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I have to disagree with the premise that too much liberalism created the problem. The solution is more liberalism: legalize gun ownership and deregulate housing. This approach has proven itself effective in the real world, it doesn't cost anything, and it doesn't require an authoritarian state.
Europe seems to be the opposite of what you suggest as a solution, but as far as I can tell it's also way more successful in dealing with homelessness and the problems it can cause than the USA or apparently Canada.
Houston's homelessness rate is about 30 per 100K. Denmark's homelessness rate is about 112 per 100K.
Houston seems to be quite successful with the housing first policy indeed, although providing housing for homeless people isn't quite the same as deregulating housing. Deregulating housing probably does make it cheaper to provide housing for homeless people, so fair enough. Houston isn't the only place with liberal gun laws, so I'm not convinced gun laws have anything to do with it though.
I tried looking up some statistics for a bit to check my intuitions in homelessness overall, but the statistics seem to be not very straightforward. For instance, the list on wikipedia for countries by rate of homelessness has the USA at 19.5 per 10.000 people and France at 48.7, however the table also a column called 'unsheltered per 10.000' and there USA scores 12, whereas France scores 4.5. So I have no clue whether France or the USA has more people living on the street now based on these statistics. I've never been in the USA personally, but I have been to lots of places in Europe, including non-touristy bits and not so nice parts of various towns and I've never seen a fent zombie or anything like that and I've never been harassed by a homeless person beyond obnoxious begging and I do know various Europeans who were shocked at the amount of (visible) homelessness when traveling to the USA. Whether there are more or less of them I do not know, but homeless people anecdotally sure seem to cause more problems and be more visible in the USA, despite the USA's liberal gun laws. I don't know that much about housing regulation in the USA, but I certainly would not describe housing in my own country of the Netherlands as deregulated.
It depends. Generally in cities in blue states residential construction is illegal and only happens by special exemption.
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The places in the US with high rates of homelessness (e.g. San Francisco) are places with restrictive gun laws and restrictive housing and building regulations. The places with liberal gun laws and liberal housing regulations have low rates of homelessness. It's very consistent.
Houston's housing first policies are good, but they only work because the baseline rate of homelessness is already extremely low. This is mostly due to cheap housing. When the lowest tiers of housing are so affordable that someone with drug and mental health problems can afford to live there, you end up with far fewer homeless people. You also avoid negative feedback loops where, once someone becomes homeless, their lives tend to spiral and their issues get worse. When housing is attainable for even the lowest income people, it provides a sort of "ladder" people can climb to get their lives in order.
Also, just to clarify, I am not arguing that liberal gun laws reduce homelessness. I'm arguing they make homeless people far less likely to hassle or assault people because you never know who's packing heat. For example, you will see some homeless people on public transit in Houston, but I have literally never seen one approach other riders to ask for money, make a bunch of noise, or threaten anyone, all of which are common behaviors in other cities.
You never answered my question about what specifically liberal gun laws are doing to facilitate this state of affairs. Is there even a single recorded case of a transit rider firing a gun at a homeless person in Houston? If there is, do you believe that this would be the correct course of action for a gun-carrying rider on a bus? (Homeless guy asks me for money, I quick-draw my gun and start blasting, and hope none of the bullets hit anybody else on the bus?) I’m as anti-homeless as anybody on this website — I’ve argued that they’re an inherently parasitic class with essentially zero legal rights, and that an appropriate course of action might be to round them all up into something like concentration camps — but this strikes even me as a dangerous and wildly irresponsible overreaction.
I maintain that you continue to posit causal relationships between different things which are, in reality, only correlated.
It should not be legal to shoot someone on the subway except to defend against deadly force. But the deterrent effect of guns extends beyond these situations. People have broad incentives to respect others' boundaries when it's unclear who has a gun and under what circumstances they might be willing to use it. I never carry a gun, but I look like I could be carrying one, and that by itself changes the way people treat me and others in public.
I can't conclusively prove causation, but the observable correlations are so strong it should at least give you pause to consider they might be causal.
If everyone is aware that firing a gun on the subway is illegal and will result in serious prison time, and therefore anyone carrying a gun is extremely unlikely to use it in that circumstance, then I’m not sure what would actually be causing the deterrent effect. Leave aside that the average bum is not even in a clear enough state of mind to seriously consider who might have a gun; even if the bum is thinking in that way, I would assume he’d also recognize the likelihood of an otherwise-law-abiding citizen would fire his gun on the subway as very low, and therefore not weight it significantly in any cost-benefit consideration.
The correlations you’re observing are simply an artifact both things being true under Republican government. As @hydroacetylene notes, Republican-run areas tend to give their police and prosecutors far greater leeway to punish vagrancy, and these areas also independently tend to support expansive gun rights. The former policy has a lot to do with curbing the behavior of bums, whereas I believe that the latter policy has very little effect.
A jury decides self-defense cases. If you can convince even one person out of eight that you credibly feared for your life or the life of another, you are not guilty.
Even a very addled person can understand "Lots of people around here have guns and there's no way to tell who. I had better not cause trouble (like swinging a makeshift halberd at people) or I might get shot."
Observably, this is what we see. The homeless objectively behave differently in places with guns versus places without.
Houston's government is entirely run by Democrats and vagrancy is not punished. The police force is smaller and less active than most comparable cities. Houston's police force is 5,300 (pop. 2.3 million) versus 11,000 in Chicago (pop. 2.6 million).
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I think you're vastly overestimating the consideration the average aggressor gives to the "but they will go to prison if they attack me" thing.
Being intimidating works because most people will not cold-bloodedly evaluate the costs and benefits of you actually using your offensive capability.
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It is probably true that legal concealed carry does little to curb the behavior of psychotic homeless(although it probably does do a little). What it probably does have a major effect on is mugging- muggings are a far smaller percentage of total crime in high crime red areas. These criminals are rational, but dumb.
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Please explain to me how expanding civilian gun ownership is going to significantly improve the issues OP is talking about. Are you proposing that we simply let people fire a gun at homeless people who start acting erratic on the subway? Does this state of affairs strike you as more safe for bystanders than the status quo is?
Similarly, “deregulating housing” doesn’t begin to engage with the question of what happens when insane homeless junkies move into an apartment complex, tear through the walls to strip the metal piping and the electrical wiring, and sell those things on the black market to buy more drugs — something which has occurred time and time again when serious efforts to provide homeless with housing have been enacted.
An expansion of liberalism means an ever-growing list of “human rights” for homeless to exploit — ever more legal hoops for police and social services to jump through in order to be able to take any serious action against a class of individuals who are inherently exploitative of those “rights”.
There's this point I've made before: given a constant source of dangerous people who commit loadsacrime which sometimes results in fatalities, and a lack of effective official countermeasures, the death rate is static regardless of how lethal each incident is (at least for a given ratio of deaths between perpetrator and victim; see below). This is because the dangerous people will keep committing crimes until killed by one of them going wrong, so raising the death rate per incident by a given ratio lowers the equilibrium number of these people in circulation and thus lowers the rate of incidents by the same ratio. So as a third-best solution (the first-best being removing the source of these people, in this case largely "meth", and the second-best being fixing your justice system so there are other ways of removing these people from circulation), you want to:
make the deaths hit the perpetrators as much as possible (in particular, make sure that the most lethal easily-constructed weapons are legal, because the dangerous people will probably have them anyway but law-abiding citizens won't if they're illegal), as this lowers the death rate via lowering the number of kills each dangerous person gets before dying;
jack up the death rate per incident as high as possible, because this won't affect the death rate per unit time but will lower the rate of incidents (and nonlethal crime still sucks).
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Cheaper housing does reduce homelessness, but it probably disproportionately gets the individuals who are least problematic off the streets.
The mechanism here is one that tends not to occur to functioning upper-middle class people; poor households are incentivized to get the number of contributing adults into a household which fit in it. The more dear housing is, the stronger the incentive. When you already have a roommate sleeping on the couch your cousin who’s down on his luck cannot just sleep their instead. But in areas with cheaper housing, it’s not worth it to let someone sleep on your couch. So your down on his luck cousin gets it instead.
Right, I have no problem in theory with policies that would make housing more plentiful and affordable. I just don’t think it would have any tangible effect on the “chronic homeless”, whose problems go far beyond a simple lack of funds.
I am focused on empirical evidence rather than theory. Houston, with no zoning and few impediments to building housing, has a homelessness rate of around 30 people per 100k residents. Canada as a whole has an average homelessness rate of at least 90 per 100k residents. Vancouver appears to be something like 728 per 100k with 4,821 homeless and a population of 662k.
Why are you assuming that these things are causatively-related? It’s well-know that other states literally send their homeless people to more homeless-tolerant states like California, giving homeless individuals one-way Greyhound tickets to various destinations on the West Coast. I’m also betting that police in Houston are far less indulgent toward the homeless and the drug-addicted, and far more willing to use forceful means to deter and harass them, than Californian and Canadian police are. Houston also has far less effective public transit than large West Coast cities do, making them less favorable places for homeless people to live.
I want to be careful to make sure that you and I are both talking about the same thing when we use the word “homeless”. There are essentially two mostly-distinct populations both referred to by that term. There are individuals who are genuinely down on their luck, struggling financially and unable (for whatever reason) to rely on the assistance of others for long-term housing. These people often live in their cars or couch-surf, or they stay temporarily in homeless shelters. Obviously housing being cheaper will reduce the number of these individuals, and I’ve no doubt that the statistics you’re pointing to are related to that.
The homeless population I and the OP are talking about are an entirely distinct class of people. (Some of them started out in the first class and, through contact with the chronic homeless or as a way to self-medicate depression or trauma, got addicted to drugs, leading them to transition into the second class, but they’re nowhere near as common as the popular narrative makes them sound.) The “chronic homeless” — what I simply call “bums” — are not going to be able to access and maintain housing even if it’s substantially cheaper than it is currently. They suffer from some combination of severe mental illness, drug addiction, criminal background, and personality disorders. They end up on the streets even if homeless shelters are available, because they are unwilling or unable to comply with the rules shelters put in place. As I noted, if they are given a place to live of their own, they tend to irreparably damage said housing, due to intentional actions or simply profound neglect and disorder. I don’t know how different Houston’s number of bums is than California’s bums, but whatever difference there is is probably because of the policy differences I noted in my first paragraph, and not because of “zoning regulations”.
In DFW you have plenty of bums- generally less threatening bums but bums nonetheless- in Dallas county, but in tarrant county(Fort Worth) you have very few. The judges and prosecutors in tarrant county are all republicans; cops know this and make more arrests and are more willing to use force. In Dallas county judges are almost all democrats(and there are fewer bums in the areas under Republican circuits), and so bums are often ignored when they do minor crimes, because city of Dallas police know there’s no point.
The Republican Party runs campaigns on the difference in public safety between the two counties. They’re right next to each other.
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Canadians define themselves as a society, that is more civilized, more progressive, more better than USA. I don't think this is going a popular proposition amongst the majority of citizens, unlike dealing with the homeless in one way or another.
Vancouver desperately needs more of this, but not to get rid of homelessness, just to make the city more affordable, which will tackle homelessness to an extent. However my argument is that creating more housing isn't enough. There should be more incentives for people to not go homeless. By carrot or by stick. Would I prefer carrot? Yes, I'm enjoying my carrots already. Some people just need a stick, don't you agree?
I don't see how "you can carry a weapon" would come off as significantly less civilized to Canadians than "police can beat you up because they deem you a socially acceptable target (and socially acceptable targets include the homeless)".
To me the difference is imminently obvious:
The catch is that the nuiscance stage is only the beginning of backsliding. Police has the unique opportunity to stop the freefall into the nightmare stage. You think about dealing with the nightmare stage, where crime is through the roof and you need to defend yourself, I think about how we can prevent it.
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We just came off of two years of police being allowed and encouraged to mace grandmas for not wearing masks at the beach. Do you really not see how that works? And isn't the entire leftist theory about the police that they are "descended from slave-catchers" and only exist to oppress acceptable targets?
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Because carrying a weapon is done by an individual -- i.e. those civilization are intended to keep down -- and the police beating up people is done by the authorities -- i.e. representatives of civilization.
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Repealing the ALR- you know, the thing that'd solve the problem more or less immediately- is coup-complete for the same reason dealing with the homeless is: it's what the average Vancouverite (and Victorian) votes for.
It's not popular amongst the majority of Vancouverites, who vote to have more homeless on the streets because [reasons]. Once you leave the city, the viewpoints tend to become a bit more realistic.
If I were a Tzar of BC, and had a save file to roll it all back when Vancouverites inevitably try to kill me, all of the zoning laws would go. There would be two zones: "mixed use" and "industrial", the minute details I'll figure out as we go.
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