But I think the suffering of the individual is largely unchanged whether it happens out in public or on the periphery. In contrast, I think we as a larger society are suffering from lack of safe and clean public spaces. So we may as well maintain some sort of enforcement.

Torronto is a perfect example. It was merged into Greater Torronto, and those new areas are what led to Trumpist style Rob Ford being elected.

And its also zoning. Its always surprising to me how in the US people don't live in the cities. In Europe, the city center are very lived in. The downtown can't turn into a ghost town, even if everybody works from home.

UK being an exception, sadly. Which is understandable, considering they basically invented the "suburb" concept and then exported it to the colonies.

I live near Manchester, I know, but the city centre is still nowhere as dense (in terms of dwellings) as most towns and cities on the continent. It's changed for sure - lots of old warehouses and factories have turned into flats - but the city has clearly been built for business activity first and foremost. And as soon as you move to smaller towns, like Warrington, the number of people actually sleeping in the immediate town centre falls to almost zero. Brits just want to live in suburbia and in the countryside.

Portland is the only city in the country that is taking as aggressive an approach towards decriminalizing and formalizing encampments, and it shouldn't be surprising that it is experiencing visible failures this early on, or an indictment of those policies.

Who the hell wants "formalized encampments"?! We going to turn our cities into third-world-style shanty towns now like you can find on the outskirts of Nairobi?

If you really want to destroy a city, I can't think of a better way to do it than going down this path.

I mean, it sounds like what you have now is worse. If your city is going to have an underclass either way, a formal shanty town seems less bad than a homeless encampment.

good or bad? not sure.

Is this really a hard problem to solve? I can certainly buy the argument that criminalizing homelessness doesn't make sense when the "criminal" has no other options. But if someone has a viable option for not living on the street, I'm considerably less sympathetic given the downsides to everyone else involved.

I guess it depends on how we define viable. In my experience working with the homeless, there are a lot of valid reasons shelters are avoided; they can be more dangerous, don't allow pets (who are sometimes the only companions they have), and don't allow families or couples. Whether that is viable or not depends on how you use the word.

It's the dogs that get left alone inside an apartment for 9 hours a day that are unhappy and neglected.

The fact that there are so many strong opinions from people who demonstrate an embarrassingly low understanding of the situation is one of the reasons the problem is so hard to solve in the first place.

A tent in a park, unless in the middle of a trail, doesn't inherently or necessarily make it less usable or less safe.

"We only help those who help themselves", etc.

You get people a safe place to sleep and then provide them with resources to become re-integrated into society, not the other way around.

2. The idea they need constant monitoring comes from the same outdated approach that believes we shouldn't help people unless they deserve it and we can make sure they deserve it. That model has not proven effective and either reducing homelessness or reducing homelessness' external costs on society. It has proven even less effective at improving long term mental health and addiction issues.

3. We have not found a long-term solution to chronic mental health and addiction issues. No approach, yet, has shown outsized performance over any other. Housing First approaches, however, have shown an improvement in homelessness, medical services and criminality – which might be the best we can hope for.

Even just cleaning is a lot of work, not to mention additional maintenance (e.g. filter changes, landscaping, etc.), regularly taking out garbage, not flushing trash down the sewer, etc.

Unless you also want to hire staff to do that for them, in which case, sign me up. I want to live for free too and not have to work and do drugs whenever I want.

> I want to live for free too and not have to work and do drugs whenever I want.

Here's the rub: When you get to the point of needing free housing, you are usually more or less already at the, shal we say, 'mature' phase of your addiction where there is hardly an ounce of joy left to be had from it. The daily grind of figuring out how to get high is basically just your hellish normal, and the best rush you might get here and there in your average month is akin to eating a nice meal, having a good (but not great) conversation, or a satisfying workout.

Compared to good sex? Get out of here. That phase of drug use is long gone. If you want that back even for a fleeting moment you have to go through the hell of withdrawal first. Even doses that put you dangerously close to OD don't really reach that anymore unless you risk them after a period of abstinence (which is where most opiate addicts used to die, back before fentanyl was the norm).

However, with all that said, I'd argue a functional addict is better equipped to deal with the stuff you mention above better than a severe addict who is trying to get sober after years of active addiction. Obviously acute withdrawal is an absolute bastard, but so are the following months of post acute withdrawal (aka your brain and body re-learning how to function at a completely new level of physiology). If we were doing it right, sobriety would be a hard requirement up front, followed by a good deal of support during the transition back into housing.

True, it's much easier to get sober in stable housing. But you know what's even easier still? Continuing to use in a more comfortable and secure environment. Or worse yet, when free housing is still pretty scarce, using your pad as a commodity to score perks from your friends who are still homeless, or worse, using it as a safer and more secure place to stash and deal quantities of drugs to support your addiction directly. Anyone in active addiction will consider these possibilities the moment the lock is turned and they are alone in their new home (not all will act on it, of course). Housing yes, but probably not 'housing first.'

You don't take a patient with a gunshot wound and make sure they have a long term care bed to lie in comfortably while they bleed. You get their ass to the ER and fix the bleed before worrying about the long term stuff.

Free housing paid for by people like me, and ideally others, who are more than happy to take what I make and give it to people who need it more than I do.

And you don’t need to be rich to do it. It’s a decision on how much money etc you actually need to be fulfilled.

If that takes a zombie proof bunker and multiple houses and first class flights and…and… then that’s on your head that you prefer to comfort yourself than take care of others.

You sound like you'd be shocked at how many high-functioning junkies live in most apartment complexes in most major cities. Upper-middle-class guys, holding down jobs - at least until a run of bad luck hits.

Yes. And nobody can handle their shit 100% of the time, so this is really quite a lot of people one or two mistakes away from being on the street. Many of whom you ignorantly count as "clean" friends or neighbors.

How does America go through the whole fucking opioid crisis and still think that addiction is a personal moral failing endemic to some outgroup? It's a sickening view.

So if you can figure out how to dominate a group, you will win and you’ll be rewarded for it. This is why people come here. America is the last place where you can basically do whatever the fuck you want, and as long as you gain enough money and influence, you’ll be celebrated.

I mean Trump EMBODIED what I just described and he not only won the presidency, he has successfully created a cult that could actually ruin everything.

Where else but a lawless wasteland would produce that?

Maybe talking to people one on one asking who they are how their day is, can you help them? Can you get them anything?

This time last year I helped a man named John stop sleeping outside by supporting him and giving him the moral and ethical support that he needed to reconnect with his family and he was off the streets and a couple of months. When we reconnected, he said that it was because of my outreach that he was able to have what he needed to reach back out to his family. It cost me 50 dollars in groceries/medical kit and about an hour of my time.

So it’s eminently possible, you can do it every single day that you go out into the world.

You simply choose not to.

It is also mind-blowing that you would release addicts with essentially zero support. They don't even get ID coming out of prison in Illinois, so they can't access any support services at all.

Again, I don't know what the solution is, but I know some things that don't work :(

What is free housing? Free as in indefinitely free with no strings attached? Free utilities, free services, free food, perhaps free transportation? Free furniture, free healthcare, free drugs, free clothes, free HOA?

Do you think the violent addicts everyone complains about just need a house, and starting from day one they will become productive members of society?

That’s it that’s the solution.

Until every person on earth has a supportive loving community - which mathematically works out very easily - we’ll never solve these problems.

There is absolutely no logistical or material reason that we can’t do this. It’s also not biologically determined - fear and greed are not inherit in humans, those are all learned behaviors. I fear however it’s going to take generations to undo how much we have invested in domination based systems rather than partnership based structures.

> There is absolutely no logistical or material reason that we can’t do this

Yes there is. What you and other "progressives" fail to acknowledge is that for every well meaning supportive and loving member of society there are two people who will use them and their resources endlessly until they drop dead. If your plan is to wait until we change human nature - then good luck.

Want to see a preview? Socialize with families of alcoholics, drug addicts, psychopaths, etc. Look how their "loving and supportive" families are destroyed by one person who abuses them with no end in sight.

Stop fantasizing about changing human nature. The future where we all meditate in peace like that advanced society in Fantastic Planet won't happen any time soon. The more likely future is that we will completely stagnate and fail to resolve any societal issues because we treat people like they are lost babies that just need a supportive and loving community to be found.

Rules are good for a well lived life. My house has more rules than prisons.

Can you even come up with 383 annoying things you require your guests to comply with... let alone 383 PAGES.

As for flogging people, this is arguably less cruel than imprisonment and is a good option for the sort of criminals the public doesn't need to be protected from (not suitable for violent criminals who will likely reoffend.) It doesn't keep people away from their families for years, let's them stay current in their job training, etc. It is nevertheless a strong deterrent but it does less damage to the rest of society.

Singapore gets results and most of their policies don't violate the letter of Bill of Rights except in a purely subjective sense, but most people in America aren't ready to give real progressive reform serious consideration.

It is quite strange because you go almost anywhere else in the world...no addicts, no-one uses drugs, they find it strange that anyone would use drugs...go to the US, you not only have drug addicts but a whole industry dedicated to offering very knowledgeable-sounding opinions about what should work...it never is explained why the drug problem in the US is so out of control with so many people who know what "should" work.

The only places where I have ever been that have had lots of drug addicts have been places that have tried to decriminalize (for some reason, almost always with help from the police who just want this stuff off their books altogether).

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/02/middleeast/saudi-drug-capital...

To help the addicts and reduce reoffending, what we probably need is better jails that are less a punishment and more an enforced rehab program with high-quality mental health support. And then a better path from jail back into society.

But that's expensive.

Personally, I'd rather criminalize the negative behavior, rather than the drugs themselves. Like DUI laws, for example.

How do you punish a homeless drug addict living on the streets with no assets or income?

It's such an infantile mindset, I'm frankly surprised it has stuck around this long.

We all just want to live, and enjoy the fruits of our lives, our friends, our families, our work. When a social break happens due to anti-evolutionary behavior, that situation needs to be corrected. Threat of punishment never needs to come into it.

[0]That of people victimized by the homeless/addicts.

Not wanting houseguests doesn’t somehow mean we aren’t collectively smart enough to figure out which levers need some tweaking to mitigate drug addiction and housing issues.

Create laws against public drug use, then enforce them.

And the scariest thing (for me personally) is that even if I knew that was a potential outcome, I don’t think it would have stopped me. And I wasn’t a junkie or hopeless addict by any means.