I found this article on the Free Press. Well written, thank you. I'd just add Shellenberger's point that "homeless" is really a euphemism for "drug addict" (co-morbid with mental health issues). Again and again in the media I see the lie that the "homeless" increase is solely due to a housing crunch. This is absurd. I don't know any normal adult that would say, "Well, since my rent went up 8% I decided I'll start doing drug cocktails of unknown origin that make me completely lose my mind, become a hoarder of garbage which I'll pile up on public sidewalks, rob my neighbors, start stabbing and shooting people, light stuff on fire, and actively avoid my own family members and the plethora of city services available to help me". I honestly don't believe that more housing is the primary tool here. In SF it's normal for 5 grown adults to all be renting rooms in one apartment. It's not great, SF's housing policies are garbage, but normal people adapt to higher prices/demand by getting less for their money, or moving to locales that cost less, or temporarily moving in with family members, or in the worst case going to shelter because they aren't doing drugs and will be admitted. In the most affluent society in human history, people still have options and people adapt even in the midst of price increases. The idea that moral depravity on the streets is the next step from a rent increase is patently absurd. On the other hand, addicts move across the country to expensive but lawless cities to do drugs, especially when they decriminalize them, again as Shellenberger has shown. One need only take a walk and talk to ACTUAL "homeless" people in any west coast city to prove this very quickly. Advocating for "the homeless" is linguistic jui-jitsu that is really about defending the same woke ideology that is appearing everywhere, and at base seems to be about nihilism itself, a glee in the destruction of the West generally including all merit, property ownership, and "privilege" of any kind. I'm a psychotherapist. To the extent these individuals are indeed "victims" of early life trauma which led to addiction, the absolute last way I'd "treat" these individuals is by letting them rot in the streets, as hundreds of thousands of people slowly kill themselves. It would be insane to write up such a treatment plan for the struggling clients I love and yet this is standard public policy across the United States.
You should learn more about this topic before you post. Well it is true that most homeless people have substance abuse problems, most of them develop them when they are homeless. Not before. This simple fact which is readily available, makes the entire rest of your argument moot
Feel free to look at Shellenberger’s exhaustive research, or just join the field of mental health with me and see for yourself. If you want to challenge my claims, feel free to cite evidence, documentaries, personal experience, or anything else that would persuade someone of your position, like I’ve tried to do.
Michael shellenberger has no relevant experience, and no peer-reviewed research whatsoever on this topic. A good discussion of his... Knowledge of the topic can be found here, making points similar to what I've made here, but unlike shellenberger, based on actual research done by relevant professionals in the field. A simple Google search for get you to that research. But if you need me to do that ground work for you, I'd be happy to do so.
“Shellenberger refuses to admit that mental illness is often caused by homelessness”, the article says.. You and this author clearly don’t work in mental health, understand the nature of the psyche, or know real people that suffer from substance use issues. I can only encourage you to go out on the street and talk to real people here in Portland where I live or in SF, for example. Your luxury beliefs won’t last long.
And for what it's worth I think what he's talking about there for mental illness is the onset of emotional problems and that segment of mental illness. Typically the more major mental illnesses like schizophrenia and so on are only exacerbated by homelessness.
I actually work with homeless people in portland. What he says about that is actually true. Do you have some expertise in mental health that we don't know about? I haven't been to school for it, but when they trained me to work with the homeless in portland, they taught me the signs and taught me the pathologies.
I don't mean to do this interaction to "win" but instead to ask you and anybody was reading along, to stop a little bit back from your visceral reactions to homelessness in your community. The sanitation, the trepidation into the parks that make you feel uncomfortable. All of that. And put aside your need to blame these people, to at least acknowledge that the causes of these things are what they are. And the solutions need to acknowledge what the real causes are. Not that you like so many people in Portland feel it's hopeless and it's better to get them out of the way and blame them then to actually address what's going on.
(That'll take you to a downloadable PDF or some similar) if you dislike the source of the document itself, please note all of the footnotes and external sources. If you would like me to track down URLs for those sources, please let me know.
You'll see that substance abuse is low on the list of proximate causes for homelessness.
Great post. The Demsas view is also wrong because, when normal people associate cities with encampments, vagrants and public drug use, they turn anti-city. In other words, if Demsas had her way and encampments were protected, even only as a way to spite anti-housing cities, her agenda would suffer. The encampments motivate anti-density attitudes. People see the encampments, the packs of lingering drunks, and they understandably freak out. Because people associate cities with social dysfunction, they’re more than happy to oppose reforms that would allow more and bigger apartment buildings. They see apartments as a nuisance and, frankly, under the Demsas view, they are!
Shelters take away individuals freedoms and rights..why does an adult have to be in bed at 615 in the evening? Why are these individuals told what they can wear? Etc, etc....list too numerous to count for lack of freedom. This is the U.S..nit the middle east!!
The problem is is that you give everything away at the very first objection. Yes, everybody knows that these anti-camping ordinances have zero intent to solve homelessness. Exactly! They simply want to push it out of sight. And the entire rest of your argument fails because of this. Because anti-camping bands do not solve homelessness, do not solve substance abuse, do not solve the community problems that homelessness creates.
Also true, but less important than the other. The cruel and unusual punishment prohibition is an individual right. There is no collective community right per se. Much less the vague, ambiguous one that you envision based on aesthetic objections and inconvenience. Yes you salt it with harm, but again your proposed solution, camping bans, does not solve that at all. In fact wear such camping bands have been enacted, the harm aspect has increased, not decreased. (Affected individuals are harder to outreach to, lack the communal resources of such encampments that at bare minimum confine self harm, and often prevent it effectively through community, and they further disassociate individuals with society, correctly interpreting this as a rejection by society which in turn loosens our innate tendency to do social behavior. When people don't litter, it's not because they're afraid of a fine, it's because they're part of society, and largely society around them doesn't).
And as with the camping bans, your comment is not intended to solve any of the problems you've identified except the aesthetic and lifestyle ones. It's all a rationalization of trying to make your life look prettier.
The ACLU says you “can’t arrest your way out of homelessness”. I’m an LA rent control landlord. I can say unequivocally that our politicians can’t spend their way out of homelessness, either (Take a bow, Bass and Gruesome). And while arresting our politicians might help, the ACLU certainly won’t let us.
Side question about all this Democratic Party angst about the Supreme Court’s recent decisions. How many of the current Justices were seated by a majority Democratic Senate? Remember: if you don’t like who nominated the Justice, don’t vote for ‘em.
Smart guys our founding fathers. They could foresee, and forestall, hijinks centuries into the future.
There are many flaws, or at least misunderstandings in this argument. There also are many things Lehman gets right. First, the argument of scale is important. One homeless person is not an encampment. While progressives argue the issue as individual rights, they miss the point that it is not a single individual that is involved in an encampment. Lehman was spot on to make this distinction.
Where did he fall short? I wish he had made two points, although one of them he seems to misunderstand, along with just about everyone else.
The first missed point is that no government is responsible for providing someone with a home. That is a personal responsibility. The Ninth Court of Appeals created a require function of government that does not exist outside of communism. Our mode of government, thankfully, is not communist. Furthermore, in an encampment, the "homeless" are not actually homeless. They have homes. They have their tents at a permanent location. The fact that their home is not a building is meaningless to them. It is meaningful to us because we live in structures. But here we are imposing our mores on them.
For three years I was the pastor of a church whose members included up to a dozen "homeless" members. They actually contributed to the mission of our congregation. Because of this surprising reality, I stopped calling them homeless. What else to call them? I started to call them our outside members. They did not need government or NGO shelters. They had their tents. That's what they wanted. This was the mistake made by the Ninth Court of Appeals.
Most importantly, what most people misunderstand about chronically "homeless" people is that want to be outside. They do not want to live inside structures. There also is the issue of substance abuse and mental illness. Not having the responsibility of maintaining a structure, whether owned or rented, is what they consider to be freedom.
Municipalities have the responsibility of condemning housing or houses or apartments that are unsafe or unhealthy. This applies to structures as well as tents.
Most of what passes as "homeless policy" is an imposition of the normative expectation of living in a building. And this is why typical progressive homeless policy fails. It fails because it completely misunderstands the homeless, outside person it wants to help.
Restrictions on creating more practical housing arise from local control. Clearly, the pendulum has swung quite far when municipalities are able to eject people they raised, or firce them into debtors' prison. It's granting them de facto and de jure power to declare who is and is not a citizen of city based on precarity.
Great post!
I found this article on the Free Press. Well written, thank you. I'd just add Shellenberger's point that "homeless" is really a euphemism for "drug addict" (co-morbid with mental health issues). Again and again in the media I see the lie that the "homeless" increase is solely due to a housing crunch. This is absurd. I don't know any normal adult that would say, "Well, since my rent went up 8% I decided I'll start doing drug cocktails of unknown origin that make me completely lose my mind, become a hoarder of garbage which I'll pile up on public sidewalks, rob my neighbors, start stabbing and shooting people, light stuff on fire, and actively avoid my own family members and the plethora of city services available to help me". I honestly don't believe that more housing is the primary tool here. In SF it's normal for 5 grown adults to all be renting rooms in one apartment. It's not great, SF's housing policies are garbage, but normal people adapt to higher prices/demand by getting less for their money, or moving to locales that cost less, or temporarily moving in with family members, or in the worst case going to shelter because they aren't doing drugs and will be admitted. In the most affluent society in human history, people still have options and people adapt even in the midst of price increases. The idea that moral depravity on the streets is the next step from a rent increase is patently absurd. On the other hand, addicts move across the country to expensive but lawless cities to do drugs, especially when they decriminalize them, again as Shellenberger has shown. One need only take a walk and talk to ACTUAL "homeless" people in any west coast city to prove this very quickly. Advocating for "the homeless" is linguistic jui-jitsu that is really about defending the same woke ideology that is appearing everywhere, and at base seems to be about nihilism itself, a glee in the destruction of the West generally including all merit, property ownership, and "privilege" of any kind. I'm a psychotherapist. To the extent these individuals are indeed "victims" of early life trauma which led to addiction, the absolute last way I'd "treat" these individuals is by letting them rot in the streets, as hundreds of thousands of people slowly kill themselves. It would be insane to write up such a treatment plan for the struggling clients I love and yet this is standard public policy across the United States.
You should learn more about this topic before you post. Well it is true that most homeless people have substance abuse problems, most of them develop them when they are homeless. Not before. This simple fact which is readily available, makes the entire rest of your argument moot
Feel free to look at Shellenberger’s exhaustive research, or just join the field of mental health with me and see for yourself. If you want to challenge my claims, feel free to cite evidence, documentaries, personal experience, or anything else that would persuade someone of your position, like I’ve tried to do.
Michael shellenberger has no relevant experience, and no peer-reviewed research whatsoever on this topic. A good discussion of his... Knowledge of the topic can be found here, making points similar to what I've made here, but unlike shellenberger, based on actual research done by relevant professionals in the field. A simple Google search for get you to that research. But if you need me to do that ground work for you, I'd be happy to do so.
https://prospect.org/culture/books/homelessness-meets-cluelessness-shellenberger-review/
“Shellenberger refuses to admit that mental illness is often caused by homelessness”, the article says.. You and this author clearly don’t work in mental health, understand the nature of the psyche, or know real people that suffer from substance use issues. I can only encourage you to go out on the street and talk to real people here in Portland where I live or in SF, for example. Your luxury beliefs won’t last long.
And for what it's worth I think what he's talking about there for mental illness is the onset of emotional problems and that segment of mental illness. Typically the more major mental illnesses like schizophrenia and so on are only exacerbated by homelessness.
I actually work with homeless people in portland. What he says about that is actually true. Do you have some expertise in mental health that we don't know about? I haven't been to school for it, but when they trained me to work with the homeless in portland, they taught me the signs and taught me the pathologies.
I don't mean to do this interaction to "win" but instead to ask you and anybody was reading along, to stop a little bit back from your visceral reactions to homelessness in your community. The sanitation, the trepidation into the parks that make you feel uncomfortable. All of that. And put aside your need to blame these people, to at least acknowledge that the causes of these things are what they are. And the solutions need to acknowledge what the real causes are. Not that you like so many people in Portland feel it's hopeless and it's better to get them out of the way and blame them then to actually address what's going on.
A good, annotated place to start is here: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://homelesslaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Homeless_Stats_Fact_Sheet.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjP6YvEw5CHAxWGHDQIHcaLDKwQFnoECBkQBg&usg=AOvVaw03n-78M27BWJMKqI-Jy6SA
(That'll take you to a downloadable PDF or some similar) if you dislike the source of the document itself, please note all of the footnotes and external sources. If you would like me to track down URLs for those sources, please let me know.
You'll see that substance abuse is low on the list of proximate causes for homelessness.
Let me know if you can't get the homeless law link to work and I'll figure out some other way to get it to you.
Great post. The Demsas view is also wrong because, when normal people associate cities with encampments, vagrants and public drug use, they turn anti-city. In other words, if Demsas had her way and encampments were protected, even only as a way to spite anti-housing cities, her agenda would suffer. The encampments motivate anti-density attitudes. People see the encampments, the packs of lingering drunks, and they understandably freak out. Because people associate cities with social dysfunction, they’re more than happy to oppose reforms that would allow more and bigger apartment buildings. They see apartments as a nuisance and, frankly, under the Demsas view, they are!
Shelters take away individuals freedoms and rights..why does an adult have to be in bed at 615 in the evening? Why are these individuals told what they can wear? Etc, etc....list too numerous to count for lack of freedom. This is the U.S..nit the middle east!!
I forgot to mention..not everyone are alcoholics or drug addicts!!
The problem is is that you give everything away at the very first objection. Yes, everybody knows that these anti-camping ordinances have zero intent to solve homelessness. Exactly! They simply want to push it out of sight. And the entire rest of your argument fails because of this. Because anti-camping bands do not solve homelessness, do not solve substance abuse, do not solve the community problems that homelessness creates.
Also true, but less important than the other. The cruel and unusual punishment prohibition is an individual right. There is no collective community right per se. Much less the vague, ambiguous one that you envision based on aesthetic objections and inconvenience. Yes you salt it with harm, but again your proposed solution, camping bans, does not solve that at all. In fact wear such camping bands have been enacted, the harm aspect has increased, not decreased. (Affected individuals are harder to outreach to, lack the communal resources of such encampments that at bare minimum confine self harm, and often prevent it effectively through community, and they further disassociate individuals with society, correctly interpreting this as a rejection by society which in turn loosens our innate tendency to do social behavior. When people don't litter, it's not because they're afraid of a fine, it's because they're part of society, and largely society around them doesn't).
And as with the camping bans, your comment is not intended to solve any of the problems you've identified except the aesthetic and lifestyle ones. It's all a rationalization of trying to make your life look prettier.
The ACLU says you “can’t arrest your way out of homelessness”. I’m an LA rent control landlord. I can say unequivocally that our politicians can’t spend their way out of homelessness, either (Take a bow, Bass and Gruesome). And while arresting our politicians might help, the ACLU certainly won’t let us.
Side question about all this Democratic Party angst about the Supreme Court’s recent decisions. How many of the current Justices were seated by a majority Democratic Senate? Remember: if you don’t like who nominated the Justice, don’t vote for ‘em.
Smart guys our founding fathers. They could foresee, and forestall, hijinks centuries into the future.
There are many flaws, or at least misunderstandings in this argument. There also are many things Lehman gets right. First, the argument of scale is important. One homeless person is not an encampment. While progressives argue the issue as individual rights, they miss the point that it is not a single individual that is involved in an encampment. Lehman was spot on to make this distinction.
Where did he fall short? I wish he had made two points, although one of them he seems to misunderstand, along with just about everyone else.
The first missed point is that no government is responsible for providing someone with a home. That is a personal responsibility. The Ninth Court of Appeals created a require function of government that does not exist outside of communism. Our mode of government, thankfully, is not communist. Furthermore, in an encampment, the "homeless" are not actually homeless. They have homes. They have their tents at a permanent location. The fact that their home is not a building is meaningless to them. It is meaningful to us because we live in structures. But here we are imposing our mores on them.
For three years I was the pastor of a church whose members included up to a dozen "homeless" members. They actually contributed to the mission of our congregation. Because of this surprising reality, I stopped calling them homeless. What else to call them? I started to call them our outside members. They did not need government or NGO shelters. They had their tents. That's what they wanted. This was the mistake made by the Ninth Court of Appeals.
Most importantly, what most people misunderstand about chronically "homeless" people is that want to be outside. They do not want to live inside structures. There also is the issue of substance abuse and mental illness. Not having the responsibility of maintaining a structure, whether owned or rented, is what they consider to be freedom.
Municipalities have the responsibility of condemning housing or houses or apartments that are unsafe or unhealthy. This applies to structures as well as tents.
Most of what passes as "homeless policy" is an imposition of the normative expectation of living in a building. And this is why typical progressive homeless policy fails. It fails because it completely misunderstands the homeless, outside person it wants to help.
You might like this podcast exposing the housing shortage deception:
https://open.substack.com/pub/soberchristiangentlemanpodcast/p/s2-ep-45-the-housing-shortage-deception?r=31s3eo&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Restrictions on creating more practical housing arise from local control. Clearly, the pendulum has swung quite far when municipalities are able to eject people they raised, or firce them into debtors' prison. It's granting them de facto and de jure power to declare who is and is not a citizen of city based on precarity.