We’ve prioritized autonomy so much that we’ve ended up in a miserable equilibrium for all involved.
The only things progressives have to offer is maybe if we spend just a few more tens of millions; maybe if we throw just a few hundred more well intentioned social workers, drug counselors, and psychologists--then those few thousands will choose a different path. Because obviously the universe is a just one and there’s never any tough tradeoffs to be made. If only everyone cared as much as we progressives (aka good people) wouldn’t life be so glorious?
Any difficult problem needs to be broken down into pieces and analyzed piece by piece, and I posit that this is the clear and obvious part of any serious solution. Logically, I can only see two other possibilities.
1) We solve homelessness and criminality once and for all, such that nobody would even attempt to pitch a tent on property that isn’t theirs without permission, or else would willingly remove themselves once their error were pointed out to them. I hold that this is impossible, and though we should always strive for perfection, we must recognize and account for our limitations.
2) We keep the status quo, where vagrants are not forcibly removed and instead are allowed to live dispersed throughout the city.
If I’m missing another possibility here, then somebody please point it out to me. Note that I’m purposefully leaving out any discussion of where those that are forced to leave should go, which admittedly must be a part of any solution but is not the part that I’m interested in for now. Additionally I accept that there is plenty to debate regarding precisely how enforced removal should be carried out; for the sake of discussion, let’s assume that everyone should be given fair warning and a chance to leave at their own accord, and violent force should be kept strictly to what’s minimally necessary to enforce the rules.
Am I wrong to think that enforced removal is necessary to any serious solution? And if so, can somebody explain to me why I’ve never heard of a “progressive” solution that grants this point and incorporates it into its plan?
The fact that only one of these will be on the receiving end of state violence really underscores how little the excuse of "you're occupying public property" has with the expected outcome.
I mean, this is what they do in a lot of cities (albeit not San Francisco), except it’s usually far less polite than this. It’s not uncommon to see LAPD breaking up homeless camps and destroying their possessions (funny how selective property rights are), and it’s not exactly fixed the problem in LA.
At best it tends to push them towards cities that’ll not abuse them arbitrarily, at least until the voters in that area vote in a police chief that’ll be “tough on crime” and they’re turned out, repeating the cycle.
> Am I wrong to think that enforced removal is necessary to any serious solution?
Yes, because it’s what we’ve been trying for about half a century and it has failed miserably. At best it results in us playing hot potato with them between different cities. At worst it involves illegal application of state violence against the poor and powerless.
It’s genuinely hard for me to understand how “enforced removal” could possibly be seen as a solution for homelessness. Maybe if your goal is to stop seeing the problem, perhaps. But it’s not exactly a solution; are the homeless going to stop being homeless after you’ve “removed” them? Or are they just going to be dumped somewhere else after getting roughed up by the cops a bit?
> If I’m missing another possibility here, then somebody please point it out to me. Note that I’m purposefully leaving out any discussion of where those that are forced to leave should go, which admittedly must be a part of any solution but is not the part that I’m interested in for now.
There’s a good reason why I accuse a lot of people of not actually wanting to solve the problem, but rather make it happen out of sight. It’s rare to have someone say it so nakedly though.
Maybe you should focus less on where they should go, and more on rehabilitating as many of them as possible back into society? If they had homes in which to secure their possessions, maybe fewer of them would feel the need to camp out on the property you seem so concerned about? Or better yet we can take a look at what policy changes have caused the homeless population to grow and change those, so that fewer of our fellow human beings end up on the street? Just a thought.
I am also extremely dubious that there are anywhere near as many untreatable cases as people seem to think.
This is exactly the “few more tens of millions of dollars and a few hundred more well intentioned social workers” argument I predicted.
What I’ve seen is fifty years of increased incarceration, police spending, and soaring housing prices.
I think it is fair to categorize the majority of interactions the public has with the homeless as negative. With most falling somewhere between simple harassment (aggressive panhandling) and serious crime (mugging, assault, property damage, etc).
Of course, this is a huge generalization and #notallhomeless blah blah blah… But I think even those that advocate for homeless would have a tough time arguing that they increase the quality of life in the neighborhoods they inhabit.
What is the effective difference between believing someone deserves to suffer, and purposefully withholding aid that could be rendered? One might be dressed up in more comfortable language, but they both result in homeless people not being helped on purpose.
Homeless people have objectively been let down by society, of course they're antisocial. They're hungry, exposed to the elements, and treated like garbage by most people they interact with. Every single one of us would behave in antisocial ways if we were in that situation. If you want them to change, you have to begin changing the circumstances that motive their current behavior. Denying aid until they change is just a polite way to deny aid permanently.
This is silly. By your logic we in the Western world are essentially causing the suffering of the Uyghurs in China because we haven't started a war to stop their oppression.
You aren't complicit just because you don't try to fix every wrong in the world.
The real world is difficult and involves suffering, pain, unfairness, etc. Our resources to limit these negative aspects of existence are finite. When we view someone "suffering" and see it as the result of their own actions, yea, I think we are even more reluctant to do anything.
All that to say: Good luck convincing people that they should allocate scarce resources to help out the people who throw containers of urine at them and defecate on the sidewalk in front of their apartment.
The last time we invaded a country to liberate people went so well, right? Clearly we should always be doing that, since it consistently reduces human suffering in the regions we invade with no risks whatsoever. Given the consistent good outcome of invasions, it's obvious that not giving people houses in our cities and not being willing to risk WW3 in order to help out the Uyghurs are morally equivalent things, good argument.
Dripping sarcasm aside, we should absolutely do something about the Uyghur genocide. But trying to draw a moral equivalency between inaction on both these things is pushing the "good faith" rule to the limit. One of them has obvious avenues for harm reduction right now, while the other is a messy thing with plenty of avenues for us to accidentally end up making things much worse for the people we're trying to help and potentially get a bunch of other random people killed to boot. These two things are not the same, at all.
Also, America created its own homelessness crisis. Surely we have a moral obligation to resolve any issues that we ourselves created, no?
> Our resources to limit these negative aspects of existence are finite.
Come now, you can't possibly think that the reason why we don't house the homeless is because of resource limitations, can you? That's just a ridiculous argument; we've magically run out of resources and coincidentally the limit was helping the homeless in our cities. Please ignore any increased consumption anywhere else, we're just absolutely out of resources, and are powerless to change that.
I'm sure you've calculated the cost of sending the police around to harass homeless people, right? Sure would be unfortunate if you make an argument about us being unable to help while we end up spending more money harassing and abusing the homeless than it would cost for us to give them homes[0]. That would make it look like we're just being cruel for the hell of it, rather than because this is the cheaper way forward.
> You aren't complicit just because you don't try to fix every wrong in the world.
You literally said above that people don't want to subsidize the homeless because they're angry at them. That is worlds apart from "terribly sorry, can't help". You’re absolutely moving the goalposts from “too angry to help” to “not my duty to help”.
And that's before we begin to discuss the circumstances that have made homelessness a thing. They didn't just appear out of nowhere, you know. Homelessness is a policy outcome, not an act of god. We absolutely are complicit as a society for homelessness in our society, because it is a consequence of the decisions we’ve made as a society. We have a moral obligation to fix the problems we have ourselves caused at a minimum.
> Additionally, good luck convincing people that they should allocate scarce resources to help out the people who throw containers of urine at them and defecate on the sidewalk in front of their apartment.
Maybe if we send in the cops to tear up their tents and beat them up it'll solve it this time. Hasn't worked for decades, but maybe this last time will be the trick! Heaven forbid we try something new.
Also, maybe we should install some public toilets. Just a thought. Humans have to defecate, if you don't give people a place to do it they will do it in the streets. It honestly seems like a lot of people would rather see their cities literally covered in feces rather than give homeless people a toilet.
0 - http://endhomelessness.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Cost-S...
Back in the mid 1980s, the Village Voice[0] ran a feature article entitled "What do homeless people want?"
The author helpfully provided an answer in the first sentence of the article: "Homes, mostly."
Given the very visible homeless population in New York City[1] at the time, and that more and more of those folks were families with children, it seemed a reasonable question to ask, with a readily available answer.
And in 2000, there was a piece in the San Jose Mercury News[2] about full-time school teachers working in the San Jose public schools who were living in homeless shelters because they couldn't afford housing on their salaries in the South Bay.
And yet, 30+ years later the problem is getting worse -- due to the lack of affordable housing stock, increasing economic insecurity and inequality, among other, lesser, issues.
So let's not continue to believe the Grimm-esque fairy tale that poor people are poor because they're lazy or stupid. And that all homeless people are drug-addicted, mentally impaired losers.
So what is it that homeless people want? Homes, mostly.
Yet our zoning and housing policies make increasing housing stock to meet demand and effectively difficult, if not impossible.
Yes, homelessness is a serious issue. And something I experienced back in those fabled 1980's. And I did have a drug (cocaine) problem while I was homeless. Then again, I didn't start using those drugs until I was already homeless. Hmmm. Correlation isn't causation, but...
[0] https://www.villagevoice.com/
[1] https://citylimits.org/2013/03/11/a-brief-history-of-homeles...
Also, substance abuse can be an outcome, not just a cause. People go homeless after getting addicted, yes, but people also get addicted in order to numb the experience of being homeless too. Using drugs is a reasonable response to a loss of hope; I’m sure every single person here has some experience with increased alcohol consumption as a response to stress. It’s perfectly human, and most of us wouldn’t do any better if we were homeless tomorrow.
Also, this attitude is never applied to the rich and powerful addicted to things like cocaine. Which is kind of curious. It makes you wonder if the issue isn’t drugs at all..
This group has generated so much negative goodwill with the general public that any “logical” solution that requires public $ is going to have a difficult time prevailing.
The easiest and intuitively cheapest solution in the minds of most people is: make them go somewhere else.
I get that it's not popular with the public, that's why we have these debates, because the public needs to figure out whether it really wants to solve the issue by partially getting over itself or it doesn't and prefers to live in the bad situation that current exists.
EDIT: usually these arguments from the progressives appeals to morality or whatever, but in this case, it's literally an effectiveness argument. It works, regardless how one feels so it should be done.
Now, if one argues "well, it might not work here," that to me is a more interesting and worthwhile discussion. But if one's point is "well, I don't dispute whether it works or not or whether it won't work here, I just hate the homeless so much I don't want to do the thing that would actually fix it," leads me to question whether one hates it enough to actually address the issue or not.
Not really true at all. If you are a Midwestern city with a homeless "problem", giving them a one-way ticket to San Francisco (or somewhere else that is hospitable to homeless) seems to be a good way to get rid of them for good.
If one is able to look at this situation objectively, this is a really interesting and complex problem to consider at the level of the municipality. Different cities will have different strategies.
...and like in my example above, a change in one city's strategies might actually change your strategy. If San Francisco starts cracking down on tent cities and tries to prohibit panhandling, open drug use, etc. then those Midwestern cities may have to start sending their homeless to another place, or just deal with them in-place.
The equilibrium that this game reaches may be the place that has the most reasonable, humane and probably expensive solution to homelessness actually increases the number of homeless they have to accommodate as they become a permanent draw.
(I’m aware I’ll be down voted by people who do not live here, haven’t had to call the cops for help themselves, and think I am just exaggerating)
I am just stating if someone refuses the safe sleeping sites and continues to break into yoga studios and throw feces and blood at people, maybe there ought to be a backup “solution”.
Why does homelessness become an excuse to commit crimes? We can both help homeless people and also not make them immune to laws.
Why should my neighbor who is wheelchair bound have no access to her sidewalk because a homeless guy is storing 100 stolen bicycle wheels on the sidewalk?
I specifically want more safe sleeping sites, but I also want people arrested if they refuse the safe sleeping site and choose to be a menace to a society.
That isn’t true, of course they’ve solved their problem using such measures…by pushing them to another city. For example, Bellevue WA will have the riot squad out pretty quickly if you so much as lay down on a bench, and it works since Seattle WA is right across the lake.
As far as I can tell, San Francisco doesn't seem to believe this. San Francisco does seem to collectively believe that adding housing is an abomination to avoided at all costs and that helping the homeless is a moral imperative.
I don't think this is true at all. Citation is needed for this.
The fact that this never works doesn’t really seem to dissuade anyone. No city has managed to solve the homelessness problem with anti-sleeping architecture and police crackdowns, but they’ll keep trying.