Rolling Tragedy

 This is one of those articles that makes the NY Times indispensable. It's a fair look at the combination of homelessness and fentanyl use that is eroding Portland, OR's sense of itself.

We were just out in Portland last month, and I kinda fell in love with it. We did see homeless people, but no more than in San Francisco or Seattle. The temperate climate makes homelessness more feasible, as you don't have to contend with the extremes of heat and cold that you do elsewhere.

The real issue though is how various policies interact to create a humanitarian crisis. Just a sampling of policies that helped create homelessness:

- The decision to close mental asylums and treat people from home with medications. Once you lose your home, maintaining medications becomes almost impossible.
- The long term erosion of the safety net means more poor people. The line between poor and homeless is porous and constantly shifting.
- NIMBY zoning laws making it harder to create multifamily housing that could bring down housing costs. 
- Once you're "out of doors" it's easier to fall into abusive drug habits. Because many of the homeless carry pre-existing trauma and have few resources to fall back on to begin with, the ability to self-medicate with opioids replaces healthier choices.
- A certain idealistic blindness among progressives that assumes - as one woman in the article puts it - that people respond only to carrots and not to sticks.
- The general trend to legalize or decriminalize drugs makes them more available to the people who have the fewest resources to deal with addictive behaviors.

As the article asserts, fentanyl has supercharged this crisis. It's so cheap and so powerful, it mimics the crack cocaine and meth crises of previous decades. 

Ultimately, though, all of those policies were created by people and could be changed by people. At this point, that won't solve the addiction problems that turn the homeless into what can almost be described as zombies. There's no such thing as a "former addict" so any changes that might result in positive outcomes will always been tenuous.  

The overall number of homeless people is actually sort of small at less than 500,000 people in a country of 334,000,000 people. They are mostly concentrated in a handful of cities that allow them access to at least some services. Still, their obvious misery and the impact they have on others make them a crisis that requires some actual effort to at least deal with some of the policy impacts that created this issue in the first place.

Solutions? I don't know, but I'd start here:

- Portland's pod cities that are managed by the non-homeless seem important. The idea of self-organizing tent cities assumes that the homeless are capable of creating self-governing entities. The large number of addicts and mentally ill people should render this idea absurd.

- Involuntary commitment for mental illness and addiction. Not prison but some form of assessment and treatment program. This, obviously, would be very, very expensive. It's odd that these rich mega-churches don't step up and support this. Jesus and all that.

- Transitional housing that allows those who are managing their addiction or mental health issues to get out of the pods and into real housing before entering the private housing market.

- More housing. Lots of progressive activists (and Yglesias) will suggest that this is at the root of the problem, but that seems like bullshit to me. There is a negative feedback loop surrounding losing a roof over your head and substance abuse, but it's pretty clear that most of the homeless have pre-existing trauma or incapacities that accelerate and amplify those issues. Still, cheaper housing would help.

My wife and I are trying to figure out where to retire to. The first question is "city or country". As long as "city" includes some accumulation of human misery that answer seems pretty clear.