It's the latest form of virtue-signaling Russel Conjugation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation. If you can't make the thing itself seem high status, you can at least make, or try to make, saying certain words about whatever the thing is low status.
This is where I disagree with you and Freddie. I think that virtue signaling is a huge part of it but I think virtue signaling can often be done internally. Many people want to feel like they are good people and this is an easy way to scratch that psychic itch. It's not always just about broadcasting it to others.
Totally agree- pushing the use of "unhoused" apparently creates a perception of progress or improvement via language norms that feels good to some on the left despite the lack of actual change created.
And, semi-related, I'd love to hear about the continued focus on housing-first programs in areas where there is simply no available housing. I agree with the concept in theory but it seems counterproductive in many places with a vacancy rate hovering in the low single digits and rent skyrocketing.
Maybe it is an incentive to start building places for them to live. I agree that the main issue is a lack of homes but I don't think it makes sense to say "we have to build homes and THEN make this change that is necessary" . I don't think there needs to be an order to it. That said, if somehow the options were build more homes and implement housing first, more homes would probably do more good on net. Also the issue with housing first is that there genuinely are some people who cannot live on their own unsupported. We would need to create systems for them but, perhaps due to being really dumb/ an inability to think, we tend to flail around from idea to idea which we committ to in a trendy way and ignore all other ideas, in this country
There's a lot to say about public housing in America but it's worth noting that it was fairly successful during the era when the middle class as well as the poor were allowed to live in it and fell into disrepair after the real estate lobby lobbied to have only the poor live in it. It was also much more successful when they were less of shit holes. They became shit holes when all their funding got cut and when Bureaucrats/ management was put in charge who didn't really give a shit about it. But even with all of that true it still is better than not having a home. I know this because people choose to live in it rather than under a bridge. Also social housing models in other countries have had considerably more success. The issue with vice seems to be concentrated poverty rather than just poverty per se. Mixing incomes is a good way to prevent poverty from concentrating.
As a counter example, look to the success of the Champlain housing trust in Burlington. Burlington is deeply unaffordable (mostly due to irritating hippies/ morons with low cognitive ability running the city) but a bright spot is the Champlain housing trust which, if you can get a unit, has allowed people to own their homes and also to rent them and kept them permanently affordable. Obviously there are not enough units and Burlington as a city should not have its policies copied but almost everyone there including amazingly the low IQ hippies are in favor of the Champlain housing trust.
The question is what is the significant factor? If the root cause of chronic homelessness is mental illness than cheap housing just disguises that and leaves the mentally ill untreated but invisible.
On the other hand committing somebody to an asylum implies housing them at the same time.
90% I think. What a crazy story- initially segregated (Pruitt for black residents and Igoe for whites) with 40% white residents, then desegregated followed by a new round of white flight. Buildings were shoddy due to budget issues and wartime supply shortages. As a result, no A/C, no trees or landscaping, single block style design instead of mixed use and mixed design. And maintenance was paid from rent, so, everything went downhill fast.
The much maligned architect later became famous for designing the Twin Towers in NYC.
There is currently a vogue among historians for saying "enslaved persons" rather than "slaves" for similar reasons. It takes a great leap of imagination to believe that someone who sees the word "slave" and somehow doesn't understand that slavery is a moral horror will nevertheless be enlightened by the term "enslaved person."
It's the most lazy form of activism, changing the language to provide nominal dignity and giving up on the material improvements that would actually provide dignity. Plus, it's just dumb.
We're definitely not in a post-material society, but those who own most of the material sure would like it if you spent all your anger about a black mermaid, thank you very much
we are in a society where material reality and material relations are more obscured than ever. That's why, for example, racism now means "saying something kinda clueless about a professional black women's hair" and not "tons of people living in incomprehensible poverty and violence in west baltimore"
Rather, all these endless arguments over how many LGTBQXZYPDQ+ can dance on the head of a pin, the constant affirmation and virtue signaling, all this nonsense is a distraction from the concrete and the material.
None of this changes the way the economic pie is sliced. This is entirely intentional.
People, for some reason decided that the traditional ego sublimations that give their life meaning (family, religion, vocation, etc) were all oppressive and so ego is unchecked and meaning is erased. What else, other than what we see now, would we expect to happen in such a society.
Or we just keep them distracted on endless bitch fights that change nothing, something like if public policy were reorganized as an especially mindless sports league, with teams and rivals. Sort of like a more clownishly acted version of the WWF, but without the banana hammocks or the playful sense of humor.
That frees people of influence and authority to be able to go on about their business unvexed by pesky questions.
I 100% agree with you about the nonsense vs. the concrete and material, but when you say it's intentional, do you mean there are people sitting around in boardrooms thinking, "let's cast a black Little Mermaid in order to distract people from noticing the horrifying inequalities we ourselves benefit from"? I get the feeling most people in most boardrooms are telling themselves they're doing the opposite.
I agree with you, at least from my work in the corporate world, they have really swallowed the kool-aid that casting a black Little Mermaid or whatever is revolutionary. I don't think they're trying to distract the populace - they're trying to distract themselves. The managerial and executive class is turning the script around in a way that allows them to be the activists and then get reinforced in their goodness when people complain.
Yes. I utterly agree with this. The laziness of it all. But I also think they are looking to draw a distinction between the identity of the person as a person and the identity of the person as homeless or a slave or whatever. They want the subject to be a person instead of a slave or homeless. I think it’s annoying and stupid. But I have a sense that’s part of the dynamic.
I think this misunderstands the distinction between the historian's role and the activist's. The historian isn't trying to emphasize the horror of slavery. They're trying to emphasize the humanity of the slavery, in order to try to get at the actual conditions and experiences. They aren't trying to argue 'slavery is bad, we should free people,' they're trying to say 'what was this experience like for the people who went through it? How did it effect them and the society that enslaved them? What did it mean to be enslaved in Cairo vs Haiti vs Rome?'
I agree. I can see more value in "enslaved person" than other word change ups because it really does insert some humanity into it. That said, it does dull down the horror of it. So yeah makes sense- historian say enslaved person and activist say slaves.
I can see this one working depending on context - like when the people are the subject of the sentence, it's "enslaved people" but when they're an object it's "slaves." "The enslaved people were forced to work seven days a week" vs. "The masters forced their slaves to work seven days a week" - the second one sounds clunky if you substitute "enslaved people." One of the things that annoys me the most about the euphemism treadmill is that lately it always seems to involve replacing one word with two or three words so as more and more terms get the "humanizing" treatment conversations become increasingly convoluted. I guess academics probably like that, though?
Yes, it’s making oneself feel better under the guise of making others feel better, such that one doesn’t even need to feel guilty about being self aggrandizing 
One of the most depressing elements of all this is that the Democrars will all begin using unhoused, if they haven't yet, but almost none of them will even attempt to propose an idea, let alone legislation, to address the fact that a lot of people don't have homes.
The version of Build Back Better that passed the House put billions of dollars into housing. It was our best chance to finally get desperately-needed federal investment into this problem.
The humorous version of Freddie's post (sorry, Freddie, but the general case has been made) is George Carlin on Euphemisms:
`There is no shame attached to the word cripple that I can find in any dictionary. ... How about differently abled. I've heard them called that. Differently abled! You can't even call these people handicapped anymore. They'll say, "Were not handicapped. Were handicapable!" These poor people have been bullshitted by the system into believing that if you change the name of the condition, somehow you'll change the condition. Well, hey cousin <jerk off motion>. Doesn't happen.'
“Unhoused” (autocorrect tried to type “unhorsed” which is an entirely different state of personal emergency) may apply to some small minority of otherwise productive individuals who, through little or no fault of their own, find themselves below American living standards and are earnestly trying to work themselves back up. We can add military veterans who sacrificed their bodies and minds for our defense and returned to find a support structure woefully inadequate for the level of care they need and deserve. These are true victims of the system, and using the destigmatizing term “unhoused” may actually be ok. Though I agree with Freddie’s point that normalizing the word and its implication probably will reduce the urgency to address the problem.
But after living in Austin for almost a decade in the late 90s-early 2000s, and spending many summers in the PNW, I’m confident in saying the vast majority of homeless people are not victims, unless you include being victims of their own bad life choices (or often deliberate life choices!), and don’t want or deserve anyone’s sympathy as they willingly leech off the goodwill of others as long as they possibly can. We can continue calling them “homeless” and that’s putting it nicely.
It’s not a leftist take at all. Not sure where you got that idea… And I didn’t share any numbers, just personal observations. Feel free to correct and discuss as everyone else has!
The vast majority of homeless people (if you want to go off of numbers rather than observations from living in Austin) are temporarily homeless and frequently cycle in and out of homelessness. The reason for your perception is the most difficult homeless people are the ones the shelters will not accept (substance abuse, insane, etc). Of course, many people, myself included, would say that no one, no matter their actions, should live without shelter. Also west coast homeless and east coast homeless are extremely different. I don't really have a good explanation for why but it's definitely true.
Fair points. But I stand by my observation that homelessness is a lifestyle choice for many, most likely due to drugs. You only have to see a few urban camps of overweight, dreadlocked 20-somethings with dogs and guitars before it turns you cold to their status as victims.
I would even venture to say that people who find themselves in and out of shelters, but never quite able to shake homelessness, are probably victims of self-sabotage as much as systemic disregard. It’s not that difficult to suck it up, push a broom for a while, and scrimp together a few nickels so you can earn yourself a little cushion against backsliding. Opportunity is everywhere for just about anyone willing to start at the bottom, but when you earn 5x the money per day panhandling as you do from honest work, it’s easy to lose sight of the long term. I’ve witnessed this firsthand.
If drugs or alcohol are involved that’s a different story and I don’t have much knowledge of the ways out, except I’m sure they exist for those who are truly motivated to escape homelessness. “Bad choices” is an oversimplification of that problem, but again at some point when do we accept that some people require a level of support that is unavailable or unreasonable?
It shouldn't be hard to force people into rehab and force the mentally ill into hospitals (it is hard but that's because we made it hard not because it is inherently hard) But the problem goes well beyond that. We don't actually know what causes what and it's probably more of a feedback loop. That is, desperate people make bad decisions like drug abuse and the homeless are desperate people. If i was sleeping under a bridge I would probably start using drugs to cope if they were offered. Also, as other commenters pointed out, homelessness corelates strongly with housing prices, wasn't much of an issue before the 80s, and isn't really a major problem in many countries. I don't think American's are uniquely prone to vice compared to other countries (other than the fact that we have uniquely high poverty rates and the poor are uniquely prone to vice because poverty shortens peoples time horizon/ increases their discount factor.) and I don't think people in Omaha are more morally upstanding than people in San Fransisco. At some point it becomes an Occam's razor type situation and you have to conclude that it's more structural than an inevitable result of individual choices. Also many people in rich families ruin their lives with drugs and alcohol but do so while living in homes and eating nutritious meals.
I am not an expert on substance abuse or its treatment, but I understand that forcing people into rehab is unlikely to produce lasting change.
To make the change, you gotta be the one who wants to change. Not because your spouse will leave you, you'll lose your job or you gotta dry out or go to jail. But because you don't want to live like that any more.
People are - fundamentally - social animals. If you took one person off the street and put them into rehab, it would likely be ineffective. But what if you took the entire group at once? Human peer groups have a tendency to be self-reinforcing after all, which can work against us, but in some cases can help in terms of public policy.
Can people really know what they want if they aren't clean? I agree you can't force treatment but you can force detox and committing yourself to treatment is a lot easier when you are clean.
I'd argue that people who are deeply addicted have no real agency. That doesn't mean society can simply take over their lives, but it should guide our thinking as to our legal/moral/social response to addiction.
I'm mostly okay with a "jail or rehab" model, at least some of the time, because it's really just a choice-and-consequences thing. Those who will not be rehabilitated may have to spend time in prison, and I don't have a problem with that. Obviously, real life is more complicated than a simple model, but the model can still work to some extent in real life.
"Permitting, " or "the system" shut those down. They weren't replaced, hence that people had poor housing, was unacceptable, and replaced with "no housing".
If you believe academics like Dennis Culhane the most common period of homelessness is 24 hours. The second most common period of homelessness is 48 hours. The vast majority of the homeless population has a brief experience of homelessness and then rapidly cycles into crashing with friends and family. It's an entirely different population that ends up on the streets for years and for that subset drug and mental illness are far more prevalent than in the general population.
The idea of rounding up the homeless and diverting into whatever intervention will suit their particular affliction seems to me as part of the same disturbed ethical framework that delivered the term "unhoused." It implies that the ills of humanity can be cured at the social level, and that anyone not participating to the fullest is a victim of *something*. It's equity with a heavy sprinkling of authoritarianism.
But again, aside from the true victims I mentioned up top, there are ways for just about anyone to improve their lot... Can't afford shelter? Find a roommate. Sublet. Move home with family. Get out of whatever exorbitant coastal metro area you live in. There are ways. People self-perpetuate homelessness because it's EASY. Certainly easier than self-improvement! And accommodative policies (but certainly NOT any linguistic framing) in many of these cities has only made the problem worse. Project housing is a dismal failure that only serves to breed more poverty and social ills. Rent control has the opposite effect by creating artificial housing scarcities.
And that brings me back to how best to help... I intuit that at the societal level we're doing what we can under a reasonable ethical framework based on utilitarianism, and indeed probably going further than the ethics would even require to the overall detriment to society (but to the benefit of the individual); providing opportunities and temporary solutions while those who are earnest about overcoming can get their feet back underneath them. But this system also invites abuse at the worst, and at best allows individuals within it to relax instead of pushing forward, knowing they won't be entirely abandoned.
Moral failing or not, "unhoused" or homeless, addicted or clean, these people exist on the fringes of our collective ethical responsibility, and as long as we provide them the means and opportunities to rejoin society with as few barriers as possible, we have to accept that not everyone can be saved, and the mission of saving the unsavable must be left to the few who make it their calling, and not all of humanity.
I don't think I disagree with most of what you say, but the argument is even if the residual portion of the homeless doesn't want help, allowing them to sleep in vacant storefronts in a CBD creates negative perceptions and is detrimental to the rest of the city's well being as a result.
Basically, it's no longer just about "how do we save the homeless" but "how do we stop them from actively inconveniencing us/making our lives worse."
Of course this argument is rooted in selfishness, but much of politics is. And from a utilitarian perspective, if 99% of people have an issue with a few thousand people stinking up the joint...it's a problem.
An old friend owns a restaurant near Haight-Ashbury and the Mission District. The broken windows and human shit on the stoop are real and regular occurrences. Maybe in certain locales such as SF the social cost of homelessness is indeed beginning to outweigh the cost of attempting to treat it. For sure we can say that normalizing the condition of living without shelter is not the solution!
>" intuit that at the societal level we're doing what we can under a reasonable ethical framework based on utilitarianism, and indeed probably going further than the ethics would even require to the overall detriment to society "
how do you explain the fact that we have significantly more homeless than most countries with a comparable GDP per capita? Are people here just uniquely stupid/ make uniquely bad decisions relative to other countries?
If we have something that other countries don't have then looking at the institutions of those other countries might be a useful place to start. In a similar vein, if our problem is fairly new then looking at what our institutions were like before the problem began might be useful. To me both of these are more useful than speculating in an abstract way cut off from any context.
A big factor is the weather. It’s just an entirely different set of circumstances to be homeless in a place where it gets below freezing vs somewhere it doesn’t.
But if anything I would expect that to make East Coast homeless nastier whereases the reverse seems to the case and they seem much nicer than West Coast homeless. I think probably has to do with numbers. More homeless on the west coast and they live in "encampments" / interact less with outside world and become anti-social. East Coast is more people scattered in parks and sprinkled throughout urban fabric.
It also depends on the population they interact with. I lived in Philly for years which isn't known as the kindest city. The difference in the way homeless act in gentrified areas full of soft yuppies and how they behave on the outskirts of these areas where the locals live is stark.
FL has the best climate for living outdoors. Yet homelessness is not a problem here. Government policies matter. Progressive policies don't work. Empirical evidence is out there.
For people with homes, yes. For the homeless, eh, but according to this comment section, clearly the single largest issue with homelessness is that "normal" people have to look at and interact with them.
The problem with this sort of analysis is the number of homeless seems to be closely related to housing prices in an area. If homelessness was just a moral failing, we wouldn't expect to see a higher proportion of homeless in LA than West Virginia, for example, as WV presumably has equal levels of mental illness and certainly has a drug issue. The difference is with a lower COL and widely available housing, the marginal folks with mental illness and/or drug issues can eke it out on SSI checks or whatever.
It's also worth nothing that the tent encampments are almost entirely due to failed public policy as well. In 2020 New York state had 91,000 homeless people, but only around 4,000 were unsheltered. The reason the West Coast has such a bad issue with street encampments is because it's not funding supportive housing to the same extent.
I agree that "moral failing" isn't a helpful way to think about homelessness, and that abundant housing is by far the best and quickest way to mitigate homelessness ... but I think the persistent idea that it's a moral failing is partly related to the under-discussed element of choice involved: people can move! No one has to live in Los Angeles, or Seattle, or San Francisco, etc..
Of course, moving isn't a realistic solution for someone already living on the streets, and maybe it isn't even realistic for people that are slowly squeezed out of the housing market over the course of several years, but it often seems like it's taken for granted that OF COURSE people can't move and I rarely see serious discussion around mobility and relocation.
I don't mean to minimize the difficulty, but I was able to move even when I was poor (< $10k/year in the 90s): usually you do it in pieces, with the help of friends.
Absolutely 100% agree that 1) I was able to do it because I had a support network and 2) not having a support network is probably a (the?) critical risk factor for becoming homeless.
But I think it's important to be detailed and accurate about the conditions that affect mobility and talking about the "the thousands necessary to move" without qualification reduces credibility.
So you're suggesting that maybe the state of California (as an example) builds supportive housing reservations for the homeless out in the high desert where it's cheaper, and ships them all there?
I mean, I guess it's theoretically possible, and if it wasn't coercive, I think they could get away with it. Not really a doable thing in parts of the country where everything's an incorporated municipality though - some random exurb in Upstate NY isn't going to accept thousands of new low-income units.
Slab City is really squatters, which are a different social grouping than what we discuss when we are talking about the "homeless." My understanding is something like 95% of the population are part-time snowbird anarchist types as it is.
Speaking of squatters, my brother had a friend in high school who decided, upon graduation, he wanted to live as a squatter punk. He moved to Berkeley, and found a punk house to move into. He lasted for a few months, when one of his "roommates" got drunk/high, killed his girlfriend, and then forced all of them to help him bury the body. He called up his father to pick him up later that day. He sells used cars now.
That's not to say that there aren't crusties who are pretty well put together and can make a serious go at "off the grid living" but from everything I've heard from folks in the scene you need to work very hard to identify and shun the bad actors from your social group.
Yes. I was living in Venice when the pandemic started and suddenly...where did all the (mostly young, really not poor looking at all) homeless people go? I assume not a small number went home. That's when we saw the real deal homeless people who genuinely had nowhere to go (like the little old lady who lived in the Walgreens parking lot behind our house, totally harmless, clearly mentally ill, she didn't budge).
Presumably they'd need to reform the legal system for this, since you're talking about differential sentencing for a crime based upon perceived status as a homeless person.
Coercive remote camps for a particular subgrouping of people is a little too reminiscent of concentration camps I think to fly in public policy, but maybe the urban outcry regarding the homelessness issue is now enough that people will be okay with this.
It’s not a concentration camp we’re putting sick people in the hospital where they belong. It’s no different than the demented elderly.
If mom is wandering the neighborhood in her nightgown in February and says she’s fine, we don’t say, “Oh well, I guess we have to respect her agency.” She gets packed off to Shady Pines where she belongs.
It wouldn't have to be coercive. If you gave them a deal that said they get to move to a compound where there will be nothing but the most basic amenities (a roof, a shower, a bed, and basic food), but in exchange they get to do as many drugs as they want and not be hassled about it - the vast majority would take the offer.
I'm all for it, only concern is where do they get the money for drugs? I could see a whole ecosystem developing but most street druggies either panhandle or commit theft.
I'm not necessarily against supplying the drugs either if it gets them away from normal functioning people. I'd just like to be prepared for it so we don't get a ghost city like they have in China.
No, as I wrote, "this isn't a realistic solution for someone already living on the streets." If mobility can play any role at all, it would have to be well before people become homeless.
It's funny that you mention upstate NY specifically, because I grew up there, and in the mid-90's, after the local economy had taken a big hit due to the collapse in defense spending post-Cold War and we had a lot of cheap housing available, the state started relocating people on public assistance from NYC up to our area. At least, that's the story I heard to account for the sudden shift in our high school's demographics.
So, the random exurb might not have a say in the matter.
Underdiscussed issue here, but I used to work a nonprofit that focused specifically on helping people on parole and probation transfer which county they were assigned to so that they could live with family members/take a job/live somewhere affordable. It's shocking how many people legally can't move to even another part of the Bay Area, much less another state entirely. For people on criminal supervision, they're often just condemned to trying to find a place to live in the most expensive part of the state, and the red tape between them and moving to Modesto or wherever is completely insurmountable.
That's part of the issue with criminalizing the problem. People with criminal records have a lot of explicit barriers to just moving somewhere new and a lot of implicit barriers from getting entry-level jobs.
The fact that it's far more difficult to survive unhoused in NY state vs California may also play a role in the numbers of street homeless in each locale.
If that were the case we'd see a lot of empty shelter beds in California, instead of typically having to wait several months to land in one even if you request it.
California simply has a chronically underbuilt supportive care system given the size of its overall homeless population.
I would think that the fact there's so many homeless despite the lack of beds shows that climate matters. The fact that people can readily survive without proper shelter provides an environment that makes it "easier" to survive being homeless.
There was an observable migration of homeless people into ATX during winters when I lived there (and I'm sure other year-round nice weather places like Phoenix and LA/San Diego). It's not difficult to live in a tent or even open-air in those places, which removes one major factor in causing people to even seek shelter in the first place.
I'm sure in places where the weather forces people indoors it's easier to corral them into the arms of programs designed to help them, and thus those programs are probably more robust than in places where the homeless have far less cause to interact with them.
because it's almost impossible to treat people against their will, because we are exposed to more toxins than others, because daily reality is more violent and "traumatic" here than elsewhere (because we haven't solved poverty which is a very easy problem to solve), because we don't have universial healthcare so it's harder to get treated, and crucially the one everyone misses- because the healthcare we DO have for vulnerable groups (ie medicaid) is confusing, fractured and there is no centralized place people know to "go to" for help.
Well, that seems like a better place to focus. At least it seems more impactful than trying to force people get sober. Society needs to make sobriety a more appealing choice, rather than making reality so unpleasant for a large swath of the population that they will do whatever it takes to get out of their heads and stay there.
Read what I wrote again. I even made a point of saying "this is the one that everyone misses" to explain what you missed. Seemed like you were expecting this answer, got excited to see it, and had a response ready to go. That excitement clouded your ability to read the full comment. Calm down, and then re read it.
We do not have universal healthcare. We have a fractured healthcare system where certain groups such as the very poor get healthcare coverage which is run by ACOs. Many providers don't accept medicaid. It is often unclear "where to go". The process for signing up for medicaid can be difficult. Think about what it would be like if you weren't' very smart or didn't speak English or just unable to navigate it for whatever reason.
When it comes to mental health almost no psychiatrists accept medicaid. You can get a low ability nurse practitioner who will only treat yuppies with "depression and anxiety" at best. If you require hosptialization it is essentially impossible to access that prior to committing some act of violence
Yes, I do think a fractured healthcare system with no coordination between providers is probably not the optimal way for people to get healthcare!
This is way too harsh. Many homeless people are mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs. They didn't choose their mental illness. The drug addiction involved an initial bad choice or series of choices, but once you're addicted, it's extremely hard to break free. You can't just tell them "just stop being addicted, you bum!"
Riiiight... Empathy means enabling homeless drug addicts forever and never expecting them to take any ownership of their circumstance because it's "extremely hard." I get it.
Yeah, I do have empathy for people who make really bad decisions. If I see someone speeding on the highway and then they crash and die I don't actually think it's funny, I think it's sad even if it is their "fault". What's irritating to me is that people who aren't inclined to have that kind of empathy insist on assuming that everyone else is like them and has similar reactions to "deserved" suffering. Either we're all lying or maybe there are people who feel differently than you/ feel empathy even for people who make very bad decisions! You can take your pick about which it is but not everyone has the same moral outlook/ aptitude as you.
I think empathy in this case is completely irrelevant. If somebody is out of their mind then you institutionalize them, period. What does empathy have to do with that? It should proceed from a simple, cold calculation that letting somebody who's crazy live on the streets is subtracting decades from their lives.
Why would you care how long they live without empathy? What kind of cold, rational calculation spits out the answer that more human life is good, without feeding it some good ol' human values?
In any case, institutionalization can be traumatizing--take a second to imagine how you would feel if you were literally kidnapped and taken to a strange place where you were *strongly encouraged* to take medications that made you feel stranger. When you try to escape you're injected with powerful sedatives and restrained to a bed for hours at a time. Now imagine you're also convinced, in the very fiber of your being, that the doctors are trying to kill you.
So, how you go about getting someone who needs to be in the hospital in the hospital is very important. And sometimes, even when someone could benefit from being in the hospital, the damage that forcing that person into the hospital against their will would do in fact outweighs it.
My impression is that the ethical intuition of "person x got what was coming to them" is stronger in some individuals such as yourself. And the ethical intuition of "suffering is painful to see on it's own terms" is stronger in other individuals. Everyone has a different balance of these two intuitions but it's really irritating when people insist that everyone is just like they are and has a strong balance of the former instead of the latter and it often comes across as a form of compensation or moral justification / feeling threatened or attacked by others who don't have the same composition/ mix of ethical intuitions. We just disagree. "you reap what you sow" is not an ethical intution that is particularly strong in me. I am well aware that it is stronger in others. But not everyone is identical!
I never said anyone deserves to be homeless or addicted to drugs. I said after we as a society have provided every reasonable avenue for them to improve their situation, and they STILL don't, there comes a point when we can't take responsibility for their continued backsliding. Some people WANT to be a homeless drug addict and are happy to take every penny of charity they are offered with no intention of ever repaying it (metaphorically speaking), and I don't see why it's a matter of "empathy" to enable and prolong this arrangement using our collective resources - financially, emotionally and otherwise.
I also said there are people who make it their life mission to focus on these lost causes, and if that's you then I have no problem at all with it. I don't think that's empathy, I think it's sympathy, or guilt, or codependency, or something else entirely. But having empathy for someone's plight doesn't mean you endorse it or feel any need to support their continued self-destruction.
> have provided every reasonable avenue for them to improve their situation, and they STILL don't, there comes a point when we can't take responsibility for their continued backsliding.
Right, in other words we can't take responsibility for that because that would require a degree of empathy that you think is unreasonable given the moral intuition of "you reap what you sow". In other words what I said.
While there is some truth in that, I think the people that end up in those circumstances don't have far to fall to begin with. I mean, you're not going to see some plutocrat's child wandering the streets of Portland looking for drugs, no matter how bad their life choices.
True that. And most of the homeless clients I work with have been disadvantaged from infancy - fetal alcohol syndrome and developmental disabilities that never receive support, horrific child abuse, the destabilization of bouncing from foster home to foster home, exposure to violence at school, being introduced to drugs before the age of 10, etc. The "bad choices" people are citing above are often "bad choices" made by these clients' parents and caretakers or by these clients when they're still literal children.
I also suspect there is a correlation with low socio-economic status going back for a few generations. The poorer your family, the less you can bounce back from bad decisions because you don't have a safety net. I know plenty of upper middle class kids who made some of the worst decisions imaginable, and they aren't homeless.
Note how our society privileges the symbolic and the abstract over the concrete and material.
This is because it's a lot easier to set up diversity committees or think up new names that gloss over unpleasantness, than it is to address uncomfortable realities and attack entrenched interests.
We are a society of affirmation. What scares me is that it isn't even a conscious plot among anyone except for maybe the eliet of the eliet. It's operating on autopilot now.
The problem is that most people don’t know what “developing” means in IR terminology, nor do they understand concepts like “world systems theory” when they try to discuss matters pertaining to globalization or international politics.
yeah I don't really care I just think it's funny that the name implies they're developing when it is also possible for a country to either shrink or stagnate.
I've seen a bunch of ballot measure signs in my (liberal urban) neighborhood that say things like "Vote! Make Your Voice Heard! Establish a Very Important Committee to Maybe Think About Racism!"
This one has always baffled me in a way other euphemisms don't. Homeless and unhoused are the same word. Like... they literally mean the same thing. It's not like slave/enslaved where you can at least claim there's a subtle linguistic difference. It's the same word!
Actually, there is a linguistic difference: home is a noun, while house is both a noun and a verb. When home is used as a verb, it refers to animals or weapons (i.e. a bird's homing instincts), but mostly home is a noun. While a house is both a thing and also something one does to or for others, i.e. one houses their guests.
Therefore, the reason this change is important to the annoying people who are pushing it is not because they are switching two nouns that mean exactly the same thing. It's because they want to switch to a word that's a verb and something that can be done. The reason that's important is because they want to imply they are "unhoused" as a force worked upon them by others. Society is withholding housing, while it houses others. It's part of their mission to turn all language into the passive voice, where mysterious forces or an amorphous "they" are always operating upon helpless people subject to these forces. Everything in life can be explained by a pervasive yet impossible to pin down "systemic" force that oppresses or privileges, grants favors or punishments. Person A doesn't do something to Person B. Person C doesn't have agency to exercise will that results in outcome Y. Instead, an amorphous systematic force causes Person A to be unhoused or marginalized.
That's the worldview they want and the language they need to convey it is passive voice all the time, for everything. Humans had this worldview for quite a long time, but the mysterious, uncontrollable force causing things to happen and granting favors and punishments was god. Then we had a brief run after the enlightenment with liberalism where we attributed people with free will and agency. The woke have reverted back to the sense that life is a bunch of uncontrollable external forces operating on helpless people, but with no god as the authority behind it or power capable of administering justice. So their mission is to evangelize about the mysterious amorphous systemic forces and try to render justice themselves.
Right, but it's only used for animals. We never say we "homed" or failed to home a person. So they can't use that, they don't want to imply that homeless people are like stray animals. They want to imply that "society" has failed an obligation to house them.
I agree that the switch to unhoused is intended to imply that someone was supposed to provide these people with housing and failed to do it. I am guessing that the people attached to this framing would describe the "uncontrollable external forces" as "capitalism" -- and in fairness Adam Smith opened that up a little with the metaphor of the Invisible Hand -- but seriously I am quite amused by the constant use of the term capitalism as some kind of monstrous force making everyone miserable.
Yep. What I find strange is that they manage to get themselves so worked up and have such emotional antagonism to a disembodied, agentless force. It's really weird. Like, it's easy to have a strong emotional reaction against an identified person or group that is doing something bad. It's easy to be offended and angry at Bigot John for being racist or Slumlord Mike for evicting a poor family, or even at god for letting such bad things happen to you. But how does one get emotionally upset at "systemic issues" or "structural problems" or even "capitalism"??
*IF* the reason they wanted to move to this terminology was because they wanted to be able to apply a more cool-headed, neutral, rational analysis to problems and remove the emotion, it would make sense. But that's not the aim at all. They want everyone to be outraged and sad and upset all the time, yet they can never point fingers at who did the bad thing -- at best they'll point to long-dead people who set up systems in the past. It's such a losing strategy.
All the bugaboos, all the time. You’ve hit on something crucial, indeed foundational, about the woke worldview: that it’s all about the poor, pathetic oppressed person who is only acted upon, (and, of course, has “trauma” as a result) who is prey to all these omnipresent but amorphous bugaboos, which all blend together. cisheteropatriarchal capitalist racist colonialism.
No wonder they’re always going on about how exhausted they are. 
Such folk don’t know how to understand capitalism from a scientific framework, so they consider it a god-force that is an amalgamation beyond the control of the individual entities who prop it up and pay tribute to its needs.
being homeless isn't an identity, it's a material status. Increase the number of homes, and the number of people who are homeless goes down.
That's why we need far more housing development. In places where housing capitalism is strong -- ATL, DFW, HOU -- you have much fewer "people currently experiencing unhousedness"than in more regulated housing markets like NYC, DC, and SF.
I know it goes against all ideological commitments leftists have made, but please look at the evidence on just this one issue.
Also historically it is the commitment that the left has made through things like Miljonprogrammet, etc. I have a poster from the soviet union bragging about how many homes they're building. The reason the "left" opposes it today is because they are really weird hippies who think wearing a leather jacket and looking kind of angry all the time is the same thing as material politics. There are committed leftists but, for reasons I can't understand- maybe fear of shrinking numbers, they REFUSE to root out the hippy element from leftist organizations.
I worked ripping down homeless camps in central LA for a year. I am willing to tentatively argue that for many homeless, “being homeless” is absolutely a self-assigned identity. They will continue to seek out bridges to get high under indefinitely regardless of what material benefits are being handed off to them. Total rejection of all civic responsibilities, zero fucks given by this stage of their lives.
I will say though that I doubt there are more than a few hundred such in the sprawling megacity of LA county, population 6ish million. But that bloc is probably what people picture when they hear “homeless”.
It absolutely is -- the temporarily out-of-work struggling actor who has to crash on his friend's couch for a month (to make up an example) isn't even on our radar. It's the guys in tent cities behind a Vons or an In-N-Out, who sit there with their improvised bicycle chop shops and blatant drug use, that people are concerned about.
It should also be noted that outside of NYC, a substantial number of homeless people are likely sleeping in their cars, and also likely mostly invisible.
In striking down a vagrancy law as "void for vagueness", the court commented that, if the law were to be applied even-handedly, then half of the men at the country club would have to be arrested as vagrants.
I really don't think this has anything to do with it. I live in a western state that has extremely pro-development policies and new housing and apartment developments going up constantly...every block and neighborhood has cranes and constant building. And we also have a big homeless encampment like all the other western states. It has more to do with weather and authority to throw them in jail or not.
What if there is a third confounding factor. IN this case demand. You see a lot of construction in areas with high demand. You also see a lot of homless in areas with high demand because prices are higher there.
I don't know, I think it's pretty clearly about weather. If you rank the states by per capita homeless, the western states are all at the top, and these are places with quite different housing policies and median home prices. Nevada, New Mexico, California, Hawaii, Oregon, Arizona...what they have in common is they all have either basically no rain or snow, ever, or year-round temperate climate. The southeast may be warm but it also rains insane amounts quite frequently or even hurricanes. Honestly think about it, if you had to choose one state where you had to live in a tent outside for an entire year, where are you going to pick?
Thanks for the good words on behalf of candor and rhetorical impact over creeping propriety. As usual, Orwell beat you to it, but at least that let’s you know you’re on to something. In his case it was the memorable formulation of “the power of facing unpleasant facts”, which isn’t something highly valued by those for whom control of nomenclature is a sufficient substitute for effective solutions to real problems.
This is an example of identity creep. The reduction of attributes / descriptions to identity. It's purpose is to "affirm how valid" it is for someone to live in destitution and filth because it's "who they are". Serves the function of normalizing the status quo.
Also, Freddie, what do you think of the Mayor's plan re: involuntary commitment? It had the predictable backlash where people waited and saw what the social script they were supposed to use to argue against it was and then did that. The "maw" as you call it. But if you read the actual plan it has such radical ideas as "stop making it illegal to share medical records during hearings on institutionalization" and "require follow up care to be arranged adequately before people are streeted". The reason people oppose these is that they think that the mentally ill are "super valid" (until, you know, they act mentally ill in a way that hurts other people) and that the only way to help another person is to "affirm" their right to live in agony and filth.
The fundamental limit of liberalism is that the only solution we can even conceptualize is affirmation. Hence identity creep. Just increase the number of identities we need to "affirm" and get rid of "stigma" and voila!
Isn’t that interesting, that waiting phenomenon? I think I saw it a little bit with Elon: people sat still for a bit. “What is he, good or bad? I don’t know -- over there They seem to think he’s good. no wait he’s bad!! HE’S BAD!!!”
People who don't have a place to live don't care if they are referred to as "homeless" or "unhoused". They have more important concerns. And people who insist on using a particular word are clearly more interested on taking care of their own feelings rather than doing something productive for the non-domiciled.
This is such a frustrating tendency among progressives - to fixate on the language used to describe the situation rather than the situation itself. It fundamentally speaks to their powerlessness: we're not going to be able to find these people homes, so let's make them (and us) feel better about them being homeless. Call me crazy, but I'm more interested in finding them a place to live!
Many people prefer to live in a tent or vehicle and call those accommodations home, so they would argue that they are not homeless. If the bar is raised to "house" being the standard, they can't really argue that a tent is a house, as house implies a permanent structure. "Unhoused" encompasses more people defined into the care of activists.
Homeless is such a benign term to begin with, I don't get how that is disrespectful to anyone. It's about as toothless a term as you can get.
And for the life of me I don't understand how 'unhoused' is somehow a better term than homeless, in being less offensive that is. Neither of them are offensive, but like Freddie said homeless works just fine for it. It makes no sense to create a new term.
The only reason I can think of for this is that this is just another word, in the now exhaustive list of words that the far Left has created, being used for language control. Control the language, control the speech. Control the speech, control the people. Eat your heart out Huxley.
But isn't that what we would like to do? Pay some money to make these people go away somewhere to be a burden we bear as a society? I think that's fair and probably better than the system we have now. Is progressive SF an answer? I sure hope not.
It's the latest form of virtue-signaling Russel Conjugation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation. If you can't make the thing itself seem high status, you can at least make, or try to make, saying certain words about whatever the thing is low status.
In the meantime, the fundamental barriers to ameliorating homelessness remain: https://seliger.com/2022/06/29/homelessness-is-a-housing-problem-when-cities-build-housing-homelessness-goes-down, regardless of the words one chooses.
This is where I disagree with you and Freddie. I think that virtue signaling is a huge part of it but I think virtue signaling can often be done internally. Many people want to feel like they are good people and this is an easy way to scratch that psychic itch. It's not always just about broadcasting it to others.
Why can't it be both?
I think it is both. Sorry if my comment didn't make that clear.
Totally agree- pushing the use of "unhoused" apparently creates a perception of progress or improvement via language norms that feels good to some on the left despite the lack of actual change created.
And, semi-related, I'd love to hear about the continued focus on housing-first programs in areas where there is simply no available housing. I agree with the concept in theory but it seems counterproductive in many places with a vacancy rate hovering in the low single digits and rent skyrocketing.
The ration of Victory Gin is increased from 100 grams to 80 grams!
Maybe it is an incentive to start building places for them to live. I agree that the main issue is a lack of homes but I don't think it makes sense to say "we have to build homes and THEN make this change that is necessary" . I don't think there needs to be an order to it. That said, if somehow the options were build more homes and implement housing first, more homes would probably do more good on net. Also the issue with housing first is that there genuinely are some people who cannot live on their own unsupported. We would need to create systems for them but, perhaps due to being really dumb/ an inability to think, we tend to flail around from idea to idea which we committ to in a trendy way and ignore all other ideas, in this country
Cabrini Green?
I'm really not trying to be a jerk here, and I don't have or see any easy answers.
There's a lot to say about public housing in America but it's worth noting that it was fairly successful during the era when the middle class as well as the poor were allowed to live in it and fell into disrepair after the real estate lobby lobbied to have only the poor live in it. It was also much more successful when they were less of shit holes. They became shit holes when all their funding got cut and when Bureaucrats/ management was put in charge who didn't really give a shit about it. But even with all of that true it still is better than not having a home. I know this because people choose to live in it rather than under a bridge. Also social housing models in other countries have had considerably more success. The issue with vice seems to be concentrated poverty rather than just poverty per se. Mixing incomes is a good way to prevent poverty from concentrating.
As a counter example, look to the success of the Champlain housing trust in Burlington. Burlington is deeply unaffordable (mostly due to irritating hippies/ morons with low cognitive ability running the city) but a bright spot is the Champlain housing trust which, if you can get a unit, has allowed people to own their homes and also to rent them and kept them permanently affordable. Obviously there are not enough units and Burlington as a city should not have its policies copied but almost everyone there including amazingly the low IQ hippies are in favor of the Champlain housing trust.
The question is what is the significant factor? If the root cause of chronic homelessness is mental illness than cheap housing just disguises that and leaves the mentally ill untreated but invisible.
On the other hand committing somebody to an asylum implies housing them at the same time.
First I've ever heard of anyone calling American public housing "successful".
As to whether a Cabrini Green or Pruitt Igoe is better than the streets, you probably have a point, even if the highrises are no featherbed.
I don't think Pruitt Igoe was ever at capacity, was it?
90% I think. What a crazy story- initially segregated (Pruitt for black residents and Igoe for whites) with 40% white residents, then desegregated followed by a new round of white flight. Buildings were shoddy due to budget issues and wartime supply shortages. As a result, no A/C, no trees or landscaping, single block style design instead of mixed use and mixed design. And maintenance was paid from rent, so, everything went downhill fast.
The much maligned architect later became famous for designing the Twin Towers in NYC.
There is currently a vogue among historians for saying "enslaved persons" rather than "slaves" for similar reasons. It takes a great leap of imagination to believe that someone who sees the word "slave" and somehow doesn't understand that slavery is a moral horror will nevertheless be enlightened by the term "enslaved person."
It's the most lazy form of activism, changing the language to provide nominal dignity and giving up on the material improvements that would actually provide dignity. Plus, it's just dumb.
I feel like we're in a post-material society. That's why all our political debates are about stupid things like "wokeness" or whatever.
We're definitely not in a post-material society, but those who own most of the material sure would like it if you spent all your anger about a black mermaid, thank you very much
we are in a society where material reality and material relations are more obscured than ever. That's why, for example, racism now means "saying something kinda clueless about a professional black women's hair" and not "tons of people living in incomprehensible poverty and violence in west baltimore"
Rather, all these endless arguments over how many LGTBQXZYPDQ+ can dance on the head of a pin, the constant affirmation and virtue signaling, all this nonsense is a distraction from the concrete and the material.
None of this changes the way the economic pie is sliced. This is entirely intentional.
People, for some reason decided that the traditional ego sublimations that give their life meaning (family, religion, vocation, etc) were all oppressive and so ego is unchecked and meaning is erased. What else, other than what we see now, would we expect to happen in such a society.
Or we just keep them distracted on endless bitch fights that change nothing, something like if public policy were reorganized as an especially mindless sports league, with teams and rivals. Sort of like a more clownishly acted version of the WWF, but without the banana hammocks or the playful sense of humor.
That frees people of influence and authority to be able to go on about their business unvexed by pesky questions.
I 100% agree with you about the nonsense vs. the concrete and material, but when you say it's intentional, do you mean there are people sitting around in boardrooms thinking, "let's cast a black Little Mermaid in order to distract people from noticing the horrifying inequalities we ourselves benefit from"? I get the feeling most people in most boardrooms are telling themselves they're doing the opposite.
I agree with you, at least from my work in the corporate world, they have really swallowed the kool-aid that casting a black Little Mermaid or whatever is revolutionary. I don't think they're trying to distract the populace - they're trying to distract themselves. The managerial and executive class is turning the script around in a way that allows them to be the activists and then get reinforced in their goodness when people complain.
Yes. I utterly agree with this. The laziness of it all. But I also think they are looking to draw a distinction between the identity of the person as a person and the identity of the person as homeless or a slave or whatever. They want the subject to be a person instead of a slave or homeless. I think it’s annoying and stupid. But I have a sense that’s part of the dynamic.
So if I call a dog a "canine animal" he doesn't have to walk on a leash any more?
If the wedding party is bombed by a Chinese-identifying lesbian, does that mean that innocents no longer die?
Humans insult my intelligence.
I think this misunderstands the distinction between the historian's role and the activist's. The historian isn't trying to emphasize the horror of slavery. They're trying to emphasize the humanity of the slavery, in order to try to get at the actual conditions and experiences. They aren't trying to argue 'slavery is bad, we should free people,' they're trying to say 'what was this experience like for the people who went through it? How did it effect them and the society that enslaved them? What did it mean to be enslaved in Cairo vs Haiti vs Rome?'
I agree. I can see more value in "enslaved person" than other word change ups because it really does insert some humanity into it. That said, it does dull down the horror of it. So yeah makes sense- historian say enslaved person and activist say slaves.
I can see this one working depending on context - like when the people are the subject of the sentence, it's "enslaved people" but when they're an object it's "slaves." "The enslaved people were forced to work seven days a week" vs. "The masters forced their slaves to work seven days a week" - the second one sounds clunky if you substitute "enslaved people." One of the things that annoys me the most about the euphemism treadmill is that lately it always seems to involve replacing one word with two or three words so as more and more terms get the "humanizing" treatment conversations become increasingly convoluted. I guess academics probably like that, though?
To my ear, it sounds like an attempt to make the terminology downright polite.
"Did you see the Johnson's enslaved person down at the market? I heard they're getting a second one next fortnight!'
Please. "Enslaved persons" is so offensive.
"People with slavery."
Yes, it’s making oneself feel better under the guise of making others feel better, such that one doesn’t even need to feel guilty about being self aggrandizing 
One of the most depressing elements of all this is that the Democrars will all begin using unhoused, if they haven't yet, but almost none of them will even attempt to propose an idea, let alone legislation, to address the fact that a lot of people don't have homes.
The version of Build Back Better that passed the House put billions of dollars into housing. It was our best chance to finally get desperately-needed federal investment into this problem.
Why didn't it pass?
The GOP + Sinema and Manchin thought that we had spent too much already on the last three spending bills.
I mean haven't we? What makes you think spending more would actually have an impact on anything tangible?
We waste billions and trillions of money from tax payers producing nothing of substance and then ask for more to throw down the hole?
Forgive my skepticism.
7% inflation shows who was probably right in that debate.
The humorous version of Freddie's post (sorry, Freddie, but the general case has been made) is George Carlin on Euphemisms:
`There is no shame attached to the word cripple that I can find in any dictionary. ... How about differently abled. I've heard them called that. Differently abled! You can't even call these people handicapped anymore. They'll say, "Were not handicapped. Were handicapable!" These poor people have been bullshitted by the system into believing that if you change the name of the condition, somehow you'll change the condition. Well, hey cousin <jerk off motion>. Doesn't happen.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvISFZ7bQcE
https://www.lingq.com/en/learn-english-online/courses/87644/george-carlin-euphemisms-447260/
“Unhoused” (autocorrect tried to type “unhorsed” which is an entirely different state of personal emergency) may apply to some small minority of otherwise productive individuals who, through little or no fault of their own, find themselves below American living standards and are earnestly trying to work themselves back up. We can add military veterans who sacrificed their bodies and minds for our defense and returned to find a support structure woefully inadequate for the level of care they need and deserve. These are true victims of the system, and using the destigmatizing term “unhoused” may actually be ok. Though I agree with Freddie’s point that normalizing the word and its implication probably will reduce the urgency to address the problem.
But after living in Austin for almost a decade in the late 90s-early 2000s, and spending many summers in the PNW, I’m confident in saying the vast majority of homeless people are not victims, unless you include being victims of their own bad life choices (or often deliberate life choices!), and don’t want or deserve anyone’s sympathy as they willingly leech off the goodwill of others as long as they possibly can. We can continue calling them “homeless” and that’s putting it nicely.
It’s not a leftist take at all. Not sure where you got that idea… And I didn’t share any numbers, just personal observations. Feel free to correct and discuss as everyone else has!
You don’t! Feel free to just move on and engage with other people to whom you might actually have something interesting to offer.
The vast majority of homeless people (if you want to go off of numbers rather than observations from living in Austin) are temporarily homeless and frequently cycle in and out of homelessness. The reason for your perception is the most difficult homeless people are the ones the shelters will not accept (substance abuse, insane, etc). Of course, many people, myself included, would say that no one, no matter their actions, should live without shelter. Also west coast homeless and east coast homeless are extremely different. I don't really have a good explanation for why but it's definitely true.
Fair points. But I stand by my observation that homelessness is a lifestyle choice for many, most likely due to drugs. You only have to see a few urban camps of overweight, dreadlocked 20-somethings with dogs and guitars before it turns you cold to their status as victims.
I would even venture to say that people who find themselves in and out of shelters, but never quite able to shake homelessness, are probably victims of self-sabotage as much as systemic disregard. It’s not that difficult to suck it up, push a broom for a while, and scrimp together a few nickels so you can earn yourself a little cushion against backsliding. Opportunity is everywhere for just about anyone willing to start at the bottom, but when you earn 5x the money per day panhandling as you do from honest work, it’s easy to lose sight of the long term. I’ve witnessed this firsthand.
If drugs or alcohol are involved that’s a different story and I don’t have much knowledge of the ways out, except I’m sure they exist for those who are truly motivated to escape homelessness. “Bad choices” is an oversimplification of that problem, but again at some point when do we accept that some people require a level of support that is unavailable or unreasonable?
It shouldn't be hard to force people into rehab and force the mentally ill into hospitals (it is hard but that's because we made it hard not because it is inherently hard) But the problem goes well beyond that. We don't actually know what causes what and it's probably more of a feedback loop. That is, desperate people make bad decisions like drug abuse and the homeless are desperate people. If i was sleeping under a bridge I would probably start using drugs to cope if they were offered. Also, as other commenters pointed out, homelessness corelates strongly with housing prices, wasn't much of an issue before the 80s, and isn't really a major problem in many countries. I don't think American's are uniquely prone to vice compared to other countries (other than the fact that we have uniquely high poverty rates and the poor are uniquely prone to vice because poverty shortens peoples time horizon/ increases their discount factor.) and I don't think people in Omaha are more morally upstanding than people in San Fransisco. At some point it becomes an Occam's razor type situation and you have to conclude that it's more structural than an inevitable result of individual choices. Also many people in rich families ruin their lives with drugs and alcohol but do so while living in homes and eating nutritious meals.
I am not an expert on substance abuse or its treatment, but I understand that forcing people into rehab is unlikely to produce lasting change.
To make the change, you gotta be the one who wants to change. Not because your spouse will leave you, you'll lose your job or you gotta dry out or go to jail. But because you don't want to live like that any more.
People are - fundamentally - social animals. If you took one person off the street and put them into rehab, it would likely be ineffective. But what if you took the entire group at once? Human peer groups have a tendency to be self-reinforcing after all, which can work against us, but in some cases can help in terms of public policy.
The track record of imprisonment of groups to produce change does not give me much hope.
Can people really know what they want if they aren't clean? I agree you can't force treatment but you can force detox and committing yourself to treatment is a lot easier when you are clean.
From what I can tell, forcing people to detox and in hopes of getting them to commit them to treatment hasn't exactly borne fruit, either.
I'd argue that people who are deeply addicted have no real agency. That doesn't mean society can simply take over their lives, but it should guide our thinking as to our legal/moral/social response to addiction.
I'm mostly okay with a "jail or rehab" model, at least some of the time, because it's really just a choice-and-consequences thing. Those who will not be rehabilitated may have to spend time in prison, and I don't have a problem with that. Obviously, real life is more complicated than a simple model, but the model can still work to some extent in real life.
"wasn't much of an issue before the 80s"
1) Urban renewal projects that closed skid row hotels and flop houses.
2) The deinstitutionalization movement that closed sanitariums and relocated patients to the streets.
"Permitting, " or "the system" shut those down. They weren't replaced, hence that people had poor housing, was unacceptable, and replaced with "no housing".
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Those are two major problems yes. I also think that the price of housing is a major problem.
A flop house is housing.
Found this interesting article about the history of homelessness in NYC that touches on this in more detail (specifically the “pre-Callahan” section): https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/why-are-so-many-people-homeless/
If you believe academics like Dennis Culhane the most common period of homelessness is 24 hours. The second most common period of homelessness is 48 hours. The vast majority of the homeless population has a brief experience of homelessness and then rapidly cycles into crashing with friends and family. It's an entirely different population that ends up on the streets for years and for that subset drug and mental illness are far more prevalent than in the general population.
The idea of rounding up the homeless and diverting into whatever intervention will suit their particular affliction seems to me as part of the same disturbed ethical framework that delivered the term "unhoused." It implies that the ills of humanity can be cured at the social level, and that anyone not participating to the fullest is a victim of *something*. It's equity with a heavy sprinkling of authoritarianism.
But again, aside from the true victims I mentioned up top, there are ways for just about anyone to improve their lot... Can't afford shelter? Find a roommate. Sublet. Move home with family. Get out of whatever exorbitant coastal metro area you live in. There are ways. People self-perpetuate homelessness because it's EASY. Certainly easier than self-improvement! And accommodative policies (but certainly NOT any linguistic framing) in many of these cities has only made the problem worse. Project housing is a dismal failure that only serves to breed more poverty and social ills. Rent control has the opposite effect by creating artificial housing scarcities.
And that brings me back to how best to help... I intuit that at the societal level we're doing what we can under a reasonable ethical framework based on utilitarianism, and indeed probably going further than the ethics would even require to the overall detriment to society (but to the benefit of the individual); providing opportunities and temporary solutions while those who are earnest about overcoming can get their feet back underneath them. But this system also invites abuse at the worst, and at best allows individuals within it to relax instead of pushing forward, knowing they won't be entirely abandoned.
Moral failing or not, "unhoused" or homeless, addicted or clean, these people exist on the fringes of our collective ethical responsibility, and as long as we provide them the means and opportunities to rejoin society with as few barriers as possible, we have to accept that not everyone can be saved, and the mission of saving the unsavable must be left to the few who make it their calling, and not all of humanity.
I don't think I disagree with most of what you say, but the argument is even if the residual portion of the homeless doesn't want help, allowing them to sleep in vacant storefronts in a CBD creates negative perceptions and is detrimental to the rest of the city's well being as a result.
Basically, it's no longer just about "how do we save the homeless" but "how do we stop them from actively inconveniencing us/making our lives worse."
Of course this argument is rooted in selfishness, but much of politics is. And from a utilitarian perspective, if 99% of people have an issue with a few thousand people stinking up the joint...it's a problem.
An old friend owns a restaurant near Haight-Ashbury and the Mission District. The broken windows and human shit on the stoop are real and regular occurrences. Maybe in certain locales such as SF the social cost of homelessness is indeed beginning to outweigh the cost of attempting to treat it. For sure we can say that normalizing the condition of living without shelter is not the solution!
>" intuit that at the societal level we're doing what we can under a reasonable ethical framework based on utilitarianism, and indeed probably going further than the ethics would even require to the overall detriment to society "
how do you explain the fact that we have significantly more homeless than most countries with a comparable GDP per capita? Are people here just uniquely stupid/ make uniquely bad decisions relative to other countries?
If we have something that other countries don't have then looking at the institutions of those other countries might be a useful place to start. In a similar vein, if our problem is fairly new then looking at what our institutions were like before the problem began might be useful. To me both of these are more useful than speculating in an abstract way cut off from any context.
More homeless total? Or more chronically homeless?
A big factor is the weather. It’s just an entirely different set of circumstances to be homeless in a place where it gets below freezing vs somewhere it doesn’t.
But if anything I would expect that to make East Coast homeless nastier whereases the reverse seems to the case and they seem much nicer than West Coast homeless. I think probably has to do with numbers. More homeless on the west coast and they live in "encampments" / interact less with outside world and become anti-social. East Coast is more people scattered in parks and sprinkled throughout urban fabric.
It also depends on the population they interact with. I lived in Philly for years which isn't known as the kindest city. The difference in the way homeless act in gentrified areas full of soft yuppies and how they behave on the outskirts of these areas where the locals live is stark.
Ultimately you get what you tolerate.
Yeah we have a lot of space on the west coast. There's a lot more room to hide.
reminds me of a marriage story where everyone keeps telling adam driver about how there's more "space"
FL has the best climate for living outdoors. Yet homelessness is not a problem here. Government policies matter. Progressive policies don't work. Empirical evidence is out there.
FL has a high rate of homelessness, they just aren’t panhandling.
I'd call that a win.
For people with homes, yes. For the homeless, eh, but according to this comment section, clearly the single largest issue with homelessness is that "normal" people have to look at and interact with them.
The problem with this sort of analysis is the number of homeless seems to be closely related to housing prices in an area. If homelessness was just a moral failing, we wouldn't expect to see a higher proportion of homeless in LA than West Virginia, for example, as WV presumably has equal levels of mental illness and certainly has a drug issue. The difference is with a lower COL and widely available housing, the marginal folks with mental illness and/or drug issues can eke it out on SSI checks or whatever.
It's also worth nothing that the tent encampments are almost entirely due to failed public policy as well. In 2020 New York state had 91,000 homeless people, but only around 4,000 were unsheltered. The reason the West Coast has such a bad issue with street encampments is because it's not funding supportive housing to the same extent.
I agree that "moral failing" isn't a helpful way to think about homelessness, and that abundant housing is by far the best and quickest way to mitigate homelessness ... but I think the persistent idea that it's a moral failing is partly related to the under-discussed element of choice involved: people can move! No one has to live in Los Angeles, or Seattle, or San Francisco, etc..
Of course, moving isn't a realistic solution for someone already living on the streets, and maybe it isn't even realistic for people that are slowly squeezed out of the housing market over the course of several years, but it often seems like it's taken for granted that OF COURSE people can't move and I rarely see serious discussion around mobility and relocation.
I don't mean to minimize the difficulty, but I was able to move even when I was poor (< $10k/year in the 90s): usually you do it in pieces, with the help of friends.
Absolutely 100% agree that 1) I was able to do it because I had a support network and 2) not having a support network is probably a (the?) critical risk factor for becoming homeless.
But I think it's important to be detailed and accurate about the conditions that affect mobility and talking about the "the thousands necessary to move" without qualification reduces credibility.
So you're suggesting that maybe the state of California (as an example) builds supportive housing reservations for the homeless out in the high desert where it's cheaper, and ships them all there?
I mean, I guess it's theoretically possible, and if it wasn't coercive, I think they could get away with it. Not really a doable thing in parts of the country where everything's an incorporated municipality though - some random exurb in Upstate NY isn't going to accept thousands of new low-income units.
The homeless already did that. See, e.g., Slab City.
Slab City is really squatters, which are a different social grouping than what we discuss when we are talking about the "homeless." My understanding is something like 95% of the population are part-time snowbird anarchist types as it is.
Speaking of squatters, my brother had a friend in high school who decided, upon graduation, he wanted to live as a squatter punk. He moved to Berkeley, and found a punk house to move into. He lasted for a few months, when one of his "roommates" got drunk/high, killed his girlfriend, and then forced all of them to help him bury the body. He called up his father to pick him up later that day. He sells used cars now.
That's not to say that there aren't crusties who are pretty well put together and can make a serious go at "off the grid living" but from everything I've heard from folks in the scene you need to work very hard to identify and shun the bad actors from your social group.
Excellent point.
Yes. I was living in Venice when the pandemic started and suddenly...where did all the (mostly young, really not poor looking at all) homeless people go? I assume not a small number went home. That's when we saw the real deal homeless people who genuinely had nowhere to go (like the little old lady who lived in the Walgreens parking lot behind our house, totally harmless, clearly mentally ill, she didn't budge).
Why can’t it be coercive? Shitting on the street is a crime if they catch you doing it off you go.
Presumably they'd need to reform the legal system for this, since you're talking about differential sentencing for a crime based upon perceived status as a homeless person.
Coercive remote camps for a particular subgrouping of people is a little too reminiscent of concentration camps I think to fly in public policy, but maybe the urban outcry regarding the homelessness issue is now enough that people will be okay with this.
https://nypost.com/2022/11/30/nypd-blindsided-by-eric-adams-plan-to-commit-mentally-ill-homeless/
It’s not a concentration camp we’re putting sick people in the hospital where they belong. It’s no different than the demented elderly.
If mom is wandering the neighborhood in her nightgown in February and says she’s fine, we don’t say, “Oh well, I guess we have to respect her agency.” She gets packed off to Shady Pines where she belongs.
I could be convinced to support New Australia, CA.
It wouldn't have to be coercive. If you gave them a deal that said they get to move to a compound where there will be nothing but the most basic amenities (a roof, a shower, a bed, and basic food), but in exchange they get to do as many drugs as they want and not be hassled about it - the vast majority would take the offer.
I'm all for it, only concern is where do they get the money for drugs? I could see a whole ecosystem developing but most street druggies either panhandle or commit theft.
I'm not necessarily against supplying the drugs either if it gets them away from normal functioning people. I'd just like to be prepared for it so we don't get a ghost city like they have in China.
No, as I wrote, "this isn't a realistic solution for someone already living on the streets." If mobility can play any role at all, it would have to be well before people become homeless.
It's funny that you mention upstate NY specifically, because I grew up there, and in the mid-90's, after the local economy had taken a big hit due to the collapse in defense spending post-Cold War and we had a lot of cheap housing available, the state started relocating people on public assistance from NYC up to our area. At least, that's the story I heard to account for the sudden shift in our high school's demographics.
So, the random exurb might not have a say in the matter.
Underdiscussed issue here, but I used to work a nonprofit that focused specifically on helping people on parole and probation transfer which county they were assigned to so that they could live with family members/take a job/live somewhere affordable. It's shocking how many people legally can't move to even another part of the Bay Area, much less another state entirely. For people on criminal supervision, they're often just condemned to trying to find a place to live in the most expensive part of the state, and the red tape between them and moving to Modesto or wherever is completely insurmountable.
That's part of the issue with criminalizing the problem. People with criminal records have a lot of explicit barriers to just moving somewhere new and a lot of implicit barriers from getting entry-level jobs.
Thank you for the incredibly helpful details. Like KT, I wasn't aware of this and I expect the issue is invisible to the population at large.
The fact that it's far more difficult to survive unhoused in NY state vs California may also play a role in the numbers of street homeless in each locale.
If that were the case we'd see a lot of empty shelter beds in California, instead of typically having to wait several months to land in one even if you request it.
California simply has a chronically underbuilt supportive care system given the size of its overall homeless population.
I would think that the fact there's so many homeless despite the lack of beds shows that climate matters. The fact that people can readily survive without proper shelter provides an environment that makes it "easier" to survive being homeless.
There was an observable migration of homeless people into ATX during winters when I lived there (and I'm sure other year-round nice weather places like Phoenix and LA/San Diego). It's not difficult to live in a tent or even open-air in those places, which removes one major factor in causing people to even seek shelter in the first place.
I'm sure in places where the weather forces people indoors it's easier to corral them into the arms of programs designed to help them, and thus those programs are probably more robust than in places where the homeless have far less cause to interact with them.
It's no secret that a lot of homeless have mental health and/or substance abuse problems.
The begs the question of why do so many Americans have these problems?
because it's almost impossible to treat people against their will, because we are exposed to more toxins than others, because daily reality is more violent and "traumatic" here than elsewhere (because we haven't solved poverty which is a very easy problem to solve), because we don't have universial healthcare so it's harder to get treated, and crucially the one everyone misses- because the healthcare we DO have for vulnerable groups (ie medicaid) is confusing, fractured and there is no centralized place people know to "go to" for help.
Well, that seems like a better place to focus. At least it seems more impactful than trying to force people get sober. Society needs to make sobriety a more appealing choice, rather than making reality so unpleasant for a large swath of the population that they will do whatever it takes to get out of their heads and stay there.
“ we don't have universial healthcare”
Outside states the didn’t expand Medicaid (which NY and CA did) who did we miss? It seems pretty universal to me.
Read what I wrote again. I even made a point of saying "this is the one that everyone misses" to explain what you missed. Seemed like you were expecting this answer, got excited to see it, and had a response ready to go. That excitement clouded your ability to read the full comment. Calm down, and then re read it.
Well then….
So your point is that we have universal healthcare it’s just confusing?
We do not have universal healthcare. We have a fractured healthcare system where certain groups such as the very poor get healthcare coverage which is run by ACOs. Many providers don't accept medicaid. It is often unclear "where to go". The process for signing up for medicaid can be difficult. Think about what it would be like if you weren't' very smart or didn't speak English or just unable to navigate it for whatever reason.
When it comes to mental health almost no psychiatrists accept medicaid. You can get a low ability nurse practitioner who will only treat yuppies with "depression and anxiety" at best. If you require hosptialization it is essentially impossible to access that prior to committing some act of violence
Yes, I do think a fractured healthcare system with no coordination between providers is probably not the optimal way for people to get healthcare!
Since when is poverty a very easy problem to solve?
This is way too harsh. Many homeless people are mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs. They didn't choose their mental illness. The drug addiction involved an initial bad choice or series of choices, but once you're addicted, it's extremely hard to break free. You can't just tell them "just stop being addicted, you bum!"
Well you *can* tell them that if you want but it's a function of how developed your empathy is or isn't
Riiiight... Empathy means enabling homeless drug addicts forever and never expecting them to take any ownership of their circumstance because it's "extremely hard." I get it.
Yeah, I do have empathy for people who make really bad decisions. If I see someone speeding on the highway and then they crash and die I don't actually think it's funny, I think it's sad even if it is their "fault". What's irritating to me is that people who aren't inclined to have that kind of empathy insist on assuming that everyone else is like them and has similar reactions to "deserved" suffering. Either we're all lying or maybe there are people who feel differently than you/ feel empathy even for people who make very bad decisions! You can take your pick about which it is but not everyone has the same moral outlook/ aptitude as you.
I think empathy in this case is completely irrelevant. If somebody is out of their mind then you institutionalize them, period. What does empathy have to do with that? It should proceed from a simple, cold calculation that letting somebody who's crazy live on the streets is subtracting decades from their lives.
Why would you care how long they live without empathy? What kind of cold, rational calculation spits out the answer that more human life is good, without feeding it some good ol' human values?
In any case, institutionalization can be traumatizing--take a second to imagine how you would feel if you were literally kidnapped and taken to a strange place where you were *strongly encouraged* to take medications that made you feel stranger. When you try to escape you're injected with powerful sedatives and restrained to a bed for hours at a time. Now imagine you're also convinced, in the very fiber of your being, that the doctors are trying to kill you.
So, how you go about getting someone who needs to be in the hospital in the hospital is very important. And sometimes, even when someone could benefit from being in the hospital, the damage that forcing that person into the hospital against their will would do in fact outweighs it.
My impression is that the ethical intuition of "person x got what was coming to them" is stronger in some individuals such as yourself. And the ethical intuition of "suffering is painful to see on it's own terms" is stronger in other individuals. Everyone has a different balance of these two intuitions but it's really irritating when people insist that everyone is just like they are and has a strong balance of the former instead of the latter and it often comes across as a form of compensation or moral justification / feeling threatened or attacked by others who don't have the same composition/ mix of ethical intuitions. We just disagree. "you reap what you sow" is not an ethical intution that is particularly strong in me. I am well aware that it is stronger in others. But not everyone is identical!
I never said anyone deserves to be homeless or addicted to drugs. I said after we as a society have provided every reasonable avenue for them to improve their situation, and they STILL don't, there comes a point when we can't take responsibility for their continued backsliding. Some people WANT to be a homeless drug addict and are happy to take every penny of charity they are offered with no intention of ever repaying it (metaphorically speaking), and I don't see why it's a matter of "empathy" to enable and prolong this arrangement using our collective resources - financially, emotionally and otherwise.
I also said there are people who make it their life mission to focus on these lost causes, and if that's you then I have no problem at all with it. I don't think that's empathy, I think it's sympathy, or guilt, or codependency, or something else entirely. But having empathy for someone's plight doesn't mean you endorse it or feel any need to support their continued self-destruction.
> have provided every reasonable avenue for them to improve their situation, and they STILL don't, there comes a point when we can't take responsibility for their continued backsliding.
Right, in other words we can't take responsibility for that because that would require a degree of empathy that you think is unreasonable given the moral intuition of "you reap what you sow". In other words what I said.
While there is some truth in that, I think the people that end up in those circumstances don't have far to fall to begin with. I mean, you're not going to see some plutocrat's child wandering the streets of Portland looking for drugs, no matter how bad their life choices.
True that. And most of the homeless clients I work with have been disadvantaged from infancy - fetal alcohol syndrome and developmental disabilities that never receive support, horrific child abuse, the destabilization of bouncing from foster home to foster home, exposure to violence at school, being introduced to drugs before the age of 10, etc. The "bad choices" people are citing above are often "bad choices" made by these clients' parents and caretakers or by these clients when they're still literal children.
I also suspect there is a correlation with low socio-economic status going back for a few generations. The poorer your family, the less you can bounce back from bad decisions because you don't have a safety net. I know plenty of upper middle class kids who made some of the worst decisions imaginable, and they aren't homeless.
How about a Woke Richard III exclaiming, "A house! A house! My kingdom for a house!"
Oof… that’s a LOT of cishet Euro-partiarchy to deproblematize through a culturally-relevant lens.
Note how our society privileges the symbolic and the abstract over the concrete and material.
This is because it's a lot easier to set up diversity committees or think up new names that gloss over unpleasantness, than it is to address uncomfortable realities and attack entrenched interests.
We are a society of affirmation. What scares me is that it isn't even a conscious plot among anyone except for maybe the eliet of the eliet. It's operating on autopilot now.
the "developing nations" would like everyone to know that name change did not mean more food and water for their poor.
the problem is that they aren't necessarily developing. Just call them poor countries or something.
The problem is that most people don’t know what “developing” means in IR terminology, nor do they understand concepts like “world systems theory” when they try to discuss matters pertaining to globalization or international politics.
yeah I don't really care I just think it's funny that the name implies they're developing when it is also possible for a country to either shrink or stagnate.
"Emerging democracy" = poor country that is in the good graces of Washington for the time being.
I've seen a bunch of ballot measure signs in my (liberal urban) neighborhood that say things like "Vote! Make Your Voice Heard! Establish a Very Important Committee to Maybe Think About Racism!"
I think this article by Ted Gioia is highly relevant here.
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/the-word-of-the-year-is-sophistry
The only way to win is to never play the game.
By putting them six feet under?
As I said in conversation earlier today: we're pretending to do something in place of doing something. And then we give ourselves awards for it.
However…pretending IS doing. In a way.
"Note how our society privileges the symbolic and the abstract over the concrete and material."
I cannot like this statement enough times.
Our language has become unmoored from our principles, and yeah, unhoused is just stupid.
This one has always baffled me in a way other euphemisms don't. Homeless and unhoused are the same word. Like... they literally mean the same thing. It's not like slave/enslaved where you can at least claim there's a subtle linguistic difference. It's the same word!
Actually, there is a linguistic difference: home is a noun, while house is both a noun and a verb. When home is used as a verb, it refers to animals or weapons (i.e. a bird's homing instincts), but mostly home is a noun. While a house is both a thing and also something one does to or for others, i.e. one houses their guests.
Therefore, the reason this change is important to the annoying people who are pushing it is not because they are switching two nouns that mean exactly the same thing. It's because they want to switch to a word that's a verb and something that can be done. The reason that's important is because they want to imply they are "unhoused" as a force worked upon them by others. Society is withholding housing, while it houses others. It's part of their mission to turn all language into the passive voice, where mysterious forces or an amorphous "they" are always operating upon helpless people subject to these forces. Everything in life can be explained by a pervasive yet impossible to pin down "systemic" force that oppresses or privileges, grants favors or punishments. Person A doesn't do something to Person B. Person C doesn't have agency to exercise will that results in outcome Y. Instead, an amorphous systematic force causes Person A to be unhoused or marginalized.
That's the worldview they want and the language they need to convey it is passive voice all the time, for everything. Humans had this worldview for quite a long time, but the mysterious, uncontrollable force causing things to happen and granting favors and punishments was god. Then we had a brief run after the enlightenment with liberalism where we attributed people with free will and agency. The woke have reverted back to the sense that life is a bunch of uncontrollable external forces operating on helpless people, but with no god as the authority behind it or power capable of administering justice. So their mission is to evangelize about the mysterious amorphous systemic forces and try to render justice themselves.
Nice analysis
You can use "home" as a verb, as in to "home stray animals".
Right, but it's only used for animals. We never say we "homed" or failed to home a person. So they can't use that, they don't want to imply that homeless people are like stray animals. They want to imply that "society" has failed an obligation to house them.
I agree that the switch to unhoused is intended to imply that someone was supposed to provide these people with housing and failed to do it. I am guessing that the people attached to this framing would describe the "uncontrollable external forces" as "capitalism" -- and in fairness Adam Smith opened that up a little with the metaphor of the Invisible Hand -- but seriously I am quite amused by the constant use of the term capitalism as some kind of monstrous force making everyone miserable.
Yep. What I find strange is that they manage to get themselves so worked up and have such emotional antagonism to a disembodied, agentless force. It's really weird. Like, it's easy to have a strong emotional reaction against an identified person or group that is doing something bad. It's easy to be offended and angry at Bigot John for being racist or Slumlord Mike for evicting a poor family, or even at god for letting such bad things happen to you. But how does one get emotionally upset at "systemic issues" or "structural problems" or even "capitalism"??
*IF* the reason they wanted to move to this terminology was because they wanted to be able to apply a more cool-headed, neutral, rational analysis to problems and remove the emotion, it would make sense. But that's not the aim at all. They want everyone to be outraged and sad and upset all the time, yet they can never point fingers at who did the bad thing -- at best they'll point to long-dead people who set up systems in the past. It's such a losing strategy.
Because capitalism has become the new malevolent god of “non-religious” political fanatics. Ideology is a natural religious replacement.
And they pay fealty to it by self-flagellating on socials.
All the bugaboos, all the time. You’ve hit on something crucial, indeed foundational, about the woke worldview: that it’s all about the poor, pathetic oppressed person who is only acted upon, (and, of course, has “trauma” as a result) who is prey to all these omnipresent but amorphous bugaboos, which all blend together. cisheteropatriarchal capitalist racist colonialism.
No wonder they’re always going on about how exhausted they are. 
Such folk don’t know how to understand capitalism from a scientific framework, so they consider it a god-force that is an amalgamation beyond the control of the individual entities who prop it up and pay tribute to its needs.
What I like about this comment is that either a capitalist or a Marxist could have written it.
Oh wow you’re right, hahaha that’s great. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what the answer is 😉
Yes. “House” often implies agency.
That was a great explanation, kryptogal, thank you.
I would note that their rationale is historically incorrect as home has been used as verb going back to 1802 :
1802 R. Southey Let. 28 Nov. in C. C. Southey Life & Corr. R. Southey (1850) II. ix. 195 When I am housed and homed.
1852 P. J. Bailey Festus (ed. 5) 174 Homed and heavened within the embrace of God.
1864 Good Words 5 792/2 As colonists or as settlers [they] have homed themselves all the world over.
1878 Harper's Mag. May 846/1 Withheld from homing to my Italy.
1893 National Observer 14 Oct. 559/1 Your tourist is homing from abroad.
Probably don't want to mention that one about colonialism. The history of unhoused goes back much further but the quotations are mostly grim:
1709 A. Pope Corr. 19 Oct. (1956) I. 74 His faithful Dog..Unfed, unhousd, neglected, [lay] on the Clay.
1743 P. Francis & W. Dunkin tr. Horace Odes II. iv. xiv. 44 Whom unhoused Scythians fear, unconquer'd Spain obeys.
1830 G. Croly George IV 283 Unhoused beggary, and the hideousness of civil bloodshed, combined and shaped themselves into a colossal power.
Sorry but I have institutional access to the OED (and like gently poking at people who torture language---not you).
I kind of like "unhoused beggary". ;)
So do I but then I first read it as unhoused *buggery*.
Very insightful!
being homeless isn't an identity, it's a material status. Increase the number of homes, and the number of people who are homeless goes down.
That's why we need far more housing development. In places where housing capitalism is strong -- ATL, DFW, HOU -- you have much fewer "people currently experiencing unhousedness"than in more regulated housing markets like NYC, DC, and SF.
I know it goes against all ideological commitments leftists have made, but please look at the evidence on just this one issue.
Also historically it is the commitment that the left has made through things like Miljonprogrammet, etc. I have a poster from the soviet union bragging about how many homes they're building. The reason the "left" opposes it today is because they are really weird hippies who think wearing a leather jacket and looking kind of angry all the time is the same thing as material politics. There are committed leftists but, for reasons I can't understand- maybe fear of shrinking numbers, they REFUSE to root out the hippy element from leftist organizations.
I worked ripping down homeless camps in central LA for a year. I am willing to tentatively argue that for many homeless, “being homeless” is absolutely a self-assigned identity. They will continue to seek out bridges to get high under indefinitely regardless of what material benefits are being handed off to them. Total rejection of all civic responsibilities, zero fucks given by this stage of their lives.
I will say though that I doubt there are more than a few hundred such in the sprawling megacity of LA county, population 6ish million. But that bloc is probably what people picture when they hear “homeless”.
It absolutely is -- the temporarily out-of-work struggling actor who has to crash on his friend's couch for a month (to make up an example) isn't even on our radar. It's the guys in tent cities behind a Vons or an In-N-Out, who sit there with their improvised bicycle chop shops and blatant drug use, that people are concerned about.
It should also be noted that outside of NYC, a substantial number of homeless people are likely sleeping in their cars, and also likely mostly invisible.
In LA it's illegal to sleep in your car. Which I honestly don't understand. The sidewalk or a tent is better?
In striking down a vagrancy law as "void for vagueness", the court commented that, if the law were to be applied even-handedly, then half of the men at the country club would have to be arrested as vagrants.
I work at a country club, that’s fucking hilarious and definitely true
I really don't think this has anything to do with it. I live in a western state that has extremely pro-development policies and new housing and apartment developments going up constantly...every block and neighborhood has cranes and constant building. And we also have a big homeless encampment like all the other western states. It has more to do with weather and authority to throw them in jail or not.
What if there is a third confounding factor. IN this case demand. You see a lot of construction in areas with high demand. You also see a lot of homless in areas with high demand because prices are higher there.
I don't know, I think it's pretty clearly about weather. If you rank the states by per capita homeless, the western states are all at the top, and these are places with quite different housing policies and median home prices. Nevada, New Mexico, California, Hawaii, Oregon, Arizona...what they have in common is they all have either basically no rain or snow, ever, or year-round temperate climate. The southeast may be warm but it also rains insane amounts quite frequently or even hurricanes. Honestly think about it, if you had to choose one state where you had to live in a tent outside for an entire year, where are you going to pick?
Thanks for the good words on behalf of candor and rhetorical impact over creeping propriety. As usual, Orwell beat you to it, but at least that let’s you know you’re on to something. In his case it was the memorable formulation of “the power of facing unpleasant facts”, which isn’t something highly valued by those for whom control of nomenclature is a sufficient substitute for effective solutions to real problems.
This is an example of identity creep. The reduction of attributes / descriptions to identity. It's purpose is to "affirm how valid" it is for someone to live in destitution and filth because it's "who they are". Serves the function of normalizing the status quo.
Also, Freddie, what do you think of the Mayor's plan re: involuntary commitment? It had the predictable backlash where people waited and saw what the social script they were supposed to use to argue against it was and then did that. The "maw" as you call it. But if you read the actual plan it has such radical ideas as "stop making it illegal to share medical records during hearings on institutionalization" and "require follow up care to be arranged adequately before people are streeted". The reason people oppose these is that they think that the mentally ill are "super valid" (until, you know, they act mentally ill in a way that hurts other people) and that the only way to help another person is to "affirm" their right to live in agony and filth.
The fundamental limit of liberalism is that the only solution we can even conceptualize is affirmation. Hence identity creep. Just increase the number of identities we need to "affirm" and get rid of "stigma" and voila!
Wait, "street" is now a verb too? Something one does to someone? You "street" someone?? So freaking weird. What does that mean, release?
it's a slang for when the homeless mentally ill are released back onto the "street" within a few hours of an episode with no follow up care or plan
Isn’t that interesting, that waiting phenomenon? I think I saw it a little bit with Elon: people sat still for a bit. “What is he, good or bad? I don’t know -- over there They seem to think he’s good. no wait he’s bad!! HE’S BAD!!!”
People who don't have a place to live don't care if they are referred to as "homeless" or "unhoused". They have more important concerns. And people who insist on using a particular word are clearly more interested on taking care of their own feelings rather than doing something productive for the non-domiciled.
This is such a frustrating tendency among progressives - to fixate on the language used to describe the situation rather than the situation itself. It fundamentally speaks to their powerlessness: we're not going to be able to find these people homes, so let's make them (and us) feel better about them being homeless. Call me crazy, but I'm more interested in finding them a place to live!
Given enough time, enough rope, and a bit of trauma, American liberals will get to goose stepping.
Many people prefer to live in a tent or vehicle and call those accommodations home, so they would argue that they are not homeless. If the bar is raised to "house" being the standard, they can't really argue that a tent is a house, as house implies a permanent structure. "Unhoused" encompasses more people defined into the care of activists.
Homeless is such a benign term to begin with, I don't get how that is disrespectful to anyone. It's about as toothless a term as you can get.
And for the life of me I don't understand how 'unhoused' is somehow a better term than homeless, in being less offensive that is. Neither of them are offensive, but like Freddie said homeless works just fine for it. It makes no sense to create a new term.
The only reason I can think of for this is that this is just another word, in the now exhaustive list of words that the far Left has created, being used for language control. Control the language, control the speech. Control the speech, control the people. Eat your heart out Huxley.
It really sounds terrible, like warehoused. Like we are just looking for a box to stuff them in.
But isn't that what we would like to do? Pay some money to make these people go away somewhere to be a burden we bear as a society? I think that's fair and probably better than the system we have now. Is progressive SF an answer? I sure hope not.