In recent years, the rate of homelessness in California has grown substantially. The Golden State now ranks first among the 50 states at 4.4 per 1,000 residents, with LA and San Francisco often hosting vast homeless encampments (or tent cities, as they’re also known). I say “often” because these encampments are frequently cleared away by police, only to reappear somewhere else.
Many have blamed California’s homelessness problem on the cost of housing there. One prominent dissenting voice is the activist Michael Shellenberger, who has argued – most famously in his book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities – that it’s largely the result of untreated mental illness and addiction.
In June, Margot Kushel and colleagues at the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at UC San Francisco published findings from “the largest representative study of homelessness in the United States since the mid-1990s”. They interviewed 3,200 homeless people across eight locations, with effort being made to achieve representativeness.
So, what were the findings?
Remarkably, 82% of the homeless people in their sample said they’d had a mental health condition, and almost 1 in 4 said they’d had hallucinations (which are indicative of serious conditions like schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder). By contrast, the lifetime prevalence of any mental condition in the general population is only 46%.
The researchers also asked participants whether they currently had a mental health condition, and 66% said they did.
As for addiction, 65% of homeless people in the sample said they’d abused drugs or alcohol at some point in their lives. And among that sub-sample, two thirds said they’d done so before their first episode of homelessness. Which means that homelessness cannot have caused them to start abusing drugs or alcohol (more plausibly, it was the other way around).
The lifetime prevalence of drug abuse in the U.S. is around 8%, while for alcohol abuse its around 18%. Assuming that drug and alcohol abuse are completely independent (which they probably aren’t) the life prevalence of either is 26%.
Overall, the survey confirms that people with mental health conditions and a history of substance abuse are massively overrepresented among the homeless in California – consistent with Shellenberger’s arguments.
However, there doesn’t seem to be much correlation between the rate of homelessness and the prevalence of mental illness or addiction across U.S. states – which is wholly inconsistent with Shellenberger’s arguments. California is neither the most mentally ill nor the most addicted state.
What’s more, there does seem to be an association between the cost of housing and the rate of homelessness (which is hardly surprising). Indeed, homelessness is most common in liberal states that tend to restrict housing development, notably California and New York.
Here’s what appears to be going on: mental illness and addiction can help to explain which individuals become homeless, but they can’t explain why some states have higher rates of homelessness than others. Why so much homelessness in California? As the conventional wisdom says, it’s the cost of housing.
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Where would you rather be homeless, regardless of your mental health or substance abuse issues, Alaska, Maine, Vermont, N/S Dakota, or Southern California?
If you’re homeless I suspect being homeless in California is less unpleasant than being homeless in most other places.
The US is rotting from the inside out. Most of its major cities now have tent encampments along the sides of the streets. It is appalling. What’s more, many of the shops are closing down their branches in city centres turning these into virtual no-go areas. That combined with the drug epidemic makes them scary places to go. The police aren’t that visible either. The banking crash of 2008 was one of the major contributors to this current trend in homelessness with banks foreclosing only too readily on defaulters rather than trying to find other ways to help them. And many of those properties just fall into ruin anyway. If anything shows what the globalists think of nation states and their populations and what they plan for the west, in this case the US, it is this and out in plain sight too. They have the money, they just ain’t going to fix this problem.
It’s stranger than fiction, how we’ve decayed. All by design via the oligarchs.
As someone who is technically homeless my observation is…..it’s complicated!
I don’t have mental issues. I work 40 hours a week and am self employed and I sleep in my very warm and comfortable work van several nights a week.
I do this because I’m single, I’m a rough and tumble blue collar guy who doesn’t care. I shower at the gym. Other times I book a nice 3 star hotel room often for several nights in a row. In recent times I rented a very nice apartment but the lease ended at an awkward time for me financially and I’ve kind of drifted with a eye to being flexible should an interstate change beckon.
I can certainly knuckle down, get a few thousand together and sign a new apartment lease. I don’t particularly want to however- the system is rigged and the whole experience leaves me feeling used and exploited. I say stuff them.
Even blind Freddie can see the racket that society has become.
Several perverse and contestable norms have come to prevail in modern society At least here in Oz. Little fuss is made directly because the fuss is suppressed by vested interests who use even more despicable (but unfortunately rather timless) strategies to deflect and obfuscate, namely nonsense political hysteria and wars and economic doom-mongering and other moral panics.
The first sick new norm is that of the excessively paid executive and the way they’ve manipulated their position to elevate their remuneration and status- along the way destroying the brief post war egalitarianism and social cohesion. (David Graeber knew these bu*s**t HR, marketing, good for nothing but nevertheless highly paid types. They all sprouted up circa 1990 when the universities started taking the top 70% instead of the previous top 10%.
A subset of this racket is the property fiddle. Same excessively remunerated whatever collar jerks have leveraged their property holding status to launch their sideline as residential property investors.
This has proven a spectacularly lucrative gravy train. Housing has been transformed into a market and one with global exposure. In a world where so called capitalist Western societies are actually heavily regulated mixed economies somehow housing has become this sacred laissez faire pure capitalist marketplace where any intervention is shouted down by the vested interests. Leveraged players with their portfolios and luxury German cars are a protected group- they can’t be touched for fear we crash the world’s economy. They know it’s a ponzi scheme and so do we and so does every central bank and every government left or right.
Problem is we’ve set it in motion and we can’t touch it for fear of real and catastrophic existential repercussions.
The answer to homelessness and the housing crisis is very very simple. One sentence simple.
Increase supply by loosening artificial planning restraints, re-establish 1960s style mutual building societies sans the Wall Street greed, restrict or ban offshore fly-in speculation, adjust the tenant landlord balance to discourage amateur mom and dad investors who should leave property holding to the various levels of government (local, state, federal) Corporations, established landholding religion, ethnic tribal collectives, school districts, NGOs and if absolutely necessary the (vastly) landed aristocracy.
These groups have less incentive to leverage the whole sh*t show until everyone squeaks and many pop (and hence land on the street). They are more vested in society running smoothly and also in actually housing their workers (eg VW in Wolfsburg, Cadbury in Bourneville), their flock (Anglican and Catholic church), their teachers (Eton, Rugby and a thousand lesser others), their people (eg the various American Indian or NZ Maori tribes) or the simply less well healed (the State).
Funny how even this homeless loser can see it clear as day.
Problem is until we stand up nothing will happen and will only get worse.
As much as I have little time for a certain cheese liking society whose armies are champions only at surrender we often look over there thinking maybe this time they’ll actually bring the guillotines out of the closet and finally set the whole necessary business underway.
I hope I see it in my lifetime.
Indeed, they need to un-rig the system.
Thing is I don’t think they can.
The housing bubble inflated the paper wealth of those already on the property ladder. A whole segment of society saw it go to their heads. Many went on a spree buying a load of frivolous junk (eg German cars, overseas holidays etc). Now they’re locked in to a world where their often modest houses can only ever go up in value, not down. Otherwise they’re bust.
Governments are terrified of the consequences if something happened to realign property valuations with reality let alone being the ones actually brandishing the policy responsible for bringing it all crashing down.
The Western world is on life support, we could stay that way for a very long time.
The Davos Deviants intend to crash the housing market. The aim is to effectively steal private property and force those who lose their homes to become renters at which point they will be forced into the 20 minute cities and brought under REAL control.
You will own nothing and be firkin unhappy.
The population of California is 39.24 million people. With a homelessness rate of 4.4 per thousand, this means there are 172,656 homeless people. Interviewing 3200 of these for a one-off anecdote collection means anecdotes were collected from 1.85% of these. The only way to validate that these anecdotes are indeed representative for the vast majority of homeless people who weren’t asked (98.15%) would be to interview them as well. With only 172,656 of them, that’s certainly doable. This would be about two months worth of work for 100 researchers (assuming 15 minutes per interview).
Considering this, the only conclusion which can be drawn from this ‘study’ is We don’t know anything about homeless people and don’t want to know anything about them, either. Except insofar they can be utilized to generate politically desired headlines, that is.
In other news, water is wet and the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
Oh, you’re just far-right prejudiced
Too preposterous, surely, to conclude that homelessness has anything to do with not being able to afford a home, er, that makes my brain hurt