The real solution would be long-term mental health institutions in places with a low cost of care. Basically, New York and San Francisco send their long-term mentally ill to less expensive locations in Mississippi or Alabama. This would provide lower costs and establishing communities with large facilities would allow for a concentration…
The real solution would be long-term mental health institutions in places with a low cost of care. Basically, New York and San Francisco send their long-term mentally ill to less expensive locations in Mississippi or Alabama. This would provide lower costs and establishing communities with large facilities would allow for a concentration of labor so staffing would be reasonable. I picked those states because they have low labor costs, but other may states may work as well.
What we do not need are huge, expensive facilities in the most expensive cities. That will never happen, nor should it. In my experience, most homeless people concentrate in cities with the best services and the best drugs. It would be brutal to live in Salt Lake City or Fargo as a homeless drug addict, but LA is quite nice. New York has winter, but they also have massive services. There is a reason homeless people congregate where they do.
The safest path would be internment in massive, concentrated mental health facilities operated with the smallest budgets imaginable. Individuals who are not new to the police or health providers. These places should be cheaper than prisons and sufficiently miserable as to encourage the unhoused to avoid behavior leading up to involuntary confinement, if they are capable. I suspect that the number of individuals engaging in anti-social behavior will drop dramatically once such behavior has swift consequences. Some unfortunately will clearly be unable to stop themselves, and mental health confinement would seem to be more humane than imprisonment. Once the rump of bad actors is gone, the threat of permanent internment will make city life bearable again.
The real question is how to get more housing built in the hard-core exclusionary cities (New York, San Francisco, Los Angleles, Washington, Boston, ...). I think we are at the point where the Federal government needs to step in and ban any and all zoning restrictions in unreasonably expensive municipalities. My hope would be that once this is imposed on New York and San Francisco, the other cities might rush to reform before uncle Sam forces them to. There is no reason why every empty lot in the five boroughs cannot have high-rise housing on it, ideally cheap towers full of studios and one-bedrooms, the housing in highest demand, and the layouts the city refuses to allow. The other housing hack would be to ban "affordable" units, because any housing outside of market housing is useless, and should not be a tax on everyone else. "Affordable units" are nothing more than disguised corruption. The practice needs to end.
The real solution would be long-term mental health institutions in places with a low cost of care. Basically, New York and San Francisco send their long-term mentally ill to less expensive locations in Mississippi or Alabama. This would provide lower costs and establishing communities with large facilities would allow for a concentration of labor so staffing would be reasonable. I picked those states because they have low labor costs, but other may states may work as well.
What we do not need are huge, expensive facilities in the most expensive cities. That will never happen, nor should it. In my experience, most homeless people concentrate in cities with the best services and the best drugs. It would be brutal to live in Salt Lake City or Fargo as a homeless drug addict, but LA is quite nice. New York has winter, but they also have massive services. There is a reason homeless people congregate where they do.
The safest path would be internment in massive, concentrated mental health facilities operated with the smallest budgets imaginable. Individuals who are not new to the police or health providers. These places should be cheaper than prisons and sufficiently miserable as to encourage the unhoused to avoid behavior leading up to involuntary confinement, if they are capable. I suspect that the number of individuals engaging in anti-social behavior will drop dramatically once such behavior has swift consequences. Some unfortunately will clearly be unable to stop themselves, and mental health confinement would seem to be more humane than imprisonment. Once the rump of bad actors is gone, the threat of permanent internment will make city life bearable again.
The real question is how to get more housing built in the hard-core exclusionary cities (New York, San Francisco, Los Angleles, Washington, Boston, ...). I think we are at the point where the Federal government needs to step in and ban any and all zoning restrictions in unreasonably expensive municipalities. My hope would be that once this is imposed on New York and San Francisco, the other cities might rush to reform before uncle Sam forces them to. There is no reason why every empty lot in the five boroughs cannot have high-rise housing on it, ideally cheap towers full of studios and one-bedrooms, the housing in highest demand, and the layouts the city refuses to allow. The other housing hack would be to ban "affordable" units, because any housing outside of market housing is useless, and should not be a tax on everyone else. "Affordable units" are nothing more than disguised corruption. The practice needs to end.