Thursday Links - Housing

The recent essay in Deep Left Analysis about housing stated that the housing problem is a mental health problem. I wish he were wrong. He's not completely wrong.

 But Stephen Eide at City Journal says mental health is a drug problem, either fentanyl or marijuana, depending on region. I wish he were wrong too.  He's not completely wrong.  Marijuana and the Mental Ill  "In recent years, countless family memoirs and nonfiction accounts of mental illness have extensively chronicled the descent into madness. This literature often highlights marijuana more than any other intoxicating substance. Pot plays a notable role in several recent book-length treatments of mental illness, including Randye Kaye’s Ben Behind His Voices (2011), Patrick and Henry Cockburn’s Henry’s Demons (2011), Paul Gionfriddo’s Losing Tim (2014), Mindy Greiling’s Fix What You Can (2020), Miriam Feldman’s He Came in With It (2020), Meg Kissinger’s While You Were Out (2023), and Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds (2023)."

The main family mental health organisation, NAMI, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, used to be very strong on tying drug reduction or abstinence into treatment. But even the professionals shy away from saying it. Families would despair, because the hospital clinicians would have a dozen reasons for not wanting to get involved in drug treatment. We aren't funded for that. (True) Mental health law explicitly excludes forced mental health hospitalisation for drugs. (True) If we do that the drug agencies will just drop all their problems here... People lose skills and ambition in the hospital...You can't get sobriety and med compliance without stable housing...(True. True. True.) Here we are back at the beginning again.

I have mixed opinions on conditional discharge as it was a large part of my job for years, navigating conditional treatment among the hodgepodge of laws, some clear, some not, the opinions of those on the front lines, the lack of resources, the rights of the patients vs the rights of everyone else, and the intrusions of pinheads. That’s pretty much my view of all mandated regulation. You scoop up the low-hanging fruit and most egregious injustices at the first pass, and it is almost always a good thing. Which unfortunately encourages people to think that the next batch of regulations is going to create a similar improvement.

 The YIMBY City Planner says it's three housing problems, regionally.

 Wouldn't you figure Trump would be on the side of landlords?  I don't think he has a solid set of principles beyond "This would be good for America, and nobody can make a better deal than me."