What a lot of people don't understand is that the policy inadequacies that led to this point are mostly state-based, and in CA, cities simply couldn't do much about strung-out junkies on their streets once city councils started experimenting with decriminalizing drug use and deprioritizing drug enforcement. It's not like arresting them was a great solution, but it was the only thing available to city police forces, and it kept these people out of the public eye. Once that was removed as a tool, they were pretty much left with "Unless they're actively threatening someone, nothing we can really do."
That's changing, mercifully. Here in SF, a lefty-fringe position took over for a while, wherein homelessness with thought of as some sort of legitimate lifestyle, and society had to be forced to see it so we could all gaze upon the misery that tech money had wrought. After a while though, normal people just get sick of having to step over an unconscious body while taking their kids out for a walk.
While it's tempting to blame Reagan for the contemporary homeless problem, I'm not sure that's really right. Reagan was a giant piece of shit, but I don't find it plausible that his policy decisions in 1980 were the proximate cause of the homeless problem that started taking off in the late 2000s.
Personally I think a lot of the homeless problem comes down to two things that worked together to produce unintended consequences.
1. Opioids
2. Evolving attitudes toward drug use
Opioids are a scourge that created lots of new addicts. At the same time, society finally started realizing that criminalizing drug use was stupid. So the first thing to happen was the easiest: we stopped throwing people in prison. But it's not like these were people who had their lives together in the first place -- they had problems, and previously the prison system is how we dealt with those problems and kept them out of public view. And simultaneously, we were seeing an explosion of addicts thanks for opioids and pharma marketing. So lots more addicts plus lots less enforcement means lots more homelessness.
Now we're in a transitional phase where we're trying to figure out the best way to help these people and maintain their dignity. In the mean time, they live in tents on the street for everyone to see. CA is now codifying the obvious -- these people cannot care for themselves, and law-abiding citizens have a right to use public sidewalks without having to worry that a guy in a tent will think they're trespassing.
All these issues are dealt with at the level of the municipality and the state, the federal government has significantly less power here. Now, I am no expert in affordable housing programs, if someone who has done more research on this topic would like to come and correct me, they are welcome. But this is my basic impression from what I've seen.
The problem isn't with high-density affordable housing but with building housing that segregates people based on income level. High-density development is a good thing generally and makes a neighborhood more varied and vibrant in my view.
The problem comes from concentrating poverty into a single location. Instead, the United States should spread it out evenly with affordable housing throughout our cities and neighborhoods. The development patterns in the United States end up with two extremes: single family houses or large apartment blocks, with nothing in between (the missing middle problem). There is a lot of implicit segregation by income there, even at the single family housing level, since different housing developments tend to build roughly the same size house repeatedly in any given development. Rather than building neighborhoods where everyone has roughly the same income level, as the United States does now, it would be better to build neighborhoods that can accept people of all income levels. That way, the problems associated with poverty and similar issues are diluted throughout a city and never concentrated.
American local governments go out of their way to do everything as if they’re the only ones facing an issue, and I think solving that tendency in American governance is likely way harder than solving anything in the homelessness space.
Even outside of that there are very large downsides for local governments to handle such issues because any successful system would likely attract more people from other parts of the country which would put an even greater financial burden on local taxpayers. Considering cities are cutting services like libraries, etc. it’s a huge disincentive for any local government to enact an actual effective solution.
https://oecdecoscope.blog/2021/12/13/finlands-zero-homeless-...
> The number of homeless people in Finland has continuously decreased over the past three decades from over 16 000 in 1989 to around 4 000, or 0.08% of the population
Actually, homelessness is easy to solve, but requires distasteful actions by the government, like involuntary commitment.
I used to travel around the world and cannot believe that US couldn't solve or is blind about this problem. It shocks me to be in the "country of technology dreams" while I look at the state of many people there. Only think in tech-noir movies.