Housing First plus voluntary (often permanent) supportive housing helps this population.
Politics. Too many politicians are invested in shaming the poor as moral failures rather than lifting a finger to help them.
You can see this on the numerous programs introduced to drug test food assistance recipients. In every case so far, the state spent a ton of money on drug tests, to “catch” and kick off the rolls a number of people in the single digits, to “save” a tiny fraction of what they spent on the testing in the first place. There was that business in Wisconsin, too, where they passed restrictions so you can’t use food assistance for dried beans in bulk (and several other staple items), because… reasons?
Here’s the Wisconsin food restrictions brochure: https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/publications/p4/p44578.pdf
The part about beans is on page 6. It arbitrarily decrees that you can only buy beans in 15-16 oz. cans or 16 oz bags only. You’re not allowed to buy fresh potatoes, either, because cheap bulk nutrition is… bad? They’re spending a lot of effort dictating the size of the container, rather than any actual concern about nutrition. It’s clear they’re more interested in making food shopping with assistance confusing and difficult. Probably so poor people will give up and stop applying for assistance.
I’m not sure if this was ever passed, but it certainly was proposed and got far enough that they thought spending money to design and print a brochure was worth it.
Right. The fourth kind of homeless, the ones that ate potatoes instead of beans in 12 oz. cans.
The USDA and the Institutes of Medicine have for several years taken the position that the typical American diet includes too much starch, and potatoes have been excluded from WIC on that basis. Agribusiness has been lobbying to get that decision reversed.
This x 1,000.
The homeless are - pretty much by definition - the group with the least political power and thus, in the U.S., the safest target for politicians opprobium. And “the poor” are always with us, so no point in really trying to fix that problem (per some old book or something…allegory/symbolism is usually over these folks’ heads).
I’m paraphrasing Mike Royko here, but the way he put it was simple:
Bring back Skid Row.
EVERY big city used to have a Skid Row, filled with flophouses and “single room occupancy” hotels. That’s where junkies and winos used to live. They were usually ugly, squalid buildings, but they gave everyone four walls and a roof for very little money.
Where’s Skid Row in Manhattan today? Turned into high-priced co-ops, most likely.
The solution to that – that is, a real solution – would be to give people more money so they can afford to buy better food. Or otherwise improve their access to high-quality nutrition.
Scolding poor people about their lousy diet when they have to stretch tiny amounts of money to feed a family for a month is privileged arrogance. When you’re hungry, when you’re just trying to survive, the first priority is calories, and a balanced and varied diet has to come second, if at all, since access is obviously an issue – you have to take what you can get. Potatoes are cheap, store well, and in fact have a reasonable amount of micronutrients. Some poor people – especially the homeless – don’t have access to a fridge so fresh produce that spoils easily is out. You can’t have it both ways – if you want them on a cheap diet it won’t be a great one. If you want them on a great diet it won’t be a cheap one.
This comes from the general attitude that the poor are moral failures / lazy moochers and thus hardly deserve the scraps that we might deign to give them. And then they get criticized for making the best purchasing decisions they can with what little they have. I think the state has better things to do than policing someone’s food, especially when their policies have set the poor up to fail.
I’ll also point out that just because someone buys 10 pounds of potatoes doesn’t mean they’re going to eat them all in just a few sittings. Spread out over a month, and over a multi-person family, it’s not that much starch. I have stew recipes that call for one large potato that makes 6-8 servings. It CAN be a part of a diet that’s just fine in terms of balance. It’s just not something you can assume about any person buying potatoes.
From my own opinions and responses so far, one word: lobbying.
(More: I don’t think more direct donations will help. PACs and lobbying will have much better return on investment.)
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While a large portion of homeless population has problems with alcoholism, drug abuse and mental illness there are large parts of the country where the price of housing is simply too high. So I would bribe politicians to get rid of restrictive zoning laws.
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Good news in that regard.
Council approves construction, placement of ‘mini-houses’ within city limits I will definitely be paying attention to how it works out. Another factor that drives up housing costs are, sadly, unions. Most cities forbid small affordable manufactured housing due to the influence of carpenter and other unions that want frame-built houses. It didn’t help that manufactured houses in the past were shit when most of the codes were written, so fire and safety commissions went along with it. But their quality has changed, but the building codes have not reflected it.
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I’m paraphrasing Mike Royko here, but the way he put it was simple:
Bring back Skid Row.
EVERY big city used to have a Skid Row, filled with flophouses and “single room occupancy” hotels. That’s where junkies and winos used to live. They were usually ugly, squalid buildings, but they gave everyone four walls and a roof for very little money.
Where’s Skid Row in Manhattan today? Turned into high-priced co-ops, most likely.
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Not just junkies and winos, but also young men who wanted a cheap place to sleep while they studied at school, people looking for work in the big city to send money back to their families living cheap in the country (but no well-paying jobs nearby), but did not want to spend a fortune on rent. Most decent sized cities will have rooms for rent, but they tend to have a high cost in terms of privacy, and often strict rules.
But rather than work with social service agencies and real estate management companies to build a more viable model, most cities* just zoned them out of existence.
To the OP, better models I have seen provide not just room, board and social services, but also allow outside employment in return for mandatory savings accounts. Some programs were as high as 75% - which adds up quick when you don’t have to worry about room and board. The programs had either a time limit or a savings threshold where the agency/shelter would help them transition to permanent housing.
So I would take my billion and spend half to endow a non-profit to study best practices and lobby local governments to implement them (making it about the size of the Brookings Institution), using the other half billion as a matching fund for projects.
And I would also allow consumption of alcohol and marijuana as long as no other violations occurred (no drunk fighting, no dealing, no absences from work due to usage, etc.), but case management and financial management would be mandatory for all participants.
*The one city I know of that has tried to build modern SROs is Phoenix. I was able to stay at Campaige Place in downtown Phoenix when it was new and shiny, but I don’t know its present condition, but I think it ownership has been taken over by CASS - Central Arizona Shelter Services, which was a great model when I had to use them for a few months in early 2000’s. They helped make sure acute homelessness stayed acute. One of the best ways to take care of chronic homelessness is to prevent its start. (Strangely, the same methodology tends to work with mental illness also. Provide intensive care for acute depression, and you may not have to worry about long-term treatment.)
I agree about implementing Housing First. To prevent people becoming long-term homeless and mentally ill in the first place, I would invest heavily in intensive parenting support for families, post-adoption support, high quality foster care and tackling poverty.
Of your options I like option #2 better because it doesn’t exclude people for taking drugs (unrealistic, means the long-term homeless with the biggest issues never get the help they need).
I’d be in support of an arrangement similar to assisted living care for the elderly. While many of the elderly are in assisted living due to physical constraints, there are also quite a few that live there due to mental issues. Lots of services are on site or close by, there’s often a privately owned bus that transports them to other places they may need to go and quite often a caretaker individual to go along with them.
I think this model would work well for those who are homeless due to mental and emotional issues. I agree with many above me – first order of business is to get them a place to live. I’d follow that with medical care, as putting the mentally ill on a schedule of medication often helps them a great deal. They may not be able to do this themselves, so having someone else in charge of it makes sure it gets accomplished.
I like the idea of a halfway house for the financially homeless - those who have lost their homes through financial hardship. They won’t need the mental care, but could benefit from assistance in learning to budget and learning how to get and keep a job. Give them training if they need it. Then, once they are re-established in society, help them move into a place of their own and ‘graduate’ them. Periodic follow-ups to identify any problems afterwards would be a good idea.
Those hard core few who simply don’t want a roof over their heads can probably not be induced to go along with any sort of program. Possibly you could get them to agree to periodic medical checkups and make meds available to those who need them, but by and large, that’s about as far as they would be willing to go.