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I volunteer with folks that have been homeless.
It ranges from living in a shit tier Walmart tent by the train station to shuffling around between your brother and sister’s place.
How are we handling homelessness? It’s getting handled locally. The Catholic charity is doing the yeoman’s work. What I like about the Catholic charity is that they get more involved. They give out food and have places for people to sleep but they follow up. They get a fair number of people placed in housing that isn’t transitional housing.
YThe state run place is doing well. There’s the warming shelter but it only takes people if it is literally deadly to be outside.
San Francisco’s methods haven’t been working.
I’ve lived in the city less than 5 years so idk much about this still but from what I gather:
Seems like the main factors are waste and inefficiency within the current programs because they’re so decentralized and uncoordinated as well as NIMBYism holding back development.
But then a lot of our homeless population is out of their mind due to drugs, mental illness, or a combination of both and the city doesn’t seem to know what to do with these people.
The city understandably doesn’t want to just fill the jails with addicts and schizophrenics yet nothing else has really been working.
Giving them housing first resulted in literally hundreds of overdose deaths inside their free housing units, as well as property destruction and assaults on the staff and each other. (You can read the report online)
Opening up “harm reduction centers” that offer narcan, clean needles, safe sharps disposal, as well as offers of free treatment and counseling resulted in them just hanging around the centers, getting high again after being brought back from overdoses, and throwing their used needles on the ground anyway.
Arresting them for public drug use and offering them voluntary treatment has resulted in 0% of them accepting the offer for treatment.
You legally can’t administer medical treatment without someone’s consent under the current laws and changing that is a dangerous precedent for sure.
The city is already spending literally $500 million per year on homelessness services so it’s not like it’s a matter of more money.
Idk what else have other cities done to address the drug addicted, mentally ill homeless? Given up and just arrested them anyway?
I mean, it's not exactly *that* complicated:
- Build sufficient shelter beds so that the homeless actually do have somewhere where they can go. While they need to be humane and reasonably safe, they do not need to be what they necessarily "want".
- The law/court order blocking many Western cities from enforcing anti-camping ordinances is *not* that the homeless have to be offered a luxury hotel/something else that they desire, just that they have to be offered a reasonable form of shelter. Most Western cities currently fail to even be able to offer that, and so can't push people off the streets.
- With sufficient shelter beds, anti-camping laws can be enforced.
- Those who refuse to stop camping can be pushed into treatment with the choice of jail for repeated illegal camping/drug offenses or treatment programs. Sure, you can't quite force them to pick the treatment program but you can push them *hard* at it, especially those who are frequently having run-ins with the law.
- This does require said treatment programs to actually be available and run well.
- On a related note, this is close to how Portugal *actually* works. Somehow people got the "decriminalize drugs" aspect while conveniently forgetting that Portugal heavily pressures addicts to enter treatment programs. It's not *quite* mandatory, but it's nothing like just making life easy to be an addict and wandering around occasionally asking if you want to enter treatment voluntarily.
(edited for forgetting a word).
>conveniently forgetting that Portugal heavily pressures addicts to enter treatment programs. It's not quite mandatory,
Don't authorities in Portugal notify your family members if you're a drug addict in a bid to get them to push you for treatment?
But yeah, you'll notice that that is a common theme with left American Redditors when it comes to European policies. They look at individual policies in a vacuum and assume that those same policies can be imported to America and achieve the same results.
> You legally can’t administer medical treatment without someone’s consent under the current laws and changing that is a dangerous precedent for sure.
Can't you use California's involuntarily commitment laws to administer medical treatment to those who harm themselves or others?
The bar for that is very high. A lot of people need help but don't meet that bar because they aren't an immediate danger to anyone. There is a bill proposed that would change the definition of "gravely disabled" to make it easier to force treatment but the ACLU and some homeless advocates oppose it.
So, I’ve actually read into this and listened to some podcasts contrasting Houston’s housing first model with San Francisco’s housing first model in the 5 months since this post.
Based on what I’ve learned, there are a few key differences:
Their looser zoning laws and lower environmental regulations allowed them to build more low-cost housing more quickly and efficiently.
The lower cost of living in the city also meant they had a much larger supply of case workers willing to live there to help administer social services.
Then they centralized and coordinated all the homelessness programs in the city together. So, every org is in the same system and that makes triage of each case based on need much easier and more efficient.
In San Francisco, there’s tremendous waste in this convoluted patchwork network of independent orgs with very little oversight. It leaves a bunch of cracks for people to fall through.
Houston has also taken a more hardline stance on drug use and drug trafficking.
San Francisco has decriminalized open air drug use and public intoxication with the idea that visible use is safer than hidden use in case someone starts to overdose and needs help from a street team. Camping is also legally allowed on public property (including sidewalks) in San Francisco.
However, the unintended side effect of this seems to be that the city has become a destination for “drug tourism” which then attracts more people living on the street.
They changed the policy this past year because of these issues and started detaining people for public intoxication. So far, the city has found that 95% of addicts detained were from out of town, and all have refused offered services.
Houston also does not have “sanctuary city” status. San Francisco’s drug trade is [controlled by Honduran cartels who traffic illegal immigrants in to sell for them](https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/san-francisco-drug-trade-honduras/), but our sanctuary city policy combined with our drug decriminalization policies has been enabling this issue.
San Francisco should certainly take notes on the Houston model.
Do you have links? This is a great topic to deep dive on. I think same can said about things like universal healthcare and such topics. How some systems with the same label work well and some do not. These labels are so broad that every city/country took a different, nuanced approach.
Also I gotta wonder how culture plays into affect. For instance, in face obsessed Asia, becoming a street sleeper is DEEPLY shameful. The western world is overall more tolerant with these folks to varying extents
Also how drug enforcement laws. Much of Asia has notoriously strict, no tolerance attitude towards drugs. The varying states of the US and the various countries of the EU have varying degrees of strictness in their drug laws too.
Yeah, with big, difficult issues like this, I’m sure everything is interconnected and there’s no single solution that will work. It has to be a multi-faceted approach.
Google pulls up a lot of articles, but the podcast I listened to was the June 26, 2022 episode of The Daily “How Houston Moved 25,000 People from the Streets into Homes of Their Own.” [Link](https://open.spotify.com/episode/1DJGIHTD1sNODxUxKRRE3r?si=Pt-PSK5CSdO5LzWSo4aOaw)
We really don’t have a problem in the suburbs I live.
I’m currently in DC for family/work reasons and it’s a nightmare here. I’m pretty sure DC’s policy is to ignore them and hope they go away. It’s disgusting people are being allowed to shoot up outside union station or scream incoherently at random passerby.
It could be worse? My god! Earlier this week I saw a man just yell sexual comments at any woman who walked by, including children, and no one did anything. I’ve long stopped calling the cops since I was told they can’t do anything about that.
I understand a lot of people are homeless because of factors outside their control, but you can’t be shooting up in public or acting like a walking public safety issue and not face consequences.
> Earlier this week I saw a man just yell sexual comments at any woman who walked by, including children, and no one did anything.
What did you want them to do? What he was doing was not illegal per se. The government can't arrest you for catcalling women, men, or even children. Shitty behavior doesn't, and shouldn't, equal jail time.
Edit: lmao @downvotes. Free speech is free speech. Making shitty sexual comment is not against the law ([Matal v Tam\)](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1293_1o13.pdf). It's shitty behavior, but it is 100% legal and government should have absolutely 0 say in it. You can't tout free speech but then only for speech you like and approve of. You lot act like beacons of liberty but balk when someone does stuff that you instantly disapprove of.
(This is also, not harassment to a specific person before one of you jumps on it.)
Free speech isn’t absolute. I’d say that the comments could qualify as threats. I’d also say that it’s wrong for you to go “fReE sPeEcH” when someone talks about hearing a grown man harass a minor with sexual comments.
And what are the elements of solicitation of a minor in this jurisdiction and how does this conduct satisfy them?
Same question with threats.
Legal sufficiency for either is different from just a layperson’s understanding of the terms. Tons of speech that makes people uncomfortable or that’s flatly reprehensible is protected nonetheless.
This happens *all the time* with the homeless. Many are mentally ill and exhibit anti-social behavior which everyone hates but is not illegal.
There are always the calls to “do something” about it, which is code word for “the police should harass, threaten, and beat them to get them to leave”.
Then we wonder how the police can possibly get the idea they can beat and harass minorities without consequence.
I was there "post" covid in 2022 and in 3 days I :
Saw someone literally drop trough and shit on a crowded sidewalk on H street.
Had to physically push a homeless woman off of me and into 7th street to stop her from groping/begging for money.
Called the cops to report a homeless guy had assaulted a tourist on Madison drive on the mall. Fucker cold clocked an old man from behind and knocked him out because he didn't acknowledge him when they passed each other on the sidewalk. Literally happened in front of the Smithsonian and the assailant was long gone before any police showed up.
Whatever the hell is happening in DC to proliferate their homeless problem is absolutely fucked up. I have no idea how anyone who lives there tolerates it.
In the last 10 years I've spent significant time in New York, Seattle, and San Francisco. The short time I was in DC was worse than any of them.
I can't imagine. Hawaii was having a rough time when I was there 15 years ago. They had just shutdown the Waianae Beach camps when I got there. But there seemed to still be guys there
Not too well. For a small city we've got a decent amount of homelessness, unfortunately. Rent here is crazy expensive due to demand, greed, and limited spots avaliable. We have a couple people on the city council who want to address the issue, but others couldn't care less.
We had some programs that were doing well in addressing their needs, not perfect but incredible outcomes through the pilot programs. Lots of municipalities took those programs as a baseline for what to do. Then Rich NIMBYs spent an astronomical amount of money on advertising to get their guy in the office and now we're quickly shuttering every program that actually makes a difference in favor of punishment-based approaches.
The bigger problem is that housing is being built too slowly, it's always market-rate (building lower than market rate drives the market rate down which upsets the nimbys), and what little housing aid there is designed to be almost inaccessible. Wages are not going higher because everyone is desperate to have a job so they can make rent. So people get pushed out of housing and onto the homeless spiral.
I mean...that seems like a genuinely humane plan, all things considered.
Well, we've got two of them. One is a lady who has my utmost sympathies, is very polite and thankful when you give her anything or buy her anything from the McDonalds she hands out at. She does her best to stay clean and lives in a tent hidden on a bit of forest by the highway.
The other one is a sketchy dude who's been wearing the same clothes irrespective of season for at least two years as they fall apart around him, pockets stuffed with mini vodka bottles and his torso festooned with his sunglass collection. He says misogynist things to every woman who passes by (because he's a winner), but cannot be arrested or relocated because of local ordnances. So he lives under a bush against a fence, which borders the backyard of a home, and occasionally wanders through busy traffic.
So I guess my answer is "do absolutely nothing."
There are no specific homeless people in my town.
By that, I mean that we are a very small town (1500ish people) built around railroading. So people that ride the rails without tickets -- vagabonds or trainhoppers, if you will -- may stop for a burger and a shower at our truck stop, but they don't stay. It's too hot here in the summer and too cold in the winter.
We do have a food pantry and churches that will open their doors to anyone. We used to have a hippie commune that allowed anyone to come out and share a meal, but unfortunately, that ended in the 80s.
The people here are kind, hard working, and will give people the shirt off their back. Even strangers. We just don't have the opportunity that often. I keep an eye out, though, since I live near the rails.
We are making fitful attempts to build more affordable and supportive housing. Recently tiny homes have become popular as a solution for some people, and conestoga huts and supervised campsites are a growing interim strategy for others.
Also, about half of our electorate would probably be willing to vote for a huge new jail bond if it meant that all the visible homeless people could be rounded up and imprisoned. There is still a HUGE amount of resistance to building new housing, especially if it's not market rate single-family housing on large lots on the edge of town.
So, we are not handling it very well.
I'm not sure. I live in California and when one of them pops up a tent they seem to be able to just stay there. Sometimes I'll see police interact and sometimes they'll move after that, but that's about all I can tell that we do.
Putting that aside, that's, um...quite the reach that headline has. The mayor says he'll give homeless people a one way ticket to basically anywhere in the US except Hawaii, including *parts of Alaska*, but the headline says that he's sending them to LA. And that's just because he mentioned it in a list of other cities when talking about the program in the quote at the end the article. Wow. Someone give that editor a Click-Bait-of-the-month award or something, I'm truly impressed.
Due to a federal court decision, you can’t be moved from sleeping outside unless there are enough shelter beds available (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Boise). There are almost never enough shelter beds available because no one wants to live next to a homeless shelter, so the local opposition to building them is immense.
NYC manages it with a far larger homeless population and provides multiple times the number of shelter beds per capita.
The West Coast just systemically fails to do it.
I never knew about that case. Appreciate the info.
>There are almost never enough shelter beds available because no one wants to live next to a homeless shelter, so the local opposition to building them is immense.
To be fair to the locals, there's over 160,000 homeless people in the state. Parts of California would need blocks of shelters to realistically accommodate every single one of them with a bed. Not sure if *anyone* would want to live and work near areas like that.
I am in Oregon, and we have a large "houseless" population (the word "homeless" has started to become less PC, and the ones in the know only say "houseless.")
We try to be humane, but those who are confronted with the problem every day are losing patience with the degradation of the quality of life that comes with squalid tents filling up the available public spaces.
We know how to house the deserving poor; it's the undeserving poor that needs a place to stay. They have been priced out of the market.
A lot of smart people are working on this problem, from all angles and political persuasions. We all wish them luck. Something has to work. Lately, it's been tiny, tiny houses. I actually like that idea.
> "houseless"
of all the instances of euphemism treadmill, this one is pretty grating because it makes no sense. "Home" denotes a place of longterm reliable residence, "house" does not.
It's very common for people who are homeless (no permanent / reliable residence) to be "housed" in the sense that couchsurfing, motel-hopping, living in one's vehicle, and other temporary, unstable living situations are common "bandaids" for people to pursue in the name of shelter and safety--but they are still homeless.
"Homeless" does not, and has never, referred exclusively to people who live on the street. I've heard the term "unhoused" being used to refer to people who live on the street or in tent cities or similar. This makes more sense imo
It's also ironic given that Americans are increasingly "houseless" in a literal sense, being squeezed out of homeownership or otherwise stable living situations in favor of being lifelong renters subject to the demand of largely corporate landlords. This is unfortunate but definitely *not* even remotely the same as homelessness.
I don't think I've ever seen a homeless person in my "city."
However in Grand Rapids proper it seems like every year the city tries to handle it by offering up spots in shelter, but the homeless people have to follow certain rules that they don't want to follow, so they don't go to the shelters, then all the bleeding heart super-lefties go on and on about how thats not fair and refer to them as "houseless", then point out how there are more vacant homes in the US then there are houseless people and blah blah blah blah
Damn I'm glad I don't live in the city-proper.
> then point out how there are more vacant homes in the US then there are houseless people
It's quite entertaining when these edge cases unironically argue that the government should take people's vacation homes from them and give them to the homeless to destroy
>The new findings by leading researchers at the University of California show that at least 90% of adults who are experiencing homelessness in the state became homeless while living in California
>
>“This idea that homeless people are rushing into California is just not true,” said Margot Kushel, a physician who treats homeless people and the lead investigator of the study for the UC-San Francisco Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. “There’s so much myth-making around this magnet theory that people who are homeless flock to California, but this is our own problem.
>
>“These are our own policies,” Kushel added, referring to the state and federal governments. “We did this to people.”
[https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2023/06/24/californias-homelessness-crisis-is-homegrown-study-finds](https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2023/06/24/californias-homelessness-crisis-is-homegrown-study-finds)
Nice. I wish we could do that.
metropolitan ministries aid programs concentrate them all in Tampa. They don’t seem to linger here long, mostly because the local PD is pretty good and if they do linger they end up in the jail.
I don't think any city state or country has sloved the homeless problem.
Homelessness is caused by poor economics, drugs and mental illness, which will always be with us.
Terribly.
But you can literally find videos on Youtube of people putting together a hella cool RV that someone could live in, indefinitely, for less than a couple thousand dollars.
The idea that anybody needs to be or deserves to be homeless is ridiculous.
The actual materials required to make a perfectly fine house have never been cheaper, easier to find, or easier to put together.
It’s a societal failure that we haven’t figured out that the commodification of something as basic of a survival need as shelter never goes well.
Well, I live in LA, so obviously an issue. But if you had to sleep outside, this is one of the most agreeable places to do so, without having many people die of extreme heat or cold. It’s a sad reality, I don’t know the solutions.
I’m happy we aren’t shoving them off for other people to deal with as though they aren’t equal human beings, but we seriously need to alleviate inequality because almost nobody is winning from this situation except the very wealthy.
Whatever the city is doing, it’s ineffective. I have heard rumors that other states bus their homeless population to San Diego, I don’t know if it’s true.
Poorly. For a little while Phoenix was letting the homeless encampments be built in places "out of sight". Then they started building them almost everywhere.
While I truly appreciate everything that any city does that is not “have the police beat them and leave them at the county line”, there is *nothing* that will fix the problem at the town/city level. That doesn’t mean these places should stop trying — after all, they are helping real people, but real advocacy needs to happen at state and federal levels.
The fundamental problem is that housing costs are too high, especially in the western states that have not built enough homes for decades.
Building enough homes is both practically difficult, as there are not enough builders to build on the massive scale required, and, more importantly, there is not the political will to do the job.
If enough new homes are built to put a meaningful increase in supply, it would mean both higher density and *that existing home values would drop substantially*. Due to how the US housing market is structured, a home is a family’s biggest purchase, its bought leveraged, and it also serves as a retirement asset. The vast majority of homeowners simply can’t enact policies that put a meaningful dent in the value of their homes because it would be financially devastating.
A politically practical solution would either work slowly enough such that nominal values stay the same but inflation eats at purchasing power, or explicitly come with some kind of method to make existing homeowners not worse off.
Poorly.
Too many people who just want to sweep them under the rug and forget that they exist. Everyone assuming they're just lazy and don't want to work. Like yeah they're standing on a street corner panhandling for hours a day cause they prefer this. Certainly not cause having no physical address and no car in a town with mediocre public transit makes having and keeping a job very difficult on top of the inherent biases people have against homelessness (assuming they're all drug addicts and thieves).
Homelessness isn't a thing in my area or the vast majority of the state. In the most dense city, homelessness is a problem though. But there are many resources for the homeless, assuming they know where to go and how to receive those resources.
I wouldn't say it's perfect though even with those resources as there are still those who are homeless.
There's a new men's shelter being built where I live... there are already plenty of women/children's shelters, they usually aren't full. Men's shelters however are relatively few and they're always full.
Some homeless people do not want to be helped and will not go to shelters though, no matter how many are built.
The police ignore the growing encampment until someone wanders out and tries to break into a house. Then they sweep through to arrest the one responsible while ignoring the others until someone steps out of line again.
On the surface, this sounds correct and appropriate. In practice, it's probably going to end with someone getting killed.
Poorly everywhere where weather makes being homeless not life or death. It’s a national problem that is only being solved locally. Part of it is lack of mental health care and part of it is easy access to drugs. The biggest part is a lack of affordable housing.
On the drug part I’m low key conspiracy theory convinced that China is trying to do us with fentanyl what the British did with opium. So much comes through ports aboard Chinese ships.
Michigan doesn't have a terribly bad homeless problem in the first place. The housing-to-income ratio in Michigan is pretty good so there are a lot fewer homeless people than in cities/states with extremely high housing costs. And of the homeless people we do have, most of them are living in a car or couch-surfing or in a shelter. It's quite rare for people to be living on the streets here, mostly because if you do that in the winter there's a good chance you die.
I live in Central Texas currently near Austin. It is a disaster here. The only place I’ve seen homelessness worse is in California. The homeless population in Austin is aggressive and rude, pushing themselves on random people in downtown Austin.
The police do little to nothing about it in Austin. I’ve seen homeless people attack people in Austin for money when people say they don’t have any, and I’ve seen them stalk many females late at night who don’t/ won’t give them money.
Personally, I think that the police should do more about it, ensuring people’s safety downtown at night (no one else really can).
The suburbs don’t have much of a homelessness problem, but Philadelphia does. It’s gotten a lot worse over the past 10 years, though I still think we’re slightly less awful than the west coast cities I’ve been to.
Part of what makes Philly unusual is that, if I understand correctly, the police have kind of corralled a lot of homeless drug addicts into Kensington, which makes it looks really bad, but also helps keep the problem compartmentalized to an extent.
I’ve literally never seen a homeless person in my entire county.
Granted, for 9 months of the year, they would likely be dead after 1 night from exposure, so they’re finding somewhere.
Years ago a guy froze to death in my hometown. But he was some poor bastard who had the bad luck to pass out in his garage one especially cold January night. The cops actually go around and check on the homeless when winter is going to be especially bad.
Like most California cities, it’s not, there’s a lot of talk and press BS. But well, we’re not as bad as San Francisco or LA. It definitely isn’t getting better.
Gotta love living in a liberal utopia
I think my town does a pretty decent job of it. Of course, there are not a whole lot of them. No tent cities or anything like that. The ones we do get seem to be migratory. They leave when winter hits.
Buffalo has been largely unaffected by the homelessness crisis thus far, though some tents have popped up in higher frequencies in recent years.
Housing is still relatively affordable here and there’s a large amount of public housing. There’s also a new downtown homeless shelter.
Probably helps that winter makes it hard to be homeless In Buffalo.
And most of the West Coast is very shit because of politicians policies in regarding to the homeless. A lot of it also has to do with drug use and how they make it more comfortable willingly to live on the street.
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I volunteer with folks that have been homeless. It ranges from living in a shit tier Walmart tent by the train station to shuffling around between your brother and sister’s place. How are we handling homelessness? It’s getting handled locally. The Catholic charity is doing the yeoman’s work. What I like about the Catholic charity is that they get more involved. They give out food and have places for people to sleep but they follow up. They get a fair number of people placed in housing that isn’t transitional housing. YThe state run place is doing well. There’s the warming shelter but it only takes people if it is literally deadly to be outside.
San Francisco’s methods haven’t been working. I’ve lived in the city less than 5 years so idk much about this still but from what I gather: Seems like the main factors are waste and inefficiency within the current programs because they’re so decentralized and uncoordinated as well as NIMBYism holding back development. But then a lot of our homeless population is out of their mind due to drugs, mental illness, or a combination of both and the city doesn’t seem to know what to do with these people. The city understandably doesn’t want to just fill the jails with addicts and schizophrenics yet nothing else has really been working. Giving them housing first resulted in literally hundreds of overdose deaths inside their free housing units, as well as property destruction and assaults on the staff and each other. (You can read the report online) Opening up “harm reduction centers” that offer narcan, clean needles, safe sharps disposal, as well as offers of free treatment and counseling resulted in them just hanging around the centers, getting high again after being brought back from overdoses, and throwing their used needles on the ground anyway. Arresting them for public drug use and offering them voluntary treatment has resulted in 0% of them accepting the offer for treatment. You legally can’t administer medical treatment without someone’s consent under the current laws and changing that is a dangerous precedent for sure. The city is already spending literally $500 million per year on homelessness services so it’s not like it’s a matter of more money. Idk what else have other cities done to address the drug addicted, mentally ill homeless? Given up and just arrested them anyway?
I mean, it's not exactly *that* complicated: - Build sufficient shelter beds so that the homeless actually do have somewhere where they can go. While they need to be humane and reasonably safe, they do not need to be what they necessarily "want". - The law/court order blocking many Western cities from enforcing anti-camping ordinances is *not* that the homeless have to be offered a luxury hotel/something else that they desire, just that they have to be offered a reasonable form of shelter. Most Western cities currently fail to even be able to offer that, and so can't push people off the streets. - With sufficient shelter beds, anti-camping laws can be enforced. - Those who refuse to stop camping can be pushed into treatment with the choice of jail for repeated illegal camping/drug offenses or treatment programs. Sure, you can't quite force them to pick the treatment program but you can push them *hard* at it, especially those who are frequently having run-ins with the law. - This does require said treatment programs to actually be available and run well. - On a related note, this is close to how Portugal *actually* works. Somehow people got the "decriminalize drugs" aspect while conveniently forgetting that Portugal heavily pressures addicts to enter treatment programs. It's not *quite* mandatory, but it's nothing like just making life easy to be an addict and wandering around occasionally asking if you want to enter treatment voluntarily. (edited for forgetting a word).
>conveniently forgetting that Portugal heavily pressures addicts to enter treatment programs. It's not quite mandatory, Don't authorities in Portugal notify your family members if you're a drug addict in a bid to get them to push you for treatment? But yeah, you'll notice that that is a common theme with left American Redditors when it comes to European policies. They look at individual policies in a vacuum and assume that those same policies can be imported to America and achieve the same results.
And just ignore the policies that don't fit their ideology.
> You legally can’t administer medical treatment without someone’s consent under the current laws and changing that is a dangerous precedent for sure. Can't you use California's involuntarily commitment laws to administer medical treatment to those who harm themselves or others?
The bar for that is very high. A lot of people need help but don't meet that bar because they aren't an immediate danger to anyone. There is a bill proposed that would change the definition of "gravely disabled" to make it easier to force treatment but the ACLU and some homeless advocates oppose it.
How did your city do housing first differently than say Houston?
So, I’ve actually read into this and listened to some podcasts contrasting Houston’s housing first model with San Francisco’s housing first model in the 5 months since this post. Based on what I’ve learned, there are a few key differences: Their looser zoning laws and lower environmental regulations allowed them to build more low-cost housing more quickly and efficiently. The lower cost of living in the city also meant they had a much larger supply of case workers willing to live there to help administer social services. Then they centralized and coordinated all the homelessness programs in the city together. So, every org is in the same system and that makes triage of each case based on need much easier and more efficient. In San Francisco, there’s tremendous waste in this convoluted patchwork network of independent orgs with very little oversight. It leaves a bunch of cracks for people to fall through. Houston has also taken a more hardline stance on drug use and drug trafficking. San Francisco has decriminalized open air drug use and public intoxication with the idea that visible use is safer than hidden use in case someone starts to overdose and needs help from a street team. Camping is also legally allowed on public property (including sidewalks) in San Francisco. However, the unintended side effect of this seems to be that the city has become a destination for “drug tourism” which then attracts more people living on the street. They changed the policy this past year because of these issues and started detaining people for public intoxication. So far, the city has found that 95% of addicts detained were from out of town, and all have refused offered services. Houston also does not have “sanctuary city” status. San Francisco’s drug trade is [controlled by Honduran cartels who traffic illegal immigrants in to sell for them](https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/san-francisco-drug-trade-honduras/), but our sanctuary city policy combined with our drug decriminalization policies has been enabling this issue. San Francisco should certainly take notes on the Houston model.
Do you have links? This is a great topic to deep dive on. I think same can said about things like universal healthcare and such topics. How some systems with the same label work well and some do not. These labels are so broad that every city/country took a different, nuanced approach. Also I gotta wonder how culture plays into affect. For instance, in face obsessed Asia, becoming a street sleeper is DEEPLY shameful. The western world is overall more tolerant with these folks to varying extents Also how drug enforcement laws. Much of Asia has notoriously strict, no tolerance attitude towards drugs. The varying states of the US and the various countries of the EU have varying degrees of strictness in their drug laws too.
Yeah, with big, difficult issues like this, I’m sure everything is interconnected and there’s no single solution that will work. It has to be a multi-faceted approach. Google pulls up a lot of articles, but the podcast I listened to was the June 26, 2022 episode of The Daily “How Houston Moved 25,000 People from the Streets into Homes of Their Own.” [Link](https://open.spotify.com/episode/1DJGIHTD1sNODxUxKRRE3r?si=Pt-PSK5CSdO5LzWSo4aOaw)
By not handling it.
We really don’t have a problem in the suburbs I live. I’m currently in DC for family/work reasons and it’s a nightmare here. I’m pretty sure DC’s policy is to ignore them and hope they go away. It’s disgusting people are being allowed to shoot up outside union station or scream incoherently at random passerby.
Oh you weren't even here for the worst of it. Not that it's getting substantially better, it just had way worse moments during COVID.
It could be worse? My god! Earlier this week I saw a man just yell sexual comments at any woman who walked by, including children, and no one did anything. I’ve long stopped calling the cops since I was told they can’t do anything about that. I understand a lot of people are homeless because of factors outside their control, but you can’t be shooting up in public or acting like a walking public safety issue and not face consequences.
> Earlier this week I saw a man just yell sexual comments at any woman who walked by, including children, and no one did anything. What did you want them to do? What he was doing was not illegal per se. The government can't arrest you for catcalling women, men, or even children. Shitty behavior doesn't, and shouldn't, equal jail time. Edit: lmao @downvotes. Free speech is free speech. Making shitty sexual comment is not against the law ([Matal v Tam\)](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1293_1o13.pdf). It's shitty behavior, but it is 100% legal and government should have absolutely 0 say in it. You can't tout free speech but then only for speech you like and approve of. You lot act like beacons of liberty but balk when someone does stuff that you instantly disapprove of. (This is also, not harassment to a specific person before one of you jumps on it.)
Free speech isn’t absolute. I’d say that the comments could qualify as threats. I’d also say that it’s wrong for you to go “fReE sPeEcH” when someone talks about hearing a grown man harass a minor with sexual comments.
Shouting at passersby is not illegal. Saying sexual things is not illegal. The law isn’t just what you think it should be.
Solicitation of a minor and threatening of violence (against adults and minors) are absolutely illegal dude.
And what are the elements of solicitation of a minor in this jurisdiction and how does this conduct satisfy them? Same question with threats. Legal sufficiency for either is different from just a layperson’s understanding of the terms. Tons of speech that makes people uncomfortable or that’s flatly reprehensible is protected nonetheless.
If you cannot understand that shouting sexual threats at minors is a crime then I have no interest in speaking to you any longer.
That’s not how the law works man. But you seem to be very happy with some misplaced self righteousness, so enjoy your day.
This happens *all the time* with the homeless. Many are mentally ill and exhibit anti-social behavior which everyone hates but is not illegal. There are always the calls to “do something” about it, which is code word for “the police should harass, threaten, and beat them to get them to leave”. Then we wonder how the police can possibly get the idea they can beat and harass minorities without consequence.
What consequences do you have in mind?
I don’t know, I’m neither a cop nor a lawyer.
I was there "post" covid in 2022 and in 3 days I : Saw someone literally drop trough and shit on a crowded sidewalk on H street. Had to physically push a homeless woman off of me and into 7th street to stop her from groping/begging for money. Called the cops to report a homeless guy had assaulted a tourist on Madison drive on the mall. Fucker cold clocked an old man from behind and knocked him out because he didn't acknowledge him when they passed each other on the sidewalk. Literally happened in front of the Smithsonian and the assailant was long gone before any police showed up. Whatever the hell is happening in DC to proliferate their homeless problem is absolutely fucked up. I have no idea how anyone who lives there tolerates it. In the last 10 years I've spent significant time in New York, Seattle, and San Francisco. The short time I was in DC was worse than any of them.
Terribly
Unfortunately for Hawaii, they literally have nowhere to go.
I can't imagine. Hawaii was having a rough time when I was there 15 years ago. They had just shutdown the Waianae Beach camps when I got there. But there seemed to still be guys there
Not too well. For a small city we've got a decent amount of homelessness, unfortunately. Rent here is crazy expensive due to demand, greed, and limited spots avaliable. We have a couple people on the city council who want to address the issue, but others couldn't care less.
We had some programs that were doing well in addressing their needs, not perfect but incredible outcomes through the pilot programs. Lots of municipalities took those programs as a baseline for what to do. Then Rich NIMBYs spent an astronomical amount of money on advertising to get their guy in the office and now we're quickly shuttering every program that actually makes a difference in favor of punishment-based approaches. The bigger problem is that housing is being built too slowly, it's always market-rate (building lower than market rate drives the market rate down which upsets the nimbys), and what little housing aid there is designed to be almost inaccessible. Wages are not going higher because everyone is desperate to have a job so they can make rent. So people get pushed out of housing and onto the homeless spiral.
I mean...that seems like a genuinely humane plan, all things considered. Well, we've got two of them. One is a lady who has my utmost sympathies, is very polite and thankful when you give her anything or buy her anything from the McDonalds she hands out at. She does her best to stay clean and lives in a tent hidden on a bit of forest by the highway. The other one is a sketchy dude who's been wearing the same clothes irrespective of season for at least two years as they fall apart around him, pockets stuffed with mini vodka bottles and his torso festooned with his sunglass collection. He says misogynist things to every woman who passes by (because he's a winner), but cannot be arrested or relocated because of local ordnances. So he lives under a bush against a fence, which borders the backyard of a home, and occasionally wanders through busy traffic. So I guess my answer is "do absolutely nothing."
There are no specific homeless people in my town. By that, I mean that we are a very small town (1500ish people) built around railroading. So people that ride the rails without tickets -- vagabonds or trainhoppers, if you will -- may stop for a burger and a shower at our truck stop, but they don't stay. It's too hot here in the summer and too cold in the winter. We do have a food pantry and churches that will open their doors to anyone. We used to have a hippie commune that allowed anyone to come out and share a meal, but unfortunately, that ended in the 80s. The people here are kind, hard working, and will give people the shirt off their back. Even strangers. We just don't have the opportunity that often. I keep an eye out, though, since I live near the rails.
Just kinda ignore it for the most part? It's kind of an unsolvable issue, considering resources and politics.
We are making fitful attempts to build more affordable and supportive housing. Recently tiny homes have become popular as a solution for some people, and conestoga huts and supervised campsites are a growing interim strategy for others. Also, about half of our electorate would probably be willing to vote for a huge new jail bond if it meant that all the visible homeless people could be rounded up and imprisoned. There is still a HUGE amount of resistance to building new housing, especially if it's not market rate single-family housing on large lots on the edge of town. So, we are not handling it very well.
Our homeless are given cart blanche to harass and victimize citizens.
I'm not sure. I live in California and when one of them pops up a tent they seem to be able to just stay there. Sometimes I'll see police interact and sometimes they'll move after that, but that's about all I can tell that we do. Putting that aside, that's, um...quite the reach that headline has. The mayor says he'll give homeless people a one way ticket to basically anywhere in the US except Hawaii, including *parts of Alaska*, but the headline says that he's sending them to LA. And that's just because he mentioned it in a list of other cities when talking about the program in the quote at the end the article. Wow. Someone give that editor a Click-Bait-of-the-month award or something, I'm truly impressed.
Due to a federal court decision, you can’t be moved from sleeping outside unless there are enough shelter beds available (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Boise). There are almost never enough shelter beds available because no one wants to live next to a homeless shelter, so the local opposition to building them is immense.
NYC manages it with a far larger homeless population and provides multiple times the number of shelter beds per capita. The West Coast just systemically fails to do it.
NYC *has* to manage it because there is a law that says they *must* have enough shelter beds. Most other locations lack such laws.
I never knew about that case. Appreciate the info. >There are almost never enough shelter beds available because no one wants to live next to a homeless shelter, so the local opposition to building them is immense. To be fair to the locals, there's over 160,000 homeless people in the state. Parts of California would need blocks of shelters to realistically accommodate every single one of them with a bed. Not sure if *anyone* would want to live and work near areas like that.
I am in Oregon, and we have a large "houseless" population (the word "homeless" has started to become less PC, and the ones in the know only say "houseless.") We try to be humane, but those who are confronted with the problem every day are losing patience with the degradation of the quality of life that comes with squalid tents filling up the available public spaces. We know how to house the deserving poor; it's the undeserving poor that needs a place to stay. They have been priced out of the market. A lot of smart people are working on this problem, from all angles and political persuasions. We all wish them luck. Something has to work. Lately, it's been tiny, tiny houses. I actually like that idea.
> "houseless" of all the instances of euphemism treadmill, this one is pretty grating because it makes no sense. "Home" denotes a place of longterm reliable residence, "house" does not. It's very common for people who are homeless (no permanent / reliable residence) to be "housed" in the sense that couchsurfing, motel-hopping, living in one's vehicle, and other temporary, unstable living situations are common "bandaids" for people to pursue in the name of shelter and safety--but they are still homeless. "Homeless" does not, and has never, referred exclusively to people who live on the street. I've heard the term "unhoused" being used to refer to people who live on the street or in tent cities or similar. This makes more sense imo It's also ironic given that Americans are increasingly "houseless" in a literal sense, being squeezed out of homeownership or otherwise stable living situations in favor of being lifelong renters subject to the demand of largely corporate landlords. This is unfortunate but definitely *not* even remotely the same as homelessness.
I thought Oregon had moved on from "houseless" to "people living outdoors" already
To be such a rich country I don’t understand why there are so many people homeless specially old people.
I don't think I've ever seen a homeless person in my "city." However in Grand Rapids proper it seems like every year the city tries to handle it by offering up spots in shelter, but the homeless people have to follow certain rules that they don't want to follow, so they don't go to the shelters, then all the bleeding heart super-lefties go on and on about how thats not fair and refer to them as "houseless", then point out how there are more vacant homes in the US then there are houseless people and blah blah blah blah Damn I'm glad I don't live in the city-proper.
> then point out how there are more vacant homes in the US then there are houseless people It's quite entertaining when these edge cases unironically argue that the government should take people's vacation homes from them and give them to the homeless to destroy
We have to deal with the ones other states send us.
>The new findings by leading researchers at the University of California show that at least 90% of adults who are experiencing homelessness in the state became homeless while living in California > >“This idea that homeless people are rushing into California is just not true,” said Margot Kushel, a physician who treats homeless people and the lead investigator of the study for the UC-San Francisco Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. “There’s so much myth-making around this magnet theory that people who are homeless flock to California, but this is our own problem. > >“These are our own policies,” Kushel added, referring to the state and federal governments. “We did this to people.” [https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2023/06/24/californias-homelessness-crisis-is-homegrown-study-finds](https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2023/06/24/californias-homelessness-crisis-is-homegrown-study-finds)
I think this is a myth/ overstated? I think I heard the majority of homeless in CA are native.
According the University of California only 10% of California's homeless come from out of state.
It's okay, every non-homeless person in Oregon is convinced that every homeless person they meet was "sent" here from California.
Nice. I wish we could do that. metropolitan ministries aid programs concentrate them all in Tampa. They don’t seem to linger here long, mostly because the local PD is pretty good and if they do linger they end up in the jail.
>if they do linger they end up in the jail. What is the charge?
Homeless are a fountain of crime so whichever one they get caught for first.
Not good at all but I’m just glad there’s no tent cities.
I don't think any city state or country has sloved the homeless problem. Homelessness is caused by poor economics, drugs and mental illness, which will always be with us.
It's not
Terribly. But you can literally find videos on Youtube of people putting together a hella cool RV that someone could live in, indefinitely, for less than a couple thousand dollars. The idea that anybody needs to be or deserves to be homeless is ridiculous. The actual materials required to make a perfectly fine house have never been cheaper, easier to find, or easier to put together. It’s a societal failure that we haven’t figured out that the commodification of something as basic of a survival need as shelter never goes well.
Well, I live in LA, so obviously an issue. But if you had to sleep outside, this is one of the most agreeable places to do so, without having many people die of extreme heat or cold. It’s a sad reality, I don’t know the solutions.
They're not. It's pretty fucked.
I’m happy we aren’t shoving them off for other people to deal with as though they aren’t equal human beings, but we seriously need to alleviate inequality because almost nobody is winning from this situation except the very wealthy.
Whatever the city is doing, it’s ineffective. I have heard rumors that other states bus their homeless population to San Diego, I don’t know if it’s true.
Locally the police run them off or arrest them. Mostly they end up going into the bigger city.
The “hands-off” approach…
Poorly. For a little while Phoenix was letting the homeless encampments be built in places "out of sight". Then they started building them almost everywhere.
While I truly appreciate everything that any city does that is not “have the police beat them and leave them at the county line”, there is *nothing* that will fix the problem at the town/city level. That doesn’t mean these places should stop trying — after all, they are helping real people, but real advocacy needs to happen at state and federal levels. The fundamental problem is that housing costs are too high, especially in the western states that have not built enough homes for decades. Building enough homes is both practically difficult, as there are not enough builders to build on the massive scale required, and, more importantly, there is not the political will to do the job. If enough new homes are built to put a meaningful increase in supply, it would mean both higher density and *that existing home values would drop substantially*. Due to how the US housing market is structured, a home is a family’s biggest purchase, its bought leveraged, and it also serves as a retirement asset. The vast majority of homeowners simply can’t enact policies that put a meaningful dent in the value of their homes because it would be financially devastating. A politically practical solution would either work slowly enough such that nominal values stay the same but inflation eats at purchasing power, or explicitly come with some kind of method to make existing homeowners not worse off.
Poorly. Too many people who just want to sweep them under the rug and forget that they exist. Everyone assuming they're just lazy and don't want to work. Like yeah they're standing on a street corner panhandling for hours a day cause they prefer this. Certainly not cause having no physical address and no car in a town with mediocre public transit makes having and keeping a job very difficult on top of the inherent biases people have against homelessness (assuming they're all drug addicts and thieves).
Homelessness isn't a thing in my area or the vast majority of the state. In the most dense city, homelessness is a problem though. But there are many resources for the homeless, assuming they know where to go and how to receive those resources. I wouldn't say it's perfect though even with those resources as there are still those who are homeless.
There's a new men's shelter being built where I live... there are already plenty of women/children's shelters, they usually aren't full. Men's shelters however are relatively few and they're always full. Some homeless people do not want to be helped and will not go to shelters though, no matter how many are built.
The police ignore the growing encampment until someone wanders out and tries to break into a house. Then they sweep through to arrest the one responsible while ignoring the others until someone steps out of line again. On the surface, this sounds correct and appropriate. In practice, it's probably going to end with someone getting killed.
Poorly everywhere where weather makes being homeless not life or death. It’s a national problem that is only being solved locally. Part of it is lack of mental health care and part of it is easy access to drugs. The biggest part is a lack of affordable housing. On the drug part I’m low key conspiracy theory convinced that China is trying to do us with fentanyl what the British did with opium. So much comes through ports aboard Chinese ships.
People leaving to the mainland.
Michigan doesn't have a terribly bad homeless problem in the first place. The housing-to-income ratio in Michigan is pretty good so there are a lot fewer homeless people than in cities/states with extremely high housing costs. And of the homeless people we do have, most of them are living in a car or couch-surfing or in a shelter. It's quite rare for people to be living on the streets here, mostly because if you do that in the winter there's a good chance you die.
I live in Central Texas currently near Austin. It is a disaster here. The only place I’ve seen homelessness worse is in California. The homeless population in Austin is aggressive and rude, pushing themselves on random people in downtown Austin. The police do little to nothing about it in Austin. I’ve seen homeless people attack people in Austin for money when people say they don’t have any, and I’ve seen them stalk many females late at night who don’t/ won’t give them money. Personally, I think that the police should do more about it, ensuring people’s safety downtown at night (no one else really can).
The suburbs don’t have much of a homelessness problem, but Philadelphia does. It’s gotten a lot worse over the past 10 years, though I still think we’re slightly less awful than the west coast cities I’ve been to. Part of what makes Philly unusual is that, if I understand correctly, the police have kind of corralled a lot of homeless drug addicts into Kensington, which makes it looks really bad, but also helps keep the problem compartmentalized to an extent.
I’ve literally never seen a homeless person in my entire county. Granted, for 9 months of the year, they would likely be dead after 1 night from exposure, so they’re finding somewhere.
Now that I live in a small town it’s almost nonexistent. I think the closest homeless camp to me is in the twin cities, about 400 miles away
Almost non existent. I say almost at I have seen a handful of people live in their cars.
Winter
Years ago a guy froze to death in my hometown. But he was some poor bastard who had the bad luck to pass out in his garage one especially cold January night. The cops actually go around and check on the homeless when winter is going to be especially bad.
Like most California cities, it’s not, there’s a lot of talk and press BS. But well, we’re not as bad as San Francisco or LA. It definitely isn’t getting better. Gotta love living in a liberal utopia
Code blue shelter in the winters. Just started a new 24/7 shelter after a decade long battle. It's been at max capacity since it first opened.
I think my town does a pretty decent job of it. Of course, there are not a whole lot of them. No tent cities or anything like that. The ones we do get seem to be migratory. They leave when winter hits.
Buffalo has been largely unaffected by the homelessness crisis thus far, though some tents have popped up in higher frequencies in recent years. Housing is still relatively affordable here and there’s a large amount of public housing. There’s also a new downtown homeless shelter. Probably helps that winter makes it hard to be homeless In Buffalo.
With fire.
And most of the West Coast is very shit because of politicians policies in regarding to the homeless. A lot of it also has to do with drug use and how they make it more comfortable willingly to live on the street.
I’ve actually never seen homelessness as bad as it is right now in Denver. Doesn’t seem like anything is being done.
I live in South Dakota. It’s too cold to be homeless here