Speaking of social movements, would anyone like to help out some homeless people in MPLS with a donation? This is a project I have started working with and I have been *nothing but impressed* (and have some thoughts about how lack of structure works in new social media environments).

The police have just evicted two homeless encampments, seizing and trashing people's stuff, so there are waves of unhoused people who suddenly have no tents, backpacks, bug spray, clothes, etc. The cops trashed people's water. Apparently the Supply Depot is chaos - several people have been on call all night to deliver stuff and drive people around.

We could use money or purchases, including small recurring donations or recurring purchases (via Amazon, sadly). The facebook is here, the linktree donation site is reliable (I have used it).

https://www.facebook.com/Sanctuarysupply/

I will always remember how people on here helped in 2008 after all the arrests and violence at the Republican National Convention so I venture to ask.

I will be happy to provide more details/backup/explanations of how this project is used and why it is good, etc.

I'm feeling pretty lousy about the situation because the stories coming out of the camp evictions are pretty bad and it turns out that some of these people have jobs, like regular day jobs that they go to and they still can't get off the streets. One guy is just resigned to having his stuff trashed by the cops every few weeks and...tries not to own anything important.

Sure, done. Thanks for letting us know.

Elites are not conspiracies. Very seldom does a small group of people get together and deliberately try to take over a larger group for its own ends.

This is so naive, that I can hardly believe my eyes. I guess 1970 really was a time of innocence.

3: I've taught this piece many times, and I think that statement is basically accurate for the specific radical feminist groups about whom Freeman was writing.

Also, Frowner, thanks for sharing the link in 1. Just donated.

There were also a lot of libertarian socialist groups (!) which suffered from the same problem, at least in Europe. It was more or less required reading at the time.

4: Yes, out of context it's kind of insane, but in regards to neighborhood feminist study groups, I imagine that it is accurate.

I'm reminded of the time I was accused of engineering a coup to take over as President of the Walt Whitman High School Chess Club.

"I'm not stuffing the ballot box. I contain multitudes. "

7: Just think how different the world would be had you succeeded. True revolutionary moments are so rare.

In high school, we had an away soccer game where we got beat 10-0 so fast that the mercy rule kicked in in the first quarter. So we all had a way too much energy on the way home. I convinced everyone that it would be a hilarious joke to go back and say that we beat them.

So we did, and it turned out to be a mini-scandal when the truth emerged. I was just gobsmacked. I was so positive that this would be a self-evidently ludicrous proposition and would clearly be funny. It turned out that often people aren't scrutinizing your girls' soccer team and aren't caught up on these self-evident propositions.

(Also I am 100% sure I've told this story here before.)

I don't remember it.

9: Well...actually I did take over as President. But it wasn't a coup!

That's what they all say.

Except John Bolton, I guess.

1: Thanks, Frowner! Just donated through the Paypal link on the Linktree. So glad you + others are doing this important work.

(I have heard some affirming/depressing stories from acquaintances about going in person to camping supply stores to buy multiple tents and having the sales people instantly grasp the reason and offer suggestions for best items. WTF is wrong with this country that REI salespeople are now becoming temporary housing experts?)

We have an absolute disaster in progress where the city had been using a hockey stadium as a mass shelter since COVID started, then held to a June 30 deadline to stand it down even though it had been apparent for weeks that there weren't enough units/shelter beds in the city for everyone there. The ultimate response, although they continue to deny that it was a part of the response to homelessness, was to waive fees at a city-owned recreational campground and send people there without any supplies or services. Volunteers have been scrambling to get food and, like, tents there, and the Salvation Army is now taking over coordination of services. Meanwhile, it's been raining heavily and the camp keeps getting attacked by bears. Fish and Game has shot five bears already, including one yesterday. Last night there was a police shooting there. The city is now saying people will be there through September.

We don't have bear issues. Though REI does sell bear cannisters.

Thanks for the link Frowner.

Meanwhile, it's been raining heavily and the camp keeps getting attacked by bears. Fish and Game has shot five bears already, including one yesterday.

That's . . . really not good.

The only protection against a Fish and Game agent with a gun is a bear with a gun and unusually small claws.

2nd amendment guarantees the right to arm bears.

From one of the links, the Fish and Game biologist:

"Our biggest concern with this is the location of the camp. Centennial is right on the edge of a large contiguous wilderness," Battle said. "It's a practically unlimited supply of bears."

It seems like a really bad location for a homeless shelter.

Yep. It's not a superb location for a campground either, but it's been there a long time and it's the only one the city owns, so here we are.

The park it's in is like a block from my house, so this is a very local neighborhood issue for me as well as a city-scale travesty. It's a big park and the campground is on the other side, though, so the direct impacts on the neighborhood are minimal. Lots of neighbors are up in arms about it, though.

Well, they can bare them.

Hopefully, it's not brown bears.

Just black bears so far. There have historically sometimes been brown bears in that area but none have been seen recently.

Lots of neighbors are up in arms about it, though.

Let the bear's pay the Bear Tax!

Ask not for whom the bear tolls. The bear tolls for thee.

Just back from my shift at the donation place - happily there was someone else there so I learned a lot. One guy came by to do a big pick-up for his camp - he is one of the organizers of a biggish group of people who have been through several police evictions together and then several other people came through including a mom with a little boy.

I learned:
1. At the eviction the police took the water that had been donated (we're in a heatwave) and drank some of it in front of the evictees and trashed the rest.
2. There is a prison brand of toothpaste, I believe it is FreshMint, and no one wants that if they have any other choice. I don't think it's something you can buy off the shelf, but if you see it don't donate it.
3. If you are transporting things in a big styrofoam cooler, you should run duct tape around the bottom half in sort of a strap pattern because they can break.

What's so obvious talking to people is that these are completely regular people who have just had a series of very bad breaks. Like, I'm sure that some of them use drugs or drink too much, but we've all known middle class people who use drugs or drink too much and stay housed and basically secure. There's so much narrative that homeless people are different in some way from housed people, and that difference is, it turns out, mostly that they don't have housing.

The wastefulness of the whole thing is astonishing - the waste of stuff, of course, the tents that have to be purchased only to be trashed by the cops every six weeks, the fact that everything has to be given out in individual plastic packaging and purchased from the worst kind of mass retailers, but also the waste of people. Some of it is just "these are people who could be successful workers or babysit for their grandkids or participate in civic life and they can't because their entire lives are too hardscrabble", but some of it is that there are leaders and organizers who, instead of leading organizations to benefit society, have to lead their unhoused companions just to survive. All that energy going into finding new tents and keeping your people from dying of heat stroke - I mean, we could power the planet on the skills that get used up on mere survival.

16: That is just unbelievable. The world was not always this crazy-dystopian, right? I mean "massive homeless encampment under regular attack by bears" was not something I remember growing up.

Thank you everyone for donating! It means a lot in a generic way to the project but it also means a lot to me personally that the Unfoggetariat specifically helps. I have been commenting or lurking here since IIRC 2007, which is absolutely bananas - that's longer than I've lived in any one place, longer than I've held any one job, longer than I've been paying on my house. I still occasionally take a look at the Fuck You, Clown thread when I need a laugh.

The wastefulness of the whole thing is astonishing

You'd think just from an MBA-asshole perspective, something would be done. We're facing the largest generation of retirees to support while restricting immigration, forcing people out of the workforce for wont of small bits of social service, and making child raising about as unattractive as possible without actually starting a Hunger Game.

Nobody else is trying to bring in this dystopia under budget.

I guess I don't participate in groups enough these days to have a good grasp of the OP.

At the eviction the police took the water that had been donated (we're in a heatwave) and drank some of it in front of the evictees and trashed the rest.

I don't know why this particular detail among everything else makes me so sputteringly ragey, but it does. It's such a THING with law enforcement. CBP does it with water that groups leave along the border for migrants. Local cops do it with protestors' water. It's just such a contemptuous, gratuitously cruel thing to do.

As to this: we could power the planet on the skills that get used up on mere survival -- quite regularly since the beginning of the Trump years I have been able to think myself both into and out of a funk by tallying the immense amount of human ingenuity that is being used up fighting against bad stuff, and how much we could get done if even a fraction of it could instead be devoted to pro-active action for good. The mind boggles, indeed.

I guess I don't participate in groups enough these days to have a good grasp of the OP.

The post title is unintentionally but nicely appropriate for the discussion of homelessness that the thread became.

16: That is just unbelievable. The world was not always this crazy-dystopian, right? I mean "massive homeless encampment under regular attack by bears" was not something I remember growing up.

I don't personally remember Hoovervilles, but I've read about them. Of course, a comparison to the 1920s is discouraging for so many reasons.

36.2: 1930s.

Also not encouraging.

30: In terms of the waste of effort, if there's one thing that drives me more insane than another, it's all the (necessary!) resources and effort devoted to protecting and supporting unhoused people as they live on the street, that can't be spent on working to create the (affordable, subsidized, public) housing supply that would keep people from being unhoused. It is shameful and absurd that there are people who are unhoused outside of the context of very short-term personal crises before they can access the kind of actual housing that should be available.

39: Yes, I keep thinking about this. The streets are not designed for people to live on them! So activists and unhoused organizers have to spend all this time, effort and money jerry-rigging inferior approximations of plumbing, heating, cooling, stoves, etc when we actually know how to, like, build a building which contains running water and heat and stoves. And then the police come and tear down the camp and trash people's stuff and all the work has to be done over again and there's more plastic in the landfills.

I really fear for the future, honestly. Minneapolis is a liberal city, or at least among the most "liberal" of US cities, and our mayor is completely in the pocket of the developers and the police union. On one hand, he himself is absolutely the worst mayor I can remember, but on the other we should be electing better people from a deeper bench! It's not just him, it's the system. He is completely on the side of the cops in this, too, and has repeatedly said and done things to indicate his support. If I were mayor and saw people in my city living on the streets with their little kids, I wouldn't be out there trying to destroy our last remaining public housing and wearing t-shirts with cop logos on the at public events.

Like, it is just such a deep shock to me that this is allowed to continue. You will be walking along downtown or in poor neighborhoods and there will be a tent on the parkway. Like, a person virtually living in someone's front yard! Not even a vacant lot, just right out there! Who wants to live in a city that is run like this? I'm supposed to enjoy my days while mere yards from my house some poor soul is sleeping on the street? I'm supposed to step over them on my way down the street?

Part of this, of course, is that the police drive people into the poorest parts of the city - back before the cops forced people off the greenway, you would bike from the river to the posh neighborhood and there was about a one mile stretch (my neighborhood!) where you'd see someone in a tent under every overpass, and then as soon as you crossed the big street into the richer area you'd never see anyone.

So our neighborhood, already neglected, gets more full of trash and needles and more full of people who are not in that great shape and there's more traumatic incidents - like, a friend was dropping me off a couple of weeks ago and this weeping woman came up to us asking for money to escape from her abusive boyfriend. Now, I generally give people something even when their story is one of the old ones that are never true since no one is out there begging for money because their life is just so great, but this woman struck me as in a lot more trouble and in a lot worse shape than usual - I have no idea whether her story was the real story, but she seemed to need more money than usual so we gave her...a sum.

But my point is that the city is just completely cool with traumatized people wandering around an already traumatized neighborhood - my neighbor says her kids have been scared to walk to the bus. I don't think her kids are in actual danger, but when you're a kid dealing with adults you should not be expected to assess people on the "are these people dangerous or just traumatized" scale.

I have lived within a six block radius for literally the past twenty years. A lot of people write my neighborhood off as messed up because of poverty, but let me tell you, it was not like this until about 2015 - things started then and got worse over time.

I dislike very much the idea that I am supposed to just harden my heart and get on with my life while this goes on around me.

The only thing that cheers me up at all is that while things are worse now than they were ten years ago, they were worse in the 80s than in the 2000s, and I don't think we saw that change coming either. Things sometimes do get better -- all the work has to be done, but sometimes it gets traction.

30: In terms of the waste of effort, if there's one thing that drives me more insane than another, it's all the (necessary!) resources and effort devoted to protecting and supporting unhoused people as they live on the street, that can't be spent on working to create the (affordable, subsidized, public) housing supply that would keep people from being unhoused. It is shameful and absurd that there are people who are unhoused outside of the context of very short-term personal crises before they can access the kind of actual housing that should be available.

I am in no way an expert but, I think I've mentioned, this issue has been a lot more visible to me over the last couple of years. There's been a gradual increase in the homeless population in my city (which is not coincidental to the increase in real estate prices over the last 20 years), but, over the pandemic there was (first) a large homeless encampment visible from the porch of my house, and then the main homeless shelter needed to be moved (to allow for COVID distancing) and the new location is right on the edge of downtown, about 5 blocks from my house, and a place that I walk and bike by almost daily.

It's really sad and frustrating and I'm convinced that there the problem isn't simply that leadership is being obstinate, and ignoring an obvious easy solution -- It seems like a really hard problem.

I can have sympathy for all of the following:

1) living next to a homeless encampment is, genuinely a quality-of-life problem. I am well aware that the impact on me personally isn't that severe, but it is negative. I am willing to be accommodating and I don't think, "impact on the people living in the immediate area" should be a veto, but I would hope that that the political leadership is aware of it -- which I think they are.

2) I know people who have been involved in efforts to get food and supplies to the homeless and I think they're doing a good thing, and that trying to alleviate human suffering is good and important.

3) The City government has been very clear that they don't have the expertise to run a housing program directly and are limited by their ability to partner with local non-profits who are willing to provide services. That comes with it's own limitations.

3a) The non-profit that runs the homeless shelter is a religious organization and I have heard that some percentage of the homeless population resists staying in the shelter specifically because they don't like the religious tone.

3b) There is a housing-first non-profit which has been pushing tiny homes as a solution. They seem to be doing good work but (a) they are still fairly small and (b) the tiny homes are NOT no-barrier housing. They do have a series of rules and restrictions in place for residents.

4) My impression is that there's a significant liability concern for anybody running housing solutions (both legal and moral). For example there's also a new building which provides 40 units of housing* run by two non-profits that both have a good reputation and yet, the local alternative weekly just had an article "Fear, anger surround [project] Open drug use, assaults alarm neighbors."

5) The saddest and most frustrating part was when it became necessary to break up the homeless encampment mentioned above** and nobody had any good plans for a good alternative. I was absolutely convinced that leaving the encampment there indefinitely wasn't viable, but there wasn't a place for them to go -- in the absence of a bunch of housing that doesn't exist run by a team that doesn't currently exist.

I don't want to just vent here, but I wish I saw a simple way to address the problem and I don't.

* The total homeless population, based on Point-in-time survey is just under 1000 with 28% unsheltered, so 40 units is small but not negligible in terms of the scale of the problems.

** For multiple reasons; there had been several propane tank explosions, and it was blocking access to the library which was preparing to re-open from COVID.

42 written without seeing 39, and I would like they're trying to wrestle with similar questions.

The thing about homelessness is that, unlike a lot of serious problems we're facing right now, it is absolutely a solvable problem with a clear solution: build more housing. Public, private, market-rate, subsidized, whatever. It all helps. That's a very tough political lift, obviously, but at least there's a clear goal and end state. We've let the problem get way, way out of hand in an ever-increasing number of places, so it's going to be a long slog to get it fixed, but it is fixable.

And people are working on fixing it! (Including me, personally; my job is very directly related to this.) People both in and out of government who work on these issues generally understand the problem and the solution very well, and there's a lot of work going on all over the place to get more housing built. The politics of it are also getting a little easier in recent years as more people are realizing the extent of the problem and the way to fix it. Organizing around stuff like Housing First and YIMBYism (very different advocacy communities, but all part of moving toward the common goal) has helped a lot.

In my case the city is interested in more construction, but it will take time. Here's what they say on their website:

On average, the city needs about X units per year to be built to keep up with expected population growth and stabilize our vacancy rates. A healthy vacancy rate can help to stabilize prices, but it will not lower housing costs. Strong demand will continue to mean that home values will appreciate, and low-income residents will require subsidized housing.

Over the past 10 years [city] has issued building permits for 7x housing units (an average of .7X per year). About a third of these units were single-family homes and two-thirds were multi-family units[1], which matches the forecast in the previous and current Comprehensive Plan. In recent years the development of new units has steadily increased to its pre-Recession level, and supply is starting to catch up with demand.

There were 1.3X new units permitted last year, which will be built in the next 1-2 years. The majority of these new units are rental apartments. We expect that once these units become available on the rental market our rental vacancy rate will most likely return to a healthy level, between 5-7%. The homeowner housing market has been slower to catch up. There are .3X single-family units in the pipeline that have been permitted and should be built in the next 1-2 years, but this will not be enough to bring the homeowner vacancy rate to a healthy level.

In my case the city is interested in more construction, but it will take time.

Yeah, that's the key thing. There's a solution, but it's not a fast one.

The other thing is that we simply need leadership who can lead - we need to build a consensus around the idea that housing people may cause some inconvenience* and that's just what it is. Homelessness is a wound in the social body and frankly not every aspect of curing a wound is convenient or fun but you still have to, like, clean and dress the wound even if it is uncomfortable and tricky. We should have leaders who are willing to risk some political capital on this to try to build a majority consensus.

Like okay, yes, you may not like having public housing or a methadone clinic or whatever on your street, but the two other options are "let people live on the street near you" and "beat people and drive them into truly horrible encampments in a neighborhood where you don't go". There is no "wave the magic wand to vanish the problem".

Also IMO a lot of people are precious snowflakes. It is completely understandable not to want to live around constant violence, needles everywhere, etc, but IME a lot of middle class people find any kind of fight or visible problem scary and try to push people out because of it. Like, at this point in the opioid epidemic, I have seen some shit and I can tell you that I would gladly accept the occasional visible fight or irritating loud yelling for how things go now. And "open drug use" - for christ's sake, I have had people openly shooting up on my lawn. If I could trade that for "sometimes see someone doing something that looks like it might be shooting up in a doorway" I totally would. Also, also - safe drug use spaces are a thing, create one and let people shoot up indoors in peace using sharps bins.

It's not that it's fun to see fights or occasional drug use, I really do get that. But the alternative is "someone somewhere in your city is going to see a lot worse things and a lot worse things will happen to people".

If I were in charge of solving these problems, I would go to homeless encampments and talk to the residents, making sure to talk to the big figures - some camps have designated or semi-designated leaders, sometimes there are just big personalities who do a lot. What do those people think would help? How do those people think that problems with violence, overdoses and dealing can be minimized? How could city services, for instance, work with encampments to deal with trash? If people literally can't get into housing, would it be better to have several smaller encampments?

Another problem is that all cities now have these heavily militarized police forces, usually buddied up to the mayor and the city council, so their natural idea is to pay the cops a lot of overtime to "deal with the problem" instead of using that money for unhoused people. Minneapolis cops make so much overtime for breaking up encampments and it's a complete gravy train, since of course they'll be breaking up the same encampment again in six weeks.

The other thing is that if we really worked on getting people into housing, in eighteen months the majority of them would be either self-sufficient or able to do some kind of sliding-scale rent. The core problems for most unhoused people are lack of sleep, stress and lack of access to medical care. These are people who have gone months or even years never being able to sleep deeply at night. After a couple of months of a secure, appropriate temperature place to sleep, and treatment for any dental infections, etc and most unhoused people will be as capable as the average American.

*While using money and policy to minimize that inconvenience

Yes to the snowflakes. I have all the sympathy in the world for middle-class people (or working-class but with secure housing) who hate the existence of encampments or individuals sleeping rough in their neighborhoods, as long as their unhappiness doesn't turn into advocating cruelty to the people stuck living on the streets. No one should be living on the streets, both because it's bad for them and because it has bad effects on the people living near them.

But when you get people kicking up a fuss about shelters or clinics or low-income housing near them, my sympathy evaporates completely. If you don't want to have to interact with poor people, pay enough taxes to fund a social welfare state that makes them not poor. If you're not prepared to do that, stop complaining.

To 42.1, maybe cities are different, but here in Red country I think the sexual harassment and sexual assault alone is enough to bring 42.1 to the level of severe. (Of course, the same is true of frats.)

Everything in 48 is 100% correct. There's a real need for political leadership but it's always so much easier for politicians to pander to middle-class fear and NIMBYism.

Part of the background to our disastrous bear-infested campground non-solution here is that we have this new hardcore right-wing mayor who's been in office about a year and is constantly getting in fights with the moderate-to-progressive supermajority on the assembly. One of the assembly members is also, separately, the head of the non-profit that manages the Continuum of Care for homeless services (which admittedly is a little weird), so that organization also gets dragged into these fights and there's tons of mistrust and ill-will all over the place. The issue of how to address homelessness is very pressing and urgent, but it's also this hot-button political issue with all these surrounding tensions. It's a weird situation to be in the middle of.

But when you get people kicking up a fuss about shelters or clinics or low-income housing near them, my sympathy evaporates completely.

But, depending on what you're talking about, that could mean very different things.

In the areas that I regularly walk there are several transitional housing spaces, a youth shelter, and various low-income housing. Those, combined, have a tiny fraction of the quality-of-life impact of either the homeless shelter or encampment. I have not argument against them (and have happily had the conversation with a co-worker in which I said, "don't worry about the youth shelter going into your neighborhood, it isn't going to be a problem." But I would have a much harder time arguing with somebody kicking up a fuss about a homeless encampment.

I think Frowner is correct -- I understand that any solution is going to involve somebody having to put up with some problems, and I'm willing to go along with something that has an impact on my life but which is solving much larger problems for someone else. But I think there are important differences of degree (and that's also why I wanted to push back on your prior comment about "just house people" -- I think that's absolutely the solution but, in terms of figuring out how to get there, trying to offer no-barrier housing is a very different proposition than subsidized or transitional housing).

I think Frowner is correct -- I understand that any solution is going to involve somebody having to put up with some problems, and I'm willing to go along with something that has an impact on my life but which is solving much larger problems for someone else. But I think there are important differences of degree (and that's also why I wanted to push back on your prior comment about "just house people" -- I think that's absolutely the solution but, in terms of figuring out how to get there, trying to offer no-barrier housing is a very different proposition than subsidized or transitional housing).

Yeah, absolutely. It's a simple solution, but it's far from an easy one. A lot of the problem, though, is a tendency for people to assume much greater impacts on their lives from some of the solutions. Even very-low-barrier Housing First projects don't necessarily have a lot of noticeable impacts on neighbors; it depends on the details and the circumstances. It's hard to convince people of that sort of thing up front, though. There's a need for housing of all types, and the political burden is slightly different for all of them.

I think a shelter and an encampment are vastly different propositions. The thing about a shelter, is that it is at least theoretically possible to run it in a way that minimizes negative effects on the neighborhood, and even at the worst those effects are going to be less severe than the effects of an encampment. But of course shelters should be minimized in favor of permanent housing where it's possible. And these all have to be very local, specific solutions -- the answer everywhere is more permanent housing, but how to get there is going to be a local problem.

I kind of think tiny houses are a frivolous fetishization of the single-family dwelling as innately superior to multi-unit living, but I also recognize that I don't know a lot about it and maybe I'm wrong.

Teo -- any time you want to write a guest post about your experience with and knowledge of this stuff, I'd be fascinated.

I kind of think tiny houses are a frivolous fetishization of the single-family dwelling as innately superior to multi-unit living, but I also recognize that I don't know a lot about it and maybe I'm wrong.

No, I think you're right about that one. But if that's what it takes to get twee Pacific Northwesterners to accept increased density, so be it.

56: Thanks! I've only been in this job about year, so I think I'll hold off on writing anything up until I build more familiarity with the various aspects of it. I've already learned a lot, but there's plenty more I don't have a firm grasp of. This will be a very salient topic for a long time, though, so I will probably take you up on that at some point.

A lot of the problem, though, is a tendency for people to assume much greater impacts on their lives from some of the solutions. Even very-low-barrier Housing First projects don't necessarily have a lot of noticeable impacts on neighbors; it depends on the details and the circumstances.

Exactly. I was genuinely pleased about the conversation with my co-worker mentioned above, when I could say, "there are places in my neighborhood like that; it shouldn't be a problem." I can also say that having the primary homeless shelter for the city (and the associated homeless support services) a few blocks away is a different experience.

No, I think you're right about that one. But if that's what it takes to get twee Pacific Northwesterners to accept increased density, so be it.

I think it's silly, and I don't know how well it scales, but I would note two significant successes of the current tiny home village:

1) Given my comments earlier about the difficulty finding non-profits with experience and willingness to provide services, the tiny home village was doable with a small capital budget run by a tiny non-profit.
2) The fact that tiny homes are, movable made it easier to get buy-in for a site (and, maybe they started in one site and moved somewhere else which has been more successful -- and not a poor neighborhood; they're next to they neighborhood that has a lot of older hippies who bought in when prices were cheap).

I feel like encampments differ in their impact based on size, location, mix of people, access to city services, how much attention they draw from the cops, etc. People assume the worst for two reasons - either they notice a genuinely bad situation because it is bad or they hear a lot of noise from the same type of Nextdoor paranoids who think that anyone they don't recognize is a criminal. (I am on Nextdoor and people do talk about real crimes and problems but about 1 in 3 posts is "I saw a teenager cut through my yard at noon on a Saturday while my neighbors had a barbecue, he must have been casing my house")

There was a self-managed women's encampment down the street from me last winter and it was very well organized and quiet - they had a little staffed table at the front, they had found a location that was basically fenced off from the street and fairly private and they worked a lot with the city to find transitional housing. But the cops busted that one up too. It's funny because the lot used to be the site of....a lot of not-grate neighborhood stuff pre-pandemic, and frankly a quiet and well-managed encampment was a massive improvement. Again, if I were mayor, I would have been running all kinds of services to those people and trying to create camps on that model, because if you can't actually house people, having them in a safe, tidy and managed encampment is the best option.

Again, if I were mayor, I would have been running all kinds of services to those people and trying to create camps on that model, because if you can't actually house people, having them in a safe, tidy and managed encampment is the best option.

FWIW, the encampment by my house started out small and well managed. It was between the library and city hall so it was quite visible. The city didn't provide a lot of services but it did bring in dumpsters, port-a-potties, and water for the residents and volunteers were bringing food.

I think all of that was good; I'm glad that was the response.

After a couple of months the camp grew larger and more disruptive and the library wanted to re-open and that's when it became a more difficult issue. But I think both the support it received was good, and the eventual decision to move it was also necessary (and not handled perfectly, but I'm not sure what it would have looked like to handle it perfectly without having a space ready that could accommodate the entire group*).

* One story that I heard, which may or may not be correct is that when the camp started the city was in negotiations to find housing. Eventually they came back and said, "we can find housing for X people" and the people in the camp said, "that would have covered the original number, but now we have three times as many people, and they like being together, so we don't want to separate them." If true, that's a completely understandable response, but it did put the city in a bind.

Given my comments earlier about the difficulty finding non-profits with experience and willingness to provide services, the tiny home village was doable with a small capital budget run by a tiny non-profit.

Yeah, this is a major issue that we run into a lot. A lot of our funding tends to go to the same few nonprofits every year, and they do good work, but we're always looking for new grantees because the need is just so great. But it's really hard to find organizations with the capacity to manage these projects, especially capital projects. Tiny houses do have some advantages in the simplicity of the construction that I can see making a difference.

I feel like encampments differ in their impact based on size, location, mix of people, access to city services, how much attention they draw from the cops, etc.

Yeah, very much so. As I mentioned above the bear camp is very close to my house, but as bad as conditions have been there we're really not seeing much direct impact on the neighborhood. A slight increase in the number of people on the street but that's about it. I'm sure it would be different if it were on our side of the park.

I've been wondering about a model to overcome the resistance from neighbors. What if there were a version like: we'll build the facilities and the neighborhood group can select the occupants (from a set of applications put together by the lead agency). I mean, it would have to obscure all the stuff that you can't select for (race, age, gender?). Maybe that would sorta skim the cream of applicants, but also, there are thousands of homeless people in the city. Siting any of them would help.

There's a vacant building on my street and I am nearly certain it was last an old folks home. Was wondering if the city could buy and run it. But then I was thinking about how to organize to counteract NIMBYISM, and I thought, well what if we could pick the people who lived there? Like, I'm sure that would also be wracking, but then we'd (not specifically me, I don't care enough to be in that process) feel like we had some control and were vested.

And then I did nothing.

What if there were a version like: we'll build the facilities and the neighborhood group can select the occupants (from a set of applications put together by the lead agency).

Hm, that's an interesting idea but I don't know how feasible it would really be in practice. There's privacy implications, obviously, plus it would really be a lot of work for the neighborhood group and for whoever is managing the intake process from the city or nonprofit side. (Also, not being able to illegally discriminate might reduce the appeal to the neighbors.)

Yeah. I was once on an HOA where an old woman assumed it was my job to keep black people from buying.

I mean, she was an asshole for lots of reasons but the other reasons were probably legal.

There's a vacant building on my street and I am nearly certain it was last an old folks home. Was wondering if the city could buy and run it.

Here's a specific thing I've learned at this job that I didn't know before: With this type of project it's generally better for the city to provide funding to acquire and rehab the building but partner with a nonprofit to own and run it. Depending on the type of funding you use, there are a lot of restrictions on things like the period of time the building has to be used for the intended purpose (for some grants it's perpetual!), and it's generally better for a separate group to be there to deal with that stuff so the city doesn't have to. This is speaking from the city perspective, obviously, and it depends on the city and the project what kind of management structure makes the most sense.

If you are interested in making this a project, find out which office in the city manages the HUD grants. CDBG, HOME, and Emergency Solutions Grant would be the programs to look at for this. Ours is part of the health department, but in other places it can be in the planning department or a stand-alone department (probably other variations too). Contact them and ask if they're interested in developing it as a project for their Annual Action Plan. It's best if you can get some interest from a nonprofit or other organized entity, that can be a subgrantee but we've met with individuals too. Like I said above it's probably not something the city will want to take ownership and operational responsibility for, but serving as a conduit for federal funding is a natural role and they may well be interested.

The advice in 69 goes for anyone else who's curious about specific opportunities in their cities. Every city over a certain size gets entitlement funds through these programs. Smaller communities can usually access them through a competitive process run by the state.

it would really be a lot of work for the neighborhood group

Frankly I was thinking it would create buy-in (or reduce opposition) and then there would be some energy for the first year and then everyone would drop off the panel and then the operator (non-profit or city) would just do it.

so pleased people are reading this!

As someone who lives near a large homeless camp, in lieu of picking people I'd be more than happy with just kicking out anyone who threatens a woman on the street with sexual assault. I don't care if people do drugs or whatever in the housing, just no threatening people in public (which is to say, heroin is fine but no meth).

What happened to cocaine? Never really in the news these days, unless someone mixed in fentanyl.