I see from the other place that Halfordismo is on the march, in that he has been granted the rights of the high, middle and low justice over the people of his native city. The mind reels, but in a respectfully approving kind of way.
SCENE 1. EXT. NIGHT.
FX: light wind blowing, dog barking, some traffic noise, distant sound of Umm Khaltoum.
CRANE SHOT: We track slowly across the roofs of Suez City. Eventually the camera centres on one particular house with a large garage beside it. We track through an upstairs window to
SCENE 2. HAMID's BEDROOM. INT. NIGHT.
The camera continues to track in until it is tight on the bedside table. The silence is suddenly broken by a phone ringing. A hand stretches into shot to pick up the phone and retreats out of shot again.
HAMID: (offscreen, sleepily) Hello?
MR AL BAKR (on phone): Hamid? It's happened again.
HAMID: (offscreen, now awake) No, Mr Al Bakr. You know I don't do that any more. You said it was my last job. My ticket out.
MR AL BAKR: I know, Hamid. But there's no one in the world with your skills. The US president has requested your help personally. The world needs you.
HAMID sighs.
SCENE 3. INT. HAMID'S GARAGE. NIGHT.
Sudden brightness as the lights come on with a snap. A huge shape looms in the centre of the garage, covered by a tarpaulin. Behind it we see Hamid enter.
He pauses and, with a single sweep, pulls the tarp off, revealing a huge and battered mechanical digger.
HAMID: Well, habibi, you and I have another emergency job.
CUT TO:
How do you accidentally run into Baltimore? It's really easy to see.
1 is great news, Halford, if you're watching.
Yes. But he's probably busy buying gavels and robes and shirts that are just the collar parts.
I couldn't find it on the other place, but I do know has name from there so googling... wow.
More applause for 2!
We just got some mail from Europe and learned that, in this possibly transformational moment for the EU, the kid and I are now legally recognized EU citizens. The old country has me registered as a man under my birth name so there's still some work to do, but seeing as this country currently has the only gay non-Serbian head of state out there, I don't think it will be a roadblock. I've never been there and we don't have money to visit, but apparently public transit is free and you are allowed to grow up to four cannabis plants in your home or garden.
I though that was an elected job in that state. Now he'll really have to stay away.
11: Head of state or head of government? I believe it's the latter in the case of Serbia, but there are apparently five total in Europe if you count heads of government.
Oh yeah, you're right, head of state is a monarch. Europe has had five heads of government to date, not counting closet cases, two currently in power.
So, your ancestors are from an extremely tiny country if I understand that correctly.
1: Wow! I guess I better avoid that county.
15: Yes, it's a dot on the map. I always thought it was just a cute fact that my last name came from there, and then lurid turned up the weird state of affairs where they grant citizenship by descent arbitrarily far back as long as (because of laws in effect once upon a time) it was exclusively through the male line prior to 1969. I do wonder what my great-great-grandfather would think of me now.
I keep a big shelf in the refrigerator full of cheese in case any of my ancestors come to see me. I want them to know I'm doing well and I think proving that I have enough cheese to feed a family is a great way to prove that across cultures and time.
Speaking of the old country, I had a nice conversation with my mother about our Ukrainian forebears recently. Sadly, I had apparently conflated two different great-uncles and probably won't inherit a stash of radioactive silver. The great-uncle whose citizenship certificate listed Chernobyl as place of birth left as a toddler. His story about his witchy grandmothers having cursed the land as they were leaving was almost certainly made up 60 years later, when Chernobyl was in the news. The great-uncle who vividly recalled his parents' burying the family silver in the backyard late at night, then taking the family to catch the pre-dawn train to Odessa and the ship to Ellis Island, expecting to return after some unpleasantries blew over, was not the same person and not even from the same side of our family. Their village was probably near Lviv, far from Chernobyl. (The story never made sense anyway. I suspect that the parents weren't hiding the silver, but digging up a literal nest egg they had buried years earlier, and told their curious young children a story so they wouldn't tip off border police/customs inspectors about what they were carrying).
Customs doesn't like freelance cheese imports.
Pokémon Go is asking me if I'm safe, but the weather seems innocuous.
I guess there's an air pollution thing in the suburbs.
re: 21
My wife's family are originally from Ukraine, although they are quite vague about precisely when they moved from there to Bohemia. Sometime immediately pre or post WW1, I think. I'm also assuming from that part of western Ukraine (Subcarpathian Rus, etc, etc.) that was part of Austro-Hungary, and then Czechoslovakia and then wasn't.
25: One thing that just blows my mind about anti-immigration people is that stories like your in-laws' are just utterly unremarkable*, but they pretend to believe that everybody is just rooted in place except for slavering hordes of dirty foreigners. Obviously everyone in America is aware of the staggering dishonesty/hypocrisy of St Patrick's Day revelers who rail against immigrants, but it's not just here.
*I mean, there might be an interesting tale, but in the big picture, tens of millions have both relocated and been subject to an array of governments
26: Related, I recall the story of some body they found preserved in a bog, and when they tested the DNA, he was basically indistinguishable from the local community, which seemed like a story about British village stability. I assume that held up, but even if it did, it's not really accurate about the UK as a whole: long before Empire, wave after wave of invaders & immigrants came and settled and ended up side by side with "natives", and I strongly suspect that a lot of people believe they can identify who's of what descent better than they really can.
Part of the reason I'm thinking about this is that it occurred to me the other day that Vikings were kind of a weird almost-settler-colonial society: when they took over a place, it wasn't nobles-only the way that a lot of post-Roman changes in rule were, nor was it population replacement the way that strict settler-colonialism is defined. But they really created population-level changes in places they conquered.
Since I've gotten back into the habit of watching Jeopardy, I am seeing the TV commercials the Republican candidates for the US Senate seat are running. Every one of them is running as the true America First Trump candidate. You would think Jane Timken, an establishment Republican, endorsed by retiring Senator Rob Portman, would realize there's no way she can compete on the grounds of being an outsider and Trump-worshipper, and she might attempt to run as the sane candidate that knows something about politics -- but, no, her commercial tries to sell her as a True Trumper. I expect the Ohio Republicans will choose the real deal -- Mike Gibbons. As far as I can tell, he genuinely has no political experience and has never said a negative word about Donald Trump.
25: I've probably mentioned this before, but I'm pretty sure my wife's grandmother family is also from that Carpathian area. Do you know what religious affiliation your in-laws were? Mine were Byzantine Catholics, which is pretty unusual (though not unusual for someone from that area).
re: 27
Yeah, iirc it was a village somewhere in the SW of England--there were literal descendants of the person whose body it was who still lived in the village--but I think that pattern repeats in lots of places. A lot of people in places like the UK have ancestry that's very deeply connected over many hundreds or even thousands of years to the place they still live. But, as you say, the blood-and-soil nativists are still full of shit.
The Vikings intermarried hugely with the locals,*** and their cultural influence was so great that the basic pronouns we use in English came from Norse. So yeah, that's quite different from a lot of other settler-colonial societies.
I've never done any of those ancestry DNA tests, but I've always assumed that if you did, it would find a mixture of Irish, Scottish, English, Welsh* and probably Scandinavian ancestry and if you told me there was some Flemish or French or whatever else in there, I wouldn't be at all surprised. Then my son would add in a whole bunch of Slavic (Czech, Ukrainian) and probably German ancestry.
* four of those I know for a fact, and the others are statistically pretty common.**
** and most of those trace back at some point thousands of years ago to Iberia, or the Steppes, or whatever population of genocidal Neolithic farmers spread across Europe and into the British Isles.
*** wiki says that current thinking is that about 15% of Scots have Viking ancestry.
re: 29
Catholic, but other than that, I don't know. No-one mentioned any specific flavour of Catholicism.
Side note, near where I live, there's a cathedral* of the Assyrian Church of the East. I always forget that those ancient strains of Christianity still exist.
* it's tiny.
There's a fair number around here, Andy Warhol being their most famous son. The church is right next to the Parkway.
32 to 29. The eastern churches of all kinds are still around here. There's Byzantine (standard issue?), Byzantine (Ruthenian), Ukrainian but in communion with Rome, Antiochian Orthodox, Georgian Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, Carpatho-Russian Orthodox, and probably many others.
Yeah, Syriac Christianity is really interesting, and of course both the religious tradition and modern Aramaic languages are severely threatened due to the wars in Iraq and Syria. An interesting thing I learned about Byzantine Catholics (i.e. churches under the Pope but which use the Byzantine Rite (usually in Greek or Old Church Slavonic), which also applies to Syriac Catholics (but not Syriac Orthodox) is that if you grew up with those rites you're supposed to go to services in your rite if possible in order to preserve them.
To 32, yeah it's mostly "coal country," which makes a certain amount of sense if you're moving from the Carpathians. My in-laws are from the Binghamton/Scranton area rather than Pittsburgh area, but those are the two main concentrations.
There's a church by me that says it's for Russians and Ukrainians. I have no idea if they are having troubles now or not.
Genetic map of the UK, but restricted only to people who live in the same place as their grandparents: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14230
All the maps I found have the interesting phenomenon that Orkney groups alone as an outlier, and yet none of them bother to sample Shetland at all.
I'd be curious about that too, because "Jimmy Pérez" isn't the first name that I would think of to give to a Scottish police officer.
There's a Byzantine Catholic church near where I used to live in Anchorage. Architecturally it looks like an Orthodox church (onion domes, etc.), which I find interesting.
Andy Warhol's church has an onion soup-shaped dome.
It's fascinating to me how little the architecture changes in Istanbul across the Christianity to Islam transition. A lot of religious architecture traditions are not required by the religion. For example the Catholic Church as far as I can tell has no requirements about the building itself.
38: the Perez is a bit unusual, but surely you must be aware that all Scottish police officers are called Jimmy.
I was not. American police would go with "Jim".
41: They built a lot of ugly churches in the 60s and 70s.
I will have the phrase "soup-shaped dome" in my head for the rest of the week, I fear.
21
(The story never made sense anyway. I suspect that the parents weren't hiding the silver, but digging up a literal nest egg they had buried years earlier, and told their curious young children a story so they wouldn't tip off border police/customs inspectors about what they were carrying).
Is this one of those alternative uses of "literally"?
I feel like an idiot--a sad, wounded idiot. I woke up early this morning needing to pee, and on the way back to bed I closed my window so my allergies wouldn't bug me when I woke up for good. Coming back to bed, I tripped over it and banged my toes quite badly, but thought it was basically a scratch and tried to fall back asleep. Woke up two hours later, saw that my sock was quite bloody, and ended up getting six stitches to connect my fourth toe back to the base of my foot. So that was fun.
The Ides of March have historically been not great for me, but really the whole March 14-16 period as a whole tend to be bad. Next year I think I'll just wrap myself in padding and hope I don't suffocate.
It was super gross. Based on other unfortunate experiences I've had, either I'm naturally one of those people who bleeds a lot, or drinking boatloads of diet soda makes a person bleed a lot. The PA or whoever stitched me up kept coming over to check his work and announcing, "You're still bleeding!" as if there was anything I could do about it.
30 Ancestry.com pegs me as 9% Swedish/Danish, although I have no identifiable Scandinavian ancestors. They also think I'm 57% Scottish, which is an overstatement, I think, but maybe that includes Breton, of which I have a smattering. (So still an overstatement). Of course, it's all dependent on what everyone gets from their parents: I'm sure my brothers and sister would show different levels of Scot. And anyway, Ancestry revises the percentages nearly every year.
I guess I suck at sympathy. Hope you feel better. But eew.
Eww? Spelling isn't my strong suit either.
Since the Roman Empire was in Britain for a few hundred years I'm curious if there's any North African genetics in the current population. But I'm too tired to look it up.
More sympathy for the torn up foot!
I have given up ever figuring it out - will someone tell me what "episode Kobe 20" means in these posts?
Kobe means 100 because basketball. I'm not 100% sure, or sure at all, of Heebie's numbering system beyond that.
48 that's awful. I hope it heals quickly
It's mocking Kobe for not scoring 100 points in a single game the way Wilt did. It seemed less cruel before he died and all.
58: I have to say it makes even less sense than our NMM convention.
That doesn't stand for "no more mocking"!
50: My son has (a mild form of) the Von Willebrand clotting disorder, about which I have learned two things: That it almost always is a result of having a parent with the disease and that a lot of people don't know they have it. It's pretty clear that he got it from me and that I got it from my mother, though we were never diagnosed.
48: That sounds so much like something that has happened to me except I woke up with just a bruise. Much sympathy!
51: not a true Scotsman, then?
The rest: thanks for the Kobe explainer. I will withhold the only remaining Unfogged vocabulary mystery I have because I'm determined that in another few years I'll crack it.
It no longer means anything. It used to refer to a specific joke, in which an grandmother came in and shouted cranky things at us. Now it just means "I announce all my jokes before telling them because I don't want them to be funny."
64.1 I don't consider myself any kind of Scotsman. One of my more recent ancestors who came to the US from Newburgh was named Anderson. I wouldn't be shocked if it turns out that that's where some of the Scandinavian comes from.
I'm looking for examples of cities with homelessness policies focused on harm reduction. For example, we want to fund trash removal and latrine services in areas where people are known to be living outdoors. Who does that?
Whoa. I am just now getting fairly involved in that issue on the drinking water side.
EBMUD (Oakland) has the only thing I've found on drinking water: https://oaklandside.org/2022/01/28/new-tool-lets-homeless-residents-access-clean-drinking-water-from-fire-hydrants/
Super intriguing, super recent.
Sacramento has been terrible on latrine stuff, but it is also a really hard problem. Seems like the Portland Loo has been the only acceptable solution so far.
Oakland brings portable Lavamae showers around to people.
Here's a recorded conference from 2019 by the Central Coast Water Quality board on the issue: https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/centralcoast/water_issues/programs/wqh.html .
I watched it live. Found it kinda non-responsive. The advocates mostly offered "have more compassion; it makes a huge difference" and not "here's how you hook up your infrastucture and here's how you get around Prop 218."
More interestingly, it looks like they have a conference coming up on May 5th.
Spike, you don't have to get around Prop 218, right? That's just California fuckery, isn't it?
If you don't even know what that is, be happy and never think of it again.
OMG, great links Megan! We have our own NH fuckery but no Prop 218.
My vague understanding is that trash pick-up is the most straightforward, since waste departments already know how to go get trash from somewhere. That one is mostly paying for it.
There's the separate cultural problem that anti-homeless people don't want to provide services since that could amount to hardening/establishing an encampment.
Are you looking for advice on that? (Not that I have any.) Or are you looking for examples where it all turned out OK once the City provided the services so how exactly did they pull it off?
I'm looking for examples that I can point to and say "look, this worked! people were helped and nothing terrible happened!"
Oh. The May 5th conference was last year. Nevermind.
The cultural hurdle you describe is a whole other thing we are going to have to figure a way over. But I do think framing it as "getting rid of trash and poop" can go a long way as that directly addresses some problems we are experiencing.
Thanks for the sympathy, all. I'm not looking forward to walking around campus tomorrow, but I'll survive. They gave me an antibiotic to take for the next five days--4 times a day, which seems like a lot. OTOF, better than gangrene.
From what I know (and I am far from expert), the key is SO MUCH control and staffing.
The Portland Loo may be different because it is transparent at the top and bottom, but from what I've heard bathrooms need to be staffed around the clock (or they get utterly trashed instantly). Which is why they are so hard.
Our city has just learned that official safe-ground encampments have to have one staffed entrance/exit.
There's this: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-08/santa-rosa-neighborhood-went-from-fighting-to-embracing-tent-city-for-homeless , which if I remember right said 'fulltime staffing and make it even nicer than it was before the encampment and we're all good.'
Oh. This is nice. In San Jose: https://sanjosespotlight.com/in-san-jose-homeless-camp-services-vary-by-location/ (I'll have to call them to find how how they do it.)
So far as I can tell, from easy to hard, it goes trash>>>drinking water>>>>>>>>>>>>>>sanitation services.
You would think 'since they're here, let's provide services so there isn't trash and sewage everywhere' would be convincing, but so far as I've seen, the anti- people want to skip magically to 'make them not exist'.
If you are in an 'make them not exist' conversation, I'm not sure there's any productive persuading to do. If you can, skip over that and go straight to demonstrating, like they did in the L.A. Times piece on Santa Rosa's project.
There's a third possibility, isn't there? Provide acceptable housing and services so they continue to exist as housed people but no longer exist as a homeless encampment. I know that seems out of reach as a policy matter, but I like to remember it aspirationally, as vastly superior to managing homeless encampments.
But while we're not providing housing, we should definitely at least provide drinking water and sanitation.
Another important point, which may come up for you, is the 'homeless people will be attracted to services' argument. If you have any supporting data, it'd be good to have it prepared.
From what I've heard from Studies (or maybe Science), homeless people tend to stay homeless in their own communities (they're homegrown). I think I heard that homeless people move for life improvement at the same rates as housed people (which is mostly not that much).
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.html
If you have any local study that speaks to that, it'll be real handy.
There's a third possibility, isn't there? Provide acceptable housing and services so they continue to exist as housed people but no longer exist as a homeless encampment. I know that seems out of reach as a policy matter, but I like to remember it aspirationally, as vastly superior to managing homeless encampments.
It's not totally out of reach, but the timelines for building more housing and shelter capacity are so long that it's not going to be visible on a day-to-day scale the way providing these services at existing encampments is.
I love how Unfogged has become an informal clearinghouse for local government policy ideas, btw.
For an example of the timelines, I'm currently working on our annual report to our funding agency that shows our progress toward meeting our goals, and for a lot of housing programs the progress is zero, because building housing is typically a multi-year project for which an annual reporting cycle doesn't really make sense. Other programs that focus on direct services to the currently homeless show much more impressive numbers, of course.
local government policy ideas
Our midlife fascination before we all move on to military history.
81 is very helpful.
I think 80 needs to be taken with a grain of salt: AFAICT, straightforward housing does, indeed, solve the primary problems of the clear majority of the unhoused. But the unhoused who cause the most concern/difficulty--the aggressively antisocial, the profoundly mentally ill, the addicted--don't especially want to be housed and cannot legally or practically be forced to be.
This is coming from my best friend who does street outreach, precisely targeting the populations most resistant to more institutional approaches--the ones who only go into shelters when it's fatally cold, and leave the moment anyone tries to provide more services than a warm bed.
Obviously housing 90% of the population would be a vast improvement, but IMO there's a lie that most homeless advocates tell us and/or themselves, that simply providing sufficient housing will solve 100% of the problem, and AFAICT it simply won't, and will still leave the people who are most prone to shitting in public (as opposed to behind a bush) or drunkenly accosting passersby. IOW, you spend $50M on the problem, and hoi polloi will still complain about the problem, because the most noxious part remains.
This actually circles around, btw, to complete support for Megan's efforts: enabling people who reject housing to still access some drinking water and sanitation does them a kindness even if it doesn't get them off then streets or prevent them from existing in public in a way the public dislikes.
cannot legally or practically be forced to be
Our mayor is trying to change that. He's pursuing a law that says that once you've offered someone two kinds of housing, if they refuse both they can be committed.
I think that's a misapprehension, at least that the most noxious part of the problem will remain even if housing and services are provided. God knows NY doesn't do enough, and I'm not holding it up as an example of doing the right thing, but we've got a legal right to shelter here, which gets satisfied with a system of shitty awful shelters. They're not good, and they're not enough, but even with that NY has infinitely less in the way of large homeless encampments than CA. If you give people a place to sleep indoors, most of them will take it, even if it sucks, and more would take it if it didn't suck.
89: Are they actually prepared to offer the housing, do you think? There are open beds that people are refusing?
81 I'm sure that's largely true. Other cities in Montana used to buy people bus tickets to Missoula, and no amount of study will disabuse people of the idea that some folks -- maybe those most difficult to serve -- have come here because services are better than wherever they were. The City knows a whole lot about the unhoused people here, but refrains from telling people's stories, for obvious reasons, and so you have rumors going unrebutted.
The idea that people are coming here from California or Oregon without some sort of real reason to be here is completely ridiculous, on climate grounds alone. And yet, it's an article of faith.
I love how Unfogged has become an informal clearinghouse for local government policy ideas, btw.
me tooooo.
An eclectic think tank for the discriminating local government official.
Nope. That's why there isn't huge opposition yet (it is like the old mental institutions and involuntary commitment! you're locking people up!). Because he's clear that you have to offer two different kinds of beds first and there is still no possibility of even one.
But that's the plan. I have to say that I don't hate the involuntary commitment. Some of the people out there are so, so, so sick.
I do agree with JRoth's assessment. There's probably >10,000 unhoused people in Sacramento. (We'll find out the latest numbers very shortly.) Lots are invisible (couchsurfing, hotel vouchers, discreet tents). You could house 9,500 of them and look like you did nothing.
But the unhoused who cause the most concern/difficulty--the aggressively antisocial, the profoundly mentally ill, the addicted--don't especially want to be housed and cannot legally or practically be forced to be.
My understanding was that when the most difficult chronic homeless cases are given housing with a dedicated social worker and wraparound services and the whole 9 yards, it's way more successful. Not doubting your friend's experience, but is she part of a comprehensive wraparound services project, or someone trying to work within an entrenched, less than ideal system?
88: this was a massive lesson learned from the 1990s homelessness crisis in the UK and how it was surmounted during the Blair/Brown era. even if you have the social housing* available, or like a UK local authority, you're legally obliged to rent it at whatever cost** if someone is high enough up the priority list, this helps very little if they end up back out of it on the street and that happened a lot. like a hell of a lot. so the outreach has to offer a much richer range of services with a lot more integration between them.
*the UK had more at the time than it has now, but it's worth remembering that homelessness as a social problem in the modern sense was identified and the charity/activist ecosystem launched in the late 1960s, the glory era of social housing construction and indeed total housing construction, and it continued to get worse through the 70s despite legislation that swung the social housing program from being a working-class entitlement program to a poverty relief program. there is almost certainly a good sociology study on this but I don't know what it is
**yes really and yes we've got a specialised ultra pernicious submarket of landlords who do nothing else but move property from the open market or social landlord pool into the market for emergency accommodation because of course we have, as the town councils are forced buyers with a deadline of hours***
***yes that sounds expensive and it's a massive call on the councils' budgets that have both the poorest tax base and highest cost base, i.e. poor inner city ones, that also tend to have homeless people. so you do need the social housing, but even if you're willing to accept it isn't going to take anyone else with it, you still need all the other stuff.
96: yes, dead right, although this is precisely the sort of thing that's difficult to scale or universalize.
97: I agree that the problem is intractable in a lot of ways, but with the services you describe, do you still end up with large semipermanent encampments of homeless people? Because in NYC, while we've got a huge homeless population, and there are certainly some people sleeping rough, we don't seem to have anything like the scale of the population literally living outdoors that they do in other places where the local governments aren't obliged to offer shelter. It doesn't solve everything, of course, but offering shelter reduces the sleeping-rough population by a great deal.
96/97: OK, but this isn't contradicting our premise.
You can provide housing to 95% of the unhoused simply by providing housing because they want to come in. But those people are already not the visible/aesthetic problem.
The remaining 5% are extremely hard to house and housing itself may be the least of it. Unfortunately, they're also the visible part and if you don't house them, it doesn't look like you solved the homelessness problem.
95: So the mayor's really jumping the gun, isn't he, if he's looking for ways to compel people to accept services he's not prepared to offer. Offering the services seems like a healthy first step.
And then -- the general standard for committing someone for mental illness is something like "danger to oneself or others." Someone who's refusing shelter under circumstances where that poses a danger to themselves could plausibly be involuntarily committed now, if anyone who wanted to commit them had a bed in a psychiatric facility to offer them. Without the bed to put them in, the power to commit is pretty empty.
You can provide housing to 95% of the unhoused simply by providing housing because they want to come in. But those people are already not the visible/aesthetic problem.
I don't think that's right. I think that a large part of the people in homeless encampments would take shelter if it were offered, because they mostly do seem to here. There are some very intractable people, but not everyone who's sleeping rough is the kind of mentally ill that would make them refuse even a kind of shitty shelter.
no time to carefully read the whole thread but just adding that at least here in san francisco, & i'd be surprised if this only happens here, the roof offered commonly requires abandoning most of one's possessions, any pets, & separation from opposite sex partners and/or children. plus it's nearly always short term, often poorly secured & potentially violent, & the hours of access are v limited & inconvenient.
if you are going to be out on the street again in the very near future, how is a brief possibly unsafe roof worth giving up kit you will shortly need once more, plus rupturing afective ties with pets & partners?
yes there are folks with severe mental illness who are treatment resistant. but there are a far greater number of people facing a cliff face of shitty circumstances to whom we are persistently unwilling to offer sensible alternatives.
I mean, maybe I'm wrong about this. Are there jurisdictions where there are plentiful open shelter beds and the policy problem is persuading people to come off the streets and use them?
99: that was precisely what the 1990s campaign, and the cross government push after 1997, were motivated by! a lot of ground has been lost since 2010 but nothing like Cardboard City has re-emerged.
100: I think the 5% assumption is optimistic on that experience. it wasn't that people didn't want to come in (remember we're 50 odd degrees north) but that they ended up back out through some combination of events.
I've heard advocates say that. But I don't think so. I think he is offering both sides something they want.
He's planning (not vaguely - new specifically, identified beds in locations)to provide enough shelter beds if he can get it past the NIMBYs. And the carrot for allowing that is that he's offering a way to get the raving naked shouters off the streets. He's hitching those together in the thought that they can only be passed together.
The homeless advocates say No, do this out of compassion and you'll alleviate so much suffering. (Which is really really true.) Then tackle the rest in some future incredibly resource-intensive way that is kind and voluntary. This will not make a visible difference until the huge effort is nearly done.
But the anti's want their aesthetic problem solved and so far have successfully stopped the city from doing anything at all.
I mean, I have a lot of holdover affection for the mayor so I could be biased. But I think he's right that you have to solve them both or you'll be stuck with status quo, which is neither.
103: no time to carefully read the whole thread but just adding that at least here in san francisco, & i'd be surprised if this only happens here, the roof offered commonly requires abandoning most of one's possessions, any pets, & separation from opposite sex partners and/or children. plus it's nearly always short term, often poorly secured & potentially violent, & the hours of access are v limited & inconvenient.
Heard this a few times!
we don't have *plentiful* beds here, but we do have them - & people refuse them for the reasins i've outlined. we also have a mayor sitting on $3m to fund a non-cop response team without releasing it to be spent, a shit ton of people approved to move into permanent supportive housing while units sit empty ... & the mayor is jetting off to europe for 10 days to drum up tourism 🤮. i guess while she's overseas at least she won't be orchestrating sweeps in advance of photo ops so there's that!
the 5% assumption is optimistic
I'm nearly at the depth of my understanding, but my impression is that there is an iceberg of people with no permanent housing who aren't sleeping rough. They're staying with friends, have jobs, etc. They occupy the first (often quite successful) tranche of getting people housed. You could house them for ages before you get to dismantling tent encampments.
104: if the UK experience is anything at all to go by, the problem won't remotely be that people refuse housing as that they end up out of it again, for a complex of confused reasons. The government of the time did like to frame it as being about getting rid of annoying people who started scrubbing your windscreen at traffic lights so you'd give them money, but this was a marketing strategy.
109: absolutely true, but their problems are different and simpler, although ironically I think more likely to benefit from building a ton of social housing.
yes there are folks with severe mental illness who are treatment resistant. but there are a far greater number of people facing a cliff face of shitty circumstances to whom we are persistently unwilling to offer sensible alternatives.
I already wrote this, but this sentence encapsulates the deal I think the mayor is offering. It is Sacramento's Right to Housing. We'll start offering sensible alternatives (and I understand that there may be no trust on that offer) and also, we've got to be able to not have the treatment resistant affecting the quality of life for people who live here (and perhaps that shouldn't be a motivator and we should only do this out of compassion, but it is also a motivator because no one enjoys sidewalks with human shit and screaming tweakers and it is disingenuous to downplay those).
I think providing permanent housing is one problem, and you're right that it probably doesn't have much immediate effect on the visible rough-sleeper problem because of the volume of invisible homeless who need it and are more capable of taking it up promptly. But providing tolerable temporary shelter that's not so punitive that it's less attractive than sleeping rough is another issue, and it's doable. As DQ says, not everyone who turns down a shelter bed does it because they're profoundly mentally ill, often it's because there are reasons that make it intolerable, and that aren't inherent in the nature of temporary shelter.
Another important point, which may come up for you, is the 'homeless people will be attracted to services' argument.
There is one guy we are going have to get past that I know is going to make this argument. As the only city in the middle of a pretty rural area, we end up being the social services hub for the region and this is a point of contention.
There is also a concern that when you allow camping, camps will get rowdy and out of control. My thought there is that campsites should be diffused across the community so that the social impact of hosting a homeless population is spread across neighborhoods and not unduly concentrated in a single part of town. However, I'm not sure that will go over well with the local gentry.
111: Sure, but they're still in the same multi-year waits for housing vouchers. Which is why your first 95% of solutions isn't gonna look like much on the streets.
Yes to building a ton of social housing. I'm in!
I'm nearly at the depth of my understanding, but my impression is that there is an iceberg of people with no permanent housing who aren't sleeping rough. They're staying with friends, have jobs, etc. They occupy the first (often quite successful) tranche of getting people housed. You could house them for ages before you get to dismantling tent encampments.
I don't know relative numbers offhand, but my general impression is that while there are a lot of people like that, they aren't necessarily "in the system" and in line to receive housing, whereas people who are sleeping rough or in shelters are easier to find and bring into the system (which is not to say there's necessarily housing available for them).
Like, the NY right to shelter has absolutely not solved the homelessness problem. Compared to what I understand the situation is in CA, it has done a tremendous amount to ameliorate the "sidewalks with human shit and screaming tweakers" problem. Just offering shelter does a whole lot.
Doesn't the potentially fatal winter make a difference?
115, 116: and they are also higher priority on really any objective standard I can imagine. they're in danger of literally losing limbs or dying.
Also, housing isn't just one thing. You can absolutely build a bunch of Permanent Supportive Housing with wraparound services and target (and restrict!) it to people with the most severe problems who are bothering people on the street. It's expensive, but there are programs out there specifically for this sort of thing. Then you build a bunch of public housing through the housing authorities and hand out a bunch of vouchers, both of which target more of the couch-surfers Megan is talking about and the people who lose their jobs and end up in camps but are basically stable otherwise. Then loosen up zoning and subdivision ordinances to incentivize more market-rate housing to bring down rents for everyone else. You can do all these things at once, and cities are. They just take time.
I'm all for it. But NIMBY's and too many veto points in the system.
Spike, the mayor demanded that every councilperson bring back two sites in their own district and only the two progressive councilwomen did and none else. Diffusing may not work either.
Doesn't the potentially fatal winter make a difference?
Less than you might think! There's an emergency cold weather shelter system that's supposed to open more space in places like churches when it gets cold, but it's not currently working very well. You do see a lot fewer tents in the parks this time of year, though, so people are presumably managing to get indoors somehow.
121: I was saying I'm all for offering shelters (to 117).
But I am also all for all the things Teo said in 120.
I'm generally in line with LB on this, but the mayor's approach Megan describes does sound like a good way to handle the politics.
Another important point is that the different types of housing do make up a whole interconnected system, so making progress on one part does help to relieve pressure on others. This is good because the politics of some of this stuff is really tough even in purportedly progressive areas.
Yeah, if they genuinely are offering tolerable housing, I think the right to commit probably won't come into play except for people who could be committed under current law, so it might be harmless PR. I don't like it, because it seems like it could be abused, but if it's a necessary political tradeoff to get housing and shelter built, I guess maybe I wouldn't actively oppose it.
The other thing I want to try is establishing a safe parking program, which seems like its getting common on the west coast but isn't really done here. Back when I was living in a truck, having a place to park and sleep overnight without risking harassment by cops would have been huge.
establishing a safe parking program
Fair warning, you may literally have to give all the neighbors $10,000 or some kind of special property tax rebate to get them on board with whatever site you pick. Also throw a banquet for them, in honor of their having made the greatest sacrifice of any resident of Yourtown since the Revolutionary War.
I will let you know if I ever learn any other relevant information about housing.
This doesn't have anything to do with homelessness, but this is the latest check-in thread, so I want to comment about the fact that today is the two-year anniversary of the lockdown for me. It's been weird. I miss my office.
I really do think there's a huge climate difference. Living outside in California, and especially Hawaii, is just much more pleasant than NYC or the Midwest. People permanently camping or living in their car in Maui or Kauai are just not the same population as people sleeping rough in NYC. California is somewhere in between.
I'd believe that it's a perceptible difference -- there are some people voluntarily sort of camping out when they have other alternatives that they'd take if the weather was worse -- but not that it's a large part of the visible homeless population. Not having security or plumbing is a pretty huge negative for most people, even if the weather won't literally kill them.
Still, the kind of year round camps like you hear about in California don't seem to happen in places with real winter. Occupy Wall Street was an exception, but I think one that demonstrates how much support it takes to sleep outside in the winter in New York.
131: yeah, guess we're all permanently crazy now. What a mess.
Literally, I think the primary difference there is the right to shelter. People in NY have the option to sleep indoors, where people in CA mostly don't. If it were all about the weather, we'd have seasonal camps comparable to the ones in CA, and we don't.
NYC is a bit weird in several ways, most obviously because it has subway stations open all night, but also because it's really really big and so it's easier to keep homeless encampments out of sight. But at any rate Google pulls up lots of stories about homeless encampments in NYC and lots of stories about the city aggressively breaking them up if they're in Manhattan.
But it sucks to be outside in New York in the summer too. That's why they invented going to upstate New York to sleep with Patrick Swayze, swim in a lake, and pay for illegal abortions.
I feel like I'm not helping upetgi make a point, but I think he's still on to something.
Yeah, I'm not saying there's no one living rough here, just a whole lot less than California. You used to live here -- do you remember seeing big encampments? I spend a lot of time in the parks in my neighborhood. The parks are huge, with plenty of sheltered areas, and there are at least few enough people sleeping in the parks that they're very hard to find.
I wouldn't know where to go to find a homeless encampment without doing research. I don't get the impression that people in most CA cities are in the same position.
And again, NY doesn't do enough at all. What I'm pointing at as a difference is more generous provision of shitty awful temporary shelters that don't do much to solve people's long term housing needs. But they are pretty effective in shrinking the number of people that are sleeping rough.
I haven't been to New York in close to 20 years, but I am sure that you right and that there aren't the people sleeping in Central Park (at least that's what it looked like to me) that I saw when I was first there (1985 or so).
It's undoubtedly true that NYC doesn't let encampments stay in Manhattan. The question is how much of that is moving people into shelters or moving them to less visible places.
It's also true that California now is utterly different than California when I lived there in the aughts, and I don't have any sense of how NYC has or hasn't changed in the past decade since I lived there.
I'm being so vehement about this, because I think the narrative that people sleeping rough are either rationally choosing it because they prefer it to reasonable options for living indoors or irrationally choosing it because they're so mentally ill they reject reasonable options for living indoors is a pernicious one. Where you give people even very lousy options for living indoors, most people will take them -- I'm sure that there are rational campers and profoundly mentally ill people who wouldn't take functional shelter if it was offered, but I'm also sure that there are few enough people in both of those categories that offering reasonably adequate shelter to everyone in California would make the giant homeless encampments go away.
In Berkeley the big encampment when I was there just before the pandemic was visible because it was next to the highway entrance ramp, not because it was downtown. There's not an obvious parallel in NYC that's as visible and also out-of-the-way.
Anyway, here's a good article about NYC people sleeping rough and the essential role the subway plays during cold weather. Most numbers seem to suggest around 4K people sleeping rough in NYC (this article is a little lower, but also during winter) which is a large number of people, but also a tiny fraction of NYC.
From this very day: https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2022/03/16/metro-chamber-endorses-homelessness-ballot-measure.html .
I simply cannot believe that the Metro Chamber would have included the 'must provide decent shelter' half of the solution if it didn't include 'and force people into it, if necessary' half.
4K people in NYC is actually not a hugely different percentage than where I live now, where the population of 30-40 people is certainly much more visible than what you see in NYC.
I'm not sure how to guess at the proportion of people with no housing who would choose to live outdoors over living in a lousy indoor situation. But my thinking is that virtually everyone who does make that choice will, if they don't find good indoor housing after a while, at least strongly consider moving somewhere with better weather.
146.1: I'm going to wait 16 minutes to open that so it's from yesterday.
145: This shows about 30K living unsheltered
in LA https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=4558-2020-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count-presentation (you have to do math, but 70% of 41K total homeless). That's a big difference, it's not just better hidden here.
At any rate, I do agree that almost everyone would prefer individual housing with no rules to a tent if that's on offer. I just don't think that NYC's "right to shelter" gets you there. And I also think in CA or HI you'd still get people who would rather live in a car near the beach than a crappy apartment in a worse location.
I've heard it's really uncomfortably hot in the valley.
But the whole point is that if you think the right to shelter is the key point then you should be comparing with Philadelphia or Chicago, not LA.
But I can't speak to where you live now -- I'm not even sure where that is.
I am really not trying to do rah-rah NY triumphalism. We don't have a right to shelter for any good reason, it was an activist judicial decision and I generally disapprove of that sort of thing. And it doesn't solve the real housing problems people have, the shelters are terrible. But where people have a right to an indoor bed, enough of them will take it that, while there are certainly some visible homeless people in New York, the experience of walking around isn't the way people describe California.
Philly is around 1k. Which is very similar to NYC per capita metro area.
http://philadelphiaofficeofhomelessservices.org/know-homelessness/
Rockford lives in a van by the beach, kind of. He's got water and electric. I assume a sewer too, but maybe he's driving it to a dumping station every week?
154: It's not so much the right to shelter, as the actual availability of adequate shelter space (both availability and acceptable conditions). I don't know enough about Philadelphia or Chicago to make those comparisons. But in parts of the country where the visible homelessness problem is the most acute, there's a lack of adequate shelter space. At which point the narrative that it wouldn't make a difference unless you could compel people to make use of it seems to me like a misguided one.
I feel like you don't understand just how much nicer the weather is in California. I'm just speaking for myself, I think I'd pick a tent in California over a shelter in NYC pretty easily, access to showers is the only thing that even makes it a little difficult.
I have too many tents and I keep wanting to buy another one.
I waited all that time and the article is behind a paywall.
Are you picturing a nice tent someplace bucolic, or one in the middle of an urban homeless encampment? There's only so much nice weather alone can do for you.
If you are still willing to discuss it, would you give us your take on this:
Far as I can tell, the guy's a reliable narrator.
That's awful. I don't know what do to either.
Any individual person might be mentally ill enough to refuse services they really need. But that doesn't mean everyone who's living rough is in that category. If you could reduce the number of people sleeping on the street by, say, three quarters by offering them a preferable place to stay indoors, don't you think it would be easier to manage persuading the hard cases like Courtney to take the help they need? And even if you couldn't persuade everyone, wouldn't it still be worthwhile anyway?
And obviously you're in favor of providing shelter, I don't mean to make it sound like you aren't. I'm just saying that it makes sense to make shelter freely available first, and then assess how necessary it is to force people into it.
We seem to be mixing a lot of categories of homeless people.
Invisible majority who are kinda indoors but not permanently housed, have their shit together, trapped by poverty. They want housing. Sufficient affordable housing would house them. (70%?)
Visibly on the street, in detectably maintained or discreet encampments. Maybe mentally deteriorating from the stress of street living, but sufficient affordable housing would house them and heal them if they could just be connected. These are not the objectionably visible homeless. They aren't going into shelters 'cause shelters are worse than their street options (possessions, car, pets, etc). (20%?)
Visibly on the street, hugely messy, mentally ill, drugs. With lots of wrap-around services and earned trust, would go into decent shelters and recover. (5%)
Visibly on the street, hugely messy, mentally ill, drugs. With lots of wrap-around services and earned trust, still reluctant and would have to be committed. (5%).
I am making up those numbers; I don't know this is accurate. The political problem is that getting all the way from 0-95% served voluntarily looks mostly the same as doing nothing in terms of addressing the visible problem. If Sac has 10,000 homeless people, then there are 1,000 hard cases. 500 people saturating your downtown looks a whole lot like 1000 people saturating your downtown.
Getting the first 9,500 people housed voluntarily is absolutely the right thing to do and would alleviate a ton of misery. It would help me and my tenderhearted kid to know that there aren't people out in the cold and rain and heat. I'm with you on doing all of that.
I think we mostly agree throughout. I'm not sure if we agree that there are categories like I propose, or if we think that maybe the percentages differ and the final category is larger/smaller/non-existent. I guess my argument is that even if it is real small, it is the overwhelming part that people mostly see.
Of course, the real problem is that we are nowhere near addressing the first 95% who want help.
I think you're misvaluing two things. I think the public burden of having people on the street in discreet maintained encampments is pretty big, and moving those people indoors is both good for them and a big political payoff in terms of recovered public space. And I think you're overestimating the number of really resistant people like Courtney. There are certainly some, but I think there are few enough that reducing the unsheltered population to only the hardcore resisters would mean that the downtown would no longer feel saturated.
I also think you'd get a payoff over time from getting the people who were willing off the streets. Courtney probably wasn't that messed up five years ago, and might not have become that messed up if she hadn't been living on the streets for that five years. If you can keep people who aren't that badly off yet from deteriorating, you don't have to manage them when they've broken down completely.
The theory behind the dual approach is that you can't get (rich NIMBY) willingness to do all the things necessary for the 9,000 unless you really do clean up the 1,000 and that has to be simultaneous, not sequential.
I think the public burden of having people on the street in discreet maintained encampments is pretty big, and moving those people indoors is both good for them and a big political payoff in terms of recovered public space.
Entirely possible and I would love to find out.
you're overestimating the number of really resistant people like Courtney
I honestly don't know what the real percentage is. The anti/NIMBY viewpoint is that it is huge (33-50%) because of meth. I don't think it is big (although it shows up again in that article about the San Jose encampment*) but I do think it is a big percentage of the intrusive homelessness.
*"Clearing camps is hardly a solution, Osmer said, noting that most people return after an encampment has been cleared out. The HUD report found that only about 20% of encampment residents accept shelter referrals before a sweep.
"Some people are just happier outside," Osmer said. "And that's all that matters.""
The horrible implication of my whole case is that I've become so used to seeing it that I've genuinely come to think, "well, the neat camps aren't so bad."
Anyway, the reason why I waded into this is that every time I see these conversations come up, the same ideas get kicked about without any apparent institutional memory and tend to turn into a peripheral theatre of some other row (e.g. both the neo-Robert Moses bulldozer wing of YIMBYs and the libertarian, let the market rip wing tend to pile in on "housing first" because plainly it suits their wider agenda). but the point I'd like to get took home is that UK experience showed that keeping people housed once there is vastly important and probably much more so than genuine service refusal ever will be.
I don't know what our rights here are, but in Boston, we've had an encampment at Mass and Cass and they've broken it up. That area had a lot of people who were substance users. Shelters don't tolerate people doing drugs and mostly kick you out during the day.
So, if you open up safe injection sites and have shelter, low-threshold housing is better, I think you could do a lot. What little I understand of Mass and Cass is that it was not great, but there was a community of sorts too.
173: I know NIMBY, but did you mean to write YIMBY, and if you did what does it stand for?
YIMBY is Yes In My Back Yard -- it's a political position devoted to fixing the housing problem by building housing including market rate housing. It's one of those political movements that has a lot of irritating very-online people in it, but I think they're mostly right about everything.
This is poorly or entirely un-supported irritability, but I have a strong suspicion that a lot of the belief in high levels of intractable refusal of services among homeless people comes from dealing with people who have learned that they're not actually being offered useful services. If you give someone a "shelter referral" that, e.g., requires them to travel hours to a shelter that turns out not to be open when they get there, it's going to be harder to get them to listen to you the next time you offer them something. I will start believing that refusal of services is a primary problem when I see reporting on safe, pleasant shelters with empty beds in cities with a lot of people sleeping rough.
173: We just had a law passed which requires zoning for towns with MBTA access and adjacent to MBTA to zone for multi-family housing. Some of the towns don't want to comply, I'm guessing. Like Lincoln has a "rural" character and 3k housing units, and they are told that if they want funds, they need to zone for 750 more units. I mean, there's a reason everybody is on a septic system. But they are also trying to develop a walkable townlet near the commuter rail.
Baker just wants housing. I would like to see some thoughtful planning too. I worry that I'm turning into a NIMBY. Somebody at the Kennedy school wrote a paper about the challenge of development in my town which went from ruralish to suburban after the war. It was pretty freewheeling compared to its neighbors, so we have more strip plazas, and during the tech boom of the 60's and 70's, most notably the rise of Digital Equipment Corporation, a lot of Garden apartments were built quickly. Some of these have been turned into condos. We also have the large townhouse style condos which usually have large areas of common land and abut conservation land as well as some newer condo developments that are not individual town houses but multi-family type units. I hate the look of those garden apartments so much. I'd love to see more housing built around the train station as well as better biking options , because I'm within biking distance of the train, though renting a locker for the bike is not cheap. I'd also really like any development in that area to build on the old rural village area (we had 3) and feel like a community rather than a strip of apartments. I'd also really like to see more commercial development. These multi family units are supposed to be suitable for families, but I think the town wanted to encourage some younger folks to move here, so that there would be some tax payers who weren't using the schools. Young people used to live in those garden apartments. Now, I think it's lower to moderate income people who want to get their kids into the school district.
But people also want to preserve trails and keep some of the farmland operating as farms. I think Baker doesn't really care about the aesthetics of it, and I really hate Robert Moses and the razing of the West End of Boston was really criminal.
YIMBY is the new name for lawn darts. Yeet in my backyard.
I've long been curious about the outsized influence of developers on local governments. I kinda think that without the representation they buy, no housing would ever get built, but I'm not really equipped to have an intelligent opinion on that.
177: also just the crankiness that everyone who works with the general public eventually develops.
180: I'm repeating YIMBY stuff I've read, rather than having a strong sense of my own. But it may be that part of why developers are powerful is that zoning/permitting/environmental review is so hard to navigate that only powerful people capable of pulling political strings -- that is, 'developers' -- can get anything built. Ordinary people who are well-off enough to own some land that could be built on don't try.
So, making the regulatory environment more builder-friendly might decrease the influence of developers over local government, because it wouldn't be a profession allowing people to turn political clout into money anymore.
But I'm not sure of this myself, it's just an argument I've read.
MA is the other US jurisdiction with some kind of "right to shelter."
If there's one thing covid should have taught us, it's that feeling oppressed by government agencies is really common even the government agency is obviously right and you can die from not listening.
182: Friend of mine is an architect, and he is designing an add-on house for a friend of his in LA. I guess you can build a single-family house in your backyard in LA or something.
My town was developed, because it had few restrictions, and some of it was ugly. Then they put a lot of restrictions in place, though less than in some of the neighboring towns, though individual developers don't want it to be too hard, but if it's too "easy" they lose the benefit of their local knowledge.
My friend the architect is somewhat afraid of multi-unit dwellings, because a ceiling fell on the couch in an apartment they rented in Chicago. His wife had just gotten off the couch and, luckily, she wasn't hurt. Densely clustered individual houses is more his speed. I think out here, townhouses with some apartments over shops would work best.
In 2019 California got a law that largely nullified local restrictions on building an additional dwelling unit in your yard. Now everybody with means in the East Bay is crazy to get one; we also have an architect friend and he's snowed under designing ADUs.
182 I don't know, but I see a lot of wolves in sheep's clothing on the 'let's make it builder friendly' side. A bunch of big developers looking to increase margins mouthing platitudes about smaller operators.
Developers have a lot of influence here because they're spending big money on developments, employing and housing people. The planning department is desperate to approve more housing and if you come in with a plausible plan and obvious financing, you'll have the city on your side.
The developer who wanted to do a huge thing at the mouth of my valley, and was only allowed to do a big thing, has come back hoping to do a bigger thing. The principal issue at the last round was whether adding a bunch of units at our only egress would impede evacuation in case of wildfire. The developer's new plan is 'don't worry, it'll be fine' -- whether this works or not, who can say. The aldermen who voted in favor of the project in 2020 are mostly gone now, but the city is yet more desperate for more housing. This development is all going to be market rate, which means that only people with out-of-state incomes will be able to afford them.
In Pittsburgh, there used to be a ton of those but they are almost all gone. That's how you can have a city lose half of its population without looking empty.
We have a lot of ADUs going in across the city. My subdivision has covenants precluding them, which are not displaced by the regs on ADUs.
I mostly missed this thread yesterday, but I'm interested in what has worked to serve the homeless population in other cities. In my city:
1) There's been a gradually growing homeless population for a while.
2) It's been more visible during the pandemic. In part because, when the library was shut down for COVID a homeless encampment set up on the library lawn (which is also across from city hall).
3) The city tried to negotiate with advocates for several months before it eventually fell apart and they swept the camp (which was terrible, but also necessary, because the library was re-opening, and leaving the camp wasn't going to work).
4) The city's position is that they came up with a plan that would have generated X beds, but by that time the camp had grown and advocates said, "we need X+Y beds, and the camp has become a community and we don't want to separate people." I don't know if this summary is accurate.
5) Because of COVID they needed a larger shelter space (to allow for distancing) and the only space that met all the criteria was on the edge of downtown (and also less than a mile from my house), so that's been very visible.
6) The shelter has enough beds to serve most of the people on the street, but it's run by a religious organization and that turns off a number of people.
7) The city, for liability reasons has no willingness to directly provide housing, so it is limited by what organizations are willing to partner to deliver services and that isn't a long list.
8) The possible alternative to invest in is tiny home villages, which have worked well in many ways but (a) the organization that runs them has had issues in the past and (b) it's hard to find neighborhoods willing to accept the villages.
I'd love to see a better option, but there are real barriers to overcome and not just on the part of the city.
I've been idly pondering a concept where immediate neighbors get to sit on a panel to select the people who get vouchers to the close-by shelter. My two immediate thoughts are that it might be politically do-able and that I'm pretty sure it would violate Fair Housing rules and be so very likely to be racist. But hear me out.
There's a vacant building on our block that I think was a nursing home. So it might be set up for rooming? But it has been vacant five years or more. I was thinking about trying to organize the neighbors and promise them we would only have good homeless people. Which is ridiculous. But, like, what if we could? There's a woman who sits at a bus stop a block away all day and night. She never moves. If I could tell neighbors that it would be her that was housed and that is no different than having her at the bus stop, wouldn't that be persuasive? I mean, I'd pay a non-trivial amount of money to never drive by her and sorrow for her again.
But then, Fair Housing. But then, maybe city staff prepare non-identifying applications and a neighbor panel selects from those?
I don't know. Nothing ever works and it is all impossible.
For scale, I haven't been saying '10,000 unhoused Sacramentans' out of the air. It was 8,000 at the last census; the recent census was a month ago and we're all waiting on numbers. People expect it to be 10,000. If I remember right, we have 378 shelter beds. That doesn't count the longer term Project Roomkey type of thing. That's 'cot in an open room without your stuff or pets tonight.'
But nothing else can get built. Not 20 room shelters, not tiny house villages, not Safe Parking, nothing. No one is willing to have them. Which is why I came back to a neighbor admission panel.
Went to a meeting on a potential Safe Parking spot. Was surprised by the ugliness and meanness. It was bad.
Our new super progressive councilwoman kept trying to say "it isn't this new shelter or the other one. We need literally all of them. We have to add up to 9,000 beds." and got shouted down in real ugly ways. They're trying to start a recall against her because they want their policy preference of "homeless people don't exist". Which could be phrased as sweeps, bus tickets out, a Real Super Good wraparound superduper shelter far away, genocide when they're being honest.
Spike, I know you think harm reduction could be persuasive but if you are in a stealth "make them not exist" conversation, I'd just skip it. There's no persuasion that's as tempting as the proposition that they just shouldn't exist.
Megan, that is heartbreaking, and not surprising. I can see why the mayor's plan could be a good way to break the deadlock.
Yeah. I'm truly not the leftiest of the advocates and have rolled my eyes at some "be even more compassionate as they slowly heal with autonomy" propositions. So I'm already not qualified to critique it from that angle.
But yeah. I do think the mayor's proposal might get through and might work. Which would be a shocking step.
I also wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't and he leaves for the Biden administration and we start from scratch. He's getting a lot of heat from the progressives but I genuinely think no one could work our conventional governance harder or better than he can. If he can't get it done, it can't be done with our existing governance. (The progressive response is 'go outside the system!'. Which might have to come next. Or never come.)
'go outside the system!'
That's like "void where prohibited. "
This is a cranky side issue, but why are villages of 'tiny houses' more politically appealing than apartment buildings/SROs? What is the advantage of a tiny house for the neighbors other than it taking up more unnecessary space?
Not 'cause of homelessness. Just 'cause we're western.
I don't mind a shared wall but I want my own direct access to the outside and no one above me (because of clomping) or below me (same).
I'm not at all knowledgeable about homelessness issues, but there's a tiny house village right in my neighborhood, and I can guess at the appeal. If I were homeless, I'd much rather living in a tiny house than in an SRO. It looks so much safer. There are no scary hallways or hidden common spaces, so when you come home you don't have to wonder what's behind the front door, or who's lurking in the stairwell. The corridors are all out in the open and everything is visible as you approach. If there's a problem, you don't have to convince a guard to come up to the third floor or whatever and take care of it -- the police just drive by and can check it out at a glance.
Now I'm fantasizing about a campaign to authorize building SROs set to the anthem of SRO life, YMCA.
Cheerful commercials with dancing homeless people checking into their new indoor domiciles, doing the YMCA hand motions. It'd solve everything.
Probably I should drink some more chamomile tea. Something calming.
Fwiw, I think tiny houses look way more claustrophobic than SROs or apartments.
It probably depends on the weather, because if you can mostly live outside, the tiny house is for sleep and keeping your stuff safe.
Yeah, I don't have the same security reaction as jms. I'm honestly not sure what's correct practically in terms of safety, but I would feel very nervous isolated in a box at ground level. Being in a real building with a front door and so on feels more secure.
I would not find an SRO to be a substitute for an apartment. I want my own toilet and windows.
Definitely much worse than an apartment, but arguably better than sleeping rough and easier to provide.
I'm not sure it's better than a tiny house. Though cheaper.
Late, but an article about the ongoing Housing First work in Utah ; (a) AFAIK Utah is where the expectation that about 5% of the homeless population is going to be uninterested even in supportive Housing First comes from; (b) operational costs ongoing.
If Moby turns down one more shelter offer, we can commit him.
Everyone wants me to buy a bigger house.
214: The Utah program is based on an earlier program in Vegas, right?
Possibly? There was also a single-building program in Seattle that Seattlites sometimes say was the first modern US wraparound attempt, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were many little tries around the country.
clew has linked what I hadn't yet gotten to. Utah started doing this a few years ago -- it was kind of a crazy thing where so-called nutty liberal ideas about solving homelessness by giving people homes united with the legislature's occasional practically-oriented conservatism* -- it costs less than managing the problems associated with homelessness. I see the force of Megan's concern -- if, from the perspective of the burbs, the problem is 'there are visibly homeless people in the city -- they're going to regard even a good policy as a failure if it doesn't minimize the broken windows, so to speak. But as far as I know, the 95% figure is regarded pretty widely as a *success* -- the intractable 5% haven't been seen as a reason to abandon the program.
*deep red state, but prior to Trump usually limited the insanity to message bills about porn and ridonk alcohol regulations --- there were usually grown-ups in charge who cared about getting stuff done.
Has the Utah Housing First program been cost effective? That's fantastic. I mean, it'd be worth it as being humane, but if it saves money over the costs of managing the same population otherwise that's really good.
220: Yes, at most recent reports, but per the article clew linked, there are some assumptions in the math that may not be good over longer terms. As I understand it, a person in housing with some basic services to make sure they get food and medical care is cheaper than the same person being unhoused and using the ER. But a decade of that housing and level of service may not be (not sure whether because of death or happy outcomes) cheaper, and the transition out of that housing and services isn't happening as expected.
220: the argument has been yes, if you account generously for the civil etc services that would be required to help the homeless population otherwise. The state auditors are basically saying yes, for now, because of the initial reduction mostly in emergency and ER costs, but don't assume that the budget will hold going forward (because someone in year two in housing is requiring services but isn't continuing to reduce the ER budget exactly.)
Surely what's goin on in 221 (as mentioned in the parenthetical) is that death rates are much lower in housing. I don't see how there could be any other explanation of being cheaper for a few years but more expensive long term.
Maybe they start gambling recklessly after a while?
223: as I understand it, it's less than it gets more expensive and more that the immense cost savings from the first year aren't a reason to cut the budget back. One complicating issue is that SLC is one of the fastest appreciating real estate markets in the country - so the plan of getting people stabilized and then getting them into other housing is getting harder because there just aren't that many houses.
I think for some people, you can't think of it as getting people stabilized and then moving on. For some people, it could be years before they move on, if ever. I think that the longer the programs exist, people see the costs but they forget about the ER savings, and they've already reduced the budgeted amount for the ER.
I think we sort of half to get away fro. The idea that we can invest In people and then they won't need help. Paul Farmer died recently, and I looked into the health worker program they developed in Haiti, and the called them accompagnateur. He talked about the role of care giving and relationships. Too often we want to spend money for a year and then walk away.
One complicating issue is that SLC is one of the fastest appreciating real estate markets in the country - so the plan of getting people stabilized and then getting them into other housing is getting harder because there just aren't that many houses.
Right, this is where the YIMBY stuff comes into it. There's always going to be a problem if the housing supply is too tight.
So, I have COVID.
I was getting increasingly confident I was immune, or at least sufficiently resistant (with vaccines and booster vaccine) that I wasn't going to get it. My wife had it and tested positive for 11 days and I didn't get it from her. Three weeks later my son got it, and he tested positive for 11 days, and I didn't get.
Two weeks after that, it has arrived. So far, I feel shitty but shitty in ways that are within the spectrum for a bad cold or mild flu, rather than anything more dramatic.
Up till last fall, I'd started blithely assuming that ordinarily careful people who hadn't gotten Covid yet and were vaccinated weren't going to get it. Since Omicron hit, all sorts of people I know have been getting it.
Hope you feel better soon!
Fortunately, they aren't trying to make us wash our hands still.
228: Neb just got it too. I guess philosophy phds only provide so much immunity. Hope it stays mild and goes away soon!
231: Omicron, and it looks like there is a BA.2 wave: https://mobile.twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1504497732039413765
Fingers crossed for Ttam and Neb.
My office is finally returning to in-person in April, masking not required, and while I'm excited about seeing people again, we're all going to get sick immediately.
They say they want us back in the office one day a week (all the same day) in June. People with shitty commutes are rebellious. I have no idea if they'll try to mask us.
Best wishes on a speedy recovery ttaM
I am (in fact we are) both digging out from a week-long shitty cold/flu/plague bout. Between us we have 2 negative PCRs and about six negative LFTs in this period so I can only conclude it was RSV or similar and we caught it off a baby. Even though we got pings from the automatic contact tracing a couple of days after it kicked in (useful!)
Hope you get better soon. I've been confused for a while about why rates are much higher in the UK than the US, looks like it's maybe a BA.2 thing and the US is starting to see a small increase. Though I do wonder whether the US won't get it as bad as Europe with BA.2, I suspect we had more infections in the initial Omicron wave here but less testing?
My company seems bought in on the hybrid model, aside from the people doing the actual chemistry/molecular design work, of course. I think I have carte blanche to work from home for as long as I want, so long as the work is getting done.
239: I think we may just be a couple weeks behind Europe, as we were with the initial Omicron wave. Could still be less severe here due to greater natural immunity from that wave, of course.
I'm still allowed to work at home 2 days a week . Masks are not required in the office, and I'm one of the very few still wearing one.
241: The earliest parts of the US (Cleveland, Baltimore, NYC) weren't really behind Europe though. Cleveland peaked less than a week after London. But maybe we just got lucky and didn't get BA.2 quickly.
I've been in some. Will be 1-2 days a week. When I'm there, I'm near clinical areas, so I have to mask. There are other buildings which are exclusively administrative and research offices where patients don't go. I don't know when they plan on removing masks there. That would require the DEpartment of Public Health changing their guidelines.
So, I should to the bar this weekend if I want to be sure I get out before another wave?
But it's St. Patrick's weekend. Too many assholes.
Maybe I'll just go see The Batman.
I've been in every day since a brief pause for Omicron in January. Today was my first day taking public transit instead of biking. Kid has an evening hockey game in a nearby suburb so I can take the harbor boat to the subway station to get there.
I think I have carte blanche to work from home for as long as I want, so long as the work is getting done.
Yeah, I hate how employers are putting onerous conditions on allowing me to work from home.
I've actually been going in two days a week with the exception of an omicron break. Everybody is supposed to start doing two days a week in April -- the same two days. It is an unavoidable irony that the whole point of getting people into the office is to get as many people as possible in at the same time -- therefore maximizing the opportunity for the spread of the virus.
252: I think they want people to work together when on-site and engage in team building. My company wants to do hybrid stuff so that they get the benefit of face time. They also hope that they can reduce their real estate footprint to save money, so it isn't just a COVID thing. I think they hope it will help with retention too, but saving money on real estate is a more powerful motivator than employee welfare.
So Thursday I woke up with a bit of a sore lip, I think I may have cut it with a fingernail in my sleep. Friday my whole bottom lip is swollen like a motherfucker and hurts. It's also bleeding from the bottom (not where I suspected I may have cut it). I've been taking panadol and some old anti-histamine I had lying around and that may be doing something but I can't really be sure. At one point I thought my teeth were in pain. I gave myself a LFT just in case (negative).
Barry - I don't know what Panadol is, but if it continues that way, it might be worth talking to your doctor.
Acetaminophen I think. Yeah, I'll be going Sunday (our Monday here) if this persists
Hot compresses (just a hot washcloth, but not hot enough to scald you) might make it feel better and probably won't do any harm.
I was wondering if that isn't what happened, not suggesting it.
Thanks LB.
I'm in a high rise and have never seen a spider inside so I don't think that's likely
259 but it could give me super powers
Like The Fly but with a happy ending.
DUUUUUDE.
I solved Semantle #49 in 3 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 39.19 (964/1000).My penultimate guess had a similarity of 28.61 (154/1000). https://semantle.novalis.org/
Our proposal for a homelessness initiative made the front page of the paper. Megan was very prescient about how some of the various harrumphers on the Facebook thread about it reacted. But there were also some positive comments, and a lot of other people who seemed open but had some concerns or misunderstandings. Its got people thinking, which is good.
265: I hate to be that guy but a few weeks ago i solved it in one. ("World")
Very apt. My starting word was mostly a joke to myself, and then.
266: Hooray! Keep the slow boring of hard boards!
255. It's a soluble acetaminophen (Tylenol to you) tablet.
270: I've heard milk of magnesia helps.
Maybe Megan has seen this video of a camp in Sacramento that was shared with me. Looks like a pretty nice setup, although I think whatever we look at will be more woodsy and on a much smaller scale.
I hadn't. Will look into it. I'm not actually all that involved, although I have a related project in mind (which is why I've been reading up). Would you point me to the article on your work?
Cool. Thank you. I hope that something good comes of it.
Apparently it's angioedema. I just got back from the doctor a few hours ago. Unfortunately my gold plated American insurance has all the faults of the fucking gold plated American healthcare system and I had to pay out of pocket for the one medication he prescribed that would do the most good otherwise I'd need to wait one or two days for approval. Fuckers.
278: Well, that sucks. Hope you feel better soon.
I got the prednisone, took the 2nd dose today and it's doing just about nothing. My lip is unbelievably swollen and the pain is a mfer.
I've always felt great when I'm on prednisone, except that it takes a while to get rid of the symptoms for which I got prednisone.
How is it going, Barry? Any improvements? (I take it this is one of these "wtf" ailments, like pretty much any case of cellulitis not caused by injecting drugs or otherwise poking your subdermal tissues on purpose...)
None and I took my third dose a couple of hours ago.
My company's big approved product is a prophylactic drug for hereditary angioedema but, of course, the genetic version is an entirely different disease/treatment paradigm. Still, all of the angioedemas sure do look awfully [expletive] unpleasant. Best of luck on the steroid response kicking in sooner rather than later.