Re: Cause of homelessness? It's not drugs or mental illness, researchers say

[Johnny America]

In article <t2p7da$3pfvj$9...@news.freedyn.de>
governo...@gmail.com wrote:
>

BULLSHIT! They can't afford housing because they spend all
their fucking money on drugs, alcohol and drug whores!

The government and do-gooders keep giving them food, clothes and
MORE MONEY!

What do they do with that money? They spend all the fucking
money on drugs, alcohol and drug whores!

SAN DIEGO — Ask just about anyone for their thoughts on what
causes homelessness, and you will likely hear drug addiction,
mental illness, alcoholism and poverty.

A pair of researchers, however, looked at those issues across
the country and found they occur everywhere. What does vary
greatly around the country, they found, was the availability of
affordable housing.

In their University of California Press book “Homelessness is a
Housing Problem,” authors Clayton Page Aldern and Gregg Colburn
looked at various contributing issues of homelessness, including
mental illness and addiction, and the per capita rate of
homelessness around the country. By looking at the rate of
homeless per 1,000 people, they found communities with the
highest housing costs had some of the highest rates of
homelessness, something that might be overlooked when looking at
just the overall raw number of homeless people.

As an example, the 2019 count of people in shelters and on the
street found a homeless population of 56,000 in Los Angeles
County; 11,200 in King County, Wash.; 9,700 in Santa Clara
County, Calif.; and 4,000 in Multnomah County, Ore. The homeless
populations became similar when looking at per capita rates,
with Los Angeles having six homeless people for every 1,000
residents and the other three, smaller counties having five
homeless people for every 1,000.

What they had in common was a lack of affordable housing.

San Diego County had about 2.5 homeless people for every 1,000
residents, which was about the average per capita rate in the
2019 count. Aldern pointed out that the San Diego number would
be greater if it included just the metropolitan area rather than
the entire county.

Aldern, a data scientist and policy analyst in Seattle, and
Colburn, an assistant professor of real estate at the University
of Washington’s College of Built Environments, said they are not
suggesting that mental illness, addictions and other issues are
not contributing factors to homelessness.

“That’s certainly not the point of the book,” Colburn said. “But
I firmly believe that we can’t treat our way out of this
problem. You could fix all the addiction in San Diego right now
and you’d still have a problem with homelessness because there
just aren’t places for people to go who have lower levels of
income.”

Lisa Jones, executive vice president of strategic initiatives at
the San Diego Housing Commission, said she has not read the book
but does see a connection between housing and homelessness.

“High-cost rental markets that far outstrip area median incomes
— and push renters into paying more than 50% of their income
toward rent — certainly are a significant contributing factor to
making households at high risk of experiencing homelessness,”
she wrote in an email.

“When households do experience homelessness, those factors make
it even harder for them to exit homelessness by renting in the
private rental market,” Jones continued. “We also know that the
longer a household experiences homelessness, the more likely
other key quality-of-life factors will be affected, such as
physical and mental well-being.

“We need to continue to strive to build a homelessness response
system that has a diverse spectrum of resources to meet a
household’s unique needs,” she concluded. “At the same time, we
need to continue to support the efforts of policy makers at
local, state and national levels to increase affordable housing
development and rental assistance opportunities, streamline
application processes, and reduce construction costs to increase
production.”

In San Diego, nonprofits and local government agencies have made
strides to create more housing. The city of San Diego purchased
two extended-stay hotels in 2020 to provide homes for 400
people, and earlier this year Father Joe’s Villages open St.
Teresa of Calcutta Villa to provide homes for 400 more people.

More permanent, affordable housing is planned throughout the
county, but the need remains great. The city of San Diego’s
Community Action Plan on Homelessness from 2019 called for
significant investment in permanent solutions rather than
shelters, with a recommendation to build 5,400 units, including
3,500 units of permanent supportive housing over 10 years.

The new projects would reverse a trend over the last decade that
showed San Diego losing thousands of units of low-income
housing, including 9,290 single-room occupancy hotels and 1,500
low-income rental units that were converted to condominiums,
according to a 2016 article in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Colburn said he was motivated to research the subject after
attending meetings with political and civic leaders in Seattle
and feeling they did not grasp the true cause of homelessness,
which resulted in responses he called scattershot.

“One day we were talking about drugs, and one day we were
talking about rent, and one day we were talking about mental
health, and one day we were talking about poverty, and I thought
that was counterproductive,” he said.

Colburn said it is true that people who are poor, addicted or
mentally ill are more likely to experience homelessness, but a
disproportionate number of people with those conditions is not
the cause of higher rates of homelessness in some areas.

“We’re not trying to dispute that these individual
vulnerabilities matter,” he said. “They certainly do. But the
point is, there are people who are addicted and mentally ill in
Chicago, and Chicago has one-fifth the homelessness of Seattle
and San Francisco. So what’s going on here? The point is these
individual vulnerabilities interact with housing markets to
produce homelessness.”

The researchers looked at homelessness in West Virginia and
Arkansas, which were hit hard by the opioid epidemic, and found
the homeless rate was low. Housing prices in those states also
are lower than in many cities with higher homeless rates,
Colburn said.

Poverty also is a contributing factor of homelessness, but the
researchers found areas with high poverty rates don’t
necessarily have high homelessness rates if housing costs are
lower. As an example, Colburn said Detroit is one of the most
impoverished cities in the country, but it has one-fifth the
homelessness of West Coast cities on a per capita basis.

“The point is, if you are poor, if you are addicted, if you are
mentally ill in an expensive West Coast city like San Diego,
you’re far more likely to experience homelessness,” he said.
“And that issue explains why Seattle, Portland, San Francisco,
Los Angeles and San Diego have much, much higher rates of
homelessness than Miami, or Dallas, or Phoenix, for example.”

Colburn said he and Aldern studied data from the U.S. Census
Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
to understand population growth, incomes, rates of poverty,
mobility, mental health and addictions in different areas.

“Pretty soon it became very clear that rental costs and vacancy
rates were by far the biggest predictor of rates of homelessness
in a community,” Colburn said. “It’s not the only factor. There
are all sorts of complicated phenomenon, but it’s a far more
convincing phenomenon than anything else.”

Colburn said they also attempted to dispel what they said are
myths about homelessness, such as that it is higher in cities
with Democratic mayors. In reality, most major cities have
Democrats as mayor, but that also includes cities such as
Detroit with smaller homeless populations, he said.

They also looked at the claim that homeless people move to areas
with greater public assistance, something they judged by
comparing the state variations in the federal Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families program. They found that states
that provided more dollars in the program did not have higher
rates of homelessness.

The researchers also cited studies on mobility that found people
with low incomes are less likely to move to another area because
moving is difficult and expensive.

“The fundamental point is, if we correctly diagnosed this
problem as a structural problem, which I think it is, then we
need structural solutions,” Colburn said. “We need a significant
commitment at all levels of government and the private sector to
ensure we have an adequate supply of housing that’s affordable
to people. And if we don’t do that, I’m highly, highly confident
that we will not put a dent in this problem of homelessness.”

Colburn said housing must be a part of the conversation when
addressing homelessness, and that conversation can be
discouraging because it will take years and be a costly
investment to create enough affordable housing to make a
difference.

“It’s not like just flipping a light switch,” he said. “That’s
why a lot of times this is a scary message to people, because it
suggests we’ve got a long battle ahead of us.”

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-07-11/new-book-
links-homelessness-city-prosperity

[BeamMeUpScotty]

If you give them a place to live why NOT make it a place with the
psychological help they need like a NUT HOUSE or a HALF WAY HOUSE with
counselors. It doesn't make sense to put them up in a Hotel, and then
hope they show up for their Psych sessions and daily training or
counseling... to keep them on track.

Have a two teared treatment where one group that needs to be kept from
hurting the public, is in the core of the facility with no access to the
outside world and then you have the outer part out side the fence as the
halfway house for people not ready to do it on their own but they have
day jobs. NOT a place for experimental treatment. And make sure NO Fauci
type Sociopaths can work there.


--
-That's karma-

Democrats will take your cars and guns and food and they will begin
their occupation as they control energy that allows them total control
of you, under the guise of saving you from yourself. That's the GLOBAL
WARMING CULT.