Beginning in the l970's with de-institutionalization, we developed the idea that treatment for mental illness and/or drug and alcohol addiction must be voluntary, i.e., the person experiencing these problems must WANT to undergo treatment and must seek it out voluntarily. But in my 30+ years as a social worker, I learned that many people are either unwilling or unable to seek help on their own. The prospect of change is too frightening; it's easier just to numb it down and continue on. And in Portland, we eliminated the types of housing where such troubled folks could at least afford a room with a lock on the door--the old SRO hotels like the Danmoore, the Hamilton, the Kenton, etc. So they gradually began to take up residence on our streets, and we began to normalize their behavior, calling it "compassion" when it's actually indifference. We convinced ourselves that we had no right to intervene in their lives, so what else could we do? We began to see the problem as intractable. I think we need to re-examine the policy of public intervention and, if necessary, civil commitment to appropriate treatment facilities. Of course, we no longer HAVE appropriate treatment facilities, but we can create them if we have the political will to do so. I'm certainly not advocating a return to long-term institutionalization, but I do not think people have a "right" to live on our streets, psychotic, violent, drug-using. They need medical treatment and basic care as much as people who suffer heart attacks or strokes. They may initially need to be forced into it. I know this strikes many people here in the Pacific Northwest as draconian. I used to believe that if we just offered enough support, people would want to get help. But I learned over the years, painfully at times, that this simply isn't true. Our non-intervention policy has failed and has even made the problem worse.
1. Yes, I do think our mild climate has something to do with it - in the east of the Mississippi it gets WAY hot in the summer (and humid) and in the midwest and east coast it also gets bloody cold in the winter. Here, we have a week or two of super hot or super cold weather, but not as unliveable as elsewhere. So maybe not "the" reason, but it doesn't hurt.
2. We've had an influx of upper income people who can afford high rent (and rents in Seattle a few years ago went up by $650, $700 $850 PER MONTH in a whack).. Many also came from places where real estate was more expensive (California, I'm looking at you), and it allowed them to purchase without dickering and it's pushed up housing prices at all levels. I will never forget the 80 some year old lady standing in my checkout line with tears in her eyes - her rent was the one that went up $850 a month - and she asked me where she was going to go... I had no answer. Another of my customers was the one where rent went up $700... last I saw her she was living in her car, and she worked two jobs in the medical field. Uncontrolled rent increases forced some out. We may not see them in tents, but they are couch surfing or living in their car or paying for motels once a week to get showers... we really do not see all the misery of homelessness.
3. We have a huge addiction problem and mental health problems and do not have the infrastructure to deal with that. I don't know that ours is "worse" than anywhere else, but we seem to be unable or unwilling to expend the funds to deal with it, and Seattle SHOULD have the budget.
4. The cost of building low income - a few years ago I read a story that building low income housing was costing more than regular housing. Partly because the need for low income housing is greatest in the city limits where property is also more expensive... but it seems to me that there was more to it. Low income housing shouldn't cost "more" than other housing. Seattle is taking to purchasing hotels and motels that can be converted to housing, which I think is great. I think we also need more "tiny home" settlements with facilities. But even more, we need low income housing that exists to be supported. Where I live, the city allowed a business to purchase an entire block of homes that were zoned "residential" and flatten them for a parking lot (ostensibly). Businesses and devlopers ROUTINELY are allowed to do things that regular homeowners can't. And all too often, it is to eliminate low income housing for someone elses' profit. And "low income housing" really needs to be for LOW INCOME people. The rents on some "low income" I can't afford, and I'm a teacher.
I'm not an economist, so I likely missed something, but that's how it appears to me.
A large part of the reason that the Times Square area has successfully reduced homelessness is that 20-some years ago Breaking Ground began to establish supportive housing. Tenants weren’t just handed a key but were supported in their transition from homelessness, meeting them where they were in their life experience. In consequence, hundreds of individuals have gained security, improved mental health and sobriety, and re-connected with their families.
What’s missing is an honest discussion about mental health and the implications of “tolerance” without meaningfully addressing the problem. The reality is that the vast majority of visibly homeless people - the ones who are living in tents and on streets - have a poorly managed mental illness. They may have been born with it, or have developed it as a result of using drugs, or they may be using drugs to cope, or some combination, but the result remains the same: thousands of people with inadequately treated mental illness who are unable to function in society. When these patients are brought to the ER, they get a cursory evaluation and maybe a few days stay and an injection of an antipsychotic, and then they’re sent back to the street to continue as they were before. The fact is that liberal states, and ultra liberal cities like SF, Portland, etc in particular are more tolerant of the consequences - we let people shoot up drugs and provide Narcan, we let the homeless take showers in the ER. Narcan and showers are great, but what we really need is mental health care reform. We have tried the gentle, tolerant approach, and it doesn’t work. We have to accept that “allowing” people to live in squalor with untreated mental illness isn’t helping them. The only solution is mandating treatment - voluntarily, through the patients conservators or healthcare proxies, or in the most dire situations, through institutionalization. No one wants “insane asylums” to come back, and we can do this more humanely than we did before, but this is realistically the only way to true change.
I'm among those who hinted at one or two of these: "greater ideological purity on the West Coast, addiction/meth issues, less focus on outcomes, and referendums that gutted tax support for public education." A summary of my input would be: forget the damn labels - if it works, do more of it; if it doesn't, do less.
Today I visited the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum with a friend. Although I grew up in West Michigan and have maintained a home here since 2018, this was my first ever visit to the museum. At the end, while listening to Jimmy Carter and others deliver glowing eulogies to the man, I was fighting back tears. Like Jimmy Carter who followed him into the White House, Jerry Ford was a public servant, in the deepest sense of the term. Simply put, these men cared more for others than their own ambitions. Both understood the "game" of politics, and managed to tolerate the nonsense that is endemic to the subculture of Washington governance, but both rose above the noise to enact policies that genuinely helped millions of people - and continue to do so. They concerned themselves predominantly with what works best overall for the greatest number of people rather than what was politically expedient. I'm convinced both men were instrumental in the successful transformation from the doom & gloom of Watergate to the unchecked exuberance of the 1980's - which Reagan claimed credit for.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said, "this is a conversation we have to have," and "The metric of progressivism has to be actual progress in living conditions." We can wallow in smug self-righteousness about refusing to interact with the gigantic chunk of America that is on the "other side" of our beliefs, or else we can do what Ford did: reach out in a spirit of compromise and expedience. None of us has all the answers. Blaming "them" for our failures won't cut it. We all need to look at what works in other places & emulate those policies, whether it meets some ideological litmus test or not. And as you are doing here, we need to gather input from as many sources as possible, especially from those who think differently than we do.
This is a perfect example of how poorly we as a society understand causality. I've made my living doing statistical research science. We do correlations really well, and most of our attempts at understanding causality are more fantasy, and intuitive projections, than reality. The problem is in our math, and even our philosophy. The lack of good footing there means that policy makers are mostly shooting in the dark. It's still important to keep shooting, but saying this caused that at these scales is almost impossible to tease apart (without a lot more sophisticated studies). In its place most of us cherry-pick factoids that support our intuitions (or worse, our interests). At least there's some data involved, but with that kind of biased selection, it's hardly science. Still it makes for good stories that people can remember, and that's gotten us pretty far.
Sorry, Nick, but I don't think you can fix civility issues with better policy.
Do some things need to be fixed with better, less tolerant, policy? Absolutely.
Will putting everyone in housing suddenly solve the "problem"? No.
Because "the problem" is bigger. San Francisco hasn't failed just because it has lots of homeless. Many of the uncivil acts that make living there so problematic, such as finding feces and syringes on the sidewalk everywhere, cannot be solved by housing everyone or giving them all places to shoot up. San Francisco has failed because, in the name of "freedom", it allows people to pretty much do whatever the heqq they please with minimal or no consequence.
Think bigger than policy! Think values (yes, I know, they're *so* Republican, aren't they??) but as Lenny Bruce noted, if people are throwing shit where the food is, you've got a problem. How do we recivilize the feral?
NIMBY is SOOOO strong. San Jose is trying to add 400 tiny homes and just this week, some neighborhood board was filled with residents with protest signs because... NIMBY. And they all say things like, "I'm all for helping the homeless, but I don't think this is the best place." as in "it's too close to my house." I realize people worrying about their home prices getting devalued when they're paying $2 mil for a hovel, but come on, people. Stop with the NIMBY.
I agree with you about nimbyism, which I think runs very deep in this country. People want their homes and neighborhoods to be havens, free from stress and fear. And people are especially fearful and fear driven when they have children. A couple of years ago, my wife and I stopped at a fast food restaurant in Portland to get some lunch and use the bathrooms. In the men’s room I found a young man cursing and making threats while staring into the mirror. His stuff was spread out around the urinal and in the toilet stall. I got out as soon as I could. My wife reported a similar kind of person in the women’s room, less violent, perhaps, but behaving just as strangely. I simply cannot imagine taking a child into either of those restrooms, not to speak of sending them there alone. I contrast this with a few days we spent in the middle of Tokyo, staying in an inexpensive hotel, walking extensively in the city and using numerous public restrooms. Even in the middle of the night, out by myself, I never felt safer. And there were homeless people there too. We saw them lining up for a free lunch.
They got their food, went to an areawith picnic tables and ate, and then went on their way. I saw zero antisocial behavior. Zero.
So I appear to be rambling from decrying nimbyism all the way to free lunches in Tokyo. What’s my point? Simply this: If we want the housed among us to really commit to helping the homeless by accepting them as neighbors, then we must take measures to make those who are not homeless feel safe and that their children are safe in the neighborhoods where they live, in the parks where they play, in the restaurants where they eat, and in all the places where they are likely to be in pursuit of that happiness that the founders so eloquently declared as a god-given right.
I have heard some people complaining that the solutions being proposed for housing homeless people (safe spaces, tiny house communities, e.g.) are only temporary so are no good and we need permanent housing. While I agree that permanent housing is needed, I think these interim solutions are helpful for getting people off the street and into services, while we work on building permanent housing. We need to bring back SROs and boarding houses, as well.
I’ve been thinking about these issues a lot and have gained a lot of insight into these issues by listening to Ezra Klein’s podcast about why a lot of progressive policies have failed. I have some insight into the education system as I have worked both in public and private schools. The public high and middle schools I have worked in have been underfunded and under staffed and have been unable to meet the needs of the most vulnerable students. There simply are not enough counselors and support staff and class sizes are too large for teachers to meet the needs of struggling students. In the private schools I have worked in, struggling students basically have wrap around services. Counselors, speech pathologists, occupational therapists, tutors, educational assistants. As soon as a problem arises, the child gets services at school. Children are not allowed to fail. Public schools just don’t have the resources to do this.
I noticed that homelessness began to increase in the early 2000s in my town and area (Ashland and southern Oregon). And it’s been increasing ever since. I know the meth and opioid use has increased as well. Based on the needles I’ve seen in the areas along the railroad, creeks, etc and behavior of some of the homeless - I believe drugs are definitely part of the problem for us. We have a lot of people coming to our area, wanting a better life … some dreams of farming or a small business but housing is ridiculously expensive and they come without a solid plan or means to support it. Plus there are some that don’t want housing … in the minority but vocal and prefer to call themselves “unhoused”. It’s truly a sad situation and people try to help with meal services and other support but it’s not enough. However, when I’m in Portland it’s magnified so much - I don’t recognize my old city. It can’t all be drugs.
California education performance used to be near the top decades ago. These things happened:
1) massive waves of immigration from Mexico flooded our schools with ESL students and led to entire neighborhoods in my city where there were multiple families, often unrelated, living in each house. Couple that with parents who worked constantly, didn’t speak English, and their kids growing up completely culturally different than their parents. Violence, child abuse, intrafamilial and interfamilial sexual abuse. This created massive dysfunction in those families, which led to huge increases in gang membership, primarily the children who grew up in these dysfunctional houses. All of this degraded the AVERAGE performance of California school kids.
2) Discipline in public schools has been banned. Because some leftists ALWAYS equate racial differences in discipline with racist enforcement, public schools can no longer hold kids accountable for their actions. It can’t possibly be that certain groups behave worse on average due to many historical factors. “IT MUST BE RACISM!” No more expulsions, no more suspensions, no more detentions. In response, good parents won court battles to start charter schools and use public school funding for them. There has been an explosion of charter schools in my area over the past 30 years, with a corresponding exodus of quite a few intelligent, well behaved kids from public schools. Who can blame them when public schools like mine were filled with gangsters killing each other and innocent bystanders? How can teachers possibly do a good job educating, when there is literally no mechanism to stop disruptive classroom behavior?
Bottom line…don’t blame the immigrants. Blame the idiot politicians who looked the other way and let them flood over the border because farmers wanted cheap labor. Then they pretended to hate illegal immigration. They should have set up an immigration system that guaranteed fair wages for farmworkers. They could have brought their families and afforded to live 1 family per household, or even gone back to Mexico with their money and been wealthy. Instead, they encouraged extreme dysfunction, gang warfare, and destroyed many neighborhoods and school systems.
Disappointed to read your dismissal of more survivable LA and San Francisco because of weather as "an excuse." I feel no need to make excuses. I actually live in Southern California and know it to be a destination for homeless people who can sleep outside at night without freezing to death. And California has been known for decades as a state where sometimes, maybe, there's a little more compassion for the people whom TFG (Donnorrhea) has been calling "losers" for decades.
Thanks Nick for your review and perspective on our common assumptions about why Homelessness is greater on the West Coast, democratic states. Now, I would like to offer some other areas to consider. It seems like population has something to do with red/blue state differences. I would also like to suggest that over the years the Democrats have tried to patchwork policies to assist housing the homeless. The result is complicated, and hard to unravel. Our current polity leaves Housing with cities; and social services with Counties. All the two have to do is not cooperate and nothing can get done.
The Federal funding policies rely on 'Continuums of Care' to receive federal dollars. In Oregon, this is confounded by 52 counties in one continuum, who cannot coordinate homeless funds between one another. Actually, an ignorance at the state level as to how federal funds are received. The NIMBY dominance of conservative city councils allows for nowhere to house folks in planning. These are such wonky issues that the general public cannot understand how it works. You did not follow up on the criminalization issues, which I think is the 'conservitive' answer to housing the homeless, and might explain red/blue state differences. Another issue is the idea that solving homelessness is a social issue to be solved by 'charity', ie churches, nonprofits should be responsible for solving homelessness. There is no way either are capable of doing more than either villainizing those who do not comply, and neither will ever have the funds to construct and manage housing affordable by the houseless, or deliver science based recovery programs. This is a worthy discussion you are working on. Thank you.
Basically, Mr. Kristof, you confirmed some of my thoughts. If Oregon is #1 in addiction and #50 in treatment, it's not surprising that there would be more homelessness, insofar as addiction contributes to homelessness. However, the issue is far more complicated. When one looks at the reasons for addiction, they include mental illness, poverty, hopelessness and lack of opportunity, usually in combination of some sort or another. Many addicts and alcoholics start using addictive drugs and alcohol at very young ages, even in elementary school. When I managed addiction programs, they often told me that the first time they tried their drug of choice, they finally felt like themselves and the first time they drank alcohol, they got drunk and drank to drunkeness on purpose thereafter. Without effective mental health programs in communities and schools, these children continue to use drugs as a coping mechanism into adulthood and beyond. Low levels of education are both an outcome and a contributor to the problem. Another issue is instability in the home. All these and other factors come together to make addiction, mental health and homelessness a three-pronged problem. You can't solve one without addressing the others.
Beginning in the l970's with de-institutionalization, we developed the idea that treatment for mental illness and/or drug and alcohol addiction must be voluntary, i.e., the person experiencing these problems must WANT to undergo treatment and must seek it out voluntarily. But in my 30+ years as a social worker, I learned that many people are either unwilling or unable to seek help on their own. The prospect of change is too frightening; it's easier just to numb it down and continue on. And in Portland, we eliminated the types of housing where such troubled folks could at least afford a room with a lock on the door--the old SRO hotels like the Danmoore, the Hamilton, the Kenton, etc. So they gradually began to take up residence on our streets, and we began to normalize their behavior, calling it "compassion" when it's actually indifference. We convinced ourselves that we had no right to intervene in their lives, so what else could we do? We began to see the problem as intractable. I think we need to re-examine the policy of public intervention and, if necessary, civil commitment to appropriate treatment facilities. Of course, we no longer HAVE appropriate treatment facilities, but we can create them if we have the political will to do so. I'm certainly not advocating a return to long-term institutionalization, but I do not think people have a "right" to live on our streets, psychotic, violent, drug-using. They need medical treatment and basic care as much as people who suffer heart attacks or strokes. They may initially need to be forced into it. I know this strikes many people here in the Pacific Northwest as draconian. I used to believe that if we just offered enough support, people would want to get help. But I learned over the years, painfully at times, that this simply isn't true. Our non-intervention policy has failed and has even made the problem worse.
I tend to think that it is "all of the above"
1. Yes, I do think our mild climate has something to do with it - in the east of the Mississippi it gets WAY hot in the summer (and humid) and in the midwest and east coast it also gets bloody cold in the winter. Here, we have a week or two of super hot or super cold weather, but not as unliveable as elsewhere. So maybe not "the" reason, but it doesn't hurt.
2. We've had an influx of upper income people who can afford high rent (and rents in Seattle a few years ago went up by $650, $700 $850 PER MONTH in a whack).. Many also came from places where real estate was more expensive (California, I'm looking at you), and it allowed them to purchase without dickering and it's pushed up housing prices at all levels. I will never forget the 80 some year old lady standing in my checkout line with tears in her eyes - her rent was the one that went up $850 a month - and she asked me where she was going to go... I had no answer. Another of my customers was the one where rent went up $700... last I saw her she was living in her car, and she worked two jobs in the medical field. Uncontrolled rent increases forced some out. We may not see them in tents, but they are couch surfing or living in their car or paying for motels once a week to get showers... we really do not see all the misery of homelessness.
3. We have a huge addiction problem and mental health problems and do not have the infrastructure to deal with that. I don't know that ours is "worse" than anywhere else, but we seem to be unable or unwilling to expend the funds to deal with it, and Seattle SHOULD have the budget.
4. The cost of building low income - a few years ago I read a story that building low income housing was costing more than regular housing. Partly because the need for low income housing is greatest in the city limits where property is also more expensive... but it seems to me that there was more to it. Low income housing shouldn't cost "more" than other housing. Seattle is taking to purchasing hotels and motels that can be converted to housing, which I think is great. I think we also need more "tiny home" settlements with facilities. But even more, we need low income housing that exists to be supported. Where I live, the city allowed a business to purchase an entire block of homes that were zoned "residential" and flatten them for a parking lot (ostensibly). Businesses and devlopers ROUTINELY are allowed to do things that regular homeowners can't. And all too often, it is to eliminate low income housing for someone elses' profit. And "low income housing" really needs to be for LOW INCOME people. The rents on some "low income" I can't afford, and I'm a teacher.
I'm not an economist, so I likely missed something, but that's how it appears to me.
A large part of the reason that the Times Square area has successfully reduced homelessness is that 20-some years ago Breaking Ground began to establish supportive housing. Tenants weren’t just handed a key but were supported in their transition from homelessness, meeting them where they were in their life experience. In consequence, hundreds of individuals have gained security, improved mental health and sobriety, and re-connected with their families.
What’s missing is an honest discussion about mental health and the implications of “tolerance” without meaningfully addressing the problem. The reality is that the vast majority of visibly homeless people - the ones who are living in tents and on streets - have a poorly managed mental illness. They may have been born with it, or have developed it as a result of using drugs, or they may be using drugs to cope, or some combination, but the result remains the same: thousands of people with inadequately treated mental illness who are unable to function in society. When these patients are brought to the ER, they get a cursory evaluation and maybe a few days stay and an injection of an antipsychotic, and then they’re sent back to the street to continue as they were before. The fact is that liberal states, and ultra liberal cities like SF, Portland, etc in particular are more tolerant of the consequences - we let people shoot up drugs and provide Narcan, we let the homeless take showers in the ER. Narcan and showers are great, but what we really need is mental health care reform. We have tried the gentle, tolerant approach, and it doesn’t work. We have to accept that “allowing” people to live in squalor with untreated mental illness isn’t helping them. The only solution is mandating treatment - voluntarily, through the patients conservators or healthcare proxies, or in the most dire situations, through institutionalization. No one wants “insane asylums” to come back, and we can do this more humanely than we did before, but this is realistically the only way to true change.
I'm among those who hinted at one or two of these: "greater ideological purity on the West Coast, addiction/meth issues, less focus on outcomes, and referendums that gutted tax support for public education." A summary of my input would be: forget the damn labels - if it works, do more of it; if it doesn't, do less.
Today I visited the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum with a friend. Although I grew up in West Michigan and have maintained a home here since 2018, this was my first ever visit to the museum. At the end, while listening to Jimmy Carter and others deliver glowing eulogies to the man, I was fighting back tears. Like Jimmy Carter who followed him into the White House, Jerry Ford was a public servant, in the deepest sense of the term. Simply put, these men cared more for others than their own ambitions. Both understood the "game" of politics, and managed to tolerate the nonsense that is endemic to the subculture of Washington governance, but both rose above the noise to enact policies that genuinely helped millions of people - and continue to do so. They concerned themselves predominantly with what works best overall for the greatest number of people rather than what was politically expedient. I'm convinced both men were instrumental in the successful transformation from the doom & gloom of Watergate to the unchecked exuberance of the 1980's - which Reagan claimed credit for.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said, "this is a conversation we have to have," and "The metric of progressivism has to be actual progress in living conditions." We can wallow in smug self-righteousness about refusing to interact with the gigantic chunk of America that is on the "other side" of our beliefs, or else we can do what Ford did: reach out in a spirit of compromise and expedience. None of us has all the answers. Blaming "them" for our failures won't cut it. We all need to look at what works in other places & emulate those policies, whether it meets some ideological litmus test or not. And as you are doing here, we need to gather input from as many sources as possible, especially from those who think differently than we do.
This is a perfect example of how poorly we as a society understand causality. I've made my living doing statistical research science. We do correlations really well, and most of our attempts at understanding causality are more fantasy, and intuitive projections, than reality. The problem is in our math, and even our philosophy. The lack of good footing there means that policy makers are mostly shooting in the dark. It's still important to keep shooting, but saying this caused that at these scales is almost impossible to tease apart (without a lot more sophisticated studies). In its place most of us cherry-pick factoids that support our intuitions (or worse, our interests). At least there's some data involved, but with that kind of biased selection, it's hardly science. Still it makes for good stories that people can remember, and that's gotten us pretty far.
Sorry, Nick, but I don't think you can fix civility issues with better policy.
Do some things need to be fixed with better, less tolerant, policy? Absolutely.
Will putting everyone in housing suddenly solve the "problem"? No.
Because "the problem" is bigger. San Francisco hasn't failed just because it has lots of homeless. Many of the uncivil acts that make living there so problematic, such as finding feces and syringes on the sidewalk everywhere, cannot be solved by housing everyone or giving them all places to shoot up. San Francisco has failed because, in the name of "freedom", it allows people to pretty much do whatever the heqq they please with minimal or no consequence.
Think bigger than policy! Think values (yes, I know, they're *so* Republican, aren't they??) but as Lenny Bruce noted, if people are throwing shit where the food is, you've got a problem. How do we recivilize the feral?
NIMBY is SOOOO strong. San Jose is trying to add 400 tiny homes and just this week, some neighborhood board was filled with residents with protest signs because... NIMBY. And they all say things like, "I'm all for helping the homeless, but I don't think this is the best place." as in "it's too close to my house." I realize people worrying about their home prices getting devalued when they're paying $2 mil for a hovel, but come on, people. Stop with the NIMBY.
I agree with you about nimbyism, which I think runs very deep in this country. People want their homes and neighborhoods to be havens, free from stress and fear. And people are especially fearful and fear driven when they have children. A couple of years ago, my wife and I stopped at a fast food restaurant in Portland to get some lunch and use the bathrooms. In the men’s room I found a young man cursing and making threats while staring into the mirror. His stuff was spread out around the urinal and in the toilet stall. I got out as soon as I could. My wife reported a similar kind of person in the women’s room, less violent, perhaps, but behaving just as strangely. I simply cannot imagine taking a child into either of those restrooms, not to speak of sending them there alone. I contrast this with a few days we spent in the middle of Tokyo, staying in an inexpensive hotel, walking extensively in the city and using numerous public restrooms. Even in the middle of the night, out by myself, I never felt safer. And there were homeless people there too. We saw them lining up for a free lunch.
They got their food, went to an areawith picnic tables and ate, and then went on their way. I saw zero antisocial behavior. Zero.
So I appear to be rambling from decrying nimbyism all the way to free lunches in Tokyo. What’s my point? Simply this: If we want the housed among us to really commit to helping the homeless by accepting them as neighbors, then we must take measures to make those who are not homeless feel safe and that their children are safe in the neighborhoods where they live, in the parks where they play, in the restaurants where they eat, and in all the places where they are likely to be in pursuit of that happiness that the founders so eloquently declared as a god-given right.
I have heard some people complaining that the solutions being proposed for housing homeless people (safe spaces, tiny house communities, e.g.) are only temporary so are no good and we need permanent housing. While I agree that permanent housing is needed, I think these interim solutions are helpful for getting people off the street and into services, while we work on building permanent housing. We need to bring back SROs and boarding houses, as well.
I’ve been thinking about these issues a lot and have gained a lot of insight into these issues by listening to Ezra Klein’s podcast about why a lot of progressive policies have failed. I have some insight into the education system as I have worked both in public and private schools. The public high and middle schools I have worked in have been underfunded and under staffed and have been unable to meet the needs of the most vulnerable students. There simply are not enough counselors and support staff and class sizes are too large for teachers to meet the needs of struggling students. In the private schools I have worked in, struggling students basically have wrap around services. Counselors, speech pathologists, occupational therapists, tutors, educational assistants. As soon as a problem arises, the child gets services at school. Children are not allowed to fail. Public schools just don’t have the resources to do this.
I noticed that homelessness began to increase in the early 2000s in my town and area (Ashland and southern Oregon). And it’s been increasing ever since. I know the meth and opioid use has increased as well. Based on the needles I’ve seen in the areas along the railroad, creeks, etc and behavior of some of the homeless - I believe drugs are definitely part of the problem for us. We have a lot of people coming to our area, wanting a better life … some dreams of farming or a small business but housing is ridiculously expensive and they come without a solid plan or means to support it. Plus there are some that don’t want housing … in the minority but vocal and prefer to call themselves “unhoused”. It’s truly a sad situation and people try to help with meal services and other support but it’s not enough. However, when I’m in Portland it’s magnified so much - I don’t recognize my old city. It can’t all be drugs.
California education performance used to be near the top decades ago. These things happened:
1) massive waves of immigration from Mexico flooded our schools with ESL students and led to entire neighborhoods in my city where there were multiple families, often unrelated, living in each house. Couple that with parents who worked constantly, didn’t speak English, and their kids growing up completely culturally different than their parents. Violence, child abuse, intrafamilial and interfamilial sexual abuse. This created massive dysfunction in those families, which led to huge increases in gang membership, primarily the children who grew up in these dysfunctional houses. All of this degraded the AVERAGE performance of California school kids.
2) Discipline in public schools has been banned. Because some leftists ALWAYS equate racial differences in discipline with racist enforcement, public schools can no longer hold kids accountable for their actions. It can’t possibly be that certain groups behave worse on average due to many historical factors. “IT MUST BE RACISM!” No more expulsions, no more suspensions, no more detentions. In response, good parents won court battles to start charter schools and use public school funding for them. There has been an explosion of charter schools in my area over the past 30 years, with a corresponding exodus of quite a few intelligent, well behaved kids from public schools. Who can blame them when public schools like mine were filled with gangsters killing each other and innocent bystanders? How can teachers possibly do a good job educating, when there is literally no mechanism to stop disruptive classroom behavior?
Bottom line…don’t blame the immigrants. Blame the idiot politicians who looked the other way and let them flood over the border because farmers wanted cheap labor. Then they pretended to hate illegal immigration. They should have set up an immigration system that guaranteed fair wages for farmworkers. They could have brought their families and afforded to live 1 family per household, or even gone back to Mexico with their money and been wealthy. Instead, they encouraged extreme dysfunction, gang warfare, and destroyed many neighborhoods and school systems.
Disappointed to read your dismissal of more survivable LA and San Francisco because of weather as "an excuse." I feel no need to make excuses. I actually live in Southern California and know it to be a destination for homeless people who can sleep outside at night without freezing to death. And California has been known for decades as a state where sometimes, maybe, there's a little more compassion for the people whom TFG (Donnorrhea) has been calling "losers" for decades.
Thanks Nick for your review and perspective on our common assumptions about why Homelessness is greater on the West Coast, democratic states. Now, I would like to offer some other areas to consider. It seems like population has something to do with red/blue state differences. I would also like to suggest that over the years the Democrats have tried to patchwork policies to assist housing the homeless. The result is complicated, and hard to unravel. Our current polity leaves Housing with cities; and social services with Counties. All the two have to do is not cooperate and nothing can get done.
The Federal funding policies rely on 'Continuums of Care' to receive federal dollars. In Oregon, this is confounded by 52 counties in one continuum, who cannot coordinate homeless funds between one another. Actually, an ignorance at the state level as to how federal funds are received. The NIMBY dominance of conservative city councils allows for nowhere to house folks in planning. These are such wonky issues that the general public cannot understand how it works. You did not follow up on the criminalization issues, which I think is the 'conservitive' answer to housing the homeless, and might explain red/blue state differences. Another issue is the idea that solving homelessness is a social issue to be solved by 'charity', ie churches, nonprofits should be responsible for solving homelessness. There is no way either are capable of doing more than either villainizing those who do not comply, and neither will ever have the funds to construct and manage housing affordable by the houseless, or deliver science based recovery programs. This is a worthy discussion you are working on. Thank you.
Basically, Mr. Kristof, you confirmed some of my thoughts. If Oregon is #1 in addiction and #50 in treatment, it's not surprising that there would be more homelessness, insofar as addiction contributes to homelessness. However, the issue is far more complicated. When one looks at the reasons for addiction, they include mental illness, poverty, hopelessness and lack of opportunity, usually in combination of some sort or another. Many addicts and alcoholics start using addictive drugs and alcohol at very young ages, even in elementary school. When I managed addiction programs, they often told me that the first time they tried their drug of choice, they finally felt like themselves and the first time they drank alcohol, they got drunk and drank to drunkeness on purpose thereafter. Without effective mental health programs in communities and schools, these children continue to use drugs as a coping mechanism into adulthood and beyond. Low levels of education are both an outcome and a contributor to the problem. Another issue is instability in the home. All these and other factors come together to make addiction, mental health and homelessness a three-pronged problem. You can't solve one without addressing the others.