Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

https://youtu.be/gcZhmUfDePE

VIDEO EXCERPTS: Homelessness has been rising in America's West Coast cities for more than a decade. [...] the problem is concentrated in a handful of cities. While nationwide, the homeless population has been shrinking for a decade.

To figure out why some places are so much more successful than others, we took a trip to Texas, where the homeless population declined almost 30% over the last decade as it grew by more than 40% in California.

Not only does Texas have vastly different politics and policies from the West Coast, but it's also home to three large cities with three very different approaches to homelessness. Austin, San Antonio, and Houston.

[...] What we found in Texas was [do it yourself] innovation. But the federal government doesn't fund innovation. For decades, it's committed to a one-size-fits-all approach known as Housing First. States like California have followed suit, leaving many charities with a choice to either fall in line or turn down millions in federal funding and state grants.

The result? More people living and dying on the streets as governors and big city mayors promise that the much awaited free permanent housing is just around the corner.

[...] Our first stop was the city of Austin, where progressive activism exists in the shadow of a conservative statehouse. It's a boom and bust town, a magnet for business and tech innovation, which has learned some of Silicon Valley's top performers.

When the ultra-rich moved in, housing prices [in Austin] started to resemble San Francisco's and the homeless population has climbed. Policy wise, Austin has a lot in common with West Coast cities, which helps explain the huge encampments here.

But Austin has an advantage that San Francisco and Los Angeles don't. When you walk over the city line, you're in a more typical Texas municipality, where light touch regulation allows innovative approaches to thrive.

The outskirts of Austin are home to Community First Village, a 51-acre community of tiny homes. The project doesn't rely on federal money and therefore isn't bound by rules imposed by Washington.

[...] The single greatest cause of homelessness is a profound, catastrophic loss of family. The homes are intentionally designed with large front porches within a walkable community to encourage socialization among neighbors.

To live here, residents have to respect the law and follow rules like keeping pets leashed, junk off their driveways and drug use out of the common areas. But behind closed doors, that's their business....

Why homelessness is worse in California than Texas

Portland and Seattle are rife with homelessness as well. Something about West Coast cities that attracts them. Better services. The warm winters. The active cultural scene. Land of bleeding heart liberals. I would probably head there if I were homeless.

In the 1960s, a wave of well-intentioned do-gooders shut insane asylums down. Between activist journalists and several popular novels of the time, the public got the idea that mental hospitals were without exception absolutely horrible places, hell on earth. We still see that idea reflected in some of the horror movies of today.

The biggest problem is that nobody really knows how to treat mental illness. Certainly not the major psychoses. The best that psychiatrists and clinical psychologists can do today is drug mental patients until their worst symptoms subside. Unfortunately the drugs have such devastating side effects that most mental patients would rather live with their symptoms, or self-treat themselves with opioids that while they don't improve the symptoms, make the individual feel good and not care any longer.

These people can't work, can't support themselves, and they end up on the street.

After the mental hospitals disappeared, public assistance used to put them up in cheap hotel rooms, in the 'single room occupancy' residential hotels. But pack too many psychiatric cases into those and they turn into psychiatric hospitals without staff. People screaming incoherently out their windows, assaulting each other and openly dealing drugs. The police were called almost every night.

So cities everywhere tore those residential hotels down as urban renewal measures, to eliminate the urban blight they caused. In San Francisco, they were replaced with upscale condos inhabited by a whole new population. (I guess that's where the greed factors in.)

The few low-end residential hotels remaining today are filled with recent immigrants (often illegal). This different new population causes fewer problems with drugs, assaults or visits by the police, so landlords prefer them. And that's the problem with all the calls for more low cost housing that we hear so often. If they build more low rent housing, it will just attract a new poor population from outside such as third-world immigrants, not the homeless.

So the psychiatric population that was once housed with public-assistance housing vouchers in those places has been forced out onto the streets as their homes were torn down or taken over by new populations.

Then the cities set up homeless shelters. Except that they are so sordid and so dangerous that most homeless people avoid them and prefer to live with their friends in their little encampments where they can use drugs freely, face less confrontation and physical threat and aren't hassled by social workers. Homeless people (especially females) tend to avoid homeless shelters like the plague, for good reason.

In the more distant past, people with psychiatric problems typically were helped by their families. There was always the crazy uncle that everybody avoided but everyone talked about. But they were still family, people felt kind of responsible and their relatives still kind of looked out for them. But today that's fantasy-land. The extended family disappeared 50 or 100 years ago. And more recent feminism has pretty much destroyed the nuclear family as well. Today the public schools are expected to take over the child raising functions once exercised by parents. It's a social experiment that's unprecedented in all of human history and I don't expect it to end well. The point being that there's no family any longer to take care of the crazy person, except perhaps a few people at the end of their own rope and unable to cope.

Most of the unhoused psychiatric population don't have anyone willing and able to take them in, except their little circles of friends on the street, their fellow crazies.

The fundamental problem is that nobody knows how to treat mental illness. Traditional sources of help (the family, the church) are disappearing fast. The mentally ill are facing intense new competition from new low-end populations like the burgeoning numbers of illegals in every community. And there's the fact that packing too many psychiatric individuals in close proximity creates severe problems of its own, not only for them, but for the surrounding population.

It's a problem that nobody at present knows how to solve. And truth be told, nobody seems to really even want to.