So you're saying that people are addicted drugs because they are homeless, they are not homeless because they are addicted to drugs?

You can have both, and they can create a feedback loop that guarantees someone will never be able to get out.

A more general example of this is scarcity mindset where the condition of not having enough of something causes someone to be poor at managing that resource [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarcity:_Why_Having_Too_Littl...

There's an alternate conclusion (which seems a more sympathetic and obvious read to me) that people who would do drugs and have nowhere private they are allowed to be end up doing drugs in public.

I'm sure the cause/effect between homelessness and drug addiction is somewhat more complicated (and two-way; I'm confident that I'd be more likely to be an addict if I were homeless).

> people who would do drugs and have nowhere private they are allowed to be end up doing drugs in public

I think there is delineation between public drug use and open drug scenes. The latter is concentrated.

I don't understand how what you just said isn't painfully obvious to all.

Both are probably true, some people get homeless due to addiction, and lack of a home keeps them relapsing, while also creating a social environment where other types of homeless persons - the mentally or physically disabled, elders, evacuees etc. - can get into drugs.

For a dealer, a dense community of chronic addicts is a cashcow, a market they can serve with much lower risk vs. catering to suburban teenage parties.

No, and this is such a weird and bad logical jump, and really shows the limitations of strict logical thinking and lack appreciated second-order type stuff.

Rich or middle class addicts still have houses to get high in.

It's anecdotal, but I've definitely had rich friends get high in the open. Even when not homeless, there are a lot of reasons to hide an addiction from the people in your home and instead seek out locations where you can get high.

Agreed.

In my moderately sized southern city of 200k, we logged/censused 576 homeless a few months ago. Of course these individuals were the ones able to be counted; there's likely more. So roughly a quarter of a percent per captia.

As with most US cities of this size and economic demographic we have a few areas where those without housing tend to congregate. Pains me and I wish I could help more than I do. And from what I have seen in my many decades of living here, these areas are totally devoid of this "open air drug market" characteristic. Not to say transactions don't happen they most certainly do, but that's true of every square foot of any US city, and the people in these places shield their behaviors from public eyes as well as anyone else that procures such things. My city is experiencing a staggering increase in violence this past year at a seemingly disproportionately faster rate than other nearby metro areas if my napkin math holds true and yet none of that violence is noted as occurring at these areas I'm describing. I think that's worth noting too.

The interplay of homelessness, mental health, drug dependency, economic struggle and societal rejection is a very complicated and interwoven problem. It's disappointing to hear that there are individuals who feel so self assured in the sources of these problems when it's evident that the qualities of these problems widely differ from place to place.

It's just if you're not homeless, your drug scenes won't be open.

Lol, it's LITERALLY just this. There is 100% nothing else to see here. This whole conversation is so wild to me.

Both are true to different extents and in different cases.

Say you're living on the streets, mentally ill or just unhappy due to circumstances. Are drugs, a way to temporarily escape your current pain, going to be more or less tempting?

In what way are open drug scenes simple to solve? The research I've scene on cities that have had large ones is that "simple" draconian and "abstinence based" policies rarely have a positive effect and most places saw the best results from complex, multiprong approaches that are implemented with an understanding that it will take years to see results.

While open drug scenes are comorbid with housing crises, they are not the same thing. There is also overlap between the strategies for addressing them, but that overlap is not complete.

What's simple to solve is homelessness.

You give them a home. Then they are no longer homeless.

The fact that this is also demonstrably (in several different jurisdictions now) less costly than either imprisoning them or dealing with the other consequences of a significant homeless population should make it a no-brainer.

But too many people have internalized the idea that no one should ever have anything they haven't "earned", including the basics necessary for survival (food, shelter, clothing, clean water, etc), so there's always angry opposition to this. (Plus, of course, the racism angle, which is fairly significant, if often unspoken.)

For those that talk about giving people things they "have not earned", I note what we've taken from those same people -- the ability for them fend for themselves and live off the land.

With regard to the mechanism of "compensating for the lease of the part of our living planet they should be entitled by birth", I think any means tested or regulated approach is problematic. Instead provide to them rent checks for the slice of the world society has taken from them, and provided to others for private ownership / exploitation.

Let a market economy sort the development and allocation of resources.

Ugh. Stop with the "theories."

We've already run the real life experiments, as suggested above. No need to try to delve into minds and motivation and life goals and other such nonsense (nonsense not in the sense that it's not true, but nonsense in that it doesn't bring any helpful ideas to the policy decisions that should be made.)

Housing first approaches are very effective, but simply providing housing isn't anywhere near a complete solution.

Drug addiction and the development of open drug spaces is not just a symptom of homelessness. If you solved housing and it became a human right, you would probably reduce the development of open drug spaces, but it certainly wouldn't be eliminated.

I'm not burying the lede, I am vigorously disagreeing with the point of view, and providing a citation.

As always happens in HN when you post the legal source of a paper, a helpful commenter has posted a link to a grey-market copy. I suggest you read it, then we can have an informed conversation about what you're claiming here, presuming it doesn't change your mind.