In reply to: I'm starting to feel personally put out posted by El Kabong
Immigration is certainly one - it is not fair to put the burden on only states with borders, of course.
Likewise, homelessness cannot be a long term state only issue. Otherwise states with the biggest safety nets will be disproportionately affected. And as evidenced with the West Coast, they are.
I believe border security / immigration is a federal issue. However, right now Texas is taking control of its own border security in opposition to the federal government. We should be able to solve this at the federal level, but can't seem to get everyone together on a solution.
With regard to homelessness, the only involvement I see from the federal government would be to help identify root cause, then, if there is a good universal solution, implement it, otherwise get out of the way. More often than not, experimentation is required and different methods work in different places. That's why local solutions tend to be more effective than broad legislation.
You need the state government to over rule NIMBY's in local governments who tey to hold back housing construction. The feds could maybe push the states to do more or withold funding unless they improve. But New York or California or Vermont are fully capable of building more housing.
That may be the case in the Bay Area or LA, but not everywhere. There is a large component of the homelessness equation that is mental illness.
This kind of proves my point. There isn't a single, easy solution to implement, and it will vary based on regional issues.
Weather's not a great explained, drug use rates aren't, population growth isn't, etc. When you look at the data.
Increasingly expensive rent vs. Median income is.
I think you're each referring to different parts of the homeless spectrum.
There is a fairly large contingent of homeless that are couch surfing, living in cars, and try to stay out of the way so as to be left alone. We don't see these people generally, because they don't affect us directly.
However, there is a small but VERY visible contingent (mentally ill, druggies, anti social assholes) that has a very outsized effect, especially on the west coast. Housing won't work for these people - generally only enforcement and deterrence.
If you try to help with the former, you cannot conflate with the latter, because you will get used. As evidenced by Oregon Measure 110 (which was badly laid out to begin with), people will see leniency as a welcome bell for abuse.
the homeless you describe the stability of a home helped improve the odds of overcoming the other issues.
It's far easier to fall into the visible homeless (mental health crisis, drug addiction, etc.) When your housing situation is unstable. Bad policy can worsen the number of people in prominent areas (see SF vs NYC, if I remember they have similar homelessness rates). But the overall number of homeless people drives the number of people who we think of as capital H homeless.
But if drug addiction caused homelessness you'd see west virgina leading the pack. If alcoholism caused it you'd see Wisconsin totally inundated with homeless people. A ranking of mental health disorder prevalence balanced with treatment resources doesn't really match either.
You cannot just throw housing at something and hope it gets better. Here in Portland, such a person burned down his apartment and almost killed several people.
I have a friend in Section 8 housing. He's seen time and time again where someone is just dropped into an apt without any sort of support system. They get lonely, their friends want to come over, they use, they fall back into it.
Sure, they'll need housing, but first they need something to force them to get on track. It cannot happen in a vacuum.
As far as West Virginia, I'd say it's because it's a less concentrated population. You can get a shack for a buck and nobody sees you suffer. Alcoholism is a terrible thing, but it doesn't make you pursue a life of crime quite like meth does.
I get that the "service resistant" homeless are not the majority, but try telling that to someone who has been chased with a knife or threatened for trying to get by on the sidewalk. I think it is a grave mistake to lump them in with the conventional homeless.
Had housing been affordable you'd have a much smaller and easily manageable homeless population. Now even if you fix the housing problem the chronically homeless that restrictive housing helped create won't just go away. You'll need social services and such.
Other examples of this are Houston which more than halved their homeless population in the last decade, and Tokyo which saw its homeless population drop when they deregulated housing construction.
I'd also point out places like Detroit, Memphis, Milwaukee with a lot of poor urban people don't have west coast/NYC/Vermont levels of homelessness despite a lot of concentrated poverty, drug use, etc. The difference is housing.
I feel like you're suggesting that people started using drugs or became mentally ill because they couldn't afford housing. I'm skeptical, I admit.
But again, I think those are the 10% of the population that is 90% of the visibility. I agree we should focus on the 90% of the population that doesn't go around committing crimes. However, you cannot have policy without touching on the 10%, no matter how small of a population it is, because (and I cannot stress this enough) that is what people see and experience.
If it's a housing crisis, why does over half the PIT count of Portland report having lived here for less than two years? There is *something* drawing them here from elsewhere.
Otherwise, I absolutely agree that permitting and regulation are killing new construction. The fact that our metro government can't build a low income studio for under 500k seems...off.
Lastly, for all the money nonprofits rake in on attempting to address homelessness, why can't we feature more families that genuinely can be helped?
How hard would it be to say "ok, here's bob and mary, 3 kids, sleep in their car. This is how we get them back on track in their lives". Show the nation there are people just like them that have problems that can be solved, *and* those people absolutely want to solve them, and I think you'll have far more support.
Think Habitat - we all helped build houses, but those families rolled up their sleeves and helped right along with us. I think it'd go a long way.
I've always put myself in the fiscal-conservative-social-liberal bucket, and as the parties polarize, the gap into which I fall grows larger.
and not progressive.