Christopher F. Rulo raises a very interesting point in this article in City Journal on homelessness:
By latest count, some 109,089 men and women are sleeping on the streets of major cities in California, Oregon, and Washington. The homelessness crisis in these cities has generated headlines and speculation about “root causes.†Progressive political activists allege that tech companies have inflated housing costs and forced middle-class people onto the streets. Declaring that “no two people living on Skid Row . . . ended up there for the same reasons,†Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, for his part, blames a housing shortage, stagnant wages, cuts to mental health services, domestic and sexual abuse, shortcomings in criminal justice, and a lack of resources for veterans. These factors may all have played a role, but the most pervasive cause of West Coast homelessness is clear: heroin, fentanyl, and synthetic opioids.
Homelessness is an addiction crisis disguised as a housing crisis. In Seattle, prosecutors and law enforcement recently estimated that the majority of the region’s homeless population is hooked on opioids, including heroin and fentanyl. If this figure holds constant throughout the West Coast, then at least 11,000 homeless opioid addicts live in Washington, 7,000 live in Oregon, and 65,000 live in California (concentrated mostly in San Francisco and Los Angeles). For the unsheltered population inhabiting tents, cars, and RVs, the opioid-addiction percentages are even higher—the City of Seattle’s homeless-outreach team estimates that 80 percent of the unsheltered population has a substance-abuse disorder. Officers must clean up used needles in almost all the homeless encampments.
What is the correct policy response? Provide more homeless shelters? Provide more low-cost housing? Legalize drugs?
Is it just barely possible that we should not only provide more resources for dealing with substance abuse but change our attitudes towards substance abuse?
I guess by policy you mean what should the politicians do about it. I haven’t any idea. What I do observe is that these problems are most severe in places where one political party (I’ll not mention which one) has been in control for a couple of generations.
Like I said, I have no idea – except don’t do what they’ve been doing.
I think it’s clearly a serious problem which should be addressed and I can’t imagine the private sector addressing it so it seems to me pretty obvious that different policy alternatives should be considered.
Let’s try this tack:
Vagrancy is a legal issue and should draw serious jail time, unless you want to make excuses for the vagrant, such as he prefers heroin to work. This approach costs money, but what doesn’t? And it’s the only legal way to dry out the addict for a few months at a time.
What I can observe about homelessness, first hand in California, is that the more benefits given to the homeless (without some kind of accountability attached) the more homeless will be attracted to such a state.
Supposedly, CA has roughly 25% of it’s national population living here. And, as one wonders the streets of bigger cities that statistic almost seems too small, as their often disorderly presence and public encampments, marked by piles of trash, is all too obvious and discouraging to residents living around them.
Dave: “and I can’t imagine the private sector addressing it”.
Well, actually, until the early 20th century that’s exactly how it was dealt with.
“Mutual aid was a foundation of social welfare in the United States until the early 20th Century. Early societies not only shared material resources, but often advanced social values related to self-reliance and moral character.”
“A service club or service organization is a voluntary non-profit organization where members meet regularly to perform charitable works either by direct hands-on efforts or by raising money for other organizations.”
Churches, civic groups, service clubs like Kiwanis, Lions, Rotary. The Salvation Army was the largest.
The major advantage of this type of aid is that it is far more personal. The people were/are volunteers, not an overburdened social worker. They dispensed more than soup.
I don’t know if it is possible to turn in that direction. I don’t know if the historical pictures painted by the participants are accurate. I don’t know how severe the problems were, but given the constancy of human nature I suspect they were similar.
Sometimes “Don’t do something, just stand there” is the best choice.
Hmm. There were also anti-vagrancy laws then. The Supreme Court struck them down in Chief of Police of San Diego, et al. v. Lawson.
Quite a bit has changed since then. For example, cocaine, morphine, and artificial narcotics are much more readily available.
Have you had any experience with private aid organizations? I have. The soup kitchen being run by my parish was shut down by the city government. Turns out the alderman wanted the city to open its own nearby and didn’t want the competition.
As Eric Hoffer put it “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” We’re a mature society now. Practically everything has become a racket.
My only experience was washing dishes in a soup kitchen for a week as community service for a DUI. You couldn’t find a nicer, kinder bunch of people.
Another major factor is the “The Community Mental Health Act of 1963”. The idea was to close down the “loony bins” (large mental health hospitals) and move the services out into the community. They shut down the hospitals but the politicians never funded the community services. An awful lot of the “homeless” would be residents of those hospitals. As a side note I recommend AVI’s blog. He is a mental health professional who reminds me of you.
http://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/
This is why I and a lot of conservative leaning folks are skeptical of government solutions. The plan looks good on paper but is rarely executed properly. The late Jerry Pournelle coined his “Iron Law of Bureaucracy” – whatever the stated purpose, the organization inevitably works towards its own enrichment first.
Not sure what the best policy is or even if the government can do all that much.
In my direct experience with homeless people, addiction is a primary factor whether it is alcohol or other drugs. My own brother-in-law went from a successful businessman to a drunk living on the street because of alcoholism (he hit bottom, never recovered and died). I also volunteer for a homeless veteran’s organization and all of them are afflicted by some kind of chemical dependency. With a few it’s hard to tell if it’s the PTSD or the drugs that are trying to treat the PTSD that is the problem.
I don’t know of any policy solutions. Self-destruction via addiction is not a modern problem, it seems to be built-in somehow – an inevitability that will affect some portion of the population. I hate that this appears to be true, but I can find no alternative explanation.
A substantial fraction of the homeless are also mentally ill. A generation ago or so, most of these were institutionalized. Reestablishing psychiatric hospitals for them would help not only with their homelessness, bad health in general, and their drug addiction. That, however, would require a major change in our laws.
There is also the issue that some drug addiction is due to the displacement of wage workers from the labor market by low-wage immigrants (both legal and illegal) and by de-industrialization cause by free trade.
All in all, we and the homeless would be better off by a return to 1965.
I doubt that we will get a mulligan on the last 54 year. The best we can probably realize is to adopt policies that actually work.
19th century solutions only work in 19th century conditions. Simply, people live longer, and with fewer infant and childhood deaths, there are more people alive. A pandemic every now and again help to thin out the herd.
Patience, TastyBits, patience. We’re doing our best to hasten one on.
Life expectancy in 1900 was 47. Families were much larger. Mentally ill people killed themselves and alcoholics died much earlier because there was no good way to treat their problems back then. Since women didnt have jobs back then you also had a built in free labor force of volunteers. There just wasn’t as much of a problem 100 years ago.
The Great Depression helped to show the limits of private charity. It works great when times are good. Not so much when they arent, when it is needed.
The soup kitchen at our church has been around for quite a while now. We see a lot of mentally ill and addicted. Also see a fair amount of older people who have trouble cooking and are basically lonely. Wife helps with cooking when needed. When I retire I will probably join in but until then I maintain some of the equipment, especially the knives. I have a decent collection of stones and enjoy sharpening. Kind of relaxing in a way.
Steve
In defense of private charity, IMO a balance is needed, particularly in the United States. Having government (at any level) be the only provider of services is inconsistent with American tradition and experience. Our European cousins, contrariwise, think that anything worth doing should be done by the government. The German government levies a tax to support churches, for example.
IMO public charity does not cultivate the same virtues in the citizenry as private charity does. Following Aristotle, virtue is a habit. You cultivate the habit by practicing it not by getting someone else to practice it.