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.
Thanks for your comment. The loss of SRO hotels, trailer parks, boarding houses and other traditional low-cost housing has been a catastrophe for low-income Americans, and of course it has been compounded by increased inequality and spreading addiction. And thanks also for your work on the front lines as a social worker.
I have always lived on the East Coast, with a brief foray into the Midwest but I believe your points are well taken. When I opened a new addiction/mental health treatment center in Connecticut, I waited until early January, knowing that issues over the holidays would bring people into treatment (as compared to opening in mid-December when people wanted to party). We were in the black in 9 months. This outpatient hospital treatment was for those who had insurance, but the basics are the same for those who don't have insurance. Something has to get people into treatment, be it a crisis or force. I also believe that safe spaces for injectable drugs and needle exchange can lead to an increase in treatment over time.
THIS^^^^^^^^^ I work with the indigent as well. This is spot on. We need hospitals. We need to be able to remand people from custody directly into hospitals.
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 agree. My reasonably well-managed mental illness (PTSD) put me on the streets when, as a disabled widow, I could no longer earn enough money at low-level, temporary jobs to afford housing. My social services admin degree let me see dysfunction more clearly both with my homeless peers and within the system. We've got to stop thinking that mental illness is a "choice," even (especially?) when it's occluded by drug use. Mentally healthy, productive people don't obliterate their brains with meth. These folks are in need of intervention long before they disintegrate completely.
Amen! I think there's also another group who do not have mental illness but are also unwilling to live by our social codes. But having some recourse for those who do have such illness would be wonderful. It would surely lower the temperature a lot and maybe the rest of the feral would go along for the ride.
Technically that's a mental illness as well, it's called "antisocial personality disorder" and those folks bounce in and out of prison... Possibly as many as a third of prisoners are psychopaths, and I suspect the percentage of those amongst the homeless is pretty high, too, because they like preying on a vulnerable population...
Then the question becomes why West Coast cities would have more people with ASPD than other places. While I think APSD does apply to some, this thread has focused almost entirely on homeless and what I've been trying to emphasize is that a lot of the things that are done that make SF so broken are not done by homeless people but by people who have lost any connection to the larger society; stealing Amazon packages off porches, breaking windows, shoplifting, car theft, and so on. Homelessness tends to be concentrated and, while uncomfortable for us, doesn't make a city a mess or ruin most neighborhoods. SF has had a large homeless population for quite some time, as has Portland. They have become broken cities only recently. It's the disregard of social conventions (like leaving other peoples' bikes alone) that makes them the mess they are.
Homelessness was once more concentrated. Once it was confined to skid rows. Now it is everywhere -- any vacant lot sprouts a tent city. We have always had criminals, people who profit off society, but they didn't live in tents on the sidewalk. Over my 17 years there Portland went from being a lovely place to live with a few scary blocks on Burnside downtown to being overwhelmed by homeless people camped everywhere. In the three years I was in Douglas County, the homeless population went from around 30 known individuals to 100 or so. I suspect the uptick in population isn't a specific underlying mental health issue but access to meth...to folks losing their mental control very, very quickly. The West Coast seems to have gotten Mexican New Meth ahead of other parts of the country?
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.
And of course, there's a better way. It's not more studies as much as doing a better job sharing the data from existing studies and ongoing studies. And with that the main challenges are around privacy. If you're in policy-related research, and want more information, send me an email. The same solution would enable things like hyper-personalized medicine. People (like me) aren't working on these problems because there's no money in it. We're mostly trading, running sports teams, and giving you the posts and videos that keep you online-- because success there turns into money. Nicholas is asking the right questions, as always. I worry he just doesn't have the scientific support he needs to do "policy modeling", because I think that field still needs to be invented.
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?
Well, for one thing, don't force people to come into this world if there is no welcome, no safe place, no love. Never treat women and girls as baby-factories who can be owned and controlled by the men in this world. The kind of damage you characterize as "feral" is linked to early childhood trauma, bad nutrition, neglect etc. Include in the culture's values the concept of women as actual humans, not livestock.
California is not a state where abortion has been hard to get since before nearly any woman who can have a baby *now* was born. Do you plan to make it mandatory for pregnant women in certain social strata?
I take it that what you mean is that women in California have access to abortion but there is still a problem with homelessness or antisocial behavior. I take it that your question about mandatory abortion was not seriously meant, just an added emphasis to your assertion that access to abortion, while a good thing, is not going to reduce homelessness in blue west coast cities.
I am pointing out that complaints of abortion being inaccessible in CA are disingenous, and the idea that abortion access is a meaningful tool to reduce homelessness is silly.
Forced birth is not the answer. BUT, if you want to force birth then pay the taxes for afterschool care, paid maternity/paternity time (at least 3 months each--if not working then paid at minimum wage for the time with their child), paid childcare and preschool, and a healthier child tax credit. Put your $ (and your votes) where you mouth is, to support the children you are forcing to be born. Canada has easy abortion access through 9 months and yet, a much lower abortion use--they take care of families.
I doubt this is s serious question. NOBODY wants to make abortion mandatory EVER for ANY woman ANYwhere. Where in the world do you live that this idea could even occur to you? It is reproduction that is being made mandatory (for WOMEN - men just leave) . And for women and men who care about, for example, the ongoing existence of Life on this planet now being gobbled up alive by human overpopulation, it is certainly not in California alone that there is great concern. Girls and women all over the nation are endangered by this deeply stupid criminalization of abortion by a MINORITY in America. And that means everyone. If girls and women are enslaved and oppressed, children and men also suffer. Our culture hasn't yet managed to connect these dots, devoted as it is to maintaining widespread ignorance.
Exactly. With Sanger, all most people know are negative aspects. And yet she was the pioneer of efforts to protect women and children suffering extreme poverty as a result of too many babies in circumstances where babies couldn't ever hope to receive adequate care, let along love. She took incredible risks, speaking out, in that era, to advocate mitigating the torture of women and of people in their formative years of growth. This silencing and distortion recur again and again in the mostly unknown Her Story of women.
Sorry, don't think so. Of course this is an issue in the US but the difficulties here are orders of magnitude greater than in any other country. Look at it cross-culturally and I think you'll see there are more problems than just "men in control". Much worse "men in control" in the middle east and they don't have this problem!
"Order of magnitude"? We're talking about the majority of humankind. The 51% through whose bodies come the 100%. But you're right. It's not men in control. It's a global system and structure of hierarchical male-privileging, male-centering patriarchal systems which enforce WITH VIOLENCE the subjugation of women and girl globally, which impacts children everywhere - that 100% in the most vulnerable formative stages of human development. I would add - ahem - you're a man. It's unlikely that you'd know much about this since a major focus of our culture is to protect men from knowing the harm. I doubt you are like our host on this thread who has traveled the world, studied and written, with his partner, realities that most men carefully avoid and ignore. "Women Hold Up Half the Sky."
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.
Tell me where I’m wrong. Before I bought my house, I researched the area zoning, which is R1 residential. I busted my type 1 diabetic ass to rise up out of a low income area to buy a house in a less crowded, less noisy, less violent area. I pay roughly $10,000 in property taxes every year and it goes up every year, even though I recently got hurt on the job and was forced to retire. After all that struggle, you expect me to accept it when some other people decide “hey, let’s completely screw over this guy and make his neighborhood just like the one he spent his life fighting to escape”? Nah man. You can call it what you want. If more housing is necessary, than there are plenty of places in my city’s downtown and industrial zoned areas where they can build up.
You're still "I got mine, and too bad for you." Because the next person busting their Type 1 diabetic ass is now denied the opportunity you had. And why are you assuming that increased density in your neighborhood would make it worse?
Because it was affordable for the first person, then things got a lot more expensive as the first person opposed development of new housing or densification, and costs went up a lot faster than incomes. So the next generation of equally hard-working people can't do what the prior generation did.
I’m skeptical that the problem is lack of development. Destroying single family neighborhoods by forcing us to rezone isn’t a legitimate solution. The real problem, in California at least, are investors. No single person should be able to own more than 2 homes. One person I know owns 4. Even his situation isn’t obscene from his perspective…He’s not wealthy. But he works tons of overtime and has a military pension from 2 tours of duty in Iraq. Still, 4 houses seems excessive. We also allow corporations to buy up housing. We also allow foreigners to buy homes here. Mexico doesn’t, Indonesia doesn’t. Instead of targeting corporations and investors, Newsom etc has stoked anger at people like me who just want our neighborhoods to stay the way they were when we sacrificed to buy here.
PS…there are still multiple “low income” gang neighborhoods in my city where people could still afford to buy…Except most of them are probably owned by investors 🤷🏻♂️.
In CA and Sant Cruz specifically, after years of frustration, zoning laws are loosening up in the case of building "ADUs" (Granny units) or "in-filling" in residential neighborhoods that have large lots and the space to include these units.
However, It also frustrates a lot of folks who hate to see their neighborhoods 'densified'.
Parking often times gets even more congested as households are so crammed that instead of 2 cars each, they need 4-5 spaces because adult kids can't afford to leave, roommates help pay mortgages and rents, or generations need to live together to support each other - as in aging parents.
No easy answers except one big suggestion:
The harder we try to hold on to the past .... the more we fight the future.
Nothing in nature stays static; and that includes us and our social needs for communities that function well for all its people~
Nothing anybody can do will change the fact that there is finite space and an increasing population. I wasn’t able to buy acres of property here like the previous generations. Bummer. I bought what I could, at about 2,380% more than what the previous generation paid for my house when the development was built in the 60s. Time for you to do the same. Or not. We have vast amounts of undeveloped land in other states. Just as every generation before you, there is simply less to go around.
Many factors affect crime rates. Density is one very significant factor. I am much more likely to encounter a sociopath if I live in an apartment complex than if I live in the country. There’s no arguing that.
Same problem here "over the hill" in Santa Cruz....only worse.
Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone > BANANAs....!
But, I bet SJ has more old fashioned "strip malls" that look pretty shabby and are mostly vacant than we do at present.
There is talk of converting our one big 'mall' on 41st Ave to:
Multi - Use /Commercial/ Residential/ Public Space complex. Even though there are literally acres of parking and the hwy is 1/2 mi. away the voices protesting "Too much Traffic" have already started.....Half the stores are empty there are very few people using whats left of this once vibrant "mall".
BTW> THEY never have a 'better idea'.... Just say NO....at every opportunity~
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.
There are many that deal with these themes but most recently June 10, July 5, July 10. The one I have been thinking about the most though is the conversation with Michelle Goldberg (love her writing). Ezra Klein is really focused on policy and not ideology.
Don't see an Ezra Klein show for July 10. Did you have another date in mind or some other forum than his show? Michelle Goldberg's "Feminism After Roe" or some other one?
I’m so sorry! I meant July 5: liberals need a clearer vision of the constitution.
July 19: why housing is so expensive.
July 8: Michelle Goldberg grapples with Feminism. Specifically about progressives seems to be more interested rooting out heretics than in gaining converts to the progressive side and that it is hard to find grassroots movements to join. Here in Portland it seems like the only progressive movement anyone hears about is the protest movement to defund the police that has gotten a really bad name. Many middle class moms like me don’t feel comfortable joining because we really aren’t interested in defunding the police. We want better schools, safe streets, affordable housing, If you say that in Portland, you are not welcome in the social justice movement. Ack! Sorry for the rant!
Rant is fine. Good place to do it and you didn't direct it at anyone in particular. Probably also fine because of Confirmation Bias (I completely agree with you on this point). The Dems, once again, continue to shoot themselves in their collective feet by making sure that their progressive wing is as loud as possible so that everyone thinks that's what the whole party is about. But this Purity thing has *always* been a problem with the Dems. Unfortunately now it's gotten to be a very illiberal purity and it's adding to the stress on democracy that tRump is so much a part of. There are some terrific articles about all of this if you're interested, most of them in The Atlantic so maybe you've read them already. The sooner the Dems disavow identity politics the sooner they'll take control of things. See I could rant about this too as it drives me nutz. "It's better to be pure and moral than to win and control anything." Really? UGH. Portland has problems but it's still a lovely city. We have a son living there. Keep up the good work.
"It's better to be pure and moral than to win and control anything."
Hey Dems...WAKE UP....
This IS the McConnell playbook !
Just look who's on the Supreme Court and the the real life and death consequences of not being cold blooded tactical if you want to get your agenda accomplished....
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.
So much of what you experienced has happened in my area in the Monterey Bay and Salinas Valley where ag is so dependent on migrant/human labor. When they ended the "Bracero" program which allowed male field workers to be legal for the harvest season then return to Mexico, we seemed to have a functional system that worked.
When you make it impossible to transit back and forth across the border, then you can't really 'go back' without high risk of intervention from Border Patrol, Immigration, etc. That also had the effect of keeping families apart, and hence the flood of women and children wanting to join their family members already here. With a 'broken' system like we've had for decades, every party will do whatever it takes to be together, and to earn a living.
However, when that first generation is working all day and night, the kids without supervision get into trouble as we see by the stats: violence, drugs, domestic abuse.
I wonder how many more times and how many years, until Congress for the umpteenth time, would finally build a system that benefits all parties involved: Business, Workers, Families, Kids....Communities ?
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.
Oh, my essay agreed that good weather is a factor in homelessness in southern California. I'm just skeptical that it's much of a factor in the Pacific Northwest, and i fear we use it as a crutch to avoid looking hard at failed policy.
Anyone who has spent any time in these citiess knows there are a vast differences in climate. Houston, Miami and Atlanta experience heat exacerbated by humidity. The climates are far from "equally good." In Texas as we recently saw you can freeze to death if you have to live outside. And all are in states well-known for intolerance of what tfg, Donnorrhea, sneered at for decades as "losers," on national TV. In Texas and Georgia and Florida, compassion isn't unknown. But those are all red states. California has at least tried to show compassion to vulnerable people, and this is known to the general population of the country, whether it's viewed as desirable or contemptible.
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.
Thanks for your comment. The loss of SRO hotels, trailer parks, boarding houses and other traditional low-cost housing has been a catastrophe for low-income Americans, and of course it has been compounded by increased inequality and spreading addiction. And thanks also for your work on the front lines as a social worker.
I have always lived on the East Coast, with a brief foray into the Midwest but I believe your points are well taken. When I opened a new addiction/mental health treatment center in Connecticut, I waited until early January, knowing that issues over the holidays would bring people into treatment (as compared to opening in mid-December when people wanted to party). We were in the black in 9 months. This outpatient hospital treatment was for those who had insurance, but the basics are the same for those who don't have insurance. Something has to get people into treatment, be it a crisis or force. I also believe that safe spaces for injectable drugs and needle exchange can lead to an increase in treatment over time.
THIS^^^^^^^^^ I work with the indigent as well. This is spot on. We need hospitals. We need to be able to remand people from custody directly into hospitals.
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 good news, thank you!
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 agree. My reasonably well-managed mental illness (PTSD) put me on the streets when, as a disabled widow, I could no longer earn enough money at low-level, temporary jobs to afford housing. My social services admin degree let me see dysfunction more clearly both with my homeless peers and within the system. We've got to stop thinking that mental illness is a "choice," even (especially?) when it's occluded by drug use. Mentally healthy, productive people don't obliterate their brains with meth. These folks are in need of intervention long before they disintegrate completely.
Amen! I think there's also another group who do not have mental illness but are also unwilling to live by our social codes. But having some recourse for those who do have such illness would be wonderful. It would surely lower the temperature a lot and maybe the rest of the feral would go along for the ride.
Technically that's a mental illness as well, it's called "antisocial personality disorder" and those folks bounce in and out of prison... Possibly as many as a third of prisoners are psychopaths, and I suspect the percentage of those amongst the homeless is pretty high, too, because they like preying on a vulnerable population...
Then the question becomes why West Coast cities would have more people with ASPD than other places. While I think APSD does apply to some, this thread has focused almost entirely on homeless and what I've been trying to emphasize is that a lot of the things that are done that make SF so broken are not done by homeless people but by people who have lost any connection to the larger society; stealing Amazon packages off porches, breaking windows, shoplifting, car theft, and so on. Homelessness tends to be concentrated and, while uncomfortable for us, doesn't make a city a mess or ruin most neighborhoods. SF has had a large homeless population for quite some time, as has Portland. They have become broken cities only recently. It's the disregard of social conventions (like leaving other peoples' bikes alone) that makes them the mess they are.
Homelessness was once more concentrated. Once it was confined to skid rows. Now it is everywhere -- any vacant lot sprouts a tent city. We have always had criminals, people who profit off society, but they didn't live in tents on the sidewalk. Over my 17 years there Portland went from being a lovely place to live with a few scary blocks on Burnside downtown to being overwhelmed by homeless people camped everywhere. In the three years I was in Douglas County, the homeless population went from around 30 known individuals to 100 or so. I suspect the uptick in population isn't a specific underlying mental health issue but access to meth...to folks losing their mental control very, very quickly. The West Coast seems to have gotten Mexican New Meth ahead of other parts of the country?
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.
And of course, there's a better way. It's not more studies as much as doing a better job sharing the data from existing studies and ongoing studies. And with that the main challenges are around privacy. If you're in policy-related research, and want more information, send me an email. The same solution would enable things like hyper-personalized medicine. People (like me) aren't working on these problems because there's no money in it. We're mostly trading, running sports teams, and giving you the posts and videos that keep you online-- because success there turns into money. Nicholas is asking the right questions, as always. I worry he just doesn't have the scientific support he needs to do "policy modeling", because I think that field still needs to be invented.
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?
Well, for one thing, don't force people to come into this world if there is no welcome, no safe place, no love. Never treat women and girls as baby-factories who can be owned and controlled by the men in this world. The kind of damage you characterize as "feral" is linked to early childhood trauma, bad nutrition, neglect etc. Include in the culture's values the concept of women as actual humans, not livestock.
I totally agree...."Every Child should be Wanted" !!!
We already have thousands of kids abandoned and neglected if not outright abused.
WE don't need to force women to bare children they don't want.
We women WILL make our own choices.....legal or not !
California is not a state where abortion has been hard to get since before nearly any woman who can have a baby *now* was born. Do you plan to make it mandatory for pregnant women in certain social strata?
I take it that what you mean is that women in California have access to abortion but there is still a problem with homelessness or antisocial behavior. I take it that your question about mandatory abortion was not seriously meant, just an added emphasis to your assertion that access to abortion, while a good thing, is not going to reduce homelessness in blue west coast cities.
I am prolife, tor the record.
I am pointing out that complaints of abortion being inaccessible in CA are disingenous, and the idea that abortion access is a meaningful tool to reduce homelessness is silly.
Forced birth is not the answer. BUT, if you want to force birth then pay the taxes for afterschool care, paid maternity/paternity time (at least 3 months each--if not working then paid at minimum wage for the time with their child), paid childcare and preschool, and a healthier child tax credit. Put your $ (and your votes) where you mouth is, to support the children you are forcing to be born. Canada has easy abortion access through 9 months and yet, a much lower abortion use--they take care of families.
I doubt this is s serious question. NOBODY wants to make abortion mandatory EVER for ANY woman ANYwhere. Where in the world do you live that this idea could even occur to you? It is reproduction that is being made mandatory (for WOMEN - men just leave) . And for women and men who care about, for example, the ongoing existence of Life on this planet now being gobbled up alive by human overpopulation, it is certainly not in California alone that there is great concern. Girls and women all over the nation are endangered by this deeply stupid criminalization of abortion by a MINORITY in America. And that means everyone. If girls and women are enslaved and oppressed, children and men also suffer. Our culture hasn't yet managed to connect these dots, devoted as it is to maintaining widespread ignorance.
Funny how bringing up Sanger is supposed to discredit birth control, abortion, etc
"White supremecy" ideology has been around for a long time....
Nah...not funny when women will die without access to abortion or birth control.
Exactly. With Sanger, all most people know are negative aspects. And yet she was the pioneer of efforts to protect women and children suffering extreme poverty as a result of too many babies in circumstances where babies couldn't ever hope to receive adequate care, let along love. She took incredible risks, speaking out, in that era, to advocate mitigating the torture of women and of people in their formative years of growth. This silencing and distortion recur again and again in the mostly unknown Her Story of women.
Apparently my allusion to Margaret Sanger wasn't overt enough. Also (laughter offstage in Chinese)
Not sure what your question is ?
I graduated college before Roe v Wade......
I Know what its like when there are only 'illegal choices'... its deadly !
NEVER AGAIN !!!
Sorry, don't think so. Of course this is an issue in the US but the difficulties here are orders of magnitude greater than in any other country. Look at it cross-culturally and I think you'll see there are more problems than just "men in control". Much worse "men in control" in the middle east and they don't have this problem!
"Order of magnitude"? We're talking about the majority of humankind. The 51% through whose bodies come the 100%. But you're right. It's not men in control. It's a global system and structure of hierarchical male-privileging, male-centering patriarchal systems which enforce WITH VIOLENCE the subjugation of women and girl globally, which impacts children everywhere - that 100% in the most vulnerable formative stages of human development. I would add - ahem - you're a man. It's unlikely that you'd know much about this since a major focus of our culture is to protect men from knowing the harm. I doubt you are like our host on this thread who has traveled the world, studied and written, with his partner, realities that most men carefully avoid and ignore. "Women Hold Up Half the Sky."
I do believe the world would stop turning if women all around the world just said NO !
for a day, a week, a month....
Actually, how would we know that?
How many Middle Eastern women have a voice in any media ?
How man of those women are ever asked a question as to what they want?
Please don't assume their silence is voluntary.....
Thank you, exactly!
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.
Tell me where I’m wrong. Before I bought my house, I researched the area zoning, which is R1 residential. I busted my type 1 diabetic ass to rise up out of a low income area to buy a house in a less crowded, less noisy, less violent area. I pay roughly $10,000 in property taxes every year and it goes up every year, even though I recently got hurt on the job and was forced to retire. After all that struggle, you expect me to accept it when some other people decide “hey, let’s completely screw over this guy and make his neighborhood just like the one he spent his life fighting to escape”? Nah man. You can call it what you want. If more housing is necessary, than there are plenty of places in my city’s downtown and industrial zoned areas where they can build up.
You're still "I got mine, and too bad for you." Because the next person busting their Type 1 diabetic ass is now denied the opportunity you had. And why are you assuming that increased density in your neighborhood would make it worse?
Why would the next person e denied it? It's not a zero-sum thingy....
Because it was affordable for the first person, then things got a lot more expensive as the first person opposed development of new housing or densification, and costs went up a lot faster than incomes. So the next generation of equally hard-working people can't do what the prior generation did.
I’m skeptical that the problem is lack of development. Destroying single family neighborhoods by forcing us to rezone isn’t a legitimate solution. The real problem, in California at least, are investors. No single person should be able to own more than 2 homes. One person I know owns 4. Even his situation isn’t obscene from his perspective…He’s not wealthy. But he works tons of overtime and has a military pension from 2 tours of duty in Iraq. Still, 4 houses seems excessive. We also allow corporations to buy up housing. We also allow foreigners to buy homes here. Mexico doesn’t, Indonesia doesn’t. Instead of targeting corporations and investors, Newsom etc has stoked anger at people like me who just want our neighborhoods to stay the way they were when we sacrificed to buy here.
PS…there are still multiple “low income” gang neighborhoods in my city where people could still afford to buy…Except most of them are probably owned by investors 🤷🏻♂️.
In CA and Sant Cruz specifically, after years of frustration, zoning laws are loosening up in the case of building "ADUs" (Granny units) or "in-filling" in residential neighborhoods that have large lots and the space to include these units.
However, It also frustrates a lot of folks who hate to see their neighborhoods 'densified'.
Parking often times gets even more congested as households are so crammed that instead of 2 cars each, they need 4-5 spaces because adult kids can't afford to leave, roommates help pay mortgages and rents, or generations need to live together to support each other - as in aging parents.
No easy answers except one big suggestion:
The harder we try to hold on to the past .... the more we fight the future.
Nothing in nature stays static; and that includes us and our social needs for communities that function well for all its people~
Nothing anybody can do will change the fact that there is finite space and an increasing population. I wasn’t able to buy acres of property here like the previous generations. Bummer. I bought what I could, at about 2,380% more than what the previous generation paid for my house when the development was built in the 60s. Time for you to do the same. Or not. We have vast amounts of undeveloped land in other states. Just as every generation before you, there is simply less to go around.
Many factors affect crime rates. Density is one very significant factor. I am much more likely to encounter a sociopath if I live in an apartment complex than if I live in the country. There’s no arguing that.
Same problem here "over the hill" in Santa Cruz....only worse.
Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone > BANANAs....!
But, I bet SJ has more old fashioned "strip malls" that look pretty shabby and are mostly vacant than we do at present.
There is talk of converting our one big 'mall' on 41st Ave to:
Multi - Use /Commercial/ Residential/ Public Space complex. Even though there are literally acres of parking and the hwy is 1/2 mi. away the voices protesting "Too much Traffic" have already started.....Half the stores are empty there are very few people using whats left of this once vibrant "mall".
BTW> THEY never have a 'better idea'.... Just say NO....at every opportunity~
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.
Please tell me which Ezra Klein show you are referring to. Thanks.
There are many that deal with these themes but most recently June 10, July 5, July 10. The one I have been thinking about the most though is the conversation with Michelle Goldberg (love her writing). Ezra Klein is really focused on policy and not ideology.
Don't see an Ezra Klein show for July 10. Did you have another date in mind or some other forum than his show? Michelle Goldberg's "Feminism After Roe" or some other one?
I’m so sorry! I meant July 5: liberals need a clearer vision of the constitution.
July 19: why housing is so expensive.
July 8: Michelle Goldberg grapples with Feminism. Specifically about progressives seems to be more interested rooting out heretics than in gaining converts to the progressive side and that it is hard to find grassroots movements to join. Here in Portland it seems like the only progressive movement anyone hears about is the protest movement to defund the police that has gotten a really bad name. Many middle class moms like me don’t feel comfortable joining because we really aren’t interested in defunding the police. We want better schools, safe streets, affordable housing, If you say that in Portland, you are not welcome in the social justice movement. Ack! Sorry for the rant!
Rant is fine. Good place to do it and you didn't direct it at anyone in particular. Probably also fine because of Confirmation Bias (I completely agree with you on this point). The Dems, once again, continue to shoot themselves in their collective feet by making sure that their progressive wing is as loud as possible so that everyone thinks that's what the whole party is about. But this Purity thing has *always* been a problem with the Dems. Unfortunately now it's gotten to be a very illiberal purity and it's adding to the stress on democracy that tRump is so much a part of. There are some terrific articles about all of this if you're interested, most of them in The Atlantic so maybe you've read them already. The sooner the Dems disavow identity politics the sooner they'll take control of things. See I could rant about this too as it drives me nutz. "It's better to be pure and moral than to win and control anything." Really? UGH. Portland has problems but it's still a lovely city. We have a son living there. Keep up the good work.
"It's better to be pure and moral than to win and control anything."
Hey Dems...WAKE UP....
This IS the McConnell playbook !
Just look who's on the Supreme Court and the the real life and death consequences of not being cold blooded tactical if you want to get your agenda accomplished....
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.
So much of what you experienced has happened in my area in the Monterey Bay and Salinas Valley where ag is so dependent on migrant/human labor. When they ended the "Bracero" program which allowed male field workers to be legal for the harvest season then return to Mexico, we seemed to have a functional system that worked.
When you make it impossible to transit back and forth across the border, then you can't really 'go back' without high risk of intervention from Border Patrol, Immigration, etc. That also had the effect of keeping families apart, and hence the flood of women and children wanting to join their family members already here. With a 'broken' system like we've had for decades, every party will do whatever it takes to be together, and to earn a living.
However, when that first generation is working all day and night, the kids without supervision get into trouble as we see by the stats: violence, drugs, domestic abuse.
I wonder how many more times and how many years, until Congress for the umpteenth time, would finally build a system that benefits all parties involved: Business, Workers, Families, Kids....Communities ?
You failed to mention Reagan and the Republican take-over in California. Funny, that.
Good riddance to Reagan and company.....
Gavin Newsom is our choice for good reason!
Just ask those who failed to recall him by a huge margin.....nice try~
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.
Oh, my essay agreed that good weather is a factor in homelessness in southern California. I'm just skeptical that it's much of a factor in the Pacific Northwest, and i fear we use it as a crutch to avoid looking hard at failed policy.
Thanks for that clarification, Nicolas.
The reasoning has been that southern and min-south cities, such as Houston or Miami or Atlanta, offer equally good climate. Makes sense to me.
Anyone who has spent any time in these citiess knows there are a vast differences in climate. Houston, Miami and Atlanta experience heat exacerbated by humidity. The climates are far from "equally good." In Texas as we recently saw you can freeze to death if you have to live outside. And all are in states well-known for intolerance of what tfg, Donnorrhea, sneered at for decades as "losers," on national TV. In Texas and Georgia and Florida, compassion isn't unknown. But those are all red states. California has at least tried to show compassion to vulnerable people, and this is known to the general population of the country, whether it's viewed as desirable or contemptible.
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.