Apr 29, 2022·edited Apr 29, 2022Liked by Leighton Woodhouse
i lived in Venice, CA, from 2013-2017 and can attest that everything said here about it is true, and maybe the truth is even worse. It really is like living in a zombie movie: at any time of day, on any street or area, some deranged Charles Manson lookalike might appear and start threatening you. (And, like a zombie movie, they even sometimes climb through your window.)
I don't know if you could call it a hack or a loophole or an Achilles' Heel, but California's admirably tolerant live-and-let-live ethos has been exploited and turned against its citizens.
I remember when 3rd Street in Venice was the main localized bum camp (excepting the Boardwalk), and it was just accepted as normal or almost an act of nature to turn over a whole city block to tents filled with drug addicts and the mentally ill.
Gradually tent by tent the whole area (much like the whole state) was colonized, and I think there are 2 main causes, both cultural: 1) there is just very little tradition or continuity here (unlike back East) and newcomers or vacationers or people who move in and out in a few years are more likely to keep their head down and not get involved, as they don't have much invested; and 2) anytime citizens did complain and a politician was forced to act, immediately an entire army of ACLU lawyers and other leftist organizers would file lawsuits and insist that any attempt to clean up the streets was a civil rights violation, that only some heartless monster would contradict a homeless person instead of centering their needs and giving them free food, free housing and free drugs. And I think these people have the tacit support of the population, because of the taboo most people here have against appearing judgmental or heartless, or even worse, conservative or Republican.
I don't know how you put this genie back in the bottle. Many neighborhoods are already unsafe, and many thousands of people live on the street, and to fix it we would need more than a Giuliani we might need a Mussolini. But any kind of real comprehensive crackdown would be deeply un-Californian, so I don't see it happening.
There's nothing inherently progressive or leftist about allowing people to live in tents on the street. Communist countries would round them up and put them into work camps (as would fascist countries). I think the socialist left cynically uses the homeless as a tool to say, basically: "Look how messed up capitalism is. We'll park these people in front of your house and protest if you try to move them. This won't end until we live in a socialist utopia where we don't have to work and you give us all your money."
But in their utopia, they wouldn't tolerate homelessness. In reality, letting people camp and do drugs anywhere on public property is pure Libertarianism. It's what happens when you have no government, left or right. The progressives are just saying "hey, you want small government? Here's what happens."
I lived in Venice Beach and Ocean Park from 1990-2005, and I thought the area was unsafe back then but manageable. There were homeless living in vans or close to the beach, but they were small in numbers compared to today. Many were young and looking to improve their situation in order to afford a rental. I also imagined the city would have cleared up the problem once money began pouring in to the beach community and million-dollar condos were built for the new wealthy residents. Instead, the homeless population has grown exponentially even as gentrification took place and rents in the area became unaffordable. What has propagated this crisis that defies all logic? The fact that there’s little continuity in the community doesn’t hold water. It was true in my day, but now many Venice Beach residents pay through the nose to live there and have settled in for good. Google moved in twenty years ago and created an employment hub for locals, as well.
I believe even the most ardent liberals and leftists in Venice Beach, and there are many, want to put an end to the homeless problem. The only way to solve the crisis is to vacate the homeless with police action, and have a plan to relocate them to another locality or state. This will entail a Mussolini or a proto-fascist leader to do the job. Can we tolerate that? We may have to.
as for the very odd and unique living situation in Venice, multimillion-dollar condos sprouting everywhere with bum camps sprouting just as much around them (my wife and i used to play a game when we lived there, when we'd see a somewhat hip and hairy dude wandering around: Billionaire or bum?):
From what I could tell many of the people who could afford these new expensive places were almost always from other parts of the country or the world, were often young people using family money, and there were a lot of successful photogs, surfer types, actors and actresses etc (the first house we rented was owned by a stunt man who traveled half the year).
I guess my point is that successful young professionals and rich kids from Europe usually don't have kids (at least not yet) and are often away working for months at a time, so even though the money flowed in, it wasn't exactly your standard family looking to plant roots but often just upscale nomads who turned a blind eye to the homeless situation.
And I attended a few VNC meetings when I was there, and the feeling I got was that the neighborhood preferred the homeless camps, no matter how bad, if it meant that it would keep Venice from turning into Santa Monica. They really had much more fear of Venice being turned into a sterile mall than into a massive outdoor insane asylum, which I respect and understand, though years later the rot has only gotten worse. (Also the VNC meetings were just a chance for people to scream about how much they hate cops and capitalism.)
Either way, I had to move for our safety and I don't even want to visit. We live up in the hills now and I would never live down in flatland LA ever again--there are just too many bums, too much filth, too much chaos.
I didn't even like Mad Max the movie. That this has become normal life in CA is--does "baffling" encompass all of it?
I live in a very small municipality in a largely rural state with harsh winters (spring ain't really sprung yet here) and a considerable drug and addiction problem, and one of our City Council members is a very progressive woman who also heads an organization providing tents and hygiene kits to the homeless living under bridges and on encampments on public land. She's got a degree from an elite college; I've got just a HS diploma, but somehow I think I can recognize idiocy pretty well when I see it.
The homeless, addicted, and mentally ill are being used. It’s a hostage crisis.
Who is blocking the solutions, the expensive tough-love steps that most agree are necessary? Look at the organizations, non-profits and public employee unions using the homeless to push for more funding, government employee positions, etc to ‘manage’ the problem. All promising perfect solutions instead of real solutions.
Yes. This is the fundamental issue. Our legal system doesn't have the mechanisms necessary to compel treatment. Instead we rely on the inevitable misdemeanors and felonies which severely mentally ill people invariably commit, and then we activate the - quite necessary - police powers of the state to imprison the people caught in this tragic snare. Our laws and penal institutions were designed for dealing with people who are sane, not people who are psychotic. I am one of those parents to whom you refer. There is next to nothing I can do for my afflicted and tortured son.
As a longtime member of Narcotics Anonymous in North Hollywood, I have seen many addicts finally get off the streets and get clean because of the consequences of going to jail which they could only avoid by going to treatment. These people have no free will, they are owned by the drugs which have hijacked their normal brain function. The only way for them to get free of this prison of addiction is to go to a detox where they can safely go through the agony of withdrawal and then to stay in treatment of become members of NA where they will find encouragement, community and motivation, accountability, shared experience and the help they need. As long as they are left on the street, they will never escape the powerful hold of addiction which will only end in jails, institutions and death. Our politicians are clueless and negligent.
I agree only with your first sentence. In my view all the -Anonymous organizations are cults which exchange one form of addiction for another. They are a permanent crutch for avoiding full responsibility for one's own choices. As with all cults, they preach a dire punishment for failing to accept all of their tenets.
I believe that addicts suffer more than anything else from toxic boredom, and finding purpose in the -Anonymous world keeps people's community within the world most damaging to them in the first place.
Membership in a human community to avoid boredom is in no way analogous to a problematic addiction. People can have unhealthy social attachments, sure, but they don't even begin to compare with addictive narcotics, alcohol etc. People going out of their houses and meeting others and supporting them being viewed as a crutch is not a fair view.
Going out of one's home and meeting others may be good or not good, depending on who you're meeting. If it's participation in a cult it's not a great way to move towards an independent life.
To a particular substance, yes. If you're talking about the underlying need to find something that consumes one's life so, that's a drive, but not necessarily a problem. You can argue that a devotion, a dependency, on physical fitness, diet and exercise can be a problem. What you can't reasonably argue is that it's more of a problem than its equivalent in smoking, liquor, and cheeseburgers. Similarly, living the NA lifestyle, going to meetings every day (or more than once a day), posting online about it, and maybe even neglecting family for it, *can* be indicative of a socialization problem. What it *can't* be is anywhere near the equivalent of a debilitating dirty needle heroin habit in a Las Vegas culvert; and nor can dependency on a human community be comparable to opiod addiction.
It's a massive category error, a 105 IQ false equivalency that doesn't bear five seconds' scrutiny, and any obvious examination of a rock bottom addict's life against that of even a diehard NA member's life bears that out at the slightest glance.
This situation is truly dystopian and the longer it's allowed to continue, the more entrenched it becomes in our society. This can't continue to be the new normal!
If government, with its armed police, refuses to fix this, people will resort to their own guns. Which commonly has been the case through much of our history, so don't think it can't happen
LW: "Those who will suffer most from this dismal state of affairs are, of course, homeless addicts themselves."
I'm sorry that I just don't agree with this proclamation of `suffering'. This is projection by white liberals living sheltered & accustomed high-life. Some surely are suffering, but my money is on the more obvious fact that most of them accept this existence just fine: FREE of society's norm!
There are certainly people out there struggling with addictions they'd like to quit, and no small number suffer from mental illness as well.
Meanwhile there are plenty of functional addicts who don't live feral lives, and many mentally ill people who actively seek treatment and medication.
And then there are many, many on the streets in California and elsewhere who are there because it's how they choose to live, and they'd rather get high in their tent than play by the rules.
Where Californian differs is that it's turned these people into a royal caste, a group that can't be criticized and whose welfare trumps those of (for example) young working families.
Where California also differs is that this is not new, this has been ongoing for several years now, and that the overwhelming majority of Californians want this, because they vote for it consistently. (Revealed preference: look at peoples' actions, not their words.)
It's reader-bait to say we should all feel sorry for the benighted homeless and the poor people around them. Why should we non-Californians be sorry? A lot of the homeless choose to live this way, and a huge majority of the people around them have affirmatively voted, time and time again, for the current state of affairs. My heart doesn't bleed for people who get exactly what they want from public policy. Would that I had the same in my city and state, in fact, authorities so amenable to the wishes of a supermajority of the electorate.
The truth is this: urban California s choose to live this way, they have done for decades, they have no meaningful tradition of a shared communal life, they choose to be governed by well-connected, clean-cut, family values-oriented super-elites who live in the most beautiful places in the world, while the voters themselves live in ugly, sprawling, atomized squalor, scuttling in and out of their 750k prefab shitbox while dodging bags of excrement tossed by feral junkies. They like it this way. So why feel sorry for them?
The only people to feel sorry for are those in the Western states - and increasingly in the Southern states - who are under siege from the malignant tumor that is the Californian influx to their neighborhoods.
If the comments here are reflective of the general public in CA, I'm worried we are veering closer and closer to a solution involving social cleaning of the homeless.
I'd like to say that I believe that Shellenberger's proposed Cal-Psych approach can help avert this disaster but I don't for several reasons:
a) Day #1 there will be a legal challenge. That will result in a case that needs to make its way to the California Supreme Court. Any decision by the Supreme Court will be appealed. Nobody knows the timeframe for that all to play out.
b) The Sheltering proposals will be fought tooth-and-nail. People simply want the homeless removed from their neighborhoods - there will be no apetite to accommodate them in shelters in their neighborhoods.
c) Mandatory re-hab has reasonable "short-term" success rates in getting the treated off of drugs. But, in general, longer-term success requires individualized-treatment - and that doesn't scale well. It remains difficult to deconvolve issues arising from addiction vs. those arising from prolonged homelessness. I've read some heart-breaking posts from folks whose own children are among the addicted homeless - but a large portion of the homeless addicts have no support network of family/friends who can provide assistance.
d) There is no *existing* useful state capacity to adminster Cal-Psych's treatment. Note: I'm not saying that the state isn't employing large numbers of persons dedicated on addressing the problem of homelessness or addiction; I am suggesting that they do not possess the skills (and probably not the inclination) to provide the sort of treatment that Shellenberger seems to think is required. And I don't think people could be easily recruited in large numbers to make up for the shortfall...it's not most people's idea of a good time.
e) Some of Shellenberger's proposals for Cal-Psych are just spit-balled nonsense - e.g. https://twitter.com/shellenbergermd/status/1427069498922704902 That PSA/"drug use is uncool" stuff didn't even work in the 1980s...though I'm sure the Ad Council would be delighted to take Gov. Shellenberger's phone call when he places it.
f) If a 3rd-party/non-party candidate were to win the CA governor's race - there is a motivation for both CADEM and CAGOP to try to engineer a recall.
I take no joy in concluding this - but I'm sketical that "Cal-Psych" will accomplish much other than enrich the NGOs to which the work will inevitably be subcontracted.
I would be relieved to be proven wrong. Were I a California voter, I would almost certainly vote for Shellenberger in the hope that I am.
Christine, you are the first person I have witnessed making the point about having to "take people on as individuals." Why others fail to share that simple wisdom is beyond my ken.
It seems to me that memories are extremely short. When the financial crisis of 2007 hit, we all watched doors open and thousands upon thousands exit their homes for the street, priced out by loss of jobs and rising rents. Ordinary working folks could be tracked from job and home to tents under bridges. No one seems to ponder how many people became substance abusers AFTER being displaced, as opposed to becoming displaced because of an addiction.
I was fortunate when I lost my home because I never lost my job. Riding the second wave, I found an affordable rental and hung on to job and rental for dear life, watching as all 'round me, others were fired as the economic gloom deepened and businesses shrank and failed completely.
For some perplexing reason, it seems that most folks mistake macroeconomic observations about the overall economy for a measure of individual success. We read everywhere about how people just need to conform and they'll be hired and housed, regardless of the combination of price inflation and ever-increasing population pressure. It seems like a combination of amnesia and lack of arithmetic ability leads folks to assume that there is income and housing available to all who simply remain sober.
Perhaps they're correct, at least in some proto-Darwinian sense; as long as the ranks of the homeless and unemployed continue to swell, competition for the the remaining housing and jobs is won by those not yet experiencing that moment of desperation where their last feeble grip on stability is lost, hurling them into the abyss.
I came of age during the stagflation of the late 1970's, and a significant percentage of those graduating high school alongside of me moved from the shelter of their parents' homes into vehicles, sometimes finding cheap rentals to share and getting by on part-time jobs and day labor. Why does it seem to escape notice that those cheap rentals are no longer available and what day labor remains is not open to most?
To your point about individuals; everyone has a trajectory, and the public discourse seems to assume that the homeless's trajectories invariably begin with drug and alcohol abuse. Thank you for reminding us all to consider people as individuals, rather than faceless members of a cohort.
The economic recession of the mid-2000's never ended, and what we see now is the result. Unemployment statistics do not include those whose benefits have expired and matching population to domicile availability is a type of arithmetic beyond fathoming for most.
It's 1978 all over again, but with no manufacturing expansion to lift people out of their desperation.
Of course it's a nuisance: homelessness and drug addiction engender crime, violence and blight in the communities they plague, and they destroy the lives of those they enslave. It's not just like an innocent lifestyle choice; it's a social ill that we need to eradicate. But that doesn't reflect morally on those who fall prey to it. It makes as much sense to blame the homeless and drug addicted for their conditions as it does to blame cancer victims for their disease.
As for the picture, we interviewed those two women on camera at length for like a half hour. They showed us around the camp and let us into their tents. The picture was entirely with their consent.
i lived in Venice, CA, from 2013-2017 and can attest that everything said here about it is true, and maybe the truth is even worse. It really is like living in a zombie movie: at any time of day, on any street or area, some deranged Charles Manson lookalike might appear and start threatening you. (And, like a zombie movie, they even sometimes climb through your window.)
I don't know if you could call it a hack or a loophole or an Achilles' Heel, but California's admirably tolerant live-and-let-live ethos has been exploited and turned against its citizens.
I remember when 3rd Street in Venice was the main localized bum camp (excepting the Boardwalk), and it was just accepted as normal or almost an act of nature to turn over a whole city block to tents filled with drug addicts and the mentally ill.
Gradually tent by tent the whole area (much like the whole state) was colonized, and I think there are 2 main causes, both cultural: 1) there is just very little tradition or continuity here (unlike back East) and newcomers or vacationers or people who move in and out in a few years are more likely to keep their head down and not get involved, as they don't have much invested; and 2) anytime citizens did complain and a politician was forced to act, immediately an entire army of ACLU lawyers and other leftist organizers would file lawsuits and insist that any attempt to clean up the streets was a civil rights violation, that only some heartless monster would contradict a homeless person instead of centering their needs and giving them free food, free housing and free drugs. And I think these people have the tacit support of the population, because of the taboo most people here have against appearing judgmental or heartless, or even worse, conservative or Republican.
I don't know how you put this genie back in the bottle. Many neighborhoods are already unsafe, and many thousands of people live on the street, and to fix it we would need more than a Giuliani we might need a Mussolini. But any kind of real comprehensive crackdown would be deeply un-Californian, so I don't see it happening.
There's nothing inherently progressive or leftist about allowing people to live in tents on the street. Communist countries would round them up and put them into work camps (as would fascist countries). I think the socialist left cynically uses the homeless as a tool to say, basically: "Look how messed up capitalism is. We'll park these people in front of your house and protest if you try to move them. This won't end until we live in a socialist utopia where we don't have to work and you give us all your money."
But in their utopia, they wouldn't tolerate homelessness. In reality, letting people camp and do drugs anywhere on public property is pure Libertarianism. It's what happens when you have no government, left or right. The progressives are just saying "hey, you want small government? Here's what happens."
I lived in Venice Beach and Ocean Park from 1990-2005, and I thought the area was unsafe back then but manageable. There were homeless living in vans or close to the beach, but they were small in numbers compared to today. Many were young and looking to improve their situation in order to afford a rental. I also imagined the city would have cleared up the problem once money began pouring in to the beach community and million-dollar condos were built for the new wealthy residents. Instead, the homeless population has grown exponentially even as gentrification took place and rents in the area became unaffordable. What has propagated this crisis that defies all logic? The fact that there’s little continuity in the community doesn’t hold water. It was true in my day, but now many Venice Beach residents pay through the nose to live there and have settled in for good. Google moved in twenty years ago and created an employment hub for locals, as well.
I believe even the most ardent liberals and leftists in Venice Beach, and there are many, want to put an end to the homeless problem. The only way to solve the crisis is to vacate the homeless with police action, and have a plan to relocate them to another locality or state. This will entail a Mussolini or a proto-fascist leader to do the job. Can we tolerate that? We may have to.
hey, great comment! just wanted to respond:
as for the very odd and unique living situation in Venice, multimillion-dollar condos sprouting everywhere with bum camps sprouting just as much around them (my wife and i used to play a game when we lived there, when we'd see a somewhat hip and hairy dude wandering around: Billionaire or bum?):
From what I could tell many of the people who could afford these new expensive places were almost always from other parts of the country or the world, were often young people using family money, and there were a lot of successful photogs, surfer types, actors and actresses etc (the first house we rented was owned by a stunt man who traveled half the year).
I guess my point is that successful young professionals and rich kids from Europe usually don't have kids (at least not yet) and are often away working for months at a time, so even though the money flowed in, it wasn't exactly your standard family looking to plant roots but often just upscale nomads who turned a blind eye to the homeless situation.
And I attended a few VNC meetings when I was there, and the feeling I got was that the neighborhood preferred the homeless camps, no matter how bad, if it meant that it would keep Venice from turning into Santa Monica. They really had much more fear of Venice being turned into a sterile mall than into a massive outdoor insane asylum, which I respect and understand, though years later the rot has only gotten worse. (Also the VNC meetings were just a chance for people to scream about how much they hate cops and capitalism.)
Either way, I had to move for our safety and I don't even want to visit. We live up in the hills now and I would never live down in flatland LA ever again--there are just too many bums, too much filth, too much chaos.
Cheers!
I didn't even like Mad Max the movie. That this has become normal life in CA is--does "baffling" encompass all of it?
I live in a very small municipality in a largely rural state with harsh winters (spring ain't really sprung yet here) and a considerable drug and addiction problem, and one of our City Council members is a very progressive woman who also heads an organization providing tents and hygiene kits to the homeless living under bridges and on encampments on public land. She's got a degree from an elite college; I've got just a HS diploma, but somehow I think I can recognize idiocy pretty well when I see it.
Please take the next step:
The homeless, addicted, and mentally ill are being used. It’s a hostage crisis.
Who is blocking the solutions, the expensive tough-love steps that most agree are necessary? Look at the organizations, non-profits and public employee unions using the homeless to push for more funding, government employee positions, etc to ‘manage’ the problem. All promising perfect solutions instead of real solutions.
Follow the money.
Yes. This is the fundamental issue. Our legal system doesn't have the mechanisms necessary to compel treatment. Instead we rely on the inevitable misdemeanors and felonies which severely mentally ill people invariably commit, and then we activate the - quite necessary - police powers of the state to imprison the people caught in this tragic snare. Our laws and penal institutions were designed for dealing with people who are sane, not people who are psychotic. I am one of those parents to whom you refer. There is next to nothing I can do for my afflicted and tortured son.
Protecting its citizens is the major reason you have gov't. If gov't won't protect the people, they will start protecting themselves.
As a longtime member of Narcotics Anonymous in North Hollywood, I have seen many addicts finally get off the streets and get clean because of the consequences of going to jail which they could only avoid by going to treatment. These people have no free will, they are owned by the drugs which have hijacked their normal brain function. The only way for them to get free of this prison of addiction is to go to a detox where they can safely go through the agony of withdrawal and then to stay in treatment of become members of NA where they will find encouragement, community and motivation, accountability, shared experience and the help they need. As long as they are left on the street, they will never escape the powerful hold of addiction which will only end in jails, institutions and death. Our politicians are clueless and negligent.
I agree only with your first sentence. In my view all the -Anonymous organizations are cults which exchange one form of addiction for another. They are a permanent crutch for avoiding full responsibility for one's own choices. As with all cults, they preach a dire punishment for failing to accept all of their tenets.
I believe that addicts suffer more than anything else from toxic boredom, and finding purpose in the -Anonymous world keeps people's community within the world most damaging to them in the first place.
Membership in a human community to avoid boredom is in no way analogous to a problematic addiction. People can have unhealthy social attachments, sure, but they don't even begin to compare with addictive narcotics, alcohol etc. People going out of their houses and meeting others and supporting them being viewed as a crutch is not a fair view.
Going out of one's home and meeting others may be good or not good, depending on who you're meeting. If it's participation in a cult it's not a great way to move towards an independent life.
You're presupposing that an independent life is the aim. What if it isn't?
Isn't dependency the problem here in the first place?
To a particular substance, yes. If you're talking about the underlying need to find something that consumes one's life so, that's a drive, but not necessarily a problem. You can argue that a devotion, a dependency, on physical fitness, diet and exercise can be a problem. What you can't reasonably argue is that it's more of a problem than its equivalent in smoking, liquor, and cheeseburgers. Similarly, living the NA lifestyle, going to meetings every day (or more than once a day), posting online about it, and maybe even neglecting family for it, *can* be indicative of a socialization problem. What it *can't* be is anywhere near the equivalent of a debilitating dirty needle heroin habit in a Las Vegas culvert; and nor can dependency on a human community be comparable to opiod addiction.
It's a massive category error, a 105 IQ false equivalency that doesn't bear five seconds' scrutiny, and any obvious examination of a rock bottom addict's life against that of even a diehard NA member's life bears that out at the slightest glance.
This situation is truly dystopian and the longer it's allowed to continue, the more entrenched it becomes in our society. This can't continue to be the new normal!
Well, we're going full-tilt on the permanent infantilization of the populace so...
If government, with its armed police, refuses to fix this, people will resort to their own guns. Which commonly has been the case through much of our history, so don't think it can't happen
LW: "Those who will suffer most from this dismal state of affairs are, of course, homeless addicts themselves."
I'm sorry that I just don't agree with this proclamation of `suffering'. This is projection by white liberals living sheltered & accustomed high-life. Some surely are suffering, but my money is on the more obvious fact that most of them accept this existence just fine: FREE of society's norm!
There are certainly people out there struggling with addictions they'd like to quit, and no small number suffer from mental illness as well.
Meanwhile there are plenty of functional addicts who don't live feral lives, and many mentally ill people who actively seek treatment and medication.
And then there are many, many on the streets in California and elsewhere who are there because it's how they choose to live, and they'd rather get high in their tent than play by the rules.
Where Californian differs is that it's turned these people into a royal caste, a group that can't be criticized and whose welfare trumps those of (for example) young working families.
Where California also differs is that this is not new, this has been ongoing for several years now, and that the overwhelming majority of Californians want this, because they vote for it consistently. (Revealed preference: look at peoples' actions, not their words.)
It's reader-bait to say we should all feel sorry for the benighted homeless and the poor people around them. Why should we non-Californians be sorry? A lot of the homeless choose to live this way, and a huge majority of the people around them have affirmatively voted, time and time again, for the current state of affairs. My heart doesn't bleed for people who get exactly what they want from public policy. Would that I had the same in my city and state, in fact, authorities so amenable to the wishes of a supermajority of the electorate.
The truth is this: urban California s choose to live this way, they have done for decades, they have no meaningful tradition of a shared communal life, they choose to be governed by well-connected, clean-cut, family values-oriented super-elites who live in the most beautiful places in the world, while the voters themselves live in ugly, sprawling, atomized squalor, scuttling in and out of their 750k prefab shitbox while dodging bags of excrement tossed by feral junkies. They like it this way. So why feel sorry for them?
The only people to feel sorry for are those in the Western states - and increasingly in the Southern states - who are under siege from the malignant tumor that is the Californian influx to their neighborhoods.
If the comments here are reflective of the general public in CA, I'm worried we are veering closer and closer to a solution involving social cleaning of the homeless.
I'd like to say that I believe that Shellenberger's proposed Cal-Psych approach can help avert this disaster but I don't for several reasons:
a) Day #1 there will be a legal challenge. That will result in a case that needs to make its way to the California Supreme Court. Any decision by the Supreme Court will be appealed. Nobody knows the timeframe for that all to play out.
b) The Sheltering proposals will be fought tooth-and-nail. People simply want the homeless removed from their neighborhoods - there will be no apetite to accommodate them in shelters in their neighborhoods.
c) Mandatory re-hab has reasonable "short-term" success rates in getting the treated off of drugs. But, in general, longer-term success requires individualized-treatment - and that doesn't scale well. It remains difficult to deconvolve issues arising from addiction vs. those arising from prolonged homelessness. I've read some heart-breaking posts from folks whose own children are among the addicted homeless - but a large portion of the homeless addicts have no support network of family/friends who can provide assistance.
d) There is no *existing* useful state capacity to adminster Cal-Psych's treatment. Note: I'm not saying that the state isn't employing large numbers of persons dedicated on addressing the problem of homelessness or addiction; I am suggesting that they do not possess the skills (and probably not the inclination) to provide the sort of treatment that Shellenberger seems to think is required. And I don't think people could be easily recruited in large numbers to make up for the shortfall...it's not most people's idea of a good time.
e) Some of Shellenberger's proposals for Cal-Psych are just spit-balled nonsense - e.g. https://twitter.com/shellenbergermd/status/1427069498922704902 That PSA/"drug use is uncool" stuff didn't even work in the 1980s...though I'm sure the Ad Council would be delighted to take Gov. Shellenberger's phone call when he places it.
f) If a 3rd-party/non-party candidate were to win the CA governor's race - there is a motivation for both CADEM and CAGOP to try to engineer a recall.
I take no joy in concluding this - but I'm sketical that "Cal-Psych" will accomplish much other than enrich the NGOs to which the work will inevitably be subcontracted.
I would be relieved to be proven wrong. Were I a California voter, I would almost certainly vote for Shellenberger in the hope that I am.
Christine, you are the first person I have witnessed making the point about having to "take people on as individuals." Why others fail to share that simple wisdom is beyond my ken.
It seems to me that memories are extremely short. When the financial crisis of 2007 hit, we all watched doors open and thousands upon thousands exit their homes for the street, priced out by loss of jobs and rising rents. Ordinary working folks could be tracked from job and home to tents under bridges. No one seems to ponder how many people became substance abusers AFTER being displaced, as opposed to becoming displaced because of an addiction.
I was fortunate when I lost my home because I never lost my job. Riding the second wave, I found an affordable rental and hung on to job and rental for dear life, watching as all 'round me, others were fired as the economic gloom deepened and businesses shrank and failed completely.
For some perplexing reason, it seems that most folks mistake macroeconomic observations about the overall economy for a measure of individual success. We read everywhere about how people just need to conform and they'll be hired and housed, regardless of the combination of price inflation and ever-increasing population pressure. It seems like a combination of amnesia and lack of arithmetic ability leads folks to assume that there is income and housing available to all who simply remain sober.
Perhaps they're correct, at least in some proto-Darwinian sense; as long as the ranks of the homeless and unemployed continue to swell, competition for the the remaining housing and jobs is won by those not yet experiencing that moment of desperation where their last feeble grip on stability is lost, hurling them into the abyss.
I came of age during the stagflation of the late 1970's, and a significant percentage of those graduating high school alongside of me moved from the shelter of their parents' homes into vehicles, sometimes finding cheap rentals to share and getting by on part-time jobs and day labor. Why does it seem to escape notice that those cheap rentals are no longer available and what day labor remains is not open to most?
To your point about individuals; everyone has a trajectory, and the public discourse seems to assume that the homeless's trajectories invariably begin with drug and alcohol abuse. Thank you for reminding us all to consider people as individuals, rather than faceless members of a cohort.
The economic recession of the mid-2000's never ended, and what we see now is the result. Unemployment statistics do not include those whose benefits have expired and matching population to domicile availability is a type of arithmetic beyond fathoming for most.
It's 1978 all over again, but with no manufacturing expansion to lift people out of their desperation.
How exactly am I “stigmatizing” addiction?
Of course it's a nuisance: homelessness and drug addiction engender crime, violence and blight in the communities they plague, and they destroy the lives of those they enslave. It's not just like an innocent lifestyle choice; it's a social ill that we need to eradicate. But that doesn't reflect morally on those who fall prey to it. It makes as much sense to blame the homeless and drug addicted for their conditions as it does to blame cancer victims for their disease.
As for the picture, we interviewed those two women on camera at length for like a half hour. They showed us around the camp and let us into their tents. The picture was entirely with their consent.
So, public housing, but without the housing. Great idea.
Florida and Texas? I think NOT!!
No.
Giving a few bucks to the homeless is ultimately not a kindness.
Is this not a discussion thread?