
An Addiction Crisis Disguised as a Housing Crisis - ltbarcly3
https://www.city-journal.org/opiods-homelessness-west-coast
======
quakingaspen
While this article alleges that addiction is the root cause of homelessness,
it makes no effort to prove that claim. That there is correlation between the
two is clear, but claiming that addiction is the root cause of homelessness of
the west coast is just fear-mongering.

Determining root cause is important to finding the right solution. Further
cracking down on homeless people will just transfer them from the streets to
jails, where they will cost the taxpayers exorbitant amounts of money (and if
they're in a private prison, create profit for private interests), while
failing to get people back on their feet when they are eventually let go.

> no city on the West Coast has a solution for homeless opioid addicts

While Utah isn't technically the West coast, how does the author's claim hold
up in the face of the resounding success of their efforts to reduce chronic
homelessness (down 91% in a decade while saving the government 50%)? Does this
proven solution fit with his root cause model?

See: [https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-
chroni...](https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic-
homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how)

~~~
Gimpei
Not saying I disagree with you, but west coast cities do have temperate
climates that I would think attract more of the chronically homeless. I'd much
rather live on the street in LA in the winter than SLC.

~~~
lazyasciiart
They also have booming economies. People move to successful big cities for
work, where they have no existing safety net. Then they can't find a job fast
enough, or get sick, or get divorced and start drinking, and become homeless.
These are the vast majority of "not from here" homeless people in Seattle. The
chronically homeless tend to be old people in pretty bad shape who don't move
cities for the weather. So is the answer that people born in economically
ruined rural areas should be locked out of big cities? Only allowed to stay
there so long as they have enough money? People arguing you shouldn't be able
to get benefits somewhere you're not "from" are arguing for a system that
entrenches the political and economic divide between rural and urban
Americans.

------
seltzered_
I think the question to ask is what created the opioid problem in the first
place - I tend to think it's lack of regulation in the pharma space.

I've criticised the author (Chris Rufo, associated with the conservative and
intelligent design group Discovery Institute) in his earlier pieces (see
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/acwqng/podcast_s...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/acwqng/podcast_seattles_homeless_challenge/edngsrn/)
) where he used seemingly incomplete estimates on the funding used in homeless
initiatives and suggesting unproven solutions (large tents, sanitariums).

I'm not denying the homeless and drug problems in Seattle. I live in the same
neighborhoods where I've seen people shoot up in starbucks bathrooms and on
the street, RV camps of bicycle chop shops and filth. The King County
complaint Rufo links to ( [https://www.krcomplexlit.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/01/King...](https://www.krcomplexlit.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/01/King-County-Complaint-1-010518-1.pdf) ) arguably means
the local government is trying to take that first step in recognizing
"addiction is the common denominator for most of the homeless", right?

~~~
scarface74
And if you tightly regulate the “pharma space” and those drugs are harder to
get, the same addicts will just find a substitute drug. The “War on Drugs” has
been an abysmal failure.

If you lock up the users, you’re just spending more money housing non violent
offenders. If you lock up the sellers, someone else will take their place.
Homeless drug addicts don’t fear jail, how could it be any worse than life on
the street addicted to drugs?

I have no idea what the answer is, but I suspect it is a better social safety
net where people think they have a fair shot in society where they don’t view
drugs as an escape or have the mindset of having nothing to lose. I honestly
haven’t thought about solutions that deeply.

~~~
mulmen
We are absolutely feeling the pain of a lack of social safety nets for all
kinds of problems.

Unpopular opinion: I’m ok putting non-violent people in jail when they break
the law. We need reform in the jails and prisons, not more lenient sentencing.

And because I’m sure it needs to be clarified, not every law breaker needs to
go to jail immediately.

~~~
iamnothere
Why is jail necessarily the best answer? Fines and restitution, community
service, court mandated counseling, "night jail" (must report to jail after
work) and other tools would work better for preventing and correcting the
harms of many (if not most?) types of nonviolent crime. Traditional jailing
creates all kinds of assorted harms that actively prevent rehabilitation and
which probably don't provide much deterrence.

Your suggestion of reform is indeed necessary, but some of the things I
suggested above would fall outside of what most people would consider "jail."
We are stuck on this singular "solution", and why? It doesn't seem to be very
effective.

~~~
mulmen
I agree with you so I should clarify what I mean by “jail”. The reform aspect
is absolutely crucial and I am not advocating for simply locking people up as
we do today. When I say “jail” I should probably say something like “adequate
social safety nets supported by state mandated rehabilitation” but the
marketing needs work.

------
wutbrodo
I don't think it's "disguised" as a housing crisis: dishonest advocates took
advantage of superficial similarities between the housing cost crisis to claim
that homelessness was driven by it. I don't think most people serious about
understanding the homelessness issue instead of exploiting it for their pet
cause think that the housing crisis is a primary driving factor (though I'd be
surprised if it wasn't contributing)

------
hackermailman
From my anecdotal experience living in an area filled with fentanyl shooting
drug addicts I've noticed they generally are substance abusers with other
drugs, such as meth or heavy drinking, ilegally procured prescription pills,
cocaine etc., they have groups of fellow substance abusers they meet with
daily to combine resources and when the money runs out switch to other drugs
that are cheaper to buy like bags of heroin to snort which they quickly get
hooked on and then I would see them on the street shooting up.

Another question is why do some countries not even have a drug taking culture
in the first place. Lot's of places I've been to where the population isn't
interested in any drug use despite it being decriminalized or readily
available.

~~~
maxxxxx
Coming from Germany I found it interesting how much the US culture depends on
ingesting substances to make you feel better. Be it painkillers or “superfood”
or other things. That makes the US really vulnerable to all kinds of
addictions. As a kid I remember only a few occasions where I took any kind of
medicine but today’s kids know a ton about all kinds of drugs and it seems
pretty standard to take some.

~~~
baxtr
Hmm, makes me wonder if it is in any way related to the somewhat “lost”
cooking culture in the states. My roommate in the States didn’t even know how
to cook tea or how to boil an egg. And I am really not kidding. Might be a
crazy theory but maybe...

~~~
NotSammyHagar
Who can't make tea? Or boil an egg. That's a terrible kind of exceptionalism.
I've never seen that in the us.

------
diogenescynic
I have been saying this for a while and the activists in San Francisco get so
offended. 90% of the people on the street in the Bay Area are on meth or
heroin. Their addiction is the bigger issue than housing affordability. The
reason so many homeless have come to California lately is that California
cities give cash handouts almost immediately. We are absolutely being taken
advantage of and really we are making the problem worse.

------
jlg23
The article points out a correlation between "being addicted" and "being
homeless" but does not provide _any_ evidence that there also is a causation.

With the same evidence one could write an article that says "increasing prices
drive out the most vulnerable first".

------
gatvol
Unclear to me if they're homeless because of addiction, or became addicted
after becoming homeless. This distinction would seem crucial to me.

~~~
ltbarcly3
Almost everyone has some kind of support network, whether it's extended family
or friends, that would offer a spare bed or a couch. Sure, they won't let you
stay forever, but it will keep you off the street until you can get yourself
together.

People who are living on the street, for the most part, have burned through
all the support their family and friends are willing to give. Their addiction
or mental illness (or combination) have resulted in their support network
turning their back on them. Sure, there are exceptions, but this is true of a
significant majority of people living on the street (this is easy to verify if
you search for studies of people living on the street and addiction/mental
illness).

It's not a coincidence that a large majority of people living on the street
are addicted to drugs or suffering from mental illness (and in fact that the
majority are suffering from both or self medicating with street drugs).

If you are homeless, but you have no mental illness and no addiction problem
there are so many people and services standing by to help. The homelessness
crisis is almost entirely a mental health crisis. People aren't living on the
street because they can't find a job or affordable housing. Look at
undocumented immigrants, they somehow find jobs and housing despite prejudice,
language issues and low wages, and still find ways to send money home despite
being completely ineligible for public assistance. If millions of people who
are still learning the language can find housing and work and save money, then
the otherwise physically healthy people living on the street can't be
explained by 'income inequality' or 'housing prices', and in fact studies show
that addiction and major mental health issues are nearly universal for people
living on the street.

~~~
tptacek
Lots of people don't have support networks of people who will lend them
housing. Be very careful with the presumption that anyone on the street must
have burned through a support network.

~~~
DataWorker
Exactly. And for those fortunate enough to have one, it is possible that the
entire support network is also homeless, or in prison, or in another country,
currently in rehab or a nursing home, or some mix of these.

------
chiefalchemist
This article aside, my general understanding has been homelessness is very
often a symptom of mental health issue. Yes, there are people (read: families)
who would obviously prefer not to be homeless. But many others are there
because individual rights / protections are such that we can not force them to
do otherwise.

------
epistasis
> If this figure holds constant throughout the West Coast, then at least
> 11,000 homeless opioid addicts live in Washington, 7,000 live in Oregon, and
> 65,000 live in California (concentrated mostly in San Francisco and Los
> Angeles)

This is a pretty silly assumption to make when the data for San Francisco and
Los Angeles show different, where less than a third of the homeless is
addicted.

And given how the housing crisis is so much worse in San Francisco and Los
Angeles than Seattle, it's choosing exactly the wrong data points to
extrapolate from.

Further, it ignores how once someone is homeless it is much easier to fall
into addiction, as other homeless people are often your support network and
there's a higher incidence of addiction among the homeless, spreading it.

All too often "not my fault" is a reason to avoid addressing the parts that
_are_ our fault.

------
electriclove
I appreciate the author identifying what is really going on with homeless on
the West Coast. Any visit to Portland, Seattle, SF, LA corroborates this. We
need to crack down on those that are perpetuating and benefiting from this
crisis.. the dealers, cartels, and yes, the pharmaceutical companies.

~~~
hackermailman
These street drug networks are pretty sophisticated and hard to crack down on.

For example a typical street operation like openly selling baggies outside of
a legalized injection clinic or to a homeless camp is often done by the
addicts themselves, who will always only be holding just enough so they don't
see much jail time if they are arrested. Security of this street dealing is
overseen by very obvious looking prison gang members who hold no evidence and
make sure to never take the money from the street addict peddling their
baggies of heroin or crack instead there are drops coordinated with the huge
prison goon nearby to prevent any robberies. Resupply is done through
complicated handoffs and drops with a network of a few dozen addicts who've
been recruited to sell for the gang. The gang themselves are buying off other
mid level gangs who in turn are buying from higher level/cartels.

You can try to put a cop on every corner and disrupt the handoffs, or harass
these enforcers off the street, but soon your police force is going to run out
of overtime money, not to mention the other factor which is gang violence
"management". The police know if they decimate the current street gang
controlling the street trade that a dozen other gangs will immediately start
fighting to be the successor meaning there will be high profile shootings
going on in the media, which in turn puts pressure on city hall, which in turn
puts pressure on the police chief to do something to stop the violence which
eventually means relaxing enforcement on whatever gang currently controls the
homeless drug trade so long as they stay in their lane and don't escalate
their street violence into the media or against people not involved in the
trade. It would be nice to arrest and stop the midlevel and high level
suppliers but nobody has figured out how to effectively do that with limited
enforcement resources either.

~~~
oh_sigh
If the low level gangs knew that cops would remain present on those corners,
would the shooting wars erupt when there was a power vacuum? Looking at these
gangs as rational economic players, it makes sense to fight over a limited,
highly valuable resource(the street corner). It doesn't make sense to fight
over it if it's value is extremely reduced(because cops will be stationed
there all the time).

~~~
hackermailman
The gangs attack each other's higher level members outside the area, meaning
broad daylight shootings at some high end restaurant or Starbucks parking lot.
There is already a heavy police presence outside the numerous injection sites
here all day long it doesn't seem to matter at all in restricting the
organized sale of fentanyl. I think you would need to quadruple the budget of
the police department to try any real sustained crackdown, and you would have
to build new prisons as the current ones are already to capacity.

Nobody will vote for the city mayor who wants to significantly jack up
property taxes to pay for a new drug crackdown when every voter knows it's
largely a tried and failed, unsustainable policy. It would be vastly cheaper
to just pour money into gang recruitment discouragement, and hand out free
heroin undercutting the gang's product which is what they've started to do
here.

------
lazyasciiart
This is a dishonest narrative propped up with misunderstood statistics. He
claims that saying "30% of homeless people" are addicts contradicts the claim
that "80% of unsheltered" \- but he's been arguing about how to get rid of
homeless people for long enough to know that unsheltered is a subset of the
homeless, and generally the group with the most issues (which is why they are
sleeping outside and not even in a car).

Oddly enough, he fails to include any of the research we do have about the
connection between cost of housing and rate of homelessness. When rents go up,
homelessness goes up. [http://fortune.com/2018/12/14/rent-homelessness-
housing-inco...](http://fortune.com/2018/12/14/rent-homelessness-housing-
income-zillow-research/) When affordable housing disappears, evictions go up
and homelessness goes up. [http://komonews.com/news/local/washington-
homelessness-resul...](http://komonews.com/news/local/washington-homelessness-
result-of-evictions-rent-spikes-uw-study-finds)

One recent positive change was a state law increasing the time a tenant has to
pay rent late from 3 days to 14 days. There are many programs that will help
pay a one-time late rent, but none of them are instant. Lots of tenants will
accept a landlord saying that if you're not out in three days you'll be
evicted and spend that time scrambling to leave instead of scrambling to pay,
so that they have a chance at renting again in the future - and there's a ton
of evidence that preventing the initial step into homelessness is by far the
cheapest and most successful way to prevent longterm issues.
[https://seattle.curbed.com/2019/4/26/18518477/eviction-
refor...](https://seattle.curbed.com/2019/4/26/18518477/eviction-reform-
washington-state-renter-rights)

Of course, Rufo and people who quote him admiringly tend not to support
interventions like this at the point of entering homelessness, since they are
committed to the idea that not having a place to live is not a cause of
homelessness (which, to be clear, INCLUDES those who are staying with friends
or using their social safety net).

~~~
NotSammyHagar
Rufo isn't interested in an open consideration of the facts. I think he just
wants to curry conservative support.

------
NotSammyHagar
He provides no evidence to back up his claim that it's a drug crisis at root.
I walk through Seattle every day and there's definitely an aspect of drug use,
but it's many many other things, including people too poor to afford a house
here, people with mental issues, along with a lot of drug use. Then I noticed
the name of this author, a kind of frustrated conservative who ran for office
in Seattle and claimed basically that people were really mean to him - so take
his claims with a giant tub of salt.

Regardless of the situation, the city is not really coping very well with this
challenge. We should just do what Utah did, focus on getting housing for
everyone, then you can send treatment to them. I can't quite understand why we
can't arrest and hold people to longer sentences who commit crimes dozens of
times in Seattle. This is separate from just arresting people for drug use,
which never solves anything. Get housing, get enough services, treatment for
people and also police and other services. That is how we deal with this.

[update, fixed a few typos]

------
Consultant32452
I think this is a belonging crisis disguised as an addiction crisis. People
mostly become addicted because they don't have strong social ties to family,
friends, church, whatever. If it were just a physical reaction to drugs every
Grandma with a hip replacement would be a junky on the streets. But good luck
putting families back together again.

------
Waterluvian
Maybe I missed it in the article. What percentage of homeless in these cities
are or were recent drug users?

~~~
astura
>In Seattle, prosecutors and law enforcement recently estimated that the
majority of the region’s homeless population is hooked on opioids, including
heroin and fentanyl.... For the unsheltered population inhabiting tents, cars,
and RVs, the opioid-addiction percentages are even higher—the City of
Seattle’s homeless-outreach team estimates that 80 percent of the unsheltered
population has a substance-abuse disorder. Officers must clean up used needles
in almost all the homeless encampments.

No word on methodologies though.

~~~
fwip
Also from the article: the mayor estimates the rate at 1 in 3. Still no word
on methodology.

~~~
opportune
Might be a difference in wording. As I recall, 2/3 of Seattle homeless are not
sleeping on the street (instead they are in cars or shelters), which may make
them "sheltered". The other 1/3 are in the street and if most of them are
addicts, then yes, about 1/3 of total homeless are addicted as well

------
techntoke
Dude, people become addicts cause life sucks when you are in a constant
struggle.

~~~
bayareanative
Addiction is an optional choice, homelessness may well be an involuntary state
of being.

------
pizlonator
If you become homeless, you are super likely to do drugs. Just visit a
homeless camp and you’ll find that out.

This article gets causality backwards. It’s kind of amusing.

------
oil25
For anyone interested in how drugs became such a crisis in America, I highly
recommend History Channel's "America's War on Drugs"
([https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7026882/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7026882/))
- it's free with a trial on Prime Video. It is a fascinating story involving
the CIA, fear of communism and, of course, the bottomless guile of corporate
greed.

------
monkeyodeath
From this article: [https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/519/filling-the-
void](https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/519/filling-the-void)

"The true source of drug addiction: a society organized around the quest for
wealth and geopolitical power, which creates enormous dislocation. This
pursuit of wealth and power inevitably produces widespread addiction, which we
insist on calling a “drug problem.”"

We live in a society where record numbers of people are lonely, depressed, and
disconnected. We worship consumerism and the economy, and idolize weirdo
greedlords like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump.

Increased opioid regulation has had the effect of forcing a lot of people who
are in pain to suffer even more. The addictions that plague our society won't
go away until we fix the underlying problems that make people so vulnerable in
the first place.

~~~
dang
> weirdo greedlords like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump

This breaks the site guidelines against flamebait and name-calling. Would you
mind reviewing them? Taking threads further into flamewar is what's most
important to avoid here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20197294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20197294).

------
Animats
A friend who lives in the SF Mission likes the idea of shipping the druggies
off to a drug camp in the middle of nowhere. They get all the drugs they want,
until they die.

~~~
maxxxxx
Same for unemployed people and depressed people who have fallen on hard times?

~~~
bilbo0s
Well, given how people who come up with ideas like that think, yeah, they
probably would like all the poors to be removed and shot or something. It's
just how those people think.

------
olliej
The article fails to acknowledge that drug abuse can be caused by homelessness
(which also makes sense when you think about it). In fact all it says is that
homeless people use drugs, and then goes on to say that therefore drugs cause
homelessness.

It also fails to acknowledge (in CA at least) that the 80s republican plan to
save money by closing mental health facilities put a large number of people on
the streets without any means to afford necessary drugs, and so no ability to
work (assuming they had somewhere to live). This dramatically increased the
cost to the state as now people with mental health issues get put in prisons.
Keeping someone in a prison costs much more than in a proper treatment
facility, and also fails to provide any rehabilitate support, _and_ now they
have a criminal record so even if they could get treatment in prison they
can’t get a job when they get out, so end up homeless, and then back in
prison.

It also ignores fairly basic concepts: there are fewer rooms available to rent
in SF than there are homeless people, so even if the city just paid the rent
for them (which is cheaper in the long term), there isn’t anywhere for them to
live.

Cool beans.

