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Homelessness: Is There a Conservative Answer?
US subsidized housing policy has produced expensive failures for a long time. Democrats invariably favor spending on bad ideas because they invariably create a need for lots of consultants, studies, government employment, and non-profit grant sponges. In contrast, typical Republican policy goals are to cut spending on bad ideas by three percent to eight percent then declare victory.
As efforts based on the faddish “housing first” approach to homelessness crash and burn, I wonder whether there can be a conservative solution to homelessness? [Feel free to replace “solution” with “favorable tradeoff” before answering.] If we really think about it, the answer to that question is much more important than just checking a box on an issue list.
I do not deny that jeering Democrats’ policy failure from the stands is great fun. And finding instances of spectacular past and ongoing social welfare policy failures does not require a lot of arcane research. Tents, feces, needles, trash, and corpses accumulating in once sparkling upscale downtown areas appear to be the predictable outcome for au courant homelessness policies.
Not surprisingly, the “housing first” approach has not been the rousing success it was predicted to be just a couple of years ago. The costs are vastly higher than projected and execution far slower than hoped. Government-funded housing construction is always hideously expensive because of the government agencies, outside consultants, non-profit groups, lawyers, insider bid winners, and other political beneficiaries who all feed at the same trough. Government-sponsored housing of all kinds has almost always been a rip-off for both taxpayers and program beneficiaries.
Forty years ago, the Reagan Administration issued a report that found that maintaining our existing shoddily built stock of public housing units is more expensive than buying units in high-priced condos. The Bush 41 administration received requests (more like loud begging) from state and local authorities for permission to demolish hundreds of thousands of units that were a financial hemorrhage as well as a blight. Those requests were denied mostly because it would look bad (i.e., not “kinder and gentler”) to reduce the stock of public housing.
When Jack Kemp was Bush 41’s HUD Secretary, there was a lot of buzz about a push to homeownership, about using federal funds to subsidize homeownership as a path upward for people on the bottom rungs. Some public housing projects with unusually effective tenant leadership and management (DC’s Kenilworth Gardens under Kimmy Gray, for example) were heavily funded as possible showcases for such transitions. Kemp’s renovation of Kenilworth Gardens cost an eye-popping average of $77,000 per unit (around $160,000 in 2021 dollars).
I was part of an outside group that sought to organize private sector involvement in privatization conversions. An old mortgage executive who had been enthused soured quickly when I brought him to the sites. He pointed out in detail the construction and design flaws in Kenilworth Gardens (shared to a greater or lesser degree by all public housing) that would severely cap its value even with rehab and even if the surrounding area rebounded. The projects could never really become market housing and their very existence meant the surrounding area would always be devalued.
Broader proposals and approaches floated in those years to radically change housing policy were doomed because (a) Democrats instinctively hate the idea of reducing dependency and (b) Republicans don’t really believe the federal government could ever pull off using federal money to get people off of dependency on federal money. And in truth, the Kemp approach did not make a lot of fiscal sense.
So what should be done if not in the larger housing policy area but just with respect to homelessness?
A wise old policy wonk once told me that defining “homelessness” too literally, i.e., “the lack of access to physical shelter” made it harder to understand much less address the real problem. He said we should think of homelessness as a symptom of “a lack of affiliative bonds”, that is, not having connections to people willing to take you in (family, friends) or socioeconomic connections to make it possible to provide for oneself or others. In this view, addiction and mental illness sever those bonds and cause the isolation that leads to homelessness. And once so completely isolated, those pathologies are unchecked and run rampant.
Because of the social isolation created by behavior pathologies, the homeless are perfect prospective clients of the welfare state. The lefty ideal has always been a comprehensive political structure determining and providing what we need, ruling over atomized individuals without any tiresome interference from all those intermediate entities like family, church, fraternal societies, or local government. (I want some credit for not saying “little platoons” and thus pretend to have read everything from Burke to Kirk as some people do.)
How do we help people get in shape to reconnect? What can and should we provide in the meantime? And who should provide it?
Healing, strengthening, restoring, or recreating human bonds is the essence of conservative social welfare policy. With all due respect to the notion of detached reliance on market forces as articulated by the pre-Christmas Eve Ebenezer Scrooge, don’t we need a more affirmative approach even if it is a just matter enhancing the utility of conferring benefits on others so as to incentivize freely chosen decisions to do so? (Economists can make even compassion and charity sound inhuman and bloodless.)
Substantive actions to the benefit of the people most difficult to help would not be just doing the right thing but a political revolution that breaks the unwarranted rhetorical monopoly on “compassion” that is the wellspring of leftist power.
I thought I had all the right ideas thirty years ago. I am starting over. What do you think?
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The problem is that nobody wants to help the homeless as much as make money and political power off the issue. Government does not really solve issues as much and manage them and turn them into a jobs program for government workers.
Defining “homeless” will be a sticking point until we can all agree on the definition. I am not optimistic.Homeless in not just the absence of shelter. Just as peace is not just the absence of war.
I’m not sure there is a policy “solution” to homelessness. A large percentage of homelessness is by individual choice. There are some who, no matter how much “help” they’re given by friends, family, or government agencies, continue to choose homelessness. Our church has encountered several people like this. There was one woman who was always ending up homeless no matter how much her family tried to help her. They’d find her a place to stay, and within a week or so she’d be back out on the streets.
As you mention above, homelessness is really a symptom of a different problem — typically mental illness or addiction or disability. You can’t just put someone up in a hotel or otherwise stick a roof over their heads and presume that homelessness is instantly solved. The homelessness will return, because homelessness isn’t the root of the issue.
Our leaders always talk about housing as the solution because they can’t or won’t address the real issues.
Fixing homelessness requires fixing addiction, mental illness, and promoting the family. Doesn’t seem our leaders want to do that.
It’s also much, much more expensive than sticking a roof over someone’s head. If it can be done at all. I’m not convinced that addicts don’t like being addicts.
Agreed. The problem is not one government can fix or alleviate. The best protection against vagrancy, which can only be minimized, is to strengthen family and neighborly bonds. Several government programs attack those bonds and should be repealed.
Such broken individuals unavoidably place tremendous strain on others. Though one might think broadening the burden across all citizens would lighten the load, de-personalizing such burdens into aid regarding mere statistics is counterproductive. Nothing helps such people so much as deeply personal, face-to-face love. Voluntary associations can and do support families bearing such burdens.
No program will repair families and restore beliefs that such bonds are indissolvable. Think less in regard to a free market and more in regard to free people who demonstrated willingness to charity long before the era of the nanny state.
This is it in a nutshell. Two famous quotes:
Of course any state or national government is antithetical to these.
In my knowledge of a few homeless people, there was no family left for them to go to. So before we get to the strengthening-families part of the cure, we need to get through the forgiveness part.
The homeless people I’ve known had angered and burned through all of their family and friend relationships. There was simply no family to go back to.
I had to look into Al Anon at one point in my life, and I was struck by how its twelve steps paralleled AA’s twelve steps. There’s good reason for that. Not the enabling part, which is what most people focus on, but on the psychological self-examination part. Both parts of the relationship have to think about the hurt they have caused to the other.
Too often homelessness is a self-destructive solution to a very broken relationship. Once both sides of the relationship understand the other side, then forgiveness follows, as surely as night follows day. But usually the person who remained and is not homeless is as addicted to living a blame-free existence as the homeless person is addicted to not trying to live in a stressful relationship anymore.
I had a friend who was extremely mentally ill whom I helped live independently in her own apartment for about twenty-five years. I had to grow up to accomplish that. The rest of her family members never did grow up. The rest of her family continued to live in anger at my friend. Everything that happened to them was her fault. But over the years, with the help of good psychiatrists and friends, my friend frankly became more mature emotionally than they were.
The intense self-examination that Al Anon requires would be exactly applicable to families who have an extremely mentally ill member. Alcoholism, drug addiction, and extreme mental illness have a great deal in common in how they affect entire families.
The basis for helping individuals is helping families understand and forgive.
I’m reading Acts at the moment, one short passage at a time, with the help of the Ten Minute Bible Hour. It’s a great series that my son told me about. I would recommend it to anyone, no matter what branch of Christianity he or she belongs to. The bottom line for Christians is that love, compassion, understanding, and most importantly, forgiveness have to be in place before help can be truly helpful. And forgiveness often requires understanding and forgiving oneself first.
One homeless person represents an entire small family in pain.
PS: Hat tip to @she who pointed to this video years ago. This is a great video about how to talk to a mentally ill (alcoholic, drug-addicted) family member.
There is certainly not “a” policy solution to homelessness. There might be some things we can do better with policy, though.
Excellent post, by the way. I’m sorry I don’t have time to come up with a quick one-liner with which to dispose of the issue right now. I may have to think about it a little more.
First, the correct number of public housing projects is ZERO. Government should work to reduce regulation to increase the stock of housing (and thus lower the cost). Existing home owners have wealth and use that wealth to reduce the stock through zoning restrictions, construction standards, and permitting.
Second, homelessness has many causes and thus needs many solutions. Assume that most homeless people have mental issues and need substance abuse help. I favor implanting of anti-psychotic meds. This will require a change of laws (ask Dr. Drew). Some people just need to be taught how to get a job, keep a job, and manage a household. Some people just like the hobo lifestyle and they should get pushed away. Some people are temporarily homeless and churches should bridge them until they are stable again.
Third, support something like Mobile Loaves and Fishes in your city. MLF in Austin has a great program that helps people transition to being homed.
Summary: 1) deregulation, 2) meds, 3) charity
I’ve known a few “homeless” people. Smart, brilliant, or slow, the one characteristic they shared was ingratitude for what they had. They all had pretty much fair to good to great options in life, but just couldn’t bring themselves to get up to work on time and do a boring job competently.
I’m not saying this to condemn them. Just pointing it out. This includes the drug addicted, the mildly mentally ill and the poorly educible.
Heather Mac Donald recently opined that the homeless need to be removed out of urban areas and put into some sort of internment. As hard as it is to imagine, the homeless lifestyle is not so bad that some people will not choose it. The lifestyle needs to be less comfortable than it is now.
Society needs to be less tolerant of deviancy. We are no where near there yet.
By the way, two of my high school neighbors were actually arrested and jailed for vagrancy. It was 1970.
By the time someone is homeless, a lot of things have happened. Those things should be the focus of our efforts to reduce homelessness. Homelessness is a symptom, not a disease.
Tough to make it less comfortable. My family members used to volunteer in a shelter and describe the weird non-conformity endemic to those guys. One would rather die from hideous infections in open sores than put up with the alleged institutional rigors of hospitals. Or die of exposure on a freezing night rather than not be able to smoke in bed or bring forbidden items inside.
How can this be translated into government policy?
The better question is how to create a plan of action which may or may not require government action.
At least there was something in this paragraph that I greatly agree with. I’m not so crazy about the part that advocated a Soviet type policy, though.
We can see from the reasons given by some of the anti-vaxxers among us, or within ourselves, that it’s not a huge step from one type of non-conformity to the other. Not that I’m against deviancy or non-conformity. Far from it.
The book I plan to write someday. So many things can be and should be done.
Not requiring government action is not going to happen. I could not have accomplished what I did without the help of SSI, housing assistance, health care, and the local towns.
That said, if we all work together, miracles can happen.
Start with posts here on Ricochet, and organize them into a book later!
That is so kind. I’m afraid I’d bore everyone to death. :-) :-)
What you write here isn’t boring. Not even when you say atrocious things about George W Bush or Mitt Romney.
Yes, you could have. People did, for thousands of years. People without your brains – they figured it out.
I understand your point. Well placed government assistance can be a big help to those trying to improve themselves. But all such actions have unintended consequences, and the net gain or loss to society can be difficult to ascertain.
But regardless, don’t sell yourself short. You might have done even better without those things. It’s hard to know.
This is closest to my thinking.
Some homeless are self-fixing and just need to clean up a little (literal baths, clothes, and someone to help them get to some job interviews.
Some need to know what cleaning up is, and what to do in a job interview.
Some need to ‘get clean’ from drugs, and that is somewhere between difficult and impossible.
Some need to take drugs and under current law (for good and ill) we can’t make them.
Some probably need to be institutionalized regardless of whether drugs will help or not. We can’t do this unless they are a danger to themselves and others (somehow living on the streets and yelling at cars doesn’t qualify).
There is one group that can force people to stay in homes and take their drugs; the military. There are provisions for recalling people to active duty and the military should consider that for their broken.
It’s a question of hours in a day. I could not have earned enough money to do this and take care of my friend at the same time.
One wonderful thing I learned was that people are really good, and they hate suffering and mental illness and homelessness. My kids were absolutely amazing, and their friends too. When my manuscripts were late, the publishers never once complained. Nor did my husband complain about the sacrifices he made to make it possible for me to spend the hours I spent doing this.
The one thing I know from this experience is that my fellow human beings are compassionate and want to help people. And if they can’t do so directly, they cheer on those who do. They were happy to see that there was one less homeless person and to see that person actually doing well in life. That’s all that mattered to them.
But the money end of it was beyond me. I would give every second of time I had, but I could never have made enough money to cover the expenses for my friend’s life.
This is the thing that we need to work around in this country, this feeling of being overwhelmed at the sheer size of the problem. It has gotten so bad now. It’s frightening to me. It was bad twenty-five years ago. How has it gotten so much worse when we know so much? Unbelievable.
Somehow we have to narrow our vision back to looking at one person at a time. We’ll never crack this if we give in to seeing a pressing crowd of disgusting faceless people.
I would start with assisted living facilities across the country.
I wish I could talk to Donald Trump. I see this as a real estate problem. I have a feeling he’d help me. :-)
3. Confine the mentally ill who demonstrate they can’t care for themselves.
Problem 90% solved.
Love that.
I agree. We need to (re-)open mental institutions and bring back involuntary commitment.
I’ve been thinking about housing the homeless for years and what it comes down to is,
Do towns have the right to remove vagrants and to keep the streets safe and the sidewalks clean? Legally, yes. It is as far as I can see long standing law.
What can a town do in the case vagrants keep returning? Arrest and jail them.
However, towns could instead set up Free Homeless Camp Zones. And provide water, toilets, trash collection, and even distribute food. They could also provide security for the homeless. They could fence the Zone in to protect the homeless and to also keep them from returning to town.
The trouble is, this sounds a lot like prison.
My great-grandfather was a town marshall (and maybe later the boss-man constable) in a small Minnesota town during the 1890s.
There was a depression that decade, and that meant a lot of homeless men (hoboes) riding the rails. His main job as town marshall was to keep them out of town and keep them from stealing chickens and clothes from the clotheslines, etc. Several stories have been handed down, including one about the time he thought he had his revolver in his big buffalo coat but didn’t. My grandfather heard his parents talk about that when he was supposed to be asleep. Another of his sons thought he was unnecessarily rough with the hoboes in the way he chased them out of town with a bullwhip. That son had issues with his father in general. My own grandfather had a conflicted relationship with him; greatly admiring him on the one hand, but still carrying on his teenage arguments with him long after he (my grandfather) was well into his 80s and his own father was long dead. My grandfather didn’t have much money when I knew him; a divorce had contributed to that though probably not in the way you would think. But even though he was poor, he was a soft touch for any hobo who came along. He knew about some of their ways of indicating to each other at which house they might get a meal or money, but he was a soft touch anyway. I had a chance to observe it at first hand once, and then ask why he had sat and talked with the guy and then gone to the house to get some money for him. He didn’t say so, but maybe he was trying to set an example for me. Later in life I got to wondering if his father’s work as a scourge of hoboes had made him see the other side, too.