Homeless in a Box.
Affordable housing is born of a confluence of dependencies. A city has leverage, a developer needs a deal, and…voila!…affordable housing is born.
Substance abuse and mental health facilities are determined the same way. A city wants to offer services, neighbors say “elsewhere,” and so it goes, until “elsewhere” is found.
Nobody loves these bastard children. They are all born of sodden compromise. Essentially, we are saying that we don’t want responsibility for these unseemly parts of our society. We shun the needs of those discarded by our market-driven system. We waffle at the thought of providing basics for those who can not compete with market economics, even though they do their best and may have qualified success. We’ve done this for years and will continue to do so, until we simply can’t do it anymore.
So why care?
Our nation’s cities are struggling with an unprecedented surge in the homeless, the addicted, and the mentally ill, with many individuals experiencing all three. The incredibly powerful drug Fentanyl is supercharging the addiction. People are aggravated and draconian measures are discussed darkly, yet these conversations are always clothed in honeyed words and the trappings of humanity.
“Mitigation,” “diversion,” “stewardship”: it’s a road that leads straight to hell.
To see the reality, we need look no farther than the prison system and—on the other end of the spectrum—privileged assisted living models for seniors. One costs an average of $33,000 a year per inmate (with thousands of inmates per a facility) and the other costs $98,000 for a single occupant in a single room.
The current wasteful provision of services to the homeless—shockingly—costs nearly as much as assisted living, but society has no paradigm for intentionally providing this level of funding to the dispossessed, as a transparent and considered expense. We end up spending this level of funding in crisis, but no one will allow the provision of the appropriate funds necessary to truly address the issue beforehand, honestly and upfront.
In that failure, determinism will lead us to the “prison” option every time, and with it the prison paradigm: warehousing, punishment for transgression, and neglect, with an expensive and ineffective provision of meager services.
We just can’t seem to do anything else.
Why?
Because the other direction is too expensive, especially with our mindset of not spending money on the “undeserving.” Each time a politician talks about mandatory treatment or “conservatorship,” they are talking about bedlam, workhouses, and debtor’s prison: places we’ve all seen before, and nothing gets us there faster than the failure of progressive or utopian plans. “Look, we spent all that money on placing the homeless in hotels and what did it get us?”
Further exacerbating the situation is our attitude: we want the results, but we just don’t care about the people. We want them gone. Let’s just get so frustrated that we round them up and ship them off somewhere. Or why don’t we strip them of their citizenship and deport them to a sh*thole country, where they belong. That would show those sh*thole countries. Turnabout is fair play. Cuba tried it with the Mariel boat lift. Why don’t we give it a try? Or, why don’t we just shoot them, or give out free Fentanyl, and let them have a mass overdose.
See where this goes?
But no, you say, calmer measures will prevail, like the crazy notion of Cal Psych promoted by Republican gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberger in this last California election. Surely there is a humane provision for these people…just not in my backyard.
The problem is, each failed half-step gets us closer to the “prison” model, and in our connected world, this model will backfire faster than ever. There is only one choice in going forward, and that is to actually address the problem.
There are five elements necessary to any recovery/re-entry program: space, privacy, services, outreach, and integration.
Where will each recovery center be, what is the occupancy of each, and how many do we need, at scale?
The citizens of your community deserve a successful model, both to assuage their anxiety at the prospect of localized development, and to justify the expenditure of their tax dollars. Without a successful model, you can expect little cooperation—and yet there are no successful models, because this necessary equation—where the proper amount of funding is spent effectively— isn’t accurately priced, proven, or even validated. If a relevant solution succeeds anywhere, even on a smaller scale, we ignore it. If relevant ideas are proposed on a larger scale, they are shouted down.
In contrast to this vicious loop of failure, we simply must accept the expenditure of assisted living levels of funding to develop and assemble the integrated services our homeless, addicted, and mentally ill populations require.
More importantly, we’ll have to address how they got there.
If we don’t question the inadequacy of modern employment to meet our basic needs, we will always create more homeless people. If we deny early treatment to the mentally ill, or foster despair at every opportunity, we will always add to the legions of addicted and the chronically mentally ill. If we warehouse them in actual prisons, we damage them further, and only temporarily remove them from the streets.
We have to stop making disposable people. If an economy can’t provide for a person’s basic needs, what kind of economy is it?
Step up to the plate, quantify the solution, spend the money, and take a hard look at the economy.
If we don’t address issues of equity, we will always have an endless supply of those who are treated unfairly. We won’t have money for positive things, just an unending battle against the negative—a battle that is as doomed to failure as the homeless finding a home, the addicted securing a bed, or the mentally ill experiencing peace.
Our current methods produce failure. We’ll all rest more easily, if we invest in a better way.
Illustration by Paul Antoniades
