… at the same moment, California guv tells all state municipalities to get going on the removal of all homeless encampments, and the PM of GB announces the country’s becoming an “island of strangers,” and needs new severe crackdowns on immigration.
Civic life, national life – What do these mean? We can toss that around all day, but at the end of the day, big majorities of people living in most countries/regions want a successfully assimilated population of people who don’t inject in the street.
May 13th, 2025 at 7:27AM
Where do homeless people go?
The Globe profiled a family living in a tent in a Rhode Island state park. the father is working full time.
A member of my church broke her leg and couldn’t work. She went from being a homeowner to trying to get on a list for a low income apartment.
We can address this by sweeping them out of sight: driven to another town, or put into a camp, or dropped into the ocean or down a mineshaft.
Or we could build affordable housing and create a healthcare system like the ones in another peer nations.
May 13th, 2025 at 7:41AM
Newsom’s model recognizes the varied categories of homeless (criminal, insane, addicted, down on their luck employed or semi-employed people), and offers money for different categories of response/shelter. Those with active warrants/criminal behavior go to detention centers or are put on monitored probation; insane people go to mental hospitals; addicts go to residential treatment centers; down on their luck employed or employables work closely with social workers/family/friends/concerned community members to find subsidized housing or other forms of temporary shelter until they are able to fend for themselves. There are other categories of homeless (runaway teens, etc etc), and all must be accounted for and responded to pragmatically. Huge amounts of money circulate around this problem, but, until the Supreme Court ruling, municipalities weren’t able to spend it in a way that actually gave citizens back their streets.
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A recent study of 60,000 homeless people in Boston recorded 7,130 deaths over the 14-year study period. The average age of death was 53.7, decades earlier than the nation’s 2017 life expectancy of 78.8 years. The leading cause of death was drug overdose, which increased 9.35 percent annually, reflecting the track of the nation’s opioid epidemic, though rising more quickly than in the general population.
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SF’s political establishment decided years ago to give addicts the streets of their city on which to hang out for a few years before dying of an overdose. I think we can do better.
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Policy makers and residents largely embraced the exciting idea that people should be able to do whatever they want to do, including live in tent cities and have fun with drugs and make their own medical decisions, even if they are out of their mind sometimes. But then fentanyl arrived, and more and more people started dying in those tents…
May 13th, 2025 at 8:38AM
What mental hospitals?
What residential treatment centers?
What social workers? What subsidized housing?
When I worked in residential treatment, it cost the state the same it would send the client to private college. Who is footing that bill? Not the current federal government.
I don’t have all, or probably any of the answers. I’m pretty sure that except for private prisons(I’m sorry,”detention centers”), all the options above will be underfunded, undermanned and overwhelmed.
May 13th, 2025 at 9:55AM
Housing options, from what I’ve read, are similarly expensive/ineffectual.
What’s new is the will, even on the part of people like Newsom, to do something. We’ll see.
May 13th, 2025 at 10:57AM
UD is going MAGA!
May 13th, 2025 at 11:11AM
Rita: UD will take promising ideas where she finds them. Bernie Sanders has some. So do conservatives.
My take on guns (very much to the left of Bernie’s) ain’t very MAGA.
May 13th, 2025 at 11:16AM
Put another way, assimilation works both ways: let the current residents buy into the aspirations of the new arrivals, and let the new arrivals buy into the norms and institutions of their new country.
The mental health part is harder: what reformers learned about the way asylum staff treated patients led to closures of those institutions rather than contemplating kinder and more effective practices.
May 13th, 2025 at 11:33AM
There are no panacea. From what I’ve read, rapidly rehousing people leads to better outcomes and is efficient.
May 13th, 2025 at 12:24PM
Ha, I was joking. Maybe “no guns, no tents, no foreigners” is the next winning combination? Enforced re-normalization after a period of excessive iconoclasm. I could support this.
May 13th, 2025 at 4:29PM
Well, I’d go for very few guns outside of the police/army; no tents outside of campsites/parks; plenty of legal, law-abiding, foreigners. Not as snappy as your phrase!
May 14th, 2025 at 12:05AM
Fortunately we have some time to fine-tune your stump speech.