I’m not one to think in conspiracies. But here is a clear, structural issue. The reward to NGOs should be granted upon reintegration, not upon crises.
The big question I have is how do you help people who refuse to be helped? That’s an ethical dilemma not necessarily a $ question.
The ethical dilemma is deep. Is forcing someone into an asylum—where they can be sheltered, monitored, and treated—more ethical than giving someone the self-determination to self-destruct on the street?
I don't have the answer, I'm not Kant. But it's a question we have been unwilling to face because it is deeply unsettling. It goes against our liberal instinct.
This never works though because once you decide to do this, it is abused. So to prevent abuse, you use law enforcement. What I mean is that we decided freedom is more important than forcing treatment. And since there are no other levers, law enforcement is left to deal with the problem.
You set up a system to help people that could be abused, and then you set up oversight committee, external auditors, regulators, board of trustees, ombudsman, inspector general. A giant pile of bureaucrats and bureaucracy. And yes, abuses will still happen. You get it all on camera, in writing, you find the abuses of the system and you close those down. New abuses happen, you find those loopholes and close them down. The problem is there's no will to do that. The systems broken, so we just threw it out and the people that it was helping got fucked. Instead of like, hey the systems broken, lets fix it.
So instead we got people living in tents with no running water, no sewage, no electricity.
But open-air drug markets are not regulated supply. They are a scourge. America's problem with fentanyl is unique in it's scale and it is not something that can be solved with permissive policy. It must be systematically dismantled.
I do think decriminalizing all drugs for use in clinical settings would be a healthy step forward. I don't think allowing illicit markets for the most dangerous substances helps anyone except criminals.
News flash: nobody does/does not do drugs based on legality.
The Rat Park experiment showed that rats in enriched, social environments consumed far less drugs than isolated rats, highlighting how environment strongly affects addiction.
In Defending the Undefendable, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s chapter “The Pusher” argues that drug dealers, often vilified as destructive criminals, play a complex social role by supplying a demand that already exists. He suggests that punishing them does little to stop drug use and may actually exacerbate harm by driving the trade underground, increasing prices and danger. Since demand for illegal drugs is inelastic, higher prices directly leads to increase in petty crimes like theft that are often motivated by addiction. I.e. addicts wouldn't have to steal as many catalytic converters if drugs were pennies per day instead of hundreds of dollars. And it's only expensive because it's illegal. It's kind of ironic.
Dark speculation here, but addiction may even be an evolutionary coping mechanism, providing just enough short-term reward to keep individuals alive when life feels unbearable. The alternative to addiction might be even worse given e.g. an unusually strong biological emotional response to a (possibly accurate) negative assessment of their personal reality.
99% reading this thread is not the problem. They are not taking your hypothetical offer.
But there is a small slice of the population that would take your offer. The small percent of people that would take more would have devastating effects on a community.
The article appears to be an excerpt from a 300 page book.
You use the money to pay for goods and services. Services like staff and therapists and psychologists and case workers. And yes, the occasional administrator as well. "Real treatment doesn't just happen. It's expensive, but under capitalism, you use the money to get it for the people that need it. The problem that I've seen volunteering is that money gets siphoned off, away from the people it's supposed to help, and it goes into pockets that part of the non-profit's stated mission.
It was clear 30 ish years ago to him how it would turn out.
It might be appalling but it should not be shocking.
Take mental illness. A mentally ill person with more resources can get the care they need, but someone who is poor can soon find themselves on the street. And homelessness itself is quite stressful, and can produce or exacerbate mental illness as well as drive people to drug addiction.
Homeless people are just like the rest of us, with their own basic human needs, and just like everybody else are trying to navigate their world as best they can.
That's just because it's not true. Aspen, Hamptons, Martha's Vineyard and other places with the peak wealth inequality do not see more homelessness (or any homelessness worth mentioning). Liberal cities are the epicenters of homelessness because they all follow the same policies of enablement.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716220981864
What’s the homeless rate in the luxury enclaves you mention? I couldnt find reliable numbers. Note that your claimed statistics for such enclaves could still be true but not discount the overall statistical relationship - such enclaves can have their own housing dynamics (such as small populations and vacation homes) which don’t negate the larger trend we see when we examine many locales such as large cities and so on. So no, cherry picked counter examples don’t negate the larger statistical relationship between homelessness and inequality.
And attributing homelessness to “enablement policies” is another hot take. It’s just as plausible that enablement policies are enacted as a response to homelessness not a cause.
But at least now we seem to be beyond blaming homelessness on individual traits.
>Note that your claimed statistics for such enclaves could still be true but not discount the overall statistical relationship
If you know statistics then you might be familiar with the "correlation does not imply causation" turn of phrase. And yes, any counter example destroys a causation claim.
We call that “the voting populace”
Knowledge is prerequisite for all else. Do pity the millions who will grow old before reading Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day’ - you too? Could you see its point?
Society is too large to see itself; someone must observe on our behalf. In this pursuit poesy may tell truth where ten thousand theses have honestly lied.
Upton Sinclair was not a meat processor.
That might be true, but there are plenty of drug addicts and mentally ill people in West Virginia (#1 in per capita overdose deaths and well above CA/NY/etc in suicides) and yet West Virginia has a pretty low rate of homelessness (roughly 1/5th CA's and 1/8th NY's) so that's clearly not the explanation.
I mean I get it, people don't like sleeping in the snow, but what are you saying? Where are they going when it snows?
You're saying CA cities wouldn't have this problem if it snowed but still gave out billions and allowed open drug usage?
I guarantee you that 98% of homeless aren't drug addicts or mentally ill. Most of them are students from a poor family (me, for 2 years until my grandmother died and I use the inheritance to finance my last years) or working poors, who don't make enough to be eligible for rent.
But people have a mental picture of homeless, and it is people on the streets they see everyday, not families living in a van or someone couch surfing for years.
People should base their opinions on reality, not invent a reality that conform to their opinions. Not only because intellectual laziness is bad, but because if we can't at least agree on the material facts, we will never be able to agree on solutions, or understand other people point of view.
> No. They are 98% drug addicts or mentally ill people.
Drug addicts and mentally ill people can be down-on-their luck. That somebody is mentally ill or have an addiction does not mean that society should discard them.
BTW addiction is very rarely the root cause of a wasted life. It's usually a failed coping strategy.
> It's well known that the money that gets given out attract more homeless people.
Homeless people are not infinite resource. You can solve homelessness on the country level, not only on the state level, and then it doesn't matter which state attracts more homeless people - because there's very few of them in the whole country.
> It's insane that left-wing governments think that spending MORE money will solve the problem when in fact it is the cause of the problem.
Poor countries in Eastern Europe does not have this problem. Maybe instead of pretending US is the whole world and if it can't deal with something - it's impossible to deal with it - try to listen to what people did elsewhere?
This line of thinking (IMO) is both manipulative and harmful. At some point we need to realize that we are enabling and not helping.
You really want to help both the person and the society that they are part of, you need tough decisions that will not be easy or fun.
What caused the opioid crisis? Doctors prescribing opioids for no good reason. Why wasn't it happening in EU? Because in EU doctors are paid and controlled by the taxpayers not by the industry. And because in EU doctors have free public education so they aren't 100 000 dollars in debt when they graduate.
Ok but opioids is one way people get addicted/homeless. Another is that they get sick and don't have coverage. Again - in a sane country they get public healthcare so they don't have to default and lose everything - so they have no reason to get addicted.
How about mental sickness? Early childhood is very important. Most EU countries have 6 months or more of mandatory paid maternity leave. On top of 20+ days of paid vacations yearly and unlimited paid health leave. Mandated by the state for all employees. If you don't take them - your company gets fined. HR people force you to take the days off.
Do you see how that would prevent a lot of mental illness/addiction/homelessness?
You can go through most problems in the US, and ultimately they are caused by the insane labour laws, healthcare, or education system.
And the funniest part is - you make all these sacrifices by not having a civilized welfare state, and you still end up paying more for healthcare (yes, including the taxes) and living shorter than people in the EU. You get addictions, homelessness, crime, shorter life spans, AND you pay more :)
Land of the free, home of the brave, there are some Americans who will rebel against the requirements and constraints of their lifelong socialization. I think this is an underappreciated factor in the study of homelessness-- people fight to be free, and as the song goes, Freedom is just another word for "nothing left to lose". There is some serious freedom that does along with having only the clothes on your back and whatever is in your pockets...
The solution seems to be public healthcare, education, transport, safety net and cheap housing.
Addiction and mental illness are excuses. Eastern Europe has more mental ilness (generational trauma from WW2 is still alive) and alcoholism than US and yet it has less homeless people.
In early 90s my parents were earning 20 USD per month each. It was about average. There were still almost no homeless people.
It's a solved problem.
Overall, I don't see neither US nor Poland as a big outliers by looking at the stats[0], it just seems like some specific places (SF) made homeless population a highly-visible nuisance by feel-good unrealistic policies that can't possible work.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ho...
There are plenty of houses. The issue is demand; people are paying $4,000/month to live in a shithole because nobody knows what things are worth. Rich executives, H1Bs and digital nomads all flock there to displace working-class families that support the basic service economy. If you built 400 condos, 1600 more rich people move in. Supply is not the issue as far as I can see it.
Are there?
Home ownership is a functional unmovable number in the USA: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S
The problem is that we only have plenty of houses... that are under occupied.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q...
We dont build high density housing. We killed off the boarding house. There's like one left in DC when there used to be dozens... They were common enough that even in the 80's you could make a tv show about it, now if you said bording house someone would look at you like you had 9 heads.
We dont have SRO's any more... In 1940 the YMCA of New York had 100k rooms for rent...
https://ishc.com/wp-content/uploads/YMCAs2.pdf
> If you built 400 condos, 1600 more rich people move in. Supply is not the issue as far as I can see it.
Do you know what the largest predictor of voting is? Home ownership. DO you know what drives home owners to the polls more than anything else? Protecting the value of their home.
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/wealthy-bay-area-town-a...
The state has, and continues to sue towns for the fuckery that they have been doing to block housing development to prop up property prices. 60 percent of people who are the most likely to vote will turn up to the polls to make sure the costs do NOT go down. It is the tyranny of majority...
SO yes there are plenty of HOUSES, and not enough of everything else that we need for people to live.
Maybe you’re used to seeing half measures. Be careful with that because half measures are sometimes used as justification to throw out the whole idea of progress instead of doing it properly (“well we tried that and things were still bad so now we have to do it my way”)
It makes a lot of sense when you realize who builds and brings capital. Debeers for an extreme example.