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Washington State Ban on the Unhoused
Washington State Ban on the Unhoused
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Gonna risk going a bit against the grain here…
I have a lot of empathy for their situation.
I don’t know what the solution is but it isn’t the status quo. A lot of the west coast cities are having a disproportionate problem with homeless. It’s not clear if people are bussing their homeless or the housing prices or what.
The amount of trash generated by these homeless camps is nuts and ruins virtually every public space. In Portland, it is common to find hypodermic needles littered in the parks. You’ll walk past people on the sidewalk passed out with a needle in their arm or actively doing drugs. Human excrement on the sidewalk. I wish I had some solution but the current situation sucks for everyone.
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A lot of the west coast cities are having a disproportionate problem with homeless.
Prices go up, rents go up, wages stay flat.
Oops! Where did all the homeless people come from?!
The amount of trash generated by these homeless camps is nuts and ruins virtually every public space.
We live in a society of disposable things, but we don't provide homeless people with trash service.
You don't see the trash you generate, because the city carts it away. Homeless people are forced to live in their own squalor because the city doesn't cart it away.
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I understand why trash, drugs, and homelessness occur. What I don’t understand is how to fix it.
The cities do clean trash up at, I should probably find a source for this, a significant cost. (From what I understand, this is due to the hazardous nature of the materials being cleaned up) Because these encampments can pop up anywhere, it’s not always practical to provide trash receptacles/dumpsters before it becomes a big problem. Having folks clear out during daytime hours at least helps that situation, but it’s far from ideal. It appears that Victoria BC is/was doing this and the atmosphere seemed a lot better overall when compared to Portland. Green spaces were usable, no major trash piles (that I saw) and homeless folks weren’t hassled when trying to sleep. I should note that I’m far from educated on Victorias homeless woes so there’s probably nuance here.
It’s not entirely clear how much power cities have to stop the housing crisis on their own, but I get the impression that the high cost of rent is mostly out of their control. Additionally, a lot of cities often do not have the resources to provide these services at the level they’re needed. It seems like there should be some level of expectation for every city/county/state whatever to provide services for a percentage of their population and organization to route folks from high saturated services to lower saturated services… and then sweep folks who refuse services… but the devil is in the details I’m sure.
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Because these encampments can pop up anywhere, it’s not always practical to provide trash receptacles/dumpsters before it becomes a big problem.
Precisely because they're impermanent. It's a problem that results from cities pushing people out rather than bringing them in.
There's a bus stop on my block that will, from time to time, just drop off someone in medical scrubs. Basically no cloths, no place to go, no cell phone, no nothing. Just someone a hospital ejected into the wild, because he was poor and they didn't know what to do with him.
So my neighbors and I have to figure out how to support Random Person who just crops up on our street, how to keep them safe from police, and how to get this person back on their feet.
We've done it four times. Two of them were just traveling cross country and had medical emergencies. One ran off. One was looking for family in the city but had never been here before and just kinda got arrested for vagrancy and then dumped at a hospital after leaving lockup.
This is just how our city handles indigent people. They snatch you up, fling you through a bureaucracy you don't understand, and if they don't know where to put you, they put you on a bus to anywhere but here.
And we wonder why we get encampments popping up randomly
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Wow. That is certainly a failure of leadership there. That’s insanity
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I'm with you that that is inappropriate in public, and west coast cities are being hit super hard. The dirt little secret is that many interior cities do also run their homeless out.
But the research shows the fastest, most sure fire way to reduce the problem is to just give folks a permanent address that is safe.
Every effort should be made to give these folks a home, even if that home is some sort of rapid mass manufacture box with a door that locks.
I do acknowledge that the states on the west coast shouldn't be the only ones that need to follow that approach, and there clearly isn't a solution for that. I.e. a state should be rapidly obligated to house IT'S homeless, not ALL OF AMERICA'S homeless... But that is a very complicated layer
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It seems like any state by state solution will fall prey to states that want to displace their homeless population instead of providing attainable housing. If we lived in a reasonable society the Federal government would intervene, but no dice.
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Agree.
I strongly believe the federal government needs to step in, with some sort of "new deal" conservation/work corp.
As the unhoused are able, they can work for the work corp. The work corp will obviously be shit pay, but you should get basic federal healthcare, and basic housing provided. If you are unable to work, that's not a blocker to receiving this basic housing.
Anyway, we could be doing this right now, across the country, providing a safety net for so many people who are near-homeless, while also improving our country through the other projects the work corp could take on. Republicans should be happy as folks are incentivised to try to work, as their basic needs are met and they can operate from stability.
I'm just spitballing here.
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A lot of the homeless are elderly or ill or handicapped. Many are homeless because they cannot work.
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I addressed that
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I’m with you on this. It seems like it’d have to be a coalition of states or the federal government tackling it. That seems impossible at the moment though.
I fully support whatever level of housing we can provide for folks that have the bare necessities… water, sewer, trash, and safety. Also agree that there would need to be some cap on services…. As a city could go bankrupt if the regions folks had flocked to them.
Portland had a few self regulated slightly better than tent cities that, as far as I could tell, had a pretty reasonable compromise. Not ideal… but they provided stability for folks and, if someone caused trouble or brought drugs in, they got kicked out. Better, at least, than the current situation of chaos, drugs, and trash everywhere.
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a state should be rapidly obligated to house IT’S homeless, not ALL OF AMERICA’S homeless
This is unconstitutional under the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment.
So all a homeless person would have to do is travel to any state; claim residence, which wouldn't be hard since they don't exactly have a home; and then petition the state for housing. I didn't have a primary address and did this a few months ago, and was able to get SNAP and Medicaid through the state.
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You clearly understand the situation I'm describing. This is a high level situation.
Responding with the pedantry of existing law is in bad faith, as the nature of my comment clearly speaks of future hypotheticals.
The operative word is "should". any critically capable reader (uh oh!) should be able to detect I'm discussing the practical, hypothetical challenges any given state would face, of they found the sufficient funds and motivation to pursue this topic far beyond their neighbors: they would see an influx of folks looking for these serbices, thus overwhelming their isolated effort.
The complication would be coordinating efforts across the country to provide services as I described, at such a pace and parity that regions, and then states would not become overly burdened by migrating homeless.
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Trying to sell this idea to people—this idea that the Constitution will get changed to support this fantasy of yours—as anything other than mad ravings is what's bad faith in this conversation. Confront the reality of the situation if you are truly interested in making change happen.
Men will not look at things as they really are but as they wish them to be and they are ruined.
— Niccolo Machiavelli
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Miss.
What I'm selling is the need for many states, or the federal government to act in coordination, such that one state isn't the only place homeless folks can go for these services
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Give them homes. That's the solution. It's actually that simple.
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A studio apartment can be over $3,000 in the Bay Area. Meanwhile, there are like five homeless people on every block of the city I lived in with five-digit population. The city would need to find some way to seize land, without calling for a vote, in order to have enough housing for everyone since rent control has been voted against for over a decade.
The main issue is that people would vote to drive the homeless into the sea before they would vote to house them.
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Cool. I know some land they can seize.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/california-forever-billionaire-backed-city-silicon-valley
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That isn't even in the same county I was in, let alone the same city.
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All you said was the Bay Area.
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there are like five homeless people on every block of the city I lived in
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It's far more complicated than that for many of the homeless. A really high proportion have chronic mental health problems like schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder. These people cannot maintain even a basic apartment. Fires are common. As are faeces smeared on the walls, major structural damage, dead animals, bullet holes and use of firearms inside the premises. Throwing a mentally unwell person into a home to fend for themselves doesn't work. The mental health treatment has to come first. It can take months, if not years, to help them out of their hole.
Another significant portion of the homeless have chronic addiction. In addiction treatment, we say that "a locking door is a death sentence" because the LAST thing you want is to give a junky unsupervised privacy to shoot up as often as they like. Apartments often turn into local hubs for dealing and sex work. This attracts all kinds of unsavory characters and crime - especially violent crime. You don't want to know what a junky would be willing to do to get a fix. A major part of this problem is called "destigmatization." This is a great documentary on how it has so thoroughly failed in Vancouver, specifically.
Both groups require intensive support before being given housing. Not after and not at the same time.
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The mental health treatment has to come first.
No. Housing comes first. You cannot treat mental health or addiction while the patient is experiencing the inhumane conditions of homelessness.
the LAST thing you want is to give a junky unsupervised privacy to shoot up as often as they like. Apartments often turn into local hubs for dealing and sex work. This attracts all kinds of unsavory characters and crime
So you think the streets are better? Believe it or not, all this still happens on the street, except now there is no guarantee of food, shelter, safety, or property. I'm sure the constant threat of starvation, death by exposure, getting robbed, or being sexually assaulted is really beneficial to mental health. Do you really think being on the street stops addicts from using as much as they want? No privacy on the street? These people are already invisible. And no, if you don't have a door that locks, you don't become immune to overdosing.
Shameful.
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The problem is there are a lot of NIMBYs that would rather them trash their cities than hang out in their neighborhoods lowering their property value. They want the government to fix the problem, but don’t want their taxes raised to accommodate it.
The people who protect the homeless are every bit as responsible for the problem as anyone they accuse.
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Sorry that we don't like seeing people die because they're mentally ill and can't operate in society like the rest of us. We need an actual social safety net funded by all the wealth that society has created rather than letting robber barons take it all.
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When you learn how things actually work, I’ll Have this discussion with you. But I can see that it will be a complete waste of time to continue.
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Lol, you have nothing to say when you're confronted with the fact that you're OK with people dying because we choose to call them a problem. Examine yourself, fellow human.
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When you learn how things actually work, I’ll Have this discussion with you. But I can see that it will be a complete waste of time to continue.
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When you learn how things actually work
You'd never know any of us have worked with homeless neighbors before, known homeless family or friends, or dealt with it ourselves.
We just don't know how things actually work, gosh darn it.
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If you did, you’d be singing a different tune..
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Hi, I work in food banking and homeless services. I know what I'm talking about and it sure seems like you have closed yourself off to the notion that other people might be able to further educate you on what you're talking about.
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I have as well. In Seattle and in Central Florida. And I know it’s not so simple to solve as “give them houses.” There’s nuance to it all. There different reasons for everyone and everyone seems to like to pile all homeless into conveniently definable camps of “downtrodden” and “mentally ill.”
But there’s also addicts and willfully homeless. There’s felons, and crippled. There’s a LARGE portion that don’t want to do anything to get better or improve their situation.
But let’s just throw houses at all of them. Because as we all know, houses grow on trees.
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OK, so no one who is serious or understands the problems surrounding homelessness and mental illness is saying that we need to simply give houses to people. It can't happen for the reasons that you seem to understand - these people need both shelter AND support. That's what basically everyone is saying. "Give them houses" means "get them indoors and cared for." Nuance is lost in slogans.
But I feel that you don't quite understand mental illness. If they're on the street, nearly all those people that you described are likely suffering from mental illness. Mental illness can be something you're born with or something that develops at some point in your life. Stress is a major factor in developing mental illness and folks on the street are living in one of the most stressful situations we commonly allow people to be put in. Disabled folks (FYI it's not really cool to call physically disabled people "crippled" anymore) are hit even harder by this. Felons have to deal with having a huge stain on their record that makes things like finding gainful employment WAY more difficult and with the mental baggage that long-term incarceration leaves you with.
If you've worked with the homeless before and talked with them, you probably understand how bad it can be out there. You have to worry about holding on to your things because you have nowhere to lock them up, your feet and back ache because your shoes are shot and you slept on pavement last night, you have to worry about finding your next meal, you have to worry about having a place to sleep that's both sheltered and safe, you're itchy because it's been a hot week and a half since you had a shower, you have to worry about the person camping next to you trying to assault you for some imagined transgression, your tooth has been hurting for a month and it's just getting worse, you have to worry about cops coming to make you move all of your stuff because the people in the houses nearby are tired of looking at your tent - it just goes on and on and there really isn't an end to it. Take a person already in a rough spot (they don't have a place to live) for whatever reason (lost their job, are being abused by a spouse, run out of the house at a young age, rent went up and they can't cover it and food and one literally has to eat to not die) and then throw all this shit and more at them all day every day and it grinds them down. Being homeless takes a person on the margin and rips what little rug there was out from under them. I don't think I need to say it at this point, but being homeless will make you crazy if you're not already there. And if you're already there there's a really good chance you're going to end up homeless because it's hard to do the things you need to do to exist in society when you're also dealing with severe mental illness.
They need supportive services to exist in society the way that society needs them to. The services have to be tailored to the person and their issues that are preventing them from being on solid ground. Some people are assholes and will be assholes if they live in under a bridge, in a halfway house, in an apartment, in a house, in a mansion or wherever. But we all know the impact that homelessness has on everyone, so we must do our best to help everyone.
Some people will refuse help entirely. Can't really do much about that, but you can make sure that they're well taken care of so their problems don't become other people's problems. Someone who has access to food, water, shelter and at the very least some basic medical care is much less likely to become a blight on a neighborhood than someone who is scrounging for everything.
In an earlier comment you said "The people who protect the homeless are every bit as responsible for the problem as anyone they accuse." Personally, I blame the wealthy class for using power and influence to gradually wipe out the social safety net through tax cuts for themselves while simultaneously turning their corporations into stateless parasite nations that funnel wealth from the less wealthy classes' efforts into their own pockets, while pushing their media outlets to blame anything but the tax rate for the top earners for the homeless issues to distort public perception and placing all the blame on the people themselves. Since I work for an organization that feeds, clothes these people, am I culpable? We provide medical care, showers, laundry services, housing placement services and give out free groceries. We give them a dumpster to throw away their trash. Is all of this our fault?
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I was with you until that second paragraph. Are you saying people shouldn't protect the homeless??
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The homeless should be helped out of homelessness. Not protected to the point that they enable it.
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The homeless should be helped out of homelessness.
By providing them with homes?
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By proving them with the ability to get their OWN homes. Help those willing to help themselves and you’ll actually help them.
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What happens when they’re too mentally ill or overwhelmed with addiction to be helped? These folks used to be institutionalized against their will but we as a society decided decades ago that this was a violation of their rights. So we kicked them out of hospitals (where they had access to shelter, hygiene, food, medication, education, and recreation) and onto the streets (where they have none of those things).
Housing first advocates like to believe that giving all these deeply troubled folks a rent-free apartment will magically solve all their problems. It doesn’t. All of the filth and despair of their situation simply gets moved off the streets and into the apartment. And then all of the problem of dealing with the unhygienic situation gets foisted upon the landlord and all of other tenants who live in the building. Don’t take my word for it, see for yourself.
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You’re using small portion of them to represent the whole. This is a nuanced issue that won’t resolve with a single fix- but just… giving them houses is t the way it gets fixed either.
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The people who don’t have these issues are the invisible homeless. They’re sleeping in cars or couch surfing. They have resources and their period of homelessness tends to be temporary. At any one time there may be a lot of them but very few are long term homeless. We could eliminate homelessness for these folks by providing them with an apartment and it wouldn’t be a problem.
It just wouldn’t do anything to solve the highly visible problem of hard core street homeless people. And so for many people it would seem like nothing at all had been accomplished.
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So no interest home loans?
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104 comments