"The New Yorker recently took a break from its primary function, hosting ideas festivals for people who subscribe to the Criterion Channel..."
FdB, I love your writing, but if it comprised only needling insults of the oxygen-rich intelligentsia, I'd continue to subscribe. You once referred to a subset of people as "the NPR tote bag class," and I find myself using that one more regularly than I care to admit.
"Trying to force vulnerable, addicted, and psychotic people to clear out of horrifically unhealthy and dangerous camps and into support services is giving up on them, but saying 'well, we need more funding' before playing Wordle in the Conde Nast break room somehow is not?"
I mean, I find it weird that he said that Nathan Heller only writes profiles of Haim or whatever but a search of his articles that took me about 2 minutes came up with this well researched and interesting piece that’s right up FdB’s alley:
No, we're a society where everyone wants to LOOK like they're saving the world. Be on the planning committee, draft mission statements, make sure your plan adequately covers every oppressed person ever. The hard, unromantic work? Not so much. Especially if it might mean working with THOSE people. Or compromising! Don't you know if you ever strike a deal with those deplorables you're literally as bad as them?
I'd argue it's not just fundamentally unserious, but fundamentally depraved. It would be cleaner ethically if Sunday brunch types just admitted they don't care enough to do anything about these issues.
Stumbled across this NYT story from 1978 about deinstitutionalized mental patients that portrays what seems to be a more humane approach than what the city does today --
For someone who keeps proclaiming he's not a bad leftist but instead a good conservative, you certainly know a lot about the inner workings of liberal circles.
Freddie I'd be curious on your view, this piece seems to suggest a very strong correlation between on-the-street homelessness, coercive treatment-worthy mental illness, and refusal of available sheltering and care options.
There's obviously no doubt of some, even substantial overlap there, Jordan Neely being a particularly well-publicized example. But do you view that as the case for the overwhelming majority of people who would be swept up in something like Newsom's raid?
This piece is written as a lonely cry in the wilderness, and among certain audiences it is. But I think there are constituencies in the country where the logic here might be pretty well understood, enough so that the more nitty gritty questions of HOW it could be brought into practice would be valuable.
One huge issue, that the LA Times has done great work illustrating, is well meaning folks believing the stories the homeless tell. “I was an accountant and I lost my job and now I’m homeless.” Then they reach out to the family and we find severe bipolar disorder, drug and alcohol abuse and in the end the story of someone who can’t care for themselves.
Those suffering serious mental health challenges are the trickiest part of the homeless problem currently, finding suitable housing will not solve their problems. Addressing this group would allow more resources to go to those whose primary issue is a lack of affordable housing. It would also help make shelters safer for others. For those who don't want to go into shelters because of a drug issues or personal preference, well I'm very sorry but that does not give you the right to set up permanent encampments on city streets. We live in society.
I volunteer in a small shelter that is the opposite of disgusting. It is clean as a whistle, compassionate, kind, we serve homemade dinners to clients at set tables in a communal fashion, and I've heard people say it's the safest and calmest they've felt in many years.
It's doable. It is the fruit of a TON OF WORK by the entire interfaith communtity here, which takes turns hosting/supporting the shelter throughout the winter, week by week, and - not incidentally - puts the volunteeers of different faiths in contact with each other every day, which is a lovely side effect.
Before the shelter had its own permanent location in a local church, it rotated each week: the temple and churches would set up for the guests in their big social halls or whatever, take care of it all, and then break it down until the next rotation.
I don't doubt it but I would expect there's considerable diversity in shelter accommodations. Certainly some larger institutions are not only filthy but also dangerous.
and I of course recognize that what a small Colorado town can do and what a huge city can do are vastly different. Just putting that out there to widen the lens on how people think shelters must be built and administered
My impression from my time working in a shelter is that the biggest danger or detractor was that some of the other homeless are really disruptive. If somebody is stealing your possessions or just in the bed next to you angrily ranting until 3 in the morning, it's uncomfortable.
Do the tent encampments have an enforcement mechanism that the shelters lack, or do residents there just put up with that?
My understanding is that it's dependent on the encampment. Some of them have a quasi governmental form of regulation but I think the biggest benefit is that the people there tend to know each other and are therefore less likely to rip each other off, or stab one another.
From what I can tell, a lot of encampments are like cat colonies, one way or another it is made clear to offenders that this is not the place for them.
It's an old problem. If you enforce a no-drugs policy, addicts won't go or stay there. If you don't enforce a no-drugs policy, the shelter is disgusting.
I've been volunteering with homeless addicts for years, and the only thing I have ever seen work is that conditions are finally bad enough that the addict has had enough and wants to get clean. Once that desire happens, it is easy to find someone a safe bed and detox. It's why I (and many former addicts) don't support making it easier to live on the street. Just my opinion, but making it possible to camp where you can panhandle is a major driver behind street deaths. Addicts know that the next fentanyl hit could kill them, but it is hard to give up artificially easy access to panhandling and dealers.
That definitely seems plausible to me, that there's a bottom percentile of highly disruptive people who make helping the rest immensely more difficult to impossible.
Highly analogous with similar issues in impoverished schools. Indeed it's surely a lot of the same people.
I have a squishy liberal's baked-in distaste of compulsion, and I think it's worth being clear-eyed about the inevitable consequences of empowering a bureaucracy with that power, but the juice might be well, well worth the squeeze for all sorts of different constituencies.
I think it is healthy and good to have a distaste for compulsion, just like it is healthy and good to have a distaste for apathy. They key of course is knowing when you've over-indexed on one or the other and need to get on with the sometimes messy business of keeping a functional society healthy. So much of life consists in the feeling of "I don't want to do this thing, and I find it unpleasant that I now have to do it, but if I don't then the alternative is worse". There are plenty of unhoused people who should be left to their own devices and allowed to find their own way in this world unhindered. Being homeless itself is not and should not be a crime or subject to compulsion. At some point though as Freddie alluded to the amount of agency a person is functionally working with is below acceptable and they should be compelled into treatment with the aim of increasing that functional agency. Otherwise people "falling through the cracks" becomes less a bug and more a feature, and you've simply institutionalized apathy.
Actually, giving homes to the homeless tends to alleviate the mental health issues. Shelters are not homes, anymore than dog kennels are homes.
And - I would argue that we do not live in 'society' because a society would not allow a situation where people cannot afford to have shelter.
And yes, I actually have helped homeless people by giving them a place to live while they got their shit together. And shockingly, a safe home, phone service, and decent meals would fix the problem of the majority of homeless people
I don't see how giving someone those things cures substance abuse or schizophrenia.
Being anxious or depressed because you have fallen on bad times is not the sort of mental illness we are talking about here. The lady next to Yale is neither of those, I can promise.
Removing the stress of living on the streets, panhandling for food, etc, gives people the stability to stay on their medications and to be able to keep medical appointments. A home gives people a reason to try and stay well.
Moreover, while the proportion of homeless that have schizophrenia is staggering (20%) - the vast majority are not so afflicted.
Housing First works. We just don’t have the public will to take care of the poor and afflicted. We’d rather blame them for their fate than do anything (like proper public housing) to fix it - because in the US NOTHING can be fixed unless some corporation can profit from it.
San Francisco has a budget for homeless services that is in the 10 digits, yet many of the issues associated with homelessness have worsened in the last decade. Maybe increasing the budget into the 11 digit range would finally solve the issue, but at a certain point you have to recognize that a huge amount of money is already being spent, and look to see if that money would be better spent using a hybrid approach that’s less dogmatic than Housing First.
Your comment is getting dangerously close to the perspective Freddie skewered in this piece.
You can say “”well, we need more funding” before playing Wordle in the Conde Nast break room”, but to act as if funding is the primary limitation ignores the nuance in this piece.
$50.1 million investment over two years to shelter approximately 600 families and house more than 450 families through new investments and turnover in existing resources.
Ed Note: SO: $3500 dollars per month per family to SHELTER people for two years? Or, if we include 600 + 450 HOUSED people (because this is a pretty unclear statement): $3455 per month to SHELTER or HOUSE 1,050 people.
I know San Francisco is expensive, but 'the city that knows how' could certain find a way to shelter people below the market rate for a 2 bedroom home?
*
$23.8 million for 130 rapid rehousing subsidies for families
Ed note: OK, if my calculator is right, the city is paying $183,076 per family to rehouse 130 families. The obscene average rent for 2 bedrooms in SF is @3,287. However, again - WHY does the city pay market rate? Because the landlords own the city council, and Diane Feinstein and her ilk wiped out the public housing in the city. Still. Let's say the city is paying 2 YEARS rent... at market rate. That means the city is pay $7628 per month per family to cover rent for each family for two years. (even by SF standards, that is a pretty decent apartment at market rate.)
*
$11.6 million for 115 emergency shelter hotel vouchers for families
Ed Note - now this isn't clear - but that would be $100,869 per family per voucher, or $8405 /mo. If we want to be generous and guess this is for 24 months - that would be 4200/mo - FOR A EMERGENCY SHELTER HOTEL ROOM. Which is more than the average rent for an apartment. You know - like a HOME.
*
$9.9 million for 50 rapid rehousing subsidies for young adult-headed family households
Ed Note: Ok - that would be $198,000 per family - 16,500 a month if we presume this covers one year, and $8,250 a month if we assume it covers two years. THAT'S A REALLY NICE HOUSE.
*
$4.8 million for 35 shallow rental subsidies for families
Investments in Young Adults
I have no idea what a shallow subsidy is - but $137,142 per family doesn't seem shallow to me. That's about 12k per month - and 6k per month if it covers 'subsides' for 2 years.
$32.5 million investment over two years to provide housing subsidies for over 280 young adults households.
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I'm gonna let you do the rest of the math on your own.
$24.5 million for 235 rapid rehousing subsidies for young adults
$3 million for 50 flexible housing subsidies for young adults
$5 million to acquire a new housing site for justice-involved youth to support the Just Home Project, an initiative led by MacArthur Foundation and Urban Institute.
Shelter Investments
$57.7 million investment over two years to maintain and expand temporary shelter programs serving adults and families
$5 million one-time funding to construct and launch a Safe Parking program in the Westside of the city
$32.9 million to continue 288 beds of non-congregate shelter for adults
$7.9 million to support capital and operations of new shelter program in the Bayview providing mix of cabins and safe parking
$11.6 million for 115 emergency shelter hotel vouchers for families
$0.3 million to expand capacity at the Buena Vista Horace Mann family shelter
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This is OBVIOUSLY corrupt. A few thousand homeless people are being helped at WELL OVER the open market rate of housing, even for shelter beds. So, landlords recieve more than market value - and 'administrative' costs, kick backs, salaries, bonus' steal money that could be used to eradicate homelessness.
Of course, that wouldn't be profitable to the people who really matter, now would it? I have a feeling if you just handed these people a check for $150,000 (less than is being spent per family) - they might be able to find their OWN way out of homelessness, without the city paying the landlords directly. Just a thought.
This has been tried over and over again, and it keeps failing. Why? Because the majority of people living on the streets are not simply people down on their luck. Not anymore. A majority of homeless in America are struggling with crippling drug addictions and/or mental illnesses, none of which are remedied by offering them a publicly funded place to live.
There is a very, very thin wedge of homeless in the real world who would be helped by this, but the majority of people who would be helped by this manage to find ways out before it comes to this, too.
Freddie is correct here in that in any truly compassionate solution to the problem, free will would have to be taken away to simply keep the people involved from dying, or hurting others.
Housing First has been tried again and again? No, it has not. Where it has been tried, the homeless populations have been massively reduced. I can provide you with solid studies on this.
San Francisco is a great case study in what happens to a homeless population when public housing is systematically destroyed, rent is so high that 100K a year is living in poverty, and then you close all the SRO hotels.
The vast majority of homeless people do not have mental illnesses. That’s a myth. However around 20-30% do (as compared to 6% of housed people) However, it’s impossible to say which came first - the chicken or the egg. Being homeless can create addiction or mental illness, and certainly exacerbates standing psychological distress.
In the US, once you fall into poverty, it is almost impossible to climb back out again. A single eviction can permanently destroy your ability to find affordable housing. Those who will rent to people who have a ‘bad credit history’ are generally sharks who will charge far more than market rate - setting people up for another eviction. Without a home, a mobile phone, an address, people have trouble keeping jobs. Previous incarceration (even for something petty or years and years into the past) blocks people from all but the most menial work.
Most of the paper thin assistance offered to people, including food stamps, requires a person have an address. A real one, not a P.o. box. What aid IS available requires the ability to navigate a complicated bureaucracy, spend hours and hours standing in lines, and a level of executive function that declines more and more under the stresses of poverty.
The shelter system, too, is abysmal. Though it’s great that people have a bed outside the storm, these places are dangerous. More, people cannot stay in them. They can sleep, and then they must be back on the street panhandling for whatever coffee money they can get. Whether there is a bed for them again the next evening is not a given.
It’s really easy to blame the homeless people for their plight. If they are crazy, and we can’t force them into hospitals and out of sight, then we can shrug our collective shoulders. However, the cause of homelessness is systemic; jobs that do not pay a living wage, and housing that does not exist for the poor. The usual cause of homeslessness is job loss, and eviction - followed by domestic violence, abuse, divorce, or the death of a parent or partner. People don’t just decide they love the homeless lifestyle. We - our middle class, our governments, our rentier class has CREATED this crisis, and rather than be accountable we simply make laws to make the victims of our collective crime illegal.
And the bonus is that solution is PROFITABLE - because then, we can just throw them all in prisons and get them out of our site - while the private prison system earns more per inmate that it would cost to just put these people in homes.
I don’t understand how someone could end up living in a tent on purely economic reasons. A basically able bodied person in America can get a job at target or wal mart, which while the pay is bad can pay for a cheap room anywhere, or for living out of a van, or for staying on a friends couch or something. To get to the point of long term tent living someone would have to have burned through their entire social network and not have been able to get on any kind of welfare or unemployment or disability but also not be able to find a low wage retail job. I mean, illegal immigrants who don’t speak English can sustain themselves without ending up on The street. This seems much more likely to be a result of drugs or mental illness.
This is exactly it. Yet, the Acela Corridor PMC fantasy that everyone living in a tent is simply someone crushed by the soulless capitalist system persists, because the reality is just too horrible to deal with. This is related to the premise of the entire piece. The BoHo class pays lip service to the problem of homelessness in urban cities, especially when it disrupts their Instagrammable vibes, but will never confront the problem honestly or meaningfully.
Sometimes I wonder if this conversation would be better if more people were willing to just say outright: "yes, I do believe it is better for people to die with their autonomy intact than be 'saved'".
It's not a moral view I share. It vastly misunderstands the extent to which the severely mentally ill can be said to have "autonomy", for reasons Freddie's discussed in previous essays. But it has a certain honesty to it the current discourse lacks.
Well put. It's funny because I think it mirrors a right-coded view (also unsaid) which is, "people do not deserve basic health care if they can't pay market prices for it."
I get what you mean, but I don't think anyone thinks that. In my experience, the people that fight for extreme autonomy have deep beliefs that everyone is capable of making the right choices if they are given the right circumstances and support.
That's delusional, but I don't think its a case of them not saying the quiet part out loud.
Yes but these people would never, ever, ever agree that this is the direct implication of their preferences. It is always both, and. We have to protect! autonomy! and! health!
Our local subreddit once had someone post a sincere concern for a woman who regularly walked into traffic. This person would watch as their elderly neighbor routinely wandered into traffic, causing cars to either swerve or simply stop in the road. It was clear this situation was going to one day end in a distracted driver just plowing into her. Another local sanctimonious poster piped in to chide everyone for their concern, accused everyone of being fascists, and suggested they just forget about it because there's no legal or preferable recourse to this situation than to let her continue on until she gets pancaked. It was one of the weirdest interactions regarding mental-health activism I can remember, because the basic thrust of the argument was just as you say Freddie, "ignore it because you can't do anything and forcing someone to not get run over is morally wrong". An Uroburos of social justice activism. "My concern for this person is actually so great I will allow them to die a completely unnecessary death rather than compel them one iota toward a meaningful existence".
“The left, in its majestic compassion, permits rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to shoot fentanyl into their veins, and to vomit blood into the streets.”
(In all seriousness I don’t attribute this position to the left writ large - idea that state doesn’t have moral authority to compel to people to follow its dictates is some horrible anarcho/libertarian mishmash that no true heir to Roosevelt, Marx, whoever would actually ascribe to)
The irony is that any anarchist utopia that one would dream up would still have to wrestle with the problem of extreme mental illness, and the options for doing so in a non-State setup likely involve some form of compulsion even if it involves excommunication from the community and leaving people to wander the countryside until they succumb to the elements. No matter how you slice it at base this is a question of what you find more morally repugnant, compulsion or apathy. Too many anarchists and libertarians are dishonest about what the real endpoint of their philosophies would actually require in real life for things to function. Murray Bookchin called this kind of naive psuedo-anarchism "lifestyle anarchism".
I don't think it's either anarchist or libertarian. It's identity politics. Progressives approach forcing the mentally ill to get treatment in the same way progressives approach deference to the experiences of the oppressed: one is not allowed to impose one's (invalid, oppressor) viewpoint on any issue that affects an oppressed class. The oppressed must be allowed to speak for themselves because they are oppressed and any time one substitutes one's own values for the stated preferences of the oppressed, one is further oppressing them.
It's progressive identitarian obeisance. Not anarchic or libertarian anti-paternalism.
I don't live anywhere close to elite coastal enclaves but in a Midwest city neighborhood that houses a number of group homes, many targeted to people with mental illness.
Some members of that population are familiar to the rest of the community because of a recurring pattern. They're fine while taking their meds and they're not when they go off them. While we have a partnership with the local police and mental health professionals to intervene when problem behavior arises, what usually happens is they get picked up for an involuntary stay in the psych ward. They get back on their meds and stabilize. They get released, and the cycle begins all over again.
Getting to a better way of treating and housing people with mental illness will require changes in the law, funding to provide a better system, and a lot more empathy and motivation than we currently demonstrate nationally.
“…what usually happens is they get picked up for an involuntary stay in the psych ward. They get back on their meds and stabilize.” Wouldn’t that be great if it actually happened? Anyone who actually thinks this happens is part of the problem. My twin sister has schizophrenia and even after I recently petitioned the court for involuntary commitment for evaluation, after one day she was released back to the street untreated. She’s still homeless, and I would say slowly dying of her illness.
She probably has to do something criminal enough to get into the system. That's how my nephew got into the system. He walked through a mall with a ski mask and a kitchen knife talking about killing people.
He's one of the kindest, gentlest people I know. But when he's trapped in a nightmare that he can't get out of where babies are being cooked in the restaurant and zombies are coming to suck out his brains, he's a danger to himself and others.
Oh she has. This ain’t our first rodeo. She spent time in jail for an assault on my father about 20 years ago. After that, she spent time homeless as well and was eventually picked up and they kept her long enough to stabilize her. The thing that kills me is that after that she spent about 10 years medicated and fairly functional. She almost finished a bachelors degree. Off meds about 4 years ago. Nothing much different about her state now versus then. I imagine it just depends on the person making the judgement as to how big of a threat she might be to herself or others. Her first psychotic break was when we were 17. We’re 41 now.
And if she does eventually get help again, she’ll ask me “why didn’t you get me help sooner? I never want to do that again.” I know this because she told me that after she was stabilized after 10 years of psychosis the first time.
If I can give one counter argument against institutionalisation for substance abuse- it doesn’t fucking work. Sadly. In the U.K., if it worked I think we would do it. But now even if people come to us saying “I’m desperate I want to get clean” we don’t keep them because it’s not an effective use of beds. But if it were we ABSOLUTELY would do it- the cost/benefit analysis would be off the charts. It would be SO worthwhile. But it isn’t, so we don’t.
You’re assuming the goal is treatment. I would argue that some people are just so susceptible to drugs and alcohol that they can’t exist in a world where they have access to those substances. Their only hope is permanent housing in a secure clean facility.
And when, as inpatients, they get clean and sober and regain their sense and say they want to leave? I can understand a sad necessity of permanent institutionalisation for refractory psychosis, but the trouble with addicts is that, when they’re not high, they’re in their right mind. That’s a tougher ethical problem, if you ask me.
The problem is that to feed their habit a lot of addicts engage in petty crime, theft, etc. At some point locking them up to induce treatment takes a back seat to locking them up because they're stealing shit and breaking into cars.
At some point, you have to wonder if the people insisting that nobody be involuntarily committed or even given antibiotics for infections/diseases really is just advocating for killing these people. You might as well round them up and shoot them—the result will be the same—just quicker and with no plausible deniability. We don’t let stray animals wander around and fend for themselves, yet we do that to people. And it has kind of a doom-loop effect. Having to navigate around people who are menacing or screaming or just falling apart has a hardening effect. The more desensitized a society to extreme human suffering, the less it is willing to spend money or time mitigating the suffering.
I have never met a conservative who believed that homeless schizophrenics and drug addicts can "pull themselves up by their bootstraps". Never once in my entire life, and I'm no spring chicken.
The idea of pulling yourself up and fixing your life requires agency which is often completely non-existent in such circumstances. In conservative circles, there is strong agreement with your argument that people like this woman need to be forcibly removed for her own good, *and for society's as well*, even if that "somewhere" is jail to get clean, or what passes for health care (bad being better than zero).
Since I know that there are other conservatives reading and commenting here as well, I invite all the ones who do think this woman can or should pull herself up by her bootstraps speak up. Here's your chance, folks!
Yes, we do, but you see, it's the "wrong" kind of charity, because a lot of it is relatively small money donations and tithing from stupid Fox watching normies to churches and boring local small time charities instead of mega million donations to NGO blobs. Obviously, McKenzie Bezos has much to teach us.
What's more, those suckers in local community church based organizations do stupid shit like offer food and housing aid to people in their own towns and cities instead of lobbying influential politicians, hosting conferences in Switzerland, or making bold PR campaigns for respecting boutique pronouns.
What a bunch of choads. These charities obviously can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Sneering set to five out of five for these rubes.
As I recall Kristof debunked the idea that religious giving was responsible for the disparity: among other factors it turns out conservatives donate more blood than liberals.
If I could make a generalization it would be that conservatives feel that charity is something that they are personally responsible for while liberals think the government should handle it.
Well, the day Nicholas Kristof "debunks" anything will be a first for me, but share - didn't see it.
And it is true - part of the conservative ethos is that people experience bad times. And the way to get through them is by building communities based on shared values and institutions. The notion that primary responsibilities are owed to God and family first, and then community, and from there into infinity.
Obviously not a flawless system in practice, but the mindset involved, and even the track records in real world outcomes, is a hell of lot better than what Freddie is writing about today.
And it's a world of fucking improvement over throwing billions of dollars into international NGO blobs. If I could wave a magic wand, and ban the entire practice forever, I would, and I'd even have the progressives and literal no fooling commies shaking my hand to thank me for it after a few months.
"Conservatives also appear to be more generous than liberals in nonfinancial ways. People in red states are considerably more likely to volunteer for good causes, and conservatives give blood more often. If liberals and moderates gave blood as often as conservatives, Mr. Brooks said, the American blood supply would increase by 45 percent."
Hmm. I'm wondering what else is in that mix though.
Conservatives tend to be more religious, and religions tend to have at least some sort of 'giving' requirement in order to be considered a good <insert sect here>. Liberals tend to assume that taxes automatically cover much of their 'giving' because it's sort of already baked into the system...at least they think it should be. The blood supply thing certainly can't be attended to with taxes though. At least not yet, give it some time. :]
On a related note, I've noticed individual charity tends to suit the wants of the giver and not necessarily the needs of the givee. This is sort of macro and niche at the same time, but from working at a public university I can't tell you how many times a donation project misses the mark because of a particular donors' (or group of donors) whims. A lot of times the things that really need fixing are sewer pipes and bathrooms and 50yo wiring, but rare is the donor who says either a) use this for new toilets, or b) use this for whatever you want.
I realize my example is a far cry from homelessness, but I can't help but think the same principles might apply.
I work for a small(ish) charity that is a network of food banks. While the folks who work and volunteer for food banks of course appreciate donations, there is a growing sense that the government really should be doing more, because the need is so far beyond their ability to help. Particularly with regards to people with mental illness and other disabilities.
I agree - most of my time around conservatives is exactly thus. They don't want lazy people to take advantage of a system that rewards laziness. They have a very different view on things like mental illness, severe development disorders, and the bootstrap stuff is absent.
A cynic would suggest that a writer looking to establish his progressive bonafides while criticizing "liberals" still needs a conservative boogeyman to bash against to establish the necessary protection against blowback from said liberals.
"Look, we both hate TeH CoNs - this is just constructive criticism from within the left - I've established my bonafides by thwacking the right wing scarecrow!"
I really enjoy reading FdB, and one of the best parts is finding the hidden conservative straw man. Well, not really hidden, just ctrl-f “conservative.” My favorite a while back was a “yes, the argument I’m making is also made by conservatives, but they’re coming from a place of hate, I’m coming from a place of love.” Or something like that.
This is a necessary station of the cross for left wing writers are obligated to perform when they arrive at an ideological space conservatives are and have been in the entrire time, lest the intended audience believe even for a second that the writer is now infected with right wing cooties.
This happens with even more intensity on those occasions where the progressive Latest Thing completely melts down (BLM, MeToo, gender affirming care) where it would be awkward to admit the cons were, in fact, right the whole time, and now it's "tiring" to talk about.
In much fairness to Freddie, he's also discussed the ridiculousness of the "I'm tired, can't we talk about something else now?" phenomenon in shitlib politics. So I'm not sure why he still has to add these weird straw men, unless he's really so distanced from knowing any real world conservatives that he actually believe sthis stuff ...?
I mean, it's possible. If you living in and around New Haven, you're more likely to meet Jesus than anyone fitting the conservative stereotypes from the Reagan age being bandied around as straw men in these pieces.
Agree completely with everything. Academia’s bubble is so powerful it can cloud even a mind like his.
I also think there’s a business side to this, but mostly I think he believes in it.
Maybe to improve things a bit, or at least to give the straw men a bit more depth he should give his conservative characters an “If you prick us, do we not bleed…” speech :)
What passes for healthcare isn’t the problem. I’m 100% sure this woman can, and does, go to Yale New Haven hospital down the street any time she wants care for whatever is killing her. Or she becomes so disoriented and obtunded that she’s brought in for care. It’s what happens when she’s not in the hospital, if she even stays in the hospital, that’s the problem.
I'm not sure of that at all. Here, I agree with Freddie completely. I've seen people like her literally do nothing except take drugs and die in public. They could save themselves, but don't. He's right. A truly compassionate system would force the issue.
Yes, I don’t understand what the disagreement is. These people taking drugs generally have multiple encounters with the health care system, but can’t function when they’re outside of it, and they often leave the hospital as soon as they feel better.
When Heller’s mother has dementia and they find her wandering down a snowy street in her nightgown and she says she’s fine - I’m guessing he isn’t going to respect her agency. He’s going to put her in memory care. Why do we treat dementia differently than severe mental illness?
I disagree with you re many things, but on the subject of forcing specific cases of homeless people (and those with certain other drug / mental problems) to be institutionalized or to undergo treatment - you are absolutely right. Of course, not all of the homeless*, drug addicted / crazy** people need to be in institutions . . but a lot of them do. Neely’s death was a preventable tragedy, but so is what is happening to Penny and others like him who are forced to interact with people like Neely. If I get in charge, you can be the homeless Czar.
* Fred slept on the north grate of a large empty building, near the White House, that we were renovating. One day I was walking near the IMF, and who do I see but Fred, dressed like an office worker. I stopped him and we talked . . . We finished our work 6-months later, Fred was still sleeping on his grate, and doing god knows what else, maybe selling insurance.
** When I was a kid, Uncle Adam used to be released for annual visits. He was scary looking & would kneel in a corner of each room of the house and pray for extended periods - when he wasn’t out visiting gravesites. He was de-institutionalized while I was in the service, and placed in a rest-home, in a double room with an elderly “normie” man. Life isn’t fair to some old men.
"The New Yorker recently took a break from its primary function, hosting ideas festivals for people who subscribe to the Criterion Channel..."
FdB, I love your writing, but if it comprised only needling insults of the oxygen-rich intelligentsia, I'd continue to subscribe. You once referred to a subset of people as "the NPR tote bag class," and I find myself using that one more regularly than I care to admit.
Well done.
Something about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.
Except the "comfortable" are now the smug PMC yuppies.
Corporate news is all about "comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted."
I am a fan of:
"Trying to force vulnerable, addicted, and psychotic people to clear out of horrifically unhealthy and dangerous camps and into support services is giving up on them, but saying 'well, we need more funding' before playing Wordle in the Conde Nast break room somehow is not?"
Peak FdB, and genius.
I mean, I find it weird that he said that Nathan Heller only writes profiles of Haim or whatever but a search of his articles that took me about 2 minutes came up with this well researched and interesting piece that’s right up FdB’s alley:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major
Ultimately, I think a mature person should be able to separate the bad, thoughtless politics of the New Yorker from their often good journalism.
That piece looks interesting, thanks for sharing. I chuckled at Freddie's quip while reading but in this light it comes across bitter and spiteful.
As a liberal with an NPR tote bag (hey it holds all my groceries like no other), I appreciate people like FdB who keep me grounded.
NPR twenty years ago really delivered good thoughtful news. I rarely bother to skim through it now.
We've become a society where everyone wants to save the world but no one wants to miss happy hour. Just fundamentally unserious.
One of my favorite substack comments ever. And yes, I will be stealing it.
No, we're a society where everyone wants to LOOK like they're saving the world. Be on the planning committee, draft mission statements, make sure your plan adequately covers every oppressed person ever. The hard, unromantic work? Not so much. Especially if it might mean working with THOSE people. Or compromising! Don't you know if you ever strike a deal with those deplorables you're literally as bad as them?
I'd argue it's not just fundamentally unserious, but fundamentally depraved. It would be cleaner ethically if Sunday brunch types just admitted they don't care enough to do anything about these issues.
Stumbled across this NYT story from 1978 about deinstitutionalized mental patients that portrays what seems to be a more humane approach than what the city does today --
https://www.nytimes.com/1978/05/21/archives/the-problem-that-cant-be-tranquilized-problem.html
This is such a thought-provoking piece, thank you. I wish every urban liberal would read it.
Me too.
Too bad they won't. They're too busy sneering and denouncing Freddie as a badthink heretic.
For someone who keeps proclaiming he's not a bad leftist but instead a good conservative, you certainly know a lot about the inner workings of liberal circles.
Freddie I'd be curious on your view, this piece seems to suggest a very strong correlation between on-the-street homelessness, coercive treatment-worthy mental illness, and refusal of available sheltering and care options.
There's obviously no doubt of some, even substantial overlap there, Jordan Neely being a particularly well-publicized example. But do you view that as the case for the overwhelming majority of people who would be swept up in something like Newsom's raid?
This piece is written as a lonely cry in the wilderness, and among certain audiences it is. But I think there are constituencies in the country where the logic here might be pretty well understood, enough so that the more nitty gritty questions of HOW it could be brought into practice would be valuable.
One huge issue, that the LA Times has done great work illustrating, is well meaning folks believing the stories the homeless tell. “I was an accountant and I lost my job and now I’m homeless.” Then they reach out to the family and we find severe bipolar disorder, drug and alcohol abuse and in the end the story of someone who can’t care for themselves.
Those suffering serious mental health challenges are the trickiest part of the homeless problem currently, finding suitable housing will not solve their problems. Addressing this group would allow more resources to go to those whose primary issue is a lack of affordable housing. It would also help make shelters safer for others. For those who don't want to go into shelters because of a drug issues or personal preference, well I'm very sorry but that does not give you the right to set up permanent encampments on city streets. We live in society.
Shelters are pretty disgusting places though. I'm not surprised somebody would rather sleep in a tent.
I volunteer in a small shelter that is the opposite of disgusting. It is clean as a whistle, compassionate, kind, we serve homemade dinners to clients at set tables in a communal fashion, and I've heard people say it's the safest and calmest they've felt in many years.
It's doable. It is the fruit of a TON OF WORK by the entire interfaith communtity here, which takes turns hosting/supporting the shelter throughout the winter, week by week, and - not incidentally - puts the volunteeers of different faiths in contact with each other every day, which is a lovely side effect.
Before the shelter had its own permanent location in a local church, it rotated each week: the temple and churches would set up for the guests in their big social halls or whatever, take care of it all, and then break it down until the next rotation.
I don't doubt it but I would expect there's considerable diversity in shelter accommodations. Certainly some larger institutions are not only filthy but also dangerous.
oh for sure! I'm just pointing this out to say that it could be otherwise
and I of course recognize that what a small Colorado town can do and what a huge city can do are vastly different. Just putting that out there to widen the lens on how people think shelters must be built and administered
My impression from my time working in a shelter is that the biggest danger or detractor was that some of the other homeless are really disruptive. If somebody is stealing your possessions or just in the bed next to you angrily ranting until 3 in the morning, it's uncomfortable.
Do the tent encampments have an enforcement mechanism that the shelters lack, or do residents there just put up with that?
My understanding is that it's dependent on the encampment. Some of them have a quasi governmental form of regulation but I think the biggest benefit is that the people there tend to know each other and are therefore less likely to rip each other off, or stab one another.
From what I can tell, a lot of encampments are like cat colonies, one way or another it is made clear to offenders that this is not the place for them.
It's an old problem. If you enforce a no-drugs policy, addicts won't go or stay there. If you don't enforce a no-drugs policy, the shelter is disgusting.
I've been volunteering with homeless addicts for years, and the only thing I have ever seen work is that conditions are finally bad enough that the addict has had enough and wants to get clean. Once that desire happens, it is easy to find someone a safe bed and detox. It's why I (and many former addicts) don't support making it easier to live on the street. Just my opinion, but making it possible to camp where you can panhandle is a major driver behind street deaths. Addicts know that the next fentanyl hit could kill them, but it is hard to give up artificially easy access to panhandling and dealers.
That definitely seems plausible to me, that there's a bottom percentile of highly disruptive people who make helping the rest immensely more difficult to impossible.
Highly analogous with similar issues in impoverished schools. Indeed it's surely a lot of the same people.
I have a squishy liberal's baked-in distaste of compulsion, and I think it's worth being clear-eyed about the inevitable consequences of empowering a bureaucracy with that power, but the juice might be well, well worth the squeeze for all sorts of different constituencies.
I think it is healthy and good to have a distaste for compulsion, just like it is healthy and good to have a distaste for apathy. They key of course is knowing when you've over-indexed on one or the other and need to get on with the sometimes messy business of keeping a functional society healthy. So much of life consists in the feeling of "I don't want to do this thing, and I find it unpleasant that I now have to do it, but if I don't then the alternative is worse". There are plenty of unhoused people who should be left to their own devices and allowed to find their own way in this world unhindered. Being homeless itself is not and should not be a crime or subject to compulsion. At some point though as Freddie alluded to the amount of agency a person is functionally working with is below acceptable and they should be compelled into treatment with the aim of increasing that functional agency. Otherwise people "falling through the cracks" becomes less a bug and more a feature, and you've simply institutionalized apathy.
Actually, giving homes to the homeless tends to alleviate the mental health issues. Shelters are not homes, anymore than dog kennels are homes.
And - I would argue that we do not live in 'society' because a society would not allow a situation where people cannot afford to have shelter.
And yes, I actually have helped homeless people by giving them a place to live while they got their shit together. And shockingly, a safe home, phone service, and decent meals would fix the problem of the majority of homeless people
I don't see how giving someone those things cures substance abuse or schizophrenia.
Being anxious or depressed because you have fallen on bad times is not the sort of mental illness we are talking about here. The lady next to Yale is neither of those, I can promise.
Removing the stress of living on the streets, panhandling for food, etc, gives people the stability to stay on their medications and to be able to keep medical appointments. A home gives people a reason to try and stay well.
Moreover, while the proportion of homeless that have schizophrenia is staggering (20%) - the vast majority are not so afflicted.
Housing First works. We just don’t have the public will to take care of the poor and afflicted. We’d rather blame them for their fate than do anything (like proper public housing) to fix it - because in the US NOTHING can be fixed unless some corporation can profit from it.
San Francisco has a budget for homeless services that is in the 10 digits, yet many of the issues associated with homelessness have worsened in the last decade. Maybe increasing the budget into the 11 digit range would finally solve the issue, but at a certain point you have to recognize that a huge amount of money is already being spent, and look to see if that money would be better spent using a hybrid approach that’s less dogmatic than Housing First.
Your comment is getting dangerously close to the perspective Freddie skewered in this piece.
You can say “”well, we need more funding” before playing Wordle in the Conde Nast break room”, but to act as if funding is the primary limitation ignores the nuance in this piece.
Yep. They sure do have that kind of budget. You know what they don't have? Affordable housing and a living wage.
Let's take a Quick Look at how that budget is spent:
https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/budget/
_______________
$50.1 million investment over two years to shelter approximately 600 families and house more than 450 families through new investments and turnover in existing resources.
Ed Note: SO: $3500 dollars per month per family to SHELTER people for two years? Or, if we include 600 + 450 HOUSED people (because this is a pretty unclear statement): $3455 per month to SHELTER or HOUSE 1,050 people.
I know San Francisco is expensive, but 'the city that knows how' could certain find a way to shelter people below the market rate for a 2 bedroom home?
*
$23.8 million for 130 rapid rehousing subsidies for families
Ed note: OK, if my calculator is right, the city is paying $183,076 per family to rehouse 130 families. The obscene average rent for 2 bedrooms in SF is @3,287. However, again - WHY does the city pay market rate? Because the landlords own the city council, and Diane Feinstein and her ilk wiped out the public housing in the city. Still. Let's say the city is paying 2 YEARS rent... at market rate. That means the city is pay $7628 per month per family to cover rent for each family for two years. (even by SF standards, that is a pretty decent apartment at market rate.)
*
$11.6 million for 115 emergency shelter hotel vouchers for families
Ed Note - now this isn't clear - but that would be $100,869 per family per voucher, or $8405 /mo. If we want to be generous and guess this is for 24 months - that would be 4200/mo - FOR A EMERGENCY SHELTER HOTEL ROOM. Which is more than the average rent for an apartment. You know - like a HOME.
*
$9.9 million for 50 rapid rehousing subsidies for young adult-headed family households
Ed Note: Ok - that would be $198,000 per family - 16,500 a month if we presume this covers one year, and $8,250 a month if we assume it covers two years. THAT'S A REALLY NICE HOUSE.
*
$4.8 million for 35 shallow rental subsidies for families
Investments in Young Adults
I have no idea what a shallow subsidy is - but $137,142 per family doesn't seem shallow to me. That's about 12k per month - and 6k per month if it covers 'subsides' for 2 years.
$32.5 million investment over two years to provide housing subsidies for over 280 young adults households.
-----
I'm gonna let you do the rest of the math on your own.
$24.5 million for 235 rapid rehousing subsidies for young adults
$3 million for 50 flexible housing subsidies for young adults
$5 million to acquire a new housing site for justice-involved youth to support the Just Home Project, an initiative led by MacArthur Foundation and Urban Institute.
Shelter Investments
$57.7 million investment over two years to maintain and expand temporary shelter programs serving adults and families
$5 million one-time funding to construct and launch a Safe Parking program in the Westside of the city
$32.9 million to continue 288 beds of non-congregate shelter for adults
$7.9 million to support capital and operations of new shelter program in the Bayview providing mix of cabins and safe parking
$11.6 million for 115 emergency shelter hotel vouchers for families
$0.3 million to expand capacity at the Buena Vista Horace Mann family shelter
-------------
This is OBVIOUSLY corrupt. A few thousand homeless people are being helped at WELL OVER the open market rate of housing, even for shelter beds. So, landlords recieve more than market value - and 'administrative' costs, kick backs, salaries, bonus' steal money that could be used to eradicate homelessness.
Of course, that wouldn't be profitable to the people who really matter, now would it? I have a feeling if you just handed these people a check for $150,000 (less than is being spent per family) - they might be able to find their OWN way out of homelessness, without the city paying the landlords directly. Just a thought.
This has been tried over and over again, and it keeps failing. Why? Because the majority of people living on the streets are not simply people down on their luck. Not anymore. A majority of homeless in America are struggling with crippling drug addictions and/or mental illnesses, none of which are remedied by offering them a publicly funded place to live.
There is a very, very thin wedge of homeless in the real world who would be helped by this, but the majority of people who would be helped by this manage to find ways out before it comes to this, too.
Freddie is correct here in that in any truly compassionate solution to the problem, free will would have to be taken away to simply keep the people involved from dying, or hurting others.
Housing First has been tried again and again? No, it has not. Where it has been tried, the homeless populations have been massively reduced. I can provide you with solid studies on this.
San Francisco is a great case study in what happens to a homeless population when public housing is systematically destroyed, rent is so high that 100K a year is living in poverty, and then you close all the SRO hotels.
The vast majority of homeless people do not have mental illnesses. That’s a myth. However around 20-30% do (as compared to 6% of housed people) However, it’s impossible to say which came first - the chicken or the egg. Being homeless can create addiction or mental illness, and certainly exacerbates standing psychological distress.
In the US, once you fall into poverty, it is almost impossible to climb back out again. A single eviction can permanently destroy your ability to find affordable housing. Those who will rent to people who have a ‘bad credit history’ are generally sharks who will charge far more than market rate - setting people up for another eviction. Without a home, a mobile phone, an address, people have trouble keeping jobs. Previous incarceration (even for something petty or years and years into the past) blocks people from all but the most menial work.
Most of the paper thin assistance offered to people, including food stamps, requires a person have an address. A real one, not a P.o. box. What aid IS available requires the ability to navigate a complicated bureaucracy, spend hours and hours standing in lines, and a level of executive function that declines more and more under the stresses of poverty.
The shelter system, too, is abysmal. Though it’s great that people have a bed outside the storm, these places are dangerous. More, people cannot stay in them. They can sleep, and then they must be back on the street panhandling for whatever coffee money they can get. Whether there is a bed for them again the next evening is not a given.
It’s really easy to blame the homeless people for their plight. If they are crazy, and we can’t force them into hospitals and out of sight, then we can shrug our collective shoulders. However, the cause of homelessness is systemic; jobs that do not pay a living wage, and housing that does not exist for the poor. The usual cause of homeslessness is job loss, and eviction - followed by domestic violence, abuse, divorce, or the death of a parent or partner. People don’t just decide they love the homeless lifestyle. We - our middle class, our governments, our rentier class has CREATED this crisis, and rather than be accountable we simply make laws to make the victims of our collective crime illegal.
And the bonus is that solution is PROFITABLE - because then, we can just throw them all in prisons and get them out of our site - while the private prison system earns more per inmate that it would cost to just put these people in homes.
I don’t understand how someone could end up living in a tent on purely economic reasons. A basically able bodied person in America can get a job at target or wal mart, which while the pay is bad can pay for a cheap room anywhere, or for living out of a van, or for staying on a friends couch or something. To get to the point of long term tent living someone would have to have burned through their entire social network and not have been able to get on any kind of welfare or unemployment or disability but also not be able to find a low wage retail job. I mean, illegal immigrants who don’t speak English can sustain themselves without ending up on The street. This seems much more likely to be a result of drugs or mental illness.
I agree, but the appellation 'homeless" is designed to elicit pity and compassion. No longer are they bums or hobos.
This is exactly it. Yet, the Acela Corridor PMC fantasy that everyone living in a tent is simply someone crushed by the soulless capitalist system persists, because the reality is just too horrible to deal with. This is related to the premise of the entire piece. The BoHo class pays lip service to the problem of homelessness in urban cities, especially when it disrupts their Instagrammable vibes, but will never confront the problem honestly or meaningfully.
I mean some folks are fairly unhireable due to criminal records or just character defects that don’t rise to the level of mental illness
Sometimes I wonder if this conversation would be better if more people were willing to just say outright: "yes, I do believe it is better for people to die with their autonomy intact than be 'saved'".
It's not a moral view I share. It vastly misunderstands the extent to which the severely mentally ill can be said to have "autonomy", for reasons Freddie's discussed in previous essays. But it has a certain honesty to it the current discourse lacks.
Well put. It's funny because I think it mirrors a right-coded view (also unsaid) which is, "people do not deserve basic health care if they can't pay market prices for it."
I get what you mean, but I don't think anyone thinks that. In my experience, the people that fight for extreme autonomy have deep beliefs that everyone is capable of making the right choices if they are given the right circumstances and support.
That's delusional, but I don't think its a case of them not saying the quiet part out loud.
Yes but these people would never, ever, ever agree that this is the direct implication of their preferences. It is always both, and. We have to protect! autonomy! and! health!
Our local subreddit once had someone post a sincere concern for a woman who regularly walked into traffic. This person would watch as their elderly neighbor routinely wandered into traffic, causing cars to either swerve or simply stop in the road. It was clear this situation was going to one day end in a distracted driver just plowing into her. Another local sanctimonious poster piped in to chide everyone for their concern, accused everyone of being fascists, and suggested they just forget about it because there's no legal or preferable recourse to this situation than to let her continue on until she gets pancaked. It was one of the weirdest interactions regarding mental-health activism I can remember, because the basic thrust of the argument was just as you say Freddie, "ignore it because you can't do anything and forcing someone to not get run over is morally wrong". An Uroburos of social justice activism. "My concern for this person is actually so great I will allow them to die a completely unnecessary death rather than compel them one iota toward a meaningful existence".
“The left, in its majestic compassion, permits rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to shoot fentanyl into their veins, and to vomit blood into the streets.”
(In all seriousness I don’t attribute this position to the left writ large - idea that state doesn’t have moral authority to compel to people to follow its dictates is some horrible anarcho/libertarian mishmash that no true heir to Roosevelt, Marx, whoever would actually ascribe to)
The irony is that any anarchist utopia that one would dream up would still have to wrestle with the problem of extreme mental illness, and the options for doing so in a non-State setup likely involve some form of compulsion even if it involves excommunication from the community and leaving people to wander the countryside until they succumb to the elements. No matter how you slice it at base this is a question of what you find more morally repugnant, compulsion or apathy. Too many anarchists and libertarians are dishonest about what the real endpoint of their philosophies would actually require in real life for things to function. Murray Bookchin called this kind of naive psuedo-anarchism "lifestyle anarchism".
I don't think it's either anarchist or libertarian. It's identity politics. Progressives approach forcing the mentally ill to get treatment in the same way progressives approach deference to the experiences of the oppressed: one is not allowed to impose one's (invalid, oppressor) viewpoint on any issue that affects an oppressed class. The oppressed must be allowed to speak for themselves because they are oppressed and any time one substitutes one's own values for the stated preferences of the oppressed, one is further oppressing them.
It's progressive identitarian obeisance. Not anarchic or libertarian anti-paternalism.
It’s a quote about the right that’s been twisted to fit this argument
"Give them liberty or give them death."
No, I don't mind which, whatever gets me the most likes on Twitter.
I don't live anywhere close to elite coastal enclaves but in a Midwest city neighborhood that houses a number of group homes, many targeted to people with mental illness.
Some members of that population are familiar to the rest of the community because of a recurring pattern. They're fine while taking their meds and they're not when they go off them. While we have a partnership with the local police and mental health professionals to intervene when problem behavior arises, what usually happens is they get picked up for an involuntary stay in the psych ward. They get back on their meds and stabilize. They get released, and the cycle begins all over again.
Getting to a better way of treating and housing people with mental illness will require changes in the law, funding to provide a better system, and a lot more empathy and motivation than we currently demonstrate nationally.
I wholeheartedly agree with your POV, Freddie.
“…what usually happens is they get picked up for an involuntary stay in the psych ward. They get back on their meds and stabilize.” Wouldn’t that be great if it actually happened? Anyone who actually thinks this happens is part of the problem. My twin sister has schizophrenia and even after I recently petitioned the court for involuntary commitment for evaluation, after one day she was released back to the street untreated. She’s still homeless, and I would say slowly dying of her illness.
I’m sorry, must be terribly difficult.
She probably has to do something criminal enough to get into the system. That's how my nephew got into the system. He walked through a mall with a ski mask and a kitchen knife talking about killing people.
He's one of the kindest, gentlest people I know. But when he's trapped in a nightmare that he can't get out of where babies are being cooked in the restaurant and zombies are coming to suck out his brains, he's a danger to himself and others.
Oh she has. This ain’t our first rodeo. She spent time in jail for an assault on my father about 20 years ago. After that, she spent time homeless as well and was eventually picked up and they kept her long enough to stabilize her. The thing that kills me is that after that she spent about 10 years medicated and fairly functional. She almost finished a bachelors degree. Off meds about 4 years ago. Nothing much different about her state now versus then. I imagine it just depends on the person making the judgement as to how big of a threat she might be to herself or others. Her first psychotic break was when we were 17. We’re 41 now.
And if she does eventually get help again, she’ll ask me “why didn’t you get me help sooner? I never want to do that again.” I know this because she told me that after she was stabilized after 10 years of psychosis the first time.
If I can give one counter argument against institutionalisation for substance abuse- it doesn’t fucking work. Sadly. In the U.K., if it worked I think we would do it. But now even if people come to us saying “I’m desperate I want to get clean” we don’t keep them because it’s not an effective use of beds. But if it were we ABSOLUTELY would do it- the cost/benefit analysis would be off the charts. It would be SO worthwhile. But it isn’t, so we don’t.
You’re assuming the goal is treatment. I would argue that some people are just so susceptible to drugs and alcohol that they can’t exist in a world where they have access to those substances. Their only hope is permanent housing in a secure clean facility.
And when, as inpatients, they get clean and sober and regain their sense and say they want to leave? I can understand a sad necessity of permanent institutionalisation for refractory psychosis, but the trouble with addicts is that, when they’re not high, they’re in their right mind. That’s a tougher ethical problem, if you ask me.
They can’t leave once a jury would agree that they have demonstrated that they can’t exist in a world where they have access to their drug of choice.
That is a very unworkable suggestion in a world where sometimes addicts do finally recover.
It’s very workable. You can only be a public nuisance so many times before you get locked away .
Once they've served their jail term for theft, breaking and entering, etc. they should be free to leave.
The problem is that to feed their habit a lot of addicts engage in petty crime, theft, etc. At some point locking them up to induce treatment takes a back seat to locking them up because they're stealing shit and breaking into cars.
At some point, you have to wonder if the people insisting that nobody be involuntarily committed or even given antibiotics for infections/diseases really is just advocating for killing these people. You might as well round them up and shoot them—the result will be the same—just quicker and with no plausible deniability. We don’t let stray animals wander around and fend for themselves, yet we do that to people. And it has kind of a doom-loop effect. Having to navigate around people who are menacing or screaming or just falling apart has a hardening effect. The more desensitized a society to extreme human suffering, the less it is willing to spend money or time mitigating the suffering.
I have never met a conservative who believed that homeless schizophrenics and drug addicts can "pull themselves up by their bootstraps". Never once in my entire life, and I'm no spring chicken.
The idea of pulling yourself up and fixing your life requires agency which is often completely non-existent in such circumstances. In conservative circles, there is strong agreement with your argument that people like this woman need to be forcibly removed for her own good, *and for society's as well*, even if that "somewhere" is jail to get clean, or what passes for health care (bad being better than zero).
Since I know that there are other conservatives reading and commenting here as well, I invite all the ones who do think this woman can or should pull herself up by her bootstraps speak up. Here's your chance, folks!
Nicholas Kristof wrote an article years ago that asserted that conservatives donate a lot more to charity than liberals.
Yes, we do, but you see, it's the "wrong" kind of charity, because a lot of it is relatively small money donations and tithing from stupid Fox watching normies to churches and boring local small time charities instead of mega million donations to NGO blobs. Obviously, McKenzie Bezos has much to teach us.
What's more, those suckers in local community church based organizations do stupid shit like offer food and housing aid to people in their own towns and cities instead of lobbying influential politicians, hosting conferences in Switzerland, or making bold PR campaigns for respecting boutique pronouns.
What a bunch of choads. These charities obviously can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Sneering set to five out of five for these rubes.
As I recall Kristof debunked the idea that religious giving was responsible for the disparity: among other factors it turns out conservatives donate more blood than liberals.
If I could make a generalization it would be that conservatives feel that charity is something that they are personally responsible for while liberals think the government should handle it.
Well, the day Nicholas Kristof "debunks" anything will be a first for me, but share - didn't see it.
And it is true - part of the conservative ethos is that people experience bad times. And the way to get through them is by building communities based on shared values and institutions. The notion that primary responsibilities are owed to God and family first, and then community, and from there into infinity.
Obviously not a flawless system in practice, but the mindset involved, and even the track records in real world outcomes, is a hell of lot better than what Freddie is writing about today.
And it's a world of fucking improvement over throwing billions of dollars into international NGO blobs. If I could wave a magic wand, and ban the entire practice forever, I would, and I'd even have the progressives and literal no fooling commies shaking my hand to thank me for it after a few months.
It's an old one, from 2008.
"Conservatives also appear to be more generous than liberals in nonfinancial ways. People in red states are considerably more likely to volunteer for good causes, and conservatives give blood more often. If liberals and moderates gave blood as often as conservatives, Mr. Brooks said, the American blood supply would increase by 45 percent."
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21kristof.html
Yeah, but just wait until Jen Rubin, Jon Chait and Matt Yglesias explain why this is BaD, AcKSHuaLLy.
Hmm. I'm wondering what else is in that mix though.
Conservatives tend to be more religious, and religions tend to have at least some sort of 'giving' requirement in order to be considered a good <insert sect here>. Liberals tend to assume that taxes automatically cover much of their 'giving' because it's sort of already baked into the system...at least they think it should be. The blood supply thing certainly can't be attended to with taxes though. At least not yet, give it some time. :]
On a related note, I've noticed individual charity tends to suit the wants of the giver and not necessarily the needs of the givee. This is sort of macro and niche at the same time, but from working at a public university I can't tell you how many times a donation project misses the mark because of a particular donors' (or group of donors) whims. A lot of times the things that really need fixing are sewer pipes and bathrooms and 50yo wiring, but rare is the donor who says either a) use this for new toilets, or b) use this for whatever you want.
I realize my example is a far cry from homelessness, but I can't help but think the same principles might apply.
I work for a small(ish) charity that is a network of food banks. While the folks who work and volunteer for food banks of course appreciate donations, there is a growing sense that the government really should be doing more, because the need is so far beyond their ability to help. Particularly with regards to people with mental illness and other disabilities.
I agree - most of my time around conservatives is exactly thus. They don't want lazy people to take advantage of a system that rewards laziness. They have a very different view on things like mental illness, severe development disorders, and the bootstrap stuff is absent.
A cynic would suggest that a writer looking to establish his progressive bonafides while criticizing "liberals" still needs a conservative boogeyman to bash against to establish the necessary protection against blowback from said liberals.
"Look, we both hate TeH CoNs - this is just constructive criticism from within the left - I've established my bonafides by thwacking the right wing scarecrow!"
But only a cynic would suggest that, surely.
I really enjoy reading FdB, and one of the best parts is finding the hidden conservative straw man. Well, not really hidden, just ctrl-f “conservative.” My favorite a while back was a “yes, the argument I’m making is also made by conservatives, but they’re coming from a place of hate, I’m coming from a place of love.” Or something like that.
Many such cases.
No, I mean there really are!
This is a necessary station of the cross for left wing writers are obligated to perform when they arrive at an ideological space conservatives are and have been in the entrire time, lest the intended audience believe even for a second that the writer is now infected with right wing cooties.
This happens with even more intensity on those occasions where the progressive Latest Thing completely melts down (BLM, MeToo, gender affirming care) where it would be awkward to admit the cons were, in fact, right the whole time, and now it's "tiring" to talk about.
In much fairness to Freddie, he's also discussed the ridiculousness of the "I'm tired, can't we talk about something else now?" phenomenon in shitlib politics. So I'm not sure why he still has to add these weird straw men, unless he's really so distanced from knowing any real world conservatives that he actually believe sthis stuff ...?
I mean, it's possible. If you living in and around New Haven, you're more likely to meet Jesus than anyone fitting the conservative stereotypes from the Reagan age being bandied around as straw men in these pieces.
Who knows.
Agree completely with everything. Academia’s bubble is so powerful it can cloud even a mind like his.
I also think there’s a business side to this, but mostly I think he believes in it.
Maybe to improve things a bit, or at least to give the straw men a bit more depth he should give his conservative characters an “If you prick us, do we not bleed…” speech :)
If the NASDAQ tumbles a thousand points in one day, are our 401Ks unaffected?
What passes for healthcare isn’t the problem. I’m 100% sure this woman can, and does, go to Yale New Haven hospital down the street any time she wants care for whatever is killing her. Or she becomes so disoriented and obtunded that she’s brought in for care. It’s what happens when she’s not in the hospital, if she even stays in the hospital, that’s the problem.
I'm not sure of that at all. Here, I agree with Freddie completely. I've seen people like her literally do nothing except take drugs and die in public. They could save themselves, but don't. He's right. A truly compassionate system would force the issue.
Yes, I don’t understand what the disagreement is. These people taking drugs generally have multiple encounters with the health care system, but can’t function when they’re outside of it, and they often leave the hospital as soon as they feel better.
Yeah, I guess I misunderstood the nature of the comment - my bad.
“ the culture of institutionalized do-gooding”
+1
When Heller’s mother has dementia and they find her wandering down a snowy street in her nightgown and she says she’s fine - I’m guessing he isn’t going to respect her agency. He’s going to put her in memory care. Why do we treat dementia differently than severe mental illness?
Dementia might happen to me one day because I will surely get old, but addiction and mental illness don't happen to people like me.
when "forcing help on the homeless and the sick is a worse outcome than simply letting them die" you can see why and how MAID is gaining such traction
I disagree with you re many things, but on the subject of forcing specific cases of homeless people (and those with certain other drug / mental problems) to be institutionalized or to undergo treatment - you are absolutely right. Of course, not all of the homeless*, drug addicted / crazy** people need to be in institutions . . but a lot of them do. Neely’s death was a preventable tragedy, but so is what is happening to Penny and others like him who are forced to interact with people like Neely. If I get in charge, you can be the homeless Czar.
* Fred slept on the north grate of a large empty building, near the White House, that we were renovating. One day I was walking near the IMF, and who do I see but Fred, dressed like an office worker. I stopped him and we talked . . . We finished our work 6-months later, Fred was still sleeping on his grate, and doing god knows what else, maybe selling insurance.
** When I was a kid, Uncle Adam used to be released for annual visits. He was scary looking & would kneel in a corner of each room of the house and pray for extended periods - when he wasn’t out visiting gravesites. He was de-institutionalized while I was in the service, and placed in a rest-home, in a double room with an elderly “normie” man. Life isn’t fair to some old men.