I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them. It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that. Not the worst thing in the world, but I do find it frustrating often to not have a bathroom available nearby (small bladder)
But, while the toilets aren’t the worst sacrifice, the cumulative sacrifices made on the alter of our huge antisocial populations are profound
> I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them. It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that.
What a weird way of stating the problem. There is too large a population of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts wandering the streets. We didn't surrender anything, at least not during the last half century in the United States. We did as little as possible to deal with homelessness and mental illness and discovered there's good money to be made incarcerating drug addicts.
And sometimes it's not even active destruction, just neglect. Public use amenities are subject to large amounts of wear-and-tear. Sometimes a thing just breaks, from someone being careless or not knowing how to operate it. You have to have the wherewithal for follow-through with upkeep.
About a half a dozen who were nearby when the bridge collapsed, and, of those, only two actually missed seeing it happen. *Everyone* heard it, though: a great roaring waterfall of concrete and steel that echoed across the derelict plains for minutes and miles. The local folk would have told you that it was the river flooding a month earlier what had done it; that, and the heat of that summer havign roasted the old tarmac to pieces. But that wouldn't have been the truth; not entirely. Their hindsight failed to reach past a few preceding seasons, the road's slow degradation after years of use and somewhat fewer years of maintenance as far beyond the horizon as the sea. The columns that supported the span, plunging deep into the river below it, had had great, sweeping cracks for as long as the youth who periodically swam out to tag them could remember. The chain link fence that ran along the bridge's sides had rusted through to a twisted ragged heap even before then.
The river the bridge had spanned was the _____, and the bridge itself - part of an interstate, from back when there had been states - had linked the northern and southern portions of Jefferson County (which still existed). Thankfully, no one was on it when it finally gave up the ghost. (For a few days, the Hughes of just south of the old rails were worried for their son, Kurt, who had failed to return home that evening; but he eventually turned up a week later, having spent the time with his girlfriend.)
The loss of the ancient connector meant 50 miles extra travel for anyone who wanted to get from Dodge to Shelley, already a 70-mile trek. With gas so hard to come by, that was no small thing. Rebuilding it would have been ideal, but the fact was that there was no one around who could possibly manage such a project; most of that expertise was locked up in Atlanta, New York-Jersey, Charlotte, and St. Louis, and not one of the territories so mentioned was on good terms with small, flyover, Sep-sympathizing Jefferson County. Besides that, there were scant funds for construction equipment and materials anyway; the curse of Jefferson's self-sufficiency knocking unwelcome on the doors of Jeffersonian hearts more often than any stranger. The bridge would not be rebuilt. So, after the commotion of the actual collapse had died down, and the locals had ceased stopping by to gaze at the ruins and shake their heads and scowl, the structure, half-submerged stone monolith, lay placid and abandoned.
None of this is really important, except for the part about the 50-mile detour. That... that is actually very important.
---
The Biker learned of the bridge's collapse well before reaching Jefferson County. For all that had broken down from neglect or sabotage or accident in this land over the years, it seemed that the grapevine was as resilient as ever. The proprietor of a public house - the one he'd stopped in at when it came time to transfer some of his precious fuel from an emergency tank to the hot rod proper - was the bearer of the bad news. He'd thanked her, pulled out the Handspring loaded with a bootleg map app, and started searching for a new route. This one wouldn't do, it was likely to be more of a still-glowing crater than a road; and that one, that one ran right through hardcore Sep territory. And this one... No, he'd definitely run out of fuel. ...Maybe the second, again? If he could be quick, go at the right time of day... Too risky, his common sense told him. Nonsense, said the impulsive part that had gotten him out of (and, admittedly, into) many a hairy situation. T could outrun any trouble he might find. And he wouldn't find any, because he would be very, very careful. 'You don't got a choice, bub. Gas isn't cheap OR plentiful.'
"Shit."
He hit the Handspring's power button and gingerly slid it back into his leather side saddle, and delayed his oncoming foolishness by taking the moment to glance around like he was looking for someone who was looking for him. Other than the pub, a converted vinyl-sided colonial, there was nothing but the coiled curves of cracked suburban roads and sidewalks; the mounded plots that lay along them, where the foundations of dozens of long-dismantled domiciles had once stood; and each building's replacements, bunches of grass and scrub, waving occasionally in the odd and rare breeze, which were staking out their own homesteads.
SF - and probably much of the US homeless problem elsewhere - is largely cost of housing; rent and home prices are ridiculous enough that if you don't make big bucks, you are likely barely scraping by. Rents here are rising way faster than inflation, and it makes everything more expensive and means a lot more people are living that much closer to not being able to pay their rent. Way easier to end up homeless after losing your job when paying 3k/month in rent than 1k/month, as at the cheaper rent saving money is actually possible.
We've consistently built a tiny fraction of the new residential units needed for projected population growth for decades now. Supply has been barely growing while demand surged; what else should we expect?
Other parts of the country have not been as extreme, but this has played out in other cities too. We've had terrible housing policy, and increased homelessness is a direct consequence.
What you say is completely true, but part of the problem is that people have very different ideas of what they are talking about when they talk about homeless people.
People who tend to complain about the homeless are generally only complaining about the visibly homeless (i.e., the people living on the street). Meanwhile the people who advocate for helping the homeless are more likely to also care about the invisible homeless who tend to make up the majority of all homeless people. These are the folks who might have jobs, live in their car, have a gym membership to shower, etc. You could spend a lot of time with many of these people and have no idea they were homeless and as a result they aren't included in many people's perception of the problem of homelessness. Therefore, it's hard for people to believe that something as simple as lowering rent prices could actually solve homelessness for a majority of homeless people.
I think the burden of proof is on your position. When activists in my area pick a fight with local government, it's never over that invisible group. Indeed, as far as I can tell, they don't give a rip about the veterans living in the forest over by the VA hospital. I've never seen them over there. They're too busy picking fights defending the ones pooping at the downtown parks (and not in the public toilet) or trying to get city funding and approval for safe drug use, etc.
Now, you're right that there are people that do care and put tremendous effort into that more invisible group. Churches and church-backed organizations do a lot of that. Difference is, except for fund-raising from like-minded folks (and a lot of them hate even asking for money), they go about their work quietly, without seeking attention or reward.
There'd be the possibility of joining forces, but not with the DSA-types that jump in the limelight and scream the loudest and advocate for free needles. The people doing the bulk of the hard work don't want to make a statement on Palestine, they just want volunteers for the hard-to-staff weekday shower-cleaning shift. They need men willing to be mentors, etc. They care about the actual people they're serving, not trying to bring about glorious revolution. The two groups aren't compatible at the moment.
> they just want volunteers for the hard-to-staff weekday shower-cleaning shift
This may sound like a loaded question, but I assure you, that's not my intention. If you want to provide for those "invisible" homeless, who aren't drug addicts or mentally ill, shouldn't the primary volunteer pool consist of exactly those invisible homeless people? Or in other words, once you have organizers, why do you need external volunteers for cleaning the showers?
Point in case - my 75-yr-old retired parents staff one of those church showers in one of the most affluent towns south of SF. They have time, because they're retired.
The people using those showers can't volunteer, they have jobs they have to get to.
That's the point here, the invisible homeless are people who are _fully employed_ but they're still too poor to have homes to live in.
Thank you for being one of the few to draw a distinction there! The thing is, that second group are arguably already being helped by the many, many taxpayer-funded services we already have. They use the resources as intended to get back on their feet. I know it's not a fun time to be in that boat, but as long as it's a temporary boat and not a permanent predicament, it's not a societal emergency. To be clear, I'd support any reasonable policy specifically targeted and proven to help people who are in this situation.
One more thing:
> something as simple as lowering rent prices
Suppose you solve that (by market means, constructing an incredible amount of homes, or by communist means, by draconian rent-control cutting all rents by 70%). A 2-bedroom apartment in SF is now $1,200 and there are 50,000 of them vacant. Would these apartments not be immediately rented by 50,000 households from elsewhere who have always wanted to live there but haven't been able to afford it? Either the rents would shoot right back up if we're letting markets function, or the apartments would be insta-filled by a few very lucky people, with a years-long waiting list for any housing that ever opens up. There will always be one more person who will be happy to move to a great climate, top-tier city, unless the rents are obnoxiously high.
Rent control won't really solve the problem as it can only help people who already live in the city but makes rents even higher for new residents - there have been studies that essentially find that rent control essentially just transfers money from newer residents to ones who have lived here a long time. And worse, it a removes incentives for improving existing buildings and for current tenants to move, thereby reducing liquidity in the market - eg if you would like to upsize or downsize for whatever reason, being locked into a good rent controlled price is a strong disincentive.
The better solution is definitely "build an incredible amount of homes" though $1200 probably is not be obtainable even at extreme ends of possibility. We also should consider it a region wide problem and not just an SF problem - the whole bay area needs to build more, as rents in Oakland, Daly City, San Mateo, etc are related to SF prices as well. If the region is going to add jobs we better add housing at the same rate, and we've massively failed at that.
But anyway if the market actually starts functioning as new supply appears any tent decrease would incrementally attract some new tenants from elsewhere. Rents only shoot back up if the supply increase isn't sustained addition, or we somehow artificially lower rents for a short period. In a functioning market we should find an equilibrium price and when demand spikes faster than units can be built, be development would spring up that in a few years would push prices back towards normal (as jobs / the economy clearly moves faster than new housing can be constructed). But even in the booms when construction should be seeing the influx of people with high salaries and trying to develop new housing to keep up... Well, the volume of new housing just didn't keep up.
Are you talking about the homeless who are actually causing any problems (the chronic homeless)? Or the meaningless statistical group of "Everyone who doesn't have their own/rented home today"?
> Way easier to end up homeless after losing your job when paying 3k/month in rent than 1k/month
Any person without serious mental and/or substance problems can handle losing their job without sleeping in the streets. By virtue of not being mentally ill and addicted, everyone else has "friends" and "family" somewhere who would say "Oh, gee Fred, sorry you lost your job. Sleep on my couch for a few weeks while you're looking for work."
The only people who don't are those who have burned every bridge by repeatedly betraying the trust of those who love them (theft, bringing drugs into their home, sexual abuse, etc).
A lot of people also sleep in their cars and shower at the gym while putting their lives together. Now, those people DO count as homeless in the official counts, but they aren't the ones causing any problems, and they also consume only a tiny fraction of the public resources that "The Homeless" we see on the streets do.
So, while lower rents would help with the official numbers, you would see little improvement on the streets because that's not why they're there.
(All that said, I'm sure there's a small pipeline from the 'temp homeless' to the 'chronic homeless,' which is probably 99.9% made up of people who are in the "living in the car" or "couch surfing" phase who make the poor choices to take up an addiction to drown their sorrows.)
Separately, the other problem with the "just build more housing" plan is: These cities aren't surrounded by 50-foot walls. They're not closed systems. Say we build so much that the $3000 rent drops to $1000. Now, people from elsewhere, seeing that SF is now as cheap as Fresno, will decide to move there, as the weather is way better, and there are tons of cool things about living in a world-class city by the sea. The low prices pull people from elsewhere just as reliably as low air pressure causes wind to blow towards it. (This is also why these temperate coastal cities can't fix things with money: The more comfortable you make it to be homeless in your city, the more tweakers from the hinterland will gravitate to the city.)
> Any person without serious mental and/or substance problems can handle losing their job without sleeping in the streets.
This statement is very load-bearing in your whole argument though. Losing a job can completely derail a person's daily habits and cause their issues to worsen, either by the additional stress or by forgetting to keep their meds. It's downhill from there.
Becoming and then staying homeless for a significant time is often almost irreversible. The key is to prevent people from ever getting there, as much as you can - and that is the point the poster above was making. The fall from house + job > house > no house makes it very hard to ever get another job that actually pays enough to go back to having a house.
After the Civil War, when many plantation properties became economically unsustainable, occasionally the main house would be abandoned by the owners, and the remaining sharecroppers would take up residence; one house that used to be for one extravagantly wealthy family, now occupied by a handful.
In Newport, RI, after the income tax made maintaining grand Gilded Age domiciles untenable, many were subdivided into multiple units. Again, a house for one family (and there servants) turned out to be decent housing for multiple.
People keep saying that America has a building deficit, and to some extent, we do. But we also have a lot of physically massive houses that house one family, because those families can currently afford it. Historically, that has not been a permanent state.
From about 2010 onwards we have had the phenomenon of the High-Income White Collar Itinerate - the Silicon Valley worker living in a converted van, or the remote coder working from a LOC country with low barriers to entry regarding Visas and Taxation. These being the 'privileged' demographic.
The less fortunate simply deal with shrinkflation of the bottom tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Only 12% of married Americans under 30 own a home in 2026. In 1960 it was 52%.
The pandemic-heightened desire for more spacious and independent living, as well as “excess” savings accumulated early in the lockdown stages of the pandemic, propelled headship rates of young adults by two percentage point to 43.1%, the highest level since 2010. This still didn't meet parity with the historic norms of 1990-2000s.
The problem is money, but at a different level. When you deal with the homeless it's too late. That money must be spent before someone becomes homeless, on welfare: unemployment benefits, accessible healthcare and housing. A minor cut taken care of immediately is nothing, but let it turn into gangrene and you won't be able to fix it at all.
AFAIK also SF was long known as "hobo capital", meaning many homeless or drifting people just ended up there. So it's much more complex than that, since many of the homeless are not even locals.
Yes, develop an economy that is not run for rent seekers. Provide a job guarantee so everyone can work at a wage floor. Build housing stock that is actually affordable and desirable for anyone on a normal wage. Make sure healthcare is affordable and available universally. Provide schools that are good regardless of where you live or what you can afford. Those things would be a start.
Spending money is necessary but not sufficient to fix this sort (or literally any sort?) of big problem.
I hope you don't think San Francisco having spent a lot of money on the problem (the $100k per person figure in isolation is deceptive, but let's not dwell on that) means we've expended more than a really minimal amount of effort as a nation on the problem. Consider how little the problem of homelessness was discussed during the last presidential cycle, or how often it's discussed in congress, and I think you'll see what I mean. (consider the words used when debating it and you'll really understand what I mean)
Something to keep in mind is that that figure includes homeless people who have been homed and are being supported, it's not just the ones currently on the streets.
I think around 1986 Reagan cut the federal funding to the facilities that would house the mentally ill. This created the homeless situation in the USA. I remember the term homeless as newly formed at that time and remember the population exploding as I went through college in center city Philadelphia.
The homeless situation as we know it had multiple causes in the 80s and prior. Part of it was Reagan-era policies wanting to save money, but the other half (which in my view would have probably still "achieved" the same end result) was activists who argued that involuntary institutionalization violated the rights of those who were committed. "The Left" and "The Right" were full partners in dismantling what we had. In my opinion, both were too stupid to realize the consequences of just deleting what existed without having a realistic plan for how to deal with those people. It's like if you realized your water heater was consuming $30 worth of electricity every month so you just turn the breaker off and say "We saved $30 and improved our climate footprint" but now everyone has to take cold showers forever and the dishes don't get properly cleaned.
There was always a population that preferred living on the margins of society. Hobo’s and tramps are different than the mentally ill and they were called hobos and tramps. My grandmother used to trade food for labor of these people as they passed through.
The homeless were people that could not care for themselves or be of use in some way. The grey area might be junkies.
The problem is you can’t get people off the street if they don’t want to get off the street unless you do it forcibly. You can end the homeless problem overnight but SF is too empathetic. I’m not even saying this is a fault, I’d rather they fail on the side of empathy than succeed violently.
The problem is one of the alternatives they consider worse than homelessness is a life without opioids.
I had cousin who was homeless in San Diego. Over the years she came into money a couple times, either from family members or through inheritance. Instead of getting a place to live she figured drugs were a better use for that money. We tried everything to get her off the street, and nothing worked. She wouldn't even stay at a shelter. Because she had no intention of giving up the drugs.
They don’t want to be homeless but they don’t want to put up with free housing drug free rules so they prefer to stay on the streets where they can keep using.
And still once I was ina small restaurant that let a homeless guy use the toilet and they forced the door open after hearing crashing sounds, and he had painted the walls with his poop and jumped up and down on the sink until it broke off.
Days later I saw a sign in their window saying the bathroom was for customers only.
SF is one of the highest cost of living cities in the US. I'm guessing housing and utilities is going to chew up the majority of that $100K, before you even consider medical and mental health visits and transportation to and from those visits, and there is likely tons of resistance from surrounding localities to allowing the City to relocate those they are helping to suburbs where they might find cheaper and/or more accessible housing, food costs, improved access to healthcare, etc.
Repeal all prohibition. It enriches cartels and incites corruption. Take all the money pissed up the wall fighting drug crime and spend it on treatment and rehab. Let corporations sell pharmaceutical grade drugs like heroin (junkies don't actually want fentanyl, it wears off too fast while heroin lasts for hours) and pay some fucking tax.
It is pretty much how China has handled it. It seems like it does actually work if your goal is to fully eliminate drug issues, but it's unacceptably harsh for most countries to palate.
A quick check suggests the penalty for possession is 3 years in prison, not life. No idea if that is a maximum sentence.
From what I can find, it looks like China does a lot of what the US does, including DARE style education, and that there is still (by Chinese accounts) quite a lot of illegal drug use.
I would think that since China is very nationalist and still fairly collectivist/anti-individualist, and has a grim history of drugs being used as a tool of foreign imperialism (the opium wars), drug use is much further out of the social "Overton window". I think that's a better explanation for apparently lower drug use than harsh punishments, because other states also have those (notably the US!)
Dealers can deal with that easily, this is often how they operate now, they don't carry big bags of stuff in their pockets usually they have nothing if police will do quick search. With that approach you will mostly catch users.
If I would be getting these naive suggestions of yours in this thread from my 6 year old son, I could respect them. But adults in 2026 should definitely know better and know a bit of history to reflect on.
The laws are enforced harshly and consistently, so people follow them. As a result, you have low crime and low total incarceration.
Take auto theft. In California, we have 1 auto theft arrest per 15 stolen cars. Incarceration rate is 1 in 5 of those arrested, so 1 per 75 stolen cars.
Japan has 1 arrest for every 2 stolen cars - A much higher rate of getting caught.
Japan has about 5,000 stolen vehicles nationally per year. California has about 200,000 per year.
As a result, there are very few in prison for it, despite the 10 year sentence.
Could it be because Japan is populated mostly (98%) by people who have lived there for multiple generations under strict rules? Also, it's probably a cultural thing where crime is shamed.
Be careful comparing such statistics between countries as the defintions of what counts at every step will be different and there are always contributing factors that skew the statistics.
Prison isn't the right idea. But getting them into some sort of treatment would make sense. And that could be court mandated for repeat offenders for some crimes.
That was what was supposed to happen in Oregon when they decriminalized drugs. However, building the treatment centers, shelters, etc took forever, in part due to communities pushing back against these facilities being built in their neighborhoods, and you still need a well-staffed justice system with sufficient judges and public defenders to actually process offenders in a timely fashion or at all. Lack of public defenders, judges and jail capacity is why Portland has so much catch and release, not due to unwillingness to enforce the law.
I kind of read the suggestion as a deterrent for dealers and people engaged in drug trafficking, which could lead to less addicts... Not as "jail the junkies!"
And? Doctors are not supposed to be a pharma dispensary. Depending on motivational factors a doctor may either tell someone to suck it up, quickly fill out a standard subscription to cover up the symptoms or spends some time to diagnose and fix the root cause and then prescribe medication by taking into account but the patients immediate needs and the long-term health impacts.
I assure you, if they stopped spending that money tomorrow, things would get dramatically worse, as all the people that money keeps off the streets would be on them.
But currently housed people becoming street homeless would.
Unless you mean to say that you don't care either way if they do.
(If your value system places zero value on that, then my value system places positive value on spending your money on things you very explicitly don't value.)
This argument is so dumb. SF spends so profligately that a well–run system could spend less money and be just as effective, if not more effective. Nobody would be turned out onto the street just because less money was being spent. Half of that money is probably going to fraudsters who are bilking the government. A lot of it is probably being spent in useless ways that ensure that more money will be spent on the problem in the future, to keep the cash spigot running to the NGOs that profit from the homeless.
The vast majority of the homeless you see on the streets in the US are there no because of money trouble, but because of mental health or drug issues (or both).
People with money issues can almost always lean on friends or family. It’s the people that no longer have any friends or family willing to put up with them that end up on the streets.
Then the question becomes why US has such a huge problem with mental health and drugs that most other countries don't have with this scale. Maybe it's easier to develop mental health and/or drug issues when there are no societal safety nets, like accessible healthcare, decent affordable housing, unemployment benefits, ...
I don't know why people seem to think the US has "no societal safety nets."
We have medicaid, unemployment benefits, how expensive our housing is completely depends on location just like other places (rural-ish areas are probably cheaper than almost all of Europe), etc.
We really should go with a harsh Chinese solution. If you do drugs in China, you hope your dad is Jackie Chan or you are going to have a really hard life. And being caught homeless in a big city gets you a free escorted bus ticket back to the poor rural area your hukou is in, where you couldnt make it either.
The more western solutions are compassionate containment like in Finland.
America cant make up its mind if it wants to be like China or Finland.
I live in Berlin and there's a ton of homeless people on the streets. As bad as most major US cities (SF is worse, or at least was - I haven't visited in a few years).
If they're spending money on, say, school lunches for poor kids and on substance abuse programs, they're not technically spending money on homeless people, but it's hard to see that the money that isn't being spent on the unhoused doesn't help people not become unhoused in the first place.
Closer familial ties + extremely harsh laws for drug sale and use. Asians realized how opium fucked China for a century and made sure none of that shit flies.
Whatever other issues they may have, they are overwhelmingly mentally ill, largely schizophrenic, and the surrender in the US happened just outside your fifty-year window when the Supreme Court decided that it should be much harder to institutionalize someone against their will. The timing was similar in the UK, from what I have read. Don’t know about the EU.
The problem with severe schizophrenics is that they don’t like and won’t take their meds if left to their own devices [EDIT: regardless of how much social support you provide, even though we certainly didn’t provide enough]. Institutions are in no way perfect, but One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not a documentary.
The causation arrow isn't unidirectional, though. Mental illness causes some homelessness, particularly often because in the US healthcare system medications are expensive and can lead to bankruptcy. (And it is certainly not the only path to bankruptcy in the US either.) But more and more studies are showing that the biggest problem with homelessness in the US is that it causes mental illness. (Same thing is being found with drug addictions: some cause bankruptcy and then homelessness, but to cope with homelessness many find new addictions after becoming homeless.)
Most homeless shelters are run by religious charities. The majority of them treat homelessness as a sin, either by intentional policy or accidents of attitude. These "charities" often require a lot of work to keep being allowed to use their housing at their shelter from regular job hunting to regularly attending worship sessions to "zero tolerance" policies on everything from curse words to keeping private possessions to having pets to sometimes taking/keeping necessary medication. It's hard to keep your mental health in good shape when the groups that are housing you in the worst weather are berating you for being terrible sinners and treating you like prisoners.
Outside of shelters the most common interactions between homeless people and the cities around them are interactions with cops, who very rarely have mental health training or social work experience, and treat homeless people like criminals because their job is sometimes to treat everybody as would be criminals.
You ever really talk to a homeless person? The ones that really survive become very organized. They have a list of shelters memorized, which months they prefer to be at each one, what things they need to fake about themselves they need to do to survive in that shelter for a few weeks, how much "rent" they need to raise before they get there (some shelters often cost pennies per day just to show that the homeless person is "working" somehow; some homeless panhandle just to afford shelters), and exactly how long they can stay before they inevitably get kicked out (most shelters are "short term", intentionally). Just listening to all the rules and regulations and requirements makes me think I would go schizophrenic dealing with that world. It sounds like being stuck in a middle school that never ends, if that middle school's "classrooms" were all in entirely different parts of a city and all had deeply different rules. I can easily see why homelessness often causes mental illness in the US.
Institutions are close to the right answer, but for an entirely different reason than you assert. We do need better secular institutions (in the endowed place of learning sense, not the mental hospital sense) with mental health as one goal among several such as long-term support in charge of dealing with the homeless. The numbers keep showing that the greatest fix we've found for homelessness is making sure that everyone has a home where they feel safe and private and don't have to do anything to "earn" much less keep that home.
Right, so, what do you do about the guy who smears feces on the walls and won't take his meds? Because that guy is the one who makes public spaces unlivable. Including places like SRO hotels that actually could provide people with affordable living spaces.
Yeah, except that because the Warren Court was so incredibly arrogant, it's almost impossible to institutionalize anyone against their will in the US unless you go through all the process of setting up guardianship.
This (straw) man scenario feels like a proximate cause versus root cause situation to me. You've managed to establish a relatively strong proximate cause (or so it seems) as "won't take his meds". Where did he get the meds he was supposed to take? How is he paying for them? Was he given the meds in a place of safety and security enough to have reason to trust the meds might help?
If you were given strange meds that you don't understand anything about by someone who wasn't your personal doctor in a situation that feels like a prison out of your control, would you take them?
That's equally a straw man question, but a useful one to maybe establish empathy for the situation that homeless "guy" might have found himself in.
That's also assuming that is the correct proximate cause. As far as I know science has not yet found exactly a "don't use excrement as spray paint" drug. There are people that will do that which don't need meds and there are people that will do that even on most anti-psychotic meds.
But let's talk about some of the root cause of it all: If you find yourself in a world that you cannot control, that won't let you use any bathroom without buying a coffee/being a customer, that doesn't want you to exist, that says you are only as valuable as the property that you own but then won't allow you any longer to own any property due to some bad luck or misfortune, at that point "the only spray paint I have to send a message about how much this world sucks" might seem pretty clear.
I find it easy to have sympathy with that sort of (straw) man, because there is a logic to it. It's not necessarily a psychotic break. At least, not necessarily at first a psychotic break.
What would I personally do to prevent that? I'd try to prevent people from being homeless in the first place. I'd try to get people mental health resources sooner ahead of crises rather than trying it do it in the middle of a different one (bankruptcy/homelessness). Which is the same as I suggested statistically seems to be the only thing that works: give people private houses with locks and keys and help them feel safe and secure in them, with a sense of ownership and privacy, and with no need to "earn" it or "rent" to keep it. Maybe it doesn't stop the person from covering "their own" walls in feces until they feel safe and secure enough (and that's still a public health problem in the meantime) to try an antipsychotic med that they need to take. But as far as I'm aware no one wants to take or trust an antipsychotic medication if they don't at first feel like they live in a safe enough or secure enough place.
Which again also circles back to "institutions are almost the correct approach, but for the wrong reasons" I mentioned before. A place with mental health resources seems to be an important part of that, still, but I don't think you can address mental health problems in a prison, especially in a society that values private property and private spaces, without first addressing the problems around homeless not having access to private property and private spaces.
But yeah, that's mostly just my opinion on the subject based on statistics and studies that I've read. You don't have to take my word on it. One archived secondary source (with additional links): https://academicweb.nd.edu/~rwilliam/ndonly/readings/SocProb...
lol suuure it does. I totally believe that becoming homeless causes people to stand on sidewalks jabbering obscenities and smearing shit all over the place.
Why the fuck are we so soft on these gutter trash in this country.
We in the west have surrendered with weak punishments and lax enforcement for anti social behaviour. In many cases even abolishing laws or putting in place public policy that prevents the imprisonment of people who commit "low level" crimes. There's a certain segment of the population who will (largely unsuccessfully) try to shame you if you promote a tough on crime approach.
In my country the entire justice system has been hijacked by activist judges who are hell bent on promoting these whacky ideas and letting serious criminals go virtually unpunished.
As others have pointed out the US has a massive prison population.
Our problem isn't insufficiently harsh punishment. Our problem is unlikely punishment. The US spends more on incarceration and less on policing and the justice system. You are less likely to get caught and punished in the US but if you get punished it's harsher. Yet studies have shown that a milder punishment that happens more swiftly and with higher certainty is much better for preventing crime.
Not sure that helps with mentally ill homeless but it's at least an improvement we could aim for
This is what China has done. Aside from drug crimes it doesn't seem like they punish any harsher than the rest of the world, they just have an incredibly good ability to follow up. If you smash the window of a store, they will find you and you'll have to pay for it. Just the knowledge that there is an almost 100% chance of having to pay to restore anything you break seems all that's needed to stop the destruction of public spaces.
On the less extreme end, Europe also has much higher rates of catching criminals and punishes then less. I understand the US is really the outlier.
I read an interesting article that laid out how that's ultimately rooted in what level of government pays for what. It's easier for local politicians to call for harsher punishment because prisons are run by state or federal but police is funded locally.
It simultaneously is and isn't. It's overfunded on things that don't matter for the problem at hand - traffic enforcement using full fledged officers in expensive vehicles, militarized SWAT teams, regulations requiring huge officer presence at all events, etc. But it's underfunded on what would change things for the better - foot patrols, investigation, etc.
This is why you can get pulled over for a broken taillight in the US and have 3 police cars behind you complete with a K9 unit, but if that same car gets stolen, you'll probably get asked to make a report and never hear a peep from the police again.
Look at officers per 100k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
France has 422, Germany 349, Italy 456, US 242. There are countries that are super safe like Japan and Singapore with only 255 and 174 but I think it's safe to say that the US probably is better compared to France here. China also has only 258 but I think they make up for it through surveillance which isn't welcome in the US.
The US also doesn't train police officers well compared to most European countries. In the US it takes just a few months to become a police officer. In Germany it takes years.
The thing there that the West has not been able to accept to achieve this is the surveillance state. Just look at Flock.
I'm not sure anyone has really cracked how to get it done without that part, though certainly tweaking the spending from prisons to police would help a lot. The trouble in the US at least is people (rightly) don't trust police, and don't want to give them more power, so it also needs to be paired with reform on that front for the population to accept it.
Because cameras alone do nothing useful, and there's precious little evidence these are being used to help address petty vandalism.
The UK already went down this road years ago - cameras everywhere, public restrooms nowhere, prompt and automatic ticketing for parking violations but precious little in the way of assistance from humans should you need it. The shut-in dotage of a former empire too afraid to leave its house.
I'm just not sure that stronger punishment and enforcement is going to be the answer here. It seems like many of the Asian cultures have a much higher level of social cohesion even without the threat of punishment. How do we get (back) to higher social cohesion in the West? I recall seeing a film of a shanty town somewhere in the US during the Great Depression. It was very neat and tidy. What happened between then and now?
Which Asian cultures are you speaking about which have high social cohesion without threat of punishment? Singapore will punish anti-social behaviour like vandalism with mandatory caning, or fine you heavily for jay walking. In Japan police will intervene much more readily in cases of public intoxication and even noise complaints.
For more serious anti social behaviour like gun crimes, violent crimes and drug trafficking there are very strong mandatory penalties up to and including corporal punishment and execution.
Conviction rates in these countries are upwards of 99%. So in cases of intervention a punishment is almost certain.
Stronger punishments? Probably not, but better enforcement? I believe so.
It has repeatedly been shown that the severity of punishment does not sway crime nearly as much as the certainty of punishment does [1]. This all feels like a byproduct of the hyper-individualism we have in the West and the US, especially.
Indeed. Wasn't there a study where a policeman stationed on a street corner decreased crime or something even if he was just standing there doing nothing? Like a scarecrow effect.
Of course people will come out and scream Gestapo! And talk about their freedoms, but are the only two choices in life complete anarchy and a police state? Can't we live somewhere in the middle like a reasonable society? It's really just slippery slope fallacies all the time like either we don't police at all or do north korea style surveillance.
Also the demonization of police, the need is to have better police, not no police! It's just absurd what people come up with, it's so unreasonable yet these ideas gain such a large following.
there are police booths on many street corners in urban areas of china. they're very common, and people don't act afraid of them. the most common interaction you see is people asking them for directions
Sorry I don't understand your reply. Are you agreeing with me? The police booth is not to make you afraid. The idea is that it would deter pickpockets and other petty crime just by being there, regardless of whether the booth was meant to do so or not. Yes it could just be a almost retired security guard inside giving out directions but that would still work better than nothing at all.
America has a low social cohension because of global immigration instead of targeted immigration compare to China. America use to share a culture because people came from the same places and shared the same religion and had a common history going back to the Romans.
....sadly more true than anyone here would probably like to admit. I love having Indian coworkers and there’s a large Indian population where I am at, but they are just completely separated in every single way from everyone else. and they keep it that way.
my Pakistani coworkers are absolutely wonderful. Sweet, hard-working, very enjoyable to talk to, but their families and lives are just a totally different universe and they don’t share it.
The honestly very poor black community around the area? they fucking hate us white people. like actively, all the time, no what no matter what you have or haven’t done they don’t like your ass one bit. i’ve seen inside some of the homes, and they are filled with independent black power movie posters about shooting Whitey. No kidding.
I know it takes a village, but when people are so very different and forced to be near each other, it doesn’t mean that they will socialize or help each other; it’s like living on two different planets. there’s all kinds of social research showing this now, and what you get is micro segregation along income lines, rather than everyone helping each other and lifting up the community together.
I wanted for most of my life for people to get along and the world to be a better place, thinking that education and modern access to information could somehow make things better. It seems that was entirely and completely wrong. when people have any kind of discomfort at all about new culture or new person or new idea? They pretty much just run away.
The people here on hacker news are probably an exception, because we are here searching for commentary and interesting ideas and new information.
This is exactly my experience. I moved into a black neighborhood and it's real bad for me. My neighbor, a white elderly woman, organizes sort of community events, but it's 90% white people from nicest houses.
> The honestly very poor black community around the area? they fucking hate us white people. like actively, all the time, no what no matter what you have or haven’t done they don’t like your ass one bit.
Did you replace folks' smoke detector batteries for them?
The way I found to get around this prejudice was to go to church most Sundays and walk around with a sling bag full of 9V batteries and knock on doors to offer to maintain smoke detectors. (It probably didn't hurt that I was also good for bumming cigarettes off of and slowing down to have a chat.)
YMMV, but showing up and doing work was apparently what my neighbors in East St. Louis and Atlanta wanted.
It's something of a meme that's grounded in reality, but it's honestly less grounded in race and ethnicity than it is in socioeconomic status.
That said, there's a joke that the white people version of this is the little bug in the lower right corner of the Windows desktop background that tattles on you for not having activated.
Its true im many places. First generation hard working. Second generation lives in the inprint of the first generation. Third generation has no connection to the original homeland and tries to find connection or it turns to antisocial behaviour.
Worth specifying that this also applies to the "good" immigrants such as the Poles, not just the much vilified Muslims. The kids of Polish immigrants really struggle. And if you go a generation back, the Vietnamese boat refugees had similar issues: their kids really had issues, there were Vietnamese criminal gangs in Oslo in the 90s. The ex-Yugoslav organized crime groups were maybe more notable in that they were often first generation, but they're mostly a memory too by now.
Then there's the "hapas", children of Asian women who immigrated by marrying native men. Scandinavia hasn't seen much trouble with them - yet. But I think there's some danger here, online I've seen some worrying communities.
I think identity rootlessness is an underestimated factor in immigration woes. Youth of all kinds can often be exploited into adopting a destructive self-identity, but some groups are more vulnerable. One notorious Swedish gang actively recruits from the foster care system.
I think less people expected those to cause generational trouble and so a common pro-migration argument 1-2 decades ago was that these people from mena regions would assimilate. After all the people from (in our case italy) mostly already did.
It's wild to see how this flipped completely around in such a short time and now some markers of integration seem to go backwards and at the same time some consider it biggoted to demand/expect assimilation.
You only have to look at Trump; third generation immigrant.
His grandfather made his fortune by operating a restaurant and a brothel for miners in Whitehorse during the Gold Rush years, his father compounded that with an actual real estate 'empire' and the grandson 'earnt' money via dodgy wealth transfer schemes and sank much of it into get rich quick scams and branding deals based on fraudulent representation and money laundering, now leading the country in historic levels of open corruption.
Ok, this is very different from the situation in Sweden.
Many were analphabets and live completely segregated from mainstream society with little hope(or wish) to integrate with Swedish society.
I agree with your analysis of the Trump family who have been detrimental for US society.
Near as I can tell, Trump III is also an analphabet, living completely segregated from mainstream society with little hope(or wish) to integrate with Swedish society (or US for that matter).
Questions for Sweden might be "How did the US integrate all the illiterate Irish?" (and should they do the same), "How did Australia integrate many non English speaking / writing Vietnamese 'boat people'?", etc.
Unless Sweden in majority is prepared to broom out all that they have accepted in, then this how it is, a mix of cultures having to find common directions and minimise friction over the next generation and a half.
It's probably the difference you can also notice between Switzerland and Germany for example. Take rough sleeping: in Germany it's there (no, not LA-style but still noticeable). In Switzerland they get immediately rounded up and taken to a shelter, no "muh freedom" discussion just housed. Add warm meals and a community and the light at the end of the tunnel starts to be be noticed. Of course mentally ill will come out again, so at some point they will have to be institutionalized. Nobody belongs on the streets, no matter what the gop is telling.
> we incarcerate people at a higher rate than any other advanced nation, BY FAR
Crime is committed at a higher rate than in any other advanced nation, though some of the others are catching up.
> The idea that we are soft on crime is insane
Not even a little bit insane. There are a million criminal laws on the books that do not get enforced at all. For example, I live in a state that is stereotypically conservative and "tough on crime" and any marijuana-related products are strictly illegal, most often at the felony level; yet I constantly smell it while driving on the road, no less! People are smoking while driving all the time. This cannot be described as anything but soft on crime.
The US system was overall built by and for people who are largely self-governing. This philosophy gets in the way of a true hard-on-crime pivot.
You don't go to jail for possession of weed in most US states. You won't even go to jail for dealing unless you've been busted multiple times or you're moving heavy weight.
When you see statistics about people incarcerated on marijuana charges, what they normally obscure is either that's not the only charge or they pled down from something more serious.
There isn't a single person in federal custody there for marijuana possession and only that.
People _2000 years_ ago were writing books about why this is not true, but in the year 2026 there's still people saying "just give them the death penalty bro"....
Over here where I live(UK) it's neither the homeless nor mentally ill people, it's groups of teenagers who have literally nothing else to do and they will destroy every single piece of public infrastructure that isn't solid metal and welded down. Even keep them out of children play parks is a challenge the local police can't manage effectively, I love finding that every single swing and seesaw has been ruined because of bored teenagers.
I dunno, this could be it but living in rural Ireland showed how many obnoxious teenagers will completely destroy a playground just for kicks. I'm sure a public toilet would fall prey to the same impulse.
How many of their homeless are addicted to drugs or nectary ill? It seems in the US almost all visible homeless fall into at least one of those groups.
Fentanyl and meth seems to be largely a North America issue. I previously was curious how other countries dealt with it. The only country I found that had previously had a meth issue was Estonia or Latvia (not sure anymore). It apparently was really bad for years. They fixed it by finding the single meth lab. Not a solution that's viable for us.
No idea what Japan does with its homeless but my money is that it's something like forced admission which isn't gonna fly in the US.
> Fentanyl and meth seems to be largely a North America issue. I previously was curious how other countries dealt with it.
It isn't a particular drug: if it isn't Fentanyl or meth it will be something else, whatever is available. In the UK it is a mixed bag, but for many the problem substance is alcohol which isn't controllable the way other drugs are because of it being legal and so commonly used in a non (or at least less) problematic manner.
The problem hits from two directions: many homeless people start the path to addiction by needing an escape and that escape method spirals and takes control, and a lot (not the majority by any means, but a sizable segment) end up destitute because of spiralling substance problems to start with.
Of course many homeless do not have a substance problem, or at least not one that would be insurmountable on its own. Financial issues (that wouldn't go away if you strip the cost of the illicit substances out, accommodation is not cheap and suitable jobs are not readily available, etc) and mental illness (separating this from drug issues is complex: "self medication" is of course a major complicating matter) are probably far more common.
> curious how other countries dealt with it
Not well, for the most part. From an outsiders PoV (sat in my small but comfortable flat with the paid mortgage and no drug issues, though the mental health thing needs work) it doesn't seem to be a bad as it has been in the past (maybe in part due to efforts to make it less visible rather than fixing the issues?) but is growing again and I suspect will do so more rapidly if AI does what it promises to the job market.
Most Asian countries are pretty serious about keeping drugs out of their countries. In Japan's case it's a little easier since they're an island nation.
You can get a life sentence there for first offense import or manufacture of narcotics. Beyond that, your family will suffer socially.
Japan will lock people up for a long period of time if they show the sort of anti-social behavior that the most visible homeless people in North America are famous for.
The US “locks people up” at a much higher rate, and for longer, than Japan does. About 1% of the adult population is in jail in the United States, and it’s about 0.03% of the population in Japan. The US puts people in jail at 30x the rate Japan does.
It is not because the US doesn’t lock people up enough.
Japan has one of the highest numbers of psychiatric beds in the world. That's what I'm referring to. If you're experiencing psychosis in public in Japan, you will be removed from public spaces. This is not true in the US.
We are not talking jail, we are talking closed institution. The kind of hospital you check in but do not check out from, as many mental illnesses are incurable.
Buddy, I can deprive you of several days of sleep, put you under severe emotional duress and have you experience a psychotic breakdown. Are you seriously saying you yourself should then be locked up for life?
That is 1% of adults being CURRENTLY locked up, not people who have ever been locked up in their life. That means the stat already factors in how long they are in for.
I tried to find some information about how Japan manages to get away from criticisms around forced labor in prison. It seems like Japan does have very poorly paid labor, as little as usd 0.05 an hour, but the incarceration rate is low.
Once again, I don't know much about Japan but I doubt there is a large ethnic minority that is only about fifteen percent of the population but somehow accounts for almost half of all incarcerated people in Japan.
From Google:
> Low Incarceration Rates: Japan maintains one of the lowest incarceration rates in the developed world (roughly 35 to 40 prisoners per 100,000 residents, compared to over 500 per 100,000 in the US).
My first thought is, I'm not certain their homeless are different in their behavior, but based on what little I know, I'm rather certain their non-homeless are. I'd expect disruption or damage to a public space of the kind that sparked this discussion to be dealt with swiftly as a high priority.
I don't know much about this, but when I visited Japan, I walked aimlessly in the outskirts of Tokyo (Sumida city) until I ended up in a homeless area. They had used old palettes and tarps to build square houses with functioning doors, and it was surprisingly clean. Their shoes were neatly lined up against the walls, they used trash bags and the ground was clean. It was quite a culture shock, because it was cleaner than non-homeless streets at home.
You can't build that kind of shanty town in the US because the cops will come and steal all your shit. Otherwise it's exactly what homeless people in the US want to be able to do.
Often times, these "sweeps" just trash everything. Imagine if you were trying to put your life back together. You got an Obamaphone so you can call state assistance programs and email job prospects. You have some basic clothes, maybe some food, maybe some few possessions you have saved from your past life.
Then the cops come and take all of it and throw it away.
Gee, I wonder why it's so hard for people to escape homelessness in the US?
Imagine trying to live any life in a world that rejected your right to property?
That’s my exact point. Our culture in the west breeds isolation and antisocial chaos in a not insignificant percent of the population. Part of it os undoubtedly the vast differences between Japanese and American culture
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Anti-social people as a group is a larger population than just the homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts, though these subsets are obviously a significant portion. The superset includes people who are genuinely anti-social in their nature, may be nominally employed, have a mailing address, and a place to sleep at night. These are the people we actually surrendered to when we changed enforcement priorities in major US cities to, ostensibly, have some grace and compassion toward the subset of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts. This is a demonstrably true statement. For me, and many like me, I know it's true because I can do something like "walk around in a neighborhood from my youth" or "visit a downtown corridor I used to frequent as a young adult" and simply observe the difference between the then and now. It's not always about the homeless, and the oft tiring debate around what to do about them. In many US cities, larceny is de facto legal as long as you are stealing goods valued under a certain amount. This is what people are talking about when they use the word "surrender".
I assume you're talking about software engineers, because in every office I've worked in the toilets have been absolutely filthy by mid-morning.
At my current place there are boot marks on top of the toilet seat that have been there for weeks, put there by one of the 10 people in the company.
I think we can just apply the broken windows theory here. If whoever's responsible for the toilet doesn't demonstrate that they care about its state of cleanliness and repair, the people using the toilet won't care about that either.
There's tons of Indians in Cupertino and Mountain View as well, so I don't know what your comment was trying to prove, apart from openly displaying your prejudice and racism.
I was picking up some lumber today (USA) and they were blaring some country song about "Try that in a small town" which was basically a gun owner's fantasy about shooting people. One of the lines was something like "we look out for our own". And that right there describes half the USA: outsiders not welcomed. ingroup/outgroup is nothing new, and its not like any country has really fixed it, and the countries that have seemed to "figure it out" are wildly racist (Nordic countries, Japan, etc.) or authoritarian (China), but that's that underlying attitude: it an outsider's fault. And even IF you are "one of their own" and you fall off the wagon, you find yourself with a bus ticket to a Blue State sanctuary city courtesy of your local Red Leaders.
I live in a city that is a dumping ground where Red States have bussed the homeless populations -- out of sight out of mind -- and even before this, homelessness was a growing due to skyrocketing rents, medical costs, and simply falling behind the treadmill. And now gave crazy new drugs, crazy new inflation, and even more unchecked greed, there's really no stopping this so called "antisocial" behavior.
Why care about a society when it doesn't give a fuck about you>?
Then again, when I was in college in the mid-80s, Freshman year a bunch of young white engineering boys in my dorm were laughing about how they smeared shit all over the bathroom walls of a McDonalds. So, it's been going on forever, but now the scale is massive. I include "white" because a lot of people think this is a non-white, non-rich, non-christian problem.
That thing about cities bussing their homeless elsewhere seems to be a pretty common urban myth. I don't think anyone has really shown that it's definitively happening on any large scale manner. And it should be relatively easy to show given that governments publish their budgets.
So not exactly the same thing, but in the Phoenix metro area the homeless population probably triples during the months when it's not 100 degrees plus. I've always assumed, with no evidence whatsoever, that there's some NGO that moves homeless from more northern latitudes to southern ones, and back, depending on the season, mostly because it just makes sense.
Governor Rick Perry of Texas openly bragged about bussing the state's homeless to California for years.
Abbot does the same thing; he simply doesn't brag about it anymore.
The LAT did a series of articles (back in 2018, and sporadically since then) in which Steve Lopez tried to humanize the homeless in Hollywood. It took him over 2 days to find someone who has actually a local. The vast majority of the homeless came from...Texas. They were given bus tickets by local authorities and told that California would overlook their drug issues and even give them free drugs.
The last census I saw of the Los Angeles homeless population found that the percentage of homeless people in LA that were never housed in LA was higher than either the percentage of homeless people who had a severe mental illness or substance abuse issue.
My understanding is a lot of it is voluntary migration. If you you're not paying rent, you don't have a job, and you've burned all your social support ties, you might as well get a greyhound to a place with good weather, good social services, and where people will look the other way on your visible symptoms of mental illness and drug addictions.
What I want to know is if anyone can identify when exactly the homeless issue became so bad. It was already a problem when I lived in the Bay, and when I moved back to the East Coast it had been 10 years in the making (conveniently when I was away). Clearly there a some sharp lines that can be drawn somewhere. But it's hard to get some actual answers.
Edit: rough clauding indicates it was when fentanyl took off, but idk, that doesn't seem wholly accurate.
It began in 1953 when thorazine was introduced on the premise that it would allow previously institutionalized people to live normal lives with only outpatient care. This turbocharged the movement to shutter mental institutions, and their populations began to crater around 1956. [0]
For a lot of people, thorazine and its descendants have been nothing short of miraculous and have lived up to the promise. But not for everyone, and in the name of charity and respect for individual autonomy, we have chosen to allow these people to either live in awful conditions and fend for themselves or do something prison-worthy.
So, while there isn’t great data on homelessness from before the 21st century, the root cause of much of it - a societal refusal to recognize certain people as requiring lifelong care for mental illness - begins in 1953.
[0] https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe...
When it became unfashionable to put mentally ill people in asylums. The additional fashion of "giving local people a voice" in construction projects planning did not help either.
It became unfashionable when the general public realized it was also commonly used to, say, lock up and lobotomize women for wanting to vote, or divorce their husband.
The problem regarding putting mentally ill people in asylums is who gets to decide who is mentally ill? I mean that's literally incarcerating people for thoughtcrime. If people have committed no crime, how can we justify taking away their freedom?
Ideally we would have a way for people who can't take care of themselves, or hold a job to be taken care of that isn't effectively putting them in prison.
Mental "asylums" that were almost as bad (and sometimes worse) than prisons is clearly bad. But just leaving people to live on the streets or end up in actual prisons isn't strictly better.
I'm not saying we should bring back the asylums, at least the way they were, but there should be a better way to take care of people who aren't able to care for themselves.
Bring them back! Yes they were bad and got abused,
but not doing them is worse. Bring them back, spend so much money on them that the abuses of the system are monitored tracked reported and fixed and then fire the people who abuse the system. That takes political capital and will that doesn't exist, but the Overton window isn't going to move in its own.
Exactly and once you're in the asylum the doctors can lobotomize and drug you to the point of insanity. People used to abuse the system to get rid of family members they had an inheritance dispute with.
Well, historically we did this by hand waving away all that and just letting some evil system take care of it out of sight out of mind, who cares how the sausage is made if you never see the factory.
That's not really an option now since the last people to blindly believe in institutions to that extent are the boomers and it'd be a tough sell to even them.
Feels like it’s been a last ten years thing in Portland too - covid locked in the whole “it’s okay for people to pitch a tent on the sidewalk and set warming fires” thing
FWIW you should clarify: do you mean mentally unstable people on streets, or do you mean any form of homelessness (living in cars, surfing on friends couch, etc). Because that second category is much larger and includes a lot of sincere people who are basically just priced out of the area that grew up in
It's a theory that labs in Mexico switched back over to P2P 'biker' meth (instead of the old stuff based on cough/flu meds) and that the new meth is causing progressive brain damage to users.
> I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them.
Or a consistent race-based or immigrant underclass caste. A lot of countries have the blessing of not having a large population whom they can dismiss the condition of based on visual cues. They just moved from feudalism to universal humanism in one generation.
Whatever bad things you can say about China or Taiwan, they both think slavery is wrong and kings are childish. Somehow the west never caught up. Still having that debate, still trying to justify why their great-grandpas killed those people. China left Mao behind; and the US is still praying to slaveholders and mocking slaves' children, while eating their inheritance.
> It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that.
The west were slavers. They literally auctioned off women to have sex with (the "fancy trade") and put children (sometimes their own) into the fields for life. When some got the morality to be disgusted by that, it resulted in bloody wars (I would even include the wars Germany really started because it lost the colony race.) Their civil society was rife with sundown towns, and in Europe actual death factories were designed to murder civilians.
The west is run by degenerates and venerates degenerates. Until it faces that properly, it will never be safe. China did that.
> the cumulative sacrifices made on the alter of our huge antisocial populations
It's "altar," and the cliché usually refers to wasted efforts to preserve something (generally an abstract ideal.) Nobody is trying to preserve "antisocial populations." They're usually trying to dispose of the old ones after using them up, and to get new ones in who still can't vote. Ironically, the "antisocial populations" are also the ones who clean the toilets.
>Whatever bad things you can say about China or Taiwan, they both think slavery is wrong and kings are childish.
I remember China being pretty racist. A lot of people visiting got a clear message. Not aggressively but quite clear.
>The west were slavers.
Who sold them the slaves? Did Europeans go hunt for slaves or did they buy them? Who did they buy them from?
Also answer this, if Americans wouldn't have bought the African slaves, all those African-Americans that are now enjoying life in the land of the free, where would they have been born today? Think if they could push a button today to wipe slavery from the past, but that meant they get to spawn back in Africa, they would push it or not? Legitimate question. Because it's not like nothing good came out of it.
> Also answer this, if Americans wouldn't have bought the African slaves, all those African-Americans that are now enjoying life in the land of the free, where would they have been born today? Think if they could push a button today to wipe slavery from the past, but that meant they get to spawn back in Africa, they would push it or not? Legitimate question. Because it's not like nothing good came out of it.
The reason that Africa is in a poor state of affairs is because of rampant colonization and pillaging by European settlers, of which enslavement was a byproduct. In your alternate universe where slavery never happened, Ethiopia and Mali would be wealthy empires.
The Mali Empire peaked around 150 years before Christopher Columbus "discovers" the Americas, and it finally collapses in 1599, finished off by Morocco. The Transatlantic Slave Trade doesn't really kick into gear until the mid-17th centuries, after the Mali Empire is no longer around.
If you wanted a better example, you might have picked, say, Benin. That you use Mali as an example of an empire screwed by Europeans in Africa suggests to me a general poverty of knowledge about any pre-colonial African history.
Benin is probably the most well known of the slaver kingdoms of the slave coast, although Benin was around for much longer than just the peak slaving period.
Mali Empire was primarily driven by its control of the trans-Saharan trade routes, at least the southern end of them, which allowed it to profit immensely from the gold and salt trades.
>The reason that Africa is in a poor state of affairs is because of rampant colonization and pillaging by European settlers, of which enslavement was a byproduct.
You are moving the goalpost and just make up stuff. Plenty of time to ... do anything, yet nothing has really been done there. If they are so great they should have been able to defend themselves. If you want to keep the discussion real and objective, feelings aside.
I am also not trying to excuse past behaviors or anything of the sorts. It was what it was and we always strive to do better when we know better. But that being said, systems are built around what is functional considering everything that can happen. When you account for everything to insure your safety and survival, it seems to work out like it did. On all sides.
And again, these interactions are never one way, longer term there's benefits to both sides, the local country, and descendants of all slaves and slave owners.
And just as an aside, I could very well argue most of us are still slaves today, but with clearly way better conditions and freedom of movement. But if you don't toil away daily, 5 days a week, you risk medical issues or lack of shelter, kind of like the homeless discussion in this thread. In some cases even death.
So putting what a few rich people from hundreds of years ago did, on me, a regular European folk, is shortsighted or even evil. I had nothing to do with any of it, my ancestors were peasants. And the same is valid for most people OP is referring to when saying "europeans". It's pure nonsense.
Antisocial people who destroy the public facility don't just come out of nowhere. People get driven to this. Not to say that you can simply ignore them when they're already everywhere, though.
Usually if you are extremely poor or extremely rich there are no consequences for you. The extremely poor are desperate and have nothing to lose, society already took everything from them. The extremely rich are above the law. As inequality increases crime increases with it, from vandalism to financial crimes.
This is why equality is so important. When the average Joe has a good job, good salary, and a home then can lose things that society has helped him to get and can take away.
A simple and unremarkable person could once upon a time have their basic factory job (or similar), make enough to own their home, and have a decent unremarkable life with their family. I think the pressures of housing costs or rent and other costs of living squeezed those people, often to distress. It's obviously not the entirety of a solution, but it's surely part of it.
"People" are not some evil force that fundamentally grows antisocial when not kept in check. There's overwhelming evidence that people want to be good. There are entire countries of good people that treat their people well, where even criminals don't become antisocial like this. (Example: Norway)
People act bad like this not because they're any more particularly free to, but because they're given incentives to. People get slighted by their county, state or the federal government, and everybody else shuns them. It's normal and practically expected to ignore homeless people, for example, and even blame them for their condition. The rich and the lucky are hostile and entitled, while the poor and mentally ill are harassed and taken advantage of. People get radicalized, even trained to commit worse crimes by what's expected of them. Nothing else gets attention or achieves anything.
It's never been about consequences, people do this whether it'll get them 25 years or not. People do this whether they'll get caught or not. They do it because they think it needs to be done, they think it's deserved and they want to get back for everything that's been taken from them and caused to them. And for that, everybody hates them and treats them like everything that's wrong with the country. When in reality, what's wrong with the country is what's creating people like this. Seeing violent criminals makes me sad for what they suffered, not angry at them for being the problem.
Culture is a significant part of how people end up this way, yes. Culture is not, however, a get-out-of-jail-free card that excuses the conditions that cause people to become like this.
'Social' isn't 'nobody annoys me'; it's empathy for, caring about, and helping others, especially those you don't like - otherwise it means nothing.
I'm in the West, and I support liberty - the defining feature of the West - uber alles; it's their right. I'm not threatening others' freedom so you can feel more at ease. (You are more of a problem for them - they can't have you locked up.)
There has to be a line draw somewhere. Generally people who say this don't actually have regular interactions with aggressive, hostile, homeless. Or are you just really cool with going to a coffee shop and have someone screaming in a pile of their own feces 20 or so feet away?
Living in Seattle, people focus a lot on the homeless because it's an obvious problem. The guy screaming at the corner, or the people sleeping on the sidewalk.
But I personally think people miss that its a symptom of greater social rot. I've had more issues with antisocial car drivers than any homeless individual. People screaming profanities because I'm crossing the street with the walk signal active, people narrowly missing me as they speed to work. Just yesterday my entire block lost power because a drunk asshole tboned another car going 75mph, killing a family of four while nearly shearing a utility pole.
The reality is that even if the line is drawn with the homeless the undercurrent of social rot is still there and it's not getting better. And I don't see people calling for car drivers to be institutionalized, quite the opposite in most cases even when they commit homicide.
In a lot of large cities, local governments reacted to the 2020-2023 protests against police brutality by drastically reducing traffic enforcement. Aggressive drivers can get away with a lot more bad behavior now and have little fear of consequences. When voters elect leaders like Katie Wilson this is one of the inevitable consequences.
1. The cities didn't 'react' to those protests by reducing enforcement, cops started quiet-quitting.[1]
2. Katie Wilson was elected last fucking year, replacing a pro-cop, pro-establishment incumbent, whereas the usual suspects have been bitching about Seattle for decades. Par for the course, of course, the usual newspapers were running hit pieces about how her failed policies have ruined the city a day after she took office, without a shred of self-reflection.
[1] Wasn't so long ago that Seattle's top-paid cop ($390,000/year!) was caught collecting overtime by napping in her car... Illegally parked in the middle of a bus-only lane. (I guess that's also Katie's fault, despite it being a year prior to her election.)
I haven't heard of that, other than laws banning pulling people over for minor mechanical issues like broken tailights (used sometimes as coverup for prejudice). Could you give examples?
> Aggressive drivers can get away with a lot more bad behavior now and have little fear of consequences.
I haven't noticed driving getting worse, except around the pandemic. Is there data?
This is just false, considering I've lived across the US. My experience has been pretty universally the same whether or not I lived in Texas, Virginia or Washington. People that are incredibly sheltered like to believe that it's unique to their city, or the result of partisan politics but the reality is that the rot is deeper than that. One of the most famous examples was in deep red Texas: Ethan Couch.
There is something not right with many Seattle-area residents. Some weird combination of anger issues, low self-esteem, and terrible driving skills. I moved to SoCal earlier this year and have seen much less rage and incompetence on the roads. I don’t get flipped off on a daily basis anymore for driving a particular polarizing electric car. No more pairs of Subarus going 5-10 under, blocking the whole road and inducing rage in the lineup of cars.
The primary shelter for my city is across the road from me. All the strung out, chronic homeless people hang out next door at the post office, because it's public property. They also hang out around my building, on the two streets around it.
There is never shit. There are no needles. These people leave you alone. They are literally insane and on absurd drugs, but they leave you alone.
Why is this true in Portland Maine, but not Portland Oregon?
I see and interact with apparently unhoused people all the time, and I've never had a problem.
> someone screaming in a pile of their own feces 20 or so feet away?
This is a hypothetical, and follows a typical pattern of trying to box people into a response using a situation that effectively never happens. It's like people asking if you'd support torture 'if you knew there was a bomb in an elementary school somewhere in NY, but didn't know which one'. That's never happened.
I have had many apparently housed people yell at or even threaten me, and almost run me over.
So I've never seen it or anything like it, spending lots of time in many neighborhoods of many cities. Human shit, to provoke an emotional reaction (of disgust) at other humans, is a favorite of the anti-freedom crowd. It's not the unhoused people, generally the most vulnerable people I know and encounter, that disgust me.
The problem is that once you draw "the line", then what? Warehouse a bunch of helpless people in overcrowded prisons? Bus them to some other less-draconian municipality? Forcibly drug them into quasi-submission and then turn them loose again until the depot injection wears off? Or perhaps we should "just kill 'em", as Fox & Friends cohost Brian Kilmeade once suggested?
If they are committing crimes, they should be imprisoned for an appropriate period of time as a deterrent to crime, a punishment for their actions, and to facilitate rehabilitation (even though evidence shows this doesn't really happen).
If they are mentally ill and unable to care for themselves or pose a threat to the community because of their mental illness, they should be institutionalized and treated. If they are able to be released into the community after a period of time, checks should be performed to ensure compliance with treatment/medication.
The most important part of incarceration is removing what is a quantifiable risk to the public from the public square. Everything else is secondary. The point of a state having police powers is to ensure for the common good, it is not to continually indulge those who wish to damage that common good. To the extent that the state is responsible for e.g. punishment and rehabilitation, these are ancillary responsibilities that are (or were) downstream from removing threats to the common good from the public square.
Seems like, after all of these police and prosecutorial "reforms", we are back to deriving why many state powers exist from first principles. Fun to watch in real time.
Lacking a house isn't a threat to others. I've rarely seen an unhoused people do harm. Annoying you isn't harm. Making rich people uncomfortable isn't a crime.
> common good
A term used to justify taking away liberty from people you don't like - 'it might take away their rights, but it's good for people in 'common''. The point of government, as Jefferson eloquently put it in the document that birthed the US, is to protect people's rights.
"I've rarely seen an unhoused people do harm" is an absurd statement.
It's an old study, but Martell in Base-rate estimates of criminal behavior by homeless mentally ill persons in New York City found that "The rate of violent crimes was 40 times higher and the rate of nonviolent crimes 27 times higher in the homeless population".
Most people don't like mentally ill homeless people who commit violent crime at a rate 40 times higher than average. Remind me what right in the Constitution enshrines your ability to crack the skull of a 70 year old nurse on the ground, then wander off and go to sleep? https://abcnews.com/US/70-year-nurse-killed-random-assault-b...
> It's an old study, but Martell in Base-rate estimates of criminal behavior by homeless mentally ill persons in New York City found that "The rate of violent crimes was 40 times higher and the rate of nonviolent crimes 27 times higher in the homeless population".
It is indeed old (1995 [0]) and that's not what the paper studied or concluded. First, the study did not gather data on the homeless population, but on mentally ill people already in the criminal justice system:
* "The authors analyzed data from ... records of 77 homeless defendants and 107 domiciled defendants referred for psychiatric examination by the criminal and supreme courts ..."
Second, the paper's goals were to gather needed data on homelessness among mentally ill people in the criminal justice system, and to examine the interactions between homelessness and crime among mentally ill people:
* "The study aimed to estimate the prevalence of homelessness among mentally disordered offenders entering the criminal justice andforensic mentalhealth systems, to compare base rates of arrest for violent and nonviolent criminal charges among homeless and domiciled persons with mental illness, and to examine patterns in the categories of victims chosen ..."
Third, the conclusion was that, among mentally ill people generally (not only those charged [1]) those homeless were ~35x more likely to be charged with crimes than those domiciled, and it was somwhat even more likely that those crimes would be violent or against strangers (there's more detail in the paper). The paper says nothing about crime among the homeless population generally.
> absurd
> crack the skull of a 70 year old nurse
Do pejoratives and outrage make it more persuasive or less? More importantly, do they make it more likely or less likely that you find and express truth?
I think much less likely, because it means 1) You are dismissing a lot of information, 2) You are not examining the matter thoughtfully (being outraged), and 3) You likely have little better argument.
That also makes it less persuasive to people who are thinking critically.
[0] When crime rates were much higher. The paper: Martell, D. A., Rosner, R., & Harmon, R. B. (1995). Base-rate estimates of criminal behavior by homeless mentally ill persons in New York City. Psychiatric Services, 46(6), 596–601. https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.46.6.596
[1] Note that they gathered data only on mentally ill people charged with crimes and not on the general population of mentally ill people. The latter group's data they took from the same author's prior research.
Look, if you make a claim - that homeless people are dangerous - then the burden of proof is on you.
A scientist doesn't say, 'there's life on Venus, prove me wrong'. A lawyer doesn't say 'you burnt down the house, prove me wrong'. They have to prove their claim. Otherwise, nobody responds - in science they'd be ignored, in court the defense doesn't even need to say a word.
Otherwise, we just don't know. I gave you the respect of taking your argument seriously, and of finding and reading your citation, even as you were hurling abuse and outrage (and maybe hadn't read it yourself, it seems). If you will step up now and contribute, you'll find a welcome reception and an interesting life and discussion. You can contribute. Someone else probably cited that quote and paper, and didn't read it, and look where it left you. You can do better than them, you can find some actual truth - and we'd both learn things, I'm certain.
But now you just don't know, admit it. Your assertion is possible of course, but IME it's also possible otherwise - homeless people are among the most vulnerable. For example, is the crime rate among homeless people more or less than the crime rate in corporate executive offices or on Wall Street or in the offices of elected representatives - I could see it either way. I just don't know.
You gave an anecdote that "I've rarely seen an unhoused people do harm". I'm saying do you have any evidence beyond your assertion from personal experience that homeless people are safe?
You're making a claim that homeless people are safe, a claim that flies in the face of most people's experience and common sense.
It also flies in the face of the data:
"In 2022 the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office reported that homeless individuals were 514 times more likely to be arrested and charged with a felony and were often facing multiple criminal cases. The data shows substantially higher rates of robbery, residential burglary, assault, arson, and vandalism.
" - https://www.sdcda.org/content/MediaRelease/Homeless%20Data%2...
"Los Angeles Police Department crime data from 2018 to 2021 shows that homeless individuals, while only 1 percent of the population, are suspects in 6 to 8 percent of all crimes and 11 to 15 percent of violent crimes."
- https://abc7.com/feature/homeless-crime-los-angeles-data-res...
You're welcome to admit you are wrong about the precious "unhoused" who are committing assault at a rate 130x times greater than normal people in San Diego, or you can keep trying to deflect about Wall Street. $20 says you're the same type of person that thinks a pitbull is a safe nanny dog.
The contempt seems like a pattern - toward homeless people, toward me, toward facts and anything and everyone else that don't fit what you want. It's not persuasive or interesting, and contempt seems pretty strongly correlated with not knowing, learning (essential to knowing), or caring about the actual facts or anyone else. It's also not respectful and incompatible with freedom - that other people can validly do and think things that make you uncomfortable.
Why would anyone take these comments seriously? Why would I spend my time on them? I think I will be moving on. I hope you have a good rest of your day.
> hey should be imprisoned for an appropriate period of time as a deterrent to crime, a punishment for their actions, and to facilitate rehabilitation (even though evidence shows this doesn't really happen).
And to prevent them from committing crime for some time. That might need to be a very, very long time. It is the most important reason to lock people up, sometimes.
I think you need to fix the cause not treat the symptom. I mean you should treat the symptoms as well, while fixing the cause of the issue.
Atm it seems everyone is trying to figure out how to treat the symptom, and they don't even know why, and they keep completely quiet about the cause of it all. Completely and utter mystery, or framed vague and unfixable enough that they do not have to really address it.
What the Swiss did back in the 80's with the heroin program...that's misinterpreted by US and they're specifically trying to mess it up in application. The Swiss didn't just give lab grade heroin to junkies, they ran a serious mental care and social reintegration program and used the heroin as basically bait. You had access to it but you had to go to their facilities where specialized people could start working with you.
What the US is doing is a mockery of that, they want it to fail so they can say it's not working and they shouldn't even try it in the future.
And I think it's quite clear to basically anyone with two neurons what the cause of it is, but authorities there are going to pretend they do not understand it. That it's some mystical unexplainable cause.
Forced rehab if needed and then somewhere they can work to pay their way, learn the skills to help themselves. There's a ton of manual labor that needs doing, potholes to be fixed.
If someone’s forcing society to pay for their living expenses, it only seems fair for society to force them to labor to cover the expenses.
I’m sure the next objection will be “what, so you’re going to concentrate them in some kind of camp?” Yes because that’s the smart thing to do with a large scale problem. Use scalable solutions.
>If someone’s forcing society to pay for their living expenses,
But the mentally unwell person didn't force society to pay for their living expenses. Society decided it couldn't stand them living their life the way they were and locked them up.
Society pays for locking people up because it is done for the benefit of society. The point is that a functioning society is more productive than an unorganized one, and so can afford to do that kind of thing.
> Antisocial behavior is a huge problem in the US.
You'll have to back that up. It's said a lot by people who want to take away freedom from those they dislike, trying to justify it by creating some state of emergency.
Crime is the lowest it's been in the lifetime of most Americans. I do see high antisocial behavior among wealthy, powerful people - should we jail them? They cause a lot more harm than dirty bathrooms.
I kind of never said the problem is too much freedom, in fact I think the problem is unrelenting abuse and neglect rather than lack of control. But I don't have sources on me, I'll try to remember to explain more later.
But, while the toilets aren’t the worst sacrifice, the cumulative sacrifices made on the alter of our huge antisocial populations are profound