utilities, etc. It's not like I spent my free time fixing up the building free of charge or anything.
So this suggests to me that behavior that I'd regard as basically par for the course is sufficiently rare that it warrants at least some note.
I had a LL agree I could paint the walls dark colors (I asked), said nothing about the security deposit, and then when I moved out tried to keep the security deposit due to it. I threw a fit and they eventually relented so I got my couple hundred dollars back.
But I would also point out that as a LL I had more than one tenant do multiple thousands of dollars of damage to my property that was not recoverable through the deposit. So I can see why LLs would be grabby for deposits.
>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!!!?!?!?
This proposal still creates ghettos, just less immediately and explicitly. It really only takes one intolerable neighbor to drive people to move if they have no other remedy, and only people who can't afford to live anywhere else will opt to fill the vacancies.
Anecdotal response to "Why don’t cities bus their homeless back to suburbs?" from a quite different area - I recall being in Minsk, Belarus many years ago, and one thing that I noticed that despite quite many people not being well off at all, there was zero visible homelessness or beggars or such; local friends asserted that local police ship out such "delinquents" to country villages in the region where they can either do farming or at least are 'out of sight, out of mind' of the administrators living in the capital.
I have heard similar stories from some other places in Eastern Europe as things that are being done by city police. It does make some sense as in the countryside there's not a deficit of housing (though often of poor quality) due to urbanization decreasing population, and while there's a shortage of *decent* jobs there, it's definitely possible (I know some quite dysfunctional people doing that) to get enough for food and cheap alcohol by odd jobs, some social security support, and perhaps planting some potatoes if they can. Of course, that life sucks in many aspects, and some (many?) people do actually prefer to be homeless in a big city instead.
>This is a great thought experiment / example of a cognitive bias / whatever it is. I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more.
It seems like the obvious objection here is that, sure, if 1 out of every 100 people would literally burn down every building around them if not put in jail, then in that world having 1% of the population in jail would be the unfortunate but correct decision.
But we don't live in a world where 1 out of every 100 people are that type of insane criminal.
In which case, yeah, having a 1% chance of being locked in jail for bad reasons is a pretty big crisis. We locked down the whole planet more or less to fight a disease with a less than 1% fatality rate, whereas in this analogy we're inviting that type of decimation intentionally.
>This is a great thought experiment / example of a cognitive bias / whatever it is. I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more.
I think in the 6/600 people scenario, I wouldn't think of it as a crisis of overincarceration, but I *would* notice that it seems kind of on the high side to form a permanent prison population in a community of that size. But at those numbers, you don't have the Law of Large Numbers insuring that things will hew close to the true frequency rates of the overall population. It's not that weird if 1% of the town's population happens to be hardened criminals incapable of peaceful coexistence because they got unlucky. Similarly, if another town of 600 has no hardened criminals, we're not going to be baffled by their inexplicable lack of criminality, because on that scale it's within the range of plausible variation.
When you see a country of 200 million with a prison population of 2 million, you're intuitively going to notice some things are different in that scenario. One is that the numbers involved are large enough that you can be quite sure the country's rate of incarceration isn't a matter of sheer dumb luck. Another is that unlike in the scenario with the town of 600, nobody is going to be in a position to know the personalities or circumstances of all 2 million inmates, or even more than a tiny fraction of them, and vouch "Yep, these inmates are definitely all hardened criminals who threaten the stability of their communities, and they're locked away because the system has treated them fairly."
In the actual country of America, rather than this hypothetical country of 200 million, you're also going to notice that the prison population is not a single permanent population; many of the people in that population of 2 million are not going to be in it ten years from now, but at the rate we're going, we don't expect the overall number to get any smaller. And if you're the type to keep track of trends, you're also likely to notice "Hey, this isn't the sort of proportional prison population size we had several decades ago, something must have changed for our prison population to be so much larger now." It could be that it's grown a lot because our population was underincarcerated in the past, and more people being locked away is better for our society, but I don't think people noticed the 1970's being a massive crime wave?
Worth a read; biased and doesn't really cite sources beyond the book mentioned in its first paragraph, but it definitely notices a lot of crime in the 1970's.
Another issue with the thought experiment is that 6 people would be imprisoned *at any given time*, many more than that will be imprisoned at one time or another.
How many more? Well... "The data show that 45 percent of Americans have ever had an immediate family member incarcerated. The incarceration of an immediate family member was most prevalent for blacks (63 percent) but common for whites (42 percent) and Hispanics (48 percent) as well. " (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023119829332)
If you told me there was a small town in which 45% of all residents had ever had an immediate relative incarcerated, I'd think that town had fallen on very hard times indeed. But apparently that would just make it an average American community...
> This has been the opposite of my experience (and the experience of some friends with experience here who I talked to). The stories I hear are all about how nightmare tenants don’t pay rent for months or years, smash everything in the apartment, and when landlords try to get rid of them the courts just say they won’t evict them because making people homeless is mean. The stories I’ve heard are that a lot of landlords straight out try to figure out how to avoid renting to poor people because if their tenants ever choose to stop paying rent it’s several years of nightmarish court cases to get 50-50 odds of the government ever doing anything.
I think this is a case where both sides are right simultaneously. My understanding is that CA *laws* are very tenant friendly and you can easily fight eviction for months *if* you know your rights and have a good lawyer. But a lot of tenants don't know their rights, or aren't willing to risk a lawsuit, and are thus are prey to getting illegally evicted by abusive landlords.
Yeah both a lot of shitty tenants and shitty LLs. Almost by definition way way more shitty tenants, but the shitty LLs have a bigger impact.
That said mostly a shitty LL is generally "harming" someone by asking them to pay more or the and/or the market price for a residence. And that person needs to walk away from their home if they don't like it. The actual harm is rather small. Meanwhile tenants can easily cost LLs tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I am all for tenant protections, but the current environment (even pre-covid) where evictions can take half a year or a year in some cases if the tenant plays their cards right is absurd.
Shitty landlords can cause a lot more damage than that. Like reusing to make the apartment habitable, or even removing the doors or just dumping someone's stuff in the street while they're at work. All illegal, but that doesn't mean people don't try it.
Well they do, but your recourse is just to move. Meanwhile while you are a tenant you have the LLs valuable property hostage so to speak.
I know of two people who have big stories about LLs "stealing" their stuff. Both times when you really dig into it after a few drinks, they were given repeated warnings by their LL to clean out a "storage space" and a "garage", and then when they didn't the LL eventually confiscated and sold the stuff.
Absolutely apartments should have to be of a certain quality to get a rental license, I believe in that, and government run inspections (at a minimum on request, possibly on a schedule).
And LLs shouldn't be able to throw your shit in the street either.
And yet I just don't know of any examples of that actually happening where it wasn't imminently justified, despite working in low income housing for ~15 years. Lots of example of shitty terrible things happening to tenants, almost every time they brought it on themselves.
There were LLs who rent out moldy unsafe hovels, or shit with exposed wires, or whatever, but those most everyone agrees should be shut down.
But so much of tenants rights these days seems to come down to "it currently takes 5 months of unpaid rent to evict someone once they stop paying rent, this is too low", and as soon as you get that number changed to 6 months, there is a desire to push it to 7. Which is just frankly absurd.
If you're poor enough, or sufficiently tied down to a particular location that you're stuck with a shitty landlord for an extended period, "just move" may be an exceedingly difficult proposition. I've known people who were stuck with shitty landlords for years, because as much as they wanted to move, they weren't in a position to do so. Searching for a new home comes with steep costs when you barely have any time or money on hand after working to afford the one you're already in.
Under those circumstances, getting kicked out by your landlord can be a grave threat, because if you lose your home, you're liable to become unable to retain your job which you need in order to afford a home.
It's much easier to get away with being a bad landlord when renting to people who can't simply afford to move. If you remain a bad landlord long-term, over time, your population of renters will tend towards being people who can't easily afford to move, because the ones who can mostly will.
Which is an argument for allowing more cheap apartments - or at least not passing tax, HUD, and zoning codes directly requiring more expensive housing.
If it would take 15-30 days to two months to get a client with cash in hand in an apartment, landlords would be encouraged to take more risk.
"cities in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina also have okay climates without too many homeless"
This is how you know Scott spends little time on the West Coast. Nominal temperatures are similar but (say it with me) it's not the heat - it's the humidity! East Coast cities freeze in the winter, and if you go far enough South that they don't they are unbearably hot in the summer. If you want a climate that's at all comparable to California, you'd have to summer in Vermont and winter in Florida. Or you could just live year-round in San Francisco.
The Cabrini-Green homes definitely faced a lot of problems with how they were built. While it was probably better than being homeless, many people who would have qualified for them and the similarly troubled Robert Taylor complex opted to stay in market-rate housing and wait for one of the less-awful government housing options to open up, often for years. The book Blueprint for Disaster is a good history of 20th century public housing failures, with a focus on these 2.
I'm still very confused by this issue on a cross-country aspect. I live in Israel, and AFAICT the number of homeless in the centers of big cities is negligible. Certainly they don't camp the in any noticeable numbers. Why is it so different? Mental illness is probably at similar levels. And why has the number of homeless increased over time in the US?
My unsubstantiated guess is that it has to do with more individualism and looser family and community ties. If you're mentally ill but your family is in the picture, it's far less likely you'll become a homeless drug addict. If you're not mentally ill, you always have a couch to sleep on not very far.
But it could very well be that the difference is stricter policing keeping the homeless off main streets, or more institutionalization, I haven't checked the numbers.
Anyway, "creating a communal less individualistic culture" might be the least feasible solution to homelessness, but it would also be good to trace some of the source of the problem. I especially don't like that this is unthinkable, and all solutions proposed treat homeless as complete individuals to be dealt with individually by incentives and deterrence.
##"Unfortunately, you can’t ask people on a survey 'are you the good or the bad kind of homeless person?' so there aren’t a lot of statistics that do a good job taking this into account."##
Why can't you ask that question? That seems like a great question to ask, actually. If the response is raving lunacy, or no response because the person is passed out from fentanyl or bum wine, then you're interviewing the Bad Kind. But I agree that the question is impolite, and might get you stabbed.
I would think that you could sort the homeless into categories ("Beach Bum," "Unlucky," and "Crazy") with pretty good confidence with one question: "What caused you to become homeless?" The Beach Bum will give you a story that isn't really sad (or at least has a decent ending, because he's more or less content with his life). The Unlucky will give you a sad story about how her dog needed surgery and then she couldn't make rent. The Crazy will give you craziness.
Maybe there are difficulties with borderline cases, maybe some people move between categories somewhat freely, maybe mental illness does not always present in ways that are obvious to survey-takers. But surely we have heuristics for identifying the "bad" homeless, right? (Chris Rock joked that if you see a beggar with a funny sign, he doesn't really need your money. "Real" hungry people, Rock explained, are too hungry to be funny.) Because when people talk about San Fransico's homeless problem, they generally do not mean "this city is too expensive for working class people to have enough economic security to provide a buffer for unexpected expenses, and they can easily find themselves evicted if they suffer a slight setback." They mean "there's shit everywhere, a bum broke into my car, and I almost got stabbed by a smelly lunatic."
Homelessness is interesting in that it's one of the clearest dividing lines between liberals and conservatives. I'm generally more conservative, and I've always seen it as an issue without any clear solution. Most conservatives seem to think this way. The heuristic is "well, people are always going to make weird decisions and as long as they don't bother me or the people I care about, it's not really my business."
I am more of the mind that rather than dividing liberals and conservatives, it divides law-abiding people who have direct experience with this crap, and those who do not. Have an encampment take over your street or park? Oh, now it's a whole different ballgame! The time for academic debate about "heroinville" and some such has passed and the time for action is here. The "clear solution" might simply be to clear the damn encampment rather than endless hand-wringing about how to solve homelessness writ large.
In other words, to echo your point, at some point it becomes your business, and then a solution, at least a local one, appears.
As an urban planner who sometimes comments publicly about housing issues, I'd like to thank you all for this crowd-sourced effort to make me better at my job.
One note: I do not find it surprising that as rates of shoplifting rise, people's hopelessness about reporting it also rises, leading people to report it less. If the proportion of police resources spent on it does not rise (which seems to be the case), then the proportion of useless phone calls to the cops will rise, discouraging people from bothering.
To Scott and all the commenters: This is the most informative and useful discussion of homelessness and urban crime I have ever read. I can't recommend it highly enough to the many people I have sent it to.
In regards to the relatively level number of shoplifting reports, you've only discussed the demand for shoplifting reports, not the supply. There aren't an infinite number of police working hours available to be spent on writing shoplifting reports, and it's difficult to get more shoplifting reports as a citizen, because you can't just pay the police more to take your shoplifting report rather than someone else's.
As the anecdote on the homeless tree camp neighbors indicates, the police may just choose not to respond.
So despite additional demand, if the police have decided they're only going to spend X% of their time, or even only write a fixed number of X shoplifting reports, perhaps even with a floor of Y severity, then the willingness of police to spend time on shoplifting reports (because this is a government bureaucracy, not a real market) is going to control the number which get filed, not the amount of shoplifting and the corresponding demand for shoplifting reports.
I have immediate family members who manage gas station/convenience stores (but not in the bay area). Shoplifting is rampant. Corporate policy is to make no attempt to stop it, even at stores with an armed guard (i.e. the worst stores). Calls to the police are only made if there is violence or a threat involved, or if the theft is over a particular relatively high dollar threshold of value. Otherwise, it's just another loss embedded in the overhead and despite having everything on camera, not worth pursuing.
Most retail companies likely have some variation of a similar policy about dealing with shoplifting, but harder than usual targets just shift the crime to other softer retail locations. If there was a massive influx of shoplifting beneath their dollar reporting number, it wouldn't induce them to report more of it, because corporate and the police don't want reports under that dollar number. That may also have an effect, because those sorts of dollar limits for particular stores are frequently found in online shoplifting discussion communities.
> I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis.
Should we expect criminality to scale linearly with population size? That seems like the weakness in the analogy, as many phenomena scale non-linearly with population.
Some of the longer running encampments will sometimes start to do this on their own. In places like skid row in LA with a large, dense population of homeless living on the streets, people may tap into an electrical line somewhere and run extension cords for lighting. Or they may find scrap wood and building materials and use that to create stronger structures.
Given enough time the encampments would likely start to resemble favelas or slums.
It's easy for us to forget but this was a very common form of housing development across the world until the past 2 to 300 years. A city may have a wall outside of which people would construct shacks, those shacks would slowly be built up and soon be real structures.
I think they have a quite different role, not because of some specific factors of living conditions (electricity, plumbing) but of the social factors - the residents of slums do expect their homes to stay there, that is their long-term home instead of a temporary spot, and they are creating and raising new families there; there is a large set of favela-born-and-raised kids but not a proportionally equivalent set of babies born and raised in the homeless encampments; there are some but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule, probably due to some state support helping get babies out of homeless encampments but a lack of similar support to get babies out of favelas.
Agreed. I think that if we wanted to substantially reduce homelessness in America a big part of it would be working out how to regulate the creation of private-sector $100-a-month housing units, which probably would be some combination of subsidized, tiny, and lacking "basics" like electricity/heat/water.
$100 a month is too expensive. Folks want free man! Make it free!
Oh, and add in some free maid service and meth delivery.
That'll solve homelessness. Great idea!
Not sure how seriously intended, and YMMV, but: it's part of the cultural mythos here, which partly fuels the self-selection of people in or out of the city. The hippie hangover, (social) libertarian vibes, everyone happy to denounce The Man (including The Man himself, there's always a bigger Man elsewhere to kvetch about). City of misfits, where all non-normies can find a niche. A strong narrative that people convince themselves into internalizing, about peace and love and generally just leaving others alone. Heaven forbid anyone ever Appeal to an Authority, that's such a Karen thing! Can't we all just get along peacefully without speaking to the mananger? Unlike Outgroup, whom we all know to be Hateful Bigots. Good thing none of them live here! They aren't welcome even if they did!
Obviously, revealed preferences show this narrative is often a crock of shit, but cognitive dissonance is a hard trap to break out of. Speaking of: Big 5 psychological factors. High on empathy and openness to experience, low on conscientiousness. Dunno about Xanax, but "everyone" is anxious and/or depressed and/or on some sort of meds. Homeless in particular are seen as like, a maximally high score in Victim Card Poker (Equity Expansion), so they get outsize outpourings of sympathy and Calls to Do Something (directed to someone else with power, I don't have power, power is evil, etc, etc.)
This is spot on. I still love the West Coast, but spot on.
I live on the West Coast and I often feel like a pariah when I bring up libertarian talking points with locals. I blame the local school system for employing far too many hyper-liberal teachers who brainwash the kids. If I have kids I'm sending them to a religious school to try and avoid any hyper-liberal from having access to my child.
Could be beneficial to expose them to bunch of different conflicting value systems. Could nudge them to think about the principles on meta level instead of adopting the default mindset.
13-year old in y-tribe school: "Mr y-tribe Math Teacher is too strict and assigns way too much homework".
31-year old in x-tribe city: "Don't badmouth y-tribe, my math teacher was a respectable person and good teacher too!".
They won't, but they won't teach them hyper-liberalism either. One example is masks: my friends kids are still voluntarily wearing them even though its not a thing adults do anymore in Seattle, all because of the brainwashing by hyper-liberal teachers. If they instead went to a Catholic school, they wouldn't be masking up.
I too have seen police relocate homeless people across the border of the nice suburb near me to my less-nice-bigger suburb. The common knowledge that this happens, and that the police in nice suburbs are willing and able to continue doing this with the support of the self-selected nice suburb residents feels like a trivial explanation for the question of "why are there no homeless people in the nice suburbs."
I agree with your three bullets, but would argue those add up to "neutral impact on all people" BUT "cost money and resources to do," which is net negative. I generally don't like my tax dollars to be spent on dumping problems elsewhere. But the history of cities fighting each other shows that most people are willing to ignore this concern.
In the initial post, one commenter mentioned that we have a bit of a Tiebout Model or competition between city jurisdictions. I agree, and see it as a long term positive sum process. An arms race which longer term will lead to a race to the top more so than to the bottom.
My argument is that the progressive framing of the problem (compassion and housing first) enables and encourages both more homelessness and more bad behavior. The appropriate response is stern control for lawful, safe and clean conditions along with shelters for the truly destitute. Thus I see the current "solutions" being supplied by the most progressive cities as being iatrogenic in nature. They make the problem worse even as they try to make it better. We will never solve homelessness until progressives wake up and realize that they are part of the problem (when you subsidize something you tend to get more of it)
As such, it is important that non progressive cities stop the absurdity at their town limits. I don’t think this requires shipping the homeless into the city (though in all honesty I support doing so), but it does require making sure that your suburb is the least attractive place for itinerant homeless people. My experience is that the cops of the pleasant suburbs in my county (San Diego) are great at doing this by using the laws to discourage homelessness. As such the homeless willingly go off to the less conservative communities. The tourists are happy, the merchants are happy, the suburban families are happy.
The problem is indeed worse in the progressive cities, but bad ideas have consequences, and it isn’t like we haven’t warned them that they are promoting both homelessness, hepatitis and social chaos. Eventually the hope is that they will want to reclaim their cities and clean up the (literal) mess they are making.
Locally, homelessness is entirely solvable. We don’t have to outrun the bear, we only have to outrun progressive cities, at least until they stop hiking in the woods with pork chops tied around their necks.
Sad but true, and applies to neighborhoods within cities as well, not just suburbs vs cities.
What Turok's post highlights (and the reason the numbers make it more uncomfortable), is that the word "institutionalisation" is being used to conflate two very different things.
At present, the law allows people to be detained because:
1. They're awaiting trial for/convicted of crimes (imprisonment)
2. They're mentally ill and treating them is necessary to prevent them from harming themselves/others (involuntary commitment) or
3. They're mentally ill and so dangerous to other people that they can't be allowed on the street (occasionally involuntary commitment, often court-ordered hospitalisation after someone is found not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity).
Indefinitely detaining people to prevent them from causing negative externalities in the future (defecating in public, shouting at people, some risk of lunging at/robbing random passers-by, starting fires etc) isn't the same as either 2 or 3 above, because treatment will often be impossible and there's not that much risk of them seriously injuring/killing someone. Pretending that the purpose of this is in order to help them is broadly intellectually dishonest. The purpose of this is to stop them causing problems (in this case, being an unbearable nuisance) to everyone else, on a prospective basis.
In other words, it's a form of internment.
That doesn't mean it's "basically the holocaust," can't be done humanely, and isn't the right course of action. I think it's probably justified. But pretending this is an extension of the mental health system is wrong, and doing it in that way will only result in having to rope psychiatrists in to sign off that these people have "dysfunctional vagrant personality disorder." There's also something slightly unpleasant about pretending this is for these people's own good - they'd probably be happier, if not more flourishing, being allowed to defecate in the streets and shout at people. The justification for it is that no-one else should have to deal with them, and Scott's burdens-type argument doesn't apply because they've specifically sought out an urban centre built and maintained by the civilized population, rather than just roaming the woods in Montana.
"Indefinitely" is doing a lot of work here. These negative externalities are already on the books as crimes, and they carry proportionate custodial sentences. You don't need internment or indefinite detention or any of that. You do however need the police and the DAs and the courts to diligently and consistently keep arresting and making cases and incarcerating quality-of-life offenders in a way that keeps them incapacitated for a reasonable amount of time. It's true that the public will have to put up with them in between their release and their next due process, but that's much more manageable than totally lassiez faire and IMO a reasonable price to pay for living in a rule-of-law democracy.
How long are you planning on making the prison sentences for public urination/public drunkenness/drug possession/shouting on a public highway? Normally these sorts of things land you with a fine.
These kinds of crimes already provide for jail time, “not to exceed 30 days” or “not to exceed one year” or whatever. Rarely if ever seeking them is an administrative choice.
Fines against indigents are a ridiculous: normally they will never have the money, but if they do at some point get back on track enough to have the money, then good for them.
Mainly I am pointing out here that you do not need some new extraordinary power of indefinite detention, or to launder everything through mental health. We already have an enumerated set of behaviors we don’t want to deal with, and proportionate amounts of time for which we are not going to deal with you after you commit those behaviors.
"Enforce the laws already on the books before rewriting the law" basically.
If our society could only actually do this...
Not sure if this system already exists or not, but in my opinion the best solution would be gradually increasing punishments. Which would require keeping a database.
Drunk or urinating on the street for the first time, $5 fine. Second time, $10. Third time, $15. Twenty times, a day in jail. Etc. If you don't break the rule for the entire year, the severity goes one step down. If you don't break the rule for consecutive three or five years, your start from step zero again.
This would mean that no one goes to jail for doing a stupid thing once, but people who just can't stop being a public nuisance despite repeated punishments will ultimately be removed from the streets. The law would understand the difference between breaking a rule exceptionally, and doing it all the time.
This exists of course, with varying levels of informality. But these kinds of incentives work only for basically normal people, not the ones who cause the majority of problems, like career criminals or "wretched homeless". Society has to commit to understanding that these people need in fact to be locked up indefinitely, and when time in prison is essentially torture for the vast majority of inmates, such commitment is difficult.
My third party perspective is that the cops in beach communities already do this. In Encinitas Ca, I see them taking pictures of homeless offenders and filling out some kind of minor report. My assumption is that they are building up a data base on repeat offenders and thus driving itinerants out of their communities to places where it is less well policed.
I don't think a definition of mental health that permits defecating on streets and shouting at people to be very useful, much like a definition of physical health that permits not being able to go up a flight of stairs.
Like it or not, societies and stairs are features of the modern world and a basic ability to navigate both is required, otherwise you will have a bad time.
"Social health"
Option #3 is that we lean harder on their friends and family to step up and take care of them already. Or offer them positive incentives to do so. That's a tall order, but it's not entirely off the table.
It's easier if there are actual mechanisms to help the friends and family with the burden. Many of the wretched homeless don't really have family or friends through.
Or their family finally threw up their hands and kicked them out.
This.
Yep. Scott imposes some weird requirement on Shellenberger that he must condemn 1950s style institutionalization in order to get a fair hearing on his current suggestions. Why? He's clearly not proposing a return to that mid 20th century style. Nor, as far I can tell, is anyone else in California advocating anything like that. It just seems oddly irrational to use this as a point of contention.
Scott is weirdly determined not to say he was wrong here. It is a little jarring.
I would expect that as a working psychiatrist, Scott is fairly familiar with what these institutions are like today. And would also have been socialized into psychiatry's understanding of its own history, which perhaps regards this period as an atrocity never to be repeated.
And yet so matter how much Scott knows about X, if Shellenberger isn't proposing X, then it is completely beside the point. It's a stunningly irrational take from a supposed rationialist.
The policy outcome you get by accepting proposal X isn't necessarily what the proposer has in mind. Your prior about what will happen should be informed by what happened last time.
Even if last time was decades ago and there have been massive improvements since? Nah. Why stop there? Why not invoke the 19th century? Or medieval barber surgeons?
The current situation is horrible for all. Scott ends up coming off as oddly reactionary. Can’t do anything? Well then status quo it is! Great…
And Shellenberger doesn’t propose X anyway. The only sweeping institutionalization in this debate is in Scott’s head.
"You're committing the Being Wrong fallacy" is one of the boringest arguments.
Is that what I did? Scott appears to be defining "sweeping" however he needs to for him to be able to claim he is still correct. If he is going to define *any* institutionalization as "sweeping" I guess that's fine, but doesn't strike me as very useful or rationalist-like (and it certainly isn't the standard Scott holds his opponents to when it comes to accuracy or rigor). Is it not ok to point that out? Do I need to write a full length dissertation on the matter to offer comment on it?
A relevant discouraging story about massive homelessness:
Back in the 1980s, Environmentalists pointed at Mexico City to prove that we were all going to strangle in our own shit and pollution. The population had exploded, and crime, homelessness, poverty, pollution, and everything bad was skyrocketing.
But today, people aren't roaming the streets of Mexico City in hazmat suits killing and eating each other, which was the expectation in the 1980s. After their 2017 earthquake, it struck me as odd that I'd never heard how Mexico City got better. So I searched, but found nothing in any book or website explaining how Mexico City had escaped what had seemed to everyone like certain doom.
I was hoping to find an inspiring story about the power of humans to overcome adversity, but instead I came across a survey of poor indigenous households in Mexico City showing a distribution of arrival year among them which was constant back until 1985, then fell to nearly zero before that. Almost none of the poor indigenous people there today had arrived before 1985, despite the fact that the population of poor indigenous people there was much higher before 1985 than it is today. That suggests that the city kicked out or relocated the poor and homeless after the earthquake, or that they left on their own.
This book: [Environment and Urbanization--Environmental problems in third world cities, V1 N1 Apr 1989, Nottingham UK: Russell Press, ISSN 0956-2478] says there were 242,000 homeless families in Mexico City in 1970 [p. 42], and that in 1975 there were 1.3 million squatters living in shantytowns on a dry lake bed on the edge of the city [earlier on p. 42]. That's the same area of unstable ground devastated by the 1985 earthquake.
The number of homeless in Mexico City when I wrote this in 2017 was only about 15,000-30,000.
So, Mexico City wasn't saved by human determination and ingenuity, but by the 1985 earthquake, which gave them the excuse to get rid of perhaps two million homeless people. I found nothing indicating how they got rid of them. But they aren't there now.
The strength of the earth quakes.
The 1985 8.1M earthquake was over 10x stronger than the 2017 7.1M earthquake.
Plus, the earlier earthquake had culled out the weaker older buildings. Better safety standards were likely placed making the later earthquake that much less troublesome.
I removed the part of my comment that you're replying to, because I realized leading with 2 paragraphs about the 1985 earthquake could cause people to think it wasn't related to homelessness, and skip on to the next comment.
[For others: What I deleted was mostly this: "After the 2017 earthquake in Mexico City, I began to wonder with remarkably few fatalities, considering that the 1985 earthquake had "5000 - 45,000 fatalities" (Wikipedia). I wondered how they'd improved an entire city's stability so much in so little time.]"
Maybe repairs after the earthquakes provided lots of jobs?
Wouldn't explain why there aren't any poor indigenous people who where there before 1985, unless the jobs were so good none of them are poor anymore. And also none of the people showing up after 1985 where able to get these good jobs.
I didn't get this in, but I thought the entire review was problematic because it was based on SF through 2019 rather than through 2022. It seems like the entire situation tipped over into catastrophe post-2019. The book was published today rather than in 2019, partially in response to the worsening of crime and homelessness in 2020-2021. You can't just write that off to the pandemic and Floyd riots, because the cultural rot existing before 2020 was revealed under pressure, during those events.
My sense is that the "catastrophe" had been steadily worsening way before the pandemic, and not just in SF.
All of your "senses" or "feelings" are nice but they may not be true. At least according to the SF Gov stats, unsheltered homelessness has decreased by 15% and overall homelessness has decreased 3.5% since 2019.
https://sfmayor.org/article/new-san-francisco-homelessness-count-reveals-15-decrease-unsheltered-homelessness-2019-2022
Okay – but this post, the comments on it, other posts, etc., have all pointed out good reasons to NOT trust the 'official stats' over other's 'lying eyes'.
"In June, 2020, Mayor Breed announced a Homelessness Recovery Plan that focused on expanding housing options for people experiencing homelessness, including investing in the largest expansion of permanent, supportive housing in 20 years. Since that date, just over 1,490 new units of permanent supportive housing that have opened. An additional 1,054 units will be open or under contract by July 2022, exceeding the goal of the plan by 70%"
I guess "the government buys all of them a house" is one way to solve homelessness.
I note that, two years into this plan, homelessness does not appear to have been solved in San Francisco. Nobody is denying that "the government buys all of them a house" is a thing governments can *try* to do to solve homelessness, we're just skeptical that it would actually *work*
Yep
RE: Isn't Cabrini-Green better than being homeless.
Shutting down CG (2010) didn't seem to lead to an increase in homelessness. https://www.cmap.illinois.gov/updates/all/-/asset_publisher/UIMfSLnFfMB6/content/homelessness-decline-challenges
An interesting analysis would be to ask if the very real problems of that development simply move elsewhere? The projects were an easy target as it was concentrated and highly visible - did dispersing the population also just disperse the related squalor and gang activity?
Dispersing public housing leading to dispersed criminal activity has been known to happen:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american-murder-mystery/306872/
If the limiting factor in property crime reporting is police time/ability/willingness to take reports, then it could make sense for the level to remain constant despite increasing crime.
That was mentioned in The Wire I think and, IIRC, backed up by my previous favorite 'cop blogger', Peter Moskos, who worked as a Baltimore police officer for several years.
Yeah, if the cop shop has 10 people who answer the phones to take reports, and they are working at 100% capacity; any overflow just doesn't get recorded. People calling get busy signals or put on hold till they hang up.
Great point!
I was thinking that there might be some kind of bias in terms of _who_ police accept reports from, e.g. 'serious' or 'important' businesses/organizations/individuals, and _some_ of those people aren't having any problems, now or in the past, reporting crimes.
But I think your idea might be an even bigger part of the apparent puzzle.
These six posts above (at time of writing this) are just the kind of thinking-out-loud we come to this comment section to read. Really excellent points.
Agreed!
Also seems plausible that the probability someone will bother to report a property crime is proportional to the perceived likelihood that the police will do anything about it. Which, given constant policing, would result in consequent reported rates.
Say the police have enough people to investigate 100 burglaries every month (in addition to everything else they have to do), but there are 1000 burglaries. Everybody pretty much knows that there's only a 10% chance that the police will investigate a burglary. Some people will figure it's worth it, some won't, so say it's 50-50 at that level and we get 500 *reported* burglaries.
A year later, the community is at 2000 burglaries/month, but the police can still only investigate 100. Now everybody knows the odds of the police doing anything are only 5%, half what they were before, so they're only half as willing to bother with a report. So, 0.25 * 2000 = the same 500 reported burglaries.
A lot of this seems to be separating the homeless into a mostly unproblematic group and a smaller very problematic group who are the ones people notice, alongside an argument that reduced rents will only help the former. However, I think it's worth asking whether housing costs are what's creating the problematic group as well. For example, it seems entirely plausible to me that although the down on their luck homeless mostly find their way out of their situation, a small minority keep getting bad breaks and transition into the hopelessly mentally ill kind. In which case, YIMBY policy would be a very important part of that solution long-term, but it would take a while for it to bear fruit. I guess that's similar to how restricting access to prescription opioids to those not already on them prevents abuse, but if you cut off an abuser them they will likely find an alternative means of accessing opioids.
Seems likely to an extent, but I think you have to look a little more broadly; it's not just "I can't pay my rent." it's "I can't follow all these damn rules" one of which is "Pay your rent."
But this is likely my libertarian bias.
With your libertarian bias what should be done with oppositional defiant disorder who can’t follow all these damn rules.
Keeping in mind these are people on the street in NYC in February many of whom eventually freeze to death. They are so disordered no amount of misery will get them to function in society.
Umm, my (obviously biased) take would be to reduce the number of rules.
For housing, that looks like "let people build themselves a shanty hut on the edge of town if they can't live as a normal tenant or homeowner." For employment it looks like "Stop trying to make every job meet "Professional standards" both in terms of what the employee is expected to do, and what the employer is expected to provide."
Employers want employees to meet professional standards because someone who is incapable of meeting professional standards is likely to be incapable of performing a job. In order to be able to do a job, you need to follow rules. Hiring someone who is incapable of following rulesis just throwing away money.
It's not about hiring somebody. It's about short-term labor. There are people who could sweep out a storeroom or unload a truck for a couple of hours for $25 but aren't going to show up every day on time. That's how drunks used to prevent themselves from becoming homeless. Casual labor and cheap flophouses. But we've decided that these things are demeaning and exploitatitve. So they get to panhandle and sleep on the street instead.
Agreed, things like HOAs and typical landlord rules can be onerous for someone who is fine with or prefers the kind of environment that has garage door murals and loud midnight birthday parties.
I think this definitely happens. In my comment quoted by Scott above, I mentioned the need to keep folks from falling into group C from groups A and B.
In some parts of the Bay there are streets with cars, vans, and RVs parked and people living in a seemingly reasonable way without lighting things on fire (for example, in light-industrial SJ by the recycling and waste transfer stations). My guess is that some of these folks have at least minor issues with mental health or addiction. But the bigger issue is how to help these folks on the edge before habits get worse or they become so hopeless that they spiral into lying strung out on the street or lighting things on fire.
So yes, YIMBY seems like it is part of the solution, in as much as the wretched might start as down-on-their luck. Clearly there are folks who don't take this path as well.
The money the homeless earn from recycling bicycle wheels, how much does that cost your city?
I think this is a really good take and I 100% agree
" it's worth asking whether housing costs are what's creating the problematic group as well"
I think its worth remembering, that there's a certain level of responsibility for maintaining a home regardless of your income/worth. Its important to remember, that even J Lo fell below this threshold, and she ain't anywhere near poor.
>J Lo fell below this threshold,
Huh?
Yes, which is why a court put her under her father's guardianship.
A quick Google search is not turning anything up -- did you perhaps mean to write Britney Spears instead of J Lo?
Yes, Britney
Homelessness is also an obvious cause of drug addiction. To give just one mechanism, if you can't find anywhere safe to sleep, or you're just exhausted from sleeping on benches, and you have to keep moving around... there's an increasingly cheap, widely available, and extremely effective stimulant that can temporarily help you with those problems, as well as make you feel better in a miserable time.
That may be true in some cases, but mental illness and drug addiction are the cause of homelessness for more people. A great many of the problems confronting us today result from the current fashion of believing whatever we choose without looking for any evidence. Everyone's brain is different, and so will react in different ways to any psychotropic drug. Just today I saw an article where a Danish researcher asserted that up to 25% of cases of schizophrenia are linked to marijuana (and who knows what else is mixed in with it). It is not compassionate to sympathize with the mentally ill and addicted but not deal with the issues.
Response to the story by eledex:
People seem to have this weird insistence that functional social norms can scale to arbitrary numbers of people.
Why would that be the case?
Are you sure they're insisting that that's _true_ and not just what they'd _prefer_?
What's the cutoff/threshold for 'can scale' anyways? That sure seems like a spectrum more than a simple binary category to me.
Dunbar's number is about 150 people...
That _is_ an obvious Schelling Point for things to scale/not-scale, but I'm _pretty_ sure that's not what Mark meant.
It sure seems like they think like most "functional social norms" can't scale past something already WAY beyond a 'Dunbar-sized' group.
Most people today live in HUGE 'cities' compared to history and they seem pretty functional in comparison too, even including the recent dysfunctions.
What does this even mean?
If it's about Dunbar's number like Doug suggested below, every small town in history is already past it. Quite a few hunter gatherer tribes are past it as well.
And otherwise I don't see why it wouldn't scale, except from a purely subjective perception PoV: 1 million people is more than 6 people, so it looks like a bigger problem even if it's a smaller percentage.
There can be limits far greater than Dunbar’s number which are still imposed by Dunbar’s number.
For example, suppose Dunbar’s number limits the size of an elite network. As long as someone is know by the elite network, they’ll get decent treatment. The elite network runs the show and when there are problems, someone who isn’t in the elite network contacts their friend who is, and that friend advocates on their behalf.
This kind of system works just fine up until a limit of 150*150 = 22,500 people. That assumes there’s no overlap between friend networks of elites, and 22,500 is quite small.
We can fudge that model by allowing a “friend of a friend” mechanic and then lowering the network size. So maybe you can have human-style norms prevail at 75*75*75 people, which is around half a million.
Of course these numbers are all hand wavy ballpark figures. I still think there’s a real intuition under them that is at least worth considering. I’d do a decent amount for a neighbor or weak tie. For one of their weak ties, I’d do something similar, as a service to my friend. But for a friend of a friend of a friend? I don’t think I’d go nearly as far. Would you?
For everybody beyond a friend, or at most a friend of a friend, we get into how normal societal rules function: you treat people decently because they're people and that's how you're used to treating them. TBH I can't right now remember how it's supposed to be called, but the concept is pretty simple. And this is a solved problem for a very very long time.
It's called the Golden Rule - "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Which is more or less a preemptive measure. Jesus went further, saying (in effect) that we have a responsibility to care for those who need help.
There are things that people do for friends, but don't do for strangers.
Our capacity to do things is limited, so we need to prioritize. Sometimes you need to know people before you can help them efficiently. (The problem they report to you may be just a consequence of something they don't want to admit or don't consider important.) Sometimes you need to trust people, for example I wouldn't let a stranger sleep over in my house.
Merely treating a stranger decently doesn't solve their homelessness.
"Merely treating a stranger decently doesn't solve their homelessness." A point I made in an earlier comment. And no, I wouldn't let a stranger sleep over in my house, particularly if there were children in the house as well. Yet arranging for the stranger to have a place to sleep other than my house would still be possible.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is a good distillation of the behavior Jesus has called us to perform. Part of the lesson is that Samaritans were looked down on by many Jews (kind of like Gypsies and former slaves, perhaps?) but rose to the occasion. The injured traveler was a stranger to the Samaritan. The priest and the Levite were not indifferent to the stranger's plight; had the stranger been dead rather than injured, they would have had to spend a week in ritual cleansing, leaving their responsibilities unmet or foisted off onto others. But the Samaritan saw a need, and rather than rationalizing all the reasons it wasn't his problem, he met it.
So I agree that our first responsibility is to think clearly and dispassionately about what the problem actually is. Too many people seem to think their responsibility ends with expressions of sympathy, as in "Bring back our girls". And in many cases, the homelessness is not the fundamental problem, it's mental illness, drug addiction, and sometimes the person has just given up. There is an organization in my city dedicated to helping the homeless. They raise money by having their clients (those recovered enough to do so) sell a periodical on the streets called "The Curbside Chronicle". Every single person I've talked with who is selling the magazine - and I've talked to quite a few - has said their first step was to get clean and sober. This program does not come near to addressing our homeless population, but people must take responsibility for themselves and acknowledge their problems before they can be helped.
I kind of agree, living in NM now (population: 2M ish) compared to CA or even OH, there's a certain degree of "everyone knows everyone". At least among the politically connected, PMC class, which I have loose associations with. In larger states there are multiple regional power clusters. CA has the north/south divide; OH has three big main metro agglomerations, even in IL, which only has one real big city, it's *so* big that there are factions within it. Multiple hierarchical systems in competition, perhaps, vs one hierarchy to work through.
The east-west divide in California is much more profound than the north-south divide. The north-south divide is mostly about style and consumer preferences. The east-west divide is poverty versus wealth. Eastern California would be the poorest state in the union, poorer than Mississippi and just ahead of Puerto Rico, if it were on its own.
Minor Eledex.
I've lived many places including downtown Seattle, LA koreatown, Austin, and various Bay Area. In 2019 I lived in San Jose near one of the big encampments that used to spill over into the road. Someone from that encampment overdosed in the park and we found them under the slide when we took our toddler daughter to play. Someone else set fire to our condo building, thankfully very little damage. Someone else broke into our car. Twice. I am aware that the police wanted to do something, and sometimes did sweeps, but had limited options and no ability to stop the encampment from reforming.
We moved back to Austin, far north suburbs, and in mid 2020 when a tent appeared on the property of the progressive church on the other side of my backyard wall, I went over in the middle of the day and tore down the tent and just threw it in the garbage.
I also used to think homelessness was a hard problem with no good solutions. I used to volunteer in kitchens on the regular. I threw my first software paycheck at one of those kitchens and I was happy about it.
Now I delete tents.
This is terrible.
This reminds me of an second-degree acquaintance's approach to reducing homelessness in his neighborhood: he didn't appreciate being hassled by homeless druggies, and really didn't want them hanging around in his (quite poor) neighborhood.
So he'd wait until it was bad weather, and go to the abandoned factory where homeless people tended to congregate and just run people off--a big construction worker with a gun yelling at you when you're half-asleep will get most people running--and then destroy everything he could that had been left behind.
His neighborhood had minimal persistent homelessness.
I mean, is the revelation that you can mold human geography through dehumanization and the crude application of force? That's a pretty well-established motif in human history, just... one that the Anglosphere mostly agrees should be excluded from our institutions, right?
Mr. Carlin and the big construction worker with the gun aren't institutions. They're individuals, just like the folks who they had these interactions with. I'm sure they would have preferred for the appropriate institutions to have intervened.
Orson,
No, I think that the crude application of force needs to be reintroduced to some of our institutions. I think the main takeaway from this article is that taking away the crude application of force was a huge, naive mistake.
The takeaway from this in my view seems to be that the whole legitimacy of institutions, the rule of law, state monopoly on violence, etc is conditional on them fulfilling certain duties expected from society, a key one of them being maintaining "social order" (however the society of the time defines it) - and if the institutions fail in these duties, then it's inevitable that the society will consider these institutions as not reliable and self-organize (starting with such individual activists, but escalating to larger organizations) to do that job themselves, often in a worse, more violent, more indiscriminate, more discriminatory and unfair way.
If the prosecution of violent crimes is too ineffective, you get mob "justice" that will lynch people that seem guilty - and you won't solve that by fighting the lynch mobs without fixing actual policing.
If the prosecution of petty property crimes is too ineffective, you'll get behind-the-scenes beatings of suspected thieves and/or "private security" taking over the role, together with mass prejudicial discrimination of people who look underprivileged i.e. poorer i.e. more likely to commit petty property crimes; and you won't solve that without tackling petty property crimes.
And if the institutions can't solve homelessness in the country/state/city, then local neighborhoods will try to solve them at least locally and they will be willing to use approaches that the larger institutions won't. As in the "More policing, less law enforcement" article quoted by others that I read just now (https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/more-policing-less-law-enforcement), essentially a key duty of the institutions is to resolve social conflict before it escalates to violence; and they refuse to apply institutional violence when necessary then that does *not* result in less violence, it devolves to chaotic non-institutional violence instead.
Good point.
I would add that one layer of the social fabric is individual and group enforcement of norms; deleting tents is a bit shocking in the current social milieu but it's very human.
Community / relational cohesion will do a lot of work when functioning. Giving everything to institutions is fraught and I think that's part of what we're seeing.
Ultimate source of social decay is religious (in a non-denominational sense) in my opinion, but these aspects of institutional limitation and community / relational failure are probably a good middle ground / secondary layer, more important than anything on the level of policy.
I'm tempted to make a 'City-Planners Hate Him! Local Man Solves Homelessness With This One Weird Trick!" joke but also make a joke about how he has literally reinvented early 20th-century policing. Unfortunately this topic is too sad to support so many jokes, so I'll leave it alone.
That has always been the unstated option, and the one that was used until a few decades ago. The problem is finding a way of getting rid of homelessness instead of just getting rid of the homeless.
I can't blame people for trying to drive vagrants away from their towns and property. As Eledex demonstrates their are very real risks involved. However that is ultimately a temporary measure.
Since my flippant reply above, I've been reading the Graham Report (a rare-verging-upon-unique example of my being glad someone in a comment thread plugged his own work). His comments here are apposite: https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/more-policing-less-law-enforcement
That is a fascinating article. Thanks for mentioning it.
That doesn't in any way solve the problem though. It just shoves it onto somebody else.
Let's play Devil's Advocate for a moment. If everyone drove away any vagrants that couldn't prove that they were from that particular hyper-local community, that would at least make the problems more granular.
In one sense, but of course that would be completely unworkable.
Of course, and most thought experiments are. It's interesting because it brings into focus part of how CMHCs failed -- in theory if every community were both so compassionate as to run a community health center for its own mentally ill AND so draconian as to drive away those who belong to other communities, the CMHC system might have had some success. Obviously large cities present a complex set of challenges and there was never any chance of creating enough CMHCs to make this thought experiment work even hypothetically.
Are you sure? Making homeless life more difficult would produce incentives to reduce homelessness. If there are no permanent homeless encampments it could prevent some people from joining that lifestyle.
This relies on a massive amount of assumptions about who the homeless are and why they are homeless.
Yes, but it is still plausible
Not just plausible, but probable. People respond to positive and negative incentives after all.
The solution to problems with people in SJ destroying your property is to destroy the property of other people in Austin?
Is there any moral or ethical framework at play here besides "might makes right"?
Uh... maybe the laws on not illegally occupying another person's land? Or illegally appropriating public land for your own private use? I mean, I get the ethical difficulties here, but let's not be deliberately obtuse. If a guy pitches a tent on the sidewalk in front of your house or apartment tomorrow, what would you do? I'd imagine you'd call the city to have it removed. And if the city did nothing, what would you do then?
The story expressly states that the tent was not on the poster's property or on city property. And while I have not had homeless tents on the sidewalk directly in front of my residence, I have had them nearby. I have somehow managed to avoid waging a campaign of property destruction.
Again, the story states that the tent was on the property of another who did not, as far as we know, ask for the poster's help in removing it. Not the poster's own property, not public property.
True enough, but the poster was clearly reacting to prior episodes in which he saw which way things can go. Regarding the church property, it is still not clear to me that they are allowed to open a campground without dealing with zoning first. Otherwise we could all do the same.
"Nearby" is not quite the same thing. I am not defending the poster, and he shouldn't have "deleted" the tent, but I would say that I understand where he is coming from.
You continue to change both the facts at issue and the goalposts. Not immediately removing one tent is not "opening a campground". And the proper response to a zoning violation is not to go in and destroy property.
I understand the dislike, much as I understand why someone might strike out in anger, but understanding the underlying emotion is not the same as endorsing the behavior.
ETA
Nearby is not the same thing as your hypothetical, but then again your hypothetical is not the same as the story that was given.
I'm changing and moving neither, just pointing out that Matthew has a set of experiences with encampments that you do not. He laid out how it completely changed his perspective on this issue.
He had lived next to an encampment before in San Jose and suffered for it. Later, he saw the first tent show up next to his house in Austin and took action. Was he right to do so? No, he was not. So I agree with you on that one. . But lots of folks without his experience seem quite content to judge him harshly and have nothing but a shrug of the shoulders for what happened to him in San Jose. That is what I took from his post.
Thad, communities do have some moral standing to control who plops down into their neighborhood, especially if they are doing so in a way that clearly violates existing norms, present safety and quality of life issues, and sometimes violates laws.
I technically agree with your statement, but it is so vague that it doesn't really help here. While I assume that it is not your intent, as written it applies equally to the current case as it does to restricting private sales on the basis of race. The moral standing may exist, but it is subject to a great many restraints.
Bringing it back to the example at hand, that moral standing does not extend to individuals unilaterally destroying the possessions of others on the property of others.
I have to agree that it is vague. I'm not an expert here on moral frameworks, like others here will be. And I have to acknowledge that the extreme version of what I'm saying justifies all sorts of horrible stuff. Maybe I need to turn in my libertarian card, but I have come to believe that communities are justified in enforcing norms. And not even for extreme stuff like encampments: I think communities are justified in restricting AirBnBs if they feel it is harming their community by contributing to a housing crisis.
This is picking on the guy who spoke up, who did something. "unilaterally destroying (stealing) the possessions (peace, public space)" of others is exactly what the wild homeless are on the radar for. Matthew did not initiate this game, it was thrust upon him and he is playing the field as he sees it.
I wonder what the breakdown would be between those with children and those without who support ripping the tent down and throwing it away.
Your story is sad but true. I think what separates you from Scott is your first-hand experience. Once you've got an encampment next to the house you bought or the apartment you rent, this is no longer a "somewhere else" problem. At that point, you want directional progress more than a nitpicking at anyone (e.g., Shellenberger) who at least proposes positive change. The thing is, as widespread as encampments are, they still only affect a small percentage of the population directly as they did for you. Therefore you have lots of people with opinions without real first-hand experience, without really being stakeholders. Those folks tend to drive the narrative.
You mentioned mentally ill homeless in terms of psychosis. I’m interested in your (and others) thoughts about personality disorders leading to homelessness. Things like borderline personality disorder, low functioning sociopathy, oppositional defiant disorder, etc.
Anti-social personality disorder?
I would _guess_ that those other disorders are 'over-represented' among the "wretched" homeless, but much less so than people with psychosis (or a disorder that routinely/regularly causes/triggers it to any degree).
What term could we use for the homeless who aren’t psychotic but none the less can’t function in society without substantial assistance?
Lumpenproletariat.
Dysfunctional.
Hmmm – I think "can’t function in society without substantial assistance" applies to basically everyone!
But I think I know what you meant :)
I think 'long-term homeless' _mostly_ covers the group you're referring to. There _are_ some deliberate 'lifestyle homeless' who probably _could_ "function in society" without '_substantially more than usual_' assistance, but I suspect they're a small proportion relative to the 'needs help' group.
"Society" IS substantial assistance. The phrase "can’t function in society without substantial assistance" means "without much more substantial assistance than most people need.
Agreed
"Years of depolicing" you claim, but increased spending on policing has not slowed down much, or at all, in most places: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/07/over-past-60-years-more-spending-police-hasnt-necessarily-meant-less-crime/
I'm not a SFian, but I think they've only been cutting into their police budget growth, not their actual police budget.
The 4 closing "rewrite" points seem quite solid though...
If an organization's _new_ hires are all for 'make work' jobs it can be both true that the organization's budget is growing but that it's providing less (efficient/effective) services too.
The kind of depolicing that cops describe doesn't seem like the kind of thing that _would_ be reflected in smaller budgets. They're still doing their jobs; the jobs are just _more_ bullshit. And a lot of newer 'bullshit' seems like the kind of thing that 'needs' to be managed by more admins too.
We're paying just as much, or a little more, for _worse_ service.
That's valid but is it actually the case? Do we have an in depth analysis of police budget over the years somewhere?
My favorite source for this stuff now is 'Graham's' blog: https://grahamfactor.substack.com/
I don't know if his archive already covers this in _sufficient_ depth for you personally, but he covers this kind of thing very well IMO.
Could you give me an actual link to budget analysis if such thing exists there?
I've checked some of the posts and I don't think anything that I've seen so far updates me. It's completely expectable that police officers would want to do more exciting things and less boring ones. Of course they would want to be more proactive and consider all the statisticians and burocrats to be ignorant and useless. And of course they would have lots of anecdotal evidence which brought them positive reinforcement. Not that it's all without any merit, but I believe my model already acknowledges it all.
I've spoken to some Russian FSB officers and guess what - exactly the same sentiment. They treat any restriction in their line of work as stupid bullshit, as a result want to dicard them, including any due process. And it's not that Russia has a lot of going in terms of due proccess, in the first place. These people views are not completely ungrounded, though.. They have to do absurdly ridiculous amount of paperwork. It's a completely broken equilibrium. But fixing it according to their interests won't get you a Pareto optimum.
Sorry – don't know of any detailed budget analysis that would suffice for you.
Does your model weight, e.g. official crime stats in SF over the anecdotal reports of residents about minor crimes increasing recently? If it does, you might not want/be-able to update until the stats are fixed (or at least improved) and that seems unlikely anytime soon.
One possibly important difference, e.g. between Graham and people like him and Russian FSB officers, is that Graham definitely does NOT want to discard due process.
But I've found quite a bit of evidence that in fact many/several U.S. cities have a below-normal/expected number of police officers and that they're also struggling to recruit new officers. That seems like it should be orthogonal to any evidence you might gain/glean from a detailed budget analysis. One piece of evidence of this is that I've seen ads on the NYC subway recruiting officers for (Washington) D.C.. That sure implies quite a bit of 'desperate effort' on the part of the D.C. police to me.
Toy example: police gets budget increase and spends all of that on Impact Officer that has job to ensure that cops follow all regulations, especially incredibly dumb ones that everyone sane ignored.
This can easily kill morale and effectiveness.
The issue with policing in America seems to be about priorities, if you are spending all your money on ex-military vehicles and SWAT teams you never use that's not going to help much. And if your workforce is mostly assigned to driving around pulling people over for minor infractions rather than investigating violent crime you're going to get less benefit. (How Do the Police Actually Spend Their Time? from NYT is interesting stats on this https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/upshot/unrest-police-time-violent-crime.html )
Apparently "pulling people over for minor infractions" IS very beneficial. There's – apparently – a big difference between _knowing_ that someone is a criminal, or even committed a specific crime, versus being able to 'prove' that they are, but 'hassling' the criminals imposes on cost on them and their criminal behavior.
And sometimes the police can luck out and what _seemed_ like a minor infraction can lead to a significant charge or some other 'break' that can be 'escalated' into some kind of 'real' punishment.
There's also the big problem with people generally not cooperating with investigations much, especially people living or working in the areas with the most crime (or violent crime).
"Sometimes they get lucky and accidentally stop a real criminal amongst all the pointless revenue generation" doesn't sound like a great defense of the practice.
It totally does seem like a great defense to me tho?
The idea is that it _does_ in fact have a significant impact on crime rates.
And, aside from the stupidity of relying on _crime_ as a source of revenue – holy fuck the misaligned incentives! – why would revenue generation, and mild punishment of bad behavior, be a bad thing either?
If they pull someone over for, e.g. a broken taillight, at least that person definitely knows that it's broken, even if no revenue is generated.
I'm all for doing away with stupid laws/rules/regulations, but I don't in fact have a problem with enforcing them in general.
What kind of alternative are you imagining? The police just not enforcing anything at all? Or only investigating 'serious' violence after the fact? Do you think enforcing littering laws/rules is similarly "pointless"?
(Also, please don't use double quotes to paraphrase me – however well, or badly, you do it. Single quotes are more clearly 'not literal' but double quotes implies that, e.g. I, said or wrote something that you in fact have written.)
I think society would be collectively better off if police stopped enforcing many (most?) traffic laws that do not result in harm to others, yes. I certainly think we would be better off if police stopped using minor traffic violations as an excuse to conduct unmotivated searches and needlessly delay/harass generally law abiding individuals, especially if they used some of that time to investigate crimes that actually have harmed others. Assuming stopping motorists for things like moderate speeding and having a broken tail light actually significantly impacts more serious crime, I sincerely doubt whether that tradeoff is worth it, and I am far from convinced that it actually does have a significant impact.
I have never heard of such a single quote/double quote convention, but will consider adopting it in the future.
My rough understanding is that a lot of criminals – the serious or professional ones – basically are too sophisticated to generally be caught, i.e. sufficient to be charged, for their (many) serious crimes.
It seems to be an extremely common misunderstanding that cops can in fact just "investigate crimes". Per "Graham", a lot of times perpetrators are caught, for serious crimes, because of seemingly innocuous report of some minor crime, or even something that's not even a crime, and that low-level 'traffic stop' style police interaction is one of the main ways that cops acquire any actionable intel at all.
And even given all of that, the murder clearance rates in a lot of places are _dismally_ low.
AFAIK, again based on people like Graham, it's mostly NOT the case that the police are "using minor traffic violations as an excuse to conduct unmotivated searches and needlessly delay/harass generally law abiding individuals". They should, and supposedly mostly are, using additional info gained _from_ stops because of minor traffic violations to possibly conduct searches – so very much (mostly) motivated, not unmotivated 'dragnets'.
And personally, I find that I very much would like the laws/rules against relatively mundane and minor offenses such as, e.g. littering or excessive noise, _to_ be enforced. I don't think it's reasonable to just give up entirely on ever being able to enforce anything like that just because the people involved could, e.g. resist arrest. I suspect that existing dynamic is going to continue to escalate until we're in a much worse equilibrium than we already are.
> Why is it so hard to solve the problem through competent and responsive police? Years of depolicing probably haven’t helped
"Years of depolicing"???
Why are you stating that as if it were a fact? It is not a fact. Police budgets just keep going up. Giving more money to cops is one of the only bipartisan positions in America.
Here's how it looks locally to me, using the Denver Police Department budget for illustration:
1992: $164M
...
2017: $241M
2018: $242.5M (different source)
2019: $246.1M
2020: $250.1M
2021: $229.5M (a slight cut!)
2022: $245.9M
Do you think 'depolicing' MUST inevitably result-in or be correlated with an absolute drop in police budgets?
I'm certainly 'optimistic' that if anyone could figure out how to spend more money doing less, it'd certainly be us (the U.S.)!
In fairness, no, not exactly. I do think it must be correlated with some mix of a drop in police *headcount*, and police *activity*. The Westword and Denver Post articles (plus one City of Denver budget PDF) I lifted these numbers from all spoke about *increasing* headcount. And over the last few years, major sweeps of homeless camps have been the DPD's favorite hobby, so it's not like they've all been on vacation or whatever.
(Also all of this should really be population-adjusted, but the best figures I can find suggest a pretty steady ~1% annual growth so I think we can disregard that over a short period.)
A more rigorous analysis would look at arrest counts, SWAT deployments, "number of people murdered by police", and so on. But on the surface all I see is more cops and more money for cops, along with an intensification of the Warrior Cop phenomenon (cf. Radley Balko), year after year after year, forever. Maybe they decided to do a little less because of Ferguson and George Floyd? I really doubt it, but in any case that's not "years of depolicing".
Denver might be weird – I think all the things you mention are, in other cities, trending in the opposite direction, e.g. police "headcount" and "activity".
The commenter "Graham" has a great blog covering all of this.
See yesterday's post, section "Police Pullback".
I wasn't sure yesterday how the drop in traffic stops and arrests caused the spike in murders, and I'm not sure I see the point here. I asked an ex-cop in the comments for some follow up.
My strong suspicion is that these things are not measured well enough to draw conclusions, and that if you ask a DA and a public defender, you would get two different stories.
You might find this article interesting: How Do the Police Actually Spend Their Time? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/upshot/unrest-police-time-violent-crime.html. Plasusibly the problem isn't number or funding of police but how they are assigned, I think most people would agree its poor prioritizaton to spend 5x time on traffic as violent crime
246M today is 118M in 1992 dollars, so there has been a drop in funding. Subtract cost disease as well and the actual amount of policing you'd get will have decreased markedly
Also presumably the Denver area's population has increased significantly during that time, further resulting in decreased per-capita policing (assuming inflation-adjusted salaries for officers have not gone down such that there are more actual officers).
And, apparently, cops are being required to write a LOT more reports, so, e.g. every traffic stop, now requires a LOT more time for cops, when they _haven't_ already been ordered not to do them at all.
"This is a great thought experiment / example of a cognitive bias / whatever it is. I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more."
600 is a ridiculously small population for a town. That is about the size of one graduating class in a large high school, or the population of an elementary school. It would be shocking if 6 kids in my graduating class were locked up.
I grew up in a village of 1,200, and if 12 people were arrested then it would certainly be a topic of conversation, but it wouldn't be shocking. It would be shocking if 12 people were indefinitely detained as being unfit to participate in a civilized existence that would be shocking, because that's not something that really happens at the moment. The number wouldn't be shocking though.
Wouldn't sound at all out of place for 17th-19th century Swedish fattigstuga ("poors' house") [1]. Every town / municipality would have one for poor and infirm without other recourse (= would-be beggars). As vagrancy and begging was forbidden, the inhabitants were kind of forced to live there if they couldn't live on their own or with relatives.
[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fattigv%C3%A5rd
Hardly a Swedish-exclusive insitution. See workhouses in UK etc.
...how many kids in your high school *entering* class (freshmen, not seniors) went the whole 4 years without being arrested?
Out of my high school class of 104, I recall 104 made it through without being arrested. This was a public school in New Hampshire in the 1980s. I am ignoring minor events like police confiscating beer or detaining skinny dippers until their parents could pick them up. It wasn’t a class of angels, but I don’t think there was anyone in school or town (5000) who was incapable of participating in a civilized existence. By all accounts opioid addiction has made the situation far worse in the intervening years.
I have no idea what the actual state of my graduating class was, but I am an introverted autistic gamer, so I'm the wrong person to ask. The example was hypothetical, and remains true: if I had known about 6 people in my class being sent to jail for an extended period of time, I would have been shocked and appalled. Whether or not there actually were 6 cohort members in jail at any given time is immaterial.
Also, there is a big difference between 1% of the population being arrested in any given year and the imprisoned population being 1% of the total.
I've heard somewhere that the minimum population for a town was 10,000 (I think this was in Pennsylvania, many years ago). You could make it "lock up 100 people in a town of 10,000".
After a night's sleep, I think it may have something to do with the famous "Dunbar number". When the number of people in the "lock them up" portion gets to be a fairly large percentage of the number of people one can know personally, the idea of locking them up (or isolating them from the rest) becomes less comfortable. The reaction seems to be "Well, how do you know they deserve it?"
Yes this was a dumb thought experiment especially because it concluded we should lock people up, not for their actions, but just because they were undesirable.
ok, but "graduating class" has already selected out the "not able to function in society" group.
"I’m surprised cities co-operate in this game while suburbs defect. Why don’t cities bus their homeless back to suburbs? Why don’t they eliminate their shelters? Obviously this would be pretty anti-social, but why are the suburbs selfish in this game and the cities altruistic? Is it just that there’s so much established precedent that cities believe it’s their problem and suburbs believe it isn’t?"
I think the most straightforward reason is that cities are big and suburbs are small. In the game between jurisdictions, homeless services are a public good. What you typically get with selfish investments in public goods is that the largest player invests and everyone else free-rides.
More concretely, it's harder for cities to push all the homeless people out because, since cities are big, a city that effectively excluded homeless people would massively overtax homeless services in surrounding suburbs, making them terrible places to be, and requiring cities to ratchet up the terribleness even further. On the other hand, each individual suburb can become a little worse than the city, encourage people to leave, and, have very little effect on the overall situation of homeless people in the city (and thus on the amount of aggression/enforcement needed to remain undesirable).
Even more concretely, let's say that it costs $1000 to send cops to an encampment and break it up. If you do this, the encampment will re-form somewhere relatively nearby. If you're, say, Glendale, CA, the odds of the encampment re-forming in Glendale are pretty low, because most nearby places are _not_ Glendale. If you're Los Angeles, CA, the odds of the encampment re-forming somewhere in Los Angeles are really high, because most nearby places _are_ Los Angeles.
I'd wager suburbs push homeless to cities more than vice versa because people are much more strongly against homeless loitering around their--and their family's--homes than around city centers, transit hubs, underpasses, etc. The latter aren't pleasant, but they aren't Eledex-anecdote level of frightening, either, and the city homeless encounters are usually brief and public.
(I know some people do live in cities, but suburbs tend to be primarily residences rather than a mix of zones and infrastructure you can more easily hide in).
This is interesting! And it squares with the concentration of homeless people being lower in residential parts of big cities, as Scott noted in San Francisco.
I guess the question would be whether the concentration is still higher in residential parts of cities than equally residential parts of neighboring suburbs. If so, you'd have to argue that the political process in cities is less responsive to residents than it is in suburbs, which very well might be true.
They also have nothing to do in suburbs. No one is going to give them money.
I think this is probably over-complicating things. Cities tend to elect progressive mayors/councillors, who "oppose the criminalisation of homelessness." If an interviewer asked them, I'm about 80% confident they'd say that shunting homeless people off to some other city was morally wrong. They have no real incentive to do anything about the homeless, they're opposed to doing anything about the homeless, and they don't do anything about the homeless.
Also (linked to this) do American suburbs but not cities directly elect their law enforcement (eg. sheriffs vs police commissioners)? Because that might also be part of the answer.
I don't think the second point holds. Sheriffs are county level, and suburbs generally have their own municipal police forces with a hired (not elected) chief of police.
But, I think that you are on to something by bringing up political responsiveness. Suburbs are, of course, typically lower population than cities.
So, if a group of 10 or 20 people (homeowners, business owners, etc.) raises the issue of a specific homeless encampment, they have more political relevance in a lower population polity. It's more notable to elected officials if that many people concerned about a specific issue show up at a city council meeting. It's more likely in a lower population area that someone in the group will have personal ties (e.g., friends with the mayor or a city council member) that can informally escalate the situation as a matter of police concern.
Probably the best way to see whether this is about the political stance of city vs suburban voters would be to see if suburbs still use tactics that push homeless people out when their voters are relatively left-leaning. In Los Angeles County, Santa Monica is a small independent city that gave a higher vote share to the more progressive prosecutor in the last election than did Los Angeles. So potentially similar political views but a different strategic position--since they're small enough to be able to push homeless people out into Los Angeles.
Another reason is that many cops, including 'city' cops, often actually live in the suburbs. They'd rather keep homeless in the city where they work than move them out to where they live.
My preferred solution to homelessness is vocational boarding schools. 8 hours every day of vocational education including some actual apprentice-level work on the side which defrays the cost. Instruction in manners and correct speech. Tight discipline. Tight security so no one can bring in alcohol or drugs. Mandatory intense exercise, because needs to be unfun enough to not incentivize people to become homeless, but unfun in productive ways and better than camping on the street. Field trips allowed during leisure hours but people who test positive for drugs upon return will lose those privileges. Three healthy meals a day and free healthcare including mental health services. Small dorm rooms. Teach a man to fish instead of just maintaining a life questionably worth living. I think this could all be done for less than the cost of furnishing homeless people with standard excessively large housing in expensive cities. People have gotten used to living solo in apartments that waste 7 times more sqft per person than dorms. The average for US housing is 700sqft/person. Dorms use only 100sqft/person but are a zillion times preferable to homeless shelters. I wouldn't mind going back to a dorm. It's extremely convenient to have a free buffet in the same building where you live and lots of like-minded people around. People who choose the same trade would be housed in the same wing of the dorm. Children would be housed together with their parents in the dorms and receive age appropriate instruction on-site. I suppose as people gain more skill they could gradually transition to getting more hours of actual work and fewer hours of instruction while still living on-site and helping to teach the novices. I miss college (except for some required off-topic classes and being poor). I think these vocational boarding schools could also be a good substitute for some of the welfare programs for non-homeless.
For incentive purposes it would need to be calibrated to be more pleasant than camping on the street or being in jail, but less pleasant than being poor and housed in a low-cost area.
1. It would be a dorm full of homeless people, not college students.
2. This is basically just bringing back workhouses, but accepting that they're never going to self-fund. That's not a criticism, just an indication that there's mounds of info on what this would be like.
3. The down-on-their-luck don't need this. The insane/stupid core of the homeless aren't going to learn anything because of the whole insane/stupid thing. Something like this *might* benefit the chunk of the housed population who are basically un-parented and uneducated, but wouldn't need to be residential and is a faintly pointless substitute for just educating them properly while they're still in school (if that's non-primitive, then so is educating them properly in the workhouses).
1. Homeless people who have something in common (they chose the same trade and are working to improve themselves) makes it probably much less socially awkward than completely random homeless people.
2. It's vaguely similar to workhouses, but vastly better conditions and emphasis on instruction. I don't think workhouses were focused on vocational education. I was going to mention that in the OP but I don't want to remind people of dubiously-relevant baggage about workhouses.
3. Almost every IQ level can find something useful to do. The 10th percentile of Janitors have an IQ of 72. I expect most homeless people have an IQ above 72. https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/occupations.aspx
I don't know if there's anyone too stupid/insane to do anything useful, but not stupid/insane enough to need either guardianship by a family member or institutionalization.
“ I don't know if there's anyone too stupid/insane to do anything useful, but not stupid/insane enough to need either guardianship by a family member or institutionalization.”
Then you won’t have solved the wretched homeless problem. And that’s the one the public cares about most.
I suppose the few who are so stupid/insane that they need either guardianship by a family member or institutionalization should get either guardianship by a family member or institutionalization as a last resort when all their relatives refuse guardianship. So when the vocational boarding school notices that one of its students is like that, it would try to contact all the relatives and get one of them to be a guardian. If that fails, assisted suicide should also be available for free if they don't want to go to an institution.
You’re using guardianship strangely in this context. You said guardianship vs. institutionalization - what do you mean?
I mean living with a family member who takes care of you and has legal guardianship over you and claims you as a dependent on her tax return. So not only legal guardianship.
What if you give them the choice "assisted suicide or institution" and they don't want either? You do realize that unwanted "assisted suicide" is MURDER, right?
If they're too stupid/insane to live alone, but none of their friends/relatives will take them in, and they don't want to go to an institution, and they don't want assisted suicide, I guess move them into VR pods while they're sleeping. They can do all the same stuff they would have done on the street but without harassing real people.
I think everyone everywhere should have the option of free assisted suicide unless the reason for the decision is only a fixable depression.
I'd assume that the hypothetical system of the parent post would consider all the "wretched homeless" as needing institutionalization of guardianship.
I mean, if the proposal is to effectively institutionalize the vast majority of the homeless (though in a perhaps limited form of institution), then the notion of institutionalizing the "wretched homeless" is obviously not taboo.
Homeless people who follow the law wouldn't be put into the vocational boarding schools against their will. Homeless people who break the law would sometimes get an option to go to vocational boarding school instead of jail. Some others would volunteer. They can quit whenever they like unless they're there by court order.
1. I didn't think this was voluntary, so I don't see that it would be different to a prison but with an even more dysfunctional population. "Social awkwardness" isn't the issue - screaming 24 hours a day and shitting in the middle of the floor is.
2. I think it's very optimistic that you could make the conditions good or instruction effective, given the population you're dealing with. Public schools seem to be the direct analogy - however much money you throw at them, you're left with a couple of shabby rooms where no-one learns anything.
3. Ha hahaha haha ha haha ha haha. 1 person in 30 has an IQ below 72 (so roughly 10 million Americans, vastly outnumbering the population we're talking about), and janitors are going to be drawn from a disproportionately functional subset of them; the insane/stupid homeless are near-tautologically the least functional.
4. Most of them won't have family members, at least who have any interest in involvement. So this just boils down to mass institutionalisation anyway.
0: It would be sort of voluntary in that when homeless people get caught breaking minor laws they could choose to go to the vocational boarding school in lieu of prison. Others would sign up of their own accord because it's better than camping in the street.
1: The subset who are too disruptive even after getting meds+abstinence would be sent elsewhere. That's probably less than 1% of the homeless. I used to walk past a large homeless encampment in Venice CA every day for several years on the way to work. Almost all of them were quiet and didn't harass me. And these were "wild" homeless without the meds or abstinence. The harassers are a very visible tiny minority. (but maybe my appearance makes me get harassed less than other people would in the same situation, ymmv)
2: I learned a lot in public schools but but the experience really sucked before I had any choice in what to study. I got bullied a lot by low IQ disruptive students in elementary but the problem went away after I got the opportunity to take all honors classes in 7th grade. If there's a strong correlation between being low IQ and being an asshole, then yeah it's probably going to be horrible at the vocational boarding school. But the school will try to mitigate this problem with a lot of indoctrination+enforcement on manners and how to behave oneself. Shelters don't do that and don't have 2-3 person dorms for privacy either.
3. The raw unemployment in the US is only 6 million so most of those under IQ 72 probably found jobs. I don't have data on IQ percentiles below 10 by profession but the range probably goes way below the 10th percentile on the chart.
4. The phrase "Mass institutionalization" tends to conjure up the bad old days of horribly dysfunctional psychiatric institutions imprisoning lots of people who didn't need to be there. But my institution is very different and better, so collapsing this into the bad-karma-having category of "mass institutionalization" would be tantamount to the noncentral fallacy (or as Scott calls it, the Worst Argument in the World).
You’re assuming these people can be brought up to some level of functionality - in many cases they can’t.
I think proper diet, exercise, abstinence from drugs, and medication could make a whole lot of mentally ill homeless people functional enough to self-support. Not all of them, but most.
Why wouldn’t they stop taking their meds and start doing street drugs as soon as they got out?
Because being fully functional on the outside is more fun than becoming homeless again? Maybe indoctrinate people to avoid people and situations that might have drugs, to reduce the likelihood of relapse. Maybe when people get clean again after the third relapse, send them to a charter city that has border security so tight that no one can bring drugs.
“ Because being fully functional on the outside is more fun than becoming homeless again?”
Can you understand the idea of knowing what you need to do yet not being able to do it?
Sure. That's why some people would need to live in an environment that offers them fewer temptations. People construct their own environments through choices about whom to befriend, where to live, and what to do.
"Able" is the wrong word. Consider the "Gun-to-the-Head Test".
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2005/03/howard_hughes_a.html
They can't keep drugs out of prisons, which are literally the most heavily secured and guarded environments in existence. I don't think there is a level of border security short of a Berlin Wall-like setup of "nothing and nobody gets in or out, ever, and anyone who tries is killed on sight" that can stop drug smuggling.
This is a good point and I am not sure how drugs could be completely eliminated in a charter city. But the price could be increased and ease of access reduced, and this would deter many people.
> Why is it so hard to solve the problem through competent and responsive police? Years of depolicing probably haven’t helped, but also, I’m imagining being the police officer who shows up here, and - what? Eledex says “Officer, these people are generally annoying, they yell a lot and start fires and stuff”. ...
This paragraph and the following are extremely revealing, and I think go to the heart of the problem. Societies have historically viewed public order (by which I straightforwardly mean "People can't harass you in ways that physically endanger you in public places") as a pretty important public good.
Scott, in contrast, kind of shrugs his shoulders and says, I don't know man, what could the cops do, can you show the homeless encampment was really doing anything horrible, wouldn't want them to get hassled if they weren't.
The question is about the social default. Should it be a default that public order (again, in a completely straightforward sense) is maintained? My claim is that there is no good equilibrium elsewhere.
The criminal justice system in English-speaking countries is terrible at maintaining public order, because:
1. Some of it is covered by freedom of speech/expression
2. The law has to criminalise clear, specific things as opposed to just being vaguely obnoxious/a nuisance
3. The police have very few powers to solve problems other than arresting people for a crime, which eventually has to go for a trial
This has historically been fine, as when it came to the fairly small sectors of the population that caused these kind of problems, the police could just ignore the law and crack skulls, and everyone turned a blind eye. There's been a lot of pushback to that sort of thing, largely because people didn't clock that it wasn't just an undesired side-effect of policing but a load-bearing part of the system. Take it away and you end up where we are. Leave it in place and you accept the slightly weird and dubious principle that, "Sometimes the police can just ignore the law and some people don't really have rights but we pretend we do and that's fine." Try to bring that back and God alone knows what would happen, as you'd shift it from being implicit to explicit.
Historical correction: it's not that the police were just ignoring the law. It's that, prior to 1972, there were laws in most states and localities against vagrancy. These laws usually expressly referenced harassment, drunkenness, solicitation, and related behaviors. Police would act under these laws to make arrests. Habeas corpus still applied, and judges could and did order people released.
In 1972, the Supreme Court (Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville) struck down most such laws.
"Papachristou did not strike down loitering and vagrancy laws altogether. Rather, by declaring Jacksonville's ordinance unconstitutionally vague, the decision imposed clarity requirements on future laws of this type."
The suburbs who kick homeless people out presumably have stricter laws than the cities with large homeless populations.
According to Wikipedia, the laws that were struck down in "Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville", were against being unemployed, and walking at night. This seems reasonable to me, and it forced cities to be more specific about what exactly is forbidden.
But then came "City of Chicago v. Morales", where gang members staying at one place with no apparent purpose and refusing to disperse after the cops told them to, was also considered technically a constitutional right by a close majority of judges.
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding of their reasoning is the following: 1) You can't make mere "standing somewhere" a crime, because it is too vague. 2) But then you can't also make "standing somewhere, after the cops told you to go away" a crime, because if it was *legal* to stay there *before* they told you to go away, then they had no business telling you to go away.
In other words, being a public nuisance is legal, because it is too difficult to provide an exact mathematical definition of being a public nuisance, and cops using their common sense is unconstitutional.
I don't know so much about American law so forgive me if this is naïve/silly, but: the issue of police inability to [something like-] create/maintain spaces wherein the population feels safe/comfortable/etc. doesn't seem so much to involve the law itself having changed..
This isn't really a reasoned/empirical argument, but I simply think that the critical problem is exactly what you address Stephen, namely why are the police incapable of handling 'minor' problems (which in fact disrupt the social 'peace' etc.), and the answer is more to do with population size, or police inefficiency, or a slow legal system... etc
But more specifically, that, for whatever reason, it feels like we're in a new situation where the choice is suddenly 'aggressive policing' or 'laissez faire gradually rising disorder and unrest' -- and that this choice is only necessary because something underlying has pushed us to this point. At least where I live I feel the main issue is population size, but again, I'm not familiar with the American legal/police system except through reading the occasional article like this.
I have several European friends who have commented that nothing like homeless encampments exist, or would be allowed to exist, in the cities where they live. They have high population densities and are not free of problems with drugs, crime, etc. But anyone who hung around a place bothering people, much less put a tent, would just be quickly whisked away. Not treated roughly (unless they refused to cooperate), but definitely moved along.
On my vacation to (northern) Italy about 20 years ago, I went on day trips to a some touristy cities (Verona, Padova, Mantua etc.) There were a number of people hanging out in parks, and others selling stuff on sidewalks.
However, a couple of times they all vanished quite suddenly. If you looked around, you would see one or more police officers soon after.
Oh, I suspect a lot of them are treated quite roughly. In most European countries police are more vicious than American cops in my experience, and there are no bills of rights. It helps with public perception that the people being roughed up generally look like the majority population.
I have the opposite impression, and persons arrested / subject to a police intervention do have a lot of rights. On the other hand I'd be legitimately scared of the police in the US.
I've been to a police station a few times, including once as a perpetrator of property destruction (I was young and drunk, had funny ideas, some guy's boat suffered), the cops were way more courteous and friendly than I'd expect from people paid minimum wage to deal with assholes all day.
That is correct. In Poland homeless people who chill in public spaces are routinely visited by the police, though they'll be left alone (aside from a suggestion to visit social services) if they're not disruptive. I can't imagine someone setting up a tent in the middle of a city and just not being bothered, they can fuck off to a forest if they really want to (technically illegal without permission, but nobody cares).
If a homeless person was aggressive towards a passerby that'd certainly end with an arrest, with or without a topping of police brutality once the cameras are off. Everyone knows this, so they don't cause problems.
Here in Austria for a while we had a lot of apparently alcoholic homeless people hanging around train stations who were clearly Polish. The rumor was that the Polish government was giving “hopeless” individuals one way tickets to Vienna. The number of Polish speaking homeless seemed to shrink to zero once COVID hit, which maybe supports that rumor.
Exactly! In Europe there is a certain level of BS that is just not tolerated. You can get help, at the community's expense, but you get help on the community's terms. There are public spaces but they have basic public rules. From what I have seen, the European way seems preferable to the chaos we have here in San Francisco. Here, we have people who are somehow "below the law". Leaving them alone doesn't seem to be going too well, either for them or the rest of the city.
What I find fascinating to wonder is if policing will ever get so thin that vigilantes who torch homeless camps and crack skulls will get the same blind eye the police themselves did in the not-so-distant past.
Nope. In turns out that such "blind eyes" are not turned symmetrically or generically. Rather, there is a strong political element to them. Vigilante action against homeless camps, even of a restrained sort (i.e., not torching anything but just pushing people to move out) would lead to a media uproar and demands for arrests.
Scott here seems to conflate policing with law enforcement. The Graham Factor would like to remind you that these are not the same thing: https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/more-policing-less-law-enforcement
There might not be any law enforcement solution to this problem. But there could be a good policing solution. Eledex calls the police, the police show up, and threaten to arrest them. They scatter and so aren't a concentrated source of nuisance for the night. And maybe the police arrest one or two of the worst, before releasing them in a few hours because nothing they've done is worth taking to court. After this has happened a couple of times, groups of homeless people probably wouldn't congregate on that lot and be a public nuisance to Eledex anymore.
This makes sense. Why do you think the police do not do this?
I'm no expert on policing, so don't trust me too much, but here's some factors that I expect contribute:
(1) Not enough police officers to cover the complaints. Solving serious crimes should take precedent over nuisance, even if the nuisance compounds into arson in the longer term.
(2) Increasing bureaucratization. When every incident needs an increasingly complicated report, with the outcome ideally proscribed by police regulations, the police get more tied into law enforcement. The work gets pointed more at the regulations instead of solving the problem as easily as possible. It also uses more time.
(3) Influence from activists. Some of this is valid criticism. This sort of policing involves a lot of personal judgments, which could have various forms of bias. Some of this is from people who want to abolish the police, or at least eliminate this sort of policing.
When police officers believe that doing this sort of thing is more hassle than it's worth, or when they're constrained by police regulations on what things they should or should not intervene in, or when they're overworked, they are less likely to respond to nuisance calls.
#3 mostly. Plus there are numerous folks who are more than just activists, but make a living with the homeless as their "clients". The Homeless Industrial Complex is a real thing. A stable (or growing) list of clients means more income.
Incentive structure issue? If you are ranked by "number of arrests" you have no incentive to actually reduce overall crime, just to get as much of the low hanging fruit of easy to arrest people as possible
But of course as long as the encampment is not right next to Scott's house, or in his front yard, it is easy for him to shrug his shoulders. They aren't going to burn HIS house down, so no big deal, right? That's the whole problem with his analysis. You can't begin by dismissing the problem as no big deal, just because it doesn't affect you personally. There are good and sound reasons why municipalities have traditionally banned public camping outside of designated areas, and it is not just because the people can be "annoying". Fire risk and public health come to mind.
[comment from a Portuguese perspective]
I think the genesis of the policy in Portugal since 2001 does not depend on the country being less conservative than others. The country was conservative by default during Salazar's dictatorship, which lasted until the 1974 revolution. At that time, the population was ~20% illiterate (or up to 40% functionally illiterate), e.g. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000029874 but I've seen similar numbers in other sources. The country evolved rapidly after that, in many colourful ways, but I think this is a cultural inertia that can't be shrugged off quickly. With regards to drug use during that period, the highlights from this report are a good summary (page 13 "Portugal before 2001" onwards)
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/uploads/52ff6eb9-76c9-44a5-bc37-857fbbfedbdd/drug-policy-in-portugal-english-20120814.pdf
- "drug use, or, to be precise, cannabis use, started to become more visible in Portugal when Portuguese citizens returned from colonies where marijuana was grown and used openly."
- " They possessed no common knowledge about drugs, especially the distinction between hard and soft drugs, what problems different drugs carried, what health risks they presented to individuals, or what kindof social problems they caused."
(censorship during the dictatorship means that this was a problem that would not be discussed)
- "In the early 1980s, the most commonly used drugs in Portugal were hashish and marijuana, but heroin had already appeared by the late 1970s."
- "In the late 1980s, and especially in the early 1990s, drug consumption in Portugal became a subject of social concern. (...) A likely contributing factor to these impressions was that drug consumption in some districts of Lisbon and other bigger cities had become more open and visible."
The specific area mentioned here was "Casal Ventoso" in Lisbon, demolished in 2000
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/12/15/lisbon-moves-to-recapture-heroin-haven/3a797216-d3a4-4202-a1e2-c88d3e3f7d55/
- "The first comprehensive study on drug use in Portugal conducted in 2001, however, showed that, contrary to popular belief, the level of drug consumption in the country was among the lowest in Europe at that time. Barely 8 percent of the Portuguese surveyed admitted to using drugs at some point in their lives. (...) Although Portugal had one of Europe’s lowest levels of illicit drug consumption among the general population, experts agree that during the 1980s and 1990s, it was one of the highest prevalence countries for problematic drug use, particularly heroin use. The 2001 survey found that0.7 percent of the population had used heroin at least once in their lives, the second highest rate in Europe after England and Wales (1 percent)"
And that number leads me to the anecdotal part of my comment. By the late 80s, heroin use was so widespread that most people knew of people in one's own or other families who were addicted. Two important aspects here are that people are closer to their families than average in the US (they typically live with their parents until they get married), and peak addiction often led to horror stories of people stealing from their parents and, eventually, being evicted in despair. If people ended up in jail, either for consumption or for theft, it was quite likely they would share needles, and this happened in tandem with the AIDS epidemic... All of this happened to "kids of good families" (as our idiom goes), as much as to poor people, which helped in downplaying explanations about poor personal choices, versus the alternative of viewing it as a medical problem. Portugal was a much more classist society then, especially in the light of the education issues, so I think this is also an important factor. So, if anything, the policy did emerge in a country that was more conservative than most of Western Europe, at that time, and also at the bottom of most EU rankings of wealth, development, etc once it joined.
This was the setting where the decriminalization policy was proposed. This was under a government led by the large center-left party ("socialist party"); it worked well and visibly enough that, when there was an alternation to the large center-right party ("social democrat party"), the policy was continued. There have been administrative and practical changes over time but, broadly, the main thrust is still to fine people for consumption, and refer them to a "Commission for Dissuasion of Drug Dependence". They will then be referred to counselling, rehab, or social work support, and/or be fined.
>14: Scatted apartments for homeless.
This is called Scattered Site Housing, NYC started doing it in 2017? possibly a bit earlier, and it is wildly unpopular everywhere the sites have been scattered.
https://www.nj.com/essex/2019/12/nyc-sends-homeless-to-live-in-illegal-rentals-in-nj-one-town-is-trying-to-stop-it.html
https://nypost.com/2016/12/09/de-blasios-disastrous-shelter-scramble/
https://citylimits.org/2022/03/02/dilapidated-apartments-lousy-landlords-plague-nycs-sprawling-scattered-site-supportive-housing-network/
"I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more."
I suspect this is because you believe they could accurately identify the 6 people in town of 600 that need to be locked up, but don't believe a nation of 200 million could precisely identify the exact 2 million they need to lock up. If they weren't perfect with all those identifications, and 2 million seems a lot easier to mess up than 6, then a bunch of innocent people would be locked up while the situation isn't even made much better because the "scumbags" who weren't caught would still be wrecking things outside.
Personally, I doubt the first situation of 6 out 600 would ever occur either. It seems almost certain to me that at least one of those six would be innocent and imprisoned because it was easier than the alternative, or just be inconvenient somehow to those in charge of the town, and then the town is really more Omelas than ideal.
MA is... a strange example to pick; coastal state full of urbanites?
Take North Dakota
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_North_Dakota
300 of 356 "Cities" have a population under 1000. These small 600 person towns are quite common in the Midwest.
What kind of place has a police department but no schools?
Anyway 600 people is a hamlet with maybe a church and a pub. Nowhere except Midsomer would have an incarceration rate that high.
Interestingly, I found my intuition even on the small town example to be doubtful of being able to accurately ID the 6 problem people. Having been a resident of a small town, I am very suspicious that one man's scumbag is another man's "guy who doesn't follow the rules of my religion or mow his front lawn and annoys you with his fringe political ideas."
That is exactly my expectation as well.
Yeah, this is my basic problem - because a lot of people say they just want to institutionalize the actually violent homeless person, but don't want to do anything to the eccentric, but weirdly, in the past, the eccentric guy has also been unjustly prisoned in the past by the state, and no, I don't think that guy should get institutionalized so you feel more safe.
Who wants to forcibly institutionalize the eccentric guy for being eccentric? I think we need to retire that straw man.
Well, you could just focus on the ones who are already repetitively breaking numerous laws. I think you could accurately identify those. Cities already do, they simply catch and release ad nauseum. You could, for the worst of the worse, just stop the release part.
"So I take the opposite position here: if the government wants people to be able to live in places long-term when they don’t have the money to pay, they should give those people rent vouchers, or pay the landlord directly, or something - not invent a legal doctrine which is basically “if people don’t want to pay you then you still need to provide the service indefinitely” and give people as many lawyers as it takes to enforce that."
This is not what I argued. I don't want that "if people don’t want to pay you then you still need to provide the service indefinitely and give people as many lawyers as it takes to enforce that.", if people simply don't want to pay they won't win the court case and I'm not arguing for infinite lawyers, just one. To counter your other points I'll show some studies rather than throwing anecdotes back and forth. A study in Denver found that in the case of eviction; 89% of landlords had lawyers while less than 1% of tenants had: https://www.coloradocoalition.org/sites/default/files/2017-09/Facing%20Eviction%20Alone%209-11-17.pdf Since a court case can prevent you from gaining housing in the future (even if you're right), this power imbalance leads to people not wanting to stand up for their rights and being evicted without due process. A study in Milwaukee found this happens twice as much as evictions that do have due process: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/BLUU3U
Meanwhile, HUD did a study of landlords and found that rental voucher are often not accepted: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-research-052819.html and only one in four people who qualify for rental vouchers actually gets them: https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/jchs.harvard.edu/files/ahr2013_01-intro.pdf
Now we could create more rental vouchers, but even if we can somehow get the landlords to accept them, adding them to the supply-constrained housing markets will only cause prices to rise. If there aren't enough houses (and none are being added anytime soon) landlords can easily raise prices to capture the value of the new vouchers without fear that they'll lose renters. I predict that people that don't receive a voucher will see their rents go up and we will have to perpetually increase voucher funding to try and stay ahead of the higher rents they're causing.
+1 there's a big difference between giving people more rights and consistently giving them the means to exercise those rights.
A few different points mentioned that I don't think were fully played against each other.
1. You originally stated Schellenberger supported "sweeping" institutionalization. He countered that while he does support institutionalization, he is not pushing for "sweeping" institutionalization.
2. After this point, it seems there is a consensus that "Homeless people" is a meaningless generalization of heavily varying degrees of independence. An example is given that "Autistic People" can range from socially awkward but fully functioning members of society, to those who need to be institutionalized with 24/7 care to not harm themselves.
3. The number of 'mentally ill permanently homeless people' is likely quite low compared to the entire homeless population. At the same time, they do cause an incredibly outsize negative impact on the quality of life of the areas they inhabit, along with crime and tremendous city expenditure to no end.
Possibly semantic, but I would not consider institutionalizing say ~4000 people in a few major cities to be remotely "sweeping" institutionalization. I think, as you did consider later, a few people locked up can be a reasonable price to pay for a significantly healthier society.
You've mentioned sweeping institutionalization in the 1950s several times, I imagine this is particularly meaningful to you as psychiatry was involved in this back then, and you may be sensitive to encouraging bringing it back. Per the 1950 US Census of institutionalized people, there were in 747817 in Mental Hospitals or Homes & Schools for the mentally handicapped, or 0.494% of a population of 151M. Current US population is 330M, and based on the data you've shown I am skeptical that this 'institutionalization of mentally ill permanently homeless people' would institutionalize close to 30k people nationwide - and that would be an order of magnitude lower than we had in the 50s!
I think that your original statement, that Schellenberger favors sweeping "sweeping institutionalization of the mentally ill" is in fact a mischaracterization of the size of the homeless population for which Schellenberger favors institutionalization as a solution. That said, he may not have been clear enough.
Source for my figures: https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/41601752v4p2ch3.pdf
Edited as I mistakenly used the incorrect figure, 1950s mental institution population revised from 296k to 747k.
And this is flaw that undercuts Scott's review. Scott is more concerned about the boogeyman of returning to 1950s mental asylums than he is about the current dystoptian nightmare that exists in many parts of San Francisco. That's his perogative, but it makes no sense to throw it at Shellenberger. He might as well have just said that he doesn't really feel affected by the homeless problem to any great extent, and have been done with it.
I wouldn't go that far, but I do think he has an unacknowledged bias against institutionalization even when it may be a good solution
Regarding #9, I do think the book did a good job explaining how horrible institutionalization is. Nevertheless, unlike bygone eras, putting addicts in rehab past the time they physiologically crave the drug the post makes sense. I do agree with the dangers of institutionalization. All I can think, and maybe someone has data to support or refute this, is a feeling that even good ideas that seem to work well do so for about a decade before bad actors game the system and what was genuinely helpful is no longer. I would be in favor of a type of institutionalization that had this baked in and was able to be broken apart when it stopped working. I readily concede that would be almost impossible.
> But the stats I found were that 70% of SF homeless lived in SF before becoming homeless, 22% were elsewhere in California, and 8% were from other states
It's critical to point out that this is *survey data*. The source in the Wikipedia article for that claim is this:
https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDReport_SanFrancisco_FinalDraft-1.pdf
Which literally just asked homeless people where they were from. I don't think I need to spell out why this might not be a reliable number.
I wish you would spell it out because I don't think I get it. Are you suggesting that a significant number of the people surveyed lied about where they are from, in some correlated way? If so what is your theory about why they would do that? (Maybe there is some fact I am missing that would make this obvious if I only I knew it. Is there some benefit you get if e.g. you say you are from SF that you don't get otherwise?)
"Two years ago, a Seattle Times reporter, Daniel Beekman, spent four hours with me as I showed him how people arriving from other cities are processed to become “locals.” I explained how soon after landing, they are assigned a local zip code with an address (of a post office, church, or intake center). City officials actually pay people to wait at the Greyhound bus terminal to process fresh arrivals. But the editors chose not to publish this exposé, and I never heard from Beekman again."
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/10/homeless-in-seattle
Thanks for the link. The author seems to have an axe to grind but taking them at their word their quote just says that some organization (funded by the city of Seattle?) seems to be arranging services for new arrivals. The quote doesn't seem to be claiming that this service includes coaching people to lie if a survey-taker ever asks them where they came from but maybe there is more context I am lacking. Are there people claiming to have received such coaching?
Previous para:
"He gets his directive from the editors—who reveal their own agenda when printing periodic updates on homelessness, including a report stating that 86 percent of all homeless people in Seattle are locals and that in-migration is a myth. The report pulled data from providers of services to the homeless. The bureaucrats build careers off homelessness, and they have devised techniques to hide ugly and frightening realities."
I saw that, and read it carefully. There is innuendo but it doesn't actually claim that these bureaucrats actually coach people to lie, just that they have "devised techniques."
They want to see something that isnt there, I am not sure you can convince them otherwise.
A distinction without difference.
Then there was that Guardian piece I linked in the last article which talked about migration and had a (brief) bit about SF being a majorly net importer.
Everyone involved in the data collection process wants them to say that they're from SF. The homeless know that being from the local area is better for them, and is more likely to get them treated sympathetically. I think there are lots of reasons people like this would lie.
Yes. The Homeward Bound program tries to repatriate homeless back to the where they are from. If you don't want that, but instead want to stay in San Francisco and continue to get public support, and get placed on the list for free housing, you say that you are "from" San Francisco. Given that the "from" is ill-defined, it isn't exacly a lie so much as a misrepresentation. If you visited Hawaii and rented a place for a month, then ran out of cash and got evicted, you would meet the definition of having "lived in Hawaii before becoming homeless", but most people wouldn't call that being "from" Hawaii.
How else would find out where someone is from at a large scale?
I agree it's difficult. However, you could actually investigate the backstory of a random sample of them to try to figure it out.
I don't think there's any large incentive to lie here. However, what makes someone "from" somewhere?
"Seventy percent (70%) of respondents reported living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless. Of those, over half (55%) reported living in San Francisco for 10 or more years. Six percent (6%) reported living in San Francisco for less than one year. This is similar to survey findings in 2017."
So only 37%(ish) have lived in San Francisco for more than 10 years.
One working definition of being "from" a place is where you were born or spent your childhood. Another might be moving to a place, then holding down a job and participating in the economy for a set length of time, although that time would of course vary according to opinions. Probably at least a few years, in my estimation, would be needed to count as "from-ness". A lot fewer than 70% would meet even this defintion in San Francisco.
Yep. Show up in San Francisco, economically desperate, possibly mentally ill, and possibly addicted to drugs, and couch surf for a few weeks, then become homeless, and you count in the 70%. Did you grow up in SF? Did you go to school in SF? Did you ever work a full-time job in SF? Doesn't matter apparently. The 70% is pure propaganda from the Homeless Industrial Complex.
Your logic in the first section is 100% incorrect. You cannot accept self report answers to the “where are your from?” Because people lie intentionally and think they will get sent back the city they came from. You are so smart so surprised you fell for this. Also there is typically no checking on them - e.g. looking them up online or in databases to cross check it with known addresses
Do you have any proof that people are lying at such high rates?
From that survey:
"Seventy percent (70%) of respondents reported living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless. Of those, over half (55%) reported living in San Francisco for 10 or more years. Six percent (6%) reported living in San Francisco for less than one year. This is similar to survey findings in 2017."
So only 37%(ish) have lived in San Francisco for more than 10 years.
That 32%(ish) who moved to SF within the last ten years and then got homeless were probably not doing that great when they moved there to begin with; and it's entirely possible that a big portion of those 8% "out of state homeless" get an apartment for a few months at some point before winding up back on the street and now get counted as "Homeless from San Francisco."
right. again, all self report data. people living on the streets know not to generally say they are from out of state b/c they fear being sent back or losing services. so we should not accept these stats at face value. all you need to do is get a real name/ID and run a background check, medical record search, etc. it would be very very very very easy to get better data on this. I think this fake data serves the goals of homeless "advocates" b/c their narrative is always that it is due to housing being too high, etc. and they become quite dogmatic in this thinking. they do this to garner sympathy b/c if it happened to them then it could happen to you vs. them being mentally ill/drug users.
Julian my background is in psychology (Ph.D Clinical Psychology). It is common for people with chronic mental illness or drug addiction to DENY their symptoms or to minimize them. So there is that observation that anyone who works with patients understands. Also, there is no significant evaluation beyond this question which is administered by people with clipboards. I don't think people understand this which is the only reason I took the time to add this comment. So if you went to a homeless encampment of 100 for example, today they would have some likely minimally trained person asking these questions and the patients self report of "mental illness" becomes the data point. they don't google search, do a background check, do a psychological evaluation. As a psychologist, if I said someone was not mentally ill b/c I asked them if they were and they denied it, I would be committing medical malpractice.
but in the context this is basically the typical way this data is derived.
and then it gets political by those that want to say the homeless are not mentally ill. it goes like this. this is how the data is edited down to being headlines in the news that people scan and then are given a narrative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_and_mental_health
"It is estimated that 20–25% of homeless people, compared with 6% of the non-homeless, have severe mental illness."
it's a political manipulation of sorts by homeless "activists/advocates" because the only actual data point is that that percentage is the % of homeless that self-report that.
Lots of commenters are echoing Shellenberger's point:
"One word, “homeless,” entails an entire, insidious discourse that acts unconsciously and subliminally on our hearts and minds, rendering us unable to understand the reality before us."
Huge differences between different types of homeless people, and using the same word for the down-on-their luck and the "wretched" person who is not capable of holding down a job or even having an apartment without trashing it just obscures our thinking.
Footnote: see George Carlin's masterful discourse on how bums became hobos became winos became homeless people.
A bum becoming a hobo would be a personal improvement, right? "A hobo travels and is willing to work; a tramp travels, but avoids work if possible; and a bum neither travels nor works."
Anyway, I'd like to read the Carlin piece you mentioned. Can you supply a link?
I was certain it was part of his bit about language that conceals the truth. He did a variety of versions of this routine, and the one that includes language about bums isn't on youtube. You can watch these two clips and imagine it, though:
on language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY
on homelessness & NIMBY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjONsL4thQQ
I may have hallucinated the line, but i remember it as him saying that we used to call people "bums", then "hobos", then "winos" and eventually "homeless people", with each layer of softening language obscuring the reality further.
Precisely. I would prefer to specify what we mean. If we mean, tent encampments taking over sidewalks with widespread fentanyl and meth abuse, we should just focus on that.
I wish we could. Discourse appears to have broken down to such an extent that this is not possible. Just as not all illegal immigrants are rapists and also not all immigrants become functioning members of society, not all homeless people are psychotic bums and not all are down-on-their-luck artists or pianists.
Also this is INCORRECT. This is self-report. This is NOT based on psychological evaluation, psychiatric diagnosis or any medical history.
The manipulation here is that they ask people if the reason they are homeless is b/c they are mentally ill or substance problem.
“This is another really good catch, and means the percent of the homeless with mental illness + drug abuse is only about 22%, not the stated ~50% - although considering only the chronic homeless separately might blunt this change.
Is there any homeless research that investigates their background? There are a lot of survey results and reports on what they said to social worked, therapists, psychiatrists, etc. do they ever then go out and talk to parents, siblings, the boss at the last job he held, people they knew in high school, etc.
Maybe part of the problem is an over reliance on self reported information?
> I'm still confused that reporting varies in exactly the right way to keep the reported level constant regardless of the real level,...
To me, this just screams parallels with induced demand, the Jevons paradox, and/or buffered chemical equilibrium: Criminals have some upper bound on the risk of real consequences that they will accept. Shopkeepers conversely have an lower bound on what probability of inflicting real consequences justifies reporting. The consequences equilibrium point is thus stable against environmental changes that assign consequences differently unless you can exhaust the buffered (non-participating) portion of one side or the other.
This is analogous to a freeway widening project having zero effect on traffic: people have a upper bound on traffic pain, and the width of the freeway is merely a lower bound on the number of people needed to inflict a given level of traffic pain in that location.
It might depend a bit on who is doing the reporting, in the sense of what kind of shops and owners. I can imagine small businesses run by the owners doing more reporting than chain type stores or stores run by a manager only. The stores run by managers are staffed by people facing all the disincentives (both carrots and sticks) towards not reporting.
Now, the question is how shoplifters decide which stores to steal from when there is an increase in shoplifting: do they pick the readily identifiable small businesses that give them problems, or do they simply steal more from the chain stores where they won't face repercussions?
My guess would be that only new or inexperienced shoplifters would steal from those stores likely to give them problems, whereas experienced shoplifters target those that don't. If the creation of new shoplifters is fairly steady regardless of amount of shoplifting (the population of shoplifters changes less than the amount they shoplift) then reports should stay flat as all the increase in shoplifting tends to happen in the stores that don't report.
I think of this in a similar, but technically distinct manner -- the reported statistic is a thresholded and smoothed measure (transfer function) of the underlying reality. The police have a limited amount of capacity to take reports and follow up on low level crime like shoplifting, especially in light of official deprioritization of that specific crime, so even if it goes to by orders of magnitude the reported number won’t without the number of police resources going up in proportion. And that feeds back into the decision of employees and shopkeepers to call them at all. This all quickly settles to equilibrium.
I recently read "Evicted" which is probably a housing-first rallying cry. First, the book is excellent and vivid. Secondly, the people it follows don't really fit into any of the categories of homeless described here. They have homes, sometimes, but are constantly pushed out. They're sorta the (b) types. They'd definitely be helped by a Housing First approach. But they're also, frankly, pretty bad. You wouldn't really want them moving in next door. Heroin addictions. Attacked the person who they had been staying with, stomping on her face and hitting her with a hammer. Most of these people really need help. But these aren't the "wretched homeless" groups either; they're in and out of housing and don't want to be in the situation they're in. But it seems like they've been stuck there too long and it's rubbed off on them. I don't know what the relevance is here, but it's not like (a)'s and (b)'s and "the good ones" and the (c)'s are "the bad ones" causing all the problems.
Re: getting tenants lawyers. That idea might actually started from "Evicted" since it's one of the proposals in the back of the book. It's hard to square your ideas with the depictions there: most tenants don't bother showing up to court. Courts fight back the landlords on the amount of money owed but the evictions were granted without exception if the tenant owed rent. The sheriff and movers show up and remove the people forcibly if necessary (one of the movers comments he's evicted his own daughter). Now this was in 2008ish and the book was influential so the system might have changed too far in the opposite direction in the mean time.
The book also contests the idea that landlords never want poor renters. The landlords in the book specialized in it: a poor tenant can be evicted at any time since they're always behind in rent. That means that they can't report you to the city for violations; you can ignore their repair requests and cut costs. And rents in poor parts of the city are only slightly behind rents in the rich part of the city (even though the house would sell for 3x as much in the rich part). But you have to be a tough landlord to put up with it.
Heroin addicts can and should be institutionalized (rehab initially) if they find themselves homeless. If the temptation of heroin is so intense for them then they need to go somewhere they can be kept away from heroin. They will get quite a few stints in rehab before they are declared incorrigible - but that will be on the table.
That’s a good point. I think most people understand that you can get cancer and sometimes the doctors will do all they can but eventually they will say - there is nothing we can do. People don’t seem to understand that it’s also true for addiction and mental health.
Sometimes people are so addicted or so mentally ill that saying “therapy” and “rehab” is like telling someone with end stage metastatic cancer, who has been through 5 rounds of chemo, you should try chemo. They tried it. It didn’t work.
The one in this book eventually receives methadone treatment and has apparently turned his life around at the end.
One possible non-institutionalization response to "where should the heroin addicts go" is that the federal government could (on federal land somewhere) build "Heroinville", a new open-air community of several square miles where people who are heroin addicts who are about to be sent to prison / rehab / an institution may choose to move to instead.
Once someone documented as having an addiction to heroin chooses to move to "Heroinville", they cannot leave unless they pass a drug test every day for 2 months, and if caught outside of Heroinville, they will be automatically bussed back to Heroinville unless they choose to go to rehab/prison instead. Heroinville would be a town like any other that could engage in various industries in exchange for imports from the outside world, which the inhabitants could choose to participate in or not to gain increased access to dollars to exchange for goods and services like tents, drugs, and food.
Upside: More choice for addicts, a mechanism for getting homeless drug addicts away from the rest of the population, very cost effective compared to current homelessness budgets
Downside: Heroinville would have severe public order problems up to and including murder
Whether or not Heroinville existing is better or worse than the status quo depends on the relative weights a person puts on:
The effectiveness of the existing rehab system
Public order of non-Heroinville American cities
The ability of addicts to avoid institutionalization
The importance of avoiding murders of addicts by addicts
Have you seen "Escape from New York"? Your proposition reminded me of that movie. The idea of leaving outsiders/criminals/addicts on their own apart from civil society has been mulled before, even tried and tested, see deportations from Britain to Australia. I think a society can flourish better with the whole range of human personalities and behavior. If one tries to have only nice people around one risks to set oneself up for predation.
I fail to see how fentanyl addicts pooping in the street and on our beaches and stealing whatever they can is contributing to the flourishing of society. Seems to me to be the exact opposite, actually.
Maybe the useful part is a strong hint to possible societal flaws somewhere. Maybe in the health sector?
Australia, notably, was an experiment that worked well, producing a much better outcome for the people deported than them being maimed, killed, or kept in workhouses (the competing options in Britain at that time).
My question would be if it also worked well for British society. It looks like it did, I admit. The deported persons seemed not to have been a deeply relevant loss where they came from (although "Fields of Athenrye" reliably moves me to tears) and they could still contribute to the Commonwealth. Maybe there could be a workable mobel of different jurisdictions with different demands to conscentiousness and risk-taking, like charter cities, but I would expect it to get messy when people have children.
>I think a society can flourish better with the whole range of human personalities and behavior.
Does that include active pedophiles, serial killers, literal terrorists, literal Nazis, etc?
The homeless, or the worst large subgroup of the homeless, may be less individually destructive to human or societal flourishing than the aforementioned groups, but I'm not buying the argument that they *must* be a net *benefit* to societal flourishing because every sort of person is a net benefit to societal flourishing.
You'd probably get better results with, "they're harmful but not so much so that we can't tolerate them, and there but for the grace of God go any of us".
Including problematic, even outright dangerous, personalities in your group provides practice in dealing with those for the more cooperative and altruistic majority. They have to be dealt with, of course, and there surely are a few who cannot be integrated. We probably only disagree over their percentages.
I think the author would say that they would have been helped immensely from a Housing First approach like that that would have stopped the problems from spiraling out of control in the first place. He also acknowledges that some of the people he followed needed serious help, not just a roof over their heads. That’s basically his argument why it can’t come from the church or charity: their needs are beyond what those can provide and they often have already depleted such sources of support.
>If we want to deal with homelessness, I think people will just have to get used to having shitty neighbors, and landlords will have to get used to having shitty tenants (as long as they can pay government-subsidized rent).
If the solution to homelessness involves making everyone miserable it isn't a solution.
"If we want to deal with homelessness, I think people will just have to get used to having shitty neighbors, and landlords will have to get used to having shitty tenants."
Absolutely not. My solution isn’t to outrun the bear, it is to outrun people believing that we just need to put up with derelicts. That is why the solution is local. I just need to live in and shop in neighborhoods with strong institutional disincentives to uncivility. Yes, that means the fentanyl addicts and street poopers will all go to YOUR neighborhood, indeed I will strongly encourage them to do so, at least until you realize that you are enabling and subsidizing dysfunctional behavior.
I am sorry for sounding like a jerk, but we are seeing two totally incompatible views of effective institutions. You probably view me as the problem for failing to play along with your righteous compassion. However I view you as promoting and feeding the problem you think you are helping to address.
You don’t solve a vermin infestation by leaving out free rat chow or recommending that "people just get used to having" rats in the kitchen.
It’s just an analogy.
The goal isn’t to get you to kick them out, it is to get you to quit enabling their bad habits. I doubt every neighborhood will wise up, but I certainly wish they all would.
So, where would the hard core go? They could go to the shelters which we should build for them, or they could live out in the woods or desert somewhere. I am aware that many won’t, in which case they either obey the local laws or face the consequences. Fentanyl addicts won’t be obeying the laws though, so they will probably end up incarcerated.
I am well aware that I am not convincing you of anything, nor am I really trying. I am just clarifying how some of us (with extensive daily exposure to hard core destitute homeless) view the problem and the solution. They aren’t going to be pooping where I surf. I will make sure of that. Sometimes, imperfect as it is, that is solution enough. You can make the call for your neighborhood. Choose wisely, as hepatitis is serious.
I largely agree with you that tolerating terrible behavior (on the margin) increases the rate of "hardcore" homelessness (fentanyl addiction / street pooping).
I also agree that we need to make it easier for landlords to run low-cost housing that is decent, which means permitting dense, small, multi-family residences that can be easily built and maintained and which are very easy to evict someone from if they fall behind on rent.
However, in our current system we have two majors "gaps" that make it very hard to have well-aligned incentives for good behavior on the bottom end of the income scale:
The first is a massive gap in the housing market between ~$500 / month rent (the worst housing still existing in most American cities) and ~$0 / month rent (being homeless).
If we want to give people a ladder of opportunity to incentivize people who aren't entirely gone to try to become more functional, we need to fill in those missing rungs in cost-space. This would probably look like shanty-towns with no electricity and/or plumbing, or Hong Kong style micro apartments, or something. This is solvable with fairly simple public policy tweaks (re-legalize forms of housing that used to be legal).
The second massive gap is the lack of "high-behavior"/"low-behavior" distinctions at the low end of the cost scale. That is, we bundle "neighbourhood public order quality" with "price" quite tightly. If you want to incentivize good behavior for people who are only making minimum wage and likely will never make more than minimum wage, you need to have different communities that are all affordable at minimum wage with different standards of cleanliness, public order, etc. That is, you need to have $200 / month residences in a neighbourhood that is "good" and $200 / month residences in a neighbourhood that is "bad" and the ability to kick people out of the "good" neighbourhood if they misbehave. This is a much harder problem to solve with public policy because an individual landlord is totally indifferent between getting $200 / month for an apartment in a "good" neighbourhood and getting $200 / month for an apartment in a "bad" neighbourhood, so the incentive structure would need to be constructed carefully through public policy.
I can't think of a way to do this easily at a governmental level, since most of the naive implementations of this system would be very easily gamed. For one part of a system at the ultra-low-end of the scale, ctrl-f for my proposal on a different branch of this thread for "Heroinville"
In the Bay Area, with the tents, you are talking about a population that does not work at all, minimum wage or otherwise. I am talking about the hard core homeless of the encampments referenced by Swami. Kvetching about housing prices is utterly beside the point. Besides, why be in the one of the most expensive housing markets in the country if it's all about cheap rent? If that's the real issue, why not relocate to a very low-cost housing area, where a governmental support check can cover the rent?
It's about easy access to drugs, and a cultural and legal attitude of not enforcing basic social norms. Folks aren't migrating in from the sticks because it's too expensive out there. Swami is right on. I am getting the sense that you are not one of us (those with "extensive daily exposure to hard core destitute homeless"). That's fine, but just realize how it may limit your perspective.
> you can ignore their repair requests
Landlords can do this if you aren't poor too. Moving is an expensive hassle. I'm looking forward to moving in about a year and hopefully landing somewhere with a fridge that consistently stays under temp.
About the different classes of homeless:
Broadly speaking a population can fall into different categories, but the distribution is probably still a smooth spectrum with no gaps.
That means that any marginal improvement in eg housing costs will still have a marginal improvement in homeless numbers.
Some comments seemed to suggest that having different categories of homeless would render marginal improvements less useful.
Sure, there are certainly fuzzy boundaries. A lot of the working class "down on their luck" may have alcohol issues for example. And one can bleed into the other, with the wrong influence and continuing bad luck, folks can spiral into addiction for example.
My original point was that there are clearly folks who are able and willing to work on getting out of their mess, and some who are very far gone. Pretending these are the same problem is not helping anyone.
Strongly agree that housing costs and lack of job security push people into this slope and into bad situations where bad things happen.
I wonder if we shouldn't be looking at it as 3 groups, splitting out "voluntary homeless" into their own set.
Agreed.
Basically, big enough quantitative changes and qualitative changes are often hard to disentangle.
Nah. High housing costs in San Francisco are certainly a problem, but they cause displacement not homelessness. You might have to settle for living way out in the boonies if you can't afford a place in San Francisco, but it isn't going to cause you to just pitch a tent on the sidewalk. There's way more going on in that case.
Hmmm that's a good point. Homeless encampments certainly are a different problem altogether from disparate homeless population. I agree that public disruption is handled much more swiftly (not necessarily roughly, as you say) in parts of Europe I am familiar with, I guess I think that just that fact alone already points to a deeper situation/cohesion which allows it, and which is not there in certain American places. I'm not sure exactly what the precise difference would be, I'm just saying I don't think it's only a difference in the written laws; these anecdotes about the security not getting involved because of slow/unresponsive legal systems or complainants not filing reports for similar issues seems to be along the same lines-- it would broadly be about some kind of social cohesion (in a city of fastidious/legally-hygenic people, a public crime would be an enormous disruption, and the surrounding populace would intervene/request police intervention -- but in many American cases it seems like the public attitude is one of deliberate ignorance of public crime/disruption).
I mean 'social cohesion' is a kind of non-answer, but I don't really want to say homogeneity, or something like that. I'm not being very clear but I want to view police inability to deal with fairly obvious social-disruption as a symptom of a deeper loss of power, and not something caused by a weakness of written law (which should anyway seek to follow closely behind reparative _actions_).
Indoor plumbing is a useful dividing line here.
Unironic yes.
Dedicate an undeveloped area as a "shanty town" hand out lots to anyone who wants to live on one. Let them build whatever shelter they want. Get volunteer groups out to build tiny homes.
Habitat for Humanity, tiny-house edition?
Yes.
"Together with the model showing housing prices predicted homelessness well, I find this really convincing."
The elephant in the room no one among the activist circle wants to talk about is that it makes ZERO sense to house a single homeless person in a place like SF or LA or NYC where housing prices are some of the highest in the entire world. In America we've got dozens of second-tier cities with modest land prices and *that's* where the homeless should be moved. If our federal government was smart, they'd take the top-20 cities in America by housing price per square foot, draw a 50 mile circle around them, and ban any federal support for the homeless from going to any organizations within that circle. Then in a few years all the homeless organizations would move outside these "circles of crazy prices" and the problem would self-resolve.
I live in Seattle and it blows my mind that we're trying to house our homeless right here in the city instead of moving them to (say) Spokane where land is 4x cheaper.
How would you make them go - and make sure they stay there? If they're not provided with work - and finding work in Spokane, I would guess, might be harder than in a bigger city, - and if there is not enough people with money to pan-handle (or mug!), they will probably abandon those houses, because a house is important, but you also have to eat?
One may argue that this will work for down-on-their-luck types who lost their house due to economics or something, and now only need a little boost to get back on their feet, but once again - finding a stable employment would be harder in a smaller city. I recently read a statistic about Moscow (Russia) homeless, for example, and the vast majority seem to be people who actually have a home in another city, but there is no work there at all for them, so they flock to the capital city in hopes to find at least something - of course, the kind of jobs they can get do not allow these people to rent a flat even on the outskirts, but at least they have something to eat. Maybe in America this is not a common case, but such people would strongly object to being transported to ass-end of nowhere, because they just came out of there.
> How would you make them go - and make sure they stay there?
Using big men with big guns, aka the "monopoly on violence". It won't be a choice - either you find a place to sleep in or you get moved to a designated homeless location.
> but you also have to eat?
You'll provide the homeless with food, water, decent shelter and basic medical care. Plus subsidize some local employers to hire the homeless.
> but such people would strongly object to being transported to ass-end of nowhere
They could object all they want, who cares? We're living in a society, which sometimes means doing things you don't like to avoid getting beaten up by other members of said society.
I, ah, suspect this approach won't fly in the current political climate, at the very least. Practically, It would require changing a few things in the good old US of A. Specifically - limiting the freedom of movement for certain persons without actually putting them in prisons. At the very least, it would require a new kind of document which would contain the address to which the subject of these measures is "bound" (so he could be returned there forcefully if caught without permission to travel).
It kind of worked that way in USSR, but whether you're a fan of Soviet-style solutions or not, it should be mentioned that whatever degree of "worked" we're talking about, it worked alongside a host of socialist policies, which are also unacceptable/unapplicable in the modern USA.
It obviously won't work in modern-day USA but the question is about the future, which can go in any direction. Its kind of similar to complaints like "well the law doesn't allow this!" which forget that laws are just a human construct and can be changed at any time, not some immutable law of nature.
I think that eventually the homeless crisis will escalate to the point where the right laws will be changed and society will accept that sleeping on the street will not be tolerated.
Yep
If you ran for governor on this platform I would vote for you. Heck, I would join your campaign staff. The homeless need tough love and teepees not free needles and half million dollar urban condos.
Since the municipality of Seattle doesn't have a monopoly on force outside of the confines of Seattle [except when overridden by the state or federal government], you'd presumably need the government of the state of Washington to use its state-wide monopoly on force to move those homeless people from Seattle to Spokane.
Why would the state of Washington do that? Right now extreme homelessness is a problem that heavily concentrated in the cities that also contain the voters most tolerant of it. That's a natural political equilibrium that's very unlikely to change anytime soon, since any state government that moved homeless people from Seattle to Spokane would be heavily punished by voters in Spokane and probably not rewarded by voters in Seattle.
Seattle could also significantly reduce the severity of its homeless problem by making housing in the city more affordable (which is under Seattle's control) or by enforcing its own laws against disorderly conduct in public (which is also under Seattle's control).
> How would you make them go - and make sure they stay there?
Let's say we don't. Let's say we just make it an option.
"Hey, you can stay here sleeping on the street, or you can have a free apartment in Oklahoma."
Even if only 10% take you up on it, and half of them come back, that's 5% less homeless people on the street. Marginal improvements are improvements.
But then you're back to trying to find a solution for the rest of them. A solution that is not "housing first" (because you already spent money on those houses in OK).
Also, I wonder if the percentage is going to be even lower than 10%. I know it would be in Moscow, because of pride - you just DON'T leave the capital if you managed to be born there, or get there somehow. SF, while not the country's capital, have a certain fleur of a "dream city" to it, so unlike Julius Caesar, many homeless might actually choose to be last in the city, rather than first in the village.
Ok?
But then they're people who are *actively* choosing to be homeless in the big city rather than housed.
At that point you can enforce all your regular laws again because they did have a real choice to do something else, and they choose not to.
Or we could just skip straight to that step.
Yes, but according to the Homeless Industrial Complex, they have a gods-given right to live in the most expensive city in the US, on 100% public support. Suggesting that they have to make any compromise at all is just unfathomable. Not liking working people....
Why is the land cheaper? Because there's fewer jobs and its more expensive to get other services. Shipping people somewhere doesn't mean they'll be able to meaningfull live there
If they're not working in SF, they might as well not work in North Dakota. But at least this way its cheaper for the taxpayers.
SF is an unusual case, but when I ran the numbers on this using 2019 data LA & Houston spent the same amount per person per year on services for homeless people (~$12,000). Homeless people are expensive and hard to manage, and they themselves likely wouldn't stay in North Dakota because there are more amenities available in big cities.*
*These amenities are a combination of public services, public transportation, panhandling opportunities, lax police enforcement, and inherent big city anonymity. Only some of these are things that big cities could change if they wanted to [public services for homeless people could be reduced, police enforcement could be increased], which means that big cities will likely remain the natural attraction points for homeless people even with a municipal governance change. The problem can be improved but unless you put in place a federal/state system for coercing homeless people to move, it'll be hard to get them out of big cities.
It's pretty expensive to get services in SF relative to most of the country, so I don't think that holds water. Regarding "meaningful lives", that's subjective, but the degree to which fentanyl addicts living in tents on SF streets are living meaningful lives is debatable to put it mildly.
>"I would be more sympathetic to this fair criticism if he was more willing to criticize the mass institutionalization era and less willing to criticize everyone who was ever against it."
This reminds me of the Javert Paradox (https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/its-hard-to-criticize-science-without-looking-like-an-obsessive.html).
As a minor note, your "r/homeless" link is not pointed to the correct location.
"Claim that the first two groups are only temporarily homeless and don’t bother anyone, and that all the problems people consider linked to homelessness are caused by the severely mentally ill."
So let me write a short defense of the "wretched" and point the finger at the “beach bums”. Without going into personal details, I've seen someone become wretched. Over the course of five years, they had a complete psychotic break, alienated all their friends and family, were given a mobile home which they barricaded and defecated in until it had to be replaced, and eventually got lost in the homeless world, to the point where private investigators by the family haven't been able to locate them. Think, very literally, someone who would become extremely agitated and paranoid within sight of power lines. Completely lost their mind.
And I think the implicit critique of the wretched, that they're the real problem, is kinda true. They, very genuinely, need more help than even a loving and prosperous family can provide. They're a screaming black hole of time, money, and energy. Honestly, I think the figures from the CA Department of State Hospitals is fairly accurate on what these people require. DSH spends about $1.4 billion on ~12k patients or $150k per patient per year. And yeah, for a room of 12 of these people, you do genuinely need 4-5 trained staff members per shift because, in a violent altercation, you do genuinely want 3-4 staff members subduing the patient in a controlled manner (for their safety and the patient's) plus an additional staff member to watch the other patients. $150k per patient per year is a pretty fair price. And, quite frankly, these places are...not a place you'd ever send a loved one. The staff tries, god some of them try, but no one wants family in DSH Napa or DSH Atascadero. At a certain point you hope the person can achieve some equilibrium anywhere. If he's camping down by the river in an out of the way spot and the local food bank workers recognize him and the cops know him and how to handle him...that's genuinely the best that can be made of a horrific situation. That’s the best life some of these people can lead.
But, in their defense, the wretched have a real claim on us. In any society a certain number of people will be born just broken. So broken that it is genuinely a full time job for 3-4 adults to care for them. And that’s fine, it’s a perfect situation for insurance in the social contract, the unspoken agreement that if you or a loved one is born so broken that badly that society will expend an undue amount of resources to make your life as comfortable as possible. That not only the government but each of us owes these people a certain amount of grace and pity “for there but for grace go I”.
I think the vibe I get from Scott here is wrong. The problem isn’t that 20% of the homeless population needs 80% of the time and energy, the problem is that they aren’t getting it because all these “beach bums” are taking it. One homeless guy down by the river, even a real crazy one, is something most of us have enough patience and grace to handle. Put a homeless camp down by the river and pretty soon people just want something done. At a really core level, people have a limited amount of empathy, especially for strangers. There’s an inherent competition for that empathy, for patience and handouts and social programs, between those who genuinely, absolutely need it and the beach bums who just don’t fit into society.
People aren’t just tired of the mentally ill homeless, they’re tired of tent cities everywhere, even at gas stops like Lodi on the I5, and they’re tired of feces on the streets and they’re tired of panhandlers. And, to be extremely unfair, the best solution the current homelessness crisis may indeed be the reinstitutionalization of the mentally ill homeless but it will be at the expense of the most vulnerable in our society to the benefit of a bunch of bums who have options in their life.
PS. Let me carve out an exception for the “car homeless” here, not because they deserve it, but because their problems can actually, practically, be solved. All the “car homeless” I’ve met are basically functional adults in bad financial circumstances where $10k would solve 80% of their problems, so, ya know, let’s just give them $10k in rental subsidies or something and be happy we found an easy problem for once. Like, I’ve past the point where I care whether you deserve a handout, I’m just grateful when a handout actually solves the problem.
PPS. Since numbers matter, my priors are that the actually “wretched” mentally ill population is a pretty constant baseline, probably somewhere around 20-50 people per 100,000 population like in Houston from the original post, whereas the big homeless epicenters have 100-500 per 100,000. I think, for many of these “wretched”, that homeless life is the best solution and dramatically better than being institutionalized and I think most people would not have a problem with the homeless if there were 80-90% less of them, no matter how bad the remainder were.
Agree with most all of this, and think it strikes at the heart of something important. We will always have folks with severe mental issues. We loose patience and will if the group becomes too large.
Fatigue at helping folks who could likely help themselves was why I stopped volunteering in homeless feeding after some years. I wanted to help the truly bad off, but a number of the folks were clearly more into the lifestyle...
"But cities in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina also have okay climates without too many homeless, so I’m not sure how much to update on this."
Don't forget humidity. A heat index over 90 calls for "extreme caution" https://www.weather.gov/ama/heatindex, and Miami's high is above that for the entire summer https://bmcnoldy.rsmas.miami.edu/mia/
According to this https://www.bertsperling.com/2013/07/02/sizzling-cities-ranked-our-new-heat-index/ Miami has the 7th highest summer heat index in the country, and Orlando, Tampa and Jacksonville are not far behind. Los Angeles is #32, and SF, Seattle and Portland are nos 48-50.
Potentially relevant to the "why can't we just build lots of housing for the homeless", from today's San Francisco Standard:
https://sfstandard.com/housing-development/hotels-demand-sf-pay-up-for-damage-during-shelter-in-place/
San Francisco rented a bunch of hotels that were sitting idle during the pandemic, to provide emergency shelter to the homeless during the pandemic (because there was a time when "get them inside, that will stop the spread of COVID was a thing). Now those hotels are giving the city a bill for the damages these "tenants" caused. And if I read correctly, at one of these hotels it came to $42,000 per room.
Presumably they're padding the bill at least a bit, but I doubt they're making it all up. Housing is not a Thing That Exists just because you paid for it once upon a time; it needs constant maintenance, and it can be destroyed by neglect or carelessness. And that probably happens a lot more when you give it to people who maybe weren't particularly functional in the first place and have no skin in the game.
If we have to budget even $20K/person/year to repair the damage associated with otherwise-homeless tenants, that's going to be a significant economic hit.
It does kinda depend on how you build. Hotels build nice-looking and fragile because this usually works for them. On the other hand, nobody can punch holes in a brick or concrete wall without some serious equipment. There are a few options for windows; there are a few ways to prevent people having easy access to scratch/break the glass, or you could use corundum.
There's no such thing as indestructible, but "not easily destructible" is quite possible. You want to use wall hangings and rugs and stuff to make this kind of building pleasant to live in, of course, but those are mobile so you get the tenants to provide their own (which brings skin in the game).
Totally tangential point to your actual substantive comment (and my apologies therefor), but as a side not I think think you underestimate the costs of using corundum even in sizes dramatically smaller than "window" (again, I know this was just a throwaway reference and not a load-bearing part of you comment, sorry!) I have some relevant (albeit several levels removed) experience here and corundum processing for use as a transparent optical medium is fucking *hard.*
I've seen the counterargument made that living on the street is dangerous enough that on average*, they'd end up costing the government more than that in emergency care costs.
*bearing in mind that the cost distributions on both sides will be long-tailed.
SF is already spending that much on the homeless. Shifting from the current ineffective status quo to housing would save money.
Your link to /r/homeless is broken - it should go to https://reddit.com/r/homeless, or better yet, https://old.reddit.com/r/homeless. Instead, it goes to https://astralcodexten.substack.com/reddit.com/r/homeless/, probably because you forgot to add a https in the href
I find the story of being "robbed or assaulted" five times, and having a friend be "literally curb-stomped" to be, uh... extremely implausible, or possibly confused about the meaning of words, to put it charitably.
Robbery specifically means to take by force or threat of force, ie, mugging not car break ins, and is quite rare - plus aggravated assault, there were 5866 total in 2019. Spread over 800,000 residents, that's a yearly risk of 0.7%. Five times in a row would be... 2 in a hundred billion? Check my math?
Anecdotally, I've lived in SF proper for 10 years, in some pretty rough areas, and I've never been robbed or assaulted. I also know many people who live in SF (funny how that works), and among them all, I know of one mugging (that actually occurred in West Oakland) and one (technical) assault (being spat on by a crazed homeless person). The idea that one relatively normal person could be robbed or assaulted five times in rapid succession is winning-the-lotto level improbable.
Also, literal curb-stomping as depicted most gruesomely in American History X is, unsurprisingly, fatal. If someone was actually literally curb-stomped and survived, I would certainly expect them to at least be hospitalized, need reconstructive surgery, etc. It would be straightforward attempted murder, and the idea that the cops wouldn't want to hear about attempted murder is pretty ridiculous. In my years here, I've called the police multiple times (mostly reporting traffic incidents, once for a homeless person laying face down in the road where they could be run over, once after catching someone attempting to steal my motorcycle) and they've always been prompt in responding. After the motorcycle incident, they took a report. I'm not denying that some people have bad experiences with lazy cops, but I find the idea that they would ignore attempted murder to be... uh, extremely implausible.
>Robbery specifically means to take by force or threat of force, ie, mugging not car break ins, and is quite rare - plus aggravated assault, there were 5866 total in 2019. Spread over 800,000 residents, that's a yearly risk of 0.7%. Five times in a row would be... 2 in a hundred billion? Check my math?
1) He didn't say it was in a single year.
2) He didn't say he was the sole victim in all of them, or even a direct victim at all.
3) Robberies aren't independent in location or victim type; they cluster (the location should be fairly self-explanatory; the victim type is that some people are easier and more lucrative to mug than others and some of this is detectable by muggers). So multiplying probabilities is naïve.
An obvious explanation would be his house overlooking an area with a lot of muggings.
Also 4) when someone's whole claim is that the police stats are unrepresentative, quoting the police stats in reply without some kind of defence of their veracity is... not especially relevant?
The 1 in 50 billion number is for once per year, for five years. Five times in one year would be even lower.
Also, beyond quoting statistics, you'll note I also provided my own anecdata, which also substantially contradicts his. Does that meet your bar for relevance, since we're not allowed to use statistics?
1) I did mess up interpreting your toy model.
2) Rolling 0.7% five times in *ten* rolls is 1 in 250 million instead of 1 in 50 billion.
3) And of course the more pertinent points are that he claims it to *not* be 0.7% and that naïve multiplication doesn't work anyway.
4) I didn't criticise your anecdote.
5) I didn't say you're not allowed to use statistics. I said that if someone says "X stats are wrong", quoting X stats is not really relevant. Quoting independent Y stats could be useful. Providing a defence of X stats could be useful.
Well if it never happened to you, then it must never happen right?
Gosh, I didn't expect to experience the Notice Me, Senpai effect so early in Substack commenting career. I'm flattered, thanks Scott!
A couple other recent-post-relevant things I wanna append to my comment, now that it's semi-Canonized:
1) Used to date a semi-professional "booster". Not like organized crime, I mean the sort of M:tG Black amoral opportunist who figures out the informal rules for what gets you caught and what doesn't, then ruthlessly exploits that as part of balancing the household budget. This also includes knowing individual stores' refund policies well. Around 5-6 years ago when SF was seeing record summer heatwaves and AC units were selling out everywhere, she made the rational choice to purchase one for 3 months, then return the much-abused-and-still-leaking unit in the original packaging for a full refund come fall.
So I feel like I've got a decent sense for this kind of person and know several of the tricks of the trade...and this isn't the profile of the sort of shoplifter my store regularly gets. It's mostly the sorts I'd classify as Young Punks with Nothing To Lose. They don't do it for lack of money, they do it for the lulz and because flouting authority/norms is just part of the youth zeitgeist. (Hence why they make so many idiotic mistakes and we're well aware of the problem as it happens, not only afterwards through inventory discrepancies.) What they have in common, though, is that if you don't respect The Man anyway, it becomes easier to rationalize a "harmless" six-finger discount. Which leads into...
2) BLM protests during summer 2020. People get hung up a lot on the effects they had on policing, the racial angle, the boredom angle, and so on. But outside of the frequently-mentioned (and rightly so!) disingenuousness of Mostly Peaceful Protests...I wanna emphasize that there very much was a vibe shift around the legitimacy of capitalist businesses, especially among the young and politically active. <s>Ancap</s> [EDIT: Anti-capitalist] sentiment has always been ambient in SF, but after the Political Establishment and MSM pushed pretty hard on the narrative that There Was No Looting (And Even If There Was, Is That Really So Bad?)...well, surprise surprise, lotsa otherwise mostly-armchair disaffecteds started making this same justification in real life. To their friends, neighbors, and coworkers - including those who worked for Evil White Supremacist Corporations.
Suddenly it became a lot more normalized to handwave looting and other "mere" property crime: because the perpetrators were the real victims of systemic _____ism, because capitalist wealth is illegitimately stolen, because corporations are rich and who cares about their billionaire profits, because Materialist Consumerism Bad, because the poor should take any means on offer to get ahead. It was The Revolution, man, and you don't wanna look like a __scab__ during a society-wide strike.
I don't know why this angle hasn't gotten much coverage outside right-media. It was a very real phenomenon on the ground...businesses that cut hours/closed continue to have reduced hours/not be open. Those jobs aren't coming back...(and they were disproportionately held by the poor and minorities.) I'll never forget the period when all the shop windows around where I work were boarded up and there was a police-enforced curfew, out of fear of wanton property crime. It was shocking precisely because I work in one of the *tamer* parts of town, a mostly-residential area next to one of the colleges. You just don't see a lot of crime out here, and yet everyone was still running scared. It's so easy to break community norms of propriety and law-abidingness; much harder to bring them back after they're gone. So the fact that none of this shows up in Official Shoplifting (Larceny?) Data just makes it more gaslight-y, because now those same people who handwaved looting can point at statistics and say, see, look, I told you it was all okay. But it's not, and we're not.
>Ancap sentiment has always been ambient in SF, but after the Political Establishment and MSM pushed pretty hard on the narrative that There Was No Looting (And Even If There Was, Is That Really So Bad?)...well, surprise surprise, lotsa otherwise mostly-armchair disaffecteds started making this same justification in real life.
Hang on, isn't that more ancom than ancap?
Fair, I think the characterization could go either way for the Median Disaffected (and I definitely know some in that former more stringent category, now that you point out the distinction). Was sorta gesturing at the background radiation-esque support for vaguely-defined Socialism(tm) that's as much part of SF's weather as Carl the Fog; "ancap" was the term that sprung to mind as best fitting the writing flow and ground truth. Mostly going off the principle that optimizing for X and not Y means necessarily optimizing against Y at some point[1].
Simultaneously, I plead the same as Freddie deBoer[2] that it's hard for me to keep track of academic labels which overlap in concept-space, especially if they're not from "my side", so the bright line between "anti-capitalist" and "anarcho-communist" in my mind isn't as clear as Jacobin Magazine would prefer. I am reminded of all the many times I've been upbraided for assuming "Democrat", "liberal", "left", and "progressive" were remotely fungible terms. Maybe there's some broader epistemic impetus behind adding yet another Trivial Inconvenience on top of difficult discourse, but it's always felt kinda like a semantic stop sign to me. (To a conservative, nearly everything will be "left"!) Apologizes if that's a mischaracterization of your intent, bit of a sore spot for me after repeated rhetorical reprimands.
At any rate: I claim the mindset that leads a whole region to loudly denounce and ban e.g. Walmart and <s>Hate Chicken</s> Chick-Fil-A, but not the sundry other popular corporate chains found in local abundance (nevermind not patronizing them, so much for supporting local business), is full of armchair-disaffecteds. How exactly one defines their malaise towards Capitalism, Inc. doesn't really change the underlying argument about irl norm shifts, of taking "no ethical consumption under capitalism" to its repugnant conclusion.
[1] Which I'm dead certain was an EY LessWrong post, but I can't seem to find it anymore. The distilled version of "The Hidden Complexity of Wishes".
[2] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what
Huh, don't think I've seen "ancap" used for "anti-capitalist", I've only seen it for "anarcho-capitalist" (which is of course much more distinct from "anarcho-communist"). Perhaps that is what magic9mushroom thought as well?
Same, "Ancap" is definitely more commonly associated with Anarcho-Capitalistism than Anti-Capitalism.
Edited to update, I'll take n = 3 ACXers all pointing out the same confusion of terms as a good enough p-value that it's probably Fully General Confusion. Thank you for the clarifications, we regret the error!
(If I were Scott I'd append a Google n-gram graph or something, curious how the "opposite" association seems so firmly lodged in my brain's lookup table.)
"California and Seattle are among the rare US cities where it never gets unbearably hot or cold,"
You mean SF and Seattle.
It doesn't get too hot in LA or San Diego too often either, compared to Austin which is unbelievably hot 90+ days per year.
Regarding point 13 (6 in 600 vs 2M in 200M): this is not a cognitive bias, this is correct application of the law of big numbers.
I expect the base rate of “people who need to be locked up or everything bursts in flames” to be somewhere around 1 in 1000. Given this rate, the probability that a 600-person town has at least 6 of them is 1 in 26260. So our hypothetical town is indeed unfortunate, but it’s not surprising that a few towns like that would exist. But given the same base rate, the probability of having 2M such people in a 200M country is less than 1 in 10^1000000 (that’s a million-digits number).
Where does "1 in 1000" come from?
That's a lot of math when it is all based on a '1 in 1000' estimate that seems to have no real-world backing.
Regarding the "town of 600 that locks up 6 disruptive citizens": I would like to point out that it paints a wrong mental picture.
The correct picture would not be "Imagine you came to a town of 600...". It would be "Imagine there would be residents locked up in every single town. 2 in a village of 200. 100 in a small town of 10.000. No matter where you went, everyone would know people locked up from their hometown."
600 inhabitants are not a town where I come from, it's a village. Town is Stadt in german, and even Kleinstadt (literally "small town") is defined as 5.000+, and that definition is from 1887. So the mental picture may paint the wrong size.
But especially, the framing makes the town an isolated case, so we subconsciously accept a more extreme variation.
That's why mental framing like this is problematic: It paints a picture and literally paints over other facts. I prefer a data-driven approach, where you compare e.g. rates of incarceration between countries to judge whether a certain number is okay or excessive.
David Roman writes "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", regarding Francisco de Sá Carneiro, which is one of the wrongest sentences I've ever read?
- Sá Carneiro never was President; he was Prime Minister.
- The matter was not "ignored for decades" -- in fact, the opposite? It has been an ongoing political, and police, topic of discussion ever since: there were 10 (!) parliamentary inquiry commissions on the matter, with different theories and conclusions, and the case was periodically reopened by the State's attorneys. You can absolutely say that the whole matter was dealt with completely ineffectually, but this vague conspiratorial "... and it was never mentioned again" BS is the opposite of what actually happened.
- Sá Carneiro was.. not particularly conservative? He was one of the founders of the "Social Democratic Party" (and there is a never-ending tradition for every leader of the party to claim that they are the true heir of Sá Carneiro and will restore the party to its founder's vision), which was always the country's "center-right" party, whatever that meant at the time (and especially in 1980 that didn't mean very right-wing at all -- the Portuguese political mainstream has always been leftward of that of other European countries because of the post-Revolution context). Noticeably he governed in coalition with the actual right-wing party. But maybe the best source for this claim is... this actual interview of him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzGvhfbCoio where he says he doesn't want his party to be a conservative party and identifies with the German SPD (the social-democratic party, center-left).
'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.”'
$950 is still good money and you can come back for more. That's why there are all these videos on 'shop lifting san francisco' etc.
Then again, the talking point is obviously 'actually, that's not shoplifting'.
> This is a great thought experiment / example of a cognitive bias / whatever it is. I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more.
I'd think 600 person towns with 6 people locked up at a given time are extremely rare; in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if no such town ever existed.
What about Dodge City, Kansas in the 1880s?
Considering that five members of the Gypsy family Grönfors were sentenced to prison after feuding with their neighbours in the village of Vojakkala, which has 62 inhabitants, my intuition differs quite a bit from yours on this matter.
Well, it's not quite that small, but Tulia, TX has a population of about 5,000 and imprisoned about 10% of its entire black population, resulting in 38 drug convictions. All convictions were eventually thrown out "because they were based on questionable testimony from a single undercover agent accused of racial prejudice" (https://www.aclu.org/other/racist-arrests-tulia-texas)
Now what should that tell us about this thought experiment? In particular, about the stipulated assumption that the mayor can "personally vouch" for exactly who does and doesn't need to be locked up?
I think the thought experiment could also be extended by noting that there are a bunch of other towns in the region, and for some reason every single other town gets by with only locking up one or two people; why does this town need to lock up several times more than that? Are its people uniquely violent or sociopathic or something?
Someone can personally vouch for 6 people being complete scumbags who just have to be locked up, but in the real world nobody could possibly vouch for anything about 2 million people, so the second part of the thought experiment is not at all a fair description of the real-world US.
No, but half a million different somebodies in a thousand different neighborhoods, cities, towns, etc. could. (Realistically, a large fraction are from concentrated areas in a few urban centers with massively-disproportionate criminality, so its more like one person vouching for a couple hundred).
> So that leaves some kind of law targeting all homeless people and demanding they go in shelters or something. I dunno, seems unfair.
Many countries have laws against sleeping in public spaces, some (including mine) forbid drinking alcohol there. On one hand, both are an absurd violation of personal freedom. On the other, the kind of people who run afoul of these laws most often need to be liable for _something_ because they are a huge pain in the ass for the surrounding community.
I'm disgusted with the solution and I'd like a better one, as a person who slept on park benches sometimes and drank on them often.
"Claim that the first two groups are only temporarily homeless and don’t bother anyone, and that all the problems people consider linked to homelessness are caused by the severely mentally ill" -- selfishly yeah, but selflessly the fact that at any given point in time certain people don't have a place to stay sounds like a problem even if they don't bother anyone else, and if we're talking about policy proposals rather than about individual actions a selfish perspective doesn't sound particularly relevant to me.
Regarding #8: it contains a few basic mistakes (Sá Carneiro was NOT President) and casually asserts conspiracy theories as fact (his death was a matter of debate and investigations for decades, but no strong evidence of foul play was ever uncovered).
One thing I don't understand from these comments and from the original essay: how do these homeless people survive? How do they get enough food to eat? Do they flock to cities because there are more opportunities for begging? If giving money to the homeless was made illegal, what would happen to them?
SSI income, theft, charity, or some combination thereof. I am not sure how any city could really make giving money to the homeless illegal.
Regulations against begging that are enforced by removing beggars from the "good spots" do not fully prevent giving money to the homeless but do reduce the total quantity of money given that way.
America is a very rich country and so there's a lot of food floating around. I have never been homeless so I don't know the details of how the average homeless person acquires food, but between churches, soup kitchens, other food-oriented charities, passerby, and dumpster diving, acquiring enough calories to survive does not appear difficult (based on the number of times I've seen homeless people throw food on the ground and the general fact that homeless people in NYC might be slightly thinner than American average but aren't emaciated).
Contrast this to the Great Depression (when America was 1/5th as rich per person, in theory) and a lot more people froze/starved to death.
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, 1 of them is a complete scumbag who just has to be locked up or else the town would be in flames. However he doesn't know exactly who it is so they have locked up the 6 most likely people. Does this seem like a mass incarceration crisis?
Given relative incarceration rates of other developed countries this seems like an alternative scenario to consider.
This is the practical way to do Omelas.
Regarding shoplifting: surely there are ways that a rising rate of shoplifting could cause a proportionately dropping rate of reports. For instance, consider a "willingness-to-report" model where reporting is mostly driven by new employees or newly promoted managers, each of whom becomes jaded and stops reporting after n shoplifting incidents. More shoplifting would just lead to each employee burning through the same n reports earlier in their career. I have no confidence that it's the right model, but feedback mechanisms are common enough in life that a constant number of shoplifting reports doesn't seem too surprising.
So... I guess I'll be the one to make the stupid, naive, lib comment about Eledex's story. He says he called the police on these people multiple times and the police didn't show. At no point does he mention walking 100 feet and trying to talk to any of them and see if something could be worked out. Maybe, even probably, it wouldn't have worked! But who knows, 5 to 15 people isn't a lot and maybe there was some kind of community leader over there who had some influence over the rest of the camp and they could have worked out a "I could do you some minor favor if you could be more pleasant neighbors," type deal. Seems worth a shot. I know the story isn't very long so maybe Eledex is eliding details, but he doesn't refer to any of them by name or description, just as "the camp" and one gets the impression he never got any closer to them than staring out his window.
Again, I get that there's some nativity and gosh I understand social anxiety and a reluctance to engage with people who are scary, but... You know, one doesn't always get to choose one's neighbors whether they own the property legally or not, and sometimes people can be reasonable when you don't expect.
Sometimes people can also stab you for looking at them the wrong way though. And any conversation where you're trying to ask people to follow (some of) the rules of polite society when they clearly don't want to is going to be a lot more tense than just "looking at somebody".
So; I think the most likely outcomes of this scenario in descending order are:
A. Eledex asks nicely, they tell him to suck a dick.
B. Eledex asks nicely, they agree on some sort of condition, but don't fulfill their end of the bargain.
C. Eledex asks nicely, they stab him.
D. Eledex asks nicely and their behaviour actually improves say, 10%; but when the construction workers come to cut down the tree they still burn it. Maybe they give him more warning.
I would probably reorder that as B -> D -> A -> C, dependent on Eledrex's interpersonal skills, but surely the risk of being stabbed is pretty low. As was discussed in the original book review thread, being homeless doesn't make you stupid and violence against the normies is the one thing likely to actually bring the police around (as well as not actually getting them anything). Where on the other hand, homeless people always need stuff even if it's as simple as permission to fill up a water can from his garden hose whenever they please.
The problem then would be increasing asks.
My roommate has described trying to help other street people after his mother bought a house for him to live in. The problem was, the asks would just keep coming, and coming and coming. Eventually, all these sketchy people knowing where he lived and coming to his door to ask him for: food, money, weed, booze, place to sleep, ect. made him feel so uncomfortable in that house that he ended up living in a homeless shelter instead; just so those people wouldn't be knocking on his door asking for things.
And refusing a drugged up or drunk person something that they think they're entitled to can certainly be a trigger for violent behaviour.
These are all certainly risks, but when I described my approach as the "lib" comment that was both "liberal" and "libertarian". It's not always fun, but when you have issues in life with people, especially your neighbors, I think it's incumbent on an individual to at least make a good faith effort to try and work them out rather than immediately going to the state to adjudicate things. Even if you're pretty sure you're in the right. Are the people in the encampment the sort to make increasing demands? Are they drugged out? Are they drunk? Are the leaderless or organized? You aren't going to find out without walking over to check things out. Impossible to know how things would have gone, but I think coming into it with the assumption that people are some "other" that can't be dealt with in good faith is a bad idea. Yeah, there's risks, but there are also risks getting into a beef with your home-owning property-deed-having neighbor about some issue. (Just ask Rand Paul.) It sounds like it was a very uncomfortable situation, but such is life.
My experience with the homeless/mentally ill in SF says the expected value is very negative and there is a good chance of getting threats of violence if not violence. If they have shown they aren't going to abide by societies rules in other ways, they may not abide with rules to use violence against people who ask nicely. My experiences:
1) Guy on bus starts yelling how "All Mexicans need to get out of the country". Mexican guy says "You mess with the wrong Mexicano, you'll be in trouble". Screaming guy pulls out a knife, says he is "The Hitler of the Streets", and threats to stab the Mexican guy.
2) Separate occasion guy on bus starts yelling at a particular Chinese person all the Chinese need to get out of the country. My friend tells the yelled at Chinese person in Chinese to "ignore that man he is crazy". Crazy guy follows my friend off the bus on Market Street and the guy starts grabbing her and is chased away by bystanders.
3) My neighbors and their young children are inside their garage with the garage door open. Crazy homeless guy walks up to them and says he's going to start bitchslapping their kids.
4) Finding that many homeless are armed as I've encountered homeless people brandishing machettes, axes, a gun (may have been a replica), and numerous people with knives.
In his Eledex's situation he also would be outnumbered. He may be safer if he brings a weapon for protection, but when it gets to that level, he is much much better off letting the police take care of it.
Other examples I remember:
5) Friend is stoped at a stop sign on a bike. Crazy guy starts crossing the street then starts kicking him and his bike but then leaves. Friend flags down a passing police car shortly after, who tells him he can file a report, but nothing will probably happen, and then the police is interrupted to go respond to a stabbing. After that he made a pepper spray holder for his bike for easy access.
6) I've nearly encountered stabbings multiple times. One stop before I was about to get on the bus, there was a stabbing. The bus never came so I took another route home and saw about this on the news. The Walgreens that I normally go to had a cashier get stabbed when trying to stop.
7) My friend twice has had to intervene to talk down a crazy person with a knife out threatening to stab someone.
When you encounter violence more often, you tend to be more careful at things that can plausibly lead to it.
I've also seen that asking nicely tends not to work. In SF and NYC the law says that 24 hours before removing a homeless encampment they have to ask them to leave and post a notice.
Nearly every time, they come back 24 hours later, everyone is still there and it leads to a confrontation, and thats for the police not a random person.
I know you're trying to engage in good faith here, and I appreciate that, but I also think that a lot of folks' experience indicates that this is just not a reasonable way to approach this type of situation. The advantage of the state to adjudicate this is that, *if* you're in the right, and the other party tells you to go piss off, in theory there are jackbooted thugs ready to remedy that. Without that threat, your leverage over people who have already shown that they're not the type to abide by the social contract is more or less nil.
Whenever this type of situation comes up on public transit (and it does, a lot), I'm always reminded of the principle of "demand futility" in corporate law, in which (roughly speaking - this is not legal advice but only half-remembered doctrine from class in an area I don't practice in) as a shareholder you're excused from requesting that the board refrain from some action[1] as a precondition to bringing a derivative suit if a majority of the board is self-dealing with respect to the transaction -- the idea being that since ex ante a self-interested board majority would always tell you get stuffed[2] if you asked them not to self-deal, it's pointless to ask them in the first place. Hence, "demand futility."
There's an analogous way that I view with obvious social defection (like ranting, loud music or street performance on a crowded subway car of people who just want to get form point A to point B with a minimum of fuss). The very fact that someone is breaking the norms that everyone else is manifestly aware of and abiding by--in short, being an asshole--is prima facie evidence that they don't believe themselves bound by such norms and perceive no risk in flouting them (short of violent force, at least--which is why it would be great to have the entity with a monopoly on violence around at times like this). Rather than get into a shouting match with an unhinged and/or heavily muscled interlocutor (or often both) that *at best* will result in you getting told to go fuck yourself and quite plausibly could escalate, the dominant strategy for everyone is to just grin, bear it, and regret that we have a shortage of cops to put a stop to it. The proof of the pudding here is that in practice no one actually *does* confront social defectors because, as Fluorescent Kneepad observes below, it's nothing but negative EV and will *at best* result in you being called rude names while the objectional behavior remains uncorrected.
[1] In response to which you will in approximately 100% of cases be told to go fuck yourself if you get in any response at all; business judgment rules wins, too bad, so sad. "Voice" is a pretty fucking useless part of the Voice / Exit / Loyalty trifecta of shareholder entitlements, your best best is "Exit."
[2] In practice, so would a non-self interested board (See [1]) but this is about theory.
This is 100% spot on, and should be a highlight to the highlights comment.
I just think you haven't been in a situation like this.
No, not surely. The risk of being assaulted is not pretty low. It's considerable. They did burn down the tree after all, only for spite. They clearly didn't care if his house burned down, and he wasn't even the one pushing them to move at the end. Being homeless may not make you stupid, but the kinds of folks in the (presumably true) story clearly aren't regular folks like you.
You have got to be kidding me. I mean, I am sorry, but you have just got to be kidding me. Have you ever been in a situation even remotely like this? The kinds of folks in the story truly DGAF about your social niceties. "Excuse me, you seem to be illegally camping next to my house and threatening to burn the tree (and my house) down... can we talk?"
I think you should try it in a much less dramatic situation and see what you think. It's not impossible that interacting with them could have good effects, but would require a lot of wisdom, good sense, probably confidence and a low arousal in the face of potential or actual conflict.
And those qualities might lead you to abort the mission before it begins.
> I’m not really optimistic about our current ability to solve this the perfect world way where police are responsive to Eledex’s complaints and able to deal with these people in particular, while leaving other innocent homeless people alone.
You can have a system where various sub-crime nuisances add up and trigger an intervention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour_order
The consensus is that ASBOs didn't really work that well, right?
Why do people write "ctrl f" when you can use the word "search"?
I am highly skeptical of that tree story. 20 propane tanks strapped to a tree? Running out of the house naked with a 6 day old baby? Sounds like a Rush Limbaugh fever dream.
20 propane tanks feels a lot more probable when you remember coleman greens are a thing.
Ok yes that is much more probable then. I was thinking gas grill size tanks. Would also make sense for people camping out to have those.
Like don't get me wrong, for all I know it was the big white ones. But the story imagines a lot less cartoonishly if they have options.
I'm assuming it was the big white ones, but these are homeless people and they probably didn't go buy 20 full propane tanks. 18 of them might have been empty. I also suspect "20" is just a hand-waved substitute for "a lot" but have no basis for that, just how I read it.
"Search" can imply that you searched the document yourself (and thus should have seen the same thing expressed with different words) "ctrl-f" specifies that you did an automated search that would only pick up exact matches.
"Search" can imply that you searched the document yourself (and thus should have seen the same thing expressed with different words) "ctrl-f" specifies that you did an automated search that would only pick up exact matches.
"Explain that the 1950s system of institutionalization was genuinely pretty terrible in a lot of ways, that the people who campaigned for it to be ended had lots of good points, but that the current system is also failing people. You support some specific loosening of the current laws around commitment, and the way you would ensure that people’s rights are still respected is [some paragraph that demonstrates you have thought about this question for five minutes]."
Well, problems regarding involuntary commitment were a relatively small part of the problems with the mental health system pre-mass deinstitutionalisation, though a lot of its problems probably could be traced back to too many patients/not enough resources.
> So that leaves some kind of law targeting all homeless people and demanding they go in shelters or something. I dunno, seems unfair. Probably there are gradations of unfairness and you could figure out some way to minimize the impact, but I don’t know, Eledex sure does have a valid gripe here.
Anyone else getting Matt Levine vibes from this paragraph?
Levine started writing Money Stuff in 2013. Scott started writing SSC in... 2013. Huh.
I was going to say that it's more the opposite - when I read Levine, I get Scott vibes (I started reading Money Stuff only about a year ago). But now I'm wondering if they had the same teacher at some point.
>>This has been the opposite of my experience (and the experience of some friends with experience here who I talked to). The stories I hear are all about how nightmare tenants don’t pay rent for months or years, smash everything in the apartment, and when landlords try to get rid of them the courts just say they won’t evict them because making people homeless is mean.
This says a lot more about you and your friends than it does about the ground truth.
>>The stories I’ve heard are that a lot of landlords straight out try to figure out how to avoid renting to poor people because if their tenants ever choose to stop paying rent it’s several years of nightmarish court cases to get 50-50 odds of the government ever doing anything.
"Try to figure out how", as if this is at all a difficult thing. Landlords have all the power in these situations. Renters can't even afford a place to live, and you think they can afford lawyers for years of nightmarish court cases???
Differs by state. It is very hard to evict in CA.
Hard compared to what?
Compared to opening a jar of pickles that's stuck really tight? Yeah.
Compared to evicting in states with even fewer protections? Sure, probably.
Compared to solving the Reimann hypothesis? No, of course not
Compared to being homeless? No, not even close.
Even in CA, where it's """"hard"""", let's not lose perspective; We're still talking about a situation in which one party has all the power and the money and the lawyers, and the other party is destitute to the point of being on the verge of homelessness.
There is a big difference between large landlords and homeowners who rent out a home. I know of two cases personally - in great detail - where the home was essentially damaged to the tune of 100s of thousands of dollars over the course of months to years while eviction proceedings dragged along. One became a haven for dealers and was essentially a complete loss.
There's pretty much no such thing as a complete loss in terms of real estate. "Location location location", etc. Most of the value of a home isn't in the building but in the land itself. The house that I currently live in is pretty much a shithole, and it continues to be a only-mostly-cleaned-up shithole, but it's nevertheless jumped in valuation, just because it happens to be in a bay area town and prices are completely absurd.
Even a homeowner who just happens to rent out a home are still in a financial position to have purchased at least two homes, which is at least two more homes than a renter.
Not fair. Back in social housing here in Ireland, the new rent allowance scheme wasn't taken up by some landlords (despite it being what you imagine would be easy money) because they didn't want those kinds of tenants. Some tenants are great, some less so.
And when you've convinced a landlord to take on a low-income/formerly homeless tenant, who then does proceed to trash the place and cause trouble, it poisons the whole relationship. That landlord is never again going to trust local government bodies urging him to take on social tenants, and the decent tenants get the same bad name.
There are plenty of bad landlords out there, that is true. But there are bad tenants, too, and some of them will abuse legal protections to make the entire process as long drawn out and bothersome as possible, and you end up with a landlord deciding they'd rather sell the property than deal with that hassle ever again, and so one more source of rental housing is taken away from people most in need.
>>Not fair. Back in social housing here in Ireland, the new rent allowance scheme wasn't taken up by some landlords (despite it being what you imagine would be easy money) because they didn't want those kinds of tenants. Some tenants are great, some less so.
All this tells me is that these landlords are in a position to refuse that scheme because the amount of "easy money" is a pittance to them, that they're in no need of "easy money", because the entire scheme of being a landlord is "easy money".
>>There are plenty of bad landlords out there, that is true. But there are bad tenants, too, and some of them will abuse legal protections to make the entire process as long drawn out and bothersome as possible, and you end up with a landlord deciding they'd rather sell the property than deal with that hassle ever again, and so one more source of rental housing is taken away from people most in need.
When a landlord sells a rental property, it doesn't disappear into the ether. The house is still there, whoever bought it is presumably doing something with it. Maybe they're renting it out, in which case you've just substituted one landlord for another. Maybe they're living in it, in which case that's great because that's one less renter who doesn't have to deal with having a landlord. As the meme goes, landlords provide housing the same way scalpers provide tickets.
As a response to the general message of your comment ("Not fair", "There are plenty of bad landlords, but there are bad tenants too", etc); Okay, fine. Sometimes people in all different kinds of socioeconomic positions can be abusive jerks. None of that changes that at the end of the "long drawn out and bothersome" process, one party is going to be homeless and the other party is, at worse, going to end up with a nice fat check from selling their spare property at a time of record high housing costs. I mean, you're basically complaining that poor people won't just shut up and accept their homelessness! I'm trying very hard to be charitable, but I can't find myself sympathizing with people who are complaining about all the lip they're getting from the poors as they're booting said poors on the street, especially in the same article that talks about how much human excrement is on said streets. And I absolutely cannot fathom looking at this situation and concluding that we need fewer of those pesky legal protections.
You have to think about it this way: if within some group of tenants, landlords can easily evict the ones who bother the neighbors, damage the property, don't pay rent, or so on, the landlords are much more likely to rent to that group. If it's hard to evict anyone in the group, then no one in the group--even if they'd be a good tenant--is worth renting to: the higher rent doesn't offset the risk of having the wiring stolen or the walls smashed.
The rent clearly offsets the risks. If it didn't, then people wouldn't become landlords. Nobody is forced at gunpoint to buy second (and third and fourth and fifth) properties and rent them out. I'm willing to concede that having the wiring stolen (??? What does one do with stolen wiring? If it's just a case of causing damage, wouldn't it be easier to destroy the wiring without stealing it?) and walls smashed is inconvenient. It's less inconvenient than losing your one primary place of residence and becoming homeless. "You have to think of it this way": Someone being evicted is losing the wiring and walls, regardless of whether or not they smash it.
If the rent did not offset the risks, people would stop being landlords (And then perhaps all those second and third and fourth and fifth properties would be on the market, and drive prices down, and people could actually afford a place of their own to live instead of having to put up with a (possibly abusive) landlord.
If we did go along with your scheme, all we would end up with is more power to landlords (literal rent-seekers). I don't think that outcome is worth stripping away legal protections.
You can sell stolen wiring as scrap metal. The older the better, apparently, since copper is valuable. I went cold at work one winter in a particular city because somebody stole the wiring out of our heating system.
Interesting. I hadn't considered this, but now that you mention it I have heard of rising copper prices, mostly in the context of explaining the rising prices of electronic equipment. Still, a quick google search suggests the price of copper is still <$4.00 a pound (I'm sure the street price for obviously-used scrap copper is much lower, but whatever), and the average house having about 100 pounds of wiring in it total (not all of which is copper, but again whatever). Still, it seems like a lot of effort to go through for _at most_ $400. It seems like anyone who is doing this must be truly desperate. I wonder how many winters they've gone cold?
Wire and a lot of pipes are made of copper. Copper is worth a lot more doing what it's supposed to do than in a heap somewhere, but it doesn't buy drugs if it's doing what it's supposed to do, and it's not your copper anyway.
I think your thinking on the landlord's risk is a little off. You are talking entirely about the risk of being a landlord in general, but the topic is very much about different things that affect that risk. You can't separate the two - the reason landlords do credit checks/income checks/rental history checks and why they have to be stopped from looking at a dozen other factors is all about that risk, and mitigating it.
Rent does not help a ton when things go bad. If someone bio-hazards a house, or rips out the wiring, or rips out the pipes, or floods it, you are in a 5-6 digit damage situation. It's far from impossible for them to take a loss.
A lot of landlords do a thing where they take the rent check from one property and use that to pay the mortgage on another property. Then the rent from that one, they use to pay the mortgage on a third, and so on, until the last rent check pays the mortgage on the property they themselves are living in. If it works, then by the time all those mortgages are paid off, they've made a ton of money. But it's super dangerous, because if one tenant stops paying rent, they could end up behind on multiple different mortgages. This is also why a lot of landlords themselves live in the least expensive property they own.
>>Wire and a lot of pipes are made of copper. Copper is worth a lot more doing what it's supposed to do than in a heap somewhere, but it doesn't buy drugs if it's doing what it's supposed to do, and it's not your copper anyway.
I hadn't considered this. Still, the price of copper isn't that high, and there isn't that much wiring in a house. Based off of some quick googling I'd estimate the potential profit of ripping out all the wiring in a house at a couple of hundred dollars. Not nothing, but not an earth-shattering amount either. I'm not saying it's never happened, but I'm saying most people, even those faced with homelessness, have a better use for their time and bodily effort than selling scrap copper out of a house. It does seem like an effective "fuck you" though, same as "bio-hazarding" as you put it.
The question then becomes how do you get people to not "bio hazard" a house? In my non-expert opinion, people are much less likely to destroy a house they have some kind of personal stake in, and more likely to destroy a house they're about to be evicted from by a landlord. Therefore to stop wire theft and "bio-hazarding", we should structure the economy to encourage people to own their own propery instead of encouraging the wealthy (You can quibble about this if you want, but anyone who can afford even one property is wealthy compared to a renter and especially the homeless) to buy up multiple properties to rent out.
Re: "if it didn't, then people wouldn't become landlords"
Arguably there are lots of people who could theoretically become landlords (lot of single-family homes with a spare bedroom or two out there), but don't, in part because of the risks described.
Speaking as a reluctant landlord in the parenthetical situation, there's definitely room on the spectrum for negative-value tenants short of "they loot the house for drug money". They could, for instance, rely on you entirely for groceries, transportation, and internet, double your dishwashing-chore accumulation and required fridge space (or grocery-visit frequency), move household items without telling anyone, fail to get along with existing pets or other tenants... and still not be able to pay the rent, because they can't hold down a job (or spend down their paycheck too quickly, or accidentally wire the check to some rando with the same name).
Do I wish they were homeless? No. But there's definitely an element of "I wish they weren't *my* problem to deal with, I don't get paid enough ($0) to deal with this on top of my day job".
>>Arguably there are lots of people who could theoretically become landlords (lot of single-family homes with a spare bedroom or two out there), but don't, in part because of the risks described.
I'm fine with this.
>>Speaking as a reluctant landlord in the parenthetical situation, there's definitely room on the spectrum for negative-value tenants short of "they loot the house for drug money". They could, for instance, rely on you entirely for groceries, transportation, and internet, double your dishwashing-chore accumulation and required fridge space (or grocery-visit frequency), move household items without telling anyone, fail to get along with existing pets or other tenants... and still not be able to pay the rent, because they can't hold down a job (or spend down their paycheck too quickly, or accidentally wire the check to some rando with the same name).
I recognize that this situation isn't ideal for you, and I don't want to dismiss your troubles as _literally_ nothing (although I would still maintain that they round off to "nothing" in the face of the suffering of the homeless, but that's not germane to point you're making). For what it's worth, and I recognize it's not worth much, I applaud you for not evicting your tenant and adding to the sum of human misery. There are definitely people in your situation who would evict, and it's a net-positive thing (in my opinion) that you aren't.
Having said all that, it sounds like your situation strays a bit from the central example of the landlord/tenant relationship. It sounds kind of like you're housing an elderly relative, or something, or have a teenaged child.
You, sir, are living down to your username, and I do not mean that as an encomium to the grandeur of your organ of generation.
If that is the extent of your objections to my comment, then sure, I'll take it.
This username is an obvious throwaway. I haven't commented in this community under my usual username since the SSC->ACX switch, on the off chance that I get recognized as someone who reads this blog; it's become increasingly embarrassing to do so since 2017 or so.
It has never occurred to me that blog readership can be a source of embarrassment.
It hadn't to me either, until it became true. The community around the blog really does the heavy lifting. I'm sure you're perfectly nice, though.
This is such a strange line of reasoning to me. Scott describes how his friends have been in a situation where somebody has the power to abuse them and they have no legal recourse -- and your response is to tell him that actually, his friends have all the power?
This happened to my parents when I was a kid. The property was supposed to be a retirement investment. Their tenants did much of what Scott describes. My parents finally sold the place, at a big loss, which was a blow to their retirement savings, and washed their hands of it. Now that neighborhood is a slum full of ruined houses. You probably saw it on The Wire.
I don't know, man. I think you have a funny idea of what power is.
They have a legal recourse. It's just that the legal recourse is annoying / takes too long, and it would really be a lot more convenient (to the landlords) if it would be less of a hassle to deprive people of the roof over their head.
The same way your parents had a legal recourse, and nobody forced them to sell the place. I don't know how they managed to sell the place at a big loss, real estate prices have basically been going in one direction. I currently live in a >100 year old house with no heating (except a small space heater), no cooling (except for a pair of fans), and even if I were to add those things, it has no insulation in the walls or floor or ceiling. At the time I moved in it didn't even have a kitchen; for years I would eat meals out of a small microwave and toaster oven, until I got an instant pot and eventually got the money together for a proper (if DIY) kitchen renovation. The house has nevertheless somehow over-doubled in value and is >$1,000,000, and it isn't because I've put $600,000 of improvements into it.
I don't want to be rude to your parents, but it takes a true kind of financial ineptitude to not make money as a landlord. Why did they sell at a loss? Who did they sell at a loss to? Surely not the tenants who couldn't afford their rent? What did the people that they sold the house to do? (I'm willing to bet it was use their legal recourses)
I don't know if you're in the US, but I've lived in several US cities. Places where such values could have crashed include e.g. Detroit, Baltimore, lots of former steel cities.
Where I live at least, you have legal standing as a tenant to complain and subject your landlord to a lot of grief if they fail to provide certain amenities, heating and hot water among them. A lot of places I've rented or lived with my family didn't have cooling; we had window AC units, which seems to be standard in a lot of places.
I am indeed in the US. There are places where values have crashed yeah, but a home in such places isn't a good retirement investment anyway, on account of how the values have crashed.
Ha, of course, if you knew it was going to crash there it would have been a terrible investment! :p
Good grief. “When I was a kid.” It was the nineties. The property had extensive smoke damage, and wasn’t worth much to begin with. Whoever bought it from them had to pay five figures to get it up to code so it would be legal to rent it again. Insurance wouldn’t pay, the college student tenants wouldn’t pay… maybe eventually gentrification hit that neighborhood and somebody could make money on it or safely live there. I dunno.
I’m just trying to tell you these legal protections you like have trade-offs. One of the trade-offs is that sometimes landlords get unjustly stuck with huge financial losses. Maybe that’s worth it! But if you deny that something happens, your argument is not very strong with people it has happened to.
>>Good grief. “When I was a kid.” It was the nineties.
House prices increasing is not a (solely) recent phenomenon. The unadjusted median house price in the 1950s was $7,354. In the 1960s it was $11,900. In the 70s it was $17,000. In the 80s it was $47,200. 90s: $79,100. 2000s: $119,600. You can adjust all of those for inflation and it might flatten the curve at certain times but the trend is clear and unambiguous.
>>The property had extensive smoke damage, and wasn’t worth much to begin with.
If it wasn't worth much to begin with, then it doesn't sound like much of a retirement investment, unless they were just hoping to randomly win big (Which is not a sound investment strategy). Still, one of the most oft-repeated investment adages is "time in the market beats timing the market". If they hadn't sold, they probably wouldn't have lost as much or lost at all, and none of the tenant protections can force them to sell.
Also, if it wasn't worth much to begin with, it makes it all the more curious how they were able to lose huge by selling it. The more details you give, the less sense your story makes.
>>Whoever bought it from them had to pay five figures to get it up to code so it would be legal to rent it again.
Okay, but why would they do this? Either it's profitable to do so, or your parents have found a greater fool. Personally, I think it's likely that _even with a five figure cost to get it up to code_ that whoever bought it still made their money back. Or at least they thought they could, which I'm taking as weak evidence in favor of that they could make their money back.
>>Insurance wouldn’t pay
This is insurance's one job. Why are we mad at legal protections for tenants and not at insurance companies doing their one job that they get paid for?
>>the college student tenants wouldn’t pay…
Wouldn't? Or couldn't?
>>I’m just trying to tell you these legal protections you like have trade-offs. One of the trade-offs is that sometimes landlords get unjustly stuck with huge financial losses. Maybe that’s worth it! But if you deny that something happens, your argument is not very strong with people it has happened to.
It's absolutely worth it. Legal protections exist to protect the meek from the powerful, and whether you want to admit it or not, in the renter-landlord relationship the landlords are absolutely the "powerful" ones. The occasional anecdote about occasional financial loses doesn't mean a thing in the face of the huge financial gains made by landlords as a whole. Occasional huge financial losses are a characteristic of any investment in any kind of market, and I see no reason why house-scalpers should be exempt.
"Legal protections exist to protect the meek from the powerful"
BWAHAHAHAHAHHA! I had no idea you were a comedian!
Yeah yeah, I know. Very head-in-the-clouds thinking, but I guess I haven't had the last crumb of optimism crushed out of me yet.
>but it takes a true kind of financial ineptitude to not make money as a landlord.
This is really not true, of housing would even be quite a bit more expensive than it is. It is a super competitive market.
It's the same sort of "power" that the "colonizers" have over the "oppressed " that are machine-gunning them in a deli reefer.
"Punching up" is totes kewl, whether it's along class, race, religion, wealth or income lines. Just pick which axis makes you the oppressed and you can do whatever you want!
It surely could not have escaped your notice that the way to get power in America is to Own Things. If you're in the Owning Things class, you can leverage the Things you Own to get what you want (usually the Ownership of more Things). If you have an alternative read on the situation, I'm open to hearing it.
My immediate reaction to this is that the "problem" homeless are the kind that ignore eviction notices and squat. The kind of people that are just temporarily down on their luck are likely the kind of people who get served their eviction papers and quietly move out without a big fuss because that is what is expected of them.
Possibly true, but I've heard the same kind of "horror stories" about people who lost their houses in the sub-prime mortgage debacle, and I'm hesitant to write off such a large group of people as "problem" types. It seems more likely to me that people strike back in whatever small way they can when being chewed up and evicted from their homes, be it by bank or by landlord, for financial reasons beyond their ability to affect or understand. The shit always rolls downhill and the poorest and most powerless suffer the most. In comparison, some missing wires and turds on the floor are pretty trivial.
Powdered concrete poured down the toilet isn't trivial.
And the cost piles up on the next tenant, who is unlikely to be richer than the first one.
Powdered concrete poured down the toilet also isn't typical, and it's disingenuous to pretend like it is.
Aren't you the guy who objected to tenants who can't pay rent not being able to afford house repairs? But now all of a sudden every tenant can afford powdered concrete to pour down a toilet to no benefit of their own? Pick a lane and stick to it.
The costs piling on the next tenant is literally my point. Like I said, the shit rolls downhill. those in power (landlords) will avoid eating the costs if they can, and they often can. Instead they'll pass them down to literally anyone they can. This makes me _less_ sympathetic to landlords who have concrete poured in their toilets, not more.
No, I'm the gal who pointed out that people who don't have sufficient economic capability to pay rent on a regular basis don't have the economic capability nor the discipline to keep up with the repairs necessary to prevent the dwelling from falling apart.
You don't understand the upkeep necessary, you don't grasp that rents are higher than mortgages because the mortgages have to be paid every month, whether or not the landlord is making repairs, or is in court to get a destructive or non paying tenant out or not.
You don't even know how cheap powdered 'crete is.
I don't care where your sympathies lie, your grasp of reality is too poor to make your emotional assessments dependable.
>>No, I'm the gal who pointed out that people who don't have sufficient economic capability to pay rent on a regular basis don't have the economic capability nor the discipline to keep up with the repairs necessary to prevent the dwelling from falling apart.
That's a sweeping indictment of a large and diverse group of people that you're in no position to make. "Discipline" isn't the problem. People can't "discipline" their way out of the rent trap, and to suggest otherwise too loudly is an excellent way to find spit in your onion rings, deservedly.
>>You don't understand the upkeep necessary,
I'm a homeowner, of a >100 year old house in the famously expensive bay area. I do understand the upkeep necessary, so I know you're blowing it way way out of proportion. It is expensive, yeah, but it's nothing compared to rent.
>>you don't grasp that rents are higher than mortgages because the mortgages have to be paid every month, whether or not the landlord is making repairs, or is in court to get a destructive or non paying tenant out or not.
Yeah, I'm sure _thats_ the problem, and not that there's a middleman literal-rent-seeker taking a cut off the top for doing basically fuck all.
Rent will always be higher than mortgages, no matter how docile and "disciplined" the tenant, because rent will always be the costs plus profit for the landlord, and approximately zero landlords in the history of ever set their rents such as to make zero or negative profit. This is not a difficult concept to grasp.
>>You don't even know how cheap powdered 'crete is.
Okay, you got me. I don't know. But I'm probably going to survive just fine because of I ever did need to know, that information is a Google search away. I'm willing to bet it's not free, though, and any money spent on toilet concrete is...flushed down the toilet. So I guess it really comes down to how badly the landlord has pissed the tenant for how much budget they're willing to allocate to their "fuck you".
>>I don't care where your sympathies lie, your grasp of reality is too poor to make your emotional assessments dependable.
You live in a fantasy world of poor starving landlords who are driven to destitution by their chosen profession. You don't get to talk to me about grasps of reality. Emotional assessments, huh? Because your plea bringing up concrete in the first place was pure logos and no pathos, right? Please.
I'll direct your attention to the fact that in spite of the cheapness of concrete and the existence of non-paying and destructive tenants, landlords keep landlording. Not only do they keep landlording but they keep landlording profitably. How do you square that with your grasp on reality? It's almost as if all this bullshit with the concrete and stolen wiring doesn't matter and is a just a pathetic attempt to garmer pity.
Ree: why don't cities ship homeless back to the suburbs, to me it feels like the obvious answer is that the people living in the suburb are also the richest and most influential people working in the city during the day, and city officials have more to lose by offending them than by hurting the poor people that actually live in most of the city.
I don't know if that dynamic holds for all cities, but it feels right for the cities I grew up around.
The SF police are equipped to take down N shoplifting reports per year. That's it.
My experience as a small-scale landlord (lived in the middle of a 3-flat and rented out the other two apartments) taught me that the U.S.'s legal processes related to rent-paying assume that most tenants won't show up to contest eviction. What I learned the hard way as a rookie landlord, and then heard from veteran landlords, was that it takes only one "motivated tenant" to crash the whole balance.
In my and my wife's case it wasn't even technically an eviction, we were just declining to renew a lease because the renter had been violating the written lease. We made the rookie mistake of explaining that (way too late an attorney explained to me why "you never give a reason"); and the renter took offense and found free legal assistance; and long story short we had to pay her to go away (and pay our attorney to help us pay her to go away).
And thus ended our interest in ever again being landlords at any scale. At small scale the annual returns when it goes well can't justify the level of loss and stress when it occasionally doesn't.
Yeah I had all the profits of 7 years of being a LL to ~10 tenants wiped out by two consecutive terrible tenants. They were even well screened...
The Cabrini-Green saga in Chicago has a key twist which seems relevant to this discussion. Originally the complex was built as public housing for people who were in the workforce; a family could not be assigned a unit unless somebody in the household could prove they had a paying job. At some point during the Great Society years that requirement was dropped. I first heard this firsthand from someone who'd spent his childhood living in Cabrini and remembered when "the rules changed", but you can google it.
What my friend remembered was that it was after the rule change that Cabrini devolved into the gang-controlled disaster that it certainly was by the late 1970s. And I think that is more or less established wisdom among Chicagoans of that era....if correct then it has an obvious consequence for the concept of building public housing to house people who are unhoused. Brings us back I guess to the uncomfortable need to accurately diagnose _why_ they are unhoused.
Yep. Free stuff without any obligation (employment, attempt to get employment, or even just obeying the law) is just a set-up for enabling bad behavior.
Yes the projects mostly started out mixed income, and trying to completely keep out the indigent, though I think a close reading of the history showed that even from the start they kind of bent the rules and started letting in people who could not in any way support themselves, and that you basically started to see flight from the lower middle class almost immediately.
I think the reason you only hear stories about bad tenants is because you don't know many renters. I think that part of the problem is that good landlords mostly get bad tenants and good tenants mostly get bad landlords.
Another question: what percentage of the security deposit do these landlords keep on average with the tenants who leave of their own accord? That seems to be the biggest issue for some tenants, that their landlords keep the security deposit for no good reason.
Something that has always stuck with me is the last apartment I rented -- I moved out about 10 years ago. I had been there, I don't know, 5 years or so. It was a not-terribly-luxurious small (like 8 units?) apartment build into Palo Alto. The landlady was an individual who lived in the building.
I told her that I was moving, and she expressed great sorrow and said I was a "walks-on-water" tenant.
I mean, I didn't do anything crazy. I paid my rent on time, I didn't trash the apartment, and I didn't, like... cook meth. I had parties sometimes that went late into the night (but weren't super wild), I asked her to handle it whenever I had problems with the plumbing or utilities, etc. It's not like I spent my free time fixing up the building free of charge or anything.
So this suggests to me that behavior that I'd regard as basically par for the course is sufficiently rare that it warrants at least some note.
I had a LL agree I could paint the walls dark colors (I asked), said nothing about the security deposit, and then when I moved out tried to keep the security deposit due to it. I threw a fit and they eventually relented so I got my couple hundred dollars back.
But I would also point out that as a LL I had more than one tenant do multiple thousands of dollars of damage to my property that was not recoverable through the deposit. So I can see why LLs would be grabby for deposits.
>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!!!?!?!?
This proposal still creates ghettos, just less immediately and explicitly. It really only takes one intolerable neighbor to drive people to move if they have no other remedy, and only people who can't afford to live anywhere else will opt to fill the vacancies.
Anecdotal response to "Why don’t cities bus their homeless back to suburbs?" from a quite different area - I recall being in Minsk, Belarus many years ago, and one thing that I noticed that despite quite many people not being well off at all, there was zero visible homelessness or beggars or such; local friends asserted that local police ship out such "delinquents" to country villages in the region where they can either do farming or at least are 'out of sight, out of mind' of the administrators living in the capital.
I have heard similar stories from some other places in Eastern Europe as things that are being done by city police. It does make some sense as in the countryside there's not a deficit of housing (though often of poor quality) due to urbanization decreasing population, and while there's a shortage of *decent* jobs there, it's definitely possible (I know some quite dysfunctional people doing that) to get enough for food and cheap alcohol by odd jobs, some social security support, and perhaps planting some potatoes if they can. Of course, that life sucks in many aspects, and some (many?) people do actually prefer to be homeless in a big city instead.
>This is a great thought experiment / example of a cognitive bias / whatever it is. I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more.
It seems like the obvious objection here is that, sure, if 1 out of every 100 people would literally burn down every building around them if not put in jail, then in that world having 1% of the population in jail would be the unfortunate but correct decision.
But we don't live in a world where 1 out of every 100 people are that type of insane criminal.
In which case, yeah, having a 1% chance of being locked in jail for bad reasons is a pretty big crisis. We locked down the whole planet more or less to fight a disease with a less than 1% fatality rate, whereas in this analogy we're inviting that type of decimation intentionally.
>This is a great thought experiment / example of a cognitive bias / whatever it is. I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more.
I think in the 6/600 people scenario, I wouldn't think of it as a crisis of overincarceration, but I *would* notice that it seems kind of on the high side to form a permanent prison population in a community of that size. But at those numbers, you don't have the Law of Large Numbers insuring that things will hew close to the true frequency rates of the overall population. It's not that weird if 1% of the town's population happens to be hardened criminals incapable of peaceful coexistence because they got unlucky. Similarly, if another town of 600 has no hardened criminals, we're not going to be baffled by their inexplicable lack of criminality, because on that scale it's within the range of plausible variation.
When you see a country of 200 million with a prison population of 2 million, you're intuitively going to notice some things are different in that scenario. One is that the numbers involved are large enough that you can be quite sure the country's rate of incarceration isn't a matter of sheer dumb luck. Another is that unlike in the scenario with the town of 600, nobody is going to be in a position to know the personalities or circumstances of all 2 million inmates, or even more than a tiny fraction of them, and vouch "Yep, these inmates are definitely all hardened criminals who threaten the stability of their communities, and they're locked away because the system has treated them fairly."
In the actual country of America, rather than this hypothetical country of 200 million, you're also going to notice that the prison population is not a single permanent population; many of the people in that population of 2 million are not going to be in it ten years from now, but at the rate we're going, we don't expect the overall number to get any smaller. And if you're the type to keep track of trends, you're also likely to notice "Hey, this isn't the sort of proportional prison population size we had several decades ago, something must have changed for our prison population to be so much larger now." It could be that it's grown a lot because our population was underincarcerated in the past, and more people being locked away is better for our society, but I don't think people noticed the 1970's being a massive crime wave?
Re: "I don't think people noticed the 1970's being a massive crime wave" -
Well, *some* noticed, at any rate. https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/
Worth a read; biased and doesn't really cite sources beyond the book mentioned in its first paragraph, but it definitely notices a lot of crime in the 1970's.
Another issue with the thought experiment is that 6 people would be imprisoned *at any given time*, many more than that will be imprisoned at one time or another.
How many more? Well... "The data show that 45 percent of Americans have ever had an immediate family member incarcerated. The incarceration of an immediate family member was most prevalent for blacks (63 percent) but common for whites (42 percent) and Hispanics (48 percent) as well. " (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023119829332)
If you told me there was a small town in which 45% of all residents had ever had an immediate relative incarcerated, I'd think that town had fallen on very hard times indeed. But apparently that would just make it an average American community...
> This has been the opposite of my experience (and the experience of some friends with experience here who I talked to). The stories I hear are all about how nightmare tenants don’t pay rent for months or years, smash everything in the apartment, and when landlords try to get rid of them the courts just say they won’t evict them because making people homeless is mean. The stories I’ve heard are that a lot of landlords straight out try to figure out how to avoid renting to poor people because if their tenants ever choose to stop paying rent it’s several years of nightmarish court cases to get 50-50 odds of the government ever doing anything.
I think this is a case where both sides are right simultaneously. My understanding is that CA *laws* are very tenant friendly and you can easily fight eviction for months *if* you know your rights and have a good lawyer. But a lot of tenants don't know their rights, or aren't willing to risk a lawsuit, and are thus are prey to getting illegally evicted by abusive landlords.
Yeah both a lot of shitty tenants and shitty LLs. Almost by definition way way more shitty tenants, but the shitty LLs have a bigger impact.
That said mostly a shitty LL is generally "harming" someone by asking them to pay more or the and/or the market price for a residence. And that person needs to walk away from their home if they don't like it. The actual harm is rather small. Meanwhile tenants can easily cost LLs tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I am all for tenant protections, but the current environment (even pre-covid) where evictions can take half a year or a year in some cases if the tenant plays their cards right is absurd.
Shitty landlords can cause a lot more damage than that. Like reusing to make the apartment habitable, or even removing the doors or just dumping someone's stuff in the street while they're at work. All illegal, but that doesn't mean people don't try it.
Well they do, but your recourse is just to move. Meanwhile while you are a tenant you have the LLs valuable property hostage so to speak.
I know of two people who have big stories about LLs "stealing" their stuff. Both times when you really dig into it after a few drinks, they were given repeated warnings by their LL to clean out a "storage space" and a "garage", and then when they didn't the LL eventually confiscated and sold the stuff.
Absolutely apartments should have to be of a certain quality to get a rental license, I believe in that, and government run inspections (at a minimum on request, possibly on a schedule).
And LLs shouldn't be able to throw your shit in the street either.
And yet I just don't know of any examples of that actually happening where it wasn't imminently justified, despite working in low income housing for ~15 years. Lots of example of shitty terrible things happening to tenants, almost every time they brought it on themselves.
There were LLs who rent out moldy unsafe hovels, or shit with exposed wires, or whatever, but those most everyone agrees should be shut down.
But so much of tenants rights these days seems to come down to "it currently takes 5 months of unpaid rent to evict someone once they stop paying rent, this is too low", and as soon as you get that number changed to 6 months, there is a desire to push it to 7. Which is just frankly absurd.
If you're poor enough, or sufficiently tied down to a particular location that you're stuck with a shitty landlord for an extended period, "just move" may be an exceedingly difficult proposition. I've known people who were stuck with shitty landlords for years, because as much as they wanted to move, they weren't in a position to do so. Searching for a new home comes with steep costs when you barely have any time or money on hand after working to afford the one you're already in.
Under those circumstances, getting kicked out by your landlord can be a grave threat, because if you lose your home, you're liable to become unable to retain your job which you need in order to afford a home.
It's much easier to get away with being a bad landlord when renting to people who can't simply afford to move. If you remain a bad landlord long-term, over time, your population of renters will tend towards being people who can't easily afford to move, because the ones who can mostly will.
Which is an argument for allowing more cheap apartments - or at least not passing tax, HUD, and zoning codes directly requiring more expensive housing.
If it would take 15-30 days to two months to get a client with cash in hand in an apartment, landlords would be encouraged to take more risk.
It is much easier to get recourse against landlords, who have assets that can be seized.
"cities in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina also have okay climates without too many homeless"
This is how you know Scott spends little time on the West Coast. Nominal temperatures are similar but (say it with me) it's not the heat - it's the humidity! East Coast cities freeze in the winter, and if you go far enough South that they don't they are unbearably hot in the summer. If you want a climate that's at all comparable to California, you'd have to summer in Vermont and winter in Florida. Or you could just live year-round in San Francisco.
Yeah there is a BIG difference between the comfort of LA in summer and Atlanta/Houston in summer.
"This is how you know Scott spends little time on the West Coast." "East coast" would make more sense to me.
I was assuming they just made the mistake.
The Cabrini-Green homes definitely faced a lot of problems with how they were built. While it was probably better than being homeless, many people who would have qualified for them and the similarly troubled Robert Taylor complex opted to stay in market-rate housing and wait for one of the less-awful government housing options to open up, often for years. The book Blueprint for Disaster is a good history of 20th century public housing failures, with a focus on these 2.
I'm still very confused by this issue on a cross-country aspect. I live in Israel, and AFAICT the number of homeless in the centers of big cities is negligible. Certainly they don't camp the in any noticeable numbers. Why is it so different? Mental illness is probably at similar levels. And why has the number of homeless increased over time in the US?
My unsubstantiated guess is that it has to do with more individualism and looser family and community ties. If you're mentally ill but your family is in the picture, it's far less likely you'll become a homeless drug addict. If you're not mentally ill, you always have a couch to sleep on not very far.
But it could very well be that the difference is stricter policing keeping the homeless off main streets, or more institutionalization, I haven't checked the numbers.
Anyway, "creating a communal less individualistic culture" might be the least feasible solution to homelessness, but it would also be good to trace some of the source of the problem. I especially don't like that this is unthinkable, and all solutions proposed treat homeless as complete individuals to be dealt with individually by incentives and deterrence.
##"Unfortunately, you can’t ask people on a survey 'are you the good or the bad kind of homeless person?' so there aren’t a lot of statistics that do a good job taking this into account."##
Why can't you ask that question? That seems like a great question to ask, actually. If the response is raving lunacy, or no response because the person is passed out from fentanyl or bum wine, then you're interviewing the Bad Kind. But I agree that the question is impolite, and might get you stabbed.
I would think that you could sort the homeless into categories ("Beach Bum," "Unlucky," and "Crazy") with pretty good confidence with one question: "What caused you to become homeless?" The Beach Bum will give you a story that isn't really sad (or at least has a decent ending, because he's more or less content with his life). The Unlucky will give you a sad story about how her dog needed surgery and then she couldn't make rent. The Crazy will give you craziness.
Maybe there are difficulties with borderline cases, maybe some people move between categories somewhat freely, maybe mental illness does not always present in ways that are obvious to survey-takers. But surely we have heuristics for identifying the "bad" homeless, right? (Chris Rock joked that if you see a beggar with a funny sign, he doesn't really need your money. "Real" hungry people, Rock explained, are too hungry to be funny.) Because when people talk about San Fransico's homeless problem, they generally do not mean "this city is too expensive for working class people to have enough economic security to provide a buffer for unexpected expenses, and they can easily find themselves evicted if they suffer a slight setback." They mean "there's shit everywhere, a bum broke into my car, and I almost got stabbed by a smelly lunatic."
Homelessness is interesting in that it's one of the clearest dividing lines between liberals and conservatives. I'm generally more conservative, and I've always seen it as an issue without any clear solution. Most conservatives seem to think this way. The heuristic is "well, people are always going to make weird decisions and as long as they don't bother me or the people I care about, it's not really my business."
I am more of the mind that rather than dividing liberals and conservatives, it divides law-abiding people who have direct experience with this crap, and those who do not. Have an encampment take over your street or park? Oh, now it's a whole different ballgame! The time for academic debate about "heroinville" and some such has passed and the time for action is here. The "clear solution" might simply be to clear the damn encampment rather than endless hand-wringing about how to solve homelessness writ large.
In other words, to echo your point, at some point it becomes your business, and then a solution, at least a local one, appears.
Liberal NIMBYs certainly turn into temporary conservatives during situations that increase the risk to their perceived physical safety.
As an urban planner who sometimes comments publicly about housing issues, I'd like to thank you all for this crowd-sourced effort to make me better at my job.
One note: I do not find it surprising that as rates of shoplifting rise, people's hopelessness about reporting it also rises, leading people to report it less. If the proportion of police resources spent on it does not rise (which seems to be the case), then the proportion of useless phone calls to the cops will rise, discouraging people from bothering.
To Scott and all the commenters: This is the most informative and useful discussion of homelessness and urban crime I have ever read. I can't recommend it highly enough to the many people I have sent it to.
Thanks to all.
BRetty
In regards to the relatively level number of shoplifting reports, you've only discussed the demand for shoplifting reports, not the supply. There aren't an infinite number of police working hours available to be spent on writing shoplifting reports, and it's difficult to get more shoplifting reports as a citizen, because you can't just pay the police more to take your shoplifting report rather than someone else's.
As the anecdote on the homeless tree camp neighbors indicates, the police may just choose not to respond.
So despite additional demand, if the police have decided they're only going to spend X% of their time, or even only write a fixed number of X shoplifting reports, perhaps even with a floor of Y severity, then the willingness of police to spend time on shoplifting reports (because this is a government bureaucracy, not a real market) is going to control the number which get filed, not the amount of shoplifting and the corresponding demand for shoplifting reports.
I have immediate family members who manage gas station/convenience stores (but not in the bay area). Shoplifting is rampant. Corporate policy is to make no attempt to stop it, even at stores with an armed guard (i.e. the worst stores). Calls to the police are only made if there is violence or a threat involved, or if the theft is over a particular relatively high dollar threshold of value. Otherwise, it's just another loss embedded in the overhead and despite having everything on camera, not worth pursuing.
Most retail companies likely have some variation of a similar policy about dealing with shoplifting, but harder than usual targets just shift the crime to other softer retail locations. If there was a massive influx of shoplifting beneath their dollar reporting number, it wouldn't induce them to report more of it, because corporate and the police don't want reports under that dollar number. That may also have an effect, because those sorts of dollar limits for particular stores are frequently found in online shoplifting discussion communities.
> I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis.
Should we expect criminality to scale linearly with population size? That seems like the weakness in the analogy, as many phenomena scale non-linearly with population.