My friend was a popular, promising artist - how did he end up on the streets of Portland, addicted and dangerous?
My friend was a popular, promising artist - how did he end up on the streets of Portland, addicted and dangerous?
When I first met Evan B Harris he was fizzing with talent and kindness. So I was shocked to hear he had become homeless and out of control. What happened to him is a story playing out in cities across America
Seems like they are over complicating it...
"Evan’s younger brother had experienced some serious mental health issues and he was awaiting news of a diagnosis."
"his mother was a schizophrenic and a heroin addict who often paid for her drug habit with sex. They were homeless, moving constantly. Often she would head off for days at a time, leaving Evan with friends or relatives, or sometimes on his own, without food. When he was 11, she took her own life"
"Evan’s father began to suffer with mental health issues. By the time the pandemic arrived, he was in full crisis, using drugs and worried enough about Covid that he had locked himself inside his house. For a week, Evan stayed with him, and they shuttled back and forth to hospital as his father experienced mounting phobias and suicidal thoughts, but refused treatment. At the end of that week, his father took his own life."
Dude literally had the deck stacked against him.
"The real problem came when Evan inherited his share of his father’s estate – $170,000. He used some of the money to rent an apartment. “But I had extreme schizophrenia and I just filled it with trash because I was so out of my mind,” he says. “I was seeing faces dripping down the walls, I couldn’t even be in there.”"
And this, kids, is why the "Housing First" model won't work. Mental Health and addiction treatment have to come first THEN housing.
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Housing First doesn't mean there's no support services. You obviously know that. I will grant that many talk about Housing First as the only solution for everyone, but this isn't looking true from the research.
Throwing out Housing First because you found an edge case doesn't mean it isn't valuable for many.
This is simply the latest case, it's not an edge case.
https://ciceroinstitute.org/research/housing-first-is-a-failure/
"We’ve built over 200,000 new PSH units for the homeless, as they’re known, and, since 2013, the federal government has mandated the Housing First strategy nationwide. Yet since that nationwide mandate has gone into effect, we’ve seen street homelessness increase by almost a fourth. While some advocates cite the overall decline in homelessness since the early 2000s, they ignore that the entire decline was the result of moving people from “transitional” government housing, which was counted as homeless, to “permanent” government housing, which was counted as not homeless. In effect, if one ignores this statistical smoke show, homelessness has gone up almost one-to-one with the increase in permanent housing."
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2023/07/90060/
"Housing First forbids requiring beneficiaries, as a condition of receiving assistance, to attend drug rehabilitation programs, look for work, or even take their mental health medicines as directed by a doctor. They can accept services that might be—and often are—offered, but they are under no enforceable obligation to do so. If they take drugs, refuse work, or even are charged with crimes, housing is still available to them.
That’s like putting a bandage on an inflamed wound without also applying medicine to heal the underlying infection. As a result, many of the unhoused receiving Housing First benefits make no effort to turn their lives around, leaving them mired in dysfunction and dependence."
"In its worst iteration, Housing First is a no-strings-attached approach. Beneficiaries receive housing and don't need to attend job training programs or agree to a sober lifestyle. It's a well-intentioned approach, but it simply isn't working.
Since 2019, California has spent $24 billion on homelessness programs, even mandating all state-funded programs to adopt the Housing First model. Homeless resource centers aren't allowed to make housing conditional on participation in addiction recovery or job training programs. Yet chronic homelessness in the state keeps climbing.
In Utah, Housing First has been the de facto approach since 2005. Yet from 2017 to 2022, the number of chronically homeless skyrocketed 328%. "
Two right wing think tanks and a mayor of a suburban town are hardly strong evidence. That mayor was a congress person who wanted to repeal the ACA, denied that Obama was born in the US, ad cut military veteran healthcare benefits.
From the Wikipedia entry for the institute that publishes Public Discourse
The Witherspoon Institute is a conservative think tank in Princeton, New Jersey founded in 2003 ... The Witherspoon Institute opposes abortion and same-sex marriage
From the Wikipedia page for the founder of the Cicero Institute
Lonsdale founded the Cicero Institute conservative think tank in 2016, and he runs it along with his wife, Tayler. The group has pushed for criminalizing homelessness and rejecting Housing First policies. The group publishes a template for state legislation that includes fines of up to $5,000 for repeatedly violating encampment bans and language to facilitate involuntary psychiatric commitments. As of August 2024, bills based on the template have been introduced in fifteen states and passed in eight. According to Rolling Stone, the Cicero Institute "helped transform homelessness policing from a niche fixation of a segment of Silicon Valley into a rallying cry in the culture war".
If you want me to take you seriously, provide a meta-analysis or a systematic review in a well regarded peer reviewed journal.
Would you prefer a local take? It's the same story over and over again:
You bring a bunch of people with mental illness and addiction issues into one place, without mandating treatment, you are CONCENTRATING the problem, not solving it.
Me: please provide a scientific study published in a reputable journal.
You: here's a local article that continues to prove my point!
Me: 😓You rejected the other sources on this, you reject a local source on this, I'm not sure how many sources you want before you'll accept Housing First doesn't work.
If you want a journal, they're out there too...
In fact, if you had bothered to look at the footnotes on the very first source I gave you:
https://ciceroinstitute.org/research/housing-first-is-a-failure/
"Yet studies have now shown that simply providing people subsidized housing does not reduce drug use, and often encourages it, which makes sense because there is no mandated treatment in PSH and the free unit provides people with more money to pursue their habits.[10]"
You would have seen the sources cited such as:
[10] "Rebecca A. Cherner, et. al., “Housing First for Adults with Problematic Substance Use,” Journal of Dual Diagnosis 13 (2017); Tsai, J., Kasprow, W.J., & Rosenheck, R.A. Alcohol and drug use disorders among homeless veterans: Prevalence and association with supported housing outcomes. Addictive Behaviors, 39 (2014): 455-460;"
But you aren't interested in the articles telling you what the papers say, you definitely won't be reading the papers either.
The study they use to support that quote does not actually support that quote. You should read the discussion section of the cited study. Did you ever wonder why they only cited one seven year old journal article? And then misrepresent it's findings?