You may remember my links on the housing problem from 10 days ago. I hope you remember. It was only ten days ago. I also recently linked to my old post on Sex Offender Registries.
City Journal has weighed in. (Paywall, but a few paragraphs will give you enough to grasp the idea, though not have it proven to you.) CJ was one of the links suggesting it was a drug problem. This is unfortunately not necessarily a contradiction. A lot of my clients during my career had impulse-control problems of all sorts, which meant no one wanted them in their house or their apartment building, or their neighborhood or even the shelter. Shelters that accept families don't want anything to do with sex offenders.
Again, trust no one who tells you that homelessness could be easily addressed. I should say, trust them as good people who are likely generous, kind, and compassionate - but not their infuriated (or despairing) sense that this would all be fixed if this rich country would stop being so prejudiced. A friend at Sunday school said something like that a couple of weeks ago. Price of a fellow, smart, balanced. Their hearts go out in pain for those they see. It's what they don't see that is the problem.
4 comments:
OK, I was _not_ expected numbers like that for relative rates of serious criminal activity. I'd have guessed factors of 10, not of 100.
Not a sex-offender story, more on the intractable 'nobody wants them' issue:
3 years out of undergrad, I was living in a shared half-of-a-duplex with several other bachelors. A friend of the group stumbled upon one of our former engineering classmates, a steady 4.0 top of the class fellow who had mysteriously dropped out. He was at this point living on the streets in the downtown. Friend's parents (he lived at home) wouldn't allow classmate to be taken in, so friend proceeded to call around to anyone he considered empathetic and likely to have a guest-room. We were the gullible ones.
Classmate lived on snickers bars and cold canned beef stew. Would not participate in our shared group meals. Stayed mostly in his room and shouted back at the voices. Our landlord next door was soon pressing us hard on the terms of our lease about guests.
Our savior was a small local social service charity funded mostly then by private donations, contributions from other charities such as office and phone, and small local grants. The founder, faced with intractable problems, thought "if someone homeless COULD hold a job and apply for an apartment, what is the biggest hurdle between between 'right now' and doing so.
A Biggest hurdle was that back then before cell-phones one couldn't effectively apply for many jobs without a mailing address and a phone. So their office became the mailing address, and they'd take messages and allow you to return-calls on their phones.
Next biggest was that landlords wouldn't rent without a security-deposit, first-month's rent, and (in urban-land) they found that landlords wouldn't let you move in unless you arrived on move-in-day with at least basic furniture such as bed, linens, comfy-chair or sofa, and kitchen utensils. So they partnered with another charity that could provide the 'stuff', a van, and moving help, and themselves provided the security deposit.
We managed to get our classmate to appear normal-enough-for-long-enough that they got him set up, and in doing so we must have been mean-enough to secure his enmity for life, as we never heard back from him after that.
Similar time, same city, the big century-old Christian homeless shelter found the formerly industrial riverfront location of their shelter changing into a nightlife zone, and new neighbors not appreciating the presence of the shelter clientele. In fact, the new neighbors banded together to buy the shelter building for enough money that the shelter could build a whole purpose-built social-service campus elsewhere in the city in a still-run-down area next to the county welfare offices. My housemates would volunteer to re-fill the shampoo and body-wash dispensers in the many showers and sort the donated clothing by size.
I read a rather persuasive article on SubStack (but have lost the link) that pretty conclusively showed if you factor out all the other variables, the one with the greatest correlation to homelessness is cost of housing. Santa Monica has an unhoused population crisis in a way Huston or Pensacola do not, even though based on all the factors you might suppose would cause homeless people to flock to them you would think they would be roughly equal. I think Douglas2's story supplies some good examples of why. High housing costs are driven by lack of housing supply, which is indicative of small numbers of marginal housing units, landlords with lots of leverage, and high initial entry costs for tenants. This was not an attempt to explain why a person might become unhoused but more along the lines of once they enter that situation they can wind up staying there, and why 'housing first' does more to alleviate homelessness than attempts to deal with 'root causes'.
Add to this the pro-squatter sentiment of some city governments, and you have a recipe for a case (I HOPE this is purely theoretical) where a kid is sent to deliver something next door--only to be met with a registered kid-fiddler who took over the place while the owner(s) was/were away.
Post a Comment