I see this take a lot but it's a very static take on homelessness.
Yes, homeless people are often in a mental state where they are difficult to take care of. However, that doesn't mean they're homeless because they're mentally unstable. Often, the reason they are unstable is because they are homeless.
Being on the street heavily exacerbates drug and mental health issues. Plenty of homeless people start out normal and then fall into this state. So if you want to reduce the number of crazy people on the street, then people need stability and homes to cut off the pipeline.
Correlation may not imply causation, but where there is causation there usually is correlation. So, if there is a rise in homelessness there is likely some factor contributing to that and if a factor is correlated there is a good chance that it's causal. Homelessness may caused by multiple factors but if it's increasing and those factors are mostly remaining static then looking for the one that is also increasing seems like a good bet.
Having actually built, planned, and done all the paperwork for a house myself most the extra costs that can't be worked around (you can DIY everything if you want) is permitting, inspection, and codes. I just didn't get my house inspected nor did I submit engineered plans, so saved tons of money, but most people don't have the option to bypass 'safety' inspections and they get gutted like a pig following all those rules.
The actual materials cost of a house, you can build one for $60k no problem and absolute shit-tons of cheap land near jobs (ex: unemployment extremely low in the Dakotas, cheap land, high demand for homeless-tier labor in the fields in bumfucklandia as ICE deports illegals making farmers desperate for anybody).
They may be desperate to hire anybody, but not everyone is willing, with good reason, to work 16 hour days with no overtime pay and sub-minimum wage no benefits and work for only part of the year and get paid under the table. only reason it make since for migrants is the low cost/standard of living back home and currency arbitrage where us dollar are worth so much more than their own currency.
Yep, there's plenty of awful jobs with no requirements but a pulse. The problem is that they'll grind your spirit and take all of your dignity and time, if not outright scam you themselves (see: MLM).
You can enter Mexico, and they have only checked I had paperwork/passport about one times of ten. No reason why you can't do the same thing if you want to do currency arbitrage. Paraguay will give you a residence permit pretty much just for showing up if you can get ahold of a USA passport, or you can avail yourself of the compact of free association and live in Micronesia without a visa. The arbitrage game is for everybody.
I've housed two sibling that were labeled as "mentally unstable"(raised by mentally abusive narcissists) and "lazy"(has narcolepsy), respectively. Both situations were pretty bad before they landed in our home, but everyone in their lives called us "angels" for taking them in.
Each of them lived with my family for two years. All my wife and I did was let them exist in their own space with no pressure to do anything (other than coexist in our house, but that's purely logistics).
Both of them have gone on to go to college and pursue their respective dreams. The elder of the two lives independently, and the younger just shipped off to college.
The broader point being that most people just need a support network and a stable place to live to start to thrive.
Granted, that's just anecdata on my part, but it seems to line up with moth metal health studies I've read when it comes to homelessness.
And this is the problem with homelessness. There are two drastically different “classes” of homeless people. There’s the working single mother waitress or nurse who fell behind on bills due to medical debt, maybe rent went up and is just bad at managing spending, saving, etc. Now she’s living in a car.
Then there’s the batshit crazy dude who’s living under the bridge who’s staring off into the trees and can’t hold a coherent conversation. This poor soul is not homeless because his landlord raised his rent from $2000 to $2200 and he just can’t eke by.
However the mother in case 1, could absolutely benefit from:
1. Better health insurance
2. Better financial education
3. A credit on housing or whatever.
This is why no one can agree on homelessness because half the population imagines the “noble” woman scenario and the other half imagines the bat shit dude with his pants around his ankle.
The solutions to each are drastically different. So you sound like an idiot when you say “we just need more homes” when you’re picturing scenario 2. But equally people sound like idiots when you say “we just need more mental institutions” but the listener is picturing scenario 1.
We’re talking in circles and English needs more words to describe these two drastically different types of people.
There's also scenario 3, which you can see pushed throughout this thread - that scenario 2 doesn't really exist, because "that bat shit crazy person smoking fent and screaming at passerbys" was once just a regular, down-on-their luck mother (scenario 1), who was driven insane / driven to drugs by being homeless".
We don't really need more words to describe the scenarios. It's all politics, we know what the game is. Whether you see homeless as primarily category 1(/3) or primarily category 2, seems to align overwhelmingly with your preferred brand of politics. And as such, in the current social milieu, there's effectively no constructive conversation that can happen. It's just political extremists being handed their moral justification for their position, refusing to accept any other version of reality that conflicts with it.
Maybe for some, but how do you see it playing out?
Suppose you're living in LA or NYC, and you lose your job, get evicted (takes a few months and you can't land on your feet by then) and then move all your stuff to a shopping cart and start sleeping under a bridge?
I'm sure this has happened, but if I were in that situation I would begin by moving out of one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. Go to the library, find cheap cost of living and high job availability place, and get a one way bus ticket there. Literally anything is better than living on the street.
This is all to say I'm skeptical of the explanation that people living on the street are just like me except with bad luck. Temporarily, sure. A few nights crashing on someones couch or sleeping in a park or bus station. But chronically homeless people.
I think the overwhelming majority of them are not rational actors (could be induced by drug abuse, mental illness, some combination of the two). So giving them keys to a home won't really solve their problems.
Where are these cheap cost of living and high job availability places? How do you rent a place in a city you've likely never been, without a job already lined up, presumedly no money for a deposit? What do you do when you realize this cheap cost of living place pretty much demands a car to be livable?
Pretty much anything is better than sleeping on the street. Why would you choose to let your last money run out and then you're stuck somewhere where if you have no reasonable way to afford rent on a low paying job.
For instance, move to Cleveland Ohio. Median home price is $173k. Rent is also cheap.
I don't know, make it work. Whats the alternative? Stay in a city and sleep on the street because you don't want to figure out a bus schedule?
The rich cities that are too expensive to live in are often the ones that provide the most benefits to the homeless, both legal and illegal. Anything from free or discounted food, medical care, laundry, charitable organizations, people who give money to panhandlers, lenient law enforcement, less violent crime, better weather, and easier targets to steal from.
Not to mention your entire support network and your friends are still there.
I think the whole point is to not be homeless. Sure, if you want to be homeless, big expensive cities might be your best bet. And a lot of people that want this lifestyle migrate to these cities for this reason.
> I'm sure this has happened, but if I were in that situation I would begin by moving out of one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. Go to the library, find cheap cost of living and high job availability place, and get a one way bus ticket there. Literally anything is better than living on the street.
If you've already been evicted then getting anybody to rent to you is extremely difficult. You are going to need not only the first month of rent but also a deposit at this rental in some other city. And it is going to be hard to get a job right away in your new city. Oh, and maybe you have kids who need to be fed.
Where is this bridge money coming from to make this move work? And what happens if it doesn't work?
Not all of them, no, but if you give someone keys to a home the problem of them not having a home is solved. We may not be equipped to solve their other problems, but that does actually solve that problem.
As far as going somewhere else, the problem is accessibility of resources for the unhoused. Many municipalities don't like the idea of random people going to their town and using the benefits from that town, you have to have lived in that town for many years and ostensibly contributed taxes while you were able to work. So if you were previously housed in LA/NYC, your best bet to getting services is to stay there because having been housed there previously gets you moved up on the list for housing.
> but if you give someone keys to a home the problem of them not having a home is solved.
I guess this is the heart of the debate though - is homelessness caused literally by not having a home? And bonus question - would changing zoning laws as OP suggest solve this?
I'm arguing no - more often than not there are contributing factors other than mental health/abuse/drugs that cause homelessness to be your only option that wouldn't be solved by someone giving you keys. Most obviously - food, utilities, is the house close enough to work that you can walk there, who is paying for maintenance of the house, will you be housed with people that are actually homeless because of mental health issues - and will they do things that cause your own mental health to be impacted etc.
There are two groups of homeless: the financially homeless, which can be helped by providing housing, and the unstable homeless (addicts or mentally ill) for whom housing will do nothing.
The majority of homeless are the former; temporarily homeless due to inability to afford housing due to loss of income or increase in rent. But they're not the ones that make the evening news.
The unstable homeless are the loud/visible part of the problem. Giving an unstable homeless person housing is just a waste of money because homelessness is just a symptom of their real issues, and it's only a matter of time before they deliberately or accidentally destroy their housing. (This has caused the bankruptcies of two separate major housing providers in L.A.'s Skid Row. LAT has a series of articles on this, subscription required. In a nutshell: for the cost of maintaining and repairing one housing unit for a single unstable homeless person in a year, you could build and maintain 4-5 housing units for the financially homeless, and the metrics get even more skewed over longer time frames.)
My whole point is that there are not just these two groups. There is instead a pipeline of your group 1 into 2. Give people homes, cut off that pipeline.
bko in the sibling comment said nearly exactly what I was going to say. While I do agree that you can "fall into" this start and it's very difficult to get out of - I'm very skeptical that with no other contributing preexisting factors you wouldn't be able to figure something out. You'd have to be extremely unlikely to
- not have any family
- not have any friends
- not have any savings
- not have anything they could sell
- not have any ability to do even temp work (IE, had some traumatic debilitating accident)
- Not being able to move somewhere that's cheaper
- Not being able to take advantage of any social programs (I'm canadian, it's pretty easy for example to get a large portion of your school paid by the government)
And if _all_ of this was true, other than potentially avoiding the impacts of being homeless - how would being given a place to live (especially in a High cost of living area) fix any of your other pretty serious issues?
Americans basically don't have savings; median is $8k [1]. People of color save less, as do people in urban areas, as do poorer people [2], all of which is in line with who is more likely to be homeless.
> - not have anything they could sell
If you think about what one might go through on the path to foreclosure or eviction, you probably sell/lose a lot of things trying to keep your home. Maybe selling your car bought you a few months, maybe you needed it for your job(s) and it got repossessed. There are a lot of circumstances where this can happen: a partner dying, moving out to avoid intimate partner violence, health care costs, etc. This is a "slowly and then all at once" type of thing.
> - not have any ability to do even temp work (IE, had some traumatic debilitating accident)
Most of the time they're already working; 53% of homeless and 40% of unsheltered homeless are employed [3].
> - Not being able to move somewhere that's cheaper
Moving is very expensive in both a time and money sense:
- find time to pack
- find a new place
- maybe find a new job(s)
- put down deposits on everything
- purchase packing supplies
- either hire movers or do it yourself (if you're able)
- find time to move
- find time to unpack
This might seem like a ridiculous and petty list, but when you have very little time and money you think like this. It's also super stressful to think like this.
> - Not being able to take advantage of any social programs (I'm canadian, it's pretty easy for example to get a large portion of your school paid by the government)
US/US State social programs have huge paperwork burdens, onerous anti-fraud requirements, and don't even give you enough money to make rent after all that (the frenzied shouts of "housing subsidies?! do you want housing prices to get even higher?!" are responsible here, also--as always--a healthy amount of racism).
That works as long as they don't strip out all the copper wiring, appliances, doors, windows, and anything else of value either because of drugs or some other unmet real need or other issues that come up when inevitably they can't be monitored 24/7. Which probably will only happen sometimes, but it only takes a few to destroy the whole program due to the sky high cost of construction in the US.
You probably need some buy in, like have the homeless people go into a wood with an axe and build their own cabin. Then it's all their own labor if they lose it.
Yes, homeless people are often in a mental state where they are difficult to take care of. However, that doesn't mean they're homeless because they're mentally unstable. Often, the reason they are unstable is because they are homeless.
Being on the street heavily exacerbates drug and mental health issues. Plenty of homeless people start out normal and then fall into this state. So if you want to reduce the number of crazy people on the street, then people need stability and homes to cut off the pipeline.