Homelessness

Politics & News
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There’s a bill moving the California assembly that I think is a pretty good example of the difficulty in addressing the mental health/unhoused nexus.

SB 1338, called “CARE court” sets up a process to compel unhoused mentally ill people to undergo treatment. From Gov Newsom:

“From a 39-0 vote on the floor of the state Senate, to the latest passage in two key Assembly committees, our efforts to advance CARE Court is receiving overwhelming, bipartisan support from California’s Legislature.

“Californians understand that we need a paradigm shift to help the thousands of individuals in crisis suffering with untreated psychosis and too often living on the streets.

“The passage of CARE Court will not only bring relief to those in dire need of care in the community, but it will also bring hope to their friends and family members who feel helpless under today’s status quo.”

The bill is opposed by Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, among others - I learned about it via a text from the ACLU asking me to call my representative. From Human Rights Watch:

Human Rights Watch has carefully reviewed SB 1338,[1] the amendments to SB 1338, and the proposed framework for the Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment (CARE) Court created by CalHHS,[2] and must respectfully voice our strong opposition. CARE Court promotes a system of involuntary, coerced treatment, enforced by an expanded judicial infrastructure, that will, in practice, simply remove unhoused people with perceived mental health conditions from the public eye without effectively addressing those mental health conditions and without meeting the urgent need for housing. We urge you to reject this bill and instead to take a more holistic, rights-respecting approach to address the lack of resources for autonomy-affirming treatment options and affordable housing. (Opposition to CARE Court (SB 1338) as Amended June 16, 2022)

This is really where the rubber meets the road imo. Aside from funding and logistical issues, the basic question is whether the state should have the right to force a mentally ill unhoused person into treatment. This is really, really thorny. I have rarely ever had to think twice about whether I agree with one of these ACLU outreaches. But it seems beyond argument that the most common current outcome for mentally ill unhoused people - incarceration - is worse than the Care Court plan. I definitely recommend reading the whole HRW letter - its arguments are compelling, but it seems like the logical bottom line of their argument is that if someone on the street will not affirmatively choose treatment, they must be left alone. Given the number of sick people I’ve seen/met on the streets of LA, I think a large percentage of them are not capable of making rational decisions about their health, and leaving them to suffer seems more cruel than compelling treatment.

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I think it’s this:

The CARE Court proposal does not provide additional housing and does not envision enforcement of long-term prioritization of housing for its graduates.

So I guess the bill doesn’t specifically provide housing for the program and presumes that existing resources, such as they are, will be used.

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You are imagining yourself making the wise choice about whether a particular person is capable of making rational decisions about their health. Maybe the actual person making that decision just won’t like Black people. Maybe they’ll feel more pressure from local businesses trying to remove tents than concern for the people in them. Maybe after the Supreme Court decides things like it’s not illegal to sleep in your car or be unhoused in a world where alternatives aren’t provided, this will just be another tool to lock people up.

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Carver’s choice – purposefully, knowingly torpedoing his chance at freedom – fails to shock those who regularly work with the chronically homeless. They say they have seen it many, many times. Only occasionally does it make the news. In January 2021, an Indiana man refused to leave a hospital until police booked him. In Mississippi, right before Christmas in 2019, a homeless man broke windows so he could spend the night in jail. And in 2018, a Washington man robbed his fourth bank in search of a long prison sentence.

Still, even assuming these are outlier cases in the spectrum of homelessness, people like Carver represent an urgent policy challenge increasingly facing communities across the country: how do cities deal with shelter-resistant, street-hardened people, the ones often demonized by politicians as living proof that US cities are dying?

No one believes that employing jails as temporary housing is smart or humane; nor does it make economic sense, as it is more expensive than other options. The fact that it is happening at all proves that something has gone horribly wrong, housing advocates say.

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Not if your goal is to be cruel to poor people.

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https://twitter.com/BillWalton/status/1591944508677058560

I did not have Bill Walton going full “concentration camps for the homeless” on my bingo card.

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That is quite an article wtf

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Yeah I’ve had this theory for a while that one way the fascist death camps could start in the U.S. is with homeless people. Well there you go.

FWIW I don’t think we should be enabling the homeless as much as some of these super-liberal cities seem to. I think we should separate them into the people who legitimately want to get back on their feet and the people who are just working the system and getting high, and treat them accordingly. And of course no one knows what to do with the mentally ill. And I don’t like how homeless advocates give zero consideration to the people who actually have to live in these neighborhoods, who are usually working class. (this is where goofy would usually come in to argue with me)

But absolutely no fucking way on camps. So beyond the pale.

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I’ve never really seen a plan for the second group that goes beyond “shoo them out of our jurisdiction and make them someone else’s problem”. In theory the Sunbreak Ranch idea seems like a better solution (even though it’s the same “get 'em away from us” idea) but it will inevitably devolve from a “one-of-a-kind location featuring 35-plus amenities and benefits” designed to “welcome all homeless persons, each of whom may come and go as they please” into someplace to trap the “system workers” and maybe allow people trying to get back on their feet to do so.

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Yea I don’t think those two groups are that separate tbh. Probably lots of overlap between people who would love to get back on their feet and people who struggle with drugs.

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Who makes this call?

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The courts.

The plan is you need programs that push them into treatment, and if they don’t show any willingness to get clean you stop giving them stipends and free places to stay and safe spaces do drugs (which lol at the idea of doing that with meth or crack - only works for heroin and fentanyl where they nod off). I still think you need to give them food and free needles.

I’m not saying I personally know the exact details on how these plans should work. But I know there’s a big debate on this issue.

On one side you have policy makers who want a more balanced policy like I described. On the other side you have the homeless advocates who think any kind of condition attached to aid is an affront to dignity, and liberals who live way out in the burbs who just want to keep throwing money at the problem and washing their hands of it, with no consideration for the people who actually live in the neighborhoods.

I’ll be bowing out of this thread very soon. Anyone who’s interested could read this article, which I think encapsulates what I’m talking about pretty well.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/rescuing-jessica-san-francisco-fentanyl-addiction/

Non paywall: https://archive.ph/wnTq6

I follow the community advocate in this story. He actually lives in the neighborhood and does more to help these people than any of the policies that keep failing imo. I take his opinion over people who are nowhere near the problem and want to solve it with first principles (which always just means throwing money).

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considering that so many displaced want to live in their RV, i don’t see a problem with public supported RV parks with utility hookups and other services around. there’s a way to run that at some nominal cost to the public per such a person who needs help. such parks should be kept to reasonably practical sizes (not giant zones) and spread out to allow people stay connected to their hometowns. in a similar fashion as tiny home settlements should be worked into communities, as much as subsidized apartment projects are supposed to be.

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Yeah we basically have these all over CA. They work pretty well from what I can see.

But of course they’re quasi-legal and every now and then the city decides to fuck with them.

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The big thing that no homeless policy ever seems to take into account is that in cities like SF, Portland, Seattle, LA, SD - even if you got every homeless person housed somehow, a new batch would appear the next day.

Kids, drug addicts and the mentally ill seem to migrate to these cities because of the weather, ease of finding drugs, the community, the permissive attitude, maybe other reasons. I’ve personally met kids on Ocean Beach in SF who said they’d rather be homeless in SF than living in an apartment in Cleveland.

They show up in SF and get hooked on drugs, just like the woman in the story. On some level it’s fun for them. The last thing they want is to pay rent and get a job. Which wouldn’t be a problem if they didn’t make the community miserable to live in.

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It sounds like these people can only survive as homeless in dense urban areas, so trying to move them out somewhere else, like the Sunbreak Ranch idea, seems destined to fail. It also seems like there are people who can’t or won’t be helped with even the most idealistic plan. 100% efficiency is never a realistic goal. And there’s no political will to fund an idealistic plan, so we’re stuck with maybe a half-assed plan. That requires a triage mentality, identifying cases with the best chance of success and accepting failure with the rest.

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It absolutely will fail. Anyone who wants to live like that is already living in Slab City, and without govt supervision.

If you force people to stay it becomes a concentration camp.

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Giving them money and services might still be the best solution if you take into account the money that is saved on emergency services, medical care, damages from criminal behavior, the cost of policing and incarceration etc.

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That, and if you give conservatives an inch on “those people don’t deserve help” then they’ll take a mile and then some.

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I think you meant “definitely will be”