Thom Hartmann recently posted an article in the HartmanReport.com (April 22, 2024) about homelessness that focused on affordability barriers pointing out that the median price of a US house is $480,000. Of course, like most financial statistics, the median (and mean/average) are skewed due to the wealthy One-percenters. There are many small towns where you can still buy a modest house for less than $150,000 - rents are lower there too. Of course, jobs are scarce the further away from a big city one lives. That fact is often a barrier to living in a rural town for many people. Hartmann also touched on the nuisance factor created by the homeless population. They sleep-in public places and leave a mess, or simply camp in parks or on sidewalks until evicted.
As a psychologist, I felt it was important to remind Hartmann's readers and others that the cost of rent accounts for only a fraction of the reasons for a homelessness epidemic in America. The majority of people living on the street have significant mental health problems including addictions to drugs and alcohol. Substance abuse often starts as autopsychiatry to cope with anxiety and depression over things like job loss. In my view, the ever-increasing homelessness population has been due mainly to government policies addressing mental illness care and treatment.
During the 60's and 70's. Most state and local government-run mental hospitals were in need of major restoration or replacement. Replacements and renovations would surely require a tax hike. Coincidentally, drugs like Thorazine, Haloperidol, and Prozac enabled outpatient treatment for many psychoses and other severe mental health disorders even though hospitalization was the preferred environment of treatment. That led well-intentioned liberal organizations to challenge the legality of long-term civil commitments as an unfair infringement on personal freedoms. The result was fewer and shorter forced hospitalizations, and many patients were released from decaying mental hospitals to their communities way too soon to reliably continue outpatient treatment.
As far as legislators were concerned - problem solved. Instead, the problem of mental health treatment soon created a flow of mentally-ill people to the streets. Their outpatient treatment often resulted in homelessness due to wandering off, forgetting or intentionally stopping medication. After all some of the new anti-psychotic medications like Thorazine and Haloperidol had unpleasant side effects like drooling and walking like a robot. There was also limited space in homeless shelters, so the majority wound up on the street because there was then, and still is, a shortage of mental health outreach workers to bring them back to treatment, find them some housing, restore their welfare checks, etc.
Why do homeless people shy away from shelters? I heard two recurring reasons from homeless people. First, many had been victims of physical and/or sexual abuse in homeless shelters and/or they had been robbed in their sleep. Second, many were concerned that they would have to stop taking illicit drugs and/or sober up. That too made street life a more appealing option to some. Those barriers, coupled with the lack of trained outreach workers and inpatient facilities to treat the homeless with serious mental health issues, created a perfect storm for ever-increasing homelessness.
What can be done to address homelessness today? Some cities and even states are considering criminalizing homelessness by banning sleeping on public land. Sleeping on private land, like your backyard, is already criminal trespass. Of course, what such a policy will wind up doing, is replacing mental hospitals with prisons. That is, of course, the exact opposite of what the liberal organizations who promoted weakening civil commitment laws intended. Today, it is time to repair the mental health support system in ways that will prevent homelessness.
From my perch on the wire, it seems that providing secure (lockable) sleeping rooms with sufficient capacity for all homeless people is a good first step. Homeless people should be able to leave their belongings (shopping carts, backpacks, tents, etc.) unattended there while getting outpatient care and/or looking for jobs. It also might be prudent to reconsider long-term custodial care in government-operated mental hospitals for the severely mentally-ill indigent. There still are some government-operated hospitals for the mentally-ill. More will probably be needed. But, as I noted, many are at maximum capacity. In addition, more outreach staff are essential to help shepherd patients through the often decades-long path to recovery both in and outside of mental hospitals, outpatient clinics, and our complex welfare systems.
