A tremendous amount of these homeless don't want to quit heroin. They don't want to live in shelters. They want to live in a tent and shoot heroin.
There is a heroin addict that lives on one street I use to walk to work. He can't have more than a few years to live, he's as broken as humans get. The street he lives on is littered with literally hundreds of his used needles across bus stops, gardens, yards, paths. He defecates on the street and in bags that he leaves around.
Letting people do this legally, which Seattle now de facto does, is not appropriate.
> A tremendous amount of these homeless don't want to quit heroin.
That’s sort of how addiction works. Drugs are a lot of fun and feel good for a long time and that lets you ignore negative consequences way past the point that someone not on drugs would make a change in their life.
People who are addicted to heroin would rather do heroin in a muddy ditch than be sober in a 5 star hotel.
I did a lot of club drugs in my 20s and knew a lot of addicts and alcoholics (although personally once I decided to quit everything around 30, I just stopped cold turkey with no problems), and although I personally avoided opiates I knew people who didn’t and had very hard lives as a consequence.
You are correct that most of them had hard lives to begin with. Happy people with strong support networks don’t tend to use heroin, I wouldn’t think.
> A tremendous amount of these homeless don't want to quit heroin.
Their addictions would be better managed if they lived anywhere but the street.
> They don't want to live in shelters.
They don't want to live in dry shelters.
> They want to live in a tent and shoot heroin.
No, they want to shoot heroin, and when given the option between tent and heroin, versus a dry shelter, they'll take the former.
That doesn't mean that they wouldn't prefer having a managed addiction, and not living on the streets. [1]
There are people with therapists, homes, loving families, and good jobs, that are also opiate addicts. They have a hard enough time breaking their addictions. In light of that, condemning someone living in a tent by the on-ramp for failing to just drop their addiction, so they can live in a shelter is lunacy.
[1] Yes, there is a small percentage of the homeless population that can't reasonably be housed, period, regardless of whether their addictions are managed. I'm not talking about them - I'm talking about everyone else.
Ultimately I don't care about blame or condemnation, it's irrelevant. What I care about is the state doing it's job and not letting anyone, for any reason, egregiously pollute and destroy our shared living environments. As far as fundamental solutions, they can and should try many things, as a first order condition, this must be forcibly prohibited.
Storing your addicted+homeless population in a prison is not only inhumane, it's not effective. And just moves the costs elsewhere. (And often increases them, since incarcerating someone is not cheap. Where will this money come from?) The problem has been swept under a rug, not actually solved.
There are two conflicting claims floating around in this thread:
> "And just moves the costs elsewhere" / "the good old 'bus them out of town, let them be someone else's problem' non-solution."
And
> "The King County homeless census[1] found the overwhelming majority of homeless in the area were living in the area before becoming homeless."
It's pretty obvious both aren't true. Either Seattle's homeless are produced primarily by Seattle, or Seattle's homeless supply is from other cities. If the homeless are coming from other cities, that supports the idea that Seattle is making itself attractive to the nation's homeless (and should stop doing that.) If Seattle's homeless are predominately from Seattle, not other cities, then Seattle should seek to emulate cities that produce fewer homeless.
Personally I believe the later theory is false. I don't believe that most of the homeless in Seattle are originally from Seattle. However many in Seattle buy into that narrative. I think Seattle is filled with homeless because other cities kick them out and Seattle welcomes them with open arms.
The problem is homeless are ruining my city and negatively impacting my day to day life. How is getting them away from here somewhere else not effective at literally solving my only problem with them?
Well, in some sense what I want doesn't matter. I'd like us as a join group to have some hypotheticals and test them empirically.
But in a more direct sense, I think this all requires the government to take some sort of ownership over these people. That is to say, you are not free to live on the streets. Depending on your state (e.g. down on luck, or ill, or addicted), the treatment is different. We may have more holding centers for the government to keep people against their will who otherwise would use heroin and live on our streets. We could have some mechanism for them to go up for 'parole' so to speak, every 6-12 months. Otherwise they are treated humanely and given make-work type projects (e.g. farming or wood-working), or the opportunity to learn, should they take it.
Of course if they are truly severely mentally ill, they will just be taken care of by the government.
But none of this starts until we all agree that it is, ultimately, illegal to abuse drugs, sleep, and shit, on the streets of a city. Once we can agree on that, we can explore a entire solution set closed off from us.
Unfortunately, the 9th circuit doesn't... share my views.
I'd prefer you didn't impose uncharitable inferences on what I said, and use it to imply I'm maligned. If you feel I'm unclear, or think what I said may propose something negative, feel free to politely ask for clarification.
The fundamental reason I suggested that is humans, particularly the type who suffer from mental illness or lack the ability to care for themselves, to the extent they end up destitute and addicted living in filth and on the sidewalk, require some sort of structure imposed on them. In the past that was done by the family, in our current world many of these family bonds are, sadly, falling apart.
Putting people in an asylum, only to sit around on a bed all day and take copious amounts of anti-psychotics is a miserable existence. Having the opportunity, if one chooses, to engage in meaningful work, can provide structure and meaning to life.
I'd prefer to think of it more as a therapeutic sort of work program, where those under conservatorship by the state learn how to live with structure, learn what it means to make something, and could even be compensated for their efforts.
In my mind at least, I am contrasting the reward of a hard days work tending to, say, an organic vegetable garden, with the mundane horror of sitting on a bed in between distributions of anti-psychotic medicine.
I hope my clarification gives you more context to realize I'm not suggesting slavery.
> That doesn't mean that they wouldn't prefer having a managed addiction, and not living on the streets.
Why would it matter what they prefer? The homeless person in the parent post is clearly breaking multiple laws, is a public nuisance and a health hazard. We can optimize society so that people like that are happy or we can optimize society for people who aren't a constant burden on others. There should be intense societal pressure to not do these things. Have you been to Seattle or SF lately? Their homeless problem is out of control compared to places like New York that took a more aggressive and productive stance toward dealing with the homeless.
Many, not all but many, of the addicts I've seen seem to genuinely no longer have agency anymore. Their addiction has totally taken over their life. The person you describe will likely be dead in a few years. The state stepping in and taking control, at least for a short time, could potentially save them. Instead, I think we've over indexed on assuming that if we put enough opportunities in front of people like that they'll volunteer themselves into getting clean. I don't think that's true.
What he is doing is not legal at all. He's littering. He's defecating in public. He's tresspassing presumably in some instances. He's perhaps doing these drugs in public. All of these things can get him in trouble if a cop cited him.
However, the one thing that won't get him in trouble is just having heroin in his pocket. All the other problems you list are still illegal.
In Seattle the police have stopped arresting for public defecation, as the city won't prosecute it anymore, as they don't wish to give the homeless a criminal record. The police don't arrest for using drugs in public, as the city won't prosecute if it's a small amount. The police won't arrest for minor trespassing, they'll just ask them to move along, as the city has stopped prosecuting homeless for small indiscretions, and just release them the same day. I recently had a homeless person trespassing near my home, using drugs openly, and the real tough part of this was he was manically cackling and yelling late at night, so that we couldn't sleep. We called the police, and they just told him to go do it somewhere else.
It's effectively legal to trespass, scream, and use drugs openly in Seattle.
Now, in addition to the above, if someone has illicit narcotics, the police won't arrest them.
This has become a situation where our police, who want to do their job, are being effectively restricted.
Shelters aren't meaningful places to exist in. They generally are just a big hall filled to the brim with bunk beds. All you can do there is sleep, nothing else. The people inside shelters are still lacking a home.
There is a heroin addict that lives on one street I use to walk to work. He can't have more than a few years to live, he's as broken as humans get. The street he lives on is littered with literally hundreds of his used needles across bus stops, gardens, yards, paths. He defecates on the street and in bags that he leaves around.
Letting people do this legally, which Seattle now de facto does, is not appropriate.