Odds and Ends

If homelessness is what happens when housing falls out of reach, then the solution to homelessness involves getting people into stable housing. This is the simple premise behind the Housing First model: that the best way to care for unhoused people starts with putting a permanent roof over their heads.

But of course, there’s a little more to it than that. While the Housing First approach prioritizes moving people into permanent housing, Housing First programs are also expected to provide various “wraparound” services to meet their clients’ needs — services like mental health care, addiction treatment, and physical rehabilitation. While critics sometimes describe Housing First as a “one-size-fits-all” model, it is in fact highly flexible: the type of housing people receive, along with the other treatments they become eligible for, vary depending on their particular needs and preferences.

Mandatory treatment programs — the kind make unhoused people prove they are “ready” for permanent housing — are more rigid and much less likely to put individuals on a path to long-term housing stability. That’s because these programs don’t emphasize treating the fundamental condition of homelessness: the lack of a home.

Let’s start with drug use. Quinones has promulgated the argument that drug addiction — in particular the proliferation of a new, especially dangerous strain of meth — is “worsening America’s homelessness problem” (or, as New York Magazine put it, has “supercharged homelessness”). He may very well be correct that this new version of meth is worse than others; while this is not my field, I feel very comfortable advising Skeptic readers not to do meth. That said, there is absolutely no evidence that meth use is in any way driving homelessness as a large-scale social phenomenon.

Determining causality for this phenomenon is difficult. Drug use, including meth use, for example, can precipitate individual bouts of homelessness. To understand homelessness in aggregate, however, it is important to distinguish between the precipitants of homelessness and the drivers of homelessness. Precipitants are particular and non-generalizable; they are the set of individual circumstances that cause a particular person to become homeless. Drug addiction is a common precipitant, but so are fleeing domestic violence, becoming unemployed, or getting hit with unexpected medical bills. Think of it like an extreme weather event: an individual spark may precipitate a major forest fire, but only under certain conditions. A key driver in this analogy is the carbon pollution that has made summers in many heavily forested areas significantly hotter and drier. Without that driver, you would still get forest fires, but they would not be anywhere near as devastating.

The precipitants of homelessness can be some combination of structural factors, personal mistakes, and plain bad luck. While one or a handful of precipitating factors can explain why a particular person became homeless, they can’t necessarily tell us much about overall rates of homelessness.

Despite its reputation, Berkeley is in many ways a deeply conservative — even reactionary — place. The city’s forces of reaction made national news last year when some of them sued to cap enrollment at UC Berkeley. But to close observers of local politics, Berkeley’s conservatism is, if anything, even more obvious when it comes to transportation policy. City officials talk a good game about climate change and traffic safety, and they’ve even put a decent protected bike lane close to campus. But in most of the city, they’ve spent the past few years consistently choosing speed and convenience for automobiles over safety for pedestrians and people on bikes.

It turns out that Berkeley residents walk and ride bicycles in spite of what the city does on transportation policy – not because of it.

For a case in point, see local intransigence in the face of the decades-long, student-led effort to ban cars from Telegraph Avenue, the main commercial strip near campus. Or the ignominious death of Berkeley’s proposed bus rapid transit system. But the final straw for me came when, after several years of pitched battle, city officials killed a modest plan to improve biker safety on Hopkins Street. That is when it finally became obvious to me that the city was simply unwilling to get serious about ensuring that all residents could move about the city safely, whether they drive a car, or not.