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I think it is becoming pretty obvious that homelessness is a national problem that can no longer be addressed at a local level.
If any one municipality gets the solution to homelessness "correct" their reward for doing so is to be flooded by homeless people from other areas. This doesn't require maliciousness on anyone's part. Imagine city A has the correct solution, and city B just lets them die in the streets. If you are a doctor in city B with a homeless patient, your best advice to them might be to tell them to get a bus ticket to city A. And that doctor would be right to continue sending patients from city B to city A until the conditions in both cities was equal. Or if you are just a semi-aware homeless person, you'd do the move yourself.
If you are just a random person in one of these cities, and all you care about is just not having homelessness. Then being closer to city B is the best option. Its cheaper and will cause the homeless to flee or be taken away by people in the system that care. Any additional amount of draconian rules or cruelty towards homelessness will move your city closer to B. If your job has you living in city A and taking care of homeless people, then you are probably correct to be a little pissed off at the people in city B advocating cruelty or draconian rules in their city. They are just foisting their problem off onto you.
Once you realize its a national problem the approaches that make sense change quite a bit.
There are lots of ways to address it. The government can build the ghettos. That has been done many times in the past. The federal government could offer subsidies to state and local entities that provide beds to homelessness. I think that would at least fit with our existing federal system of governance. The government can build prisons / mental institutions / etc.
Addressing the problem at the national level will not look pretty. It will almost certainly look ugly. Because homeless people have lives that are objectively shitty right now. Even if you are improve their lives significantly you aren't likely to get out of "objectively bad life to live" and into "objectively good life to live". So you'll have the government running a program where a bunch of people seemingly live terrible lives on the government dime, and it will definitely look like the government is causing them to live these terrible lives.
There are a few paths I can envision that lead to 'national government addresses homelessness':
It depends what type of "correct" solution you're talking about.
A maximally "nice" solution, like free housing maintained by Government employees and unlimited free drugs, implemented in one city, would indeed probably draw all the homeless from the whole nearby area, thus exhausting the budget. Though honestly this would probably bust the budget of any city just dealing with the ones already there.
A maximally "mean" solution, like summary execution of all homeless, vagrants, beggars, etc, implemented in one city, would also solve the the problem of ordinary people not being able to walk the streets without being harassed, but would probably have the opposite effect, pushing all the homeless out of that city into other nearby cities with more average policies.
@anti_dan and @MotteInTheEye bring up a similar point.
I think my main point still stands, because there still is a selection effect as long as local policies differ, and as long as you can convince / trick / force the homeless to take a bus ride.
Lets say there are the two cities again. city A and city B. City A is maximally nice and "solves" the homelessness problem. City B is maximally mean and "solves" the homelessness problem. Both cities have to deal with side effects of their solution. Maybe city A has severe budgetary problems. Maybe city B is a totalitarian state where the presumption of innocence is gone and lots of people get thrown in prison or executed on flimsy grounds.
Now lets say there are two other cities. One city kinda likes the policies of city A, but doesn't have the budget resources to do it. One city kinda likes the policies of city B, but has too strong of a legal system and constitutional protections to carry it out. But they both have the budget / legal allowance to export the homeless. The solution for both of these new cities is straightforward, just send the homeless on to their preferred "solution" city.
Whether you think the solution is to be nice or mean to the homeless, the same problem exists with localities trying to implement it. The problem is certainly worse if places are trying to be nice, but its still there if you want meanness.
I had been thinking more about the opposite effects of the different solution types. One city doing the nice way draws in more homeless, and so places a substantially higher burden on itself while only having a minor positive effect on nearby cities that homeless move there from. So your point of it being unsustainable on a small scale applies. However, one city doing the mean way expels out homeless (anyone sufficiently with it to try to avoid near-certain death is going to leave), so having a minor negative effect on nearby cities. That means that way is sustainable and so is possible to start and grow without an all-at-once national initiative.
I hadn't thought of other cities aligned with the mean city but not going quite so far wanting to send their homeless to that city. I'm not sure that changes things though. The problem of getting more homeless that you plan to treat the nice way is that the cost of every extra one is high, but the cost of treating them the mean way can be quite low, presuming we're dispensing with legal protections. Especially when they've been conveniently gathered onto a bus for you.
I've never seen the cost of the mean solution as monetary. I think other people in the thread have pointed out the problems of being mean to homeless people. To sum up some of the points:
Some of the people on this forum seem a bit blase about executing homeless. I'm not sure if they'd all maintain that attitude if they were the specific ones delegated the task of carrying out the executions. For those that do maintain the blase attitude, I certainly wouldn't want to be neighbors with them. I'm not saying this entirely to admonish them. I had some homeless encampments near my neighborhood, and I have two young girls. I only found out about the encampments because one of my other neighbors had politely packed up their tents and left them a handwritten note of "dont camp here". He is an Afghanistan war veteran and has shot at people and been shot at. I had a lot of admiration for my neighbor in that moment, mainly for his restraint. I would have been tempted to at least trash the person's stuff.
I understand the tendency and desire to be tough and mean to the homeless. I feel it all the time. I just have a very premonition about acting on those feelings.
I'm having trouble phrasing my last point. To get at the heart of it though, violence is a slippery slope and a spreadable disease all in one. I see human society as a multi-generational project to try and use less violence and more trading to get what we want. Its a really difficult problem, because often the only way to stop violence is to use violence in response. If you have ever known some military or police families ... they can be a bit violent. The parents think corporal punishment is normal and fine. The kids think bullying is normal and correct as long as they have more physical power. Certainly not all of them ... but I can't be the only one with that observation?
Violence often looks like a small time monetary expense, but I think normalizing it creates a massive long term expense in the form of interpersonal misery.
I've described possible solutions at 2 extreme ends of the range of possibilities, but haven't actually advocated for any particular position. Part of why I enjoy discussing issues here is that I don't feel so compelled to take a specific position and defend it to the (metaphorical) death at all costs, but can consider a range of things before deciding on some specific position.
My description of the maximally violent solution and how it might spread might be taken as advocacy. I see it at least as much a warning as advocacy. Beware, those who actually make policy, if any particular place feels that the situation has gotten bad enough to go that far, the going-that-far might possibly spread farther and faster than anybody anticipated or wanted.
Perhaps most of that was more of a reply to others who have more directly advocated such things. Nevertheless, regarding violence, I tend to think that a little bit goes a long way, and people tend to feel a desire to use excessive amounts of it when a situation has been allowed to go on too long and get much worse than it needed to be. I think "violence" (defined as a scale starting at things like firm orders and harsh looks) is best applied in small amounts and highly limited scope, but right away when necessary. Probably ought to have a better word for that, but I can't come up with one right now.
I'm not 100% sure what we should actually do. I think there is clearly a cohort of homeless who are all of the above of hopelessly addicted to hard drugs, regularly aggressive and violent towards random people, have no fear of any sort of consequences, and completely uninterested in any sort of help. I'm not sure what the size of it is, but I expect the local police, jailers, and mental health professionals in any particular area know who they are. Those people should at the very least be locked away until such time as they can go multiple months without reverting to their previous lifestyle, using whatever force is necessary to achieve that without unduly risking the safety of whatever personnel are doing so, up to and including lethal force if absolutely necessary. It may not be so easy though to ensure that all jurisdictions strictly limit such treatment to those clearly in that cohort, but I fear we've already let this go far enough that there isn't much choice but to do something like that and hope for the best.
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So, I am certainly one of the posters whom you would consider “blasé” about executing homeless. I consider the question “would I be able to pull the trigger myself” frequently. It’s very easy for me to ask, “Will no one rid me of these turbulent bums?” But would I capable of meting out that type of violence myself, if tasked to do so? Now to be clear, I do not believe that it’s illegitimate to advocate for a particular policy unless one is willing and eager to sign up to be a law enforcement officer, security guard, etc. It’s okay to have specialized positions which employ only individuals with the physical and psychological qualities appropriate for that job, and for others outside that position to still have a say in what policies will be carried out. But, it’s still worth asking whether my rather cavalier attitude about the topic is purely a consequence of my own distance from the ugly part of the process I’m advocating. I have personally never meted out any sort of interpersonal violence; I’ve never even been in a fistfight - I’ve been punched, but have not thrown a punch in return - and I’ve only fired a gun a handful of times. (My marksmanship leaves much to be desired.) So the question of whether I’m capable of carrying out executions, and the adjacent question of whether it would break me psychologically to do so, are appropriate questions to ask.
Now this, I don’t understand at all. What, specifically, are your concerns about having me for a neighbor? I’m an extremely respectful, quiet, and orderly neighbor. It is precisely my preference for orderly, clean, and peaceful environments which causes me such distress at being surrounded by homeless and the disorder they bring. What actual actions do you predict I would perform, as part of being your neighbor, as a result of my stated beliefs? Clearly I’m not saying that I personally am planning on going John Wick on random bums any time soon; I’m very much in the “be nice until you can coordinate meanness” camp, and am not a loose cannon.
Now, I did recently get in a very heated verbal confrontation with a bum who had decided to camp on the sidewalk outside my apartment complex, and whose long chain of tied-together shopping carts was blocking our exit path. That confrontation, in which I did not lay a hand on the man, resulted in him leaving almost immediately, taking all of his garbage with him, and he has not been seen since. Do you think this makes me a bad neighbor? Do you think I’m a coward or hypocrite for arguing with him instead of shooting him in the head, since the death penalty for chronic homelessness is what I advocate here? I would venture to say that the vast majority of those who advocate a similar position would act exactly the same way I did in that scenario.
I think this whole paragraph is asserting things which are not actually generalizably true. For example, Singapore is notorious for applying the death penalty for a far wider array of crimes than any European country does in this day and age. Furthermore, Singapore (like Japan) uses a method of execution - hanging - which has been out of use in European countries for over a century now due to its violent optics. However, Singapore (also like Japan) is one of the least violent societies on earth. It is perfectly able to contain the violence to one very small but important facet of society - the criminal justice system - in order to prevent its spread to the larger society as a whole. The men responsible for carrying out executions in Singapore do not, as far as I’m aware, also go out and blow off steam by murdering people for sport in their spare time. I’m not even sure if they have higher rates of corporal punishment of children than the average Singaporean or Japanese. (And, if they do, are you so sure that corporal punishment, within reason, of children for transgressions is ineffective at shaping those children into responsible and pro-social adults?)
A decade ago I absolutely would have agreed with you that civilizational progress is all about reducing the amount of interpersonal violence across the board, and I still share your basic visceral aversion to violence in terms of the way I live my own life. However, I’ve come to believe, through observation, that actually reducing violence requires the carefully targeted and process-based application of non-arbitrary violence against the most anti-social elements of society in order to maintain sustainable peace. Those anti-social elements are not going to stop being violent and unstable just because the rest of us forswear violence; rather, we need people who are not inherently prone to extreme violence to be willing to step up and do a little bit of it, in small doses, so that we can then go back to living our normal lives.
Except this is the lowest period of non-arbitrary violence against the most anti-social elements of society in probably human history and also the least violent part of human history. In the past, there was way harsher actions against anti-social elements of society, and far more general violence and chaos.
Also, the reason I wouldn't want is you're not a nice, respectful, orderly neighbor. You're an authoritarian with dreams of violent cleanses of people lesser than you, so in aggregate, crime and disorder goes down by 5%, if they're out of bounds of what you determine to be an orderly society.
This is that "nothing was ever good" thing you see all the time on Twitter, isn't it? The outright denial that there was ever a time when things were better in any way, that all the problems caused by recent policies always existed, and all evidence to the contrary is a Reactionary Fascist Myth.
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Actually no, violent crime rates in America are significantly higher today than they were in, say, 1950, when the U.S. had harsher vagrancy laws than today. In 1890s England, violent crime rates were lower than they are in England today, despite laws being stricter at that time. Yes, certainly the world of 2024 is less violent than the world of medieval times and before, but it’s also true that rates violence in, say, 1990 were significantly higher than they had been a couple of decades prior; since laws had grown more lax during that time, rather than less, whatever causal relationship you’re attempting to draw between laxity/non-punitivity and low rates of societal violence seems fairly questionable.
What specific actions do you think I take, as a result of my beliefs about crime and punishment, that actually impact how good or bad a neighbor I am? Do you think I discuss my philosophy of policing with my neighbors? Do you think that any of the policies I advocate would have any significant impact on the day-to-day lives of the other residents of my apartment complex? If not, then in what sense am I “not a nice, respectful, orderly neighbor”?
Sure, you don't do anything bad now - firstly, becuase you're by your own admission timid, but also because the state would put you away for shooting an irksome vagrant. Why would I want to take chances with living next to people like you in case the state shifts to be more permissive, though? Would you like to live next to a literal Marxist-Leninist intellectual who is perfectly civil yet a) owns a gun and b) posts on the Internet about all the kulaks and bloodsuckers he'd be putting against the wall if only the revolution came?
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You know, this is actually an interesting moral point that leftists usually hammer into mush with their usual lack of nuance and subtlety, what with "words are violence, silence is violence, everything is violence," etc. but... hypothetically, let's say I'm your neighbor, and I'm black, and I become aware of your views. I know you personally are probably never going to take any action against me. You'll be a nice, respectful, and orderly neighbor. We'll get along, and you might even loan me your drill or ask me to watch your cats and stuff, like a good neighbor.
But I know that should the state suddenly go full Jim Crow II and start rounding up me and mine in trucks, you not only won't raise a peep in protest, you will approve. That you are, in fact, quietly working towards that happening, even if it's only very abstractly. Maybe you will feel a teensy bit bad about it happening to me and my family, but not bad enough to protest or even think it's wrong.
Do you see how in that situation, I might not actually consider you a great neighbor, no matter how pleasant you are to my face?
I am not trying to pick on you here - I honestly find you kind of interesting (and yeah, in person I probably would find you pleasant and easy to get along with - though, granted, I am not black), the self-admitted soy blue triber who's gone full wignat. But I have to admit there is something I find deeply unpleasant about your repeated instance that you are a kind and gentle soul who'd never harm a fly. No, you just want the state and men with less scruples to do the dirty work for you. I'm really trying to avoid Nazi metaphors here, but they do spring to mind. No, I do not believe that wanting to change things via force requires that you be willing and able to execute that violence yourself, but I must admit, the men who at least are open about how much they'd enjoy being the (literal) whip hand strike me as more honest (including to themselves). I may find them disgusting also, but for an entirely different reason.
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You get at the heart of why I ask about being willing to carry out violence. Someone is going to take on that psychological burden. Its easy to forget that when its not you. My level of experience with violence is pretty similar to yours, except I do have some decent marksmanship. I think I'd be able to pull the trigger and execute people, but I am also decently certain that it would eventually break me as a functioning member of society. Its a big mind-shift to see people as fleshy bodies that can easily be blown apart with a few rounds, and that is what I think I'd come to see other people as. And I have a cold temper that never manifests as screaming in people's faces, but certainly does manifest as logically thinking of ways I can maximally hurt someone. Having the 'murder' option readily available in my mental toolbox would be very bad for me.
Basically I wouldn't be happy to have myself as a neighbor that carries out executions. It is similar reasons that make me a libertarian. I'm pretty certain I would abuse power if I were in a powerful position, so I tend to not trust others in those positions.
Your interaction with a bum is something I'd like in a neighbor. I might have found your particular approach too risky for my taste. Unless I had a few other neighbors standing there with me.
Japan and Singapore mostly don't execute that many people. Maybe a dozen a year. I'm not worried about the spillover effects of that level of capital punishment. Certain cities of Texas might have a higher per capita execution rate.
There are currently about a half million homeless people in the US. I don't think you'd need to kill all of them. But conservatively maybe 10% of them are hopeless about getting out of their situation and would end up on the chopping block. Fifty Thousand executions. That is an unprecedented number in not just the Western world, but the entire world.
I went and looked it up and Iran apparently executed the most people in 2023, about 850 people. I think their society is already far more violent than I'd ever like to experience. Its not just the people carrying out the executions, its a support structure, and a society willing to say "yeah thats fine, go murder those people".
This is basically my belief as well. As I said above, getting rid of violence often requires violence. But executing about 50k people would not be trying to minimize violence. It would be a society wide escalation. There are only about 20k murders a year in the US. This just doesn't seem like "carefully targeted" violence at all.
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A built in assumption of your "problem" is that solution B is not correct. An assertion not in evidence.
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This is true only if homeless people have no agency to determine their place of residence, or if the solution is one that the homeless people themselves prefer to the default "unsolved" conditions.
If on the other hand there is a solution that the homeless people would prefer to avoid and they have some agency to avoid it by relocating, then the incentive would flow the opposite direction, with localities that do not adopt it getting flooded.
This is one reason "combining housing with aggressive anti-vagrant policing" might actually work.
The first places to start it get to keep all the fixable workers while pushing the dregs out, while holdout cities have to deal with an increasing burden of irredeemables.
In the end San Francisco would be overrun by every fentanyl zombie in the country. (Then we build the San Bruno Wall and blow up the bridges.)
For every fixable homeless person in a city with expensive housing, there is likely a responsible homeful person living within their means in a cheaper city who would jump at the chance to move, if only housing were affordable.
I don't think you get to (fairly) keep the fixable workers while pushing the dregs out. You either build more housing or you don't, but the current homeless in your city probably all have to go.
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I think the implication was that the "solution" actually solved their homelessness (ie housing them, finding them jobs, treating their mental illnesses) rather than solving the issue of them being unpleasant for locals, like kicking them out or throwing them in jail. It's not a real solution if you simply push them off to be someone else's problem, then you're just in a prisoner's dilemma where everyone does that to each other.
The problem with homelessness is the problem it causes for others, not the problems the homeless are themselves suffering.
Solving homelessness means solving the problems they cause for others. It does not mean fixing their problems as people.
The former is bad karma from ignoring the latter. If you solve the former without solving the latter, and continue ignoring the latter, it will somehow end badly for you; I don't know how, exactly, nor how long it will take, but it won't be an outcome you consider satisfactory.
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I suppose if you have some sort of selfish or elitist morality system where only you and people like you matter. But even then, "helping" homeless people doesn't just mean reducing their suffering but also converting them into productive members of society.
As a utilitarian, I think all humans matter. Failure to own a home (which is a state that literally all humans are born into and only manage to avoid by having kind/competent parents or producing enough to earn money for a place to stay on their own) does not discredit one from being a human and having inherent worth as a human being.
Now, if the cost to help a drug-addicted violent person fuel their addiction is the blood sweat and tears of five other people who have to pay for it out of their wages and suffer from crimes, then yeah, that's not worth it. But if you can help fix their addiction, and their behavioral issues, and turn them into a functioning and contributing member of society, then you've done all that AND saved an entire person's life, and then they can go and help other people as a productive member of society.
That's a big if. But it's a big gain if done. I'm sure that some homeless people are irredeemable scum who can't be changed. I'm equally sure that some people with homes and lots of money are also irredeemable scum who cause more harm than good but do it sneakily enough not to get caught. Houses are correlated with being a good person, but not even close to perfectly.
An actual solution to homelessness means solving the root cause of the issue, be that mental, behavioral, cultural, economic, social, or some combination. And then they're not homeless in the first place and that solves their issues and the problems they cause for other people at the same time. Anything less is a bandaid. Maybe useful as a temporary patch, but not ideal.
That doesn't sound like a very utilitarian position TBH. I agree with it, but I also don't claim to be utilitarian. It seems to me as though the utilitarian policy here is something like "the homeless people are causing everyone to suffer, so it's worth it to alleviate that suffering even if they suffer a lot individually". Basically the setup of the city in The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.
You misunderstand. I'm not saying it's never okay to do that. If Omelas were literally the only solution then yeah, I'd probably be okay with that. I'm saying it's less than ideal. Suppose we have 1 homeless person simultaneously suffering from homelessness and whatever mental illness or anti-social personality is causing it (1 point) and inflicting suffering on 3 people (1 point each). And the following options:
Do literally nothing: Everyone suffers, (-4 points)
Pay to house the homeless person. They no long suffer, but they still harass everyone else, and it costs money (though less than the suffering of being homeless or else ordinary people wouldn't buy homes. So maybe (-3.5 points)
Exile the homeless person to another town. They suffer double, but the three people they were harassing are no longer harassed. BUT the new town has three new people for them to harass. (-5 points)
Exile the homeless person from all society and/or incarcerate them and/or execute them. They suffer.... I dunno, a lot, call it X. But the three other people are fine. (-X points)
Fix the homeless person's issues so they transform into a normal person. Let's suppose this is very difficult and expensive (-Y points). But everything else is resolved. They no longer suffer, the other people no longer suffer. (-Y points)
Your imagining of utilitarianism seems to be the claim that X < 3.5, that if we sacrifice homeless people via option 4 it's better than letting them inflict suffering on others. If option 5 did not exist, I might tentatively agree. 5 Does exist. I think Y < X < 3.5, and so Option 5 is ideal. Utilitarianism does not require sacrificing people to make other people happy, sometimes it just involves making everyone happy simultaneously. That's not always possible, but given that in this instance the very issue that is causing homeless people to inflict suffering on others (mental illnesses, addictions, and/or criminality) is the same thing inflicting suffering on themselves, solving that would get us both simultaneously.
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No. Trying to solve root causes is how you get yourself intractable problems. Alleviate the symptoms; there's nothing wrong with a bandage.
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Understand that for many the problem is in fact the suffering the homeless people themselves are experiencing. You might not care about them, but many do, and this is one of the core disconnects in these debates.
Of course I understand that. I can hardly help but understand that when surveying the topic in any depth at all. My understanding of the perspective is why I spoke against it. I don't think there's any policy that can achieve this, and therefore all homelessness policies advocated by you and yours are unlikely to achieve actual results. That's what I want to communicate, to you and to others.
If you'd like to do charity, you may do so in your own time with your own resources, but society needs governance, and that means dealing with the problems they are causing to others, and framing the debate in that manner.
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Human suffering is not a solvable problem.
Especially and particularly the suffering of people caused by their own decision making. You can't solve people fucking their own life up without preventing them from having the freedom to control their own lives.
While I agree with you on the general idea here (that we shouldn’t try to solve their suffering) I disagree with this general idea.
You absolutely can do this, it is just incredibly expensive. With enough resources you can catch someone every time they fall, and piece their foot back together after every time they shoot it. Do I want to expend the immense resources this would take in literally insane people? No. But it is possible, especially when the insane people’s own standards for “not suffering” are far below that of a middle-class teenager.
Some people certainly want to expend the resources required, and I think a different argumentative tack is necessary to bring those people around.
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