Where I live (central Oregon), this is not the case. More than 80% of our homeless population are people that were born and raised here, and were priced out of housing and onto the streets due to housing prices skyrocketing to eyewatering levels. It has tripled in the last ten years, with a 1-br apartment going for under $600 in 2013 now going for $1700. The homelessness here is homegrown, not imported.

Portland is better housing-wise, but not by much. Considering how most people who are both homeless and on drugs were homeless first, then turned to drugs, I think this is a strong confounding factor. It's hard to saw what effect decriminalization has had on drug use when it's adjacent to a housing crisis that is manufacturing more homelessness and drug use all on its own.

Not sure if they still do, but Eugene used to buy you a one-way bus ticket to Portland or Salem and some food vouchers if you claimed to have family there. They didn’t really verify.

Agreed. This suggests to me that homelessness and drug use may be orthogonal problems.

If you triple my rent over the next 10 years, without raising my income, then I'm gonna be homeless. No drug use necessary, batteries included, no assembly required.

Do you know that the person raising your rent isn't the same person that pays your salary, right? And raising it is mostly up to you. Doing drugs because you are incapable of matching society's dynamics isn't an excuse

Maybe raising it is "up to you", but it's up to you within the context of an existing economy, not a vacuum. "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already..."

> the person raising your rent isn't the same person that pays your salary

Yes, I am aware

> raising it is mostly up to you

The rent? Or the salary?

> Doing drugs because you are incapable of matching society's dynamics isn't an excuse

Like I said, 3xrent creates a homeless me, no drugs involved

Seattle's 2019 point in time counts says 84% local, 11% in-state, 4% came from out of state. San Francisco has similar numbers. Seattle excluded this data from their most recent report. Possibly because they out of state numbers have been going up, and it is harder to raise money and sympathy for non-local homeless? But even if you allow for that, it is huge majority local.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211022190558/http://allhomekc....

West coast should bus them back then.

I don’t think this is it. A lot of the unhoused in Seattle are locals or in state, and many of the out of state are from neighboring states such as Idaho or other West Coast states.

Rather I think the problem is that half assed decriminalization efforts simply aren’t enough and that drug overdose has become a much more severe issue because of the opioid epidemic and the proliferation of fentanyl. What needs to happen for decriminalization to work is much better social support for addicts, including safe use sites staffed with nurses, free health care for addicts including detox hospitalization and substance abuse treatments, social housing including housing specifically for recovering addicts and active addicts. In addition full legalization and regulated drug markets (preferably via pharmacies with a strict non-profit motive) wouldn’t hurt either.

What Seattle has done is basically just decriminalization without any of the support needed to go with it. Yes we support addicts and spend a lot of money on their care, however these are all suffering from austerity and are often just post-hoc measures (which often cost more in the long run).

Yes, for Seattle a key issue is there is hardly any supporting services available for the mass of people who need it. There are just a lot of people needing services. Seattle also has a huge shortage of mental health treatment professionals. You can't just start working with one of them, you have to wait for months on a waiting list. There's not nearly housing at night.

So you have fentanyl, not much housing, not much treatment, not enough hospital space. People get addicted, at least some move here when addicted and then they are stuck.

It's also not just a seattle problem. Alaska has also been struggling with lots of deaths from drug abuse or overdose. Wasilla - https://alaskapublic.org/2023/04/10/troopers-warn-of-lethal-..., Anchorage - https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/anchorage/2023/07/27/anchora...

> What needs to happen for decriminalization to work is much better social support for addicts, including safe use sites staffed with nurses, free health care for addicts including detox hospitalization and substance abuse treatments, social housing including housing specifically for recovering addicts and active addicts

How many productive members of society does it take to support each drug addict? Should there be any calculation, or should we say "whatever it takes"?

Yes, whatever it takes. A society which doesn’t take care of their sick is a failed society. Seattle is the richest city in one of the richest state of the richest country in the world. If we wanted to we could easily take care of anyone that needed it.

At some point we have to say it takes too much. If it takes 20 college-educated social workers, medical professionals, etc. just to enable one junkie to eek out a miserable existence doing drugs and sleeping on the street, it's too much. Their lifestyle is untenable. On some level, we have to accept that one can fuck up one's own life, and fuck it up so badly that others can't fix or maintain it for you.

Sure, it's a cost benefit analysis.

More realistically smaller total staff than 20 dealt with 3,800 addicts in an 18 month trial a decade and a half ago with benefits to the community (reduced expenses from deaths, overdoses, central record keeping, etc) that were considered worthwhile to keep such centres going until the present day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38608095

FINAL REPORT OF THE EVALUATION OF THE SYDNEY MEDICALLY SUPERVISED INJECTING CENTRE

https://www.drugsandalcohol.ie/5706/1/MSIC_final_evaluation_...

might be of interest to some.

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. "

So “old book says so”?

As well as old bronze lady:

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

That is an oft repeated myth. A recent study by UCSF of California homelessness found that 90% of homeless Californians became homeless while already living in California, and 75% still live in the same county as they did when they became homeless [0]. Locals are approximately 90% of the problem.

[0] https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/20/california-a...