The link in the last para is really interesting. There is massive variation from state to state not only in the size of the homeless population (adjusting for size of state) but in the degree to which this is sheltered or unsheltered homelessness. If you're sheltered homeless, you have a bed under cover to sleep in, but it's not adequate enough to consider a home - it's a homeless shelter or something. If you're unsheltered, you sleep in a park, or in your car or something.
California not only has one of the proportionally highest homeless populations in the US, it also has an unusually high share of them unsheltered. MA's homeless are 93% sheltered. CA's are 68% unsheltered.
I think the climate might be different in California.
1. I'm not a lawyer and the current Martin v Boise link in the OP seems to be broken, but yeah, I'd bet it's dead or at least hollowed out.
2. Presumably they're aware homeless people still exist, they'd just be someone else's problem.
California's weird with lots of urban sprawl and warm climate. So there's lots of land no one would want to live in because it's essentially a desert, and lots of places people want to live that already have medium-density or low-density development and bad infrastructure. The sort of person likely to suffer from unsheltered homelessness (untreated schizophrenia, addiction, general instability, whatever) just can't survive in a place with real winters. In the rural south or Pacific coast north of California they might live in some not-up-to-code place out of the way, but in California the logical thing to do is just make massive camps at underpasses and squat in any space that's vacant long enough.
I'm not any kind of expert, this is ex recto, just based on visiting family out there ~twice a year.
Is Boise-compliance still a thing, in light of the Supreme Court ruling? Or is it dead?
No, the latest ruling (Grants Pass) overturned Boise.
Is he really just treating the entire homeless population of California like invasive kudzu that needs to be cleared when it takes root?
Not the entire population. Newsom's orders only apply to state property, like the big patches of land by state highways that often host encampments (so many big roads in urban areas being state-owned).
But most of the cities want to do the same thing and are starting to do so. San Francisco was a litigant in the overturning of Boise!
Is this actually popular with Californians?
By and large, yes. Or at least, the biggest voices cities hear day-to-day are people saying "Get this horror out of my neighborhood!" and those pushing back are few and sound shrill/unrealistic to electeds, because they're fighting against such a huge current, even if they're right.
Finally: apparently there are 180K homeless people in California. That's not actually that much housing. You could provide enough beds with 600 hotels. Obviously I know that sheer resources is not the actual roadblock, but it's worth pointing out that it's barely a roadblock at all.
This is true, but you have to consider it both a stock (people currently homeless) and a flow (people becoming so). As long as housing isn't affordable to the average person, you will have a steady stream of people encountering life problems - losing their job or whatever - and becoming homeless because there's zero cushion anymore, not even much cheaper housing anywhere to fall back on (residential hotels).
San Francisco should have realized it by now because they made a creditable attempt to house the homeless, spending huge amounts of money on permanent supportive housing that works for the people it houses by and large, but the flow keeps flowing and they don't see visible results. (Gavin Newsom presided over a lot of that effort and experience personally.)
Of course San Francisco is still only moving toward building significant new housing at a macro level by the skin of their teeth and thanks to state coercion. Jury's still out on if it will show results. Berkeley by contrast, with the political consensus built, has been building more at the scale needed to start reducing rents, the stats are there showing rents dropping, but it's less than 10% in older housing so it has to be sustained longer to really help. And then you need this to happen at the regional level across dozens of cities!
Democrats have done a great job distinguishing homeless people (visible, disruptive, needy, shaming by their existence and presence) from the deserving poor (elusive, imagined, elsewhere).
5: Agree. The way Dem-voting hand-wringers frame it is "It's a health and safety issue! These encampments are so bad!" and of course they have nothing better to offer besides "get them out of my sight". The same people will protest against ways to house them in or anywhere near their neighborhood!
This suburb (2020: 70% Biden, 27% Trump) just recalled two councilmembers for not opposing supportive housing, even though it was the county building it and the city couldn't stop it, plus it might have been illegal even if the city had been an approver (we have more automatic approvals for shelters and supportive housing now.
I have my finger on the pulse of California and Id guess clearing the encampments has majority support. No matter how you feel about homelessness as a policy issue, it's genuinely quite annoying to have somebody set up a tent on the sidewalk in front of your house.
We've had a homeless neighbor for the last several years who doesn't make trouble and stays out of the way and I'm basically fine with it, it's maybe even nice that he might deter petty thefts from time to time, but he was visibly using drugs and I can see why somebody with a lower risk tolerance wouldn't like having him around (and, e.g., my kids got out of take-out-the-trash duty because I wasn't comfortable leaving them alone near him). OTOH we've had other people in the neighborhood who would look you right in the eye and threaten to kill you while having a delusional episode and it's bad.
I don't think the encampments are a big deal if they're out of the way but we used to have one a block away that was just taking over an entire block between us and the bus. That got broken up a few years ago when they had a big push to open more navigation centers and hasn't come back. From what I've seen it seems like whatever they've been doing is working.
8.2: Yeah, I wouldn't assume everyone from a cleared encampment got to a navigation center. Often the intended message is "you have to go where no one will complain about you," like out of residential areas.
I have no informed opinion on whether the current policy regime is humane, I can only say that I still see a lot of homelessness but it's less obnoxious now than it was five years ago.
No dispute that it's not great to have homeless encampments near residential areas. It's just such an intractable issue.
But it's depressing to waste the carrot of "you can clear out encampments" without pairing it with "while figuring out how to provide beds or services to the people in them." It's like wasting any potential leverage towards a solution.
"I don't want solutions, I want to stop looking at the problem!"
That's how I handled the place where the groundhog ate my siding.
I didn't like Boise as a rule, because it seemed to me to incentivize jurisdictions offering phony shelter options -- enough to entitle the jurisdiction to clear encampments, but when examined in detail, for example by someone who wanted to make use of them, unsafe or harmful or not actually available. I think that's where the myth that a significant part of the visible homelessness problem is due to people who actively want to live on the street: people who say that sort of thing have been living under a regime where offers of shelter are a trap.
It's like wasting any potential leverage towards a solution.
One of the issues is that with the American division of responsibility, cities do public order but don't have anywhere near the money (or in most states, taxing power) to shelter or house the people involved - that's at the county or state level. It's the work of a moment to tell the police "get those people out of here!".
(San Francisco one of the exceptions as a consolidated city/county, and a handful of other big jurisdictions. But even they need more money for the purpose at a macro level.)
people who say that sort of thing have been living under a regime where offers of shelter are a trap.
One thing that's been a hair more acknowledged lately is that the traditional "congregate" shelters (a big room with a lot of bunk beds) are objectively terrible and even desperate people have very good reasons to refuse them. Lots of violence, theft, etc. SF, at least, is ensuring some degree of privacy in the new shelters it opens. (Maybe one roommate.)
I always want to preface this by saying that NYC is not doing enough, conditions here aren't ideal, many things about our municipal government are nightmarish. But we have a (judge-made law, normally I'm not crazy about that either) straightforward right to shelter, and it means we don't have significant encampments. Literally unsheltered homeless people are fairly few and mostly significantly mentally ill.
18: Yeah, I bet that has something to do with climate. We don't want to spend a ton on shelters (and we have the additional burden of Prop 13 of course) but if unsheltered people were routinely freezing to death we would probably have hashed something out by now.
A number of big-city mayors in CA recently came together and started advocating for a package of reforms including an NYC-style right to shelter. I'm not sure how effective that would be with our baseline level of spending - possibly just more work for impact litigators to boast of.
Aren't Californians afraid that if they shelter all the homeless people, more homeless people from other parts of the county will want to move there?
For example, Nevada seems like the kind of place willing to solve problems with Greyhound tickets and a loose interpretation of the law.
21: It's wrong, most homeless people became homeless near where they are now, but it can happen, and it's definitely a worry in the ether.
Someone in Cleveland proved there is no ether. I saw the plaque.
There was a sheriff in a nearby county back when I was growing up who drove a man with no fixed address and no visible means of support to a town in the next county. And he would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling kids the guy stabbing someone in that town.
25: Restrictive zoning rules ... I'm coming for you.
Boise only ever applied within the 9th Circuit, so heebieville would never have been legally required to comply with it. A moot point now of course.
I mean, the sheriff did get away with it in the sense of avoiding negative consequences. But he had to endure what I now call "Republican-consequences," which is having to listen to people make accurate, well-supported claims about something you did wrong.
26: Not like that. Like he found a local, housed guy with alcoholism and they both got drunk and somehow quarreled.
It did apply to us, and the city has an agreement with the local ACLU chapter which resolved a lawsuit over it that governs procedures for abating camps (notice requirements, storage of belongings, etc.). It's not clear what effects Grants Pass is going to have on that. We also have a new mayoral administration that may take a different approach on these issues than the last one, but details are still unclear.
Yeah, I bet that has something to do with climate. We don't want to spend a ton on shelters (and we have the additional burden of Prop 13 of course) but if unsheltered people were routinely freezing to death we would probably have hashed something out by now.
I strongly doubt this is the case, actually.
If Brian Dennehy's character were lazy and cheap, the whole movie wouldn't have happened.
Anyway, yeah, clearing camps doesn't do anything but push them around unless there are real alternative options. We had a notorious example just recently where there was a big encampment in a park that the city eventually abated and many of the people just went a couple blocks away and set up camp in the street.
People are often hesitant to go to traditional congregate shelters for good reason. Non-congregate shelter works better and has much better outcomes but it's also more expensive and logistically complicated so it's hard to shift the system in that direction. It's a difficult problem.
The big-picture solution is much more housing but in addition to zoning and resistance to change (big issues lots of places) it's just very expensive to build that much and it doesn't happen quickly. Cities and states don't generally have that kind of money and the federal government has so far not been willing or able to open its pursestrings at the level required. The private sector could do it but the extent to which it has a motivation to do so depends on the local economy and housing market. Zoning reform is necessary but not sufficient.
Trautman: I don't think you understand. I didn't come to rescue Rambo from you. I came here to rescue you from him.
Teasle: Well, we all appreciate your concern Colonel. You look extremely well informed so I'm going to send everyone home and pretend this didn't happen while I sit at the bar.
This is the worst issue in my Ohio small town--probably 200 or so homeless and very visible. Many People are so anti-homeless they have started attcking the homeless shelter with every baseless conspiracy theory--they are bussing them in, they somehow make thousands of dollars off them, etc. one horrible woman started a Facebook group basically targeting the shelter and anyone who helps them. The local theatre hosted a fundraiser for the shelter and they started getting a ton of online harassment from this group and threats to come to their board meetings and people going through their public filings. It's horrible how awful these people can be--they are filled with hatred
Trautman: But he killed one of your officers.
Teasle: That guy always bugged me.
I strongly doubt this is the case, actually.
Can you elaborate? For my part when I said "we would have hashed something out" I meant minimal shelter to get people off the street. I suppose our treatment of people in heat waves is a counterexample.
36: Those people probably vote for couch fuckers.
We have active camps all through the winter. (Fewer than in the summer of course.) People don't often literally freeze to death; the technical challenges of winter camping are real but manageable. They do die in other ways sometimes. None of it seems to add any additional urgency to efforts to solve the problem.
The extent to which homeless people have been thoroughly dehumanized in the minds of many people is an important factor in understanding the whole discourse around this.
My city is wrestling with this as well, and no one is seeing a solution that's within our means. The state is run by assholes who think that everyone in cities (esp. mine) should suffer as a matter of principle, so they're the opposite of helpful.
I think our homeless population under 700 people altogether. From the media attention, you'd think it was way more people.
They won't say it out loud, but it's clear that a lot of people think the actual solution is for the cops to shoot all the homeless people and they're frustrated that they won't. What they will say is that they wish the cops would throw them all in jail, which was the focus of a lot of the anger over the Boise decision.
44 Our jail is full, and no one wants to build another one. Yours isn't?
No, all the jails are full. Jail isn't a solution either, as much as people want it to be.
In Ohio, prisoners (though not those in local jails) make furniture. Wonderful furniture with various cushions and crevices.
Who am I kidding, surely he already knows.
I'm thinking maybe we should just shut Ohio down until we can figure out what is happening there.
I feel like maybe we don't really want to know.
The great thing about living in DC is that when we say we want wrap-around, housing-first services for unhoused people, the people who make decisions about funding that sort of thing are elected in Ohio.
HOW AM I GOING TO BE PREZ SOMEDAY IF NO ONE OUTSIDE OF CALIFORNIA CAN SPELL MY NAME RIGHT?
I live two blocks away from our main homeless charity and the main places for encampments are two blocks away or five blocks away from my house, and it's really awful. I'm not saying I know what the solution is, just that if you live nearby and especially if you are a pedestrian nearby it's a very real problem, and if the framing is that people are overreacting you're not going to get anywhere.
What I would like is putting more people in jail longer, not for being homeless, but for street harassment. You start carrying a weapon down the bike trail and assaulting people and you were just in jail last week too then make it a longer sentence. If you're yelling and women walking by at how you'll rape them because they didn't give you money? Prison, and not just for a week. Yes we need to solve the housing shortage, but people being awful in public would still be a problem if they had housing. The housing problem and the being a scary asshole in public problem aren't the same problem.
54: I don't dispute that it's important to reduce street harassment no matter who is doing it. But this thread is about clearances of entire encampments at once. So unless you think every encampment resident is guilty of this, or you believe in collective punishment...
I was proposing an alternative to clearing the encampments.
I do also think that it would make sense to pick a good location for encampments and not allow them in other locations. Just playing whack-a-mole is cruel and also accomplishes nothing.
San Jose had the largest encampment I've ever seen for the first couple years of Covid. It was along the river near the freeway in an area of land that's been kept clear because it's part of the approach to the runways for the airport. As I understand it, there were some real benefits compared to smaller encampments spread out in more areas in terms of being able to set up services, but it also still looked like a very difficult place to live.
It wasn't that close to residential areas - I lived on the other side of the freeway and there wasn't a noticeable impact compared to pre-pandemic when there were smaller camps along the river - but you can't really live under an airport approach if the airport is busy again. It was also very visible to drivers on the busier routes across that part of town. I assume they eventually cleared it but I don't think they had done so before I moved away.
To their credit, San Jose seemed to be trying to do things with tiny homes and other small shelter approaches but I don't know how much impact that had.
it would make sense to pick a good location for encampments and not allow them in other locations.
I think that would be state-controlled land -- like beaches and the areas around and below highways --i.e., the very land Newsom is kicking people out of.
It depends on which state controlled land, some might be appropriate and others less so. What I'd like is people to actually think about what are good locations rather than just making them move over and over.
It definitely makes sense to try to do some management and get them in places with services, fresh water, order maintenance, etc. Ironically, that may be exactly what led to the Sanctuary Districts in Star Trek lore.
OT: How hard is it to get a parrot to sit on your shoulder while you walk down the sidewalk? I couldn't ask the guy who was going it because I was driving and there was no place to stop.
Speaking of antisocial behavior (not homeless people in this case), Jesus Christ
Street harassment and threats are a real problem. It's not a real problem, but I was walking down the street this afternoon when a woman told me that I looked like James Gandolfini. I guess I looked unhappy, so she clarified that it was a complement. But the thing is that I'm older than he was when he died. And my cousin who is only a couple of years older than me is on life support in a hospital right now, so I'm especially not feeling too young to die.
My city just enacted a ban on camping in some areas, and restrictions in some other areas. It's apparently impossible politically, and maybe even problematic legally, to say both (a) you can't camp in place X and (b) you can camp in place Y. So they go with (a), saying where people can't go, and don't say anything about where people can go.
I strongly believe that trying to figure out where encampments should be is a mistake. There should not be encampments. Adequate, acceptable shelter should be available for everyone who wants it, and high quality services for the percentage of people whose needs aren't adequately addressed by the provision of shelter.
This is the only decent way to treat homeless people, and it's the only practical way to solve the problem for nice middle class people who find encampments upsetting. Which they are perfectly right in doing! They should be upset! But there's not a cheap law-enforcement solution that makes people without housing disappear if you're not willing to kill them; providing housing and services may be expensive, but it is the only alternative that works.
It's definitely legal to designate specific areas where camping is allowed, and some cities have done it. We've had a lot of discussion about it locally and the leanings of policymakers have gone back and forth but are currently largely against it. Politically it's tough but then so is everything around this.
I strongly believe that trying to figure out where encampments should be is a mistake. There should not be encampments. Adequate, acceptable shelter should be available for everyone who wants it, and high quality services for the percentage of people whose needs aren't adequately addressed by the provision of shelter.
Agreed, and, until that shelter exists, would you prefer to think of it as "places encampments will be supported where they exist and given a guarantee against dispersal"?
my cousin who is only a couple of years older than me is on life support in a hospital right now
Sorry dude. If it makes you feel any better, James Gandolfini is dead.
Thanks. I never ever watched The Sopranos.
61: Not very hard if you keep their flight feathers clipped. Best they can do is glide to the ground and waddle back to you, and they'd rather be up high than on the ground.
67: I'm not in control of anyone's municipal government, so my saying things is easy. But "until that shelter exists" is bullshit. If the failure to offer decent temporary shelter/permanent housing to people who need it were being treated as an emergency, it could happen maybe not overnight, but fast enough that picking preferable sites for encampments wouldn't be any kind of meaningful thing to do.
In my city, at least, there are certainly lots and lots of vacant office buildings that haven't filled back since the pandemic.
73: It's on the Bowling Green YouTube.
We have right to shelter for families, so all of the migrants are being sent here. I don't know if they are going to distinguish between long-term residents and new arrivals, but you used to be able to stay in extended stay shelters (mostly motel rooms) for 9 months with the option to extend it. Our Governor Maura Healey has now slashed that to 5 days because the Feds have not offered assistance. It's costing the state almost a billion dollars right now. Unfortunately, many of the new arrivals are here legally but can't work. She said the message is "Massachusetts is full."
I think the current system costs about $952 million a year.
I liked Maura Healey fine as AG, but I'm kind of annoyed with her as Governor. Our earned income tax is basically a flat 5.00% (Municipal government is property taxes.). We had a ballot amendment to tax earners making $1 mill or more per year at 10% on the income above $1 million to pay for education and transportation though there was no way to prevent the legislature from cutting other funding for those things. She made sure to pass a tax "relief" bill which lowered rates on taxes that disproportionately benefit high earners.
21: I thin' that's what Mass is afraid of.
Healey also said that if people have shelter options out of state, the Commonwealth will pay to send them there.
I think lurid must have posted about the shameful episode a few years back where a church in our neighborhood wanted to provide parking and hookups in its lot for 3-5 families in RVs, and some local busybodies on the block found out about the plan and got it shut down hard. Street harassment sucks and I get a lot more of it as a woman, but it just beggars belief how many nice middle-income Californians think their nice middle-income neighborhood is going to turn into the Tenderloin the instant you offer someone a place to sleep.
Now I want social justice and a steak.
Third-world problems.
https://nilepost.co.ug/news/208102/street-children-returned-from-kampala-to-karamoja-overwhelm-moroto-town
As they say in Ohio, "When you own a big chunk of the bloody Third World, the babies just come with the scenery."
Your jails are full? Drop me a line.
Our jails are actually emptying out. In 2014 we had 11,000 prisoners. Now we have just over 6,000. The one near me just shut. People are eagerly awaiting its redevelopment. Wonder what Knecht's thoughts are on that one, actually since he lives near it.
We pay other prisons to take our overflow, at an absurd price tag.
I tried to get our city to designate areas where camping would be allowed and got shot down because it would attract people to camp there. So now people camp where camping is not allowed.
We did undertake a major effort to remove the mountains of trash from places where people have camped. That's been a big improvement. But my idea to make some dumpsters available has not been implemented.
SF tried "safe sleep sites" in the early 2020s but they have all been shut down. Based on this recap, it sounds like some of the homeless preferred them to shelters, but the neighbors hated them (for the usual mix of valid and purely aesthetic reasons) and the cost of supporting one person at the sites was around 2x that of a shelter bed.
I am having no luck getting the city to provide water to people experiencing homelessness. Been working on it for three years now, to zero evident progress.
Our progressive councilmember tried to walk the walk and site shelters in her own district and was voted out.
... the cost of supporting one person at the sites was around 2x that of a shelter bed.
Interesting. That makes some sense, but I wouldn't have guessed it (I assume that it sleeps fewer people per site and that would help explain both why it might be preferable to a shelter and why it's more expensive per person).
MPLS is a bit of an outlier, in that Everything Changed with regards to policing, and peoples attitudes towards it, post-George Floyd. So now we have neighborhoods where pretty much no one calls the police unless they're actively being shot (yay!) and a police department that thinks it's Fort Apache X1,000,000. The pigs just cleared the encampment in the vacant lot 2 blox down the street for I believe the 3rd time in as many years, completely blocking off a huge section of the neighborhood to prevent people from coming and yelling at them when they bulldozed my neighbors' possessions with no warning. And they cleared two other big encampments elsewhere in the city the same morning, so that, once again, literally hundreds of people are sans toit ni loi simultaneously, which means they're back to pissing in the bus shelters and shooting up in the convenience store.
Pre-COVID, I was particularly infuriated one summer when there was a semi-legitimate encampment in our biggest neighborhood park, that was by and large doing pretty well, but the neighbors heard there was a rape there and forced the city to run everybody off. MOTHERFUCKERS! Do they think that people (of all genders and sexualities) are NOT being sexually assaulted when they are unhoused ALL THE TIME EVERYWHERE? Meanwhile, all of these public hygiene and morals campaigners had ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEM when the same mix of Black and Native kids were sleeping in doorways a mile down the street during the winters before and after that summer. Fucking idiots. What pisses me off almost more than anything is how big a percentage of the local unhoused populations are kids who are obviously too young to have ever signed a lease. SOMEBODY is kicking 16 - 20 year olds out of whatever housing they had, with no provision for some place stable and affordable to move into. And are they shooting up? Are they doing sex work? Are they getting in fights or mugging people? DUH. You put people in that ecosystem and they're going to become part of it, whether they had a propensity to do any of that stuff or not.
When I was that age, there were still flop houses where you could get a room, or half a room, for maybe 30 hours of minimum wage work per month. You'd be living badly, but if you had food stamps and could run the most basic of scams, you could survive indoors with heat and a bathroom and little risk of being stabbed. But most of those places either got gentrified out of the rental market, or the landlords just jacked the rent up so high that even with a higher minimum wage, no young people working part time could afford to live there.
Everything is bullshit.
Right. Subsidized or somehow encouraged or permitted by regulation, I don't care how it happens, everyplace needs bottom-of-the-market affordable-for-broke-people housing. "The YMCA", or SROs, or boarding houses, or something.
Also, when my grandmother was that age, they had the Danish Young People's Home, where kids just off the farm could stay in dorm-style housing and get a couple hot meals a day and live decently, and not be taking up space in flophouses that was needed by the seriously down and out. Why can't we have something like that again? But even for university students, a percentage of the people who would have been housed in dorms or tumbledown shared houses 20 or 30 years ago are now paying through the nose to live in these horrible, soulless, privately-run warrens, which are no doubt full of sexual assault stories of their own.
In the past, I don't think most middle-class people realized just how many people were able to get along by the skin of their teeth through some mixture of casual, part time work, benefits, selling plasma, scams and couch-surfing. I certainly knew plenty of people who were getting by that way.
Are you sure the "Danish Young People's Home" was real and not something from a pron? It sounds suspicious.
I'm not going to type out every detail of a long, traumatizing story, but Nia had entered foster care as a dependency case after turning 17 (meaning neither she nor I was at fault but I was unable to meet her level of need and the state was required to intervene) and she spent the rest of that year in a residential behavioral/mental health program. She qualified for group homes because of her intellectual disability or Job Corps or adult foster care with a family while she does her last year of high school as long as she'd recommit to foster care at age 18, but of course she signed herself out to live with birth family and not even three days later was calling me to pick her up so she could run far away. That meant I got involved in juggling things on a number of different fronts, since she and I agreed she couldn't live with us safely but also she had nowhere else to go until she could re-enter foster care. If she'd graduated high school and needed independent living, that would require 90 days, though I don't know what any young adult who needs foster care is supposed to do for 90 days on their own. She spent a week with a friend from the residential program before it became clear I hadn't been able to resolve this (and her caseworker had forgotten to leave an out-of-office message and was on vacation and unaware of all of this, which I found out by desperately messaging the caseworker I actually like.) The final plan was that since the court date to remove her from foster care at 18 hadn't happened yet, we'd try to use that to get her to recommit to care instead. But that would work better if we could show we had nowhere to go, which meant I needed to drive her to a homeless shelter. And wow is there not much worse than taking your child to a homeless shelter, though this one (not in our region) was absolutely fantastic as those go. It was a Victorian house with a few beds per room but nothing wild and only for ages 18-24 or something, with a house right next door for actual children and one beyond that for young adults with children. Except they required that people staying there vacate the house at 3 pm and not return until the home reopened for the night at 7 or 8, and so on her second day there she decided to bail and have her birth family pick her up and we started the cycle of dysfunction again. (There was another 24-hour Salvation Army shelter she could walk to and stay in until the better shelter reopened and the public library was open, but she got anxious after 10 minutes or so in either one and would end up calling me hyperventilating, which was not great for either of us.)
Anyway, it sucked a lot, but I'm so grateful for the people at that place who were amazing during few hours she let them be and for her caseworker who was so inept she didn't file the right paperwork to un-enroll Nia. The judge was very much in favor of her continuing foster care, which then puts her at the top of the list for group home placements. (I've been afraid to file for guardianship because I think we'd end up in the same situation we were in where she couldn't find a placement and I was expected to just hang onto her indefinitely, even though I wasn't physically safe and none of us were emotionally healthy. I want it to be the state's responsibility to find her housing when she blows through somewhere, because they can force places to try. But we'll see what actually happens as foster care and Adult Protective Services and MRDD Services have to fight out who's going to manage it. I strongly think it shouldn't be me, because that's my only chance of having a relationship with her. And I do now have a better relationship with her than I have basically ever.) Anyway, she's now in a very small Appalachian but not super rural group home that seems to be a good fit so far, 2 weeks in. We think I can pick up her post-residential belongings from her great aunt's without her dad getting violent with me, maybe. So good things, mostly. Sort of. Whatever. Better.
I've said this before and unfortunately I can't find my source for it. I saw some online poster that said that pre-WW2, half of the tenancies in New York were by the room (or bed), not individual apartments. After WW2, planners decided those were uncool and zoned them out. But you are never going to be able to house half the people in cities in full individual apartments where those didn't previously exist.
Bring back boarding houses!
"I saw some online poster that said that pre-WW2, half of the tenancies in New York were by the room (or bed), not individual apartments"
Sounds entirely plausible. One of my favourite cookery books, "Cooking in a Bedsitter", was written for young people in the 60s who started out - as my own parents did - renting a single room with access to a shared bathroom, and cooking if they were lucky over a single gas burner, without benefit of fridge.
But I don't think it's the case that you have to replace rented rooms with apartments one for one. People share apartments.
95: I just want to clarify that nothing in 91 was intended to imply that parents or individual caregivers are primarily responsible for kids leaving school finding themselves without housing. Obviously, there are many situations in which it is entirely appropriate for young people not to stay in a particular living arrangement, and in those cases it can't always be parents or relatives who pick up the slack. Hostels, SROs, squats, rooming houses, nontraditional housing options -- there are lots of ways that society could find to get people into a warm, safe, clean bed every night, and everyone ought to be taking more responsibility for creating those possibilities.
I do sympathize with the impulse that says that we live in a society that should have higher minimum standards for housing than shared bathrooms and no kitchens; people shouldn't have to live like that. I just think enforcing that has made everyone worse off.
(And of course it's kind of parallel to what I called bullshit above -- I think SROs/bedsits/whatever are enough better than homelessness that they should be allowed. Most people trying to figure out what to do about encampments think that encampments in well-chosen places are enough better than encampments in badly chosen places that they should be facilitated. That whole discussion makes me testy, but it's reasonable and well-meaning, I just think it's practically misguided.)
94: not only did my grandmother work at the DYPL home when she was a young adult, but later when she was married and lived up the street she would host informal events, like bridal showers or birthday parties, for the residents. The building is still there too. It was an old people's home for a long time as social housing needs changed.
The absolute bare minimum, rock bottom options should be the equivalent of either a youth hostel or a really nice public campground (permanent shower/restroom facility, community center with staff, laundry, vending machines, game room, library/computer lab, and a small camper for each person.) That's for the people who are pretty much able to take care of themselves, and in addition then there would be more structured/heavily serviced options for people who had mental/emotional health issues or serious disabilities or addiction problems. Bet you could do that for less than the annual cost of a new sports stadium every 15 years.
Thorn, wishing you strength and positive outcomes.
While we're quibbling about the flavors of free ice cream we'd like, I think you're still succumbing to the impulse to make everything nice and supportive in a way that makes it harder to serve everyone. Community centers and libraries are terrific, but not terrific enough to hold housing hostage for. There are some people who are broke but who just need a safe place to sleep with a door that locks and access to a bathroom, and if we could provide that for them, that shrinks the overall problem enough that providing services for the people who need more gets easier.
(I also get testy about the "tiny house", "really nice public campground" kind of options, but that's on practical grounds that maybe I'm wrong about but I could be convinced otherwise. In terms of cost, durability, and ease of maintenance I cannot believe that any of the outdoor options competes with a multi-occupant building, and I think the cultural sense that asking people to sleep under a shared roof is oppressing them is Bad, Actually. But that's a practical question I could be wrong about.)
I knew someone who had a good job with money who came from abroad and was saving to buy a place who negotiated an extended stay at the suburban hotel next to his workplace. It was less expensive than an apartment, furnished and came with breakfast and a kitchenette. He could walk to work where there was a subsidized cafeteria. So, he cooked his dinner in his kitchenette.
For a single guy, I didn't sound bad. It was a pretty boring area but he was able to save money. I think individuals cooking for one or two is hugely overrated and an inefficient way to buy groceries. Honestly, when I was young and busy, even after college, I would have preferred some kind of cooperative housing like a sorority with cooked breakfast included.
Our local YWCA closed and tried to become a nit very good hotel.
105: thinking about campground type options more as a stopgap/transient focused solution. Or for more rural areas where it wouldn't really make sense to drop in a 100-room SRO. Obviously, here in the actual city, repurposed existing structures would be where to start, and then move on to more purpose-built solutions.
The tiny house/micro-house/mobile housing side of things also makes sense to me primarily in the context of meeting immediate, emergency needs. From a resource use perspective, as well as comfort, safety, access to services, etc. perspective, multi-unit structures would be the ideal.
95: Wishing the best for Nia and you.
I think there is value to be had in formalizing existing camping situations. A lot of people who live rough do so because value their independence, and really don't want to accept any more than a place to pitch a tent where they can be left alone. Some people own dogs, or use a lot of drugs, or have other things they prioritize over the limited additional comfort one gets by choosing to accept public shelter. These can be frustrating people but you have to meet them where they are at.
So when an encampment is discovered, why not ensure that it meets some very basic sanitation standards and have a social worker come around every couple of weeks to reissue a camping permit, help with the trash, and say "oh by the way lets talk about what kind of services are available to help you get past of this tough situation in your life"?
I usually scoot over automatically when someone seems to be looking for a seat, but this guy had aman bun.
111: You're closer to the provision of social services than I am, so maybe I'm just wrong. But I'll believe that "encampments", as opposed to a very small number of intractably difficult people, are caused by people who wouldn't take decent safe shelter if offered, when I read reporting about the decent safe shelters with plenty of available room standing empty while social workers try to persuade people to move in out of the cold. As far as I can tell, in jurisdictions with encampments, the available shelter space isn't there.
I'm not claiming there's literally no one who is unwilling to move indoors, but I'm pretty thoroughly convinced that there are few enough people like that, that if you could provide shelter for everyone else, you wouldn't be talking about managing encampments, you'd be talking about monitoring individuals.
And "why not manage encampments", is because I think it's a fundamentally harder problem to do at any meaningful level than providing shelter. The only thing that makes it cheaper and easier than providing real shelter is that jurisdictions trying to do that sort of thing don't do enough to do much good.
Certainly, people should do what they can to help people living in encampments, but it's putting a bandaid on a broken leg. Better than not doing anything, if a bandaid is what you have, but not much at all of a way toward a real solution.
tried to become a nit very good hotel.
BG is going to tremendous lengths to avoid saying "lousy".
A lot of people who live rough do so because value their independence, and really don't want to accept any more than a place to pitch a tent where they can be left alone. Some people own dogs, or use a lot of drugs, or have other things they prioritize over the limited additional comfort one gets by choosing to accept public shelter.
Well, some do. Probably not "a lot".
Rough sleeping went down to around 500 across the whole of England in 2002, and now it's around 4,000. Even if you assume that no government could possibly have been kinder or more caring towards rough sleepers than that of Tony Blair, and that those 500 were sleeping rough because they liked it, that still implies that the other 3500 on the streets now don't like it and would like to sleep under cover if they could.
(England not the UK because this is tracked by nation, and the four nations have different and incompatible ways of measuring homelessness).
To unpack my testiness on this point a little more. Snapping about how it seems very implausible to me that encampments are caused primarily by people who choose to sleep outside despite having safe decent other options is rude to people like Spike who are genuinely trying to help unsheltered people, and who are trying to respect their autonomy. 111 is a comment from a good person, who is doing more than I am to help unsheltered people, and irritably attacking the premise of it makes me kind of a twerp.
Rude though it is, however, first, I think I'm right on the facts (I would think that, of course), and if I am, I think focusing on the percentage of homeless people that are committed to living outside despite having decent other options is absolutely terrible, damaging framing. Where I'm coming from is (1) middle-class taxpayers and voters have to be on board to achieve any solution to housing unsheltered people, because that's where the money and the permissions come from. (2) voters hate encampments and visible homelessness, and they're not unreasonable to do so. Uncompassionate, sure, but encampments are awful for the people who have to live near them and interact with them. So (3) framing the problem as a conflict between the middle class people who hate living around people who are sometimes abusive (see 54) and are necessarily unsanitary and so on, on the one hand, and the rights of the free spirits who have to be allowed to live in public spaces wherever they want without consideration of the costs they're imposing on other people, on the other hand, is going to have a profoundly negative effect on voter willingness to do anything meaningful about the problem.
The vast majority of people want to live safely and decently indoors, and serving those people adequately would reduce the size of the unsheltered population to the point where it wouldn't be a serious problem for the rest of society, and could be addressed with individualized attention to unsheltered people's issues. Getting safe and decent shelter and housing for everyone who would accept it is a very big, expensive problem, but it's a big, expensive problem of a scale that it is possible to address, and we'll never get taxpayers to address it unless they believe that it would do some good to make public spaces more livable for them.
I think focusing on the percentage of homeless people that are committed to living outside despite having decent other options is absolutely terrible, damaging framing.
That's not how I read 111, because it goes on to mention shelters. I took it to mean people who decided to live outside because it was the best of the options available to them at the time and that they don't want any other help because they know the kinds of help available.
It's framing someone who thinks living outside is their best option as a fact about them rather than as a fact about their options.
I'm not saying there aren't any incorrigibly free spirits out there, or any severely mentally ill people who aren't competent to weigh their options. But in the vast majority of cases (I am saying this without data to back it up), someone who believes living outside is a better option than shelter believes it reasonably, because either they are not actually being offered shelter, or because the shelter they are being offered is objectively less safe and comfortable by widely shared standards than living in a tent in New England weather.
120.1: well put. Spike mentions people with dogs who would rather sleep rough than give up their dog in order to sleep in a shelter. That is, very likely, not someone who wants to sleep outside because he likes it outside. That's someone who doesn't want to give up his dog, and if he had somewhere with a roof that allowed dogs, he'd happily take it up.
I agree that encampments are caused primarily by a lack of affordable housing, and its much better to get people into shelters than have them stay in encampments.
Our situation is a bit different from large cities where the calculus may be different. We have enough forested space in my community that hiding out in a tent in the woods is a viable option for people. And we even have a roughly adequate supply of shelter space, with the balance of folks being put up in hotels.
The shelter system we have works well for, e.g., a family that gets evicted and needs a place to stay for two months while they try to find a new place to live. We can and do focus on situations like that.
But that's not everybody. Many have tried the shelter, but it doesn't suit them for various reasons. Faced with a choice between staying in a bunkroom with a bunch of other people of their same gender, where they have to behave themselves and try not to get in fights, vs staying in a tent in the woods where they can drink and get high and have sex, a lot of people are going to choose the tent.
You can try to force them out of the tent, but experience has shown they will just move the tent somewhere else. Having some influence over where that tent might be is a useful thing, and, ideally, is a first step toward building trust in the system.
I guess I disagree with your concern about focusing on a percentage of the people, specifically as it relates to "framing." Framing is a media concept, and yeah, for the sake of media consumption and selling the policy its better to focus on the homeless families and homeless vets and people with a relatable story.
But that small percentage of chronically homeless, who often don't come across to others as particularly sympathetic at all, and who may annoy the local middle class folks and make others feel unsafe - you have to try to help them too. Even if its only at the level of harm reduction, like picking up the trash and making sure they have a safe place to poop.
Its still better to have these folks in the system - even if its just a pinky toe in the system - than to have them completely on the outside and totally on their own.
or because the shelter they are being offered is objectively less safe and comfortable by widely shared standards than living in a tent in New England weather.
This time of year, the New England weather is pretty spectacular. Preferences do change quite a bit when winter roles around.
That guy who stayed in a tent all year in Maine demonstrated how to achieve harmony with nature by stealing propane tanks.
122: Definitely, doing whatever you can to provide whatever services are available to everyone who needs them is the best you can do.
In terms of people lacking shelter, yes I agree that the vast majority want shelter and would take it if it were available.
In terms of crazy people who make being a pedestrian scary and uncomfortable, I expect the majority is people are the exceptions.
I do think it's better to think of these as two very different (though overlapping) problems and remember that a lot of people are focused on the latter.
Here I'm getting into more things that I can't prove but am deeply convinced of because they make sense. Essentially, that being unsheltered, or even insecurely sheltered, generates antisocial behavior. You have terribly stressed, sleep deprived, people living in incredibly insecure conditions -- they are just way more likely to be acting out than the same person, even with the same mental health problems, would be if they were comfortably housed.
Housing wouldn't solve everything, but I would bet you it would shrink the anti-social behavior problem by a great deal.
Pretty good article in the local paper today about the encampment I mentioned earlier (the one that the city cleared from the park and just moved a couple blocks over and into the street). I was at the meeting it refers to on Wednesday and the description of the things people said there is accurate. I think this quote sums up the effect of the Grants Pass decision well:
"The legal landscape changed, but the reality hasn't changed," Constant said. "The simple act of having the power to abate doesn't actually give these people a place where they can go."
127: I don't know. By the same token, when someone is screaming in the street, you don't know they're unhoused - they could have a place and just be wandering during the day.
It's possible, but public perception of disorder seems to track with numbers of unsheltered people. It doesn't mean they're all exactly the same people, but it seems tightly rather than loosely connected.
They're connected, but I do think it's important to realize that they're separate things that can be addressed separately. The thing I would always tell people is that Boise doesn't mean the city can't enforce other laws, even in the encampments. Whether it's actually a reasonable use of resources to send cops in to arrest people for things like disorderly behavior is of course a judgment call, especially because the jails are full so giving someone a citation for a misdemeanor and sending them back out doesn't really do anything to address the issue.
Yeah 131 is getting at a key point which is that people want the police to "do something" and so something like Boise that stops the police from doing something is massively unpopular even though what it's banning isn't something that would accomplish anything. But it's not reasonable to expect the general public to be informed about policy at any level of detail. There's a real problem, the government isn't doing anything about it, and so people are mad about it.
That's sort of why I get snippy and irritable about framing. I know it's hard, but associating "doing something about antisocial people on the street" with "building decent, safe, sufficient shelters" in voters' minds seems like the only way to get out of this mess.
I think UK politics would look very different if scary screaming mentally ill people were just something one expected to see regularly in any major city, and you just had to adopt a kind of 'whoops, there's today's threatening nutter, looks like it's Spiders Bob again, I'll just cross over the street and carry on with my shopping' approach.
133: Part of the problem here is a lack of a good word to refer to one of the problems. What most people mean when they talk about the homeless problem isn't primarily about housing, it's about public antisocial behavior, but we don't have a word for the people doing that behavior that isn't "homeless person." Most of the people shooting up in the public library or smearing shit on the walls of the starbucks or screaming at people walking by or groping people or whatever are in fact homeless, but most aren't, and crucially most homeless people aren't doing any of that, but what word should people use?
I thought that's what the Speakers' Corner was for. Or is that too much like supporting an encampment?
sorry "some aren't" not "most aren't" in the middle clause.
134: Not just the major ones, we're a city of 80k in a county of 175k.
I'm sure it's a major city to someone.
And of course this interacts badly with the US laws about weapons. Just one encampment, a mile away from my house, has already had two murders: one a gunshot and the other a machete hacking. In both cases both the murderer and the victim were both homeless, but at any rate crazy people with machetes is not a great combination for anyone.
The number of used needles found in parks each year in our town of 80k is 2-3k.
If I'm reading it right (and probably I'm not, because the numbers look implausible), despite a right to shelter NYC clears approximately 10 homeless encampments *every day*.
https://gothamist.com/news/how-often-does-nyc-sweep-homeless-encampments-mayors-answer-is-past-due
Presumably the guy whose bonus depends on clearing a certain number of camps is friends with the guy who determines what counts as a cleared camp.
Those stats seem to include clearing out people peddling stuff on the sidewalks, rather than being limited to where unsheltered people live. One specific location mentioned in the article, 14th St near the L, is right near where my mother lives and she does a lot of her shopping from those guys (this does not mean it's a normal thing to do. Mom is a giant weirdo and I make fun of her for it.) In that specific location, the cops probably roust everyone a couple of times a week and they come right back, but it's people selling stuff, not people encamped there.
I really do not mean to imply that there's no one unsheltered in NYC; there definitely are some. There just don't seem to be enough unsheltered people that a lot of semipermanent settlements arise.
That makes sense, those numbers seemed off.
That said, most estimates I can find seem to be saying around 5k people sleeping rough in NYC at any given time, and so I'm pretty confident the lack of visible large encampments in Central Park is driven more by a strictly enforced policy against tents (and a large police presence) than just the number of people. Of course the other big factor is the subway as an alternative place to sleep rather than a park. (I can also find lots of people saying people don't sleep in Central Park because of the rats, which is horrifying, but I'm not sure how much I believe it.)
Like, she keeps buying "Rolix" watches or there are guys on the sidewalk selling groceries?
I remember people camping in Central Park when I was there in the 80s.
As far as I can work out we have 25-40 people in town who regularly live in encampments, compared to 400-500 homeless people at any given time.
147: The latter. There's a particular guy who sells mildy expired stuff from Citarella she patronizes. She's going to die of food poisoning one of those days, but my pointing this out has no effect.
Antisocial people with mental illness may be housed. I ran into a guy begging about a year ago who looked down and out and worse than the last time I saw him, but I know he was a client of the Department of Mental Health and lived in a group home in the past. I also had a co worker at a Mental Health agency who had the experience of someone begging. He knew this person because he had done a social work evaluation. He said "I know you, Inknow the group home you live in, and I know there's food. I did know an extremely anti social person who just seemed unwilling to tolerate any rules at all and kept getting kicked out of apartments. I saw him climb over barriers in an art exhibit. He was a high priority client of the Department of Mental Health and may have had a Guardian.
The existence of such people does not mean that the problem of homelessness isn't a really big issue and is u likely to be a cause of some antisocial behavior.
They're terrific, she says. The Citarella guy texts her when he restocks. Like I said, I have no control over her behavior.
Slightly OT: experiences like Upetgi's, if nationally representative (as appears to be the case) will totally swamp any good news on national crime stats.
I had to google Citarella. They sell fish. I think you have a good point.
I reassure myself that Mom isn't demented by remembering that she's always been like that.
We're not at all representative, because we're a small blue island in a large red sea, so we attract homeless people from a much larger area. So the number of homeless people as a fraction of population is way out of whack. No idea how the fraction who are in encampments compares.
She was a flight attendant. Doesn't she remember what happened to everyone who ate the bad fish on Airplane!?
we don't have a word for the people doing that behavior that isn't "homeless person."
We mostly say "tweaker" but "in crisis" is the more polite version.
158: They got to meet Kareem Abdul-Jabar?
"I thought that's what the Speakers' Corner was for"
Most of the Speakers Corner speakers were fundamentalist Muslims and Christians last time I went. Probably a bit mentally off balance as well of course, but not really threatening immediate physical harm.
Very delayed metaphysical harm.
I think the upshot of this conversation is really just requisite variety (he said, getting his cybernetics beard on and cranking into the latest naked yoga pose). You need roughly as many solutions as you have problems, and there are what, four problems here?
1) Providing housing for the poor
2) Providing housing for the middle class
3) Providing emergency aid for the desperately poor and generally troubled
4) Maintaining whatever level of public order the community wants (not everyone wants to be the Tenderloin, not everyone wants to be a well off lakeside suburb of Hamburg)
1 and 2) are similar in that they're primarily about bricks, concrete, and like substances but 1) is likely to need much more subsidy than 2), and even if you do get the tax funding to address them both with public housing you have to prioritise 1 and people leaving 3 if you want this to be defensible*. Alternatively you draw a tight line around some subset of 1 and 2 and leave 3 to be dealt with by 4 - this is what glory era British council housing did*, which helps a lot with both management and also getting 2 to pay the taxes for it, but it's rough on 3 who are after all the most deserving*** and stores up trouble in 4.
YIMBYism might take care of 2 but 1 needs yer actual public housing and 3 needs structured care**** of some sort.
*this is what we did since the 1970s but it's tough to build much and the need to look after 3 tends to make 1 difficult
**a classic insight about its sociology was that the rents were usually set so you needed a proper job and the council would be down on you if you didn't behave in the proper respectable manner
***as I keep saying the reference homelessness NGO, Shelter, was founded in 1968, a year in which the UK started 400,000 homes across the council, association, and commercial sectors
****the 1990s crisis in the UK happened at the historic trough of the house price/salary ratio
re: 163
I don't disagree with any of that.
Re: your ** and 3,
I grew up in a council house on a very mixed estate with some very poor people* and some decently employed people who owned cars and had decent jobs. There were a couple of methods of handling 3 and 4 that I don't think are really options today:
1. Straight up violence. There was a decent pool of properly hard bastards among the "Dads" (for want of a better term) on my estate--1970/80ss urban central Scotland, etc--and someone that was aggressively antisocial, whether that was an adult or a teenager, could expect to eventually receive a beating. Community justice was a thing, e.g. my sister and I both got bitten by a neighbour's dog. After several warnings, my Dad went to their door and laid the guy out, and I have loads of similar stories from my immediate pool of friends and social acquaintances. The aggregate level of violence was higher than anywhere I'd be comfortable living now as a white-collar university educated not-hard person, but it certainly kept the lid on certain kinds of antisocial behaviour.
2. Institutions. My village had two major hospitals for the mentally handicapped, and the mentally ill, and both were used liberally. Sometimes fairly, and sometimes very definitely not in a way that we'd be comfortable with now (for good ethical reasons).
3. Active policing. There was a police station in the village, and patrols were commonplace and if you called them, they turned up quickly.
One thing I'm really conscious of now, living in London, is that with the lack of community violence as a tool for social order--a good thing, I stress--you do need the state in the form of the police, local council, health and social care system, etc. to fill that void, and it's conspicuously lacking. I've tried and failed to report a growing number of instances of antisocial behaviour, and the couple of times I've phoned the police to report an in progress crime, I've either had i) literally no answer, or ii) someone answered but told me I was on my own, as no police are coming.
* including us for the 8 or so years that both my parents were on benefits full-time
I get legitimately puzzled by the public disorder conversation, because I'm not sure if public disorder in NYC is lower than, e.g., where Upetigi is or in San Francisco, or if my tolerance for it is just higher. I've been saying that I sympathize with voters/taxpayers who behave uncompassionately toward unsheltered people in terms of how they're willing to spend money, because they're angry about disorder, and that they have to be convinced that providing housing and other services is their best solution for reducing disorder.
But I do not perceive the level of public disorder due to unsheltered people/people in crisis in the parts of NYC where I spend time as at an intolerable level at all. I see unsheltered people frequently, but in a context where I'm worrying about their welfare if anything, not worrying that they're going to make my life difficult in any way, 19 times out of 20, with the 20th time being never really a big upsetting deal (like, there someone shouting on the subway in a way I feel like I need to pay some attention to). My sense is that the problem is much worse in other places, but maybe my perceptions are what's off.
re: 166.2
I can't speak for other places, but in the parts of London I frequent a lot, unhoused people specifically, qua unhoused, aren't generally the biggest issue in terms of public disorder.
However, there is a growing* problem of street disorder in my own particular part of London, which is centred around the use of drugs and alcohol in a couple of specific places, some of which are places where homeless people hang out, but some of which are centred around a couple of dodgy pubs and shop which sell cheap booze to the visibly intoxicated,** and a couple of hostels and half-way houses which are used by people coming out of social care, the mental health system, or prison. I don't personally find it intimidating. It's just annoying. A friend who lives next to one of these places, though, is really not very happy about people sitting on the front wall of his house doing drugs and dealing.
* it's worse than a few years ago, it's not any kind of crisis.
** there are available mechanisms for dealing with some of these issues, including the licensing of premises to sell alcohol, and community policing, but my local council seem to fail to do this. One of the more notorious pubs just had their license renewed despite very strenuous community complaints.
That is, when I burble on about our wonderful "right to shelter" here, it's not that I think it means we're doing enough to help people who need help (we are absolutely not), it's that I think, based on my perception of conditions here compared to how people talk about conditions elsewhere, that what we're providing here is enough to reduce public disorder to a more tolerable level. I don't think the difference in conditions between here and San Francisco is that the cops here are more efficiently brutal in clearing encampments; if efficient brutality worked, it'd work everyplace. I think it's that they have more shelter to offer at a level that's acceptable to a higher percentage of the unsheltered population.
I think part of the issue is here is that work from home means fewer workers are on the streets downtown. So the same amount of disorder as before is a higher percentage of what people see walking around.
I think 163 is basically right. It's a set of distinct but interconnected problems, all of which are solvable in theory but difficult to solve in practice for different reasons.
166: Yes, I think there do seem to be genuine differences in the level of public disorder in different places that make it hard to compare. UPETGI's community seems like an extreme in terms of the amount of impact on random passersby. Parts of San Francisco may be similar. My experience here is more like LB's in New York; there's "disorder" in that there are encampments around and there's a certain amount of violence and unsanitary conditions associated with them and sometimes spilling over into activity outside of them, but it very rarely impacts other people directly. When people say they feel uncomfortable or unsafe it's more like "I saw some tents in the park" or "a panhandler asked me for change." Which are still not great, but quite different from, like, guys assaulting people with weapons on bike trails.
Where I live now is definitely worse in terms of public antisocial behavior than NYC when I lived there. And Berkeley (both now and in 2020, but not in the aughts) in turn is clearly worse than where I live. That said, judging from my visits there's been a noticeable uptick in antisocial behavior (mostly on the subway) in NYC in the last 10 years. So if you haven't noticed any change post-pandemic then maybe it bothers you less.
The other thing is that in NYC it's much more likely that there's a crowd of other people nearby, whereas somewhere less dense you're often alone on a block with someone behaving erratically and aggressively and it's very hard to know when that might escalate to violence. Most of the time it doesn't of course, but sometimes it does. Someone walking down the bike path hitting people with a pole is a rare event (that happens!) but someone walking while holding some makeshift weapon is much more common and it's always scary.
I'm also just very freaked out by someone yelling at strangers, especially if they're not seated. Which maybe shouldn't be scary from some probability viewpoint, but raises my heart rate.
I've noticed an uptick in things that don't register as crime or disorder to most people, but are very antisocial. Things like honking too much or parking like more of an asshole than usual. Having noticed this in myself, I've tried to be extra polite and nice. Which mostly works until my last nerve snaps. Like when I flipped off the old lady who kept honking at us while we were waiting for a red light.
Absolutely, driving has gotten visibly worse post-pandemic.
The other low level antisocial behavior that shouldn't be the end of the world but makes me very unhappy, is people using the volume on their phone without headphones in public (especially on public transportation). Even in New York, where usually people behave like they live in a society!
The change in driving strikes me as both criminal and disorder.
176: And in my small franchise gym, of all places! A guy who I overheard chattering to others about being on the Gen X/Boomer cusp and saying a range of law enforcement/intelligence agencies had "tried to get" Trump and failed.
I blame work from home. People are working over Zoom meetings and Outlook is trying to make Teams happen, so it hides the links to Zoom while boosting a meeting site on Teams that no one asked for. Then the olds all go to the Teams meeting and everyone is frustrated with everyone else.
Or let me give one recent example (last couple months) of a different sort which wasn't dangerous, but was certainly extremely uncomfortable. Sitting on the porch of one of our local coffee shops, someone on the block started screaming at the top of her lungs that someone was sexually assaulting her. She was having a whole full on conversation about how she doesn't know this man and doesn't want him to touch her, etc. for like 5 minutes. And there's just no other person there, she's just fully alone. Not sure if it's hallucinations or some kind of flashback. It wasn't dangerous to me, but it's in a very different category from just like "I don't want to see a tent." The police (or maybe a combination of police and social workers) responded and I'm not sure how the whole thing resolved exactly, but she did stop full on screaming at the top of her lungs when they arrived. This is a sympathetic case and I hope she got some help, but it also makes it very easy to see why people don't want to interact with seriously mentally ill people on a daily basis.
163: I'd add that the hard cases are really hard. A lot of the "framing", so to speak, assumes that with the right support, everyone that is unhoused won't be, and then won't need the support any longer. This is true of a lot of people, but there are some people who just aren't going to be capable of caring for themselves, and I don't think we have a good solution there.
Locally there aren't many unhoused people, but where people get worried, I think, is when a troubled area intersects one that people expect to be safe. The bike path is safe for 95% of its length, with playgrounds and parks, but there's the one underpass 3 miles in, and all it takes is one bad incident for people to decide the whole path is dangerous, etc.
The weirdest local thing is that the main park where troubled people hang out during the day has roads on three sides and only directly abuts one thing: the main post office. And at some point they surrounded the post office with very temporary looking 12-foot fencing and a gate. I'm not sure how much of that was about keeping people out at night vs making customers feel safe parking there, but it's the weirdest looking thing.
Apparently the fences would usually be against local ordinances, but the Post Office has sovereign immunity??
The kids these days are souping up their car engines to make intentional backfiring sounds. Its loud and pervasive and profoundly anti-social, but also tuning your car to be loud is a middle class thing so people don't complain about it like they do when they see a tent somewhere.
183: That looks right. Ann Arbor Township v. US, 1950. The courts had previously found the government to be able to ignore local zoning when building defense housing for the war effort, but this expanded it.
184 that's been going on since teens had cars
I thought 184 was more of a Gen X thing, taking the muffler off motorcycles etc.
It's hard to tell because Stockard Channing was 33 and playing a teenager in Grease.
There is a new thing they do that makes the engine go snap crackle pop really loud over and over and it should be outlawed with extreme prejudice.
184 that's been going on since teens had cars
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/511tbv/never_forget_that_the_whistles_go_wooooo/
Like Spike, I am strongly opposed (thankfully not common here, but I have very little patience for intentionally noisy cars).
Berkeley (both now and in 2020, but not in the aughts)
I grew up in Berkeley and it was kind of remarkable how much the city changed in terms of visible social disorder by the early aughts. I moved away in the mid-aughts and haven't spent a whole lot of time in Berkeley since, none at all since 2020 except for a brief trip to return library books checked out pre-pandemic. Up until 2019, my view of the city was so shaped by growing up in the area in the 80s and 90s that it still seemed pretty low on the disorder scale, comparatively speaking.
Whistle tip may be new but teens have been fucking with mufflers to make engines loud sins the 1950s
They didn't even have the silicone sleeves.
And whats the deal with the bright-ass LED headlights?
Meth heads put them in other peoples' cars so everyone is blind and won't see them steal Sudafed.
Absolutely, driving has gotten visibly worse post-pandemic.
Again in just the last three days I had someone zoom past me on the right in order to run a completely red light. As in, I was sitting fully stopped at the red light, the car came up behind me, created its own right-hand lane on the shoulder, passed me, and floored it through the light.
Very often these cars also have paper temporary tags (sometimes long-expired) and/or license plate obscuring devices. It's infuriating. I don't really think jail is the answer, but they are absolutely making the roads meaningfully less safe for everyone.
And someone could write a sociology thesis on the Venn diagram overlap between cars with FOP or similar plates and those with license plate obscurers. No shame whatsoever.
164: Doesn't London have like, twice as many cops per capita as NYC? What do they do all day?
Here on the mean streets of MPLS, the only time I feel like there's a real threat to public safety is when you get a bunch of young men together and there's gunplay, or when you've got people flipping out over a domestic dispute in public, as I saw on Saturday downtown. This younger fellow was apparently feeling like he was being disrespected (or "dissed" as old white people say) and he was ready to take all comers -- luckily nobody was dumb enough to engage with him and he eventually ran out of steam and biked off. There's carjackings, sure, but when a "spree" is half a dozen in a weekend, that doesn't seem like much to be concerned about in a 2.5 million person metro. I think I have had exactly one dodgy encounter with an unhoused neighbor in my entire life here, and it was pretty low-key, and a long time ago.
There was a shooting about ten years back at the Giant Eagle near my house. I tried to get people to call it The Death Eagle, but it didn't work. Probably out of a combination of good taste and the fact that no one died. Or even went to the hospital so far as they could figure out.
Two people drove into that store since I've been here. But none since covid.
Well, you know what they say about how Pennsylvanians can't drive.
198: Minneapolis has eight times the homicide rate of London, for context. Overall crime rate is double in London, though, because the answer to your question is "they essentially ignore all crimes other than serious violence, homicide, and public order duty".