Homelessness

Politics & News
204

Yeah I work near the VA in LA. At the aptly named Veterans Park they have tents set up which you can tell are the govt since they’re all the same and spaced evenly apart. Some of these I think are vets awaiting some kind of judgment that have nowhere else to stay.

Then you have little encampments that move around the park, until the cops throw away all their shit (this was all pre-covid). They disappear for a while but come back eventually. I’ve said hi to those guys. They seem pretty on the ball. I think they have a little community that they police themselves, and I’m sure they’d be happy to tell you their grievances with the VA if you ask.

Then as you get farther away from the park, you get the severely mentally ill. My theory is the park community guys shun these guys from the park. For some reason they seem to be attracted to the extremely busy intersection surrounded by high-rises where I work. I’ve seen them playing with knives, had people punching at the air right next to me, seen people jerking off in public multiple times, peeing on the bus bench. Sometimes they wander into restaurants and cause disturbances.

I had a guy call me the N-word and accuse me of loitering and wouldn’t stop haranguing me. Weirdest thing was that guy was nicely dressed and had a full Trader Joe’s bag in his hands. I guess he has a place to live but was just having some kind of episode. That one really got under my skin for some reason. I was having a bad day already and was afraid I had covid (this was the last week in the office). I started yelling back at the guy which obviously I never do with crazy people. But he was dressed so nice I just didn’t get it. I felt like a complete idiot once I calmed down.

By the end I was getting a little worn down with all the encounters and felt like eventually I was either going to be part of a violent incident, or see one and have to decide if I need to step in.

207

Alcohol addiction is in many ways much more harmful than illegal drug addiction. It regularly tops the list of any criteria based severity rankings.

In contrast, a very significant share of the harm from other drugs comes from them being expensive and illegal.

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208

Yeah LA is a mess. This jumped out at me:

Nationwide, about 580,466 people were homeless in 2020, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. More than a quarter of them are in California, or about 161,548 people. Of those, nearly 64,000 live in Los Angeles County.

So over 10% of the homeless people in the country are in LA County. I wonder how many of them are from here? I’m not saying they shouldn’t be able to be here, I’m saying that this is the country’s problem that LA is being asked to solve. And the better we do at solving it - providing more housing and services to the homeless - the more people come here from other areas.

As for forcing homeless people off the street / out of encampments, that’s obviously absurd if you don’t have another option to offer them. The question in the LA Times article was more: is it absurd if you DO have another option to offer them?

The other thing I’d point out, is that the really dirty secret is that this isn’t just heartless politicians wielding authority for the fun of it. Their constituents in deep-blue Los Angeles are demanding it.

209

Also once substances are legalised they lose some of their initial appeal to some number of people who would otherwise become addicted to them.

210

Good article by about Sam Quinones, who has done great work covering the causes of the opioid and addiction epidemics. After the part about fentanyl he talks about the new manufacturing methods for meth without ephedrine.

First of all, the reformulation allows the mass distribution of methamphetamine unlike we’ve ever seen before. So it’s now all across the country, from LA to Vermont, including regions like New England where it never existed really before in large quantities.

Along the way though, what I found is that it is accompanied by rapid onset of severe symptoms of schizophrenia, particularly hallucinations. There is incoherent babbling. There’s an extraordinary degree of paranoia. It’s very intense, so you think everybody’s out to get you. No longer is it a party drug. It’s more of a sinister drug, where you kind of turn inward.

What happens is people very quickly become homeless. As this form of meth has marched across the country, we have also seen an enormous increase in mental illness and in homelessness, particularly the encampments that we now have in so many towns across the country. I believe the tent encampments are connected intimately with this kind of methamphetamine. Certainly nobody on this form of meth wants to be in a homeless shelter. Because they’re kind of paranoid and scared of everybody. And so people feel a tent is a little pod where you can be alone away from this nasty world. And I believe it’s all connected.

There have been no neuroscientific studies on this. So what exactly is happening? I don’t know. Is it because the meth has some new formulation or some new kind of chemical in it? Or, on the other hand, is it simply the fact that it’s so much more potent and so cheap and people are using lots of it? I don’t know. What I’m giving you is the street reporting, from talking to people who have worked in this world most of their professional lives, people who have been addicted to it and people now in recovery.

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211

Las Vegas has a significant population outside 24/7, at least until winter. It gets cold in the desert. We’d fluctuate from 50 people in the nightly shelter, up to 500+ in winter. The longterm hardcore would tend to transition to warmer weather, usually meaning SoCal.

214

If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall support him as though he were a stranger and a sojourner, and he shall live with you. Take no interest from him or profit, but fear your God, that your brother may live beside you.

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215

Tucker chimes in:

216

What a disgusting monster. I truly hope something abysmaly terrible happens to him in his lifetime

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217

I watched that entire stupid thing. Not a SINGLE suggestion of ehat to do otherwise other than “Take their tents and tell them to get out”

Awful

218

“drag their tents to a landfill”

219

Homelessness is pretty sick in this country. I live in Venice and basically everyone hates Mike Bonin because he’s bucking the status quo on homelessness. Everyone I talk to just gives a blank stare when I suggest that maybe there is a better way and maybe 800 billion a year in military aid could be repurposed.

220

Nice. I don’t even believe in divinity anymore but I do believe that the teachings of Jesus are a good framework to organize society around. I’m surrounded by fake ass Christians

221

A serial killer has been targeting homeless people in New York and D.C. At least two dead so far.

223

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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225

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.

227

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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228

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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229

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

230

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

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