There are really two distinct homelessness problems:
1. The “temporarily unhoused”. These are people who have fallen on hard times and need temporary assistance to get back on their feet. These people live out of their cars and are largely invisible.
2. The chronically homeless. These are drug users who infest public spaces and are highly visible and disruptive.
When laypeople talk about “homelessness”, they typically mean 2 as it’s more visible and disruptive to them.
The second category isn't just drug users. It's also people who are not mentally capable of keeping up the routine of decisions that keep them off the streets. Opposite of the "temporarily unhoused" category, they tend to be "temporarily housed".
This is a good point, but part of what the article is saying is that where housing is cheap, some of even those "at the margins of society" people with some drug problems can maybe stay housed. Which means fixing the drug part of their problems is easier than if they're moving around on the streets.
Ya, but isn’t that complete BS? I lived in Vicksburg MS, and while housing is definitely cheap, it’s not free, and you can’t really survive there if you can’t make any money at all. So you either die or move.
Yes, that’s totally true! I think this is a much more interesting problem when we get rid of the drug addiction component. It is just sad that drug addiction is consuming all of our social resources that could otherwise go into solving housing problems.
A lot of kids from Vicksburg also move to LA and don’t make it because of housing costs, so they move elsewhere. But should they have made it? Should LA be affordable enough for everyone who wants to live there to live there? If not, but we want to subsidize housing for some segment of the American population to live in LA, how do we prioritize? If yes, how much housing do we need to build to satisfy all American and international demand to live in LA?
1. The “temporarily unhoused”. These are people who have fallen on hard times and need temporary assistance to get back on their feet. These people live out of their cars and are largely invisible.
2. The chronically homeless. These are drug users who infest public spaces and are highly visible and disruptive.
When laypeople talk about “homelessness”, they typically mean 2 as it’s more visible and disruptive to them.