Sorry, it actually is.
You have a guy who decided to live in a tent for a week as a publicity stunt, and that is supposed to make him an insightful expert on the nature and causes of the problem, in total contrast with the observations and experience of every single person that ever did any serious work on homelessness?
The "goes and talks to a group of homeless" take sounds an awful lot like an attempt to go on the confirmation bias path, intended to fabricate a justification to continue to not address the root causes, than an honest and objective approach to understand issues.
Who, then, is qualified to speak on these issues? Is only aggregate data through official channels, and not individual experience, relevant to the discussion?
Imagine going to any place of work for a week. Let's say a trading center. How much will you learn from first hand but short-term experience? People tend to say you need 10,000 hours of practice to be good at a given skill. In a week you are barely starting to get familiar and it's already over. You haven't experienced any depth or any breadth of the domain.
Another example would be: how much of a country can you learn by visiting 1 city? At some point to fit the huge problem space into 1 mind you need to generalize and use statistics. In addition to practical experience so you're not lost in abstract concepts.
Personally i think that both first hand experience and stats/theoretical knowledge are necessary to be effective at a domain. So I'm glad to see a politician getting personally involved.
To the defense of the other side, I would say first-hand experience tend to be more engaging than theory/stats, especially to politicians (usually non STEM profiles who got where they are through developing EQ, not critical thinking). This results in politicians only engaging with that type of approach, and typically having a limited/personal understanding of the problems they are in charge of.
I wish for instance that a politician in charge of a topic would have to go through a mandatory 1 week intense course from domain experts to broaden their perspective and understanding. Instead it tends to be all emotion, all urgency, and leaning the way most people are pulling, whatever the rational merits of that position.
A more likely explanation is the way that paternalistic administration of care is anathema to the current way of thinking. That is to say that one should never presuppose how to solve someone else’s problems, but rather one should listen to their lived experiences and give them what they say they need to solve their own problems. This is a good principle to follow in most situations, but like all prescriptive outlooks it fails when exposed to certain edge cases. In this case, the edge case is people who lack the executive function to know how to better their situation, or even to take advantage of situations that will when they’re presented.
There is some evidence that this just clean up the streets approach is part of the reason so many ended up here after having been cleared out of wherever else they started. In Berkeley/Oakland cleaning up the streets just shifted people around at great cost so now the focus is on cleanup and portable toilets for basic sanitation.
The difference is in the language. "Clean up our streets" puts the emphasis on the homeless as the problem for everybody else, as opposed to homelessness being a problem for the homeless.
For starters, can we agree that a publicity stunt like spending a week in a tent as a live action roleplay is no way to get any insight on a deep-rooted social and economic problem? Specially given the clear preexisting bias and political motivation to ignore the problem, avoid accountability, and continue doing absolutely nothing?
> Is only aggregate data through official channels, and not individual experience, relevant to the discussion?
I am really perplexed by the insistence of this take. I mean, aren't these "official channels" actually people paid by him to work for him full time on this issue?
How terribly disfuncional and incompetent is a whole local government, led by this mayor, supposed to be if he feels the need to waste a week's worth of his personal time to do something himself when no one in his own organization, not a single person, is able to reliably gather any info or insight onto the problem?
I mean, in other issues we see the executives of local governments appointing people to actually fix the problem with clear goals in mind, and hold them accountable for the outcome.
But no. I this case we're only seeing a former senator turned mayor somehow arriving at the conclusion that homeless people are all drug addicts and/or suffering from mental health problems. From that starting point, the solution is, surprisingly, to go with the same political tropes of using the police to brush the problem under the rug by banning all the undesidables to get them out of sight.
https://www.denverpost.com/2021/05/18/aurora-homelessness-ca...
And what do you mean “ignore the problem”? I directly quoted his conclusion which included “we should do more to house them”. Can you point to a conclusion of his where he actively sought to ignore the problem?
I’m struggling to wrap my head around your rationale. If the situation were different - let’s say a lack of childcare options - would you also tell politicians not to talk directly to parents looking for childcare? Only talk to advocacy organizations because such a “stunt” doesn’t get to the “deep seated social issues at hand”?
And what do you mean “waste a week”? Since when is having leaders directly engage people a problem? What angle are you coming at this from? I’m trying to understand your motivations when you’re actively rejecting efforts to find solutions.
No, we cannot agree on this. I don't understand how this is walking the walk, and not just talking the talk. If the mayor went on to make grandoise claims about homelessness that were unreasonable, I would start to agree, but I don't see that happening here.
> But no. I this case we're only seeing a former senator turned mayor somehow arriving at the conclusion that homeless people are all drug addicts and/or suffering from mental health problems.
This is strawmanning the mayor's point. He is claiming that we are not addressing the root cause of homelessness. He's not saying "homeless people are all drug addicts." Those are your words.
