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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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Singapore solved the problem of homelessness quickly and easily. They built low cost housing, rented it at cost. As it filled up they upgraded the next batch and sold them, and so forth. Nothing was free. Anyone who abused their housing, vandalized etc. was kicked out. Accountability actually works. Singapore was tiny but the principle is pretty basic. Free stuff without responsibility has never worked anywhere ever.
And then what? Aren’t you back to square one, then?
You are right. The reason homelessness has grown in the US is that we tolerate it and in efforts to be compassionate we support it. Unintended consequences of kindness and lack of foresight. Can we stop being do-gooders?
Yes you go back to the tail of the line, but you’re still in line. People learn rather quickly. The cheaper apartments were torn down after a decade, replace by much better apartments until eventually there were no subsidies and no low end apartments. Economies grow that are well run. Now it’s one of the richest countries on earth.
It’s not being do gooders. It’s rewarding builder friends and buying votes.
They plead guilty to a felony, so they court has control. They can always leave and go to prison. They are forced to participate in treatment and follow the treatment guidelines. The treatment professionals meet with the Court staff every week to discuss the clients. This is the combined Treatment Team. Most clients have sanctions from time to time, which means a week or two in jail. The Treatment Team monitors progress. Family is involved as possible, which can be hard when people have burnt family out. Drug screens are par for the course.
It is amazing, but forced treatment does work. I have seen clients who cursed and yelled at the judge come back and hug the judge at graduation. Hard not to cry at graduation.
Now, we need something on the order of tens of thousands of these courts across the nation. They are expensive to run and take time. Good luck with that.
Helping an addict to postpone hitting bottom is often not helping.
“Forced treatment” also means circumstances which (a) not even the usual delusional thought patterns can ignore or wish away and (b) compulsory removal from the substance(s) of choice so that recovery has a chance. The company of others in the same boat makes self -discovery and clarity much more available.
Even the best programs see large relapse rates. Because there are no magic bullets we have to bite the bullet and devote resources. What do we do as a society to tighten up human connections? Discourage behaviors and attitudes that tend to have bad outcomes? It is a war with several fronts.
I am not sure what you mean by postpone hitting bottom. I assure you, a treatment court is not postponing anything.
Forced treatment does work. I have seen it with my own eyes. And relapse after a treatment court was better than just people coming to treatment. But, it is often 2 years long. That is far longer than most treatment programs. Addiction and severe and persistent mental illness changes the brain. It takes time.
As I understand it, being a drug abuser is not a viable option in Singapore. Here, a very high percentage of homeless are drug abusers.
Who is on this treatment team? What is the treatment that people have to do?
There is some debate about the need to “hit bottom”. Some therapists argue that it is overrated, that some people make rational choices well before. I would reply that the great majority of people I have spend a couple of thousand hours listening to in meetings would disagree. A long pattern of behavior based on pain avoidance and artificial mental pleasure states has usually got to stop working such that the pain ratio increases sufficiently such that constructive action is even considered. And the longer and deeper the addiction, the tougher the climb out.
I know people who did as many as six rehabs, hideous legal, personal and social consequences before getting it. And a couple of them just went out and died after many months of sobriety.
If you are getting results for such people. God bless you, Bryan. You are a hero. This is so often a battle against long odds with limited resources. There are more forms addiction opportunities out there and culturally we are not well-prepared morally or cognitively not to fall prey.
Federally run and financed institutes?
Yes drugs are highly discouraged as well as illegal. It would be the same were we to choose to discourage them rather than just making them illegal.
Good questions that I think are worthy of an actual post. I’ll do one this week, fair?
Gosh, thanks. I don’t feel like a hero. I am a servant.
I look forward to that – thanks!
Looking forward to it.
Well that guy is, and that might be for the best anyway.
I bet they save money in the aggregate.
The location of ‘hitting bottom’ isn’t the same for everyone. Forced treatment might be part of creating a higher bottom.
“Hitting Bottom” is just not, in my experience, necessary for someone to change their pathway.
build homeless camps and shelters on college and university campuses