A relevant discouraging story about massive homelessness:
Back in the 1980s, Environmentalists pointed at Mexico City to prove that we were all going to strangle in our own shit and pollution. The population had exploded, and crime, homelessness, poverty, pollution, and everything bad was skyrocketing.
But today, people aren't roaming the streets of Mexico City in hazmat suits killing and eating each other, which was the expectation in the 1980s. After their 2017 earthquake, it struck me as odd that I'd never heard how Mexico City got better. So I searched, but found nothing in any book or website explaining how Mexico City had escaped what had seemed to everyone like certain doom.
I was hoping to find an inspiring story about the power of humans to overcome adversity, but instead I came across a survey of poor indigenous households in Mexico City showing a distribution of arrival year among them which was constant back until 1985, then fell to nearly zero before that. Almost none of the poor indigenous people there today had arrived before 1985, despite the fact that the population of poor indigenous people there was much higher before 1985 than it is today. That suggests that the city kicked out or relocated the poor and homeless after the earthquake, or that they left on their own.
This book: [Environment and Urbanization--Environmental problems in third world cities, V1 N1 Apr 1989, Nottingham UK: Russell Press, ISSN 0956-2478] says there were 242,000 homeless families in Mexico City in 1970 [p. 42], and that in 1975 there were 1.3 million squatters living in shantytowns on a dry lake bed on the edge of the city [earlier on p. 42]. That's the same area of unstable ground devastated by the 1985 earthquake.
The number of homeless in Mexico City when I wrote this in 2017 was only about 15,000-30,000.
So, Mexico City wasn't saved by human determination and ingenuity, but by the 1985 earthquake, which gave them the excuse to get rid of perhaps two million homeless people. I found nothing indicating how they got rid of them. But they aren't there now.
I didn't get this in, but I thought the entire review was problematic because it was based on SF through 2019 rather than through 2022. It seems like the entire situation tipped over into catastrophe post-2019. The book was published today rather than in 2019, partially in response to the worsening of crime and homelessness in 2020-2021. You can't just write that off to the pandemic and Floyd riots, because the cultural rot existing before 2020 was revealed under pressure, during those events.
An interesting analysis would be to ask if the very real problems of that development simply move elsewhere? The projects were an easy target as it was concentrated and highly visible - did dispersing the population also just disperse the related squalor and gang activity?
If the limiting factor in property crime reporting is police time/ability/willingness to take reports, then it could make sense for the level to remain constant despite increasing crime.
A lot of this seems to be separating the homeless into a mostly unproblematic group and a smaller very problematic group who are the ones people notice, alongside an argument that reduced rents will only help the former. However, I think it's worth asking whether housing costs are what's creating the problematic group as well. For example, it seems entirely plausible to me that although the down on their luck homeless mostly find their way out of their situation, a small minority keep getting bad breaks and transition into the hopelessly mentally ill kind. In which case, YIMBY policy would be a very important part of that solution long-term, but it would take a while for it to bear fruit. I guess that's similar to how restricting access to prescription opioids to those not already on them prevents abuse, but if you cut off an abuser them they will likely find an alternative means of accessing opioids.
I've lived many places including downtown Seattle, LA koreatown, Austin, and various Bay Area. In 2019 I lived in San Jose near one of the big encampments that used to spill over into the road. Someone from that encampment overdosed in the park and we found them under the slide when we took our toddler daughter to play. Someone else set fire to our condo building, thankfully very little damage. Someone else broke into our car. Twice. I am aware that the police wanted to do something, and sometimes did sweeps, but had limited options and no ability to stop the encampment from reforming.
We moved back to Austin, far north suburbs, and in mid 2020 when a tent appeared on the property of the progressive church on the other side of my backyard wall, I went over in the middle of the day and tore down the tent and just threw it in the garbage.
I also used to think homelessness was a hard problem with no good solutions. I used to volunteer in kitchens on the regular. I threw my first software paycheck at one of those kitchens and I was happy about it.
You mentioned mentally ill homeless in terms of psychosis. I’m interested in your (and others) thoughts about personality disorders leading to homelessness. Things like borderline personality disorder, low functioning sociopathy, oppositional defiant disorder, etc.
> Why is it so hard to solve the problem through competent and responsive police? Years of depolicing probably haven’t helped
"Years of depolicing"???
Why are you stating that as if it were a fact? It is not a fact. Police budgets just keep going up. Giving more money to cops is one of the only bipartisan positions in America.
Here's how it looks locally to me, using the Denver Police Department budget for illustration:
"This is a great thought experiment / example of a cognitive bias / whatever it is. I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more."
600 is a ridiculously small population for a town. That is about the size of one graduating class in a large high school, or the population of an elementary school. It would be shocking if 6 kids in my graduating class were locked up.
"I’m surprised cities co-operate in this game while suburbs defect. Why don’t cities bus their homeless back to suburbs? Why don’t they eliminate their shelters? Obviously this would be pretty anti-social, but why are the suburbs selfish in this game and the cities altruistic? Is it just that there’s so much established precedent that cities believe it’s their problem and suburbs believe it isn’t?"
I think the most straightforward reason is that cities are big and suburbs are small. In the game between jurisdictions, homeless services are a public good. What you typically get with selfish investments in public goods is that the largest player invests and everyone else free-rides.
More concretely, it's harder for cities to push all the homeless people out because, since cities are big, a city that effectively excluded homeless people would massively overtax homeless services in surrounding suburbs, making them terrible places to be, and requiring cities to ratchet up the terribleness even further. On the other hand, each individual suburb can become a little worse than the city, encourage people to leave, and, have very little effect on the overall situation of homeless people in the city (and thus on the amount of aggression/enforcement needed to remain undesirable).
Even more concretely, let's say that it costs $1000 to send cops to an encampment and break it up. If you do this, the encampment will re-form somewhere relatively nearby. If you're, say, Glendale, CA, the odds of the encampment re-forming in Glendale are pretty low, because most nearby places are _not_ Glendale. If you're Los Angeles, CA, the odds of the encampment re-forming somewhere in Los Angeles are really high, because most nearby places _are_ Los Angeles.
My preferred solution to homelessness is vocational boarding schools. 8 hours every day of vocational education including some actual apprentice-level work on the side which defrays the cost. Instruction in manners and correct speech. Tight discipline. Tight security so no one can bring in alcohol or drugs. Mandatory intense exercise, because needs to be unfun enough to not incentivize people to become homeless, but unfun in productive ways and better than camping on the street. Field trips allowed during leisure hours but people who test positive for drugs upon return will lose those privileges. Three healthy meals a day and free healthcare including mental health services. Small dorm rooms. Teach a man to fish instead of just maintaining a life questionably worth living. I think this could all be done for less than the cost of furnishing homeless people with standard excessively large housing in expensive cities. People have gotten used to living solo in apartments that waste 7 times more sqft per person than dorms. The average for US housing is 700sqft/person. Dorms use only 100sqft/person but are a zillion times preferable to homeless shelters. I wouldn't mind going back to a dorm. It's extremely convenient to have a free buffet in the same building where you live and lots of like-minded people around. People who choose the same trade would be housed in the same wing of the dorm. Children would be housed together with their parents in the dorms and receive age appropriate instruction on-site. I suppose as people gain more skill they could gradually transition to getting more hours of actual work and fewer hours of instruction while still living on-site and helping to teach the novices. I miss college (except for some required off-topic classes and being poor). I think these vocational boarding schools could also be a good substitute for some of the welfare programs for non-homeless.
> Why is it so hard to solve the problem through competent and responsive police? Years of depolicing probably haven’t helped, but also, I’m imagining being the police officer who shows up here, and - what? Eledex says “Officer, these people are generally annoying, they yell a lot and start fires and stuff”. ...
This paragraph and the following are extremely revealing, and I think go to the heart of the problem. Societies have historically viewed public order (by which I straightforwardly mean "People can't harass you in ways that physically endanger you in public places") as a pretty important public good.
Scott, in contrast, kind of shrugs his shoulders and says, I don't know man, what could the cops do, can you show the homeless encampment was really doing anything horrible, wouldn't want them to get hassled if they weren't.
The question is about the social default. Should it be a default that public order (again, in a completely straightforward sense) is maintained? My claim is that there is no good equilibrium elsewhere.
I think the genesis of the policy in Portugal since 2001 does not depend on the country being less conservative than others. The country was conservative by default during Salazar's dictatorship, which lasted until the 1974 revolution. At that time, the population was ~20% illiterate (or up to 40% functionally illiterate), e.g. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000029874 but I've seen similar numbers in other sources. The country evolved rapidly after that, in many colourful ways, but I think this is a cultural inertia that can't be shrugged off quickly. With regards to drug use during that period, the highlights from this report are a good summary (page 13 "Portugal before 2001" onwards)
- "drug use, or, to be precise, cannabis use, started to become more visible in Portugal when Portuguese citizens returned from colonies where marijuana was grown and used openly."
- " They possessed no common knowledge about drugs, especially the distinction between hard and soft drugs, what problems different drugs carried, what health risks they presented to individuals, or what kindof social problems they caused."
(censorship during the dictatorship means that this was a problem that would not be discussed)
- "In the early 1980s, the most commonly used drugs in Portugal were hashish and marijuana, but heroin had already appeared by the late 1970s."
- "In the late 1980s, and especially in the early 1990s, drug consumption in Portugal became a subject of social concern. (...) A likely contributing factor to these impressions was that drug consumption in some districts of Lisbon and other bigger cities had become more open and visible."
The specific area mentioned here was "Casal Ventoso" in Lisbon, demolished in 2000
- "The first comprehensive study on drug use in Portugal conducted in 2001, however, showed that, contrary to popular belief, the level of drug consumption in the country was among the lowest in Europe at that time. Barely 8 percent of the Portuguese surveyed admitted to using drugs at some point in their lives. (...) Although Portugal had one of Europe’s lowest levels of illicit drug consumption among the general population, experts agree that during the 1980s and 1990s, it was one of the highest prevalence countries for problematic drug use, particularly heroin use. The 2001 survey found that0.7 percent of the population had used heroin at least once in their lives, the second highest rate in Europe after England and Wales (1 percent)"
And that number leads me to the anecdotal part of my comment. By the late 80s, heroin use was so widespread that most people knew of people in one's own or other families who were addicted. Two important aspects here are that people are closer to their families than average in the US (they typically live with their parents until they get married), and peak addiction often led to horror stories of people stealing from their parents and, eventually, being evicted in despair. If people ended up in jail, either for consumption or for theft, it was quite likely they would share needles, and this happened in tandem with the AIDS epidemic... All of this happened to "kids of good families" (as our idiom goes), as much as to poor people, which helped in downplaying explanations about poor personal choices, versus the alternative of viewing it as a medical problem. Portugal was a much more classist society then, especially in the light of the education issues, so I think this is also an important factor. So, if anything, the policy did emerge in a country that was more conservative than most of Western Europe, at that time, and also at the bottom of most EU rankings of wealth, development, etc once it joined.
This was the setting where the decriminalization policy was proposed. This was under a government led by the large center-left party ("socialist party"); it worked well and visibly enough that, when there was an alternation to the large center-right party ("social democrat party"), the policy was continued. There have been administrative and practical changes over time but, broadly, the main thrust is still to fine people for consumption, and refer them to a "Commission for Dissuasion of Drug Dependence". They will then be referred to counselling, rehab, or social work support, and/or be fined.
This is called Scattered Site Housing, NYC started doing it in 2017? possibly a bit earlier, and it is wildly unpopular everywhere the sites have been scattered.
"I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more."
I suspect this is because you believe they could accurately identify the 6 people in town of 600 that need to be locked up, but don't believe a nation of 200 million could precisely identify the exact 2 million they need to lock up. If they weren't perfect with all those identifications, and 2 million seems a lot easier to mess up than 6, then a bunch of innocent people would be locked up while the situation isn't even made much better because the "scumbags" who weren't caught would still be wrecking things outside.
Personally, I doubt the first situation of 6 out 600 would ever occur either. It seems almost certain to me that at least one of those six would be innocent and imprisoned because it was easier than the alternative, or just be inconvenient somehow to those in charge of the town, and then the town is really more Omelas than ideal.
"So I take the opposite position here: if the government wants people to be able to live in places long-term when they don’t have the money to pay, they should give those people rent vouchers, or pay the landlord directly, or something - not invent a legal doctrine which is basically “if people don’t want to pay you then you still need to provide the service indefinitely” and give people as many lawyers as it takes to enforce that."
This is not what I argued. I don't want that "if people don’t want to pay you then you still need to provide the service indefinitely and give people as many lawyers as it takes to enforce that.", if people simply don't want to pay they won't win the court case and I'm not arguing for infinite lawyers, just one. To counter your other points I'll show some studies rather than throwing anecdotes back and forth. A study in Denver found that in the case of eviction; 89% of landlords had lawyers while less than 1% of tenants had: https://www.coloradocoalition.org/sites/default/files/2017-09/Facing%20Eviction%20Alone%209-11-17.pdf Since a court case can prevent you from gaining housing in the future (even if you're right), this power imbalance leads to people not wanting to stand up for their rights and being evicted without due process. A study in Milwaukee found this happens twice as much as evictions that do have due process: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/BLUU3U
Now we could create more rental vouchers, but even if we can somehow get the landlords to accept them, adding them to the supply-constrained housing markets will only cause prices to rise. If there aren't enough houses (and none are being added anytime soon) landlords can easily raise prices to capture the value of the new vouchers without fear that they'll lose renters. I predict that people that don't receive a voucher will see their rents go up and we will have to perpetually increase voucher funding to try and stay ahead of the higher rents they're causing.
A few different points mentioned that I don't think were fully played against each other.
1. You originally stated Schellenberger supported "sweeping" institutionalization. He countered that while he does support institutionalization, he is not pushing for "sweeping" institutionalization.
2. After this point, it seems there is a consensus that "Homeless people" is a meaningless generalization of heavily varying degrees of independence. An example is given that "Autistic People" can range from socially awkward but fully functioning members of society, to those who need to be institutionalized with 24/7 care to not harm themselves.
3. The number of 'mentally ill permanently homeless people' is likely quite low compared to the entire homeless population. At the same time, they do cause an incredibly outsize negative impact on the quality of life of the areas they inhabit, along with crime and tremendous city expenditure to no end.
Possibly semantic, but I would not consider institutionalizing say ~4000 people in a few major cities to be remotely "sweeping" institutionalization. I think, as you did consider later, a few people locked up can be a reasonable price to pay for a significantly healthier society.
You've mentioned sweeping institutionalization in the 1950s several times, I imagine this is particularly meaningful to you as psychiatry was involved in this back then, and you may be sensitive to encouraging bringing it back. Per the 1950 US Census of institutionalized people, there were in 747817 in Mental Hospitals or Homes & Schools for the mentally handicapped, or 0.494% of a population of 151M. Current US population is 330M, and based on the data you've shown I am skeptical that this 'institutionalization of mentally ill permanently homeless people' would institutionalize close to 30k people nationwide - and that would be an order of magnitude lower than we had in the 50s!
I think that your original statement, that Schellenberger favors sweeping "sweeping institutionalization of the mentally ill" is in fact a mischaracterization of the size of the homeless population for which Schellenberger favors institutionalization as a solution. That said, he may not have been clear enough.
Regarding #9, I do think the book did a good job explaining how horrible institutionalization is. Nevertheless, unlike bygone eras, putting addicts in rehab past the time they physiologically crave the drug the post makes sense. I do agree with the dangers of institutionalization. All I can think, and maybe someone has data to support or refute this, is a feeling that even good ideas that seem to work well do so for about a decade before bad actors game the system and what was genuinely helpful is no longer. I would be in favor of a type of institutionalization that had this baked in and was able to be broken apart when it stopped working. I readily concede that would be almost impossible.
> But the stats I found were that 70% of SF homeless lived in SF before becoming homeless, 22% were elsewhere in California, and 8% were from other states
It's critical to point out that this is *survey data*. The source in the Wikipedia article for that claim is this:
Your logic in the first section is 100% incorrect. You cannot accept self report answers to the “where are your from?” Because people lie intentionally and think they will get sent back the city they came from. You are so smart so surprised you fell for this. Also there is typically no checking on them - e.g. looking them up online or in databases to cross check it with known addresses
Lots of commenters are echoing Shellenberger's point:
"One word, “homeless,” entails an entire, insidious discourse that acts unconsciously and subliminally on our hearts and minds, rendering us unable to understand the reality before us."
Huge differences between different types of homeless people, and using the same word for the down-on-their luck and the "wretched" person who is not capable of holding down a job or even having an apartment without trashing it just obscures our thinking.
Also this is INCORRECT. This is self-report. This is NOT based on psychological evaluation, psychiatric diagnosis or any medical history.
The manipulation here is that they ask people if the reason they are homeless is b/c they are mentally ill or substance problem.
“This is another really good catch, and means the percent of the homeless with mental illness + drug abuse is only about 22%, not the stated ~50% - although considering only the chronic homeless separately might blunt this change.
Is there any homeless research that investigates their background? There are a lot of survey results and reports on what they said to social worked, therapists, psychiatrists, etc. do they ever then go out and talk to parents, siblings, the boss at the last job he held, people they knew in high school, etc.
Maybe part of the problem is an over reliance on self reported information?
> I'm still confused that reporting varies in exactly the right way to keep the reported level constant regardless of the real level,...
To me, this just screams parallels with induced demand, the Jevons paradox, and/or buffered chemical equilibrium: Criminals have some upper bound on the risk of real consequences that they will accept. Shopkeepers conversely have an lower bound on what probability of inflicting real consequences justifies reporting. The consequences equilibrium point is thus stable against environmental changes that assign consequences differently unless you can exhaust the buffered (non-participating) portion of one side or the other.
This is analogous to a freeway widening project having zero effect on traffic: people have a upper bound on traffic pain, and the width of the freeway is merely a lower bound on the number of people needed to inflict a given level of traffic pain in that location.
I recently read "Evicted" which is probably a housing-first rallying cry. First, the book is excellent and vivid. Secondly, the people it follows don't really fit into any of the categories of homeless described here. They have homes, sometimes, but are constantly pushed out. They're sorta the (b) types. They'd definitely be helped by a Housing First approach. But they're also, frankly, pretty bad. You wouldn't really want them moving in next door. Heroin addictions. Attacked the person who they had been staying with, stomping on her face and hitting her with a hammer. Most of these people really need help. But these aren't the "wretched homeless" groups either; they're in and out of housing and don't want to be in the situation they're in. But it seems like they've been stuck there too long and it's rubbed off on them. I don't know what the relevance is here, but it's not like (a)'s and (b)'s and "the good ones" and the (c)'s are "the bad ones" causing all the problems.
Re: getting tenants lawyers. That idea might actually started from "Evicted" since it's one of the proposals in the back of the book. It's hard to square your ideas with the depictions there: most tenants don't bother showing up to court. Courts fight back the landlords on the amount of money owed but the evictions were granted without exception if the tenant owed rent. The sheriff and movers show up and remove the people forcibly if necessary (one of the movers comments he's evicted his own daughter). Now this was in 2008ish and the book was influential so the system might have changed too far in the opposite direction in the mean time.
The book also contests the idea that landlords never want poor renters. The landlords in the book specialized in it: a poor tenant can be evicted at any time since they're always behind in rent. That means that they can't report you to the city for violations; you can ignore their repair requests and cut costs. And rents in poor parts of the city are only slightly behind rents in the rich part of the city (even though the house would sell for 3x as much in the rich part). But you have to be a tough landlord to put up with it.
Hmmm that's a good point. Homeless encampments certainly are a different problem altogether from disparate homeless population. I agree that public disruption is handled much more swiftly (not necessarily roughly, as you say) in parts of Europe I am familiar with, I guess I think that just that fact alone already points to a deeper situation/cohesion which allows it, and which is not there in certain American places. I'm not sure exactly what the precise difference would be, I'm just saying I don't think it's only a difference in the written laws; these anecdotes about the security not getting involved because of slow/unresponsive legal systems or complainants not filing reports for similar issues seems to be along the same lines-- it would broadly be about some kind of social cohesion (in a city of fastidious/legally-hygenic people, a public crime would be an enormous disruption, and the surrounding populace would intervene/request police intervention -- but in many American cases it seems like the public attitude is one of deliberate ignorance of public crime/disruption).
I mean 'social cohesion' is a kind of non-answer, but I don't really want to say homogeneity, or something like that. I'm not being very clear but I want to view police inability to deal with fairly obvious social-disruption as a symptom of a deeper loss of power, and not something caused by a weakness of written law (which should anyway seek to follow closely behind reparative _actions_).
"Together with the model showing housing prices predicted homelessness well, I find this really convincing."
The elephant in the room no one among the activist circle wants to talk about is that it makes ZERO sense to house a single homeless person in a place like SF or LA or NYC where housing prices are some of the highest in the entire world. In America we've got dozens of second-tier cities with modest land prices and *that's* where the homeless should be moved. If our federal government was smart, they'd take the top-20 cities in America by housing price per square foot, draw a 50 mile circle around them, and ban any federal support for the homeless from going to any organizations within that circle. Then in a few years all the homeless organizations would move outside these "circles of crazy prices" and the problem would self-resolve.
I live in Seattle and it blows my mind that we're trying to house our homeless right here in the city instead of moving them to (say) Spokane where land is 4x cheaper.
>"I would be more sympathetic to this fair criticism if he was more willing to criticize the mass institutionalization era and less willing to criticize everyone who was ever against it."
"Claim that the first two groups are only temporarily homeless and don’t bother anyone, and that all the problems people consider linked to homelessness are caused by the severely mentally ill."
So let me write a short defense of the "wretched" and point the finger at the “beach bums”. Without going into personal details, I've seen someone become wretched. Over the course of five years, they had a complete psychotic break, alienated all their friends and family, were given a mobile home which they barricaded and defecated in until it had to be replaced, and eventually got lost in the homeless world, to the point where private investigators by the family haven't been able to locate them. Think, very literally, someone who would become extremely agitated and paranoid within sight of power lines. Completely lost their mind.
And I think the implicit critique of the wretched, that they're the real problem, is kinda true. They, very genuinely, need more help than even a loving and prosperous family can provide. They're a screaming black hole of time, money, and energy. Honestly, I think the figures from the CA Department of State Hospitals is fairly accurate on what these people require. DSH spends about $1.4 billion on ~12k patients or $150k per patient per year. And yeah, for a room of 12 of these people, you do genuinely need 4-5 trained staff members per shift because, in a violent altercation, you do genuinely want 3-4 staff members subduing the patient in a controlled manner (for their safety and the patient's) plus an additional staff member to watch the other patients. $150k per patient per year is a pretty fair price. And, quite frankly, these places are...not a place you'd ever send a loved one. The staff tries, god some of them try, but no one wants family in DSH Napa or DSH Atascadero. At a certain point you hope the person can achieve some equilibrium anywhere. If he's camping down by the river in an out of the way spot and the local food bank workers recognize him and the cops know him and how to handle him...that's genuinely the best that can be made of a horrific situation. That’s the best life some of these people can lead.
But, in their defense, the wretched have a real claim on us. In any society a certain number of people will be born just broken. So broken that it is genuinely a full time job for 3-4 adults to care for them. And that’s fine, it’s a perfect situation for insurance in the social contract, the unspoken agreement that if you or a loved one is born so broken that badly that society will expend an undue amount of resources to make your life as comfortable as possible. That not only the government but each of us owes these people a certain amount of grace and pity “for there but for grace go I”.
I think the vibe I get from Scott here is wrong. The problem isn’t that 20% of the homeless population needs 80% of the time and energy, the problem is that they aren’t getting it because all these “beach bums” are taking it. One homeless guy down by the river, even a real crazy one, is something most of us have enough patience and grace to handle. Put a homeless camp down by the river and pretty soon people just want something done. At a really core level, people have a limited amount of empathy, especially for strangers. There’s an inherent competition for that empathy, for patience and handouts and social programs, between those who genuinely, absolutely need it and the beach bums who just don’t fit into society.
People aren’t just tired of the mentally ill homeless, they’re tired of tent cities everywhere, even at gas stops like Lodi on the I5, and they’re tired of feces on the streets and they’re tired of panhandlers. And, to be extremely unfair, the best solution the current homelessness crisis may indeed be the reinstitutionalization of the mentally ill homeless but it will be at the expense of the most vulnerable in our society to the benefit of a bunch of bums who have options in their life.
PS. Let me carve out an exception for the “car homeless” here, not because they deserve it, but because their problems can actually, practically, be solved. All the “car homeless” I’ve met are basically functional adults in bad financial circumstances where $10k would solve 80% of their problems, so, ya know, let’s just give them $10k in rental subsidies or something and be happy we found an easy problem for once. Like, I’ve past the point where I care whether you deserve a handout, I’m just grateful when a handout actually solves the problem.
PPS. Since numbers matter, my priors are that the actually “wretched” mentally ill population is a pretty constant baseline, probably somewhere around 20-50 people per 100,000 population like in Houston from the original post, whereas the big homeless epicenters have 100-500 per 100,000. I think, for many of these “wretched”, that homeless life is the best solution and dramatically better than being institutionalized and I think most people would not have a problem with the homeless if there were 80-90% less of them, no matter how bad the remainder were.
San Francisco rented a bunch of hotels that were sitting idle during the pandemic, to provide emergency shelter to the homeless during the pandemic (because there was a time when "get them inside, that will stop the spread of COVID was a thing). Now those hotels are giving the city a bill for the damages these "tenants" caused. And if I read correctly, at one of these hotels it came to $42,000 per room.
Presumably they're padding the bill at least a bit, but I doubt they're making it all up. Housing is not a Thing That Exists just because you paid for it once upon a time; it needs constant maintenance, and it can be destroyed by neglect or carelessness. And that probably happens a lot more when you give it to people who maybe weren't particularly functional in the first place and have no skin in the game.
If we have to budget even $20K/person/year to repair the damage associated with otherwise-homeless tenants, that's going to be a significant economic hit.
I find the story of being "robbed or assaulted" five times, and having a friend be "literally curb-stomped" to be, uh... extremely implausible, or possibly confused about the meaning of words, to put it charitably.
Robbery specifically means to take by force or threat of force, ie, mugging not car break ins, and is quite rare - plus aggravated assault, there were 5866 total in 2019. Spread over 800,000 residents, that's a yearly risk of 0.7%. Five times in a row would be... 2 in a hundred billion? Check my math?
Anecdotally, I've lived in SF proper for 10 years, in some pretty rough areas, and I've never been robbed or assaulted. I also know many people who live in SF (funny how that works), and among them all, I know of one mugging (that actually occurred in West Oakland) and one (technical) assault (being spat on by a crazed homeless person). The idea that one relatively normal person could be robbed or assaulted five times in rapid succession is winning-the-lotto level improbable.
Also, literal curb-stomping as depicted most gruesomely in American History X is, unsurprisingly, fatal. If someone was actually literally curb-stomped and survived, I would certainly expect them to at least be hospitalized, need reconstructive surgery, etc. It would be straightforward attempted murder, and the idea that the cops wouldn't want to hear about attempted murder is pretty ridiculous. In my years here, I've called the police multiple times (mostly reporting traffic incidents, once for a homeless person laying face down in the road where they could be run over, once after catching someone attempting to steal my motorcycle) and they've always been prompt in responding. After the motorcycle incident, they took a report. I'm not denying that some people have bad experiences with lazy cops, but I find the idea that they would ignore attempted murder to be... uh, extremely implausible.
Gosh, I didn't expect to experience the Notice Me, Senpai effect so early in Substack commenting career. I'm flattered, thanks Scott!
A couple other recent-post-relevant things I wanna append to my comment, now that it's semi-Canonized:
1) Used to date a semi-professional "booster". Not like organized crime, I mean the sort of M:tG Black amoral opportunist who figures out the informal rules for what gets you caught and what doesn't, then ruthlessly exploits that as part of balancing the household budget. This also includes knowing individual stores' refund policies well. Around 5-6 years ago when SF was seeing record summer heatwaves and AC units were selling out everywhere, she made the rational choice to purchase one for 3 months, then return the much-abused-and-still-leaking unit in the original packaging for a full refund come fall.
So I feel like I've got a decent sense for this kind of person and know several of the tricks of the trade...and this isn't the profile of the sort of shoplifter my store regularly gets. It's mostly the sorts I'd classify as Young Punks with Nothing To Lose. They don't do it for lack of money, they do it for the lulz and because flouting authority/norms is just part of the youth zeitgeist. (Hence why they make so many idiotic mistakes and we're well aware of the problem as it happens, not only afterwards through inventory discrepancies.) What they have in common, though, is that if you don't respect The Man anyway, it becomes easier to rationalize a "harmless" six-finger discount. Which leads into...
2) BLM protests during summer 2020. People get hung up a lot on the effects they had on policing, the racial angle, the boredom angle, and so on. But outside of the frequently-mentioned (and rightly so!) disingenuousness of Mostly Peaceful Protests...I wanna emphasize that there very much was a vibe shift around the legitimacy of capitalist businesses, especially among the young and politically active. <s>Ancap</s> [EDIT: Anti-capitalist] sentiment has always been ambient in SF, but after the Political Establishment and MSM pushed pretty hard on the narrative that There Was No Looting (And Even If There Was, Is That Really So Bad?)...well, surprise surprise, lotsa otherwise mostly-armchair disaffecteds started making this same justification in real life. To their friends, neighbors, and coworkers - including those who worked for Evil White Supremacist Corporations.
Suddenly it became a lot more normalized to handwave looting and other "mere" property crime: because the perpetrators were the real victims of systemic _____ism, because capitalist wealth is illegitimately stolen, because corporations are rich and who cares about their billionaire profits, because Materialist Consumerism Bad, because the poor should take any means on offer to get ahead. It was The Revolution, man, and you don't wanna look like a __scab__ during a society-wide strike.
I don't know why this angle hasn't gotten much coverage outside right-media. It was a very real phenomenon on the ground...businesses that cut hours/closed continue to have reduced hours/not be open. Those jobs aren't coming back...(and they were disproportionately held by the poor and minorities.) I'll never forget the period when all the shop windows around where I work were boarded up and there was a police-enforced curfew, out of fear of wanton property crime. It was shocking precisely because I work in one of the *tamer* parts of town, a mostly-residential area next to one of the colleges. You just don't see a lot of crime out here, and yet everyone was still running scared. It's so easy to break community norms of propriety and law-abidingness; much harder to bring them back after they're gone. So the fact that none of this shows up in Official Shoplifting (Larceny?) Data just makes it more gaslight-y, because now those same people who handwaved looting can point at statistics and say, see, look, I told you it was all okay. But it's not, and we're not.
Regarding point 13 (6 in 600 vs 2M in 200M): this is not a cognitive bias, this is correct application of the law of big numbers.
I expect the base rate of “people who need to be locked up or everything bursts in flames” to be somewhere around 1 in 1000. Given this rate, the probability that a 600-person town has at least 6 of them is 1 in 26260. So our hypothetical town is indeed unfortunate, but it’s not surprising that a few towns like that would exist. But given the same base rate, the probability of having 2M such people in a 200M country is less than 1 in 10^1000000 (that’s a million-digits number).
Regarding the "town of 600 that locks up 6 disruptive citizens": I would like to point out that it paints a wrong mental picture.
The correct picture would not be "Imagine you came to a town of 600...". It would be "Imagine there would be residents locked up in every single town. 2 in a village of 200. 100 in a small town of 10.000. No matter where you went, everyone would know people locked up from their hometown."
600 inhabitants are not a town where I come from, it's a village. Town is Stadt in german, and even Kleinstadt (literally "small town") is defined as 5.000+, and that definition is from 1887. So the mental picture may paint the wrong size.
But especially, the framing makes the town an isolated case, so we subconsciously accept a more extreme variation.
That's why mental framing like this is problematic: It paints a picture and literally paints over other facts. I prefer a data-driven approach, where you compare e.g. rates of incarceration between countries to judge whether a certain number is okay or excessive.
David Roman writes "In fact, the only actual conservative who was ever president of Portugal in living memory was murdered by state security; they didn't even bother to cover the crime very much, and then the whole country has sort of ignored the matter for decades, as one of those things that sometimes happen", regarding Francisco de Sá Carneiro, which is one of the wrongest sentences I've ever read?
- Sá Carneiro never was President; he was Prime Minister.
- The matter was not "ignored for decades" -- in fact, the opposite? It has been an ongoing political, and police, topic of discussion ever since: there were 10 (!) parliamentary inquiry commissions on the matter, with different theories and conclusions, and the case was periodically reopened by the State's attorneys. You can absolutely say that the whole matter was dealt with completely ineffectually, but this vague conspiratorial "... and it was never mentioned again" BS is the opposite of what actually happened.
- Sá Carneiro was.. not particularly conservative? He was one of the founders of the "Social Democratic Party" (and there is a never-ending tradition for every leader of the party to claim that they are the true heir of Sá Carneiro and will restore the party to its founder's vision), which was always the country's "center-right" party, whatever that meant at the time (and especially in 1980 that didn't mean very right-wing at all -- the Portuguese political mainstream has always been leftward of that of other European countries because of the post-Revolution context). Noticeably he governed in coalition with the actual right-wing party. But maybe the best source for this claim is... this actual interview of him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzGvhfbCoio where he says he doesn't want his party to be a conservative party and identifies with the German SPD (the social-democratic party, center-left).
'Under the CA penal code, shoplifting is “entering a commercial establishment, during business hours, with the *intent to steal,* where value does not exceed $950.”'
$950 is still good money and you can come back for more. That's why there are all these videos on 'shop lifting san francisco' etc.
Then again, the talking point is obviously 'actually, that's not shoplifting'.
> This is a great thought experiment / example of a cognitive bias / whatever it is. I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more.
I'd think 600 person towns with 6 people locked up at a given time are extremely rare; in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if no such town ever existed.
Someone can personally vouch for 6 people being complete scumbags who just have to be locked up, but in the real world nobody could possibly vouch for anything about 2 million people, so the second part of the thought experiment is not at all a fair description of the real-world US.
> So that leaves some kind of law targeting all homeless people and demanding they go in shelters or something. I dunno, seems unfair.
Many countries have laws against sleeping in public spaces, some (including mine) forbid drinking alcohol there. On one hand, both are an absurd violation of personal freedom. On the other, the kind of people who run afoul of these laws most often need to be liable for _something_ because they are a huge pain in the ass for the surrounding community.
I'm disgusted with the solution and I'd like a better one, as a person who slept on park benches sometimes and drank on them often.
"Claim that the first two groups are only temporarily homeless and don’t bother anyone, and that all the problems people consider linked to homelessness are caused by the severely mentally ill" -- selfishly yeah, but selflessly the fact that at any given point in time certain people don't have a place to stay sounds like a problem even if they don't bother anyone else, and if we're talking about policy proposals rather than about individual actions a selfish perspective doesn't sound particularly relevant to me.
Regarding #8: it contains a few basic mistakes (Sá Carneiro was NOT President) and casually asserts conspiracy theories as fact (his death was a matter of debate and investigations for decades, but no strong evidence of foul play was ever uncovered).
One thing I don't understand from these comments and from the original essay: how do these homeless people survive? How do they get enough food to eat? Do they flock to cities because there are more opportunities for begging? If giving money to the homeless was made illegal, what would happen to them?
Suppose you came upon a small town of 600 adults. The mayor tells you that while the large majority of the town's people are kind and decent, 1 of them is a complete scumbag who just has to be locked up or else the town would be in flames. However he doesn't know exactly who it is so they have locked up the 6 most likely people. Does this seem like a mass incarceration crisis?
Given relative incarceration rates of other developed countries this seems like an alternative scenario to consider.
Regarding shoplifting: surely there are ways that a rising rate of shoplifting could cause a proportionately dropping rate of reports. For instance, consider a "willingness-to-report" model where reporting is mostly driven by new employees or newly promoted managers, each of whom becomes jaded and stops reporting after n shoplifting incidents. More shoplifting would just lead to each employee burning through the same n reports earlier in their career. I have no confidence that it's the right model, but feedback mechanisms are common enough in life that a constant number of shoplifting reports doesn't seem too surprising.
So... I guess I'll be the one to make the stupid, naive, lib comment about Eledex's story. He says he called the police on these people multiple times and the police didn't show. At no point does he mention walking 100 feet and trying to talk to any of them and see if something could be worked out. Maybe, even probably, it wouldn't have worked! But who knows, 5 to 15 people isn't a lot and maybe there was some kind of community leader over there who had some influence over the rest of the camp and they could have worked out a "I could do you some minor favor if you could be more pleasant neighbors," type deal. Seems worth a shot. I know the story isn't very long so maybe Eledex is eliding details, but he doesn't refer to any of them by name or description, just as "the camp" and one gets the impression he never got any closer to them than staring out his window.
Again, I get that there's some nativity and gosh I understand social anxiety and a reluctance to engage with people who are scary, but... You know, one doesn't always get to choose one's neighbors whether they own the property legally or not, and sometimes people can be reasonable when you don't expect.
> I’m not really optimistic about our current ability to solve this the perfect world way where police are responsive to Eledex’s complaints and able to deal with these people in particular, while leaving other innocent homeless people alone.
You can have a system where various sub-crime nuisances add up and trigger an intervention.
Why do people write "ctrl f" when you can use the word "search"?
I am highly skeptical of that tree story. 20 propane tanks strapped to a tree? Running out of the house naked with a 6 day old baby? Sounds like a Rush Limbaugh fever dream.
"Explain that the 1950s system of institutionalization was genuinely pretty terrible in a lot of ways, that the people who campaigned for it to be ended had lots of good points, but that the current system is also failing people. You support some specific loosening of the current laws around commitment, and the way you would ensure that people’s rights are still respected is [some paragraph that demonstrates you have thought about this question for five minutes]."
Well, problems regarding involuntary commitment were a relatively small part of the problems with the mental health system pre-mass deinstitutionalisation, though a lot of its problems probably could be traced back to too many patients/not enough resources.
> So that leaves some kind of law targeting all homeless people and demanding they go in shelters or something. I dunno, seems unfair. Probably there are gradations of unfairness and you could figure out some way to minimize the impact, but I don’t know, Eledex sure does have a valid gripe here.
Anyone else getting Matt Levine vibes from this paragraph?
>>This has been the opposite of my experience (and the experience of some friends with experience here who I talked to). The stories I hear are all about how nightmare tenants don’t pay rent for months or years, smash everything in the apartment, and when landlords try to get rid of them the courts just say they won’t evict them because making people homeless is mean.
This says a lot more about you and your friends than it does about the ground truth.
>>The stories I’ve heard are that a lot of landlords straight out try to figure out how to avoid renting to poor people because if their tenants ever choose to stop paying rent it’s several years of nightmarish court cases to get 50-50 odds of the government ever doing anything.
"Try to figure out how", as if this is at all a difficult thing. Landlords have all the power in these situations. Renters can't even afford a place to live, and you think they can afford lawyers for years of nightmarish court cases???
Ree: why don't cities ship homeless back to the suburbs, to me it feels like the obvious answer is that the people living in the suburb are also the richest and most influential people working in the city during the day, and city officials have more to lose by offending them than by hurting the poor people that actually live in most of the city.
I don't know if that dynamic holds for all cities, but it feels right for the cities I grew up around.
My experience as a small-scale landlord (lived in the middle of a 3-flat and rented out the other two apartments) taught me that the U.S.'s legal processes related to rent-paying assume that most tenants won't show up to contest eviction. What I learned the hard way as a rookie landlord, and then heard from veteran landlords, was that it takes only one "motivated tenant" to crash the whole balance.
In my and my wife's case it wasn't even technically an eviction, we were just declining to renew a lease because the renter had been violating the written lease. We made the rookie mistake of explaining that (way too late an attorney explained to me why "you never give a reason"); and the renter took offense and found free legal assistance; and long story short we had to pay her to go away (and pay our attorney to help us pay her to go away).
And thus ended our interest in ever again being landlords at any scale. At small scale the annual returns when it goes well can't justify the level of loss and stress when it occasionally doesn't.
The Cabrini-Green saga in Chicago has a key twist which seems relevant to this discussion. Originally the complex was built as public housing for people who were in the workforce; a family could not be assigned a unit unless somebody in the household could prove they had a paying job. At some point during the Great Society years that requirement was dropped. I first heard this firsthand from someone who'd spent his childhood living in Cabrini and remembered when "the rules changed", but you can google it.
What my friend remembered was that it was after the rule change that Cabrini devolved into the gang-controlled disaster that it certainly was by the late 1970s. And I think that is more or less established wisdom among Chicagoans of that era....if correct then it has an obvious consequence for the concept of building public housing to house people who are unhoused. Brings us back I guess to the uncomfortable need to accurately diagnose _why_ they are unhoused.
I think the reason you only hear stories about bad tenants is because you don't know many renters. I think that part of the problem is that good landlords mostly get bad tenants and good tenants mostly get bad landlords.
Another question: what percentage of the security deposit do these landlords keep on average with the tenants who leave of their own accord? That seems to be the biggest issue for some tenants, that their landlords keep the security deposit for no good reason.
>The clearcut and obvious easy solution of just renting large numbers of apartments which are NOT clustered together idiotically to create horrible high concentration brand new sudden ghettos around hotels or housing developments....is the obvious thing everyone says they want to do which somehow has NEVER happened!!!?!?!?
This proposal still creates ghettos, just less immediately and explicitly. It really only takes one intolerable neighbor to drive people to move if they have no other remedy, and only people who can't afford to live anywhere else will opt to fill the vacancies.
Anecdotal response to "Why don’t cities bus their homeless back to suburbs?" from a quite different area - I recall being in Minsk, Belarus many years ago, and one thing that I noticed that despite quite many people not being well off at all, there was zero visible homelessness or beggars or such; local friends asserted that local police ship out such "delinquents" to country villages in the region where they can either do farming or at least are 'out of sight, out of mind' of the administrators living in the capital.
I have heard similar stories from some other places in Eastern Europe as things that are being done by city police. It does make some sense as in the countryside there's not a deficit of housing (though often of poor quality) due to urbanization decreasing population, and while there's a shortage of *decent* jobs there, it's definitely possible (I know some quite dysfunctional people doing that) to get enough for food and cheap alcohol by odd jobs, some social security support, and perhaps planting some potatoes if they can. Of course, that life sucks in many aspects, and some (many?) people do actually prefer to be homeless in a big city instead.
>This is a great thought experiment / example of a cognitive bias / whatever it is. I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more.
It seems like the obvious objection here is that, sure, if 1 out of every 100 people would literally burn down every building around them if not put in jail, then in that world having 1% of the population in jail would be the unfortunate but correct decision.
But we don't live in a world where 1 out of every 100 people are that type of insane criminal.
In which case, yeah, having a 1% chance of being locked in jail for bad reasons is a pretty big crisis. We locked down the whole planet more or less to fight a disease with a less than 1% fatality rate, whereas in this analogy we're inviting that type of decimation intentionally.
>This is a great thought experiment / example of a cognitive bias / whatever it is. I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more.
I think in the 6/600 people scenario, I wouldn't think of it as a crisis of overincarceration, but I *would* notice that it seems kind of on the high side to form a permanent prison population in a community of that size. But at those numbers, you don't have the Law of Large Numbers insuring that things will hew close to the true frequency rates of the overall population. It's not that weird if 1% of the town's population happens to be hardened criminals incapable of peaceful coexistence because they got unlucky. Similarly, if another town of 600 has no hardened criminals, we're not going to be baffled by their inexplicable lack of criminality, because on that scale it's within the range of plausible variation.
When you see a country of 200 million with a prison population of 2 million, you're intuitively going to notice some things are different in that scenario. One is that the numbers involved are large enough that you can be quite sure the country's rate of incarceration isn't a matter of sheer dumb luck. Another is that unlike in the scenario with the town of 600, nobody is going to be in a position to know the personalities or circumstances of all 2 million inmates, or even more than a tiny fraction of them, and vouch "Yep, these inmates are definitely all hardened criminals who threaten the stability of their communities, and they're locked away because the system has treated them fairly."
In the actual country of America, rather than this hypothetical country of 200 million, you're also going to notice that the prison population is not a single permanent population; many of the people in that population of 2 million are not going to be in it ten years from now, but at the rate we're going, we don't expect the overall number to get any smaller. And if you're the type to keep track of trends, you're also likely to notice "Hey, this isn't the sort of proportional prison population size we had several decades ago, something must have changed for our prison population to be so much larger now." It could be that it's grown a lot because our population was underincarcerated in the past, and more people being locked away is better for our society, but I don't think people noticed the 1970's being a massive crime wave?
> This has been the opposite of my experience (and the experience of some friends with experience here who I talked to). The stories I hear are all about how nightmare tenants don’t pay rent for months or years, smash everything in the apartment, and when landlords try to get rid of them the courts just say they won’t evict them because making people homeless is mean. The stories I’ve heard are that a lot of landlords straight out try to figure out how to avoid renting to poor people because if their tenants ever choose to stop paying rent it’s several years of nightmarish court cases to get 50-50 odds of the government ever doing anything.
I think this is a case where both sides are right simultaneously. My understanding is that CA *laws* are very tenant friendly and you can easily fight eviction for months *if* you know your rights and have a good lawyer. But a lot of tenants don't know their rights, or aren't willing to risk a lawsuit, and are thus are prey to getting illegally evicted by abusive landlords.
"cities in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina also have okay climates without too many homeless"
This is how you know Scott spends little time on the West Coast. Nominal temperatures are similar but (say it with me) it's not the heat - it's the humidity! East Coast cities freeze in the winter, and if you go far enough South that they don't they are unbearably hot in the summer. If you want a climate that's at all comparable to California, you'd have to summer in Vermont and winter in Florida. Or you could just live year-round in San Francisco.
The Cabrini-Green homes definitely faced a lot of problems with how they were built. While it was probably better than being homeless, many people who would have qualified for them and the similarly troubled Robert Taylor complex opted to stay in market-rate housing and wait for one of the less-awful government housing options to open up, often for years. The book Blueprint for Disaster is a good history of 20th century public housing failures, with a focus on these 2.
I'm still very confused by this issue on a cross-country aspect. I live in Israel, and AFAICT the number of homeless in the centers of big cities is negligible. Certainly they don't camp the in any noticeable numbers. Why is it so different? Mental illness is probably at similar levels. And why has the number of homeless increased over time in the US?
My unsubstantiated guess is that it has to do with more individualism and looser family and community ties. If you're mentally ill but your family is in the picture, it's far less likely you'll become a homeless drug addict. If you're not mentally ill, you always have a couch to sleep on not very far.
But it could very well be that the difference is stricter policing keeping the homeless off main streets, or more institutionalization, I haven't checked the numbers.
Anyway, "creating a communal less individualistic culture" might be the least feasible solution to homelessness, but it would also be good to trace some of the source of the problem. I especially don't like that this is unthinkable, and all solutions proposed treat homeless as complete individuals to be dealt with individually by incentives and deterrence.
##"Unfortunately, you can’t ask people on a survey 'are you the good or the bad kind of homeless person?' so there aren’t a lot of statistics that do a good job taking this into account."##
Why can't you ask that question? That seems like a great question to ask, actually. If the response is raving lunacy, or no response because the person is passed out from fentanyl or bum wine, then you're interviewing the Bad Kind. But I agree that the question is impolite, and might get you stabbed.
I would think that you could sort the homeless into categories ("Beach Bum," "Unlucky," and "Crazy") with pretty good confidence with one question: "What caused you to become homeless?" The Beach Bum will give you a story that isn't really sad (or at least has a decent ending, because he's more or less content with his life). The Unlucky will give you a sad story about how her dog needed surgery and then she couldn't make rent. The Crazy will give you craziness.
Maybe there are difficulties with borderline cases, maybe some people move between categories somewhat freely, maybe mental illness does not always present in ways that are obvious to survey-takers. But surely we have heuristics for identifying the "bad" homeless, right? (Chris Rock joked that if you see a beggar with a funny sign, he doesn't really need your money. "Real" hungry people, Rock explained, are too hungry to be funny.) Because when people talk about San Fransico's homeless problem, they generally do not mean "this city is too expensive for working class people to have enough economic security to provide a buffer for unexpected expenses, and they can easily find themselves evicted if they suffer a slight setback." They mean "there's shit everywhere, a bum broke into my car, and I almost got stabbed by a smelly lunatic."
Homelessness is interesting in that it's one of the clearest dividing lines between liberals and conservatives. I'm generally more conservative, and I've always seen it as an issue without any clear solution. Most conservatives seem to think this way. The heuristic is "well, people are always going to make weird decisions and as long as they don't bother me or the people I care about, it's not really my business."
As an urban planner who sometimes comments publicly about housing issues, I'd like to thank you all for this crowd-sourced effort to make me better at my job.
One note: I do not find it surprising that as rates of shoplifting rise, people's hopelessness about reporting it also rises, leading people to report it less. If the proportion of police resources spent on it does not rise (which seems to be the case), then the proportion of useless phone calls to the cops will rise, discouraging people from bothering.
To Scott and all the commenters: This is the most informative and useful discussion of homelessness and urban crime I have ever read. I can't recommend it highly enough to the many people I have sent it to.
In regards to the relatively level number of shoplifting reports, you've only discussed the demand for shoplifting reports, not the supply. There aren't an infinite number of police working hours available to be spent on writing shoplifting reports, and it's difficult to get more shoplifting reports as a citizen, because you can't just pay the police more to take your shoplifting report rather than someone else's.
As the anecdote on the homeless tree camp neighbors indicates, the police may just choose not to respond.
So despite additional demand, if the police have decided they're only going to spend X% of their time, or even only write a fixed number of X shoplifting reports, perhaps even with a floor of Y severity, then the willingness of police to spend time on shoplifting reports (because this is a government bureaucracy, not a real market) is going to control the number which get filed, not the amount of shoplifting and the corresponding demand for shoplifting reports.
I have immediate family members who manage gas station/convenience stores (but not in the bay area). Shoplifting is rampant. Corporate policy is to make no attempt to stop it, even at stores with an armed guard (i.e. the worst stores). Calls to the police are only made if there is violence or a threat involved, or if the theft is over a particular relatively high dollar threshold of value. Otherwise, it's just another loss embedded in the overhead and despite having everything on camera, not worth pursuing.
Most retail companies likely have some variation of a similar policy about dealing with shoplifting, but harder than usual targets just shift the crime to other softer retail locations. If there was a massive influx of shoplifting beneath their dollar reporting number, it wouldn't induce them to report more of it, because corporate and the police don't want reports under that dollar number. That may also have an effect, because those sorts of dollar limits for particular stores are frequently found in online shoplifting discussion communities.
> I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis.
Should we expect criminality to scale linearly with population size? That seems like the weakness in the analogy, as many phenomena scale non-linearly with population.
A relevant discouraging story about massive homelessness:
Back in the 1980s, Environmentalists pointed at Mexico City to prove that we were all going to strangle in our own shit and pollution. The population had exploded, and crime, homelessness, poverty, pollution, and everything bad was skyrocketing.
But today, people aren't roaming the streets of Mexico City in hazmat suits killing and eating each other, which was the expectation in the 1980s. After their 2017 earthquake, it struck me as odd that I'd never heard how Mexico City got better. So I searched, but found nothing in any book or website explaining how Mexico City had escaped what had seemed to everyone like certain doom.
I was hoping to find an inspiring story about the power of humans to overcome adversity, but instead I came across a survey of poor indigenous households in Mexico City showing a distribution of arrival year among them which was constant back until 1985, then fell to nearly zero before that. Almost none of the poor indigenous people there today had arrived before 1985, despite the fact that the population of poor indigenous people there was much higher before 1985 than it is today. That suggests that the city kicked out or relocated the poor and homeless after the earthquake, or that they left on their own.
This book: [Environment and Urbanization--Environmental problems in third world cities, V1 N1 Apr 1989, Nottingham UK: Russell Press, ISSN 0956-2478] says there were 242,000 homeless families in Mexico City in 1970 [p. 42], and that in 1975 there were 1.3 million squatters living in shantytowns on a dry lake bed on the edge of the city [earlier on p. 42]. That's the same area of unstable ground devastated by the 1985 earthquake.
The number of homeless in Mexico City when I wrote this in 2017 was only about 15,000-30,000.
So, Mexico City wasn't saved by human determination and ingenuity, but by the 1985 earthquake, which gave them the excuse to get rid of perhaps two million homeless people. I found nothing indicating how they got rid of them. But they aren't there now.
I didn't get this in, but I thought the entire review was problematic because it was based on SF through 2019 rather than through 2022. It seems like the entire situation tipped over into catastrophe post-2019. The book was published today rather than in 2019, partially in response to the worsening of crime and homelessness in 2020-2021. You can't just write that off to the pandemic and Floyd riots, because the cultural rot existing before 2020 was revealed under pressure, during those events.
RE: Isn't Cabrini-Green better than being homeless.
Shutting down CG (2010) didn't seem to lead to an increase in homelessness. https://www.cmap.illinois.gov/updates/all/-/asset_publisher/UIMfSLnFfMB6/content/homelessness-decline-challenges
An interesting analysis would be to ask if the very real problems of that development simply move elsewhere? The projects were an easy target as it was concentrated and highly visible - did dispersing the population also just disperse the related squalor and gang activity?
If the limiting factor in property crime reporting is police time/ability/willingness to take reports, then it could make sense for the level to remain constant despite increasing crime.
A lot of this seems to be separating the homeless into a mostly unproblematic group and a smaller very problematic group who are the ones people notice, alongside an argument that reduced rents will only help the former. However, I think it's worth asking whether housing costs are what's creating the problematic group as well. For example, it seems entirely plausible to me that although the down on their luck homeless mostly find their way out of their situation, a small minority keep getting bad breaks and transition into the hopelessly mentally ill kind. In which case, YIMBY policy would be a very important part of that solution long-term, but it would take a while for it to bear fruit. I guess that's similar to how restricting access to prescription opioids to those not already on them prevents abuse, but if you cut off an abuser them they will likely find an alternative means of accessing opioids.
Response to the story by eledex:
People seem to have this weird insistence that functional social norms can scale to arbitrary numbers of people.
Why would that be the case?
Minor Eledex.
I've lived many places including downtown Seattle, LA koreatown, Austin, and various Bay Area. In 2019 I lived in San Jose near one of the big encampments that used to spill over into the road. Someone from that encampment overdosed in the park and we found them under the slide when we took our toddler daughter to play. Someone else set fire to our condo building, thankfully very little damage. Someone else broke into our car. Twice. I am aware that the police wanted to do something, and sometimes did sweeps, but had limited options and no ability to stop the encampment from reforming.
We moved back to Austin, far north suburbs, and in mid 2020 when a tent appeared on the property of the progressive church on the other side of my backyard wall, I went over in the middle of the day and tore down the tent and just threw it in the garbage.
I also used to think homelessness was a hard problem with no good solutions. I used to volunteer in kitchens on the regular. I threw my first software paycheck at one of those kitchens and I was happy about it.
Now I delete tents.
This is terrible.
You mentioned mentally ill homeless in terms of psychosis. I’m interested in your (and others) thoughts about personality disorders leading to homelessness. Things like borderline personality disorder, low functioning sociopathy, oppositional defiant disorder, etc.
"Years of depolicing" you claim, but increased spending on policing has not slowed down much, or at all, in most places: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/07/over-past-60-years-more-spending-police-hasnt-necessarily-meant-less-crime/
I'm not a SFian, but I think they've only been cutting into their police budget growth, not their actual police budget.
The 4 closing "rewrite" points seem quite solid though...
> Why is it so hard to solve the problem through competent and responsive police? Years of depolicing probably haven’t helped
"Years of depolicing"???
Why are you stating that as if it were a fact? It is not a fact. Police budgets just keep going up. Giving more money to cops is one of the only bipartisan positions in America.
Here's how it looks locally to me, using the Denver Police Department budget for illustration:
1992: $164M
...
2017: $241M
2018: $242.5M (different source)
2019: $246.1M
2020: $250.1M
2021: $229.5M (a slight cut!)
2022: $245.9M
"This is a great thought experiment / example of a cognitive bias / whatever it is. I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more."
600 is a ridiculously small population for a town. That is about the size of one graduating class in a large high school, or the population of an elementary school. It would be shocking if 6 kids in my graduating class were locked up.
"I’m surprised cities co-operate in this game while suburbs defect. Why don’t cities bus their homeless back to suburbs? Why don’t they eliminate their shelters? Obviously this would be pretty anti-social, but why are the suburbs selfish in this game and the cities altruistic? Is it just that there’s so much established precedent that cities believe it’s their problem and suburbs believe it isn’t?"
I think the most straightforward reason is that cities are big and suburbs are small. In the game between jurisdictions, homeless services are a public good. What you typically get with selfish investments in public goods is that the largest player invests and everyone else free-rides.
More concretely, it's harder for cities to push all the homeless people out because, since cities are big, a city that effectively excluded homeless people would massively overtax homeless services in surrounding suburbs, making them terrible places to be, and requiring cities to ratchet up the terribleness even further. On the other hand, each individual suburb can become a little worse than the city, encourage people to leave, and, have very little effect on the overall situation of homeless people in the city (and thus on the amount of aggression/enforcement needed to remain undesirable).
Even more concretely, let's say that it costs $1000 to send cops to an encampment and break it up. If you do this, the encampment will re-form somewhere relatively nearby. If you're, say, Glendale, CA, the odds of the encampment re-forming in Glendale are pretty low, because most nearby places are _not_ Glendale. If you're Los Angeles, CA, the odds of the encampment re-forming somewhere in Los Angeles are really high, because most nearby places _are_ Los Angeles.
My preferred solution to homelessness is vocational boarding schools. 8 hours every day of vocational education including some actual apprentice-level work on the side which defrays the cost. Instruction in manners and correct speech. Tight discipline. Tight security so no one can bring in alcohol or drugs. Mandatory intense exercise, because needs to be unfun enough to not incentivize people to become homeless, but unfun in productive ways and better than camping on the street. Field trips allowed during leisure hours but people who test positive for drugs upon return will lose those privileges. Three healthy meals a day and free healthcare including mental health services. Small dorm rooms. Teach a man to fish instead of just maintaining a life questionably worth living. I think this could all be done for less than the cost of furnishing homeless people with standard excessively large housing in expensive cities. People have gotten used to living solo in apartments that waste 7 times more sqft per person than dorms. The average for US housing is 700sqft/person. Dorms use only 100sqft/person but are a zillion times preferable to homeless shelters. I wouldn't mind going back to a dorm. It's extremely convenient to have a free buffet in the same building where you live and lots of like-minded people around. People who choose the same trade would be housed in the same wing of the dorm. Children would be housed together with their parents in the dorms and receive age appropriate instruction on-site. I suppose as people gain more skill they could gradually transition to getting more hours of actual work and fewer hours of instruction while still living on-site and helping to teach the novices. I miss college (except for some required off-topic classes and being poor). I think these vocational boarding schools could also be a good substitute for some of the welfare programs for non-homeless.
> Why is it so hard to solve the problem through competent and responsive police? Years of depolicing probably haven’t helped, but also, I’m imagining being the police officer who shows up here, and - what? Eledex says “Officer, these people are generally annoying, they yell a lot and start fires and stuff”. ...
This paragraph and the following are extremely revealing, and I think go to the heart of the problem. Societies have historically viewed public order (by which I straightforwardly mean "People can't harass you in ways that physically endanger you in public places") as a pretty important public good.
Scott, in contrast, kind of shrugs his shoulders and says, I don't know man, what could the cops do, can you show the homeless encampment was really doing anything horrible, wouldn't want them to get hassled if they weren't.
The question is about the social default. Should it be a default that public order (again, in a completely straightforward sense) is maintained? My claim is that there is no good equilibrium elsewhere.
[comment from a Portuguese perspective]
I think the genesis of the policy in Portugal since 2001 does not depend on the country being less conservative than others. The country was conservative by default during Salazar's dictatorship, which lasted until the 1974 revolution. At that time, the population was ~20% illiterate (or up to 40% functionally illiterate), e.g. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000029874 but I've seen similar numbers in other sources. The country evolved rapidly after that, in many colourful ways, but I think this is a cultural inertia that can't be shrugged off quickly. With regards to drug use during that period, the highlights from this report are a good summary (page 13 "Portugal before 2001" onwards)
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/uploads/52ff6eb9-76c9-44a5-bc37-857fbbfedbdd/drug-policy-in-portugal-english-20120814.pdf
- "drug use, or, to be precise, cannabis use, started to become more visible in Portugal when Portuguese citizens returned from colonies where marijuana was grown and used openly."
- " They possessed no common knowledge about drugs, especially the distinction between hard and soft drugs, what problems different drugs carried, what health risks they presented to individuals, or what kindof social problems they caused."
(censorship during the dictatorship means that this was a problem that would not be discussed)
- "In the early 1980s, the most commonly used drugs in Portugal were hashish and marijuana, but heroin had already appeared by the late 1970s."
- "In the late 1980s, and especially in the early 1990s, drug consumption in Portugal became a subject of social concern. (...) A likely contributing factor to these impressions was that drug consumption in some districts of Lisbon and other bigger cities had become more open and visible."
The specific area mentioned here was "Casal Ventoso" in Lisbon, demolished in 2000
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/12/15/lisbon-moves-to-recapture-heroin-haven/3a797216-d3a4-4202-a1e2-c88d3e3f7d55/
- "The first comprehensive study on drug use in Portugal conducted in 2001, however, showed that, contrary to popular belief, the level of drug consumption in the country was among the lowest in Europe at that time. Barely 8 percent of the Portuguese surveyed admitted to using drugs at some point in their lives. (...) Although Portugal had one of Europe’s lowest levels of illicit drug consumption among the general population, experts agree that during the 1980s and 1990s, it was one of the highest prevalence countries for problematic drug use, particularly heroin use. The 2001 survey found that0.7 percent of the population had used heroin at least once in their lives, the second highest rate in Europe after England and Wales (1 percent)"
And that number leads me to the anecdotal part of my comment. By the late 80s, heroin use was so widespread that most people knew of people in one's own or other families who were addicted. Two important aspects here are that people are closer to their families than average in the US (they typically live with their parents until they get married), and peak addiction often led to horror stories of people stealing from their parents and, eventually, being evicted in despair. If people ended up in jail, either for consumption or for theft, it was quite likely they would share needles, and this happened in tandem with the AIDS epidemic... All of this happened to "kids of good families" (as our idiom goes), as much as to poor people, which helped in downplaying explanations about poor personal choices, versus the alternative of viewing it as a medical problem. Portugal was a much more classist society then, especially in the light of the education issues, so I think this is also an important factor. So, if anything, the policy did emerge in a country that was more conservative than most of Western Europe, at that time, and also at the bottom of most EU rankings of wealth, development, etc once it joined.
This was the setting where the decriminalization policy was proposed. This was under a government led by the large center-left party ("socialist party"); it worked well and visibly enough that, when there was an alternation to the large center-right party ("social democrat party"), the policy was continued. There have been administrative and practical changes over time but, broadly, the main thrust is still to fine people for consumption, and refer them to a "Commission for Dissuasion of Drug Dependence". They will then be referred to counselling, rehab, or social work support, and/or be fined.
>14: Scatted apartments for homeless.
This is called Scattered Site Housing, NYC started doing it in 2017? possibly a bit earlier, and it is wildly unpopular everywhere the sites have been scattered.
https://www.nj.com/essex/2019/12/nyc-sends-homeless-to-live-in-illegal-rentals-in-nj-one-town-is-trying-to-stop-it.html
https://nypost.com/2016/12/09/de-blasios-disastrous-shelter-scramble/
https://citylimits.org/2022/03/02/dilapidated-apartments-lousy-landlords-plague-nycs-sprawling-scattered-site-supportive-housing-network/
"I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more."
I suspect this is because you believe they could accurately identify the 6 people in town of 600 that need to be locked up, but don't believe a nation of 200 million could precisely identify the exact 2 million they need to lock up. If they weren't perfect with all those identifications, and 2 million seems a lot easier to mess up than 6, then a bunch of innocent people would be locked up while the situation isn't even made much better because the "scumbags" who weren't caught would still be wrecking things outside.
Personally, I doubt the first situation of 6 out 600 would ever occur either. It seems almost certain to me that at least one of those six would be innocent and imprisoned because it was easier than the alternative, or just be inconvenient somehow to those in charge of the town, and then the town is really more Omelas than ideal.
"So I take the opposite position here: if the government wants people to be able to live in places long-term when they don’t have the money to pay, they should give those people rent vouchers, or pay the landlord directly, or something - not invent a legal doctrine which is basically “if people don’t want to pay you then you still need to provide the service indefinitely” and give people as many lawyers as it takes to enforce that."
This is not what I argued. I don't want that "if people don’t want to pay you then you still need to provide the service indefinitely and give people as many lawyers as it takes to enforce that.", if people simply don't want to pay they won't win the court case and I'm not arguing for infinite lawyers, just one. To counter your other points I'll show some studies rather than throwing anecdotes back and forth. A study in Denver found that in the case of eviction; 89% of landlords had lawyers while less than 1% of tenants had: https://www.coloradocoalition.org/sites/default/files/2017-09/Facing%20Eviction%20Alone%209-11-17.pdf Since a court case can prevent you from gaining housing in the future (even if you're right), this power imbalance leads to people not wanting to stand up for their rights and being evicted without due process. A study in Milwaukee found this happens twice as much as evictions that do have due process: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/BLUU3U
Meanwhile, HUD did a study of landlords and found that rental voucher are often not accepted: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-research-052819.html and only one in four people who qualify for rental vouchers actually gets them: https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/jchs.harvard.edu/files/ahr2013_01-intro.pdf
Now we could create more rental vouchers, but even if we can somehow get the landlords to accept them, adding them to the supply-constrained housing markets will only cause prices to rise. If there aren't enough houses (and none are being added anytime soon) landlords can easily raise prices to capture the value of the new vouchers without fear that they'll lose renters. I predict that people that don't receive a voucher will see their rents go up and we will have to perpetually increase voucher funding to try and stay ahead of the higher rents they're causing.
A few different points mentioned that I don't think were fully played against each other.
1. You originally stated Schellenberger supported "sweeping" institutionalization. He countered that while he does support institutionalization, he is not pushing for "sweeping" institutionalization.
2. After this point, it seems there is a consensus that "Homeless people" is a meaningless generalization of heavily varying degrees of independence. An example is given that "Autistic People" can range from socially awkward but fully functioning members of society, to those who need to be institutionalized with 24/7 care to not harm themselves.
3. The number of 'mentally ill permanently homeless people' is likely quite low compared to the entire homeless population. At the same time, they do cause an incredibly outsize negative impact on the quality of life of the areas they inhabit, along with crime and tremendous city expenditure to no end.
Possibly semantic, but I would not consider institutionalizing say ~4000 people in a few major cities to be remotely "sweeping" institutionalization. I think, as you did consider later, a few people locked up can be a reasonable price to pay for a significantly healthier society.
You've mentioned sweeping institutionalization in the 1950s several times, I imagine this is particularly meaningful to you as psychiatry was involved in this back then, and you may be sensitive to encouraging bringing it back. Per the 1950 US Census of institutionalized people, there were in 747817 in Mental Hospitals or Homes & Schools for the mentally handicapped, or 0.494% of a population of 151M. Current US population is 330M, and based on the data you've shown I am skeptical that this 'institutionalization of mentally ill permanently homeless people' would institutionalize close to 30k people nationwide - and that would be an order of magnitude lower than we had in the 50s!
I think that your original statement, that Schellenberger favors sweeping "sweeping institutionalization of the mentally ill" is in fact a mischaracterization of the size of the homeless population for which Schellenberger favors institutionalization as a solution. That said, he may not have been clear enough.
Regarding #9, I do think the book did a good job explaining how horrible institutionalization is. Nevertheless, unlike bygone eras, putting addicts in rehab past the time they physiologically crave the drug the post makes sense. I do agree with the dangers of institutionalization. All I can think, and maybe someone has data to support or refute this, is a feeling that even good ideas that seem to work well do so for about a decade before bad actors game the system and what was genuinely helpful is no longer. I would be in favor of a type of institutionalization that had this baked in and was able to be broken apart when it stopped working. I readily concede that would be almost impossible.
> But the stats I found were that 70% of SF homeless lived in SF before becoming homeless, 22% were elsewhere in California, and 8% were from other states
It's critical to point out that this is *survey data*. The source in the Wikipedia article for that claim is this:
https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDReport_SanFrancisco_FinalDraft-1.pdf
Which literally just asked homeless people where they were from. I don't think I need to spell out why this might not be a reliable number.
Your logic in the first section is 100% incorrect. You cannot accept self report answers to the “where are your from?” Because people lie intentionally and think they will get sent back the city they came from. You are so smart so surprised you fell for this. Also there is typically no checking on them - e.g. looking them up online or in databases to cross check it with known addresses
Lots of commenters are echoing Shellenberger's point:
"One word, “homeless,” entails an entire, insidious discourse that acts unconsciously and subliminally on our hearts and minds, rendering us unable to understand the reality before us."
Huge differences between different types of homeless people, and using the same word for the down-on-their luck and the "wretched" person who is not capable of holding down a job or even having an apartment without trashing it just obscures our thinking.
Also this is INCORRECT. This is self-report. This is NOT based on psychological evaluation, psychiatric diagnosis or any medical history.
The manipulation here is that they ask people if the reason they are homeless is b/c they are mentally ill or substance problem.
“This is another really good catch, and means the percent of the homeless with mental illness + drug abuse is only about 22%, not the stated ~50% - although considering only the chronic homeless separately might blunt this change.
Is there any homeless research that investigates their background? There are a lot of survey results and reports on what they said to social worked, therapists, psychiatrists, etc. do they ever then go out and talk to parents, siblings, the boss at the last job he held, people they knew in high school, etc.
Maybe part of the problem is an over reliance on self reported information?
> I'm still confused that reporting varies in exactly the right way to keep the reported level constant regardless of the real level,...
To me, this just screams parallels with induced demand, the Jevons paradox, and/or buffered chemical equilibrium: Criminals have some upper bound on the risk of real consequences that they will accept. Shopkeepers conversely have an lower bound on what probability of inflicting real consequences justifies reporting. The consequences equilibrium point is thus stable against environmental changes that assign consequences differently unless you can exhaust the buffered (non-participating) portion of one side or the other.
This is analogous to a freeway widening project having zero effect on traffic: people have a upper bound on traffic pain, and the width of the freeway is merely a lower bound on the number of people needed to inflict a given level of traffic pain in that location.
I recently read "Evicted" which is probably a housing-first rallying cry. First, the book is excellent and vivid. Secondly, the people it follows don't really fit into any of the categories of homeless described here. They have homes, sometimes, but are constantly pushed out. They're sorta the (b) types. They'd definitely be helped by a Housing First approach. But they're also, frankly, pretty bad. You wouldn't really want them moving in next door. Heroin addictions. Attacked the person who they had been staying with, stomping on her face and hitting her with a hammer. Most of these people really need help. But these aren't the "wretched homeless" groups either; they're in and out of housing and don't want to be in the situation they're in. But it seems like they've been stuck there too long and it's rubbed off on them. I don't know what the relevance is here, but it's not like (a)'s and (b)'s and "the good ones" and the (c)'s are "the bad ones" causing all the problems.
Re: getting tenants lawyers. That idea might actually started from "Evicted" since it's one of the proposals in the back of the book. It's hard to square your ideas with the depictions there: most tenants don't bother showing up to court. Courts fight back the landlords on the amount of money owed but the evictions were granted without exception if the tenant owed rent. The sheriff and movers show up and remove the people forcibly if necessary (one of the movers comments he's evicted his own daughter). Now this was in 2008ish and the book was influential so the system might have changed too far in the opposite direction in the mean time.
The book also contests the idea that landlords never want poor renters. The landlords in the book specialized in it: a poor tenant can be evicted at any time since they're always behind in rent. That means that they can't report you to the city for violations; you can ignore their repair requests and cut costs. And rents in poor parts of the city are only slightly behind rents in the rich part of the city (even though the house would sell for 3x as much in the rich part). But you have to be a tough landlord to put up with it.
About the different classes of homeless:
Broadly speaking a population can fall into different categories, but the distribution is probably still a smooth spectrum with no gaps.
That means that any marginal improvement in eg housing costs will still have a marginal improvement in homeless numbers.
Some comments seemed to suggest that having different categories of homeless would render marginal improvements less useful.
Hmmm that's a good point. Homeless encampments certainly are a different problem altogether from disparate homeless population. I agree that public disruption is handled much more swiftly (not necessarily roughly, as you say) in parts of Europe I am familiar with, I guess I think that just that fact alone already points to a deeper situation/cohesion which allows it, and which is not there in certain American places. I'm not sure exactly what the precise difference would be, I'm just saying I don't think it's only a difference in the written laws; these anecdotes about the security not getting involved because of slow/unresponsive legal systems or complainants not filing reports for similar issues seems to be along the same lines-- it would broadly be about some kind of social cohesion (in a city of fastidious/legally-hygenic people, a public crime would be an enormous disruption, and the surrounding populace would intervene/request police intervention -- but in many American cases it seems like the public attitude is one of deliberate ignorance of public crime/disruption).
I mean 'social cohesion' is a kind of non-answer, but I don't really want to say homogeneity, or something like that. I'm not being very clear but I want to view police inability to deal with fairly obvious social-disruption as a symptom of a deeper loss of power, and not something caused by a weakness of written law (which should anyway seek to follow closely behind reparative _actions_).
"Together with the model showing housing prices predicted homelessness well, I find this really convincing."
The elephant in the room no one among the activist circle wants to talk about is that it makes ZERO sense to house a single homeless person in a place like SF or LA or NYC where housing prices are some of the highest in the entire world. In America we've got dozens of second-tier cities with modest land prices and *that's* where the homeless should be moved. If our federal government was smart, they'd take the top-20 cities in America by housing price per square foot, draw a 50 mile circle around them, and ban any federal support for the homeless from going to any organizations within that circle. Then in a few years all the homeless organizations would move outside these "circles of crazy prices" and the problem would self-resolve.
I live in Seattle and it blows my mind that we're trying to house our homeless right here in the city instead of moving them to (say) Spokane where land is 4x cheaper.
>"I would be more sympathetic to this fair criticism if he was more willing to criticize the mass institutionalization era and less willing to criticize everyone who was ever against it."
This reminds me of the Javert Paradox (https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/its-hard-to-criticize-science-without-looking-like-an-obsessive.html).
As a minor note, your "r/homeless" link is not pointed to the correct location.
"Claim that the first two groups are only temporarily homeless and don’t bother anyone, and that all the problems people consider linked to homelessness are caused by the severely mentally ill."
So let me write a short defense of the "wretched" and point the finger at the “beach bums”. Without going into personal details, I've seen someone become wretched. Over the course of five years, they had a complete psychotic break, alienated all their friends and family, were given a mobile home which they barricaded and defecated in until it had to be replaced, and eventually got lost in the homeless world, to the point where private investigators by the family haven't been able to locate them. Think, very literally, someone who would become extremely agitated and paranoid within sight of power lines. Completely lost their mind.
And I think the implicit critique of the wretched, that they're the real problem, is kinda true. They, very genuinely, need more help than even a loving and prosperous family can provide. They're a screaming black hole of time, money, and energy. Honestly, I think the figures from the CA Department of State Hospitals is fairly accurate on what these people require. DSH spends about $1.4 billion on ~12k patients or $150k per patient per year. And yeah, for a room of 12 of these people, you do genuinely need 4-5 trained staff members per shift because, in a violent altercation, you do genuinely want 3-4 staff members subduing the patient in a controlled manner (for their safety and the patient's) plus an additional staff member to watch the other patients. $150k per patient per year is a pretty fair price. And, quite frankly, these places are...not a place you'd ever send a loved one. The staff tries, god some of them try, but no one wants family in DSH Napa or DSH Atascadero. At a certain point you hope the person can achieve some equilibrium anywhere. If he's camping down by the river in an out of the way spot and the local food bank workers recognize him and the cops know him and how to handle him...that's genuinely the best that can be made of a horrific situation. That’s the best life some of these people can lead.
But, in their defense, the wretched have a real claim on us. In any society a certain number of people will be born just broken. So broken that it is genuinely a full time job for 3-4 adults to care for them. And that’s fine, it’s a perfect situation for insurance in the social contract, the unspoken agreement that if you or a loved one is born so broken that badly that society will expend an undue amount of resources to make your life as comfortable as possible. That not only the government but each of us owes these people a certain amount of grace and pity “for there but for grace go I”.
I think the vibe I get from Scott here is wrong. The problem isn’t that 20% of the homeless population needs 80% of the time and energy, the problem is that they aren’t getting it because all these “beach bums” are taking it. One homeless guy down by the river, even a real crazy one, is something most of us have enough patience and grace to handle. Put a homeless camp down by the river and pretty soon people just want something done. At a really core level, people have a limited amount of empathy, especially for strangers. There’s an inherent competition for that empathy, for patience and handouts and social programs, between those who genuinely, absolutely need it and the beach bums who just don’t fit into society.
People aren’t just tired of the mentally ill homeless, they’re tired of tent cities everywhere, even at gas stops like Lodi on the I5, and they’re tired of feces on the streets and they’re tired of panhandlers. And, to be extremely unfair, the best solution the current homelessness crisis may indeed be the reinstitutionalization of the mentally ill homeless but it will be at the expense of the most vulnerable in our society to the benefit of a bunch of bums who have options in their life.
PS. Let me carve out an exception for the “car homeless” here, not because they deserve it, but because their problems can actually, practically, be solved. All the “car homeless” I’ve met are basically functional adults in bad financial circumstances where $10k would solve 80% of their problems, so, ya know, let’s just give them $10k in rental subsidies or something and be happy we found an easy problem for once. Like, I’ve past the point where I care whether you deserve a handout, I’m just grateful when a handout actually solves the problem.
PPS. Since numbers matter, my priors are that the actually “wretched” mentally ill population is a pretty constant baseline, probably somewhere around 20-50 people per 100,000 population like in Houston from the original post, whereas the big homeless epicenters have 100-500 per 100,000. I think, for many of these “wretched”, that homeless life is the best solution and dramatically better than being institutionalized and I think most people would not have a problem with the homeless if there were 80-90% less of them, no matter how bad the remainder were.
"But cities in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina also have okay climates without too many homeless, so I’m not sure how much to update on this."
Don't forget humidity. A heat index over 90 calls for "extreme caution" https://www.weather.gov/ama/heatindex, and Miami's high is above that for the entire summer https://bmcnoldy.rsmas.miami.edu/mia/
According to this https://www.bertsperling.com/2013/07/02/sizzling-cities-ranked-our-new-heat-index/ Miami has the 7th highest summer heat index in the country, and Orlando, Tampa and Jacksonville are not far behind. Los Angeles is #32, and SF, Seattle and Portland are nos 48-50.
Potentially relevant to the "why can't we just build lots of housing for the homeless", from today's San Francisco Standard:
https://sfstandard.com/housing-development/hotels-demand-sf-pay-up-for-damage-during-shelter-in-place/
San Francisco rented a bunch of hotels that were sitting idle during the pandemic, to provide emergency shelter to the homeless during the pandemic (because there was a time when "get them inside, that will stop the spread of COVID was a thing). Now those hotels are giving the city a bill for the damages these "tenants" caused. And if I read correctly, at one of these hotels it came to $42,000 per room.
Presumably they're padding the bill at least a bit, but I doubt they're making it all up. Housing is not a Thing That Exists just because you paid for it once upon a time; it needs constant maintenance, and it can be destroyed by neglect or carelessness. And that probably happens a lot more when you give it to people who maybe weren't particularly functional in the first place and have no skin in the game.
If we have to budget even $20K/person/year to repair the damage associated with otherwise-homeless tenants, that's going to be a significant economic hit.
Your link to /r/homeless is broken - it should go to https://reddit.com/r/homeless, or better yet, https://old.reddit.com/r/homeless. Instead, it goes to https://astralcodexten.substack.com/reddit.com/r/homeless/, probably because you forgot to add a https in the href
I find the story of being "robbed or assaulted" five times, and having a friend be "literally curb-stomped" to be, uh... extremely implausible, or possibly confused about the meaning of words, to put it charitably.
Robbery specifically means to take by force or threat of force, ie, mugging not car break ins, and is quite rare - plus aggravated assault, there were 5866 total in 2019. Spread over 800,000 residents, that's a yearly risk of 0.7%. Five times in a row would be... 2 in a hundred billion? Check my math?
Anecdotally, I've lived in SF proper for 10 years, in some pretty rough areas, and I've never been robbed or assaulted. I also know many people who live in SF (funny how that works), and among them all, I know of one mugging (that actually occurred in West Oakland) and one (technical) assault (being spat on by a crazed homeless person). The idea that one relatively normal person could be robbed or assaulted five times in rapid succession is winning-the-lotto level improbable.
Also, literal curb-stomping as depicted most gruesomely in American History X is, unsurprisingly, fatal. If someone was actually literally curb-stomped and survived, I would certainly expect them to at least be hospitalized, need reconstructive surgery, etc. It would be straightforward attempted murder, and the idea that the cops wouldn't want to hear about attempted murder is pretty ridiculous. In my years here, I've called the police multiple times (mostly reporting traffic incidents, once for a homeless person laying face down in the road where they could be run over, once after catching someone attempting to steal my motorcycle) and they've always been prompt in responding. After the motorcycle incident, they took a report. I'm not denying that some people have bad experiences with lazy cops, but I find the idea that they would ignore attempted murder to be... uh, extremely implausible.
Gosh, I didn't expect to experience the Notice Me, Senpai effect so early in Substack commenting career. I'm flattered, thanks Scott!
A couple other recent-post-relevant things I wanna append to my comment, now that it's semi-Canonized:
1) Used to date a semi-professional "booster". Not like organized crime, I mean the sort of M:tG Black amoral opportunist who figures out the informal rules for what gets you caught and what doesn't, then ruthlessly exploits that as part of balancing the household budget. This also includes knowing individual stores' refund policies well. Around 5-6 years ago when SF was seeing record summer heatwaves and AC units were selling out everywhere, she made the rational choice to purchase one for 3 months, then return the much-abused-and-still-leaking unit in the original packaging for a full refund come fall.
So I feel like I've got a decent sense for this kind of person and know several of the tricks of the trade...and this isn't the profile of the sort of shoplifter my store regularly gets. It's mostly the sorts I'd classify as Young Punks with Nothing To Lose. They don't do it for lack of money, they do it for the lulz and because flouting authority/norms is just part of the youth zeitgeist. (Hence why they make so many idiotic mistakes and we're well aware of the problem as it happens, not only afterwards through inventory discrepancies.) What they have in common, though, is that if you don't respect The Man anyway, it becomes easier to rationalize a "harmless" six-finger discount. Which leads into...
2) BLM protests during summer 2020. People get hung up a lot on the effects they had on policing, the racial angle, the boredom angle, and so on. But outside of the frequently-mentioned (and rightly so!) disingenuousness of Mostly Peaceful Protests...I wanna emphasize that there very much was a vibe shift around the legitimacy of capitalist businesses, especially among the young and politically active. <s>Ancap</s> [EDIT: Anti-capitalist] sentiment has always been ambient in SF, but after the Political Establishment and MSM pushed pretty hard on the narrative that There Was No Looting (And Even If There Was, Is That Really So Bad?)...well, surprise surprise, lotsa otherwise mostly-armchair disaffecteds started making this same justification in real life. To their friends, neighbors, and coworkers - including those who worked for Evil White Supremacist Corporations.
Suddenly it became a lot more normalized to handwave looting and other "mere" property crime: because the perpetrators were the real victims of systemic _____ism, because capitalist wealth is illegitimately stolen, because corporations are rich and who cares about their billionaire profits, because Materialist Consumerism Bad, because the poor should take any means on offer to get ahead. It was The Revolution, man, and you don't wanna look like a __scab__ during a society-wide strike.
I don't know why this angle hasn't gotten much coverage outside right-media. It was a very real phenomenon on the ground...businesses that cut hours/closed continue to have reduced hours/not be open. Those jobs aren't coming back...(and they were disproportionately held by the poor and minorities.) I'll never forget the period when all the shop windows around where I work were boarded up and there was a police-enforced curfew, out of fear of wanton property crime. It was shocking precisely because I work in one of the *tamer* parts of town, a mostly-residential area next to one of the colleges. You just don't see a lot of crime out here, and yet everyone was still running scared. It's so easy to break community norms of propriety and law-abidingness; much harder to bring them back after they're gone. So the fact that none of this shows up in Official Shoplifting (Larceny?) Data just makes it more gaslight-y, because now those same people who handwaved looting can point at statistics and say, see, look, I told you it was all okay. But it's not, and we're not.
"California and Seattle are among the rare US cities where it never gets unbearably hot or cold,"
You mean SF and Seattle.
Regarding point 13 (6 in 600 vs 2M in 200M): this is not a cognitive bias, this is correct application of the law of big numbers.
I expect the base rate of “people who need to be locked up or everything bursts in flames” to be somewhere around 1 in 1000. Given this rate, the probability that a 600-person town has at least 6 of them is 1 in 26260. So our hypothetical town is indeed unfortunate, but it’s not surprising that a few towns like that would exist. But given the same base rate, the probability of having 2M such people in a 200M country is less than 1 in 10^1000000 (that’s a million-digits number).
Regarding the "town of 600 that locks up 6 disruptive citizens": I would like to point out that it paints a wrong mental picture.
The correct picture would not be "Imagine you came to a town of 600...". It would be "Imagine there would be residents locked up in every single town. 2 in a village of 200. 100 in a small town of 10.000. No matter where you went, everyone would know people locked up from their hometown."
600 inhabitants are not a town where I come from, it's a village. Town is Stadt in german, and even Kleinstadt (literally "small town") is defined as 5.000+, and that definition is from 1887. So the mental picture may paint the wrong size.
But especially, the framing makes the town an isolated case, so we subconsciously accept a more extreme variation.
That's why mental framing like this is problematic: It paints a picture and literally paints over other facts. I prefer a data-driven approach, where you compare e.g. rates of incarceration between countries to judge whether a certain number is okay or excessive.
David Roman writes "In fact, the only actual conservative who was ever president of Portugal in living memory was murdered by state security; they didn't even bother to cover the crime very much, and then the whole country has sort of ignored the matter for decades, as one of those things that sometimes happen", regarding Francisco de Sá Carneiro, which is one of the wrongest sentences I've ever read?
- Sá Carneiro never was President; he was Prime Minister.
- The matter was not "ignored for decades" -- in fact, the opposite? It has been an ongoing political, and police, topic of discussion ever since: there were 10 (!) parliamentary inquiry commissions on the matter, with different theories and conclusions, and the case was periodically reopened by the State's attorneys. You can absolutely say that the whole matter was dealt with completely ineffectually, but this vague conspiratorial "... and it was never mentioned again" BS is the opposite of what actually happened.
- Sá Carneiro was.. not particularly conservative? He was one of the founders of the "Social Democratic Party" (and there is a never-ending tradition for every leader of the party to claim that they are the true heir of Sá Carneiro and will restore the party to its founder's vision), which was always the country's "center-right" party, whatever that meant at the time (and especially in 1980 that didn't mean very right-wing at all -- the Portuguese political mainstream has always been leftward of that of other European countries because of the post-Revolution context). Noticeably he governed in coalition with the actual right-wing party. But maybe the best source for this claim is... this actual interview of him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzGvhfbCoio where he says he doesn't want his party to be a conservative party and identifies with the German SPD (the social-democratic party, center-left).
'Under the CA penal code, shoplifting is “entering a commercial establishment, during business hours, with the *intent to steal,* where value does not exceed $950.”'
$950 is still good money and you can come back for more. That's why there are all these videos on 'shop lifting san francisco' etc.
Then again, the talking point is obviously 'actually, that's not shoplifting'.
> This is a great thought experiment / example of a cognitive bias / whatever it is. I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more.
I'd think 600 person towns with 6 people locked up at a given time are extremely rare; in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if no such town ever existed.
Someone can personally vouch for 6 people being complete scumbags who just have to be locked up, but in the real world nobody could possibly vouch for anything about 2 million people, so the second part of the thought experiment is not at all a fair description of the real-world US.
> So that leaves some kind of law targeting all homeless people and demanding they go in shelters or something. I dunno, seems unfair.
Many countries have laws against sleeping in public spaces, some (including mine) forbid drinking alcohol there. On one hand, both are an absurd violation of personal freedom. On the other, the kind of people who run afoul of these laws most often need to be liable for _something_ because they are a huge pain in the ass for the surrounding community.
I'm disgusted with the solution and I'd like a better one, as a person who slept on park benches sometimes and drank on them often.
"Claim that the first two groups are only temporarily homeless and don’t bother anyone, and that all the problems people consider linked to homelessness are caused by the severely mentally ill" -- selfishly yeah, but selflessly the fact that at any given point in time certain people don't have a place to stay sounds like a problem even if they don't bother anyone else, and if we're talking about policy proposals rather than about individual actions a selfish perspective doesn't sound particularly relevant to me.
Regarding #8: it contains a few basic mistakes (Sá Carneiro was NOT President) and casually asserts conspiracy theories as fact (his death was a matter of debate and investigations for decades, but no strong evidence of foul play was ever uncovered).
One thing I don't understand from these comments and from the original essay: how do these homeless people survive? How do they get enough food to eat? Do they flock to cities because there are more opportunities for begging? If giving money to the homeless was made illegal, what would happen to them?
Suppose you came upon a small town of 600 adults. The mayor tells you that while the large majority of the town's people are kind and decent, 1 of them is a complete scumbag who just has to be locked up or else the town would be in flames. However he doesn't know exactly who it is so they have locked up the 6 most likely people. Does this seem like a mass incarceration crisis?
Given relative incarceration rates of other developed countries this seems like an alternative scenario to consider.
Regarding shoplifting: surely there are ways that a rising rate of shoplifting could cause a proportionately dropping rate of reports. For instance, consider a "willingness-to-report" model where reporting is mostly driven by new employees or newly promoted managers, each of whom becomes jaded and stops reporting after n shoplifting incidents. More shoplifting would just lead to each employee burning through the same n reports earlier in their career. I have no confidence that it's the right model, but feedback mechanisms are common enough in life that a constant number of shoplifting reports doesn't seem too surprising.
So... I guess I'll be the one to make the stupid, naive, lib comment about Eledex's story. He says he called the police on these people multiple times and the police didn't show. At no point does he mention walking 100 feet and trying to talk to any of them and see if something could be worked out. Maybe, even probably, it wouldn't have worked! But who knows, 5 to 15 people isn't a lot and maybe there was some kind of community leader over there who had some influence over the rest of the camp and they could have worked out a "I could do you some minor favor if you could be more pleasant neighbors," type deal. Seems worth a shot. I know the story isn't very long so maybe Eledex is eliding details, but he doesn't refer to any of them by name or description, just as "the camp" and one gets the impression he never got any closer to them than staring out his window.
Again, I get that there's some nativity and gosh I understand social anxiety and a reluctance to engage with people who are scary, but... You know, one doesn't always get to choose one's neighbors whether they own the property legally or not, and sometimes people can be reasonable when you don't expect.
> I’m not really optimistic about our current ability to solve this the perfect world way where police are responsive to Eledex’s complaints and able to deal with these people in particular, while leaving other innocent homeless people alone.
You can have a system where various sub-crime nuisances add up and trigger an intervention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour_order
Why do people write "ctrl f" when you can use the word "search"?
I am highly skeptical of that tree story. 20 propane tanks strapped to a tree? Running out of the house naked with a 6 day old baby? Sounds like a Rush Limbaugh fever dream.
"Explain that the 1950s system of institutionalization was genuinely pretty terrible in a lot of ways, that the people who campaigned for it to be ended had lots of good points, but that the current system is also failing people. You support some specific loosening of the current laws around commitment, and the way you would ensure that people’s rights are still respected is [some paragraph that demonstrates you have thought about this question for five minutes]."
Well, problems regarding involuntary commitment were a relatively small part of the problems with the mental health system pre-mass deinstitutionalisation, though a lot of its problems probably could be traced back to too many patients/not enough resources.
> So that leaves some kind of law targeting all homeless people and demanding they go in shelters or something. I dunno, seems unfair. Probably there are gradations of unfairness and you could figure out some way to minimize the impact, but I don’t know, Eledex sure does have a valid gripe here.
Anyone else getting Matt Levine vibes from this paragraph?
>>This has been the opposite of my experience (and the experience of some friends with experience here who I talked to). The stories I hear are all about how nightmare tenants don’t pay rent for months or years, smash everything in the apartment, and when landlords try to get rid of them the courts just say they won’t evict them because making people homeless is mean.
This says a lot more about you and your friends than it does about the ground truth.
>>The stories I’ve heard are that a lot of landlords straight out try to figure out how to avoid renting to poor people because if their tenants ever choose to stop paying rent it’s several years of nightmarish court cases to get 50-50 odds of the government ever doing anything.
"Try to figure out how", as if this is at all a difficult thing. Landlords have all the power in these situations. Renters can't even afford a place to live, and you think they can afford lawyers for years of nightmarish court cases???
Ree: why don't cities ship homeless back to the suburbs, to me it feels like the obvious answer is that the people living in the suburb are also the richest and most influential people working in the city during the day, and city officials have more to lose by offending them than by hurting the poor people that actually live in most of the city.
I don't know if that dynamic holds for all cities, but it feels right for the cities I grew up around.
The SF police are equipped to take down N shoplifting reports per year. That's it.
My experience as a small-scale landlord (lived in the middle of a 3-flat and rented out the other two apartments) taught me that the U.S.'s legal processes related to rent-paying assume that most tenants won't show up to contest eviction. What I learned the hard way as a rookie landlord, and then heard from veteran landlords, was that it takes only one "motivated tenant" to crash the whole balance.
In my and my wife's case it wasn't even technically an eviction, we were just declining to renew a lease because the renter had been violating the written lease. We made the rookie mistake of explaining that (way too late an attorney explained to me why "you never give a reason"); and the renter took offense and found free legal assistance; and long story short we had to pay her to go away (and pay our attorney to help us pay her to go away).
And thus ended our interest in ever again being landlords at any scale. At small scale the annual returns when it goes well can't justify the level of loss and stress when it occasionally doesn't.
The Cabrini-Green saga in Chicago has a key twist which seems relevant to this discussion. Originally the complex was built as public housing for people who were in the workforce; a family could not be assigned a unit unless somebody in the household could prove they had a paying job. At some point during the Great Society years that requirement was dropped. I first heard this firsthand from someone who'd spent his childhood living in Cabrini and remembered when "the rules changed", but you can google it.
What my friend remembered was that it was after the rule change that Cabrini devolved into the gang-controlled disaster that it certainly was by the late 1970s. And I think that is more or less established wisdom among Chicagoans of that era....if correct then it has an obvious consequence for the concept of building public housing to house people who are unhoused. Brings us back I guess to the uncomfortable need to accurately diagnose _why_ they are unhoused.
I think the reason you only hear stories about bad tenants is because you don't know many renters. I think that part of the problem is that good landlords mostly get bad tenants and good tenants mostly get bad landlords.
Another question: what percentage of the security deposit do these landlords keep on average with the tenants who leave of their own accord? That seems to be the biggest issue for some tenants, that their landlords keep the security deposit for no good reason.
>The clearcut and obvious easy solution of just renting large numbers of apartments which are NOT clustered together idiotically to create horrible high concentration brand new sudden ghettos around hotels or housing developments....is the obvious thing everyone says they want to do which somehow has NEVER happened!!!?!?!?
This proposal still creates ghettos, just less immediately and explicitly. It really only takes one intolerable neighbor to drive people to move if they have no other remedy, and only people who can't afford to live anywhere else will opt to fill the vacancies.
Anecdotal response to "Why don’t cities bus their homeless back to suburbs?" from a quite different area - I recall being in Minsk, Belarus many years ago, and one thing that I noticed that despite quite many people not being well off at all, there was zero visible homelessness or beggars or such; local friends asserted that local police ship out such "delinquents" to country villages in the region where they can either do farming or at least are 'out of sight, out of mind' of the administrators living in the capital.
I have heard similar stories from some other places in Eastern Europe as things that are being done by city police. It does make some sense as in the countryside there's not a deficit of housing (though often of poor quality) due to urbanization decreasing population, and while there's a shortage of *decent* jobs there, it's definitely possible (I know some quite dysfunctional people doing that) to get enough for food and cheap alcohol by odd jobs, some social security support, and perhaps planting some potatoes if they can. Of course, that life sucks in many aspects, and some (many?) people do actually prefer to be homeless in a big city instead.
>This is a great thought experiment / example of a cognitive bias / whatever it is. I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more.
It seems like the obvious objection here is that, sure, if 1 out of every 100 people would literally burn down every building around them if not put in jail, then in that world having 1% of the population in jail would be the unfortunate but correct decision.
But we don't live in a world where 1 out of every 100 people are that type of insane criminal.
In which case, yeah, having a 1% chance of being locked in jail for bad reasons is a pretty big crisis. We locked down the whole planet more or less to fight a disease with a less than 1% fatality rate, whereas in this analogy we're inviting that type of decimation intentionally.
>This is a great thought experiment / example of a cognitive bias / whatever it is. I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis. I’ll have to think about this more.
I think in the 6/600 people scenario, I wouldn't think of it as a crisis of overincarceration, but I *would* notice that it seems kind of on the high side to form a permanent prison population in a community of that size. But at those numbers, you don't have the Law of Large Numbers insuring that things will hew close to the true frequency rates of the overall population. It's not that weird if 1% of the town's population happens to be hardened criminals incapable of peaceful coexistence because they got unlucky. Similarly, if another town of 600 has no hardened criminals, we're not going to be baffled by their inexplicable lack of criminality, because on that scale it's within the range of plausible variation.
When you see a country of 200 million with a prison population of 2 million, you're intuitively going to notice some things are different in that scenario. One is that the numbers involved are large enough that you can be quite sure the country's rate of incarceration isn't a matter of sheer dumb luck. Another is that unlike in the scenario with the town of 600, nobody is going to be in a position to know the personalities or circumstances of all 2 million inmates, or even more than a tiny fraction of them, and vouch "Yep, these inmates are definitely all hardened criminals who threaten the stability of their communities, and they're locked away because the system has treated them fairly."
In the actual country of America, rather than this hypothetical country of 200 million, you're also going to notice that the prison population is not a single permanent population; many of the people in that population of 2 million are not going to be in it ten years from now, but at the rate we're going, we don't expect the overall number to get any smaller. And if you're the type to keep track of trends, you're also likely to notice "Hey, this isn't the sort of proportional prison population size we had several decades ago, something must have changed for our prison population to be so much larger now." It could be that it's grown a lot because our population was underincarcerated in the past, and more people being locked away is better for our society, but I don't think people noticed the 1970's being a massive crime wave?
> This has been the opposite of my experience (and the experience of some friends with experience here who I talked to). The stories I hear are all about how nightmare tenants don’t pay rent for months or years, smash everything in the apartment, and when landlords try to get rid of them the courts just say they won’t evict them because making people homeless is mean. The stories I’ve heard are that a lot of landlords straight out try to figure out how to avoid renting to poor people because if their tenants ever choose to stop paying rent it’s several years of nightmarish court cases to get 50-50 odds of the government ever doing anything.
I think this is a case where both sides are right simultaneously. My understanding is that CA *laws* are very tenant friendly and you can easily fight eviction for months *if* you know your rights and have a good lawyer. But a lot of tenants don't know their rights, or aren't willing to risk a lawsuit, and are thus are prey to getting illegally evicted by abusive landlords.
"cities in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina also have okay climates without too many homeless"
This is how you know Scott spends little time on the West Coast. Nominal temperatures are similar but (say it with me) it's not the heat - it's the humidity! East Coast cities freeze in the winter, and if you go far enough South that they don't they are unbearably hot in the summer. If you want a climate that's at all comparable to California, you'd have to summer in Vermont and winter in Florida. Or you could just live year-round in San Francisco.
The Cabrini-Green homes definitely faced a lot of problems with how they were built. While it was probably better than being homeless, many people who would have qualified for them and the similarly troubled Robert Taylor complex opted to stay in market-rate housing and wait for one of the less-awful government housing options to open up, often for years. The book Blueprint for Disaster is a good history of 20th century public housing failures, with a focus on these 2.
I'm still very confused by this issue on a cross-country aspect. I live in Israel, and AFAICT the number of homeless in the centers of big cities is negligible. Certainly they don't camp the in any noticeable numbers. Why is it so different? Mental illness is probably at similar levels. And why has the number of homeless increased over time in the US?
My unsubstantiated guess is that it has to do with more individualism and looser family and community ties. If you're mentally ill but your family is in the picture, it's far less likely you'll become a homeless drug addict. If you're not mentally ill, you always have a couch to sleep on not very far.
But it could very well be that the difference is stricter policing keeping the homeless off main streets, or more institutionalization, I haven't checked the numbers.
Anyway, "creating a communal less individualistic culture" might be the least feasible solution to homelessness, but it would also be good to trace some of the source of the problem. I especially don't like that this is unthinkable, and all solutions proposed treat homeless as complete individuals to be dealt with individually by incentives and deterrence.
##"Unfortunately, you can’t ask people on a survey 'are you the good or the bad kind of homeless person?' so there aren’t a lot of statistics that do a good job taking this into account."##
Why can't you ask that question? That seems like a great question to ask, actually. If the response is raving lunacy, or no response because the person is passed out from fentanyl or bum wine, then you're interviewing the Bad Kind. But I agree that the question is impolite, and might get you stabbed.
I would think that you could sort the homeless into categories ("Beach Bum," "Unlucky," and "Crazy") with pretty good confidence with one question: "What caused you to become homeless?" The Beach Bum will give you a story that isn't really sad (or at least has a decent ending, because he's more or less content with his life). The Unlucky will give you a sad story about how her dog needed surgery and then she couldn't make rent. The Crazy will give you craziness.
Maybe there are difficulties with borderline cases, maybe some people move between categories somewhat freely, maybe mental illness does not always present in ways that are obvious to survey-takers. But surely we have heuristics for identifying the "bad" homeless, right? (Chris Rock joked that if you see a beggar with a funny sign, he doesn't really need your money. "Real" hungry people, Rock explained, are too hungry to be funny.) Because when people talk about San Fransico's homeless problem, they generally do not mean "this city is too expensive for working class people to have enough economic security to provide a buffer for unexpected expenses, and they can easily find themselves evicted if they suffer a slight setback." They mean "there's shit everywhere, a bum broke into my car, and I almost got stabbed by a smelly lunatic."
Homelessness is interesting in that it's one of the clearest dividing lines between liberals and conservatives. I'm generally more conservative, and I've always seen it as an issue without any clear solution. Most conservatives seem to think this way. The heuristic is "well, people are always going to make weird decisions and as long as they don't bother me or the people I care about, it's not really my business."
As an urban planner who sometimes comments publicly about housing issues, I'd like to thank you all for this crowd-sourced effort to make me better at my job.
One note: I do not find it surprising that as rates of shoplifting rise, people's hopelessness about reporting it also rises, leading people to report it less. If the proportion of police resources spent on it does not rise (which seems to be the case), then the proportion of useless phone calls to the cops will rise, discouraging people from bothering.
To Scott and all the commenters: This is the most informative and useful discussion of homelessness and urban crime I have ever read. I can't recommend it highly enough to the many people I have sent it to.
Thanks to all.
BRetty
In regards to the relatively level number of shoplifting reports, you've only discussed the demand for shoplifting reports, not the supply. There aren't an infinite number of police working hours available to be spent on writing shoplifting reports, and it's difficult to get more shoplifting reports as a citizen, because you can't just pay the police more to take your shoplifting report rather than someone else's.
As the anecdote on the homeless tree camp neighbors indicates, the police may just choose not to respond.
So despite additional demand, if the police have decided they're only going to spend X% of their time, or even only write a fixed number of X shoplifting reports, perhaps even with a floor of Y severity, then the willingness of police to spend time on shoplifting reports (because this is a government bureaucracy, not a real market) is going to control the number which get filed, not the amount of shoplifting and the corresponding demand for shoplifting reports.
I have immediate family members who manage gas station/convenience stores (but not in the bay area). Shoplifting is rampant. Corporate policy is to make no attempt to stop it, even at stores with an armed guard (i.e. the worst stores). Calls to the police are only made if there is violence or a threat involved, or if the theft is over a particular relatively high dollar threshold of value. Otherwise, it's just another loss embedded in the overhead and despite having everything on camera, not worth pursuing.
Most retail companies likely have some variation of a similar policy about dealing with shoplifting, but harder than usual targets just shift the crime to other softer retail locations. If there was a massive influx of shoplifting beneath their dollar reporting number, it wouldn't induce them to report more of it, because corporate and the police don't want reports under that dollar number. That may also have an effect, because those sorts of dollar limits for particular stores are frequently found in online shoplifting discussion communities.
> I find myself sharing his intuition: if 6 people were locked up to “clean up” a town of 600, this would seem unfortunate but basically fine, but when it’s 2 million in a country of 200 million, then it feels like a crisis.
Should we expect criminality to scale linearly with population size? That seems like the weakness in the analogy, as many phenomena scale non-linearly with population.