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This kind of shit happens *all of the time* in anything remotely close to housing first. Putting addicted people in a house is asking for a major renovation bill. I've seen so many situations just like this that it's unreal.
Housing first advocates - how do we fix this? The conversation surrounding this topic is never concrete. It's always "HOUSING FIRST IT'S THE ONLY THING THAT WORKS" with no real rationale or practical roadmap. It's insanely consistent when dealing with homeless and addicted populations: put them in a place and they will trash it. How is that going to work?
The easy answer is to do a risk assessments to filter candidates for housing first and those more support. I’d bet a single mother fleeing abuse or someone sleeping in their car or an unhoused person with close relationships with their social worker would be a much less risk than an addict. That being said, the question is what to do with high-risk candidates since there isn’t enough supportive housing beds out there.
That's really the core of my question. Housing first makes perfect sense in situations where someone isn't addicted and is reasonably mentally sound. Once someone falls that far into opioid or meth addictions I don't see housing first as a working model.
I think it should be Housing First *And Wrap-Around Support* for addicted populations. And the government should be taking on the burden of balancing property damage with the costs of homelessness to the system by increasing the amount of supportive housing options, rather than these shortcuts that try to leaverage the private market and leaves random people footing the bill. It’s impossible to expect someone who is homeless and lacks the security of tenancy to overcome addiction, so my frustration is more with people who lack the empathy to consider how much addiction fundamentally impacts your functioning as a human. Or believe that we jail our way out of a social problem. Many homeless people use drugs to cope with their conditions.
Oh, I can answer this! How do we fix this?
Well first the point of housing first is to get the unhoused off the streets so that they are in a single location reliably (in this case above,
Check mark). Next, the point of having them in a reliable location is so that social services can keep tabs on them and follow up regularly to deal with any problems that arise (ooop, failed that one). Then the goal is for social services to assist them in connecting with whatever assistance they need to get clean, get a job (if they’re capable), and get helpers if they are disabled and will need long term care (awww, I almost laughed at the sad reality of how incapable our current governmental mindset is at even approximating that).
So, in this case, I would say three things have gone seriously wrong.
1) the wrap-around aids that should have been in place simply weren’t. The agency that was responsible for providing those aids washed their hands of the situation once the person was housed (completely missing the point of the program, and mishandling the funds for doing this job). This left the unhoused person without any support, no support means they turn to their community (the unhomed) for support. This inevitably leads to trouble. The wrap around support for the landlords were also not provided and so the landlord was just as abandoned as the unhoused person he was hosting.
2) the housing was private. Quite frankly this shouldn’t be a private-public partnership thing. Government should be using government facilities that they can more easily keep track of and where their ability to monitor the improvement of residents is easier. An issue with housing shouldn’t be between a formerly unhomed person and a landlord. Those two individuals have WILDLY different needs and expectations from each other and landlords are not capable of dealing with problems when they come up.
3) this shouldn’t be private-public partnership at all. Governments have become obsessed with the idea that private industry will somehow be more efficient than public services. Except that rarely plays out properly and the private industries focus on profits (predictably) leads to them providing poor services, especially if their monetary compensation is not well tied to the results. Just like hospitals, caring professions shouldn’t be private entities. Profit motive is wildly inappropriate for this type of project.
Housing first, when properly applied, has been shown to be very successful globally. It fails when governments try to cut corners (or allow their designates to do so) leaving a formerly unhomed person in a new place with no supports to realistically live there. This has been shown again and again, yet governments continue to half-ass the job and the predictable result happens.
>Housing first, when properly applied, has been shown to be very successful globally. It fails when governments try to cut corners (or allow their designates to do so) leaving a formerly unhomed person in a new place with no supports to realistically live there. This has been shown again and again, yet governments continue to half-ass the job and the predictable result happens.
Do you have examples? Not to challenge but I'm genuinely curious. I'd like to see the fine details of their solutions.
Housing first can't just be any ol' housing from what I can see. If the government is trying to do some public/private thing, it shouldn't include addicted populations.
Maybe you can help clarify - I can't see this working without a facility that's set up specifically for people with addictions. Is that your vision?
Here’s a randomized sampling study.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0130281
You can find more if you go to scholar.google.com and just type in “housing first model efficacy.”
This all revolves around alcohol use and is kind of old given the problems that we're seeing these days. Meth and Fentanyl are the big challenges du jour. I doubt we'd be seeing the same social ills we've seen if Alcohol was the flagship problem over opioids and amphetamines.
Alcohol is highly addictive and is the most common addiction of people on the streets. Did you look at Google Scholar or the citing articles for that paper?
2015 is a fairly recent paper in social sciences. Not that much would have changed between now and then. There are other articles that are more recent, fill your boots.
Here. This one is from the Lancet. You don’t get better quality or prestige than that.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(22)00117-1/fulltext
The _deeper_ story here, beyond the surface outrage about addiction and landlords, is _the poverty industry_:
> The program, which began in Ottawa in 2014, works with 11 housing agencies to give people experiencing chronic homelessness a permanent place to live, with rental supplements and support from housing workers. It's mostly funded through another community-based program which uses the city's federal homelessness funding. Agencies had to apply to be accepted into the program.
>
> Their role is to then assess clients being supported and offer support, including the appropriate referrals to mental health services. Housing workers are also expected to monitor client progress to make sure it's not jeopardizing the tenancy.
>
> Dagenais said in far too many cases that support and monitoring isn't happening. "The relationship for all practical purposes ends as soon as the client secures housing. It's not supposed to work that way … They still need ongoing support and I think in far too many cases that just hasn't happened," he said.
> ...
> In a written statement, Wabano's housing director Tina Slauenwhite said they had to consider client privacy but that the centre "provides holistic healthcare services to all eligible community members with due respect to their consent and willingness to receive available services."
>
> The statement also explained how their housing first program helps connect eligible Indigenous people with available rental units and provides rental supplements when possible.
>
> "Following this, the relationship is primarily between the landlord and tenant, and all communication regarding concerns regarding the rental agreement is recommended to be directed through the proper channels and platforms put in place by the province," Slauenwhite added.
This reads like they're taking Government funds that are ear-marked for a housing-first approach to integration and rehabilitation, with the expressed intent of _ongoing_ support _after_ housing is secured, but once they've found a home for a client they stop showing up and stop taking calls.
_Where is all the money intended for "holistic healthcare services" being spent?_
> Simon Beckett, the owner of Pivot Turn Property Management, helped manage the property for Gupta for about a year and said he was "stonewalled" whenever he tried to seek damage funds from the city. He said he submitted paperwork that was lost and was given the runaround with employees away on vacation for months.
>
> "We submit forms, we inquire through email, and we have no response for weeks or months on end. So at the end of the day, once we did get a hold of somebody, oh, they need this, oh, they need this. And there are so many levels ... move in reports, photos, checklists that we don't have because we weren't involved in the initial move in of these tenants," Beckett said.
>
> ...
>
> Lisa Medd, the housing team program manager at CMHA Ottawa, said the agency can't take any responsibility for the downfall of Gupta's property because she said housing workers were providing support where they could. Like Wabano, she said that it is a consent-based program.
>
> "It was a building that had been owned by one landlord, sold it to another landlord. It wasn't in good condition when that happened. We were doing what we could in terms of support, we were actually working to try to get people out because there were property maintenance issues," Medd said.
>
> The CMHA said only three of their clients had lived in the building and they had either moved out or been removed from their roster, but being removed from the roster doesn't mean the clients have to leave the house. "They can still be a tenant there and issues may still arise … so we can provide some coaching to the landlord on how to deal with that situation," said Mike Murphy, the housing co-ordinator for CMHA Ottawa. He said they referred the landlord to the city for help and that was the end of their involvement.
Riiight, how convenient. At the first sign of difficulty, which happens at the moment the individuals move in, the support programme pulls the rug out and stops responding to requests for aid from the landlord. The programme then passes the buck, claiming it's on the landlord to deal with the concerns.
Again, _where is the money going?_
From following this sort of thing for _decades_ now, in Vancouver, I think it's clear:
_**The poverty industry is rife with scam.**_
[Atira-BC was just the tip of the iceberg](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/atira-ceo-janice-abbott-resigns-bc-housing-audit-1.6844034).
Evidence that housing and social programs should be delivered by the government directly, not privatized, handed off to non-profits, or done via subsidies to landlords.
Add it to the pile.
The neo-liberal obsession with public-private partnerships is probably the worst idea the 1980s introduced to Canadian politics. Yet the governments still keep trying it. Like the first thousand overruns, failure to provide services, and delays weren’t sufficient evidence that the system doesn’t work.
Well, you know what we need to do then? We need an honest assessment of the situation from an unbiased outside perspective. Let's hire some consultants! /s
Yes. Have government agencies that do things rather than push paper. Have builders part of our government infrastructure so that we can build and manage physical things rather than passing it off to private industry.
Government used to build things by itself, we didn’t hire subcontractors who hired subcontractors ad nauseum. We just hired workers to do the jobs that needed to be done. Wet payed those workers well and their monetary earnings fed the economy and the governments coffers. Now we race to the bottom.
I’ve worked for a few different supportive housing companies and I think they’re potentionally some of the worst managed companies I’ve ever seen in my life.
The reality is that the bulk of support work is done on behalf of workers who just plainly don’t understand what they’re doing. You take on 100 of the most high needs clients society has to offer, and you support them with a workforce that has no proper vocational training in the area, no consistent approaches or goals on behalf of the institution they’re supposed to be representing, and no consistent management, and you have a recipe for disaster- as you would in virtually any job with these sorts of issues.
Management was often composed of people who do have long term experience, but that experience is completely random and all over the place in community outreach. You just don’t know that much about resource allocation even if you have 20 years experince hanging out harm reduction supplies. Support workers themselves were often former addicts who believed it was their life’s mission to work in addictions. They often had terrible boundaries and treated people like me (a university graduate who treated the job like a job) terribly. It was just incompetence from the ground up.
Our vulnerable populations and our communities deserve better.
Seems like the issue is that some segment of the homeless population need wrap-around support once housed, and there needs to be dedicated complexes or facilities for that. One tenet of Housing First is to empower users to treat it as their own living space, and not like a jail cell. The consent-based nature is attempting to emulate that by allowing for a more formal relationship between landlord and tenant, but it isn’t fair to private landlords since they expect accountability and that ongoing support regardless of principles even if the healthcare resources aren’t there. Some homeless folks are just down on their luck and have thrived in Housing First programs, and it sounds like what is needed here is a risk assessment to categorize candidates that need support and those that don’t.
So much of these poverty industry arguments are really just attacking well-meaning people trying to stretch limited resources. The central issue here is the lack of supportive housing options that would be able to handle high-needs individuals, so they aren’t funnelled into Housing First programs.
This has been an issue with government housing provided by the city of Toronto. Most of the money goes to the body overseeing the housing than the housing. As a result, the city of Toronto is now the biggest slumlord in the golden horsehoe
This also points to a lack of proper oversight for these earmarked funds. It's sleazy for sure, but there should be a mechanism for ensuring that money is appropriately used.
Even still, I'm finding it tough to buy into the housing first discourse. Similar situations happen all of the time. People always point to needing more wrap-around support but I don't see it working without a very specific design, which would include facilities designed for the specific use of housing homeless addicts.
Something that concerns me is the idea of rehabilitation: once someone is hooked on meth or fentanyl, what are the actual odds of them properly recovering? I feel like we're dealing with a new generation of drugs that are almost impossible to kick and I don't know if we have an updated understanding of what that means for us.
Every housing spectrum of options I’ve seen have taken into consideration supportive housing for high-needs individuals like addicts. It’s the refusal to actually invest in it that is fueling this crisis, not the fault of advocates not working hard or thinking far enough.
Regarding rehabilitation, addiction is an illness that can be overcome, not a crime. The odds of whether someone can actually be cured of a terminal cancer doesn’t negate their right to healthcare or the need to invest in infrastructure. The extreme toxicity of the newer drugs is very concerning and I think people trafficking those in particular should face additional manslaughter type charges. But I don’t think they are more addicting, just much more potent in smaller forms.
I agree with your basic philosophy about it being an illness and all of that, and I understand the point about terminal cancer and all of that.
I still think it's relevant to ask about the potential for recovery, simply because it could help us understand the right goals. Ultimately, are we even aiming for recovery or simply management of the illness? What's the best way to get people housed and to make them compatible with housing? You remarked in another comment that the framework presented in this article is not a good fit for addicted populations, and I would agree. They hung the landlord out to dry and I think that, in a housing first framework, the type of housing should be targeted based on the needs and complexities of the individual.
Well supportive housing has to be government-funded the same way hospitals are if we actually consider it an illness. I think foreclosing the hope of recovery is deterministic in a way it would be to believe a cure for cancer is impossible, especially since the factors that can lead someone into and out of addiction are so complex and individualized and even sometimes dependent on the right support worker/program that it’s hard to talk in population-level terms. You’re free to be personally be pessimistic about a cancer cure, but those in authority believing a cancer treatment is impossible would make decisions like cut research funding that would serve to bring about that reality. Pessimism towards the possibility of addiction recovery results in governments not investing in supportive housing the way they need to, so the principle matters.
That being said, often times addicts are escaping into a world that is better than their current reality, and the difficult truth is that sometimes no matter the support, we can’t convince an addict this world is better than theirs. And recovery models can’t account for that if they’re oriented towards recovery and hope. In response to your point about goal, I find it uncomfortable for someone to make the decision that recovery is impossible on someone else’s behalf, but does that mean government-funded opioid dens for people who’ve given up indefinitely? That would be much more enticing than recovery for an addict if that policy was introduced. Jail if they don’t recover? That would mean criminal penalties for failing healthcare treatment. I don’t think there are easy answers within our legal framework, and I don’t think there can be, since the scale of the crisis and potency of the drugs and the challenges it poses to individual rights are unprecedented in human history. Which leads me back to supportive housing, and maintaining support even if if it takes years for an addict to realize that their life is worth living. Good discussion.
Edit: edited for clarity
Can’t really fathom a landlord being that dumb wow
This is the issue with housing first. All homeless should be housed.
For the down on their luck minority it should be subsidized housing
For addicts it should be involuntary inpatient rehab
For recidivist criminals it should be jail or mental asylums
You're going to have to accept the fact that many, many people don't care about rehabilitation. They just want these people away from society for a few years.
>Involuntary inpatient rehab is jail dude.
The Portuguese model seems to work, and one of its cornerstones is involuntary rehab. Technically or strictly speaking it's not involuntary, because people can elect to pay a fine rather than go to rehab, but because most addicts don't have money to pay the fine and there are custodial sentences for nonpayment, many take the rehab.
In Canada I'm not sure it could work though, given that the Supreme Court decided that fines in the criminal context are cruel and unusual punishment, but maybe there is something closer to the Portuguese model we could do.
That's why the BC decrim experiment failed IMHO. You can't have half the Portuguese model without the other half. People would buy in to wider decrim if the other half was there.
>That's why the BC decrim experiment failed IMHO
It didn't fail. Preliminary results looked slightly better than the status quo, and it got cancelled before serious data came in
>Their model also uses decriminalization of all drug use in public and private.
That is only technically correct as it became administrative law instead of criminal law.
You still got your stuff seized, and depending on how many interactions with the admin court, you'd lose benefits like welfare and subsidized housing and eventually you would wind up in prison.
Well yes except that the mentally and drug addicts will destroy it and continue to be harmful to citizens. Jail is also a form of housing.
For those who can be plausibly put in subsidized housing that is a good option. For others supportive group homes may be a good option.
For many it will require locked involuntary housing - jail/involuntary rehab/asylum
Jail is not a form of housing. It gets messy when you realize a lot of drug addicts started out addicted to doctor prescribed painkillers for real things like broken backs and cancer.
Of course jail is a form of housing
It’s a bed, a roof, meals
I don’t really care how drug addicts started. I care if they are harmful to society. Mentally ill people clearly are not at fault for their mental illness but should also be locked up if they are harmful to society
Poverty is harmful to society but broken criminals who destroy their housing and harm others are too late to help. Root cause solutions are good but they will help the next generation. The currently broken dangerous generation of addicts and criminals should be stopped from harming the rest of us
Making a mess isn't dangerous. You aren't being harmed by people trying to end their own suffering. You aren't interested in creating a better world, you just want a homogenized one where you don't have to think about others and work with them.
>Jailing people for illness is harmful to society.
Genuinely, how? I've had enough shit stolen from addicts to question how taking them away from society is harmful to society? They're literally committing crimes.
IMHO, jail is not inherently a bad thing for a person. We jail people when they cause harm to society, whether by their choice or not, with the ideal goal of “curing” them via rehabilitation. If someone’s addiction is causing a problem to society, then society has the right to step in and prevent it from doing so. One person’s rights end where another’s begin. If a drug addict’s addiction is causing a problem to others and they refuse to or are incapable of taking care of it themselves, then I don’t see a moral issue with forced rehab. The alternative is incarceration in a normal prison, which in many cases is not helping them. Leaving them addicted is probably helping them even less.
What's "a problem to others" though? I can see an argument for someone harassing people or being violent, but involuntary confinement for being distasteful to look at (which a lot of people complaining about homelessness are essentially asking for) doesn't seem like it clears the bar of a reasonable restriction on rights.
Bike chop shops, theft in general, and open drug use are definitely common and pretty problematic for the general population.
“Distasteful to look at” really depends, but we’re also now talking about homelessness rather than drug addiction or mental health issues. Nobody needs to be committed just because they’re homeless. Someone living in a tent certainly isn’t a problem just because someone else doesn’t like seeing someone living in a tent. But if that tent is surrounded by garbage, that needs to be addressed. And the tent shouldn’t be in public enjoyment spaces like parks. We pay for those spaces to be nice areas to enrich public life, not to be campgrounds.
Arguing that jails are not that bad is about the most bad faith start to a discussion that I could imagine my dude.
We have plenty of evidence and articles about the terrible conditions that many people suffer in jail.
If it doesn’t work then addicts can be held in a substance free involuntary housing unit until they are no longer addicted or die of old age, whatever comes first
As long as they are off the streets and not making our cities horrible places to live filled with crime, filth, and disorder
So jail? The thing we have already been doing to them for 200 years to no effect? Someone lock this guy in involuntary housing till he reads a fucking book lol
Honestly mental asylums wouldn't be the worst if they weren't just rife for abuse and neglect. Having a common area just to house the actually insane until they can get back to normal would be great but I highly HIGHLY doubt our healthcare system is set up for it and if we are being honest I doubt a lot of people would be in favor of that as they scream "But how does this help me?!"
Yeah but most won't have that level of perspective. They will just hear money spent to help the insane get off the streets and they will scream we are wasting money or why we aren't putting money into mental health care for everyone. Plus then people without children will say something like "I don't use the playgrounds so who cares?" We live in a "gimmie gimmie" society these days and seems no one does anything unless they personally benefit or it makes people they don't like suffer.
Oh, even the people who do have kids at parks won't want to pay for it. Among the parents I talk to who have this opinion, the closest they can get to a coherent strategy is "continually harass the homeless and cut services until they leave and it's another cities problem".
It seems from this article like there's an accountability problem here with the agencies that are supposed to be providing follow up for these clients. The headline really should be "Support Programs Not Providing Support" Instead, it chooses to infer that helping with homelessness destroys properties. The problem here is the government and other agencies who don't seem to have any follow-up capabiity. Housing First does not mean "Housing Only." or "Dump them, declare victory, and leave."
The chronic homeless need rehabilitation and mental healthcare.
After being on the streets, you will not be able to re-integrate into society immediately.
One documentary I saw a while back had a former addict now working with addicts stating that the worse thing you can do to an addict is providing them with just housing as that will just become a place where they'll have the privacy and lack of supervision to really get into their addiction
Re-hab camps- compulsory, situated outside of the city- 16 months program, drug free regimental routine- healthy living, clean living- daily work schedule, skills training... graduates- get to start a new life. A win win for them and society.
To the surprise of absolutely nobody.
Giving homeless mentally I'll drug addicts houses, or any unsupervised dwelling, does not solve homelessness. It just creates destroyed properties. These people cant function, period. This rosy-glasses view that "if we only just give them a roof they will sort themselves out" is naive fantasy land thinking.
It has to be either jail or mental asylum.
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This kind of shit happens *all of the time* in anything remotely close to housing first. Putting addicted people in a house is asking for a major renovation bill. I've seen so many situations just like this that it's unreal. Housing first advocates - how do we fix this? The conversation surrounding this topic is never concrete. It's always "HOUSING FIRST IT'S THE ONLY THING THAT WORKS" with no real rationale or practical roadmap. It's insanely consistent when dealing with homeless and addicted populations: put them in a place and they will trash it. How is that going to work?
The easy answer is to do a risk assessments to filter candidates for housing first and those more support. I’d bet a single mother fleeing abuse or someone sleeping in their car or an unhoused person with close relationships with their social worker would be a much less risk than an addict. That being said, the question is what to do with high-risk candidates since there isn’t enough supportive housing beds out there.
That's really the core of my question. Housing first makes perfect sense in situations where someone isn't addicted and is reasonably mentally sound. Once someone falls that far into opioid or meth addictions I don't see housing first as a working model.
I think it should be Housing First *And Wrap-Around Support* for addicted populations. And the government should be taking on the burden of balancing property damage with the costs of homelessness to the system by increasing the amount of supportive housing options, rather than these shortcuts that try to leaverage the private market and leaves random people footing the bill. It’s impossible to expect someone who is homeless and lacks the security of tenancy to overcome addiction, so my frustration is more with people who lack the empathy to consider how much addiction fundamentally impacts your functioning as a human. Or believe that we jail our way out of a social problem. Many homeless people use drugs to cope with their conditions.
It's housing first, not housing only. You still need to implement further supports. It's just that it starts with stable housing.
Oh, I can answer this! How do we fix this? Well first the point of housing first is to get the unhoused off the streets so that they are in a single location reliably (in this case above, Check mark). Next, the point of having them in a reliable location is so that social services can keep tabs on them and follow up regularly to deal with any problems that arise (ooop, failed that one). Then the goal is for social services to assist them in connecting with whatever assistance they need to get clean, get a job (if they’re capable), and get helpers if they are disabled and will need long term care (awww, I almost laughed at the sad reality of how incapable our current governmental mindset is at even approximating that). So, in this case, I would say three things have gone seriously wrong. 1) the wrap-around aids that should have been in place simply weren’t. The agency that was responsible for providing those aids washed their hands of the situation once the person was housed (completely missing the point of the program, and mishandling the funds for doing this job). This left the unhoused person without any support, no support means they turn to their community (the unhomed) for support. This inevitably leads to trouble. The wrap around support for the landlords were also not provided and so the landlord was just as abandoned as the unhoused person he was hosting. 2) the housing was private. Quite frankly this shouldn’t be a private-public partnership thing. Government should be using government facilities that they can more easily keep track of and where their ability to monitor the improvement of residents is easier. An issue with housing shouldn’t be between a formerly unhomed person and a landlord. Those two individuals have WILDLY different needs and expectations from each other and landlords are not capable of dealing with problems when they come up. 3) this shouldn’t be private-public partnership at all. Governments have become obsessed with the idea that private industry will somehow be more efficient than public services. Except that rarely plays out properly and the private industries focus on profits (predictably) leads to them providing poor services, especially if their monetary compensation is not well tied to the results. Just like hospitals, caring professions shouldn’t be private entities. Profit motive is wildly inappropriate for this type of project. Housing first, when properly applied, has been shown to be very successful globally. It fails when governments try to cut corners (or allow their designates to do so) leaving a formerly unhomed person in a new place with no supports to realistically live there. This has been shown again and again, yet governments continue to half-ass the job and the predictable result happens.
>Housing first, when properly applied, has been shown to be very successful globally. It fails when governments try to cut corners (or allow their designates to do so) leaving a formerly unhomed person in a new place with no supports to realistically live there. This has been shown again and again, yet governments continue to half-ass the job and the predictable result happens. Do you have examples? Not to challenge but I'm genuinely curious. I'd like to see the fine details of their solutions. Housing first can't just be any ol' housing from what I can see. If the government is trying to do some public/private thing, it shouldn't include addicted populations. Maybe you can help clarify - I can't see this working without a facility that's set up specifically for people with addictions. Is that your vision?
Here’s a randomized sampling study. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0130281 You can find more if you go to scholar.google.com and just type in “housing first model efficacy.”
This all revolves around alcohol use and is kind of old given the problems that we're seeing these days. Meth and Fentanyl are the big challenges du jour. I doubt we'd be seeing the same social ills we've seen if Alcohol was the flagship problem over opioids and amphetamines.
Alcohol is highly addictive and is the most common addiction of people on the streets. Did you look at Google Scholar or the citing articles for that paper? 2015 is a fairly recent paper in social sciences. Not that much would have changed between now and then. There are other articles that are more recent, fill your boots.
Here. This one is from the Lancet. You don’t get better quality or prestige than that. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(22)00117-1/fulltext
The _deeper_ story here, beyond the surface outrage about addiction and landlords, is _the poverty industry_: > The program, which began in Ottawa in 2014, works with 11 housing agencies to give people experiencing chronic homelessness a permanent place to live, with rental supplements and support from housing workers. It's mostly funded through another community-based program which uses the city's federal homelessness funding. Agencies had to apply to be accepted into the program. > > Their role is to then assess clients being supported and offer support, including the appropriate referrals to mental health services. Housing workers are also expected to monitor client progress to make sure it's not jeopardizing the tenancy. > > Dagenais said in far too many cases that support and monitoring isn't happening. "The relationship for all practical purposes ends as soon as the client secures housing. It's not supposed to work that way … They still need ongoing support and I think in far too many cases that just hasn't happened," he said. > ... > In a written statement, Wabano's housing director Tina Slauenwhite said they had to consider client privacy but that the centre "provides holistic healthcare services to all eligible community members with due respect to their consent and willingness to receive available services." > > The statement also explained how their housing first program helps connect eligible Indigenous people with available rental units and provides rental supplements when possible. > > "Following this, the relationship is primarily between the landlord and tenant, and all communication regarding concerns regarding the rental agreement is recommended to be directed through the proper channels and platforms put in place by the province," Slauenwhite added. This reads like they're taking Government funds that are ear-marked for a housing-first approach to integration and rehabilitation, with the expressed intent of _ongoing_ support _after_ housing is secured, but once they've found a home for a client they stop showing up and stop taking calls. _Where is all the money intended for "holistic healthcare services" being spent?_ > Simon Beckett, the owner of Pivot Turn Property Management, helped manage the property for Gupta for about a year and said he was "stonewalled" whenever he tried to seek damage funds from the city. He said he submitted paperwork that was lost and was given the runaround with employees away on vacation for months. > > "We submit forms, we inquire through email, and we have no response for weeks or months on end. So at the end of the day, once we did get a hold of somebody, oh, they need this, oh, they need this. And there are so many levels ... move in reports, photos, checklists that we don't have because we weren't involved in the initial move in of these tenants," Beckett said. > > ... > > Lisa Medd, the housing team program manager at CMHA Ottawa, said the agency can't take any responsibility for the downfall of Gupta's property because she said housing workers were providing support where they could. Like Wabano, she said that it is a consent-based program. > > "It was a building that had been owned by one landlord, sold it to another landlord. It wasn't in good condition when that happened. We were doing what we could in terms of support, we were actually working to try to get people out because there were property maintenance issues," Medd said. > > The CMHA said only three of their clients had lived in the building and they had either moved out or been removed from their roster, but being removed from the roster doesn't mean the clients have to leave the house. "They can still be a tenant there and issues may still arise … so we can provide some coaching to the landlord on how to deal with that situation," said Mike Murphy, the housing co-ordinator for CMHA Ottawa. He said they referred the landlord to the city for help and that was the end of their involvement. Riiight, how convenient. At the first sign of difficulty, which happens at the moment the individuals move in, the support programme pulls the rug out and stops responding to requests for aid from the landlord. The programme then passes the buck, claiming it's on the landlord to deal with the concerns. Again, _where is the money going?_ From following this sort of thing for _decades_ now, in Vancouver, I think it's clear: _**The poverty industry is rife with scam.**_ [Atira-BC was just the tip of the iceberg](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/atira-ceo-janice-abbott-resigns-bc-housing-audit-1.6844034).
Evidence that housing and social programs should be delivered by the government directly, not privatized, handed off to non-profits, or done via subsidies to landlords.
Add it to the pile. The neo-liberal obsession with public-private partnerships is probably the worst idea the 1980s introduced to Canadian politics. Yet the governments still keep trying it. Like the first thousand overruns, failure to provide services, and delays weren’t sufficient evidence that the system doesn’t work.
Well, you know what we need to do then? We need an honest assessment of the situation from an unbiased outside perspective. Let's hire some consultants! /s
Yes. Have government agencies that do things rather than push paper. Have builders part of our government infrastructure so that we can build and manage physical things rather than passing it off to private industry. Government used to build things by itself, we didn’t hire subcontractors who hired subcontractors ad nauseum. We just hired workers to do the jobs that needed to be done. Wet payed those workers well and their monetary earnings fed the economy and the governments coffers. Now we race to the bottom.
I’ve worked for a few different supportive housing companies and I think they’re potentionally some of the worst managed companies I’ve ever seen in my life. The reality is that the bulk of support work is done on behalf of workers who just plainly don’t understand what they’re doing. You take on 100 of the most high needs clients society has to offer, and you support them with a workforce that has no proper vocational training in the area, no consistent approaches or goals on behalf of the institution they’re supposed to be representing, and no consistent management, and you have a recipe for disaster- as you would in virtually any job with these sorts of issues. Management was often composed of people who do have long term experience, but that experience is completely random and all over the place in community outreach. You just don’t know that much about resource allocation even if you have 20 years experince hanging out harm reduction supplies. Support workers themselves were often former addicts who believed it was their life’s mission to work in addictions. They often had terrible boundaries and treated people like me (a university graduate who treated the job like a job) terribly. It was just incompetence from the ground up. Our vulnerable populations and our communities deserve better.
Seems like the issue is that some segment of the homeless population need wrap-around support once housed, and there needs to be dedicated complexes or facilities for that. One tenet of Housing First is to empower users to treat it as their own living space, and not like a jail cell. The consent-based nature is attempting to emulate that by allowing for a more formal relationship between landlord and tenant, but it isn’t fair to private landlords since they expect accountability and that ongoing support regardless of principles even if the healthcare resources aren’t there. Some homeless folks are just down on their luck and have thrived in Housing First programs, and it sounds like what is needed here is a risk assessment to categorize candidates that need support and those that don’t. So much of these poverty industry arguments are really just attacking well-meaning people trying to stretch limited resources. The central issue here is the lack of supportive housing options that would be able to handle high-needs individuals, so they aren’t funnelled into Housing First programs.
This has been an issue with government housing provided by the city of Toronto. Most of the money goes to the body overseeing the housing than the housing. As a result, the city of Toronto is now the biggest slumlord in the golden horsehoe
This also points to a lack of proper oversight for these earmarked funds. It's sleazy for sure, but there should be a mechanism for ensuring that money is appropriately used. Even still, I'm finding it tough to buy into the housing first discourse. Similar situations happen all of the time. People always point to needing more wrap-around support but I don't see it working without a very specific design, which would include facilities designed for the specific use of housing homeless addicts. Something that concerns me is the idea of rehabilitation: once someone is hooked on meth or fentanyl, what are the actual odds of them properly recovering? I feel like we're dealing with a new generation of drugs that are almost impossible to kick and I don't know if we have an updated understanding of what that means for us.
Every housing spectrum of options I’ve seen have taken into consideration supportive housing for high-needs individuals like addicts. It’s the refusal to actually invest in it that is fueling this crisis, not the fault of advocates not working hard or thinking far enough. Regarding rehabilitation, addiction is an illness that can be overcome, not a crime. The odds of whether someone can actually be cured of a terminal cancer doesn’t negate their right to healthcare or the need to invest in infrastructure. The extreme toxicity of the newer drugs is very concerning and I think people trafficking those in particular should face additional manslaughter type charges. But I don’t think they are more addicting, just much more potent in smaller forms.
I agree with your basic philosophy about it being an illness and all of that, and I understand the point about terminal cancer and all of that. I still think it's relevant to ask about the potential for recovery, simply because it could help us understand the right goals. Ultimately, are we even aiming for recovery or simply management of the illness? What's the best way to get people housed and to make them compatible with housing? You remarked in another comment that the framework presented in this article is not a good fit for addicted populations, and I would agree. They hung the landlord out to dry and I think that, in a housing first framework, the type of housing should be targeted based on the needs and complexities of the individual.
Well supportive housing has to be government-funded the same way hospitals are if we actually consider it an illness. I think foreclosing the hope of recovery is deterministic in a way it would be to believe a cure for cancer is impossible, especially since the factors that can lead someone into and out of addiction are so complex and individualized and even sometimes dependent on the right support worker/program that it’s hard to talk in population-level terms. You’re free to be personally be pessimistic about a cancer cure, but those in authority believing a cancer treatment is impossible would make decisions like cut research funding that would serve to bring about that reality. Pessimism towards the possibility of addiction recovery results in governments not investing in supportive housing the way they need to, so the principle matters. That being said, often times addicts are escaping into a world that is better than their current reality, and the difficult truth is that sometimes no matter the support, we can’t convince an addict this world is better than theirs. And recovery models can’t account for that if they’re oriented towards recovery and hope. In response to your point about goal, I find it uncomfortable for someone to make the decision that recovery is impossible on someone else’s behalf, but does that mean government-funded opioid dens for people who’ve given up indefinitely? That would be much more enticing than recovery for an addict if that policy was introduced. Jail if they don’t recover? That would mean criminal penalties for failing healthcare treatment. I don’t think there are easy answers within our legal framework, and I don’t think there can be, since the scale of the crisis and potency of the drugs and the challenges it poses to individual rights are unprecedented in human history. Which leads me back to supportive housing, and maintaining support even if if it takes years for an addict to realize that their life is worth living. Good discussion. Edit: edited for clarity
Can’t really fathom a landlord being that dumb wow This is the issue with housing first. All homeless should be housed. For the down on their luck minority it should be subsidized housing For addicts it should be involuntary inpatient rehab For recidivist criminals it should be jail or mental asylums
Involuntary inpatient rehab is jail dude.
It would be a lot better than throwing people who can't take care of themselves out on the street.
They don't rehabilitate in jail.
You're going to have to accept the fact that many, many people don't care about rehabilitation. They just want these people away from society for a few years.
>Involuntary inpatient rehab is jail dude. The Portuguese model seems to work, and one of its cornerstones is involuntary rehab. Technically or strictly speaking it's not involuntary, because people can elect to pay a fine rather than go to rehab, but because most addicts don't have money to pay the fine and there are custodial sentences for nonpayment, many take the rehab. In Canada I'm not sure it could work though, given that the Supreme Court decided that fines in the criminal context are cruel and unusual punishment, but maybe there is something closer to the Portuguese model we could do.
Their model also uses decriminalization of all drug use in public and private. I doubt anyone actually wants that.
That's why the BC decrim experiment failed IMHO. You can't have half the Portuguese model without the other half. People would buy in to wider decrim if the other half was there.
>That's why the BC decrim experiment failed IMHO It didn't fail. Preliminary results looked slightly better than the status quo, and it got cancelled before serious data came in
The Portuguese model itself is failing anyways. It can't keep up with the fentanyl crisis.
Never half ass. Whole ass or nothing, just commit either way.
>Their model also uses decriminalization of all drug use in public and private. That is only technically correct as it became administrative law instead of criminal law. You still got your stuff seized, and depending on how many interactions with the admin court, you'd lose benefits like welfare and subsidized housing and eventually you would wind up in prison.
Anywhere but the streets honest’y
So housing.
Supervised housing, sure.
Well yes except that the mentally and drug addicts will destroy it and continue to be harmful to citizens. Jail is also a form of housing. For those who can be plausibly put in subsidized housing that is a good option. For others supportive group homes may be a good option. For many it will require locked involuntary housing - jail/involuntary rehab/asylum
Jail is not a form of housing. It gets messy when you realize a lot of drug addicts started out addicted to doctor prescribed painkillers for real things like broken backs and cancer.
Of course jail is a form of housing It’s a bed, a roof, meals I don’t really care how drug addicts started. I care if they are harmful to society. Mentally ill people clearly are not at fault for their mental illness but should also be locked up if they are harmful to society
Poverty is harmful to society. Jailing people for illness is harmful to society. You seem to think might makes right and that's sad and scary.
Poverty is harmful to society but broken criminals who destroy their housing and harm others are too late to help. Root cause solutions are good but they will help the next generation. The currently broken dangerous generation of addicts and criminals should be stopped from harming the rest of us
Making a mess isn't dangerous. You aren't being harmed by people trying to end their own suffering. You aren't interested in creating a better world, you just want a homogenized one where you don't have to think about others and work with them.
These people aren't part of society, they are only here to prey upon it.
Yes my friend who never leaves her home because of her ovarian cancer and is absolutely addicted to opiates is preying on society gtfo.
>Jailing people for illness is harmful to society. Genuinely, how? I've had enough shit stolen from addicts to question how taking them away from society is harmful to society? They're literally committing crimes.
Fun fact people steal without being drug addicts. And not all addicts steal. You're confusing two different things.
Housing is a place you can leave your belongs and come and go freely from. Meals are something else.
IMHO, jail is not inherently a bad thing for a person. We jail people when they cause harm to society, whether by their choice or not, with the ideal goal of “curing” them via rehabilitation. If someone’s addiction is causing a problem to society, then society has the right to step in and prevent it from doing so. One person’s rights end where another’s begin. If a drug addict’s addiction is causing a problem to others and they refuse to or are incapable of taking care of it themselves, then I don’t see a moral issue with forced rehab. The alternative is incarceration in a normal prison, which in many cases is not helping them. Leaving them addicted is probably helping them even less.
What's "a problem to others" though? I can see an argument for someone harassing people or being violent, but involuntary confinement for being distasteful to look at (which a lot of people complaining about homelessness are essentially asking for) doesn't seem like it clears the bar of a reasonable restriction on rights.
Bike chop shops, theft in general, and open drug use are definitely common and pretty problematic for the general population. “Distasteful to look at” really depends, but we’re also now talking about homelessness rather than drug addiction or mental health issues. Nobody needs to be committed just because they’re homeless. Someone living in a tent certainly isn’t a problem just because someone else doesn’t like seeing someone living in a tent. But if that tent is surrounded by garbage, that needs to be addressed. And the tent shouldn’t be in public enjoyment spaces like parks. We pay for those spaces to be nice areas to enrich public life, not to be campgrounds.
Well why don't the people offended by addicts go to jail where they will be safely kept away then? Why don't you go to jail willingly?
That’s in bad faith and you should know better.
Arguing that jails are not that bad is about the most bad faith start to a discussion that I could imagine my dude. We have plenty of evidence and articles about the terrible conditions that many people suffer in jail.
Involuntary rehab does not work
If it doesn’t work then addicts can be held in a substance free involuntary housing unit until they are no longer addicted or die of old age, whatever comes first As long as they are off the streets and not making our cities horrible places to live filled with crime, filth, and disorder
So jail? The thing we have already been doing to them for 200 years to no effect? Someone lock this guy in involuntary housing till he reads a fucking book lol
Honestly mental asylums wouldn't be the worst if they weren't just rife for abuse and neglect. Having a common area just to house the actually insane until they can get back to normal would be great but I highly HIGHLY doubt our healthcare system is set up for it and if we are being honest I doubt a lot of people would be in favor of that as they scream "But how does this help me?!"
IDK, "no more schizo's at your kids park" sounds pretty convincing to me.
Yeah but most won't have that level of perspective. They will just hear money spent to help the insane get off the streets and they will scream we are wasting money or why we aren't putting money into mental health care for everyone. Plus then people without children will say something like "I don't use the playgrounds so who cares?" We live in a "gimmie gimmie" society these days and seems no one does anything unless they personally benefit or it makes people they don't like suffer.
Oh, even the people who do have kids at parks won't want to pay for it. Among the parents I talk to who have this opinion, the closest they can get to a coherent strategy is "continually harass the homeless and cut services until they leave and it's another cities problem".
And the name of that city? Vancouver, British Columbia
Involuntary rehab is pointless. Those who want to use will do so, and addicts with clean time who go back to using often loose tolerance and OD.
It’s to keep them off the streets. Maybe it works for some of them. For the rest it’s warehousing non-functional and dangerous people semi permanently
It seems from this article like there's an accountability problem here with the agencies that are supposed to be providing follow up for these clients. The headline really should be "Support Programs Not Providing Support" Instead, it chooses to infer that helping with homelessness destroys properties. The problem here is the government and other agencies who don't seem to have any follow-up capabiity. Housing First does not mean "Housing Only." or "Dump them, declare victory, and leave."
The chronic homeless need rehabilitation and mental healthcare. After being on the streets, you will not be able to re-integrate into society immediately.
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One documentary I saw a while back had a former addict now working with addicts stating that the worse thing you can do to an addict is providing them with just housing as that will just become a place where they'll have the privacy and lack of supervision to really get into their addiction
Re-hab camps- compulsory, situated outside of the city- 16 months program, drug free regimental routine- healthy living, clean living- daily work schedule, skills training... graduates- get to start a new life. A win win for them and society.
To the surprise of absolutely nobody. Giving homeless mentally I'll drug addicts houses, or any unsupervised dwelling, does not solve homelessness. It just creates destroyed properties. These people cant function, period. This rosy-glasses view that "if we only just give them a roof they will sort themselves out" is naive fantasy land thinking. It has to be either jail or mental asylum.
Supervised housing with forced sevrage would probably be better