Our broken homeless system

San Francisco’s Michael Shellenberger:

If you take the so-called homeless problem, I believe it's fundamentally a problem of untreated mental illness and drug addiction, a form of mental illness. It's often self-inflicted, and it sometimes comes from trauma or from undiagnosed depression, anxiety, or schizophrenia, but sometimes it just comes from partying too much.

We don't have a functioning psychiatric system. A lot of people that are addicted to hard drugs might have done fine with an antidepressant, some cognitive behavioral therapy, and exercise, which works for almost everybody. We don't have that, and that's the traditional progressive criticism.

Then the other issue is why are there so many people on the streets in San Francisco? It's because we let them. There's a myth that it's because of the weather. Certainly in freezing places like Chicago, it's hard to be on the streets year-round. But there's other places like Miami, which are warm, which don't have the same problems that we have. Or they did, and then they fixed them. The solution is basically universal shelter—a safe and clean place to sleep. It should not be so nice that it attracts people to want to stay there.

That's not the policy we have. We have a "housing first" policy rather than a "shelter first" policy, under this utopian idea that we can just provide everybody who wants their own apartment in San Francisco or Venice Beach with their own apartment. It's obviously wrong. Just geographically you can't do it, but financially you can't do it. And it creates a terrible incentive for people to become homeless.

We need a "treatment first" policy. We need to enforce laws, including misdemeanors, including against public camping, public defecation, and public drug use. Those are cries for help from people. When they break those laws, they should be arrested, brought before a judge, and given the opportunity to have rehab or psychiatric care rather than jail or prison.