I've ben homeless. It's not fun. Nobody does it because they want to. Ending up on the street trying to make the most basic of normality work is really hard work. I didn't end up on meth or anything (I stuck to alcohol), but I understand why some people facing this do. When your life is utter shite, drugs help.
Without any kind of social safety net the people who fall out of the bottom of society have nowhere to go except this. Build a decent safety net and they won't be living in the park and the park becomes the better place you'd like it to be.
So, on behalf of the unhoused: sorry your kids can't play in the park but we're facing bigger problems. Helping us with our problems will help you with yours.
It is the case that we have difficulty placing public toilets because of the risks their abuse will pose to unsuspecting users. I don't think it does anybody any good to pretend that these aren't real problems, or that we can moralize past them.
I think, at least in most major metros, we're past the point of it being a live issue whether to fund services to transition homeless people off the streets. Residents will fund those services simply because the alternatives are so disruptive. With that in mind, I feel like any response to this problem that centers on "well we should fund more services" is basically stalling.
Decades ago there were institutions that these people were placed in. We decided not to do that any more, for good reasons and bad, and I think maybe we should revisit that decision.
First big wave of it (when you started to see tents appear under the highways and such) was 2008. Second big wave where that seemed to metastasize were Rahm Emmanuel's budget cuts. In particular, he shut down all the mental health clinics, and you ended up with a lot of people getting forced off their meds.
EDIT: Another thing, when I moved here there were still quite a few housing projects. I am not going to pretend they weren't rough. I walked through the ABLA homes most days and watched them get torn down. I had a kid hit me with a rock while biking through Cabrini. But there was a place where people could be off the streets back then. Now where do you go? What's waitlist for section 8 up to?
Say this budget was doubled. What should that money be spent on, that isn't being funded now?
Section 8 has long wait lists. It seems kinda unbelievable to argue that destruction of thousands of units of low income housing didn't cause people to not have housing.
I don't doubt that many people are mentally ill. Before Rahm's cuts, we had a taxpayer-ran system of caring for the mentally ill.
(I've been a renter and a homeowner in Chicago; I grew up here).
More seriously, you get grafts like these. $800k for sheds in Los Angeles [1] or 300k for shipping containers in Oakland [2]. These are the type of stories that destroy hope that government us up to the task of handling the problem, no matter how much money they throw at it.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-05/lopez-co...
https://oaklandside.org/2024/07/10/oakland-fbi-investigation...
To the extent that your premise is true (and I believe that, for many individuals, it is) that also speaks to our city pulling up the ladder on people. I was living in Logan Square when Rahm shut the mental health clinics down. There was one on Milwaukee. People protested for months. People on the streets obviously being in a very bad place and not getting help became a lot more noticeable after.
I suspect the bulk of the money in that budget is being spent on civil servants and very little of it actually reaches the people who need the help.
Doubling the budget will just attract more graft and not double the amount of help getting through. But I'm not an expert, so I may well be wrong.
Portugal (as an example) treats drug use as a health problem and has much better results.
Addiction is a disease, a health problem, not something you can beat out of people by imprisoning them or being "really aggressive". That just makes the problem worse.
We lost the war, so let’s just admit it and move on. Like you say, there is nothing we can do, so we should redirect our resources to unhoused cases that we have a much better chance of solving. We can liberalize drugs if you want, let them do all the fent they want; society just shouldn’t be on the hook for fixing them, which doesn’t seem to work very well anyways, even if we spend all of our money on it.
We’ve spent billions and billions on the “homes are the solution to homelessness” crowd. And the problem has only grown worse.
[0] USA has the highest drug use per head of population in the entire world. Portugal is way down the list.
I don't think there's "nothing we can do". I think it's more of a question of how we approach the problem. We have always approached it as a failure of the individual in question, requiring correction by punishment. This has clearly not worked (ever) but everyone seems reluctant to abandon it.
If we approach addiction as a disease, like cancer, that affects some people against their will, rather than something they chose because they're junkie scum, we might help them more [1]
> society just shouldn’t be on the hook for fixing them
In the USA society is never on the hook for fixing people. All that rugged individualism. Other societies work differently, and that seems to get better results.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/drug-use-... the USA has the highest world
Can you cite this? How much does the US spend on entitlements vs other countries?
The agenda for during my adult life has been cutting services for needy (public housing, mental health, etc). Since we seem to agree that homelessness is getting worse isn't it also rational to agree that cutting these services is, at the very least, not helping.
The core problem is that there are a large contingent of homeless drug users who just want to be left alone so that they can continue to be homeless drug users. Any services given to them will just be redirected by them towards enabling continued drug use. It's like an inbuilt self-sabotage that is totally alien to regular folks, but the choice way of living for those with it.
This isn't talk about much at all, because the story book tale is that homeless people are just regular people who are down on the luck, and if we could just show them some respect, compassion, and spare a few resources, they'd be right back on their feet again. But that story is just a fairy tale used to sell a feel good idea, reality is way more fucked up than that.
Anecdotally during covid la metro cut a ton of staff, including security, and people started smoking meth and crack and fent in the station platforms openly. It was disturbing and made the few of us still riding the system then feel very unsafe and complain to metro leadership and the press. As a result they hired more staff to arrest and kick these people out and ridership constantly improves. I haven’t seen someone smoke from a glass pipe on metro station property in probably years now, going from seeing it at one point or another basically every workday.
The people who end up in truly dire circumstances have backstabbed everyone who ever trusted or helped them. They have burned every bridge, and nobody they know wants anything to do with them. All to feed a ravenous addiction.
Hard to make compulsory though. Nixon didn't do it, but that era also gave asylums a horrible reputation.
https://abc7.com/post/federal-judge-frustrated-missing-data-...
"frustrated" is an understatement.
"You're not working on your time frame now. You're working on mine," Carter said.
And surprise. LA is getting small improvements on the homeless situation.
>The people who end up in truly dire circumstances have backstabbed everyone who ever trusted or helped them.
Or their family backstabbed them, if they ever had one (this article has a case study on someone raised out of an orphanage). Or this continually individualistic society has loosened support networks so you never truly got "friends". Or you simply got priced out because rent became 3k and you're not a silicon valley engineer.
Not all homeless people are drug users. Just the ones you remember most.
They're refusing treatment because they're addicted. They're refusing shelter because the shelters have policies (like not using drugs, or from the article; no pets) that they can't meet.
A lot of them have been abused by the institutions that were supposed to help them in the past, so understandably don't trust that they will be helped by similar institutions now.
Any of us, put in the same situation, would find it impossibly hard to deal with. I was lucky; I had friends who could help and I got lucky with some work that allowed me to get out of that situation. If I'd not had that luck, I could easily have gone down the same road.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we...
It's kinda interesting. In terms of % of GDP on social welfare spending it's halfway down the list (but still just above Australia and Canada which surprises me).
In terms of government taxation and spending it's very close to the top on taxation and #10 on spending, which is definitely not what the USA tells itself.
This implies that the USA taxes folks heavily and then doesn't spend it on social welfare (which seems consistent with the vast military spending).
A friend of mine who lived there for a while commented that that's because the police round them up and ship them out to the suburbs where they're not being seen by the tourists. They then migrate back to the centre over time because that's where they can beg, and the cycle repeats. Nothing is solved, no-one wins, and people die because of this policy, but at least the tourists are impressed by the lack of street people.
Moving drug addicts off the subway does literally nothing to solve the problem, except it keeps the subways nice and clean and allows everyone to think the problem doesn't exist any more.