Virtually every homeless shelter will refuse to house someone who is drunk, on drugs, or belligerent. This article only makes a passing reference to people who refuse shelter so they can continue their substance abuse, but this is a salient reason for homelessness given by many people on the streets (especially in SF).
In discussing this issue with the EMT and paramedic students I teach, absolutely this.
"If your life had descended to a point where you had to go to the bathroom in an alley and use scrap paper to wipe, or were eating your lunch that you fetched from a trash can on the street in the rain, there's a good chance you would use opioids to numb the pain of that existence, too."
And once you start using some of the most powerfully addictive substances we know, it's not about "flaws of character" or anything else, now you've messed with brain chemistry, in some cases, permanently.
I’m asking because as a teenager I lived in motels and homeless with pill-mill turned heroin addict parents and my anecdotal experiences with the broader transient public suggest a downward spiral involving substances first.
> suggest a downward spiral involving substances first.
Anecdotally, as a person in San Francisco who's been in recovery 23 years, all the people I know who were once homeless became homeless because they were abusing drugs and alcohol. Sometimes mental illness was at play, too.
There's a strong selection bias in my sample set — they're all alcoholics/addicts (thankfully in recovery, thankfully housed).
A lot of it is substance abuse first, a lot of it isn't. Homeless advocates don't want to emphasize the former cases, however, since it drains empathy faster than just assuming everyone is in the latter category (although it doesn't really matter, empathy is drained quickly in either case). The same debate rages over between groups of people who wind up unhoused locally vs those who arrive already unhoused (you get more empathy for the former and less for the latter, both categories are significantly non-empty).
I can't find a firm answer to the question "Among the homeless, what fraction have opioid use disorder; a history that contains a legitimate medical visit connected to the prescription of opioids; and no history of substance abuse prior to that visit?"
We'd need a Danish style medical records system to answer queries like that, or you can study it with VA data.
So overall, I think you're right. Opioid disorder is so much more common than homelessness generally, homelessness is not going to possibly explain opioid use disorder in the general case. Of course it can interfere with treatment. However, when so many people use cannabis, and I haven't even investigated alcohol, the right idea is that substance abuse is so prevalent in America, you'd need more serious interventions earlier on. The issue that can be acted by just medical professionals, which is the prescription of painkillers due to legitimate medical visits that lead to substance abuse, I think there is action on this but I'm not sure what it is.
That’s my experience as well. The path all the homeless and couch surfers I’ve known was drug abuse and dependence leading to loss of job then eventual homelessness due to not paying rent, roommates getting fed up, or parents getting fed up. I know that some homeless are different and became homeless first and then became addicted to substances, but I have not known them.
As another poster, Sean, points out most homeless advocates are loath to admit to this for obvious reasons.
I'd hesitate to say 'typical'. I think your use of the word 'spiral' is entirely appropriate because it becomes this revolving descent. Casual substance use becomes substance abuse becomes poverty becomes ... and similarly mental health becomes poverty becomes self-medication via substance use and abuse.
Uncle Bob gets hurt, can't work for a while, and gets put on Percocet, but that's to expensive and has limitations. Eventually he gets on other pills, and then a neighbor mentions he sells pills sometimes, and can get other stuff.
Few years later Bob can't take pills, can't afford them, but can snag bags of H. That's stable for a second but eventually it screws his life up more, and he's homeless.
A lot of young folks end up there cuz their home life was bad and it was easy to party / forget abuse at home, and just end up stuck.
I'd also add that the homeless are often victims of abuse with pretty much no societal support. Several homeless people were murdered here and it was basically a "what are you gonna do about it?".
For good reason, many homeless also don't trust cops as they are just as likely to abuse or harass them as anyone else.
Channel 5s recent discussion on this is something everyone should watch to get a good picture of what they are dealing with.
There are non-sober shelters out there, but homeless are afraid of them because they allow drunk, on drugs, or belligerent residence, so they refuse to use them. Drug addicts don't want to room with other drug addicts, they feel like (and are often correct that) they have better chances sleeping outside.
They'll also refuse to house you if you have a pet, smell like alcohol, have a tent, or they just filled up already. There is rarely consistency in a shelter, so most are better off finding an alternative that's consistent. Otherwise you end up with no shelter some nights, with no way to manage it.
I can't stand how everyone keeps brushing over the fact that it's completely legal to clear an encampment if there's somewhere for them to go. Instead of immediately starting housing first initiatives; these cities pretend there's nothing they can do and continue to sue for the right to inflict cruel and unusual punishment on their citizens. It's insane.
If you lost your job and couldn’t find another one, you’d land on a couch somewhere. Most of us would.
Other people may be glossing over some legal technicality but the “it’s easy, we just need to spend more money” crowd constantly and deliberately glosses over the fact that the population we are talking about are not people down on their luck and just need a helping hand to get back on their feet. They are people that have alienated everyone in their lives and that no else in this world—-including each other—-wants to share space with.
> If you lost your job and couldn’t find another one, you’d land on a couch somewhere. Most of us would.
Another way of saying this is that your safety net is the excess capacity of your social network. If your network is composed of people with stable jobs and guest rooms, it's practically guaranteed that someone will accommodate you for as long as you need. After taking all the time you need to get back on your feet, you will probably pay it forward to others in your social network.
If your social network is composed of people with low income, lots of dependents, and unstable housing, it's less likely. Sometimes because your peers have no capacity to help, but mostly because the network is already saturated - you're not the only one of your friends who needs a couch and a ride to work.
A term to describe this phenomenon is "class", which is a concept so thoroughly erased from American culture that we have to rediscover it through thought exercises like this.
>> If your network is composed of people with stable jobs and guest rooms, it's practically guaranteed that someone will accommodate you for as long as you need
I had a stable job, had plenty of room for someone to stay over, had people in my network that were junkies, and no way would I ever let them in my house. That would be insane. Best case, they steal my shit to buy drugs, that is the most favorable possible outcome, worst case they OD in my bathroom.
There's nothing you can do. But no, you can't "accommodate" them.
Why did you bring up drug addicts, when nobody else mentioned it? We were talking about losing your job and couch surfing, and your immediate response was "no way I'd let a junky into my house."
Do you think that everyone that ended up homeless (living out of their cars or couch surfing) deserved it due to some personal failing? That's the usual conservative line, but they tend not to be so forward about it, so I'm curious
Well, most of the commenters on HN would. But more than 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and the cost of giving a friend shelter is not just space on a couch. If the friend is broke, you're absorbing their food costs. Maybe not a big deal for a few weeks, of course. But when highly competent software engineers are out of work for months...
Plus the pandemic exacerbated the problem a fair bit.
And no, spending more money isn't easy. There's nothing easy about this. I think Housing First is the right solution because it works, not because it's trivial.
Aye. Studies have shown that a lot of "homeless" folks are couch crashing, sleeping in cars, or have other made-do options. Some people make it work, but most of the time people are stuck there, and are often one bad argument away from being on the street.
Cities are trying to build what they can get political will to build, but the scale and costs of what has recently been done so far are unbelievable. County of LA voters already voted to tax themselves over a billion dollars for homeless services and shelters. An audit recently found they were spending some half a million per unit on new shelter projects (1). There are by recent counts 75,000 homeless people in LA county, so at the prices LAHSA has been paying for new shelter beds the county would need to spend almost 40 billion dollars. That is the size of the entire LA county budget for reference.
> I can't stand how everyone keeps brushing over the fact that it's completely legal to clear an encampment if there's somewhere for them to go.
There's a whole world outside any given city. We shouldn't brush over this fact either.
If cities face restrictions on public space they'll just continue to turn their public spaces over to private entities who don't have to follow such rules which is its own kind of dystopia and not one that would be any more friendly to the struggling poor.
>> these cities pretend there's nothing they can do and continue to sue for the right to inflict cruel and unusual punishment on their citizens
The punishment for vagrancy was the same as the typical punishment for many other crimes - a short stay in jail or a fine. That's neither cruel nor unusual. Far from being unusual, it is a completely ordinary punishment.
The cruel and unusual punishment clause was intended by the authors the Constitution to prohibit the use of torture in order to get a confession. The founders were worried about things like the Inquisition or the use of torture devices like the rack.
The 9th Circuit completely ignored the original meaning of the Constitution, as it has done in so many other cases. Hopefully the Supreme Court will uphold the rule of law here, instead of continuing to allow the judicial branch to usurp the functions of the legislative branch by ignoring or misinterpreting the law in order to enact its own policy decisions.
It's more nuanced than that. People who are homeless sometimes have preexisting conditions that caused them to become homeless (mental issues, substance abuse issues) and obviously their addictions just get worse.
People who are on the street turn to any kind of drug they can find to numb the harsh realities of living on the street. Alcohol and cheap opioids.
It would be a struggle to find a homeless person without some kind of substance abuse problem. Addict to homeless process, or homeless to addict process.
> numb the harsh realities of living on the street
not just the street; schizophrenia and schizo-affective disorder are substantially over-represented in the homeless population, and many of the people who suffer from these conditions are self-medicating to try to "cope" with them. This is of course a double or triple tragedy: first, we have quite effective drugs that they could use which be much more beneficial than alcohol, opiates and nicotine; secondly, it is much easier to treat these conditions if they are caught early, but the nature of the intersection between US healthcare and poverty means that it very often is not.
ps. I learnt all this last night at a training program for first responders.
You’re stripping these people of way too much agency. As a formerly homeless heroin addict, I assure you that the vast majority of addicts and dual diagnosis individuals can get off the street. Estonia and Switzerland have accomplished this for fentanyl and heroin respectively, in addition to stimulant and alcohol abusers.
The issue is there’s a cohort who thinks that the solutions that enable safe streets require too much sacrifice of one’s individual liberty - even if said individual abuses their freedom to harm themself and others.
We need publicly funded SROs, group housing and mental health facilities, with trained medical and security staff as needed. It won't be pretty and it will cost a literal fortune, but we've been living with the alternative for decades now and it's not pretty or cheap either.
And the most-impacted cities can't be expected to pay for all of this. A solution of this scale can only come from the federal level.
Pay drug buyers to narc on sellers (especially via recordings). Catch the sellers of addictive drugs (especially P/meth) and bust the network by making it too risky to sell hard drugs. However would need a way to prevent buyers from becoming victims of retribution.
If the homeless problem is predominantly due to drug usage then we need an effective way remove the drugs from society. Might help reduce theft too?
Note I am not a fan of persecution for drug usage! Personally, I would prefer to see many drugs (mushrooms, weed, ecstacy) decriminalised and made safe. Currently street drugs are unreliable quality (due to manufacturing adulterants, mixing in fentanyl/crap). I have known some reasonably functional/social users of some class A drugs - so I am not religiously against drugs - but I have also witnessed damage to individuals and society due to drug usage.
I highly recommend watching The Wire as it provides a stunningly accurate depiction of how this strategy failed in Baltimore. As a sibling comment points out, the "war on drugs" was an abject failure, because the people getting imprisoned for their role in the drug economy were usually street-level dealers and foot soldiers. The people who run criminal enterprises tend to insulate themselves from its everyday operations, which is why they could only get Al Capone off the streets by charging him with tax evasion.
I wholeheartedly agree with your notions on drug usage and decriminalization of certain substances though! You might be interested in Dr. Timothy Leary, who wrote extensively on "control over your own nervous system" as long as it did not affect others [1] (on page 49).
I think the replacement of SROs by luxury apartments in downtown SF (mid Market neighborhood) was an under appreciated driver of homelessness there. This was housing of last report for many.
The supreme court agreed to hear this case. So you can pretty much expect cities are going to get what they want as they didn't hear the prior ruling for basically the exact same thing.
The rule right now is before cities can start clearing out people, they have to have enough beds/locations for the homeless. If there's not enough places for the homeless then public camping is legal. (meaning that if cities wanted to clear out the homeless they can build a place for them to stay.)
Its a rule that has disproportionately harmed the major cities in the metropolitan regions that are forced to bear the load from other cities in the area with more "move-it-along" type policing of the homeless. Its certainly a thing in LA county that's for sure. You can go to Venice Beach where it borders with the city of Santa Monica, and its pretty telling how things are really shaking out when all the tents are set up on the LA side and the Santa Monica side of the border is free of tents somehow.
It builds and builds, until you end up with these small cities having homeless populations that can be sheltered in a single apartment complex type build of say 500-2000 people or so, and then something like the city of LA that might have something like 45000 homeless people. That's a project on an entirely different scale, that's half the population of Burbank right there just in homeless people of shelter space that has to be built in one city by this rule. On top of the existing housing crisis of a lack of places to live for everyone else too. If this is the law set by a federal judge then it seems the federal government should pay for it, if its going to be so amazingly costly for cities to bear this build out.
I'm probably not as cynical about the Court. Their decision not to hear a challenge earlier can also be rooted in "ripeness". If you have a lower court system that can expose some deeper consideration and debate on the attributes of case before it gets to you, it's best to let that play out as much as possible.
But obviously there's something in the 9th's position that a consensus feels is worth reviewing. I wouldn't for a minute assume that means the cities get everything they want. Remember that whatever they decide will be the law for five times as many states as the 9th oversees. But likewise, I don't see the 9th's position as very practical in terms how any given city has to implement it. Let's start by recognizing that some homeless are not victims of circumstance. It makes me want to hear the best arguments on both sides.
The thought of fining or even jailing the homeless just for being homeless scares me. It's a more like criminalizing the poor and it would be a total waste of taxpayers money.
In California, it costs over $106k/year to house each inmate. About half of that go to paying prison guards and admin. Those are 2021-2 numbers, it is certainly much higher now. Imagine what else could be done with that money.
I agree. Why should my money go to a private prison to restrict an "unsightly" person when the same money could buy them a lot cheaper housing facilities? It costs a lot of tax payer money to throw people in jail (especially if it's a private prison).
A more humane treatment of the homeless is also a benefit to the tax payer.
Until they flood it/burn it down/convert it into a meth lab.
People's problem isn't with the homeless in general, it's with the mentally ill and/or drug addicted ones that shit on public transit/street corners and accost strangers and turn public parks into open air heroin dens. Free housing won't help this sort of homeless.
There are tons of marginally-housed people who are just normal folks who couldn't afford rising rents. You just don't see them because they tend to stay in cars, motels, or couch surf.
The people you mention are a tiny visible minority.
That we should choose the humane route, but I wouldn't raise cost as a reason why.
If housing the homeless in prisons is cheap, then a program where they can come and go from a prison but otherwise use it as a sanctuary would not be bad. If we are talking about treating the unhoused as criminals then that's where I take issue.
The frustration to me is that cities are asking for this power in many cases with no actual plan in place. It's just "we don't care what happens, just move along". And at the risk of absolute condensation into a soundbite, a large part of homelessness derives in one form or another from those same cities and government's attitude towards mental health, which as someone who sees it every day as a paramedic, is nothing short of a fucking travesty.
I feel like cities are mostly concerned with street lights and garbage removal and local crime.
Fixing a broader societal failure like the lack of housing and poor mental health seems like it should sit at a state / province or federal / national level.
Well, part of it is a pragmatic understanding that there are areas with encampments that are for many reasons terrible spots for having an encampment. City of LA passed an ordinance recently barring encampments from within 500 ft of schools, near things like fire hydrants or driveways where sight is blocked or other certain road configurations where it would be very dangerous for pedestrians either living in the encampment or trying to navigate around the encampment thats blocking sidewalk access by walking on the street. I wouldn't be surprised if ADA considerations are being factored in with these site selections, now that the city has endured a number of lawsuits from people getting hit trying to sidestep an encampment now.
You can enforce these common sense safety rules today while you wait for money to be agreed upon and earmarked, planning to begin, contracts awarded, construction to take place, etc. Even if the stars aligned and all relevant power brokers agreed on starting a homeless shelter tomorrow, it could be ten years before one person is helped with that act.
The problem is so severe that a single city or even a large city, like Los Angeles, is basically helpless to stop it. This is a federal issue and needs to be handled on the federal level.
All of these problems are downstream of California cities refusing to build enough housing to meet demand.
The homeless population is not fixed, it's a continuous stream of people becoming homeless, and some finding housing or leaving the area or dying.
The inflow rate of people entering homelessness is a regional problem; once you're homeless it's hard to go very far. So regional areas in charge of determining housing levels (the Regional Housing Needs Allocation process) has been messed up for a long time. It's finally getting fixed by state level policy.
Until California decides to build enough housing in order to house a person on minimum wage, then we will continue to have this people. Its not every state that has this problem, only those with housing so much more expensive than wages.
> All of these problems are downstream of California cities refusing to build enough housing to meet demand.
California has been a magnet for the poor/downcast/hobos (using the term with its original meaning)/etc... since the late 19th century. California will never be able to build enough to meet demand on minimum wage, simply because if they did...there would be even more demand.
> The inflow rate of people entering homelessness is a regional problem; once you're homeless it's hard to go very far.
This is flat out wrong. I rode a Greyhound from Vicksburg to Seattle via LA once, and the bus stopped at each prison along the way, almost everyone getting off in LA and nowhere else to go. It isn't a regional problem, if it was just a regional problem it would be easy enough to solve as the demand would be bound. But it isn't: the more housing and services you offer, the more demand you are going to get.
If you build free housing for 45k homeless, you will wind up with 45k homeless housed and 45k more arriving in the hopes of being housed. You didn't solve your problem at all.
Sure there are some people arriving, but it's a fraction of the total, usually only 1/5 in most surveys and in the academic literature.
Just below you is a comment that's doubting the idea that a homeless person wouldn't move to somewhere cheaper immediately, whereas you seem to be asserting that homeless people will just move to a very high cost area.
I do agree that is we build housing for 45k homeless people, we will soon end up with 45k more, because homelessness is a temporary attribute for people, and far far more than 45k enter homelessness in LA every year.
Talking about the point in time counts as if they explain the magnitude of the problem is wrong, as you point out. It's a stock versus flow problem.
I do disagree that we can't build enough housing. Housing is super expensive to build right now, but that's by design. There's a finite number of people who want to live in the area, and it's pure folly to say "we can't do that". The truth is that current residents don't want to allow enough housing to be built. Which means it's an active choice to throw hindereds of thousands of people into homelessness through excessively high high housing costs, rather than have more neighbors.
It isn't even a fraction of the total, its a flood. LA churns homelessness like nowhere else in the world. Skid row fills up with one group of people in the fall, and a completely new group next fall.
> Just below you is a comment that's doubting the idea that a homeless person wouldn't move to somewhere cheaper immediately, whereas you seem to be asserting that homeless people will just move to a very high cost area.
When you are released from a Texas prison and no one is picking you up, the state of Texas hands you an open bus ticket, with the implicit knowledge that you are going west. You aren't moving to a cheaper place, you are losing your housing (Texas correctional housing) and you need to survive somewhere. It isn't like they have much other choice! It isn't about money, they could move to cheaper Houston, but they can't afford housing there either and the weather and services suck, so its off to LA.
> Talking about the point in time counts as if they explain the magnitude of the problem is wrong, as you point out. It's a stock versus flow problem.
Again, I don't think you get the problem, but it is multi-faceted, you have kids sleeping in cars for a couple of weeks because they got into a fight with their parents, technically homeless that year, but not part of the chronic homeless problem yet (and hopefully never). I guess I'm just referring to chronic homeless cases, not the more economic homelessness that is often just temporary (they have roots and such to help out, and don't have a huge drug addiction that keeps them from functioning in society).
I know life is hard and shit happens, but I refuse to believe that, except for very few edge cases, people who are staring down homelessness just decide to stay in one of the most expensive places in the world and live on the street rather than move somewhere cheaper And find a cheap apartment. It makes absolutely no sense.
I think if you do decide to stay in Los Angeles, when you have no job, no prospects, no family, no money and no place to live, you should be declared as someone who is unable to care for themselves.
Say you have a job, friends, a small support network, and are living on the edge, paycheck to paycheck. You don't have $800 in the bank to travel to a cheaper area and try to find a job and an apartment. You are just struggling to get by. Then your car breaks down, and you can't get to work, and you have less pay, or maybe even lose your job. You lose your apartment, and are stuck with no money, and no way to travel. What do you do? Leave everything you know? Is this really so implausible?
This is the story of so many people who are homeless. Not everyone, but many. There are a thousand paths into homelessness, but falling into it though unexpected expenses is extremely common
I don't even know what that means. It's a like a "move it along" policy to your problems. I hesitate to even ask: what tools do you imagine the feds have to fix homelessness, outside of driving a good economy, and perhaps protectionist measures to build low-skill industries back in the US (and all that entails)?
From my vantage point, a combined strategy of mental health facilities with accessible healthcare and a social safety net is a good starting point. (Most likely will never happen in the US)
I seriously doubt that affordable housing or better employment opportunities are going to do anything, specifically because even people making six figures are struggling to find housing here (LA) so I doubt any amount of subsidized housing is going to solve or even make a dent in the number of homeless people.
It's just a matter of sizing the scale of the problem to the correct budget so it can actually be solved. City of LA has 45,000 homeless people in it. Recent audits put the cost at half a million per unit, all services roped in with that number I believe, for a new shelter bed and staff. That's almost 23 billion dollars provided you have the land for this UCLA sized project cleared already, a whole lot more if you don't. City of LA's entire budget is 13 billion dollars; all it can do is fight the tide with a leaky bucket essentially.
Federal government budget, on the other hand, is 6.1 trillion dollars, and they own the world money printer too, along with a huge amount of acreage all over the american west. The homeless crisis could be solved with a pen stroke from DC today.
Jobs aren’t a complete solution. Especially not low-skill industrial jobs. Some of these people are incapable of employment. They need full time professional care. It is a mental healthcare issue. Since the feds gutted mental healthcare under Reagan they can fix it too.
The only humane solution is to bring back mental hospitals, even with involuntary commitment. The severely mentally ill and/or drug addled are incapable of taking care of themselves. Giving out free needles and making it easier to live in an alley like a stray dog is not humane. What do you think about this?
The "move it along" policing at least has the effect of making it less easy to be homeless which I think ultimately is a more humane strategy than subsidizing a sub-human life.
How does this help the homeless person? I have a homeless neighbor I help out a bit, but there's only so much I can do, I don't have many resources of my own. He's 70-something, has cataracts and glaucoma, can barely walk, and has his stuff split between a car and a tent. The county helps him out with some things but it's band-aid levels of assistance when he should be in an assisted living facility. I'm not sure how much more deserving he has to be to get some meaningful help.
The idea that making it harder to be homeless will somehow cause people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps assumes that they can afford boots and have sufficient strength to pull on them, so to speak. A lot of homeless people are at rock bottom and need something more comprehensive than a cot and a hot dinner.
There are clearly unwritten rules around this issue. For example San Diego has homeless encampments everywhere and Coronado has none. And while being an island doesn’t hurt, Coronado also vigorously enforces its vagrancy laws, mainly by dumping them back in San Diego. Half the island being federal property probably has something to do with it maybe?
Incidentally Coronado is one of the safest, cleanest, most beautiful, and expensive communities in the USA.
Overall giving communities more power to handle this situation seems like a good idea. It is important that we treat less fortunate people with compassion but there has to be some mechanism of where we draw that line.
Poor neighborhoods of San Fransisco look worse that some of the Indian slums and are taken over by criminals, theives and rapists not to mention drug dealers.
> Poor neighborhoods of San Fransisco look worse that some of the Indian slums and are taken over by criminals, theives and rapists not to mention drug dealers.
Cities/governments have loads of options to fix homelessness which won't violate people's rights. But it's crazy to me that nobody is willing to do any of them. I get political ideologies... just that surely the suffering of these people should supersede your ideology.
No no, they'd rather argue that the supreme court is wrong and they do need cruel punishment and violate their rights? Some cities, particularly those in california, oregon, and washington are practically operating internment camps(tent cities) for the homeless. As far as I'm aware there's no concerted effort to kill directly, just indirectly.
So Gavin Newsom facing his own policy failures and instead of fixing them, he's urging the supreme court to reconsider? that's the best use of his time... seriously?
Homeless people are your fellow man. Do you not have any sort of humanity to want to solve this problem?
California might have a recall election, but Gerry says nothing will change with that. So they are looking at 2026 at any possible change here. Gavin is at term limit, but will his Democrat successor have the ideology to do what is right? I very much doubt it.
One thing that has been fascinating about "The Law" as I get older: You can literally rule on most things whatever way you want, and change your mind and thats cool too. Have seen too many "set in stone" decisions change to feel otherwise.
One example is the debate over whether Trump can be prosecuted. One side argues: Well, if Biden assassinated Trump with a predator drone, wouldn't you want him to be prosecuted and not protected by executive privilege? If not, Trump should be prosecuted.
That is a standard that is completely arbitrary and you can rule either way depending on what you feel like any day of the week. The argument that executives should be protected from doing the shady stuff they usually do in office (Obama assassinating arabs with drones all day long) is a kind of coin flip, both arguments are solid.
I am truly convinced even the law is political behind the scenes, and applied at will based on which way popular opinion or political pressure / expedience is blowing at that moment.
For example: Commercial Real Estate is collapsing. Cities are finally being destroyed. Guess what happens? Suddenly all employees mandated to go to work (how convenient for commercial real estate sector that every employer is forcing employees back to work ... its almost as though a capitalist / finance conspiracy is happening behind the scenes to try to help out real estate owners).
And now another "pro commercial real estate" ruling. By the Supreme Court.
Kicking homeless people out of downtowns is great for cities. suddenly a random change of heart linked to a meltdown in the sector. That doesn't seem like a coincidence.
What on earth would make the supreme court, which has an unlimited list of things to do, decide to randomly revisit an 8 year old ruling which just so happens to benefit commercial real estate?)
I am pretty sure the courts are political and highly influenced by capital and it is done behind the scenes, and they can change their ways at will, like this. It all feels way too synchronized.
Aliens or even humans in the far future would be puzzled looking at our time and seeing overabundance of unused buildings and a lot of unhoused people at the same time and the same place.
Aliens maybe. Humans have understood, and enforced, "property rights" for quite a while now. Unused buildings are not just automatically ideal for homeless shelters, and even if it were for some reason a perfectly usable vacant apartment complex, there is still the issue of wear and tear/maintenance costs.
If it was as easy as just building some apartments and walking away from responsibility after that, this would be a much easier thing to solve.
Your explanation is natural, even obvious I'd say, for today. Imagining though how people of the future would ask "Why all those people had to suffer and die in the cold?" your explanation given as the response to that question would sound like "They didn't have a right critical for their survival" - very unconvincing to say the least.
>Humans have understood, and enforced, "property rights" for quite a while now.
May be 10-12K years. Copyright has had only 500 years and is already in turmoil. The property rights may as well be just an artifact of scarcity, similar to how copyright has been an artifact of "copy". Thus with technological progress, space exploration, etc. the property rights may get completely changed or even completely disappear, at least those property rights that we today call so. And in several thousand years the current property rights and their power over an individual well-being would be a hard to understand puzzle. Especially if the future people will get even more capable of empathy and less prone to violence, greed, etc.
>If it was as easy as just building some apartments and walking away from responsibility after that, this would be a much easier thing to solve.
Again, in future it may be even much easier than that, and the future people would be looking at it like generation Z looks at paper maps (and that is just meager 20 years of tech progress - now compound such changes 50 times over 1000 years)
Unused buildings are not just automatically ideal for homeless shelters
The perfect is once again the enemy of the good. People always invoke the building code to talk about Why We Can't Do Anything despite an abundance of empty commercial real estate, but the alternative is people trying to survive in broken down cars and tents.
It's a slow motion catastrophe on the scale of a natural disaster, but every attempt to address it in concrete form (ie by policymakers) is stymied by either self-styled moralists whining that it's stealth communism, or dissemblers hiding behind bureaucratic nostrums. At best you get half-assed pilot projects like tiny houses in parking lots under bridges, which only serve a small number of people and are themselves grossly insufficient.
I was mostly talking about building maintenance and upkeep. Somebody has to pay for that. Truly vacant buildings are often mothballed to the extent of having water shut off, hvac disabled, etc.
Filling a building with homeless adds to costs, increases wear and tear, and those costs have to be borne by someone.
It’s not about perfect being the enemy of good. It is about simple costs and overhead. The homeless people obviously can’t cover basic costs. The building owners don’t have much real incentive to donate the building for use, so in the end the vacant buildings do not equate to a solution.
Obviously, I think we should use tax money to support them because a lot of them are indigent and literally dying slowly on the street. Certainly this costs money but turning on utilities and converting the building away from its original commercial purpose seems a lot less expensive than starting from scratch or relying on some distant-future housing development policy to alleviate an urgent immediate problem.
Large empty building which have already been constructed and fitted with internal infrastructure are significantly more useful for sheltering people than policy objectives that only exist on paper. Even a building with no services enabled is significantly better at providing shelter than a car or a tent because being inside a building minimizes exposure to wind, rain, and snow.
Thus, buying or leasing the large empty buildings makes it a lot easier to start solving the problem in a practical way.
>One example is the debate over whether Trump can be prosecuted. One side argues: Well, if Biden assassinated Trump with a predator drone, wouldn't you want him to be prosecuted and not protected by executive privilege? If not, Trump should be prosecuted.
We have an actual living former president (Obama) that ordered the assassination of an American citizen with a predator drone (and killed the target's 16 year old American citizen son as collateral damage) and virtually no one called for his prosecution outside of weirdos like me.
Executive privilege is an ugly back door to do whatever you want, and no amount of legal argumentation covers it up. Someone was elected to run the country, that gives them power to do things. It is assumed they are trusted to do those things. The proper mechanism to get rid of them is an impeachment. That's it.
America kills people that are anti-America. Its not going to be a pretty process. The door is left open to that, and there must be protection for presidents in this system to do those things.
