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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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It is more than forgiveness. Sometimes you can love and forgive people but know you can not contribute to their madness. You can not allow them close enough to destroy you and your family.
I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, that’s why I jumped into this conversation in the first comment I made.
The stronger-families solution is no solution at all.
In my daydreams about how to help the homeless, I’ve often laughed to myself that one great strategy would be for a family group to take on someone else’s family member while another group takes on theirs. :-)
When I decided to do this, I did it for humanitarian reasons. It wasn’t personal in the same sense as it would be with a family member. My friend was a family member, but there was not a longstanding or good relationship sometime in my past. And I had very clear and narrow and easy-to-reach goals. I just wanted her to have a decent place to live, a social life of some sort, and health care. I far exceeded my own goals, but that’s only because I set them so low. :-) And I had a lot of help. Sometimes it came from the most unlikely people.
I wish that we could become impatient with a problem for which I see so many solutions. It’s not like trying to cure cancer. Helping mentally ill people live decently is a problem that we as a society can come together to solve. It would take a commitment and money. But it could be done. We have to get organized. We have to decide to no longer be indifferent, to try our best and keep trying until we figure it out for each person without violating his or her dignity or personal freedom (unless he or she has committed a crime) or trampling over his or her right to refuse our help if he or she wishes.
I know the “housing first” movement has been a disaster in some places. However, I agree with the idea in principle. I think it needs to be at the center of our helping efforts. It has to be there first. It is the key to all of the rest of the help we need to give.
I wish people who advocate this would also advocate some reforms to keep the system from being abused. In the old Soviet comedies it was super-easy to abuse the system. One call to the hospital and you could have a troublesome family member or neighbor institutionalized and/or injected. Here in real life in the U.S. it was a little harder, but still, people who shouldn’t have been were institutionalized at the instigation of local political enemies or family members.
So I’d like to know what reforms people propose to keep that from happening, and what reforms would make it easier to rectify the situation for people who don’t have easy access to lawyers.
First, disincentives to living on the street. Sweep homeless camps in public parks and arrest all drug dealers forthwith. Make sure the dealers are prosecuted and not immediately released. Same with firearms dealers (both are prominent in Seattle homeless camps); make sure they have immediate consequences for dealing drugs and guns. Many of the rest are mentally ill and require treatment so I am in favor of involuntary commitment. No street people should be allowed to camp in public parks, making them dangerous and unavailable to the taxpayers who pay for their upkeep. Right now, the Seattle School District is refusing to move a big homeless camp next to a public school!
Yes, there is a conservative solution: Re-institutionalize the mentally ill. That will get 65%-80% of the homeless off the steets in most cities.
Right now we have parole hearings to determine if prisoners receive early release. Maybe start with that model, and have release boards that periodically review patients’ cases.
Pretty common task for cops in a lot of places, I’m sure. All the 40s and 50s film noir movies set in LA show that one of the primary tasks of the police was to make sure that Okies and other undesirables keep moving so as not to disrupt the emerging but fragile middle-class tone of S. California’s burgeoning growth. As an old retired cop told me fifty years ago the community (a) wanted the cops to be as tough as needed to keep those types out but (b) they never want to hear or know about such tactics.
Part (b) could be why there wasn’t much about it in the local newspaper. I had heard these stories from my grandfather when I was little, and may have been the only person to whom he told the story about overhearing the discussion the night his father returned from work after not having his revolver when he needed it. His father probably did a lot of things he never told about, but that time he asked his wife if she had taken the revolver out of his coat. She said she had. She had taken it out to clean the coat and forgot to put it back in. He told her, “Well, they almost got me tonight.” I don’t know what kind of revolver one would fail to notice, and how heavy a coat would be not to notice the difference. The story about the bullwhip came from a different one of his sons.
I remember Grandpa saying his father had been the town constable. Eight-10 years ago I spent an afternoon in the newspaper archives at the Minnesota Historical Society to see what I could verify. I learned that he had been town marshall, one of two who worked for the constable, at least in the early years, and not the constable himself. But there were no details about the hobo issue, which was something I was really hoping to find. It may have been a case of the town fathers not wanting that stuff to appear in the papers.
Time ran out before I got to the later newspapers in the decade, and I haven’t been back to finish the search. Maybe this summer it will work, if the covid restrictions get lifted. My great-grandfather may have gotten promoted to the constable job later in the decade. I looked at the way my mother had written down her father’s words when she was recording some of his stories before he died, and it’s not inconsistent with the way he told it.
My solution:
Functioning adults do not get benefits beyond unemployment and a similar thing for the self-employed. (VA is excluded, but becomes a voucher system)
If you can’t or won’t function, you need to give up your majority and go back to being a minor. You can be medicated without your consent, cannot vote, cannot sign contracts, and generally are treated like a teenager. Your family is your first option (dependent tax credits), then various charitable organizations. The government is the last resort, just like with kids. Your benefits go to the person in charge of you.
If someone refuses to take care of themselves or become a minor, they get nothing but what people toss their way. Apply laws on vagrancy and public hygiene.
Two Govt agencies in Australia have two different definitions, fwiw :
This is a topic I know a lot about, and I have been on a board to address it for the past 6 years.
Homelessness is a complex problem, and as such, conservatives should be aware of any simple solutions. The Housing First fad was never going to work and will continue not to work.
Unfortunately, chronic homelessness is linked strongly to mental illness and substance use. The people who are chronically homeless fail at the tasks needed to maintain housing. To address it, we have to address those things, and that means not just money for treatment, but using force to make people engage. I have seen drug courts and mental health courts really work. Those can take up to two years of work for people who have pled guilty to a crime.
The best we can do is try to ameliorate the issue as best we can while we hope that someday we will have better treatments.
You can only force people to engage for so long. What happens when you stop forcing them?
In 2002 researchers were testing implants that could deliver schizophrenia meds for 12 months. I would start with that and then give them a bracelet to track their locations.
Great post and comments. Have seen it up close and personal in San Francisco for over 35 years. Agree with RushBabe and TBA. The issue is not lack of housing. It is the drug use and mental illness (often both) that makes one incapable of making a rational decision. Fund new mental hospitals and drug treatment centers. But first get those folks off the streets. All at once. Military solution was suggested by one commentator. Probably 50,000 housing units on closed military bases in California. Sweep them up. Evaluate them. Crazies go into door 1 and get what treatments the shrinks think may work. Druggies into door 2. Give them treatment; if no success then confinement. Regular folks, probably less than 20% of the homeless, into door 3 to get job training. Will probably cost less, overall, than the $7o0,000 studios LA building for their druggies. Probably comes with free needles like the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco.
It’s not enough to say what should be done. You also have to say who should do it. Sometimes that reveals problems.
The Governor of the state of California. But Gov. French Laundry would rather swill his cabernet with Nancy Pelosi and talk about how much more they can shake down the taxpayers. Caitlyn Jenner looking better and better.
A least it would give the governor something important to do with its time.
If compulsion is required, we need the state. As for selection and delivery of services, a mix of private sector providers whose success rate matters may be preferable.
When we think of courts we think crime or personal injury suits. But the vast bulk of court resources are devoted to family issues and much of the criminal side is about what to do about addiction. A society, we are a mess.
Addiction and “self-medication”. The root causes of which are hard to fix. And honestly, unless you fix why an individual is prone to addiction they’ll get right back to it once they’re back out. Homelessness, in fact even addiction, are just the visible indicators.
Is that currently a legal option (leave aside how willing people would be to pay for it)? Are there anti-vagrancy laws still on the books?
In Australia that’d be unlawful confinement.
That’s what I was going to post after reading all the comments, if someone else hadn’t been specific enough. A very large part of current homelessness came from deinstitutionalizing mentally ill, in the past.
And, a lot of the homeless, especially the mentally ill ones, would not be willing to live in that situation. They already refuse to go to shelters because they can’t smoke or drink or shoot up or whatever.
Um.
If a minor is found out on the street, and/or… non-hygienic or whatever… aren’t they pretty much just taken back home?
I can see needing a lot more police etc, to track all those people.
Isn’t drug treatment in PRC especially, already a very expensive joke, with/because of those private sector providers? Last I heard, they import addicts from other states because they can cash in on treatments including repeat treatments for the same people, over and over.
Yeah. You have two choices – be a responsible adult or a minor. Minors get treated differently, like you said. However, this is a voluntary system, so that liberals can’t just make us all minors. If you don’t become a minor and still act like a crazy hobo, you go to jail.
But my point was, what if someone becomes a “minor,” but has no home to be returned to, or their parents or other relatives don’t want their 35-year-old “minor” back home? They go to “juvenile hall” with all those luscious actual-teenagers to prey on?
Great post.
Homelessness is just a downstream impact of the two issues you mentioned, it’s addiction and mental illness (with a lot of overlap between those two, from a Venn diagram perspective). The impacts of a serious addiction or mental illness are exactly as you describe – a severing, a dislocation, from the normal bonds of family and friends, which truly isolates someone, over time, and can mean they literally have nowhere to go other than the street.
A house, regardless of funding mechanism, doesn’t fix either of the above situations. It is then, logically, not the solution. Treatment for addiction and mental illness will help, as would then a path to independent living (including housing subsidization of some kind). The eventual goal would be a transition to independence, work training/volunteer opportunities, part-time to full-time work, and maybe also a path to home ownership (grants for down payments, shared equity programs, and the like).
The latter part of the above paragraph is the easier part. The really hard part is treating addiction and mental illness, and the mental illness component is the much, much tougher one to address. Considering that much of that cohort requires ongoing medication to maintain a normal state, their opportunities in returning to the rest of the world are already limited – but depending on the illness, not impossible to overcome.
That last part, mental illness, really requires family and a local support model. The political instinct to do something, something popular, like build more housing, has a decades-long failure rate, and tends to worsen the problems, concentrate them, in urban gulags, where even survival and eventual escape become unrealizable dreams.
The Dems substituting government spending for family is a half-century’s worth of policy disaster. Throwing pallets of money at problems is often the wrong longer-term solution, but solves a politician’s short-term need to find something to run on, that he or she doesn’t have to pay for.
Just read Drew’s response, after my post. He said it much better.
After two years people are now not being forced. They have changed.
That is good to hear. Truly. And if you’re doing this work, thank you for your service.
What were they forced to engage in?