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We have been there before. But a society that dethrones Providence, rewards victims and punishes achievers, and denies pride of place and history, is not well-positioned to recover and provide opportunity.
Like you, I have no answers. But we have a battle brewing in my little town over the problem.
In an unlikely bit of timing, my husband and I moved to Monrovia CA on the upswing. We weren’t from the area so knew nothing of its bad reputation. We moved here in 1987 – by 1988 there was a new mayor in town. Robert Bartlett had served many years on the City Council; according to legend he and his cronies stacked the council and elected him mayor with one goal: to revitalize the city.
And boy did they. By the time Mayor Bartlett didn’t run in 2001, things were looking up, a solid tax base, lots of filming and a hot housing market. My experience has been that towns like mine need stories and Mayor Bartlett provided many: he stood on a friend’s lawn with a bullhorn yelling at some drug-dealing inhabitants of a house across the street while the cops emptied the place, he chased out the tattoo parlors and the seedier bars. I don’t need to know what he did with the hookers, but from what I’m told we had our share.
About 10 years ago there was a ballot measure to raze the library (some idiot had torn down the Carnegie library and replaced it with something ugly). It passed, millions spent on a new library, park and playground. I believe the cost added about $500/year to my property tax bill. I voted against it and am still annoyed by it.
Especially since one end of the park is now inhabited by a sizable population of homeless. The library provides a handy bathroom but I guess not handy enough. A new bathroom is being installed in the park at a cost of about $200K +; it’s supposedly got all sorts of features that deter the type of activities that occur in bathrooms that service the homeless. I still won’t use it – not after someone I know walked in on someone shooting up in the library bathroom.
So now we’re running backwards: our city council discusses the homeless at every meeting; there’s lots of small businesses leaving town because the people sleeping (and peeing) in their door fronts and harassing customers are bad for business.
Half the town wants someone to do something so their kids can use the park and library, the other half remind them shrilly “there but for the grace of God …” and cite chapter and verse of the laws and regulations prohibiting the police from doing anything, including the confiscation of property.
I don’t have an answer. But I predicted years ago that CA would become a third-world state. Measuring by the smell of pee, we’re there.
The sad thing seems to be, the more we,( the collective official we), try to help, to fix things,the worse it all becomes. Clearly there will always be people who can’t make it in organized society for whatever reason, but we seem to multiply their numbers through our official efforts to help.
A program in Bogota run by a Catholic priest has been able to help the street kids, those orphaned or displaced by the violence or who run away from abuse. They do so through strict discipline and free choice and once a kid makes it he or she help the next batch. They get nothing without work and good behavior. By their early teens most of these kids, gamines (some start out not much more than toddlers but are cared for in the streets by other gamines) are addicted to something, including gasoline so most don’t reach adolescence and by then will have robbed or even killed but some still get saved and then help others. One on one, individual to individual no pity, no freebies, just work and hope.
We closed the mental hospitals in the Fifties because new drugs were going to cure everything. Then in the Sixties, we got rid of the vagrancy laws. We were a much poorer country 60 years ago, but we didn’t have masses of people sleeping in the streets.
New York has largely solved its problem, by opening up enough shelter beds to equal (roughly) the mental hospital intake of generations ago. But it’s expensive; San Francisco is willing to spend the money, but obnoxious pressure groups stymie every effort. In L.A., we didn’t have much of a problem until a few years ago. We don’t have SF’s legal issues, and we know what to do, but we aren’t willing to spend the money.
Ultimately you either kill all the mentally disturbed people, or you have to institutionalize them.
I think I read that Catholic Schools began in a similar fashion in New York.
In the Fifties? I don’t think so. That came later. And it wasn’t because drugs were going to cure everything, but at least in part because there were civil liberties issues. There were people who were committed to institutions unjustifiably. Drugs for mental illness came later, too.
That’s the way I remember it, and I’m sticking with my story.
Thank you for this excellent post. I think this is going on in every large and small city in the country.
The best way to deal with homelessness is to try to prevent it. There are many good strategies for doing so.
On Cape Cod, our ecumenical council made preventing homelessness a priority, and it has enjoyed so much success that the program has been emulated around New England. The council found that it was easier to prevent certain types of homelessness by helping families or individuals with one or two rent and/or utility payments than to allow people to become homeless and to have to start from scratch.
As far as drug addicts and alcoholics are concerned, they need much more support than we are giving them. It’s a tragedy to most addiction counselors that Medicaid will help for 30 days’ treatment, but no more. The counselors say another 30 days with supportive housing and job counseling afterward is what’s needed. We need to work on that.
Mentally ill people need supportive housing too–not institutionalization but hospitalization and rehabilitation. The Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University is a very successful program. Every community needs assisted-living and congregate living arrangements tailored to the needs of mentally ill people.
Assuming there is an adequate number of housing units available in a community, then we need a proactive preventive strategy. We know there are certain times in people’s lives and certain events that often result in homelessness. We need to have a presence in people’s lives to ask, “Do you have a home? Where is it? Can you afford it?” That way, we can head off homelessness for people going through difficult transitions: graduating from or dropping out of high school, community college, or college; aging out of foster care; getting fired or laid off from a job; getting divorced; going through bankruptcy; going through eviction; dealing with the death of a person who is significant to a person’s life; getting out of prison; and getting out of the military. Those are just a few.
If we could prevent homelessness, each community first making sure that it has adequate affordable housing, we could whittle the problem down to something manageable with our existing shelters that provide temporary warmth and security.
People on Ricochet have assured me that there’s no housing shortage, but, wow, that does not jive with my knowledge of this problem. (And this article and so many others, in response to a Google query “affordable housing shortage in the United States,” say otherwise.) But if it’s true, I guess it is a local issue. Every community needs to do a simple headcount and make sure housing units are actually available. I know we are nowhere near what we need in New England. On Cape Cod, where I live, the waiting time for a Section 8 apartment is three or four years.
Psychiatry never rode as high as it would in the Fifties, when even some Westerns ought to have been called “Freud Rides the Range”. There was a genuine faith that soon (as the fake newspapers in A Clockwork Orange would later proclaim) “science has the cure” to social problems like crime. The Fifties were the real start of the pill and tranquilizer era, as any bio of Montgomery Clift will confirm. New York started closing its mental institutions in response to horror stories in the press as well as films like The Snake Pit and The Caretakers. That’s a 1963 film; Clockwork was published in 1962. I didn’t say it was an immediate process. Civil liberties did play a role, as it did with the vagrancy issue, but at the time it looked not only better, but cheaper, to send ’em home with a prescription.
It’s impossible to help people who don’t want to be helped, and many homeless don’t.
This is without a doubt true.
On one hand, the people in our park seem to be not too far gone, when queried I’m told they just say they like living there. A few months ago I walked past and one guy was saying, “I’m going for ice. Who needs what?” Well hell. That sounds like me and my sisters in Yosemite.
On the other hand, I have a good friend whose brother lives on Skid Row. He’s been the beneficiary of countless stints in rehab – since he was highly educated and came from a good home with family that cared he was always considered someone with a high chance of success.
Nothing ever took. His mother is 89 and dying and the whole family dreads him finding out in case he shows up.
He was a highly successful businessman at one point – my impression is that he put most of his gains up his nose and I think that maybe triggered some festering mental illness.
I’m also reminded of the book The Soloist. Even with the dedicated assistance of Steve Lopez (of the LA Times), getting that guy off the streets and getting him the help he needed took herculean effort not to mention he was (and is) his own worst enemy.
I agree with all of that except the highlighted part.
Here is an interesting take (written in 2002) I found while looking for information to back up my version of the story: “Drug Treatment in Modern Psychiatry: The History of a Delusion.” It supports your version in part, but here are some concluding remarks of interest:
Most government attempts to create affordable housing have perverse effects. And sometimes when people do live in affordable housing, state and local social workers want them out because it’s substandard housing.
That’s true. That is a local issue. It takes a certain amount of local resolve to avoid these problems. It is worth it for a community to address these issues and ensure that there are affordable housing options for people.
I have been watching a new low-income apartment complex being built in the town next to mine–I think there are 600 units. I am thrilled to see it. I’m sure there will be myriad problems to work out, but we just have to keep solving them one by one as they come up.
One good move here in California : cities are lightening up on codes, have backed off and are now allowing granny flats and more units on a lot.
My daughter and her family lived in our back house. While I can’t imagine they would ever be homeless, and they can certainly afford rent, it makes for more availability.
Probably too little too late.
That’s good. But did you say this is happening in California?
There’s a biparty coalition of interests in favor. The Democrats get density; the Richie Rich crowd gets a new inventory. Part of me is sympathetic. But the main resistance isn’t from the Left, but from middle class homeowners who are skeptical about the can’t-lose effects of living on a block that suddenly has a second family living in everyone’s backyard. As Jay Leno used to say, “What could possibly go wrong with that?”
Is that who the homeless people are? This is the question I have about this problem:
who are the tent people?
Illegal immigrants?
Mentally ill?
Drug addicts?
Non-disabled, non-addicted people who have lost their jobs and consequently their homes?
Please advise.
I was listening to the Tom Woods Show podcast. He recently had a guest who was an addictions counselor who has a fairly high success rate (not only was he the manager he had been a client). The counselors point is that most rehab and addictions groups follow a flawed model and dont actually address the problems and are not very good at getting people back on there feet.
We forget most addictions treatments stem from the AA movement started in the Great Depression. We have learned so much from that time but we continue to address things using techniques developed in the 30s when we had less understanding than today.
http://www.thecleanslate.org/
As to fix the homeless problem. Hire Rudy Giuiliani to replace your city council and mayor. In 4 years the problem should be solved.
“Have you witnessed this apparently recent phenomenon lately–a jam-packed tent city in your town? Have you had to dodge or step around needles, feces, piles of broken glass and all the other detritus these tent cities bring with them? Has your City Council or State Legislature grappled with this problem, and, if so, to what effect?”
I work in SF so I deal with it daily. I will not ride a bike without fenders because of the feces problem. I have seen the beautiful young girl with a needle in her arm on Market St with crowds of people walking by looking at their phones.
How can these people ever get back on their feet in such an expensive city, competing with sanctuaried immigrants for housing and jobs?
I think the local government’s efforts to address the problem merely creates a homeless industrial complex of good talkers and spenders.
What if the answer is “All of the above?”
Actually, the homeless guy who was out panhandling by Lowe’s and Schlotzky’s yesterday looked like none of the above, but just because the sign he carried said “homeless”doesn’t mean he really was. We do have real homeless, though, who tend to gather in tent cities in winter.
And I knew (from the Internet) one homeless guy who rode a cheap bicycle between northern states and southern states. He’d use the internet in libraries, and would sometimes explain to us how he managed. He had an arrangement with a temp agency, and would pick up work when he’d need money, and work long enough to hit the road again. One difficulty was keeping his stuff from being stolen while he was at work, so he had to know where and how to hide it. He lived off a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when on the road. He’d wear out about one cheap, Wal-Mart type bicycle a year, but was usually able to come up with a new one when needed. His surname was familiar to me, but he never answered questions about what circumstances led him to this kind of life. Last time I was in the part of the world from which his name was familiar to me (and in a part of the world he often mentioned in summertimes) I asked around as to whether anyone knew him, but although people were familiar with the surname nobody knew him or anything about him.
He turned 62 a few year ago and was getting familiar with the social services for people that age, and I don’t think we’ve heard much of him since then.
When people come up with a single solution for homelessness, as though there is a single cause, that’s usually a sign to me they’re on the wrong track.
What you subsidize you get more of. Seattle is on its way to SF status. We are the home of “you can’t move the truck, because it is his home”.
The short answer is, “yes.” Homeless are all of the above, both singly or in combinations: Hence the need for one on one solutions as has been already spoken in this conversation.
Just throwing money at it is exactly the wrong thing to do: too often that just results in tax subsidized slums, tax subsidized drug communities, tax subsidized second and third generation hard core welfare recipients.
Also I don’t believe there is any combination of changes in laws, rules, regulations or their enforcement that will make the problem go away overnight.
Perhaps addressing the issue ought to be left to the individual states, individual municipalities and individuals, rather than expecting Washington to take care of it. I do think we ought to faithfully play the role of Don Quixote and try to get Washington to stop exacerbating the problem.
There is certainly some truth to the observation by Mr. Webster that some people do not want to be helped, and that they prefer to live the life they live….on the streets. As an American living in Europe, we have some of that here.
But, I think that what one sees in the USA probably reflects a small fraction of such people. As I have challenged Peter Robinson to do, drive from Charlotte NC to Atlanta GA using the two-lane state roads. This is the region of the USA of which I am most familiar. You drive through the small towns, repeatedly seeing the closed small….and indeed some very large former manufacturing plants…whose employees have long been laid off, and whose machines have been dismantled and sold to somewhere in the Far East, or to Mexico. You see poverty. You see crumbling infrastructure. The inhabitants of these small towns are many of the people who occupy Line 8 on Bureau of Labor Statistics Table A-1. Ninety-five million (+) Americans between 18 and 65 yrs of age “Not in work force”. Alright, about half of these people are students and the disabled. But, a large fraction of the balance have been betrayed by those creating bad public policy. Bad trade deals, misguided social welfare programs destroying families, punitive local taxes and regulations to opening and building business, etc.
So, that is what I see when I visit a big American city now: the manifestations of bad public policy over the last half century. Depending on where you visit, blame will rest either mainly on federal malfeasance, or on local and state forms of it. In the Carlolinas, it unquestionably lies at the feet of the Feds and the bad trade deals. In places like California, it appears to me that there has been real competition between the federal and state to cause most of the misery.
I’m a director at a Gospel Rescue Mission. Most homeless people are out there by choice and I can’t say as I blame them. What adult wants their cell phone taken away upon check in (phones have cameras and we shelter women hiding from their abusers) and lights out at 9:30?
Nevertheless, their choice is a bad one. Cities need to outlaw camping and make it stick and take away children from moms making the choice to keep them in a tent city. There’s room in the shelters; we can and do throw down mats all night long.
In another brilliant move urban planners closed all the “flop houses”, cheap lodging that could be rented for a night or a week to keep people off the street. Nothing was built to take their place.
I used to take my family for a vacation in San Diego every summer. Over time we came to know that lovely city as well as we knew our own metropolis in AZ. We watched it grow, welcomed the gaslight district, attended concerts by the bay, and saw the buildings rise and march along the waterfront. But then, about ten years ago, it caught the homeless contagion. Beggars claimed their corners. Abandoned RV’s lined the side streets. Parks became homeless campgrounds.
The SF problem had moved south. The smelly Elmos converged on Hollywood Blvd and their progeny settled in the far more hospitable climes of our adopted city.
San Diego has now been officially disowned. And I’m not alone. Municipalities who stand by and watch as drugs and filth fill their streets are destined to fail. I remember the squeegee men in NYC in the seventies and eighties. That smell I smell in SF, LA and now SD I remember too. It used to permeate Boston’s South Station and the then Combat Zone. It once stung the eyes in Times Square.
The only way to deal with the homeless is to refuse to tolerate them. That may sound cruel but it isn’t.
We’ve made it easier to be a bum. Now we have more bums.
California has made it much easier to be a bum, SF prides(?) itself in the services available for the homeless. California has more bums, SF has whole streets of bums, running with their sewage.
How many of the ‘solutions’ make it easier to be feckless and dependent, which would make it tougher? Markets work in everything, including human misery.
In America, the homeless problem is not a story of poverty. Yes, the homeless are poor, obviously, but in America the homeless problem is a story of two things:
Virtually every homeless person you see in America has at least 1 of those 2 issues. This is not a story of people who were middle class getting more and more poor until at last they find themselves on the street because they simply couldn’t make a living. And in places like San Francisco, this isn’t a story of people just not being able to afford a place to live because the housing prices are too high. The vast majority of homeless people in San Francisco are not from San Francisco. They moved there, because it isn’t a bad place to be homeless compared to other choices. Ditto with places like Portland, and where I live in Colorado. Where you see an unusually huge homeless population, you see a place where homeless people moved. They did not grow up there.
But again: you CANNOT talk about the homeless problem in America without talking about substance addiction and mental illness. THOSE are the causes of homelessness in America, period. This is not an economic problem, it is a social problem. When you see a homeless person begging, that is their job. It is not their solution to not being homeless anymore, it is their job while they are homeless. The only solution to not being homeless anymore would be to have their addiction or illness treated, and that, as you must know, is a difficult and long process. And in America, we usually do not force you to do it.
Because here is the truth: everyone born in the US starts with a local support network: you have family and you have friends. If you fall on hard times, you can rely on people you know to give you a hand. Some people’s support network is stronger than others’, but we all start with one.
Now take someone who develops a mental illness or a substance addiction. They start taxing that support network as they can’t keep a job or make money due to their problems. They live with family, they borrow money from friends. Eventually, if their problem keeps getting worse, and especially if they don’t seek help for it, they exhaust their support network. Their family stops helping them, and their friends stop helping them, because everyone around them is tapped out or too exasperated. And we also should acknowledge this: there are a lot of people with substance abuse or mental illness that do not want help. That’s a sad fact, but it’s a fact.
So when you see someone begging on the street, that person has a family. They had friends. They have just burned all those bridges and are now turning to strangers for support. That is the story of being homeless in America. Yes, there are the rare people who simply had no one in the world when they fell on hard times, but that is extremely rare, and usually a lie that they need strangers to believe in order to beg effectively. Most stories you hear homeless people tell you are not the whole story, and if you talked to their families and friends, you would hear another tale.
As usual, I think private charity is generally more appropriate than government to address these issues. But deregulation of housing and professions would help close the gap between the costs of living in the shadow society and the costs of living in lawful society.
Construction codes are like vehicle safety laws, equating optimal conditions to minimum requirements. Many of our laws make the perfect the enemy of the good. There are no solutions, only tradeoffs. I could probably go on with idioms relating inherited wisdom absent from politics.
The point is that we could have a much broader and more gradual scale of housing costs/conditions and professional aptitude (with mimimal licensing and associations) if government would get out of the way.
But that will never happen. What can actually be done is individual households and (church) communities dealing with the particulars of each case without adherence to any script. Treat people as persons, not statistics.
My extended family includes schizophrenics, drug addicts, sociopaths, and layabouts. None of the broken people I have known turned their lives around. They are perpetual, informal wards of loved ones. Painful relationships hold, voluntarily, until they don’t. It’s an imperfect world.