I’ve seen them on the rear of a bus and on(inside) the train. I understand that that may be a way to get some help advertised from within [the homeless community], if you will. I suppose I am referring to something to get more attention to those of us who are not homeless, methods of helping those that are, statistics, anything that can “get through” and possibly get others to contribute. Make the issue of homelessness more pronounced and hopefully more can and will help. I really don’t see enough of it otherwise, I actually see absolutely nothing that reminds me of it unless by some odd chance I am staring at the back of a bus(which I usually good about avoiding) or I see a homeless person and help them if I can… It just seems like there is not enough awareness, I could be wrong of course.
This is the really the ONLY long-term solution for homelessness. Pick everyone up for vagrancy, evaluate them for mental fitness and involuntarily institutionalize the people that fail for treatment for mental illness or substance abuse. The truth is that living on the streets is creating a danger to oneself (and often the community), and shouldn’t be allowed; the desire to do so shows the person is non compos mentis. Ideally, we would call these minimal security facilities prisons rather than treatment centers, because US taxpayers will happily pay ~$35,000/year/person to imprison someone, but they’re loathe to pay any amount to help them.
The rest - the financial homeless - could be helped by work programs, subsidized affordable housing or the simplest but most-resisted solution: mandating that minimum wage in a community be enough for a person to live on in that community.
The homeless people you see camping under bridges are a small part of the homeless population. These are almost all single men, mostly with addiction and/or (typically and) mental illness issues.
But most of the homeless are invisible. They live in cars, couch surf with friends and relations, camp in state parks, sleep in church basements. They are just people who can’t afford housing because the safety net too weak. A medical crisis, getting laid off and having to take a lower paying job, a woman fleeing an abusive spouse with her small children, even your car getting totaled, can put you out on the street with few options, if you are poor in this country.
The worst of the worst, the visible homeless, are a hard nut to crack, because many simply are not mentally able to live in any organized way. But thinking they are “the homeless problem” is not helpful in actually solving it.
The 80 or 90 percent of people who are simply too poor to afford rent – those people could easily be helped just by creating such systems as a living wage, rent control, childcare in workplaces, and most all all, single payer health care.
That is, provide what civilized countries offer their citizens.
All those solutions would make the problem worse. To solve the homelessness caused by expensive housing the solution is easy, more housing. The problem is that most cities are run by people whose only interest is keeping existing homeowners happy and rents high. This means they make building new houses almost impossible, make it too risky to rent rooms out, and generally outlaw the density necessary to solve the problem.
We did that for a while, with those suffering from schizophrenia, etc. Until Ronald Reagan closed all the asylums in CA, homelessness was much rarer. Mostly the guys in skid row were hardcore alcoholics & drug users.
But yes, you have the crux of it, there are several types of homelessness, thus there is no one single root cause.
The other two types are those that prefer the lifestyle, the “freedom”, we used to call them “hobos”. They dont see them being homeless as a problem.
Then you got the runaway kids. We certianly could do more to help them. The Foster system needs work, as well as Child Services.
Do you propose to take land from private owners by eminent domain, or how exactly are we freeing up this land?
This is a very hot issue in San Francisco, where I live. Among other travesties, in a city with a huge shortage of housing there are 30,000 rental units currently off the market for a variety of reasons. This matches the number of new housing units that the late mayor Ed Lee established as a 6-year goal back in 2014, which was supposed to be such a big deal Some of these units are off the market for good reasons, such as renovation or repair, but that is a rather small percentage.
The SF Apartment Association theorizes that rent control, which was extended to smaller buildings (4 units and less) a few years ago, had the effect of pushing those landlords out of the rental market, due much more to tenant protections than to the actual limitations on the amount of rent charged. When you are a live-in landlord in a 3 or 4 unit building, having one bad tenant can make it awful for everyone, and they can be very hard to get evicted. That’s one theory.
Another theory has it that rich folks who buy or own apartment buildings keep them empty as a tax write-off. I don’t understand enough about such things to understand how that would help their bottom line, but it’s a theory. One idea to take advantage of that is to ask those owners to lease the buildings to non-profits for one dollar a year, and the non-profits would then be able to rent them out at way below market rates, and most of the rent money would be used for upkeep and repairs so they don’t turn into slums. The owners would still get the tax write-off, and people would have places to live.
On the topic of homelessness, in a city like San Francisco, when people lose their rental housing that they were able to afford, there is then such a gap between what they can pay and what rents cost that they are generally forced to pull up stakes and leave the area completely.
Other homeless news in SF: the city is trying to build a 250-unit building for homeless using modular construction techniques, in the heart of South of Market (7th and Mission behind the courthouse). They got the land for next to nothing from the feds, and they’re moving forward, both to benefit the homeless and to prove the concept of modular construction for subsidized below market housing.
Universal healthcare (*) would make the problem worse?
- Universal and single payer aren’t the same, but people often confuse them. I’m assuming Ulfreida did.
and a living wage would make things worse? really?
There’s more than one type of homelessness, unfortunately. Some people are temporarily homeless, and some are “homeless for life”.
This article splits them into three categories: Temporary, episodic and chronic. The names comes from the study, the rest of just my opinion 
Temporary is usually just economic. Someone barely making it gets sick, can’t pay the rent, and end up on the street. Not in this article, but I read a story about a man suffering from depression who became homeless, after not paying rent for three months. His depression “cleared”. Afterward he got a gym membership so he could shower, managed to retain a few outfits, his cell phone and some professional tools (he was a cameraman) and slept on a building roof until he made enough money to get a home again. He worked that whole time, without telling anyone. I don’t know what he did about mail, I guess he rented a post office box.
IIRC the tale took place in the UK, and unfortunately I know nothing about British unemployment insurance. Due to his depression I doubt he could have taken advantage of the tool. In Canada unemployment insurance will cover you if you’re too sick to work for a while, but you need to have worked a certain number of hours (if you’re part-time, you might not qualify) for a legitimate employer (if you work under the table, then the government doesn’t know about those hours) and you get up to 55% of your salary.
In addition to social assistance or short-term appropriate credit, we need a housing strategy to deal with that type of homelessness. In many parts of the developed world housing prices and rents are simply too high.
Episodic generally involves mental illness. The homeless person lives with friends or family until they get tired of misbehavior, and then they’re evicted. They clean up and the cycle repeats.
The third is chronic, and is frequently associated with mental health and drug problems. Even solutions such as “housing first” (in effect, give them a home, because it’s harder to find work without one) doesn’t work because people with some severe problems cannot work or manage themselves. People with such conditions used to be institutionalized.
Make vagrancy a jailable offense that drops off your record. Get them off the street, off drugs, and under psychiatric care.
As I stated in the other thread, I worked in rental property management for 26 years, and we would rent to the homeless on government subsidy. About 80% of them simply believed “Yeah, but the rules don’t apply to me.” Some examples:
I don’t have to pay my $70 a month, you’re getting most of the rent.
My lease says who is living in the apartment, but he’s not living there. He is just staying there.
My lease says No Pets, but the dog isn’t my pet. I’m just watching him for a friend.
My stove doesn’t work. Yes, it was working fine when I rented the place, but it broke.
It’s a one room apartment, but I’m pregnant with my third child.
If it should help me get an apartment, you should waive the rental fee and security.
Etc, etc, etc. These people just will not live with other people’s rules.
People not having places to live.
people incapable of holding down a job due to drugs or psychological problems.
Or sometimes unexpected expenses pop up(medical, home, auto and others) that render some incapable of making timely rent or mortgage payments. Pensions are mostly a thing of the past, and it really doesn’t take much to wipe out what little that might be saved
That doesn’t really explain long term homelessness. There are a variety of ways to cover this until you’re on your feet. Family, friends, YMCA, public housing, charity housing etc…
A massive debt just goes unpaid into bankruptcy. We’re currently in a very low state of unemployment and yet everyday I see the same people smiling blissfully with their cardboard sign within sight of a large sign advertising for new hires.
Drugs and mental issues are a more likely cause of homelessness.
I think people think of visible homeless when they think of homeless.
But most homeless people aren’t standing on the street corner, begging. Most homeless people are living in motels, shelters, friends’ and families’ couches, and cars. They wash up in public rest rooms. A lot of them have jobs and look “normal”. But their jobs don’t pay enough to cover rent+deposit. Or no landlord will rent to them because they have bad credit or they have a history of being evicted.
I can understand feeling hopeless about the chronic homeless. But the solution for people in the above situation is fairly straight-forward. Find them a cheap place to live that’s close to their place of work and they won’t be homeless anymore. Thing is, most people don’t even want to strengthen the safety net so that everyone is guaranteed housing. People don’t even want to support public housing for the poorest of the poor, let alone affordable housing for less desperate folk.
I’ve got dozens of boarded-up HUD homes in my neighborhood that have been abandoned for years, but I’m supposed to believe that people living on the street are the crazy ones?
I ran into that a lot during my brief bout of homelessness. People without mental illnesses or substance abuse problems who basically felt that they were homeless because everyone else had these unreasonable demands, like they should work and pay for things when obviously the people the money goes to don’t need/deserve it.
National Law Center
On Homelessness and Poverty
Those causes suggest an explanation for why the highest rates of homelessness are correlated with states that have the highest costs of housing. That cause can be ameliorated by a sufficient supply of subsidized affordable housing, but I don’t know anywhere where that is the case. If such housing supply is inadequate in places with pretty socialistic public policies, I hate to think what it’s like in red states.
The other thing I get from that ordered list is confirmation of the basic thesis of a radio documentary I heard recently, that rather than being primarily attributable to extreme circumstances like mental illness or drug abuse, homelessness is something that can happen to anybody. It happens to perfectly ordinary people, even those with good jobs who own their own homes. A typical scenario might run as follows. A person loses their job at an advanced age where they are effectively unemployable. Property taxes and living expenses whittle away at their savings, and the house deteriorates because they can’t afford to maintain it. By the time they’re desperate enough to sell, the place has deteriorated to the point that it doesn’t bring in any reasonable price. No one will rent to them because they can’t show a sufficient source of income, and waiting lists for subsidized housing are a decade long. The next stop: homelessness.
If anyone has a chance to see the movie God Bless the Child, I highly recommend it, with the caveat that it’s depressing as hell, but artistically it’s beautifully done. It’s not about the above scenario but about job loss, homelessness, the love of a child, and a heart wrenching choice.