As someone who has, on occasion, been homeless (and being 195 cm and 125 kg and sleeping in a '99 Camry is not an experience I can recommend) and also only having read the first section, I have a feeling that there may very well be different "classes" (?) of homeless.
I will admit that I was fortunate enough to not be faced with the prospect, and fair warning, this is basically just "gut feeling" levels of rigor, but I simply feel that there is likely a distinction to be made between "people who are currently homeless because they lost their housing due to recent misfortune or price increases" and "people who are currently homeless and shoot drugs and defecate on the sidewalk". To call back a few weeks, just describing all of these people as "homeless" strikes me as akin to (and likely as effective for "solving the problem") as calling everyone from the person with mild Aspergers and the truly severely 24/7 care require disabled person with autism, "Autistic".
"Homelessness is a spectrum", etc.
And perhaps I am absolutely, completely wrong, and I might well have also ended up using the sidewalk as a restroom and doing hard drugs if it had gone on longer than it did. I'm also probably significantly more able to quickly find *some* job doing *something* that pays decently than your average homeless person, and thus that may also color my views on the topic.
I don't know, and hell, maybe you even address all of this in the, uh, 90% of the article I haven't actually read yet, but it seems as though simply trying to treat this as a monolithic problem isn't going to actually be effective.
I dunno. I understand that you disagree with Shellenberger about the "drugs and mental illness" driving factor versus housing costs, but... why couldn't it be *both* in this case?
That is to say, yes, the general levels of homelessness in SF may well be primarily driven by housing prices. But perhaps the thing that makes SF seem so particularly bad is the proportion of the homeless population there with a serious addiction and / or mental health issue. (Epistemological status: Total ass-pull. I have no research or numbers to back any of that up, I'm basically just brainstorming at this point.)
As someone who has, on occasion, been homeless (and being 195 cm and 125 kg and sleeping in a '99 Camry is not an experience I can recommend) and also only having read the first section, I have a feeling that there may very well be different "classes" (?) of homeless.
I will admit that I was fortunate enough to not be faced with the prospect, and fair warning, this is basically just "gut feeling" levels of rigor, but I simply feel that there is likely a distinction to be made between "people who are currently homeless because they lost their housing due to recent misfortune or price increases" and "people who are currently homeless and shoot drugs and defecate on the sidewalk". To call back a few weeks, just describing all of these people as "homeless" strikes me as akin to (and likely as effective for "solving the problem") as calling everyone from the person with mild Aspergers and the truly severely 24/7 care require disabled person with autism, "Autistic".
"Homelessness is a spectrum", etc.
And perhaps I am absolutely, completely wrong, and I might well have also ended up using the sidewalk as a restroom and doing hard drugs if it had gone on longer than it did. I'm also probably significantly more able to quickly find *some* job doing *something* that pays decently than your average homeless person, and thus that may also color my views on the topic.
I don't know, and hell, maybe you even address all of this in the, uh, 90% of the article I haven't actually read yet, but it seems as though simply trying to treat this as a monolithic problem isn't going to actually be effective.
I dunno. I understand that you disagree with Shellenberger about the "drugs and mental illness" driving factor versus housing costs, but... why couldn't it be *both* in this case?
That is to say, yes, the general levels of homelessness in SF may well be primarily driven by housing prices. But perhaps the thing that makes SF seem so particularly bad is the proportion of the homeless population there with a serious addiction and / or mental health issue. (Epistemological status: Total ass-pull. I have no research or numbers to back any of that up, I'm basically just brainstorming at this point.)