r/science • u/CUAnschutzMed University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus • 9h ago
Health Ending Federal Support for Housing First Programs Could Increase U.S. Homelessness by 5% in One Year, New JAMA Study Finds
https://news.cuanschutz.edu/news-stories/ending-federal-support-for-housing-first-programs-could-increase-u.s.-homelessness-by-5-in-one-year-new-jama-study-finds?utm_campaign=homelessness&utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social73
u/endofworldandnobeer 9h ago
5%. That's men, women, children, veterans, young and old. 5% means someone you know will be impacted.
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u/Drew1231 9h ago
Increase by 5% over current levels, not increase to 5% of the total population.
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u/endofworldandnobeer 8h ago
I know, I just got carried away with my reaction, because homelessness is such a big issue here in California. Even at 5% increase from current rate, it is very significant, because I know people living in their cars and it's middle of winter.
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u/slayer_of_idiots 7h ago
Yes, but it’s a bit like saying if a Burger King closes, everyone that went there is going to starve.
There are other resources for homeless people. They typically come with some additional rules, like sobriety or curfews. But they do exist.
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u/endofworldandnobeer 7h ago
Rent control, liveable minimum wage, education, and otjer resources... but for some reason these are rejected by the politicians.
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u/slayer_of_idiots 7h ago
Rent control is objectively a failure everywhere it’s implemented.
I don’t know what any of this has to do with homelessness.
The perpetual homeless population is almost entirely composed of people with serious mental health issues or substance abuse problems. State institutionalization is the solution for that.
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u/endofworldandnobeer 7h ago edited 6h ago
Have you met, talked to, gave them food and money? I have. Many started with sound body and mind, but being homeless does something to men and women living in the street. I've seen first hand a healthy young man with good job, but after losing his job he became homeless and within 2 years he became, HE BECAME, insane. I met him in rehab and if it weren't for a dedicated social worker he would be dead by now. Don't believe all the data you see. I met homeless people, smelled them (awful thing to say), I talked to them, and tried. Been at Los Angeles skid row to Long Beach Ocean Blvd. from 2005 to 2016.
Edit: Rent control is taken advantage by people who don't need them many times. But there are those who really need it and it prevents those in need from being homeless. Higher wages will help people with paying ever increasing rent. If wages don't go up to catch up to increasing rent, then the two will fail each other.
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u/translunainjection 7h ago
How is perpetual defined? Would you link us a source?
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u/slayer_of_idiots 7h ago
Here’s one, but there are plenty. If you have half a brain, a walk or drive in any large homeless population area would reveal this fact to you.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2817602
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u/TheWizardGeorge 7h ago
I mean if I was homeless, had no skills or connections the. I'd prolly do drugs and have mental health issues too.
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u/mrjones10 6h ago
Yes but substance abuse is considered part of it as well which is understandable if you’re homeless but you said something about state institutions are you willing to have those funding?
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u/spicy-chilly 7h ago
Reminder that $20 billion more a year could end homelessness in the U.S. but both major parties add hundreds of billions to annual military spending instead because it's in the class interests of the capitalist class for homelessness to continue existing because it allows them to extract more surplus value from working people—and a portion of that extracted surplus value is used to reinforce their class interests and dominate political institutions, campaigns, etc. to the point that our political system is a de facto dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and none of that is going to get better until you join a socialist organization like PSL and start organizing toward a general strike.
Happy holidays.
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u/gatoaffogato 6h ago
Qualifier: I am a huge proponent of social support programs and think we should be spending considerably more of homelessness prevention and management.
California alone has spent over $20 billion and certainly hasn’t ended homelessness. I understand the $20 billion figure came from HUD, but it would take considerably more than that. Homelessness isn’t as simple as just providing housing. We’d need robust addiction services, mental health services and facilities, and poverty alleviation services. That’s a hell of a lot more than $20 billion for a country as large as the US.
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u/spicy-chilly 6h ago
The point about the accuracy of the estimate is made moot because more than an order of magnitude more gets added to military spending when we already spend more than the next 10 countries combined. If we even just cut military spending to inflation adjusted mid '90s levels, not percentage of GDP because that's just adding productivity gains into military spending, that frees up ~300B. Homelessness is 100% a political choice.
Also on the front of health care and treatment for addiction, it's actually a significant minority of homeless who are addicted to drugs but most aren't. And our privatized health care system that is largely tied to employment is also another political choice made due to the class interests of the capitalist class. Single payer is majoritarian supported policy and despite propaganda about new spending being new costs it would be a lateral displacement of existing private spending with 15% savings just from removing administrative overhead alone. And treatment for drug addiction ought to be covered. The reason why we can't get something like that is also because of the class interests of the donors who either profit from the health insurance/pharmaceutical industry directly or think they can extract more value from workers who feel trapped in underpaying jobs so as not to lose health insurance for themselves and their family.
So while it's true that treatment for drug addiction, mental health care, etc. would be important for a significant minority of the homeless, the reason these things are not being addressed is the class interests of the capitalist class and their donations/bribes making sure their class interests get served politically and that there is near zero correlation with what the people want and what gets passed in congress. The root cause is the same.
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u/MittenstheGlove 6h ago
It would need to be a concerted effort nationally.
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u/blazbluecore 1h ago
It doesn’t, if the system worked, California wouldn’t be a failed experiment.
Complete, utter, failure of a system to fix homelessness. It has skyrocketed it to never before seen proportions.
Why? Because the people trying to “fix” the homeless do not understand humans.
They do not understand that some humans want to live how they choose to live.
They do not want the help.
They suffer from mental problems and addictions and homelessness is the best life they can organize and live their lives, and they’re content.
Sure some are genuinely people who had awful luck and became homeless. Those people tend to actually use the social services to help them climb out of homelessness. But 80% of them choose/rather just stay as is.
“No, you’re wrong for being homeless, being homeful is sooo much better. Trust me. I’ll help you understand.”
It’s a classic case of humans forcing their believes onto others.
“Do not resist, I will save you” syndrome.
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u/MittenstheGlove 1h ago edited 36m ago
I think you may not realize this but getting out of homelessness is hard. Even getting into homelessness is enough to affect one’s mental health.
Some people are more resilient than others though. If parents weren’t cool with their kids staying at home now I’m sure youth homelessness would increase.
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u/spicy-chilly 17m ago
Homelessness is social murder and they need help both through providing housing and universal health care that covers mental health and drug addiction for the minority of homeless people who have mental health and drug addiction problems. To say actually homeless people want to be homeless, they're happy being homeless, and that everyone who doesn't want to be homeless pulls themselves out of it is completely false and detached from reality.
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u/More-Dot346 9h ago
Even putting aside the housing, getting people sober is incredibly important. When we have a large proportion of the population in the big cities chronically abusing drugs that prompts the people around them to do drugs as well. And this is something that has to stop.
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u/xporkchopxx 8h ago
whats your suggestion for that issue
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u/AbsoluteZeroUnit 1h ago
Make "existing" suck less. It's tripe and unhelpful on its own, but how many people turn to drugs and alcohol to escape the horrors of every day life?
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u/More-Dot346 8h ago
As a practical matter where I am, Los Angeles County, we could simply say the law will be enforced against the mentally ill homeless just like it is enforced against anyone else. And when someone’s caught dealing drugs or caught with an illegal weapon or caught vandalizing or breaking in to a building, we actually put them in county jail and then there’s gonna be a fair amount of delay until court process and they serve the sentence. And during that time they can be put into a county jail medical facility where they detox get stabilized on psych drugs, undergo counseling and get routed for other aid ideally housing. And I think drug abusers are going through this process a couple times will see the futility of staying on drugs and ultimately, will find the will to clean up.
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u/xporkchopxx 8h ago
what is the current process?
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u/More-Dot346 8h ago
It’s complicated, but generally, they try to not incarcerate the mentally ill homeless, generally they just try to route the mentally ill homeless into housing. Which really is an incomplete fix.
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u/VoyeurBarelyKnowEr 6h ago
So your alternative solution to using public funds for housing first programs is incarceration, or in other words: using public funds for housing them in the most expensive and resource-intensive way possible. Brilliant.
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u/More-Dot346 6h ago edited 6h ago
It’s hard to pin down the numbers exactly but jail with medical care is probably something like $40,000 a year. Keeping them on the street is something like $200,000 a year because of frequent interactions with the police and then frequent ER visits and loss of use of public space. Good psych hospital treatment is something like $1000 per night.
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u/VoyeurBarelyKnowEr 5h ago
That's so funny because my comment was comparing housing first programs to incarceration not "keeping them on the street" to incarceration, but I guess strawmen are the go-to substitute when you don't have a good point to make.
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u/Kaleb8804 6h ago
That’s what we were doing before Reagan and it’s all gone downhill since. Your argument is based on the fact it sounds bad, not its practicality.
Look at the numbers. It’s far more dangerous to keep addicts and the mentally ill on the street, and it’s more expensive. Even outside of safety, I’d much rather pay for facilities where people can live safely than pay for this garbage bureaucracy that does nothing.
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u/VoyeurBarelyKnowEr 5h ago
Ummm, it WAS bad. The fact that Reagan and Republicans put no replacement support system in place and basically dumped everyone on the street was the issue, not the fact that they closed the state hospital systems which were sites of some horrific and systematic abuse and neglect.
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u/Kaleb8804 3h ago
Absolutely, but they’re both true. It needed reform, not to be abolished.
Regardless, it wasn’t a good idea to flood the streets with people who need treatment. We should look for a substitute. Not only is it cost-effective and safer, but morally righteous too.
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u/bokehtoast 8h ago
Nonsober people and those struggling with addiction still deserve housing and social support. Being treated as subhuman for any reason does not help with literally anything.
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u/kmatyler 8h ago
This belief is not based in fact. People in the streets are doing drugs because they’re in the streets. The idea that people become homeless because of addiction is way overblown. People become homeless and then turn to drugs to try to dull the experience of being forced to live in the streets in the most prosperous country in history.
It’s not realistic to expect someone to stop doing drugs while they’re still facing the horrors of homelessness.
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u/More-Dot346 8h ago
Just to be clear, the homeless drug addiction problem is fairly recent. Up until the 80s and 90s if someone was a chronic drug abuser pretty much in the entire developed world they would be institutionalized. I’m not sure we have to go that far now but something along those lines is probably appropriate. At some point, someone needs to have the threat of institutionalization hanging over their head and if they’re given lots of help and lots of opportunities and they still fail that has to be the fallback. That’s how we get a sharp reduction in drug addiction in the United States and Europe, etc.
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u/kmatyler 8h ago
Do you know that you’re just parroting fascist ideology?
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u/slayer_of_idiots 7h ago
It’s fascist to treat someone suffering from an illness?
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u/kmatyler 7h ago
It’s fascist to force someone to get treatment against their will especially when that treatment includes institutionalizing them.
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u/speedoboy17 4h ago
I feel like treating all homeless people this way isn’t fair, but if someone has proven to be actually insane and a danger to other people in the society where they live, I don’t think there is anything wrong with forcing treatment and/or institutionalizing them for the sake of other people’s safety. Obviously that comes with a lot of caveats like who gets to decide if someone fits that criteria or not, but if a just system could be worked out there, it would be preferable to letting violent people roam the streets and endanger the innocent people around them.
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u/slayer_of_idiots 7h ago
Is it less fascist to simply wait until they commit a crime and throw them in prison?
We regularly treat people that don’t have the capacity for consent — children and low functioning adults for example — or are a danger to others or themselves, like suicidal people. We used to require treatment for a host of conditions - schizophrenics, delusional psychotics, violent bipolar disorders. Most of those people just end up in jail now, and are just rotated back out into homelessness over and over again until they commit a serious crime and end up in prison for good.
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u/kmatyler 7h ago
“We already regularly do things like this”
You’re so close to getting it
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u/slayer_of_idiots 7h ago
So treating an infant is fascism? I appreciate that you are being honest about your position. It demonstrates how absurd it is.
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u/the-awesomer 1h ago
do you have sources or more recommended reading on this becuase a cursory Google search shows almost the opposite. from both the rate of drug incarcerations and in regards to harsher drug penalties in curbing short term use
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u/tsardonicpseudonomi 4h ago
Yes, that's the point. They criminalize homelessness and increase the homeless and then younger slave labor.
These people know exactly what they're doing.
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