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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29942 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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Paradoxically, this happens in part because we don't spend enough on homeless shelters. People don't realize this but a lot of shelters are closed during the day and will literally kick out the people using them and tell them to come back that night.

This presents an obvious issue, if the shelters are where you're supposed to go when you're homeless but they're not open, where are the homeless using them supposed to go? Some places have daytime shelters but as illustrated by this thread often the answer is just "go to the library". Some others (across multiple threads, you can find quite a few discussing where to go when the shelters close) include heading out to the woods, the mall, a movie theater, setting up a tent, coffee shops, a university/community college, even a storage unit or go do their day job (something like 40% of homeless have a job and that number is rising).

Now maybe if we do get plentiful and reliable day shelters where homeless can go, there will still be some shitty stragglers at the libraries and parks and buses. There probably would be a few at least and we can figure out how to get them away then but until the option of daytime shelters is at least available we can't be expecting anything else. They have to exist somewhere and they're gonna choose a place that is open to the public, air condition and feels safe.

Paradoxically, this happens in part because we don't spend enough on homeless shelters.

Nope. Absolutely fucking not. Not only will further subsidization just incentivize more homelessness, we have massively increased our homelessness spending concurrent with the homeless problem getting worse. We've run this experiment and it didn't work.

We've run this experiment and it didn't work.

Flophouses were common in the early 20th century and before.

Living conditions were poor, but they worked just fine.

We've run this experiment and it didn't work.

Have we? I've not seen any experiment where they take a city without day shelters for their homeless and then put funding into day shelters and see what happens.

we don't spend enough on homeless shelters

There are localities that spend $60k per homeless person per year. They are overburdened with meth addled street shitters hanging out in libraries. In a better world these people would be institutionalized. But alas we don't live in that happy place.

I don't think that a bare metric of dollars spent is relevant. The homeless industrial complex consumes that money.

Libraries taken over by homeless seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon, though, mores than night only shelters.

The shelters kick them out not necessarily for lack of funding, but possibly hoping they’ll get jobs/go to work?

That might be the intent, I don't know. But the result seems to be, as we can see in those threads, "oh shit where do I go? Oh the library or the mall".

It seems the lack of day shelters just turns other things into day shelters.

My city spends almost six figures per homeless person. The exact accounting is difficult, because of a combination of understandable (what philosophically counts as spending on the homeless?), bureaucratic (how do you get figures on the costs of emergency room visits?), and sheer graft (nonprofits that mysteriously siphon away lots of money with no services rendered evident), but it's a lot. Despite that, the homeless problem is as bad as ever, and many of the libraries are as a result entirely unusable to the public.

So, suppose it is true that so long as spending isn't, say, a quarter million per year per homeless, libraries will remain unusable. Voters are left with a set of unenviable choices: spend a quarter million per year on the homeless and finally get clean safe libraries; let libraries remain ersatz day shelters for the homeless that happen to be decorated with shelves of books; or stop funding public libraries. The first option isn't practicable, and the second is just stupid. So the third option ends up being the one that actually happens.

Total amount of money isn't very useful if it's being spent on things that aren't effective. It's a similar issue to what we see with drug rehab, all the money going to the Christian centers whose cure is "find God" or the reiki ones or the horseback riding ones or the chicken processing plant one not only doesn't help, it likely hurts compared to the more evidence backed solution of medication.

I imagine if a bunch of the money currently spent on "homelessness" just went to day shelters or (even better for a pretty large amount of homeless) just having temporary housing/apartments available, we'd have all the people in those instead of heading off to their local library.

Christian rehab centers

Can anyone tell me about the Christian graft industry, how you get in etc.? In another life, I'd have love to be involved! (Not joking, seriously curious what life decisions would have gotten me there.)

It’s unclear that Christian rehab centers are worse than harm-reduction based ones, to start with.

But if you’d like to work in a Christian charity, start by volunteering. When and if you get hired it will be at a lower rate of pay than elsewhere.

(Warning to the reader: this turned into an extended rant.)

The issue with homeless shelters is quite simple: other homeless people. They are unsafe and chaotic. You can add rules to make this slightly better--no drugs, no alcohol, no pets--but that makes the homeless you most want out of the libraries and off the streets even less willing to go to a shelter.

So that leaves individual housing and apartments. But they can't be temporary: if they are, what happens when the beneficiary runs out of time? Do you kick them out, making them homeless again? So you indefinitely let them stay. A one bedroom in my city runs around $2500 a month, at the very low end. That's $36k/year for each person housed, which in isolation is still better than $100k/year. But the population housed would be constantly growing. And it's assuming no additional costs: you might reduce emergency room visits from once per week to once per month, but it's still a cost. And what happens when the tenant destroys substantial parts of the property? During COVID, vacant hotels were used by my city to house the homeless, and one hosting a couple hundred suffered $20M in damages over two years. $20M here, $20M there, and soon you're talking about real money.

All these funds are coming from taxpayers that are themselves having to spend a significant part, and often a majority, of their income to pay for rent or mortgage. It's the number one reason people leave my city.

And yes, our housing policy is shit, significantly contributing to the issue. But in a world where activism to improve our housing policy has failed for over a decade, I have to assume that it'll be at least a decade before anything improves on that front. Does that mean I should just forego crazy luxuries like clean and safe libraries, parks, sidewalks, and transit for the next decade? Why shouldn't I just move, taking the 60k I pay every year to the city along with me, when there are plenty of places that do manage to have public spaces at a small fraction of the cost? Plenty of people are doing exactly that already, which has driven massive deficits in the city budget. And then how are we going to pay for even more homeless services? Shutting down schools? Libraries? Parks?

I don't really disagree with anything you wrote. But in practice, none of these cities seem to be capable of building the shelters or housing needed, and it is totally unacceptable to let things like public libraries or most public spaces be held hostage for decades, just because every level of government involved is incapable of doing anything about homelessness. The homeless understandably want to go somewhere that feels safe, but so does the general public, and there are many more of us.

Here's a compromise: a huge operational shelter, complete with three hots and a cot, and you can stay as long as you want and even get basic medical services. You can even camp on the outside where no rules are enforced. The only catch: it's in the middle of nowhere. If you're arrested for aggressive vagrancy in a metro area and can't prove you have a residence or employment, you are put on a bus and sent to the camp shelter. You are not required to stay, but the state will not give you a free ride out.

Reminds me of the Charity Centers from "Down And Out In Christania" by AntiDem (and, less optimistically, the terrafoam projects from Manna by Marshall Brain).

But then what do we do? We either have a place to go (day shelters, library, etc) or put them in jail. But the US already has really high incarceration rates to the point even the "soft on crime" states look pretty extreme compared to a lot of the rest of the world. Maybe some of this is explained by a difference in definitions (and I definitely think we should discount some of the countries like Russia and China since they might even be faking data) but it's hard to imagine there's much categorical flummery available within the question of "is a person locked up against their will by the government?", especially compared to western peers so I'm not sure how effective just keep locking up even more is going to work out for us.

At the very least it seems there's a deeper issue to be addressing in why the US seems to have way more visible homeless than Taiwan or Japan or New Zealand or the UK.

But then what do we do?

Institutionalize them. Not jail. These people are deeply unwell and need care.

Do you earnestly believe that everyone in a night shelter who goes to a library or mall during the day due to lack of a day shelter being available are so deeply unwell they need forced hospitalization?

It seems to me the first step should be "make a day shelter available" and then the second step for stragglers who are too unwell to use it is the mental institutions.

I thought the topic of discussion was homeless people who are scary and make formerly good public spaces ruined because regular people now feel unsafe in them. Those people need to be institutionalized.

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