I used to also think that many homeless "preferred the lifestyle of homelessness" but I recently learned of a town in Canada (Medicine Hat) that found it more cost effective to house the homeless. This myth that people prefer to be homeless was shattered and this town found that nearly all homeless were able to reintegrated back into having their own places. The mayor was skeptical at first now, he says, “It makes financial sense. That’s how I had my epiphany and was converted. You can actually save money by giving somebody some dignity and giving them a place to live.”
Medicine Hat on brink of ending homelessness
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/medicine-hat-on-brink-...
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/medicine-hat-has-al...
At first, this seems very socially liberal and at odds with a Conservative party kind of thing until you look at the financials and realize it actually is fiscally very conservative- it saves a ton of money on policing and medical care.
All that said, have you been to Medicine Hat? That's not a place with a very relaxed 'homeless lifestyle'. It's -15C here in Toronto today, and we're like 700km further south. In the west coast of the USA, you can survive on the street without the air itself killing you.
So what's the political argument against it?
1.) HF is not effective at keeping recipients out of the criminal justice system. (This finding is controversial as, especially in Canada, 2-3 years often go by between arrest and subsequent criminal punishment.)
2.) HF creates 'slums'. (This finding is controversial as the solution is to attract a wider array of potential landlords. From a landlord's perspective, getting involved with HF is difficult as they feel that having one HF unit in a building will depress rents for the entire building.)
3.) HF is built around low quality data collection tools. HF programs always start with something called a point in time (PIT) count in which a city's homeless population is counted. PIT counts always show that homelessness is both older and whiter than frontline activists have found. This problem is highly complex and could easily turn this into a 250 page essay...:)
4.) HF is a one size fits all approach to a very complex problem. People who believe this fall into the narrative that a homeless woman with three children who lives from couch to couch is dramatically different from a homeless man who suffers from schizophrenia and pushes all of his worldly possessions in a cart. I'd argue that this is not so much a criticism as an example of ignorance - HF by its very nature recognizes that every community is different and each community must build its own program. Second, HF is built around personal relationships between recipients and advocates. The advocates are responsible for getting a particular recipient the type of help that he/she needs.
I mostly support Housing First, so I don't believe these, though #2 and #3 are definitely problems.
(source - I am an anti-poverty activist and have studied HF extensively.)
The conservatives we have in the US are so extreme they make even the ones in Canada look very, very liberal. A proposal like that here would induce horrible rage and kicking and screaming about "the free market" and "entitlements". Someone would be called a communist. Maybe impeached. Conservatives run on platforms of removing programs that help the poor, not starting new ones.
There's a reason the blog poster addressed his open letter to the chief of police, and not to a local homeless charity with a check attached. He doesn't want to help solve the problem, he just wants to whine about it really loud to powerful people without doing any work or spending any money and hope it goes away.
So you pack housing developments with addicts, crazy people and criminals. Next step is they start attracting their friends, and all of the sudden the development turns into a crime-ridden shithole. The families living in these development get screwed.
It also causes other disruption. NYC is adopting this type of policy, so people on waiting lists or in housing they don't like are flocking there from all across the region, and are receiving enhanced benefits. (It's pretty difficult to prove that someone is bona-fide homeless.) Meanwhile, the chronic homeless people who can't hold it together are still addicted, still in need of mental healthcare and are still living under an overpass.
Housing first works best for the fist class as well as those who have succumbed to addiction. Some of the others require intensive intervention, perhaps institutional. As someone pointed out, its complex, but it's something beyond any individual's purview, responsibility, etc., so inhabitants who do pay taxes, etc., should expect some kind of organization would be responsible for addressing the issue rather than the knee jerk public castigation for speaking one's opinion about a social issue.
Indeed, something as simple as smoking weed (regardless of the reason) will exclude you from most government assistance. Living indoors is not always a suitable trade-off for giving up medications that work.
But you also have people avoiding an address for whatever legal or avoidance reasons.
http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic...
The article mentions that some people had trouble adapting to their new houses. Some slept in tents inside their house, others still slept on the street several days a week until they got used to having a house.
Naturally, though, not all homeless should be categorized this way. A great many of them surely have serious psychological disorders that prevent them from living normal independent lives. Surely many of them have suffered in many ways, and many of them are surely in the circumstances they're in due to factors they couldn't control. These are the ones that really do need help of _some_ kind.
I sympathize with people like the mayor of the town you use as an example, but he's wrong: you don't give people dignity by giving them a place to live. Housing isn't the source of human dignity. When you give people with no dignity things of value, they don't value those things, and then eventually they become valueless through abuse and neglect. That's why homeless shelters have to have volunteers to monitor when they house the homeless. That's why simply building a big apartment complex and giving keys to the homeless isn't a long-term solution and in all likelihood a fast-track to a destroyed property and a bunch of people spending some time in the clink.
Outside of personal interventions and great investment of resources into individuals, I'm not sure there are really any great solutions. It makes me sad, but I don't have any great ideas for how to help them better (writ large), than try to meet some basic material needs (food pantries, temporary shelters) and keep them safe.
I searched "salt lake city homeless" remembering the program there and the SF Gate article discussing it's applicability to SF happened to be the first result, so I'm just embracing the irony, not trying to force it.
In reality, the homeless population in 2016 SF and in 2014 Medicine Hat are shaped by the specific conditions and incentives in those communities.
Certainly, being homeless in Iceland would be different that being homeless in Liberia. I was just sharing an example of a situation where a person had their views about the homeless changed. In this case it was the mayor of Medicine Hat.
