Show-Me Institute Podcast
Homelessness and Housing Policy with Judge Glock
In this episode, Susan Pendergrass speaks with Judge Glock, the Director of Research and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor at City Journal, about the ongoing attempts to address homelessness through housing policy. They explore the effectiveness of current housing initiatives, the challenges in implementing effective policy solutions, innovative approaches to reduce homelessness, and more.
Produced by Show-Me Opportunity
- Duration:
- 33m
- Broadcast on:
- 25 Jun 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
(upbeat music) - Dr. Judge Glock, Judge. Welcome to the ShowMeans 2 podcast. I appreciate you joining us. And we were just talking about this before we started for a quick second, but we just did a podcast on housing with Brian Kaplan and heard some sort of super provocative ideas about how to make sure that every house prices go down in San Francisco and everyone has a place to live, which is to dramatically deregulate housing and get rid of zoning and that type of thing. But of course that conversation, this sort of side issue came up of homelessness and homeless encampments. And I was thinking about that in your name popped up because you've done a lot of research and writing on this idea. And I feel like 10 years ago, so St. Louis has had homeless encampments and we've struggled, our downtown streets are, unfortunately people with drug addictions and mental health issues and it makes the downtown in many parts of downtown unpleasant and the downtown's already struggling. And then what to do, do you break up these encampments? And so I guess what I really was curious to talk to you about today is what can we do about this? It seems new, am I wrong? And what can be done to sort of address this very complicated issue? - Yeah, so thanks, of course, for having me on. And your first impression in impulse that this is relatively new is correct. As I sometimes described to people, if you knew American cities in the 1980s or 90s, even those cities that were very hard on their luck and in a very bad way, such as Washington DC, where I partially grew up, they're, for all of their problems, they did not have pervasive street encampments. Nobody kind of in the mid 1980s, thought even in a city that had become fairly lawless, that you could set up a series of puppets on a sidewalk and those would just exist there indefinitely. I did a little bit of research trying to find out when this became more common and there wasn't anything systematic, but basically what you saw is that besides some notable exceptions, such as Los Angeles's Skid Row, a lot of these began popping up in the early 2000s and then many more in the 2010s to the point where it's become surprisingly common in a major American city, see large numbers of tents occupying significant parts of public space, sidewalks and public parts and so forth. And this, not surprisingly, has led to a big debate. Part of my work has pointed out that as unpleasant as it may seem, enforcement of rules against public camping and sleeping and so forth, is one factor that does help remove and alleviate the problems with these homeless encampments. Now, it is not the only factor and there are many issues around homelessness, including the price of housing that you mentioned discussed with Dr. Kaplan. But to my mind, there is no question that if cities refuse to take any action about public encampments or refuse to discourage them in their public spaces, they're going to see more of them. And one of the best examples of this is my former home city of Austin, Texas. So in 2019, the city by unanimous vote agreed to legalize sleeping in public places and public sidewalks and so forth. And what you saw was immediately within the next year was a 45% increase in unsheltered homelessness. Now, some of the advocates claimed that, well, that's just because people are much more visible. They were living in out of the way forests and parks and you didn't see them before. And now we know their number is much greater because we are able to count them out in these public streets and sidewalks and so forth. Now, one, besides the fact that bringing people out into public spaces can be a bad in itself and that it impacts many more people when you have people existing on the sidewalks, occasionally fighting on the sidewalks, doing drugs on the sidewalks, and yes, inevitably defecating on the sidewalks, that this was clearly not a question of just moving people out from out of the way streams and parks and greenways into the public. And we know this because in Austin about the shelter system had about 20% fewer people in the year after this end of street sleeping ban took place. So immediately after the ban, the number of unsheltered rises rapidly, the number of shelter decreases. And you continue to see which affected it. Many people will deny, which is a large number of people from outside of the city who were coming there. Many advocates for the homeless will say that the majority of homeless people are from the city in which they are found to be homeless. And that is true. But that aligns two very important distinctions. One is the distinction between the sheltered and the unsheltered, which actually I would hope to get into a little further with you in the course of this podcast. But two, that the number, the quote unquote minority that's from elsewhere is a large minority. In Austin, it was over 35% for a while. So if you have a third plus from outside the city, and that difference from outside is making the difference between a very large homeless population and a normal size homeless population, the ability of cities to attract people from outside due to permissiveness of drug laws, of public cabinet, et cetera, can be pretty substantial. - Yeah, it's interesting that people think, or I don't know, it seems to me that sometimes the people who make public policy think it happens like in a bubble or in a static form, because my sister, I mentioned all the time, lives in Portland, Oregon, and they decided that they decriminalized drugs, then it would simply affect the people living in Oregon at that time who were getting arrested for small drugs. And instead what obviously happened is people migrated to Oregon because drugs are decriminalized and they have a huge homeless problem where people are pitching tents in other people's front yards and they increase taxes. So they just did this sort of trifecta that made people say, guess what I'm gonna do is move away from Portland 'cause I don't wanna live here now. What about this idea of housing as a right? How does that weave in? - This actually relates to the issue that you mentioned about drug use and permissiveness of drug laws. And again, advocates for the homeless will correctly point out that the majority of the homeless do not, for the similar to the mobility issue about who moves where in that there is a massive difference between the sheltered and the unsheltered homeless population. So people don't think about it 'cause you don't see it in your daily life, but 60% of the whole homeless population is sheltered. They're in a home, they're in a battered women's shelter, they're in a family's shelter, a single men's shelter, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That is actually the majority of the population and we just don't see it, it's invisible. But when people talk about the quote unquote homeless, that is not who they're thinking about, of course. They are thinking about the what's called the unsheltered population out on the street in public parks and in the tents and so forth. And that we do know that drugs or alcohol are a very significant issue. And that is why that kind of common sense response when people say that, or the advocates say that mental health and drug addiction are not a severe problem among the homeless and your average citizen kind of tilts their head and wonders, that doesn't jive with my experience. That average person is thinking correctly about that unsheltered homeless population they encounter. One of these UCLA studies found that about 75% of the unsheltered have a substantial drug or alcohol problem. About 75% have a substantial problem with mental illness and obviously the vast majority then have both. So the unsheltered have these very severe problems or almost an order magnitude greater than the sheltered population, which a good proportion of which tend to be single women and children while the unsheltered tends to overwhelmingly be single men. So a lot of advocates of homeless have come to believe what this ideology knows, the housing first idea. Also sometimes framed as a housing is a right that we all should have access to. So the housing first idea is so intuitive as to be almost laughable in that if you are homeless by definition, you are lacking in a house. And therefore we can quote unquote solve homelessness by giving anyone who is homeless a house. And many cities across the U.S., especially starting in the early 2000s, began adopting housing first as their motto, especially for what was known as the chronically homeless. This is largely unsheltered population who's been homeless for more than a year. So they say, "Hey, we have this kind of hardcore homeless population. They're out on the streets. They have all of these issues. And if we can just offer them a free house importantly, with no preconditions whatsoever, you do not have to, when you're offered a housing first house, you do not have to take mental health assessments. You do not have to abide by sobriety. You do not have to do anything. That's very importantly part of their housing first model. If we can give them the house, we can basically move most of these people off the streets. We can quote unquote save money in the social services and the police we use out in the streets that are interacting with these unsheltered homeless all of the time and therefore quote unquote solve our homeless problem within a period of years. And you had a number of cities, including San Francisco, that said we're basically going to solve homelessness in a decade. - So is the idea that out of the smell, you have problems these people have. If you solve housing first, the rest of them will dissipate. - That is, that's largely the ideology. And so some of the advocates of housing first will claim that really they don't have all of these problems, all of these problems in so far as they exist. And again, some people deny that there's drug or alcohol problems or problems with mental health. But in so far as these problems exist, they will, they were downstream of not having a house. Such as you became homeless, therefore you got addicted to drugs and alcohol, therefore you became mentally ill. As one of my friends has pointed out, you quote, don't get schizophrenia from the streets, nearly existing in public does not suddenly make you develop bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Yes, of course, makes treating these problems more difficult. But it's not the same thing as you are mentally healthy individual with no significant problems. You end up on the street and six months later, you're starting to see visions, so forth. That is not how mental health actually works. And similarly for drug and alcohol addictions. When the same UCLA study looked at how many of these unsheltered people say drugs and alcohol were a factor in causing them to lose housing, it was the majority. It was the majority that said part of the reason I am no longer house is cause of my drug and alcohol problem. Now, yes, and so, but in their mind, they ignore a lot of these long-term risk factors, the housing first advocates that is, and say if we get someone at house, most of their problems will be solved, they can get treatment for their mental health, they can learn to stop abusing drugs, they can get drug rehabilitation work and so forth. Organically, it'll happen, just organically. Yes. I mean, you said there's no conditions on housing. Yes, so no, no, you get into a housing first house and the civil service workers or just the social workers who are there cannot require you to do anything, cannot even require you to so much as talk to them. And you have kind of these absurd situations where social workers are chasing residents around the house, trying to get them to be interviewed for a few minutes to see if maybe they'd like to go into a drug treatment program. But not surprisingly, anyone who's dealt with addiction issues or dealt with mental health issues, people in those situations aren't really eager to get clean and clear very fast. And so if you give them a comfortable situation, it does seem that nothing much changes in terms of their drug and mental health abuse and there does seem to be at least some evidence that especially drug abusers die more quickly in these units because what's known as the check effect. There's a long series of social science studies that show that when drug addicts in particular get a large amount of money or they have less financial stress, if they're still embroiled in their addiction, they're likely to do more drugs 'cause the money is larger there. So if you give someone basically free apartment and they don't have to worry about that, they don't have to worry about being in a shelter, they will be doing more drugs. And the death rates in some of these units are absolutely wild. There was a recent New Yorker study. - I saw you wrote about that by Jennifer Egan, right? - Yes, Jennifer Egan that presented one of these housing first apartments in New York, I believe called 90 Sands, has this troubled but ultimately very hopeful model for what we could do about the homeless and only very far down in the article did they mention that, well, 16 people had died in this a single apartment complex within the first eight months and the majority of those were overdose related. As I said in that article, I said, well, if this is excess, I am horrified to wonder what failure would look like. These are obscene rates of death and they're unfortunately not that uncommon when you have a large number of drug addicts giving no supervision and basically free housing indefinitely. You, one of the things in that article that Jennifer Egan described was precisely that their signs started going up around the house about the apartment about don't do drugs alone because people were Odine in their own apartments and nobody was there to revive them or give them Narcan, one of these revival drugs. And so basically you had a staff of a government funded project going around encouraging people to do drugs together to be safe and I could go on and on. - Yeah, I mean, that's a public solution publicly funded and we've talked about it at the showman's too. Couple of programs in St. Louis that are privately managed and privately funded like through the catholic diocese, they have places where men can spend the night but they have to clean their room, they have to, I mean, they have to be clean, they cannot, there can be no alcohol, no drug. I mean, they have conditions and it seems to me that those are the ways to turn people around. I think there's also, you might be familiar with, DC's got a newspaper that people who are homeless can sell the newspaper, they buy them and they resell them and they make some money and so they actually are earning. We also profiled a church and a nonprofit in the western side of the state where people basically do work and volunteer at the church and they earn tickets and the tickets can be turned in for food or other consumer goods. And that is like empowering these people versus, there's just no way. Why would people ever think that that's going to work? If you give free housing with no conditions, why would people just then out of the goodness of their soul appreciate it so much that they would turn their lives around? I mean, it's, it is somewhat baffling but it emerges directly from this ideology that any personal problems are again, downstream of sort of economic oppression and social dysfunction. I've occasionally seen it just said, you know, systematic racism is of course the explanation for this, for homelessness without engaging that of course, most homeless people are not black. And I think it's a small minority, our majority is white. So all of these other explanations that is just social oppression, it's just economics, yet anyone with some common sense seems absurd. - And yes. - So what is, what is the policy solution? You mentioned enforcing the no sleeping, no camping, which just makes common sense to me. What is the solution to help people? Well, let me just back up for a minute. I've often heard that when we close down the mental health institutions in the 80s and put everybody out on the street and that's why we have homeless people. Is that? - No, run, that is, it's strange. The story is often described as Ron Reagan closed down the mental institutions. And this is why we had a proliferation of homelessness in the 1980s. Not surprising, this is false. There is an issue that we need more mental institutions. The mental institution actually peaked in the mid 1950s at about 550,000 beds in America. Now it's around, I wanna say 40,000. So we're at the 10th of the level of mental health inpatient beds and our population is more than double. That is a bad situation for the severely mental ill. It had nothing to do with the only argument. You could really make about Ron Reagan as the signed a law in Wazi Governor of California that was part of this general movement to de-institutionalization, but that was happening all over the country. So we do need more of those beds and part of the homelessness that we don't have these long-term treatment facilities for the severely mental ill. And for that group, you're largely talking about schizophrenics, bipolar, and to a lesser extent, people with severe depression. But mainly schizophrenic and bipolar. We just don't have the treatment facilities for those. Now there are some other methods that have arisen since then such as assisted outpatient treatment where you basically have a court monitor a mentally ill individual and make sure they're taking their medication, they're going to their treatment regime and so forth. And expanding those is very important to getting more people into treatment. And the other factor is exactly the one you described about tying the housing to these rules and benefits. This, to my mind, this is the crazy, I would say the second craziest aspect of housing first, I'll get to the first in just one moment, that you have this wonderful opportunity in that the government is giving housing severely reduced price or basically free to people out in the streets. And that is a great opportunity to leverage that, to help someone get their life together, especially if they're in a mental health crisis. Someone who is schizophrenic will avoid treatment. But here you're saying, hey, as long as you're in this house, we can help you to make sure you stay well and you're taking your medication and so forth. And the fact that they abjure that responsibility is mind-blowing. And exactly as you say, it's the private sector that mirroring what anyone again who has dealt with these sorts of problems and their family knows is merely throwing more money than someone in a crisis situation is not going to get it to better. That is not a free market solution. As I answered, people say, well, there's kind of a conservative free market case for just handing people money and not having the government involved in that at all. But no, no one in the private sector thinks just giving money to someone without consequences is a solution to most social problems. There's a reason you always kind of time money to conditions and this is an opportunity. Now, the second side of that, and I mentioned before, to my mind is the craziest aspect of the housing first problem that also needs to be changed to change the trajectory here is how they allocate these housing first units. So you have an issue. Everyone wants free or almost free housing, of course. There are a lot of homeless people. There are a lot of even long-term chronically homeless people. So how do you decide who gets the house? They basically have a point system in most of the U.S. That you describe who is more vulnerable. It's called the V.I. Spadat. I've always forget what the exact acronym stands for. In most of the U.S. is this V.I. Spadat is used. So you get a bonus point for things that would make sense. You've been on the street longer, you have a physical disability, et cetera. But to my mind, some of the most shocking things is you also get a bonus point towards a free house if you are currently abusing drugs. You have a bonus point to a free house if you are mistreating your children, if you are a parent. You get a child taken away by Child Protective Services is a bonus towards you getting into a free house. If you are committing acts of violence or selling drugs, those are bonus points as well. So you have a system that is not only encouraging and allowing people with drug and mental health addictions or mental health problems to live in free houses without consequences indefinitely, you're the one that is actively rewarding people with the most severe problems. - Why, why does that happen? - That is a very good question. In fact, the woman that was the main subject profile in that New Yorker article, again, somewhere down in the article they mentioned, she quote unquote got the apartment because she was a heroin abuser, which meant someone who was not a heroin abuser did not get the free apartment. Yeah, so why would the government possibly do this? Again, to the common sensical person, they would say, well, that is rewarding bad behavior and the government stay away from that. From the ideology of the homeless advocates, someone who commits more acts of violence who is more addicted to drugs, who has more problems with abusing their kids is quote unquote more needy. They have more demands than the other person. Without thinking, of course, any consequences whatsoever that would have on people who were trying to get their lives back together. - And also like the group living in the same apartment building, you've just generally got emails troubled group you could put together. - Oh, that you could possibly imagine. And there's lots of-- - Synergy. - Yeah, oh, yeah, there's lots of screaming people who said I was trying to get clean, but how am I possibly going to get clean in an apartment where people are smoking crack in the hallways? You selected based on drug abuse, and then you're telling people to get clean, not only are they not going to get clean, they're going to-- - It's going to be now. - Yeah, it is a absolutely insane process, but one of my favorite examples actually is in Massachusetts, where you've got four points to a free house if you were currently abusing drugs and not in recovery. You were down to one point if you had been in recovery for 12 months, so that was really going to hurt your chances. But you had a bonus two points opportunity if you've overdosed in the past year. Literally telling people the way to get your life ahead and to move on is to overdose and continue to abuse drugs without treatment. - Yeah, I mean, I just had like a flash to the housing crisis of 2007 and '08, where they're like, if you've missed, if you stop paying your mortgage, you might get bailed out. So people were like, oh, guess what I just decided I'm going to do, not pay your mortgage. And I'm like, you can't get bailed out until you haven't paid your mortgage for six months. I mean, again, to this policy has consequences, and we sort of know the consequences that we want, and yet we curact policy and enacted that leads us down the opposite road. What should we do? What should we do with it? - Yeah, it's one, it's policy without consequence are belief and incentives. It seems better. Someone with a more, you know, conservative viewpoint would say like, you reward a certain behavior, you're going to get more of it. If you're rewarding drug abuse and not taking your medication for your mental illness, which is a bonus for these housing first units, you're going to get more of that sort of behavior. So yes, tying the housing into these sorts of recovery plans, in 2018, there was a bipartisan federal bill, the Communities Act, I believe, I believe, that encouraged recovery housing, which is housing where people often former addicts get together, but there's a great model called the Oxford House, which brings for their former attacker, usually a suburban style house and help make sure that they are all encouraging each other, get clean. If you don't stay clean, you get out of the house. And this is a way for people to prop each other up on their road to recovery. This is a great, yes, this leads to a lot of dropouts, not surprisingly. So the advocates hate it 'cause they say, hey, you know, 80% of people don't finish the program. Well, to me, if 100% quote unquote, finish the program, but they're worse off afterwards, I don't care. If you can get 20% or whatever to actively move on to recovery, that is a great, that is a great program. And a lot of those sort of models, importantly, getting the federal government out 'cause it's large of the federal government, including all of these insane programs, allowing a lot more of these-- Housing first, that's a federal push. It is an explicitly federal program that since 2013 has been more or less mandated the federal level for local governments if they're going to receive federal funding. And so it is-- - Have any cities or states gotten it right? - None has been great. And we've seen some places that have done better than others, though. I do, a lot of the Housing First advocates, like Houston, for instance, as a city that has, quote unquote, built a lot of housing and done better on homelessness. But as I also point out, they actually haven't built that much more housing or that different than anywhere else in the United States in terms of the affordable subsidized housing for the homeless. They've built a lot more market rate housing in general, the sort of things that Brian Kaplan talked about, and that's driven rents down, and that's definitely helped a lot. But they've also had what the mayor, Sylvester Turner used to call a tough love approach about we are going to mandate that you get off the street into some sort of service program. Mayor Kevin Faulkner of San Diego, which for a while was the only California city to see active decreases in homelessness, had what he called a requirement that, a requirement to not just get off the streets, but to use the available services. We have a obligation to provide you services, you have an obligation to use them. And those sorts of things can make a difference. Now, none of them is going to be ideal, but a combination of focused on enforcement clearing the streets with the ideal of not arresting people, but moving people into shelter and services, providing those shelter services with some sort of mandates in terms of sobriety, in terms of progress on some social goals, and attaching that to some real work on drug addiction and mental health. And you're going to get some of the way to kind of rolling back a lot of the unfortunate tendencies that have happened in the last 20 years of America. - Do you have a writing article about homelessness, and you put your name on it, and you're about to hit publish, and you're like, oh God, I'm going to sound so mean. (laughs) I'm such a bad guy, you know, because that's, I think sometimes free marker policies in general seem like they put people last. And that's because, as my colleague at the Cato Institute, Neil McCloskey likes to say, everyone wants to be Santa Claus, you know, but someone asked me to cringe. But if the government is just passing out free housing, and if they're prioritizing the people who are doing the least to deserve it, that somehow seems nice. And then making requirements of people or trying to incentivize the behaviors that we know will improve their lives somehow seems mean. And I think it's oxymoronic. - Yeah, it certainly is. And as, for whatever I write about the housing first stuff, I usually don't get that much pushback because the policy is just so patently absurd. And whenever you describe it to people, normal people, they're immediately horrified. I think that the kind of homeless activists have existed in a bubble for a while, and just they didn't talk to anyone outside of it. And no one outside of their little bubble realized that awarding people housing based on drug abuse was not a good idea. They just know and told them that like, that might come off strange in most of the country. The, when I talk about enforcement, yes, that's when I get the most pushback. But there's two things that I often tell people about that. Is one on enforcement, I'm only as conservative as the median San Francisco voter, which actually voted for a street camping ban in 2016. That city never enforced it, of course. But the median voter in that city was for it. And in my previous hometown of Austin, Texas, I think a Democrat plus 50 county and extremely left-wing county, you had a large majority also vote to reinstate that camping ban as of before. So the idea that enforcement is sort of this fringe activity or like belief, this is squarely in sort of the 80% of Americans are for not allowing people to camp wherever they want whenever they feel like it. And the other side of that is you just point to the absolutely disastrous effects here. So Los Angeles had a program, hard to remember in 2006 called Safer Cities, where they tried to clean up their skid row. And what they saw is about a 50% reduction in homelessness, an equivalent reduction in homeless deaths and just a general improvement in the area, an academic study found that there wasn't any spillovers to the other neighborhoods. So it didn't seem like they were just pushing the problem around. There was a Jamie Foxx movie and I forget what it was called. It was the violinist or something in that effect of filmed around 2013 on skid row. And the filmmakers said they had to junk up skid row to make it look like it did just 10 years ago. Nobody would have to do that today. You couldn't even film in there anymore. - You could film downtown all it? Yeah, anyway. - Yeah, 'cause you become a disaster again. And that's good. So after the city stopped enforcing those things, the number of homeless deaths quadruple. You now have 2,000 homeless deaths on the streets of LA every year. You're picking up about five body bags off the street every single day. Now it's tough to imagine what he less compassionate, circumstances and that looks like. But that's what they're doing. And those who say like, well, just allow people with severe mental illness and drug addictions to exist indefinitely and completely unmanageable public parks and sidewalks. That is obviously not a solution. And so when I keep pressing people on that, people do seem to warm up that this is maybe not the most hateful thing they've ever heard, but actually can be. And I think is the more compassionate solution here. - I mean, in Oregon for the record, trying to roll back their decriminalization of drugs. I don't know how successful it would be. I think it's too paced to the tube and all of that. But they're like, oh, did we go too far? - Well, yeah, it's, I don't know how much your listeners would follow this. So in the coming days, the Supreme Court should issue a ruling in this grants pass case, which is a case that came out of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which not surprised the Ninth Circuit was kind of singular and that no other circuit would describe anything like this, which said that basically no city in that circuit could enforce its campaign and sleeping bans, as long as they did not have sufficient shelter space for everybody in that city. And they did not count in those shelter spaces, places that say had religious aspects, which is a lot of-- - Where's grants passed for the listeners? - It is in Oregon. It is in the state of Oregon and it's a small city that has had to deal with a lot of homeless population. So this Ninth Circuit made this blanket statement somehow in the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution that our founding fathers said you could not remove anybody from public parks or sidewalks. And what did you see? You saw an explosion in homelessness in the Ninth Circuit. There was about a quarter in the next four or five years and the rest of the country, it was actually pretty stable. Most of the increase in homelessness has been in those West Coast states and partially as a result of this grants pass case. So it looks like the Supreme Court is going to overturn that and I think that will help some of those states and cities take action. And what you saw is that even very liberal mayors and governors originally Gavin Newsom wrote the Supreme Court to say, you have to overturn this ruling. This is impossible for us to deal with right now. And so that kind of idea that this is no longer acceptable has become much more common since I started talking about this years ago. - Well, this is all fascinating. I could talk about it forever. We talk a lot at the show me institute about the crime problem in St. Louis II and they're also closely connected. And I just appreciate your scholarly work on it and explaining it to us in a way we can understand. I'm sure most people are shocked to hear what you had to say, but thank you for saying it. I appreciate it. - Well, thank you so much for having me. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)