Normative sociology of homelessness

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Christopher F. Ruto writes,

the Seattle metro area spends more than $1 billion fighting homelessness every year. That’s nearly $100,000 for every homeless man, woman and child in King County, yet the crisis seems only to have deepened

The article goes on to list various approaches to homelessness, all of which assume a politically correct cause for the problem. For example, one woman on the city council is reported to claim that

the city’s homelessness crisis is the inevitable result of the Amazon boom, greedy landlords and rapidly increasing rents.

Pointer from John Cochrane, who concludes

really dysfunctional policies persist through the repetition of these fairy-tale narratives.

Normative sociology, which looks at what some people want to be the causes of social problems, is quite harmful.

45 thoughts on “Normative sociology of homelessness”

  1. I often think back on an interview I heard with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. He discussed at length setting it up as largely volunteer, commenting that there was pressure to hire high priced staff; rent expensive office space; etc.

    That touches on bureaucracies’ answer to any problem: hire people; rent offices; ask for ever more funding regardless of results and need. Education inc. serves as an example: despite declining enrollment, our local school board has asked for another million dollars in bonding authority. Ha ha ha. The local hospital is doing yet another remodel, despite cavernously vacant rooms and the nearby clinic losing its last full time doctor and on and on.

  2. To be fair, popular conservative writers engage in normative sociology, as well. E.g., blaming the social problems of African Americans on Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. And then there’s normative supply-side economics, in which the cure for every economic problem is a tax cut for high-income people.

    There is a “normative” version of every social science, and such a version for each ideological disposition.

    • Of course, as a result of the hegemony of the Left in academia, media, professional organizations, bureaucracies and (increasingly) the corporate world, the real harm comes from progressive “normative” social science.

      • Conservatives’ normative political science has done terrific things for the Middle East, though.

        Oops I meant terrible. I keep getting those words confused.

    • blaming the social problems of African Americans on Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society.

      Okay, but we’re not spending $X billion in service to our narrative.

          • I’m not saying that progressive policies don’t have bad effects, but it is simplistic to imagine that huge social problems – the socially dysfunctional underclass, poor educational results – can be attributed entirely to particular progressive governmental policies (expanded welfare, the public school monopoly) to which we conservatives object.

    • It is totally established that the optimal form of raising children is the married mother-father staying together to raise the “family”. It’s not perfect, and there was a time in the booming 50s-60s when there was a lot of married husband violence against their wives. That needed to be stopped; but no-fault divorce was not a good step. (Reagan’s biggest regret. ?)

      Easy divorce and cultural acceptance of sex before and outside of marriage has been a disaster for poor people, both poor whites and poor blacks. It’s not been so great for college educated, so far, tho the #MeToo reaction indicates lots of women have been less satisfied than the “free sex” promoters thought.

      It used to be that the optimal was “normal”, and “normative”, tho not universal. The social problems in the USA, and the OECD countries, will continue getting worse as promiscuity continues to be popularized and encouraged.

      “Responsible Promiscuity” is an idea I used to favor, but now am sure is a mistake.

  3. the Seattle metro area spends more than $1 billion fighting homelessness every year. That’s nearly $100,000 for every homeless man, woman and child in King County, yet the crisis seems only to have deepened

    Isn’t that what James Taranto used to call a “Fox Butterfield” moment, back when he was writing Best of the Web Today at WSJ?

    In any other business, that would be considered a good “return on investment,” yes? More $$$ invested = more product produced? But IANAE, so maybe I’ve got that wrong….
    [and a happy and fruitful new year to all!]

    • “Seattle city hall subsidizes homelessness by $100,000, surprised when homelessness increases”

      That’s the entirety of the explanation there. No further navel gazing into gentrification, or transphobic policy, or whatever the whipping horse du jour, is need

  4. That’s nearly $100,000 for every homeless man, woman and child in King County,

    AN argument for UBI / negative income tax? At least in King County?

    • It makes precisely the opposite case.

      Realistically, if you handed these people lots more cash without strings, you would indeed succeed in reducing the homeless population problem, via lots more overdose deaths. Not only do people disagree on what causes homelessness and what might help make less of it, but also on fundamental vision of what they actually want to happen both to these people and to normal urban neighborhoods, residents, and visitors.

      It’s better to understand the issue of the current number and type of people sleeping outside as more of a policy trade-off or consequence of choices local jurisdictions and judges make and for which they should accept responsibility, rather than as a classic ‘problem’ that arises out of mere stochastic misfortune or impersonal economic forces. The exacerbation from bad policy is so severe it’s become more important than the root causes. The fact that they tend to cluster in the particular urban locations with the most generous goods and services and least hassle from the authorities supports this point of view.

      Our individualistic society’s legal system and prevailing ideology doesn’t have a “foster care for troubled grown-ups” pigeon hole for these pigeons – who are adults who do not meet the commitment threshold of being a clear and present danger to themselves or others, but who nevertheless need to be placed under the enduring supervision and direction of responsible caretakers and custodians with broad authority to command obedience and privately discipline transgression and who will be compensated for their troubles. Social work, hospitals, and prison don’t cut it.

      This paternalistic pigeon hole used to exist, but it was abolished, and what we see now is the fallout from that and other decisions that treat this population as fodder in the accelerating rat race of competitive sanctimony.

      1. As for ‘universal’ – the problem population is tiny – no need to spend lots of money on everyone just to help this small target group. “King County is home to more than 1 million residents earning below the median income, and 99 percent of them manage to find a place to live and pay the rent on time.”

      2. Negative income tax doesn’t help if the homeless don’t earn incomes, “only 7.5 percent of the homeless report working full-time, despite record-low unemployment, record job growth and Seattle’s record-high $15 minimum wage. The reality, obvious to anyone who spends any time in tent cities or emergency shelters, is that 80 percent of the homeless suffer from drug and alcohol addiction and 30 percent suffer from serious mental illness, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.”

      3. “Just give them money” doesn’t accomplish much of what people think they want to do for these people, when you’re talking about mentally ill, drug using vagrants with dozens of serious personal problems and who don’t actually want to live in shelters or institutions, so who won’t if you don’t literally force them to, and prefer to set up tents in the temperate Pacific Northwestern climate when the authorities let them. Which Seattle authorities mostly do.

      “In recent years, O’Brien has become a leader in the campaign to legalize homelessness throughout the city. He has proposed ordinances to legalize street camping on 167 miles of public sidewalks, permit RV camping on city streets, and prevent the city’s homeless-outreach Navigation Teams (made up of cops and other workers) from cleaning up tent cities.”

      • You make some good points. Giving cash is typically not the answer.

        “Money will not solve a behavioral problem.”

        or as my friend likes to put it, channeling the proverbs he learned in his youth:”Money will not solve a money problem.”

        Or to qualify that. In the “post-scarcity society,” there is little *a priori* justification to assume that giving out more money will solve a money problem

      • Our individualistic society’s legal system and prevailing ideology doesn’t have a “foster care for troubled grown-ups” pigeon hole for … adults who do not meet the commitment threshold of being a clear and present danger to themselves or others, but who nevertheless need to be placed under the enduring supervision and direction of responsible caretakers and custodians with broad authority to command obedience and privately discipline transgression and who will be compensated for their troubles. … This paternalistic pigeon hole used to exist, but it was abolished…

        What was this “paternalistic pigeon hole”?

      • With the exception of the mentally ill, I kind of wonder why society doesn’t regard “drug-using vagrants” as just oddballs who are making different choices in life. So what if their tents are an eyesore? Why is this a problem? Why can’t people just be drug using vagrants in peace? Why are other people entitled to vagrant-free sidewalks? If you want to live in a free society, you have to put up with people who are going to make choices that you wouldn’t personally make and don’t approve of.

        • If you owned a cafe or other small business that depended on foot traffic and a bunch of homeless people camped out on the sidewalk right in front of your storefront, I imagine your live and let live sentiments would vanish pretty quickly.

          • Whether I would or wouldn’t really would not feel differently, would not change the reality of whether someone has a legal or moral right to (a) use drugs, and (b) hand out on sidewalks looking scruffy.

            I guess if you wanted vagrant-free sidewalks you could grant store owners property rights over their public sidewalks and they could all get together and hire a private security force to get rid of vagrants. There are mechanisms. Just not sure that the existence of homeless drug-users in general is really a “problem” that society should worry about. People make choices. Some of those choices involve propritizing getting high over living in a house with a roof. If they aren’t actively engaged in violent crime or theft, it’s really none of my business.

          • Yes, we should all have to hire private security forces to protect ourselves against vagrants. An efficient outcome if there ever was one. If it makes you feel any better my building raised the HOA to hire a do nothing rent-a-cop to walk around and he hasn’t prevented much crime.

            Just this week I had a bunch of black teenagers try to sneak into my building to steal bikes (or worse, we’ve had three car jackings over the last few years), then when someone confronted them they pulled the fire alarm, waking my infant daughter and making us stand in the cold winter night for the fire department to come and all of us losing precious sleep. Your bullshit nonsense is why it happened.

          • Wouldn’t we normally regard this sort of thinking as guilt-by-association and stereotyping? Some drug-using vagrants are criminals, some are not. Why is it not possible to arrest and prosecute the criminals while leaving the peaceful harmless ones alone?

          • Punishing criminals after they have committed crimes in necessary, but that punishment isn’t itself primarily useful to the victim. What the victim wants it not to have been a victim in the first place. If you have to be near the homeless, the odds of your being a victim go up quite a bit. Nobody wants that.

            In every city there is affordable housing of good quality within short commuting distance to jobs. However, it has the negative externality of being near people who are likely to behave badly. Even if not all the people that are likely to behave badly behave badly, it is enough of a risk that people pay exorbitant sums to live in whatever part of town allows them to be physically separated from the undesireables. Everyones revealed preference is to judge a book by its cover, because covers are usually accurate enough to predict outcomes.

        • I have a hard time believing that this isn’t a troll, but I’ll pretend that this is a sincere statement on your part. Using drugs and looking scruffy in and of themselves aren’t necessarily problems. Defecating and urinating all over public spaces, engaging in rampant property theft to feed their addictions, rendering public spaces inhospitable or unusable to other humans, scattering biohazardous needles all over landscape, creating acres of squalor and filth that propagate vermin and disease, attacking and harassing people passing by, setting the landscape on fire near critical infrastructure, sex-trafficking, dumping raw sewage from your derelict RV all over the city, etc, etc, etc – are all problems. We’re not just talking about aesthetics here.

          • So this strikes me as something that calls for more of an education and outreach effort plus increased enforcement against individuals, than a policy of rounding up and removing all homeless people en masse. Make it clear that there are proper places to dispose of needles and human waste, that property theft isn’t going to be tolerated, etcetera, and then enforce those rules while leaving non-violators alone, and they may develop some internal norms in their “community” (such as it is), wherein the violent and dangerous people aren’t tolerated and are quickly handed over to the police because the harmless ones don’t want any trouble from the cops.

        • > Why can’t people just be drug using vagrants in peace?

          I don’t know where you’ve lived your life, but I used to live in San Francisco and I can confirm that most of these vagrants are very much _not_ in peace. They’ll scream at you. They’ll charge at you menacingly. Sometimes they try to stab you. They’ll try to take your money to spend on more drugs. They shoot up heroin in public, and then drop the needles in front of major tourist attractions, where small children contract AIDS after stepping on the needles.

          Oh, and of course the biggest problem is that each of them is getting $100,000 of our money (or, more accurately, each of them is causing $100,000 of our money to get funnelled into largely ineffective social programs that mostly exist to employ a bunch of useless do-gooders).

          There would be a lot less of a problem if these people were _just_ people who want to sleep on the sidewalk and do drugs in peace.

  5. I had a Poli Sci professor in 1993 that mentioned real future problem in which with more women working, local societies would struggle with local non-economic solutions. So in the past the church with the assistance of many women would provide solutions to these problems. And now local society does not have this bridge.

    1) Conservative still act like housing deregulation is One Solution here and not just part of it. Is Johnny Cochrance really hoping we force ‘rich’ homeowners to sell? (And the majority of these homeowners are upper middle class residents who choose not to sell. Also if rents fall by 20% I don’t see land investors building either.)

    2) I find it weird that no discussion of drug issues in Rust Belt either.

    3) Where is the private sector on job training or working with the homeless? We hear how low labor supply they should the leaders here in hiring or Seattle a place to call home.

    • 3) Anglo-American law says that if you train someone for a job and they decide to take their new skills somewhere else, you’re out of luck. That reduces the incentive for “the private sector” to train.

      • Then how did the private sector do this before 1970s? Employees had the freedom to move back then.

        • As far as I know, this is the primary purpose of non-competes, which are still legal in many states. If you get a job at XYZ corp, XYZ corp makes you sign a non-compete stating that if you quit you’re forbidden from working for a competitor for two years. Now, XYZ corp can invest in training you in things specific to XYZ corp, secure in the knowledge that you won’t just leave to go work at the higher-paying ABC corp as soon as your training is over

  6. My guess would be that the homeless population is highly heterogenous. Many individuals have serious drug / alcohol problems, many have serious mental health problems–and those groups overlap. There are some lifestyle types doing it as a sort of lark (mostly youngish demographics) as well as people who just can’t fit in or don’t care to.

    The economist Harry G Johnson had a phrase in an essay: some people are not steadily employed because they have “a strong preference for leisure and an aversion to industrial discipline. ” Or to go back to scripture, the Centurion told Jesus that he was a man under authority. many homeless people are not under authority. And yes, I realize that some people have jobs and are still homeless. I would like to see the figures for how many people stay that way–the average person who can hold down a job can probably stop being homeless given some planning and problem solving.

    One solution, obviously, would be more “half-way houses” that help people get off the street and accustomed to sleeping in the same place every night, working at something productive and socially acceptable most days, and following directions.

    Not everyone who is homeless wants to do this things listed above. The more that homelessness is made a tenable and workable livelihood strategy, the less motivated some people are to do everything honest and ethical and feasible to get off the street and stay off the street, even when steady work eats up their leisure time and provides them with a very low standard of living.

    I recall reading in the book _Down and out: The origins of homelessness_ that many of the homeless have family members somewhere that they cannot or will not stay with, because they are not welcome moving in with family. That book is old, ca. 1991 by Peter Rossi, but a decent scholarly work. The author points out that the vast majority of people with no cash income are not homeless. Why? Because they have the ability to live in a functioning household where they can get along with others and contribute to the household adequately that they are not kicked out.

    It’s a good analytical point. The vast majority of adults with no cash income are not homeless–they can function in a household and keep a roof over their head.

    For some proportion of the homeless, it is a livelihood that is “revealed preferred,” at least in a non-cold climate with abundant services. Portland and coastal California are revealed preferred to Fargo, North Dakota.

    = – = – = – =

    Final Note: I just finished trying to help a family friend get off the streets, or stay off the streets, or improve his situation. Long story short, it’s hard to help him, he can’t stay with nearby family members, he’d rather sleep on the church steps than go to the Open Door Mission, and he has a pack a day cigarette habit and enjoys eating at a cheap restaurant where his presence is welcome or tolerated. I would not characterize him as frugal, or a good planner.

    For a while he was sleeping in a half-derelict minivan, damn near happy as a clam, sleeping in a van in November in Upstate New York, running the engine to stay warm, doing odd jobs, mooching off me and others , watching youtube videos on his phone while chilling in the van. From my perspective, I worry about my future more than he worries about his. Methinks he is back in jail at the moment for parole violations. Until you try to help someone like that, you don’t realize how hard it is.

    I’m not certain that he’s been steadily “on his feet” much in a decade or more, despite the fact that he has good craft skills and can do mechanic work and general construction. The guy can fix almost anything–staying out of trouble is harder.

    I blame…

    * lack of aptitude and attitude to hold down a steady job

    * Inability to get along with others and follow directions

    * poor planning. Poor impulse control. Poor control of expenditure.

    * Tendency to mooch, which makes him a poor houseguest.

    * His behavior is consistent with periodic crack use–He often can’t afford a pack of cigarettes. If you want him to work for you you have to give him a ride, provide him with tools, buy him a pack of cigarettes.

    He’s been in jail two or three times in 2018, (assault and parole violations–from what I can tell he is not a thief). His aspiration is to get on SSDI, which he has some legitimate need of since he has a very bad hip.

    He has a plan for the rest of his working life. From my perspective, it’s SSDI. He’s in his early to mid 50s, physically robust except for a bad hip. He does work odd jobs–at least when not in jail.

    • There are definitely many homeless people who have all kinds of behavioral problems. There are others who have just had a serious run of bad luck, and who could get back on their feet given a chance. If possible, we should help the second type without unduly encouraging the first, but that’s tough to do.

      • I keep thinking of Charles Murray’s old essay at AEI entitled “Stigma makes generosity feasible.” It’s short, simplistic, but still valid here.

        Occasionally someone laments the collapse of the age-old distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. Such a distinction can be overdone, but it remains useful.

        And yes, some people just need a hand up. As I said, it is a heterogeneous population. The role of human agency–volition and its limitations–is a difficult one. If you know what I mean.

        • The prole-hating doctor theodore dalrymple has discussed this issue. It probably goes back to Acquina, or Aristotle.

          My hero, Deirdre McCloskey, likes to say that nothing is said about welfare reform that was not said during the Parliamentary Debates on the reform of the English Poor Laws ca. 1850. She might be right!

  7. I live in the Seattle area and the basic drivers of the problem are obvious: a permissive social environment, lax law enforcement, and generous provision of services has attracted an influx of vagrants, addicts, and the mentally ill (often all embodied in the same person) from across the country. This is in addition to the endogenous supply of teen runaways, battered women, and hard-luck cases.

    Unfortunately the failure to discriminate between the various populations has lead to a significant reduction in the capacity to help the percentage of the fraction of the homeless population with local roots.

    I may add more later – but I should note that the billion dollar estimate does not include property losses, higher property insurance premiums, and the cost of private security measures. Prior to the influx of criminal vagrants into our region I had never operated a handgun and had no desire to own one. After noting an increasing number of sinister characters in the remote areas that I frequent in the outdoors, I started to consider it. After finding a homeless encampment right behind our back fence, a few feet behind where my two small daughters spent many hours playing with little supervision – I had my “last straw moment” and headed to the local range for training. Maybe it was a teen runaway camping for a few nights, maybe it was a high-level sex offender strung out on meth. Seems prudent to prepare for encounters with the latter rather than the former. Between the gun, the CPL, the training courses, the safe, and the ammo and range time I’ll have spent close to $2,000 that I would have much rather spent on virtually anything else.

    I should also add that anyone who wants to get a closer look at the slow-motion catastrophe unfolding in Seattle should subscribe to the “Safe Seattle” page on Facebook.

  8. Above Comment:

    “The author points out that the vast majority of people with no cash income are not homeless. Why? Because they have the ability to live in a functioning household where they can get along with others and contribute to the household adequately that they are not kicked out.”

    Thinking about it, it doesn’t take much to find a place to live. A friend of mine had a friend stay in their spare bedroom rent free for a summer in exchange for providing assistance with child care. Another friend has kind of a degenerate son who isn’t too responsible and smokes too much pot (his dad has to control his bank account so he doesn’t spend it all on pot), yet somehow he doesn’t do anything so bad that he gets kicked out (and he has a job he performs with at least half his ass).

    And I know a lot of devout christians that take in homeless on a regular basis. Many of them aren’t ultra pleasant or easy to deal with. But it doesn’t take much not to get kicked out of those households, just like it doesn’t take much to not get kicked out of shelters. However, people still do get kicked out (or don’t go because they know they will be kicked out).

    Steve Sailer used to say that in a post-scarcity culture, the one problem the poor have is they have to live around people like themselves. They have TVs, food, shelter, etc. However, many of them are just downright unpleasant to be around and will not abide by basic norms of behavior. There is no money fix for that.

  9. Where I live, folks with common sense can rent a house and each room is less than $400. $4800/year and you are housed, bath and kitchen; if you can gather a group with common sense.

    We have desperate homeless people all over, none with common sense. The cost of providing commons sense via government is about $100,000 I guess. Something else is the problem, not homelessness.

  10. Another unmeasured cost here is the reduced access to parks and other public spaces, and diminished capacity to enjoy them. Four years ago, before the junkie apocalypse reached it’s current heights, my daughter had a magnificent time frolicking in the leaf-piles at Greenlake park in the fall. Things had deteriorated considerably from the mid-2000’s even then, but transients staking claim to territory in this park – probably the most popular in the city by far – was still somewhat unthinkable at the time. Anyhow – there’s zero chance that I’d allow my daughter to jump and roll in the leaf-piles now, due to the low but real chance that there’d be one or more infected hypodermic needles mixed amongst the leaves.

    Many women who used to go trail running in our parks now have to contend with the uncertainty that comes with the potential for encountering transients camped in the woods, parents have to scan playgrounds and playfields for hypodermic needles, transients camp on the said playfields, local wetlands and native plant areas that were restored at great expense over the course of several years are destroyed in the course of several weeks, hobo-fires that engulf trees and endanger nearby homes are a regular occurence in the summer, jurors fear for their safety since accessing the court building requires navigating past a gauntlet of needles, feces, and aggressive transients, etc, etc, etc. It’s not clear how to measure such things, but the costs are substantial.

    • Of course we can measure them. When people spend money to help avoid or mitigate these unpleasantries it shows up in GDP, making libertarians happy that the economy is growing. Or perhaps there is some “good” neighborhood where there are less vagrants, certainly the property values in that neighborhood have skyrocketed!

      It’s like when they wanted to get rid of the volleyball courts here because people playing sports are just doing something free all day, rather than spending money in local bars which can then be taxed.

      • Property value dynamics in Seattle are determined by scarcities created by public policy. Shortages of housing, roadway capacity, and decent schools have made neighborhoods that are a) close to the city, b)have very restrictive single-family zoning, and elevated property values created by factors a and b to a level that keeps the percentage of poor children down to a tolerable level.

        The fact that the sort of off-the-shelf progressives that live in these neighborhoods and support the politicians who created the above dynamics and favor pathological enabling are being plagued by criminal drug vagrants ripping off their Amazon deliveries and defecating in their garden beds is one of the few tangible manifestations of karma that I’ve witnessed in my lifetime.

  11. We need “mental institutions” that are far more open to inspection, and far less Nurse Ratched (?) problems. Where the patients can easily leave. And come back to sleep (before curfew; at 10pm?), and get meals, toilet, showers. More honestly about how much freedom society will allow / pay for, for those in poor mental health, if not actually ill.

    Plus a gov’t issued “food card”/ ID card to each “needy” person.

    A gov’t Job guarantee program would be excellent to help the 5-10% of the temporary homeless who actually could go back to living normal, working poor lifes.

    States and cities should be experimenting with more ways of handling the problems of drug addicts who just want safe drugs and no work. “Reality is crutch for those who can’t handle the drugs” …

    First an honest political decision must be made on how the “mentally unwell” should be allowed to live, and where this living should take place. Then, the vagrants need to be physically taken to that place, registered/ checked in, and start living there.

    And be taken to jail for a couple of days when they illegally trespass / pan-handle / do illegal drugs in other areas.

    Likely to be socially cheaper than jail, most of time, for most of the vagrants — but different states & cities with different programs should be getting Fed money to find ways to minimize the problems. And allow other orgs to help those willing to change their behavior so as to be helpable.

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