“There are many reasons a person could find themselves homeless, but severe mental illness is a major contributor. Last month, Esquire ran a first-person account of Patrick Fealey, an award-winning journalist who found himself unable to hold a job after he was diagnosed with Bipolar I disorder in 1997; after struggling for years, he became homeless in October 2023. While admitting that his particular cocktail of drugs is not ideal and negatively affects other parts of his body, Fealey writes that it also “enables me to function and has kept me alive for twenty-seven years.”
A 2019 meta analysis of 31 studies, encompassing nearly 52,000 homeless people in both developed and developing countries, found that more than 10 percent had schizophrenia or related disorders.
“While ensuring drug safety is essential,” Singer and Bloom write, “the REMS program has unintentionally created barriers that disproportionately affect individuals with severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia, further compounding the significant challenges they already face, including unemployment, substance abuse, heightened suicide risk and homelessness.””
“there’s the one homelessness problem experienced by the homeless themselves through a lack of housing. Then there’s the other homelessness problem experienced by the public generally through exposure to a bunch of vagrancy and disorderly behavior spilling out into streets because of that lack of homes.
San Francisco’s APEC cleanup did nothing to address the first homelessness problem, which is what the local homeless advocates are complaining about. The city simply moved some homeless people from one area of the city to another. Some have plausibly ended up inside homeless shelters or less visible spots on the street. But, the number of homeless people in the city remains as high as ever.
San Francisco did make some progress on the second homelessness problem by dismantling tent encampments, replacing people on the streets with flower boxes, and creating a heavily policed security cordon covering a few city blocks.
Even still, the city hardly “fixed” its second homelessness problem. It just shifted encampments and vagrant behavior away from the downtown.”
…
“San Francisco is one of the richest cities in the free world. Its residents shouldn’t have to choose between a degraded quality of life that comes with thousands of people living on the streets and an aggressive police state that keeps those thousands of homeless out of sight and out of mind.
Escaping that unhappy tradeoff would require the city, and the surrounding region, to radically liberalize housing construction.
That would bring housing prices down and bring a lot more people inside. That wouldn’t solve everyone’s problems, but it would mean a lot of dysfunctional behavior playing out in public will instead move behind closed doors.
A less overwhelmed San Francisco city government (and voluntary philanthropic actors) could also more judiciously deal with those remaining people that insist on pitching a tent in the park or smoking meth on the street.”
“In 2018, a federal court issued a consequential decision about homelessness in America: People without housing can’t be punished for sleeping or camping outside on public property if there are no adequate shelter alternatives available.
The Ninth Circuit’s decision, Martin v. Boise, said that punishing homeless people with no other place to go would violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Ever since, cities and states have struggled to comply with it, crafting convoluted policies like a new camping ban in Portland, Oregon that prohibits homeless camping during the hours of 8 am to 8 pm.
As municipal backlash to Martin grew, so has the nation’s homelessness crisis, especially in the nine Western states under the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction, where some 42 percent of the country’s homeless population now lives.
The Supreme Court declined to hear Martin in 2019. But they now could reconsider the decision. A petition was filed in late August concerning a similar case in Grants Pass, Oregon, a city of 38,000 people. In 2022, the Ninth Circuit decided it would be unconstitutional for Grants Pass to fine homeless people sleeping on public property if there was nowhere else for them to go. The city is challenging that decision.”
“California politicians have been unable to make meaningful headway on a deteriorating homelessness crisis, and the conflict has shifted to a new arena out of their control: courtrooms. A series of rulings in California and beyond has barred cities from clearing encampments even as mayors are contending with lawsuits that accuse them of failing to do so. Sacramento’s top prosecutor hit the city with such a complaint, and Los Angeles spent years in legal limbo after a judge ordered the city and county to shelter every person in a sprawling encampment.”
“Gov. Gavin Newsom is pressing the U.S. Supreme Court to review a controversial ruling that has prevented cities from clearing homeless encampments.
In a brief filed to the high court Friday, Newsom’s office warned a ruling invalidating anti-camping ordinances in Grants Pass, Ore. had “paralyzed” cities around California by imposing an “insurmountable roadblock” that effectively bars cities from moving people from parks and sidewalks.”
“If a property owner can’t properly vet tenants and potentially can’t evict them, then they aren’t going to invest in or rent out apartments. They certainly aren’t going to make repairs to houses lived in by non-paying tenants, which will make the housing stock less adequate. We need more housing, not less, and such edicts discourage housing investment.”