Baltimore was just able to significantly reduce their homeless population by giving them housing. Portland needs the Portuguese "rehab or jail" mentality. What they're doing now is NOT working.
Without even considering the point of jailing or rehabbing 1,100 homeless people in a city that has neither the jail nor rehab capacity for its housed population,[1] the city is failing to help even the half of the fraction of homeless people who want and accept help.
1: https://www.mailtribune.com/top-stories/2022/01/29/oregon-is...
Having been chronically homeless and still having strong ties to the community in my area, big fucking citation needed boss.
People don't generally like to be homeless or want to be. If they're choosing it over the options you're offering them, that's a good opportunity for some serious introspection about what exactly you're offering, and on what terms.
Seattle and Portland don't offer much shelter like this, the Union Gospel Mission is a hot mess and so are many of the other shelters.
Everett, WA has good inpatient treatment services like what I describe available to everyone. King County (containing Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, etc) & Pierce County (Tacoma, etc) have no equivalent, just terrible programs like Seadrunnar.
Good hearted people think that if only the homeless had a chance at housing, they'd live a normal life but it's generally backwards - they are homeless because they are unfortunately really screwed up and just giving them a chance to live indoors isn't going to fix that.
No doubt many people who can’t afford housing lost their money to addiction, and giving them housing will not solve the addiction.
That being said: getting clean is way more likely in a stable living environment than in an unstable one.
I’d also add that homelessness can exacerbate an existing addiction. It’s a stressful and traumatic experience.
So yes, giving them housing will not solve addiction. Addiction is hard to overcome even for wealthy people with loving, supportive family.
Is that really true? "Housing is expensive" suggests that these people are working but the rent is too high, and that's not what's happening in most cases. The druggies had dropped out of working a long time ago.
// More expensive cities see more homelessness.
Are folks living in tent cities natives? A lot of them migrate as part of their homeless experience because these cities are better for being homeless than wherever they are coming from.
I'm sure you don't mean that as an endorsement of giving people bus tickets as a "solution".
Can you explicitly state why that is not helpful, to educate people?
This is not terribly surprising. People are regularily preyed upon in shelters, suffering abuse and having their things stolen.
A few years ago when many homeless were camping in Strathcona Park in Vancouver, I was speaking with a person there and they said that they were offered housing in an apartment owned by a slumlord and he stayed there one night and left to sleep in the park again, because the situation in the apartment was worse than staying in the park.
I don't doubt his story but it is absolutely remarkable in that it speaks to the incredibly low quality of shelter and housing that is offered to people. I am not at all surprised that people would feel safer and healthier sleeping outside.
I donate my time on the weekends at The Arches Project which is basically a (failed) effort to reduce the impact of homelessness in Oregon. We spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars to build facilities to provide some beds and daily meals and the overall impact it has on solving the problem is insanely minimal.
If you go to the website to volunteer you'll find a PDF that basically dials back their stated public mission from "reduce homelessness and promote permanent housing / stability" to something closer to "have less people die from cold weather and starvation".
Those are great goals, but I think if the vast amount of people knew we were spending hundreds of millions of dollars and accomplishing so little they would (a) be more motivated to reallocate that money better and (b) be less convinced the problem is being solved inspiring alternative solutions.
Some housing is effectively not terribly different from seniors homes, for seniors who simply have run out of money and have nowhere to go.
Some housing is women's only for women who have escaped dangerous abuse situations and do not want to be around men.
Some housing is "dry" for people who previously had addictions issues and are trying very hard to stay that way.
Some housing for people who are "hard to house" and who require a great deal more help and attention than other groups.
It's all important and needed.
My main takeaway is like many deeply complex problems, you have to start to break things up in chunks and tackle things independently. Some aspects easier than others, and others will take more time and money and attention.
If you try to treat everything the same and lump everything together it'll never work.
You can look at the epidemiology of what's happening there and it's actually amazing. Thousands of lives saved every year just from overdoses, let alone the social damage caused by drugs.
Every time you complicate or add a restriction you lose people out of the system. Sounds like there are about twelve restrictions or hoops to jump through in the Portland system.
Housing first programs in Salt Lake City showed phenomenal success. Get people houses and then take care of the other things like medical care, mental health care, addiction treatment.
Know why the phenomenally successful program isn’t around anymore? Republicans pulled funding to it out of a weird and broken ideological belief. Not based on the facts of its effectiveness.
At a certain point if your ideology doesn’t allow for the value of facts it’s just broken.
There are multiple articles that show the homeless do infact refuse shelter based on a number of reasons so the whole predicate you base your reasoning on should be reexamined.
Step 1 is the seizure of property (which questionably constitutional)
Step 2 is to not provide them anywhere to actually live
Step 3 is to arrest them when they break the law now that they have no shelter at all, and so inevitably break some law.
Then the private prison owners get money from the government, and in a bunch of states you get slaves. Win-win for everyone who apparently matters.
[1] https://www.oregon.gov/doc/about/pages/history.aspx#:~:text=....
Slight tangent story: While overall I think open carry laws are not the best idea, one positive use case I've seen manifest in Texas is mutual aid groups. Usually they run unofficial soup lines and things like that, but they also started lining up conspicuously armed with rifles and body armor around a homeless camp whenever police try to "sweep" the people living there. Not making threats or pointing their weapons - behaving perfectly legally per Texas legislation and case law - just being present and offering to happily leave if the city provides a written and signed one year apartment lease to everyone in the camp, or something in that vein.
It's usually effective in at a minimum getting the police to buzz off, and sometimes at getting real help to these people since "casually bully and push them around" is taken away as an option.
Ok, so what exactly is permanent housing in modern society? If you have housing, you have rent, taxes, utilities. If those aren't paid then that housing isn't so permanent. I'd hazard that the "permanent housing" has a lot of rules and requirements that homeless people may find challenging, and also therefore isn't so "permanent".
Even if the housing is free, then it is sponsored, subject to the line item whims of local politics and funding. So is that "permanent"?
If you're permanent, do you become subject to harassment by other neighbors and police?
Is the "permanent" housing contingent on serpentine regulations, paperwork, applications, etc? Reviews, checkins, etc? Not so permanent then.
