California Homelessness: New Policies To Address An Intractable Problem

Wednesday, June 22, 2022
Virtual Meeting

The Hoover Institution Economic Policy Working Group invites you to a panel discussion, California Homelessness: New Policies to Address an Intractable Problem, with Lee Ohanian, Kevin Kiley, and Michael Shellenberger.

This virtual event brings together three experts on California’s homelessness crisis to focus on understanding why this problem continues to worsen, despite spending record amounts every year, and on how alternative policies will reduce homelessness and more broadly improve the quality-of-life for all Californians.

The event will be structured as a panel discussion, moderated by Hoover Senior Fellow Lee E. Ohanian, who writes frequently about California homelessness in his weekly Hoover column, “California on Your Mind”. His columns focus on understanding why the more we spend, the more homeless we have, and how we must change policies, ranging from opioid abuse tolerance to affordable housing business costs, to make progress.

Assemblyman Kevin Kiley (R, Rocklin) is one of our panelists, and who is one of the state legislators who created the Republican Legislative Caucus’s plan consisting of 15 new bills to address homelessness. These ideas range from conducting data analytics to understand just who the homeless are, where they live, and how many have mental health and substance abuse problems, to reforming existing state laws to reduce the cost of building new housing, which currently exceeds $1,000 per square foot for cookie-cutter studio apartment units. Kevin is one of the young leaders within the Republican party. He has fought continuously to reverse AB 5, which makes it illegal for some Californians to work as an independent contractor, and he has written several commonsense Assembly bills to reduce living costs in the state, including suspending the State’s gasoline tax to address our extremely high gasoline prices.

Gubernatorial candidate and author Michael Shellenberger is our other panelist. Michael’s recent book San Fransicko: Why Progessives Ruin Cities has been on the bestseller list since its publication last year. The book powerfully and persuasively describes how well-intentioned policies, such as San Francisco’s willingness to tolerate illegal drug use and its refusal to prosecute drug-related crimes is damaging the city beyond recognition.

A review summarized the book’s theme as follows:

Progressives have embraced 'victimology,' a belief system wherein society’s downtrodden are subject to no rules or consequences for their actions. This ideology, cultivated in cities like San Francisco for decades and widely adopted over the past two years, is the key to understanding, and thus solving, our crises of homelessness, drug overdoses and crime.

This unique event will highlight how and why California has gone off track in addressing one of California’s most important issues and will show how California can constructively and humanely address this issue with new ideas. The first hour will be devoted to the panel discussion, followed by 15-20 minutes of Q&A.

[bellagirlgirl]

Wow, what a great discussion! As far as I'm concerned, the homeless issue is the #1 thing to fix in California. I live in the East Bay (near Berkeley), and the growth in the homeless presence has pushed my "compassion" into anger because I want to know WHY we have so many people camped out along freeways and living under freeway overpasses like trolls. Even more important is HOW can it be fixed??!! My vote in the next gubernatorial election will ignore party affiliation; I am voting for the person who convinces me that he/she has the best plan to tackle the homeless issue. (Are you listening Gov. Newsom?)

[tommypain]

Outstanding. Insightful and unbiased. Thank you.

[nathanngumi]

A very interesting discussion! Michael's book San Fransicko is an eye-opener on the history of homelessness in USA and why the Progressive Movement's initiatives like housing first and harm reduction are great in theory but fail in practice because of perverse incentives (what Karl Marx described as the road to hell paved with good intentions).

[lawrencemartin]

Shellenberger isn't brilliant. He's just a voice of common sense. I'm not sure California is ready for common sense.

[RosscoeDownunder]

Thomas Sowell approach: facts, objective analysis, humility, no 'solutions' only trade offs.

[apointonacurve]

Homelessness is BIG PROFIT!!! Why solve a problem that pays so well? It's an industry that provides jobs while providing tons of corruption paths and theft of money. That's why there's still homelessness.

[karryhoward]

$17 billion in the pockets of the insiders right.

[EmbraceTerror]

Homeless expert here -- living out of the back seat of my tiny car for two years (covid didn't help). I'm only on minute 13:00 and will watch the rest later.

I wish the "experts", especially elected officials would live completely homeless for two years. I bet our "solutions" would be much quicker and effective, and possibly non-partisan. Time spent collecting advanced degrees and “studying” the encampments as if lab rats hinders “experts’” ability to see the on-the-ground situation at the empirical evidence level, including the "psychiatric problem".

What Michael called the open drug scene misses that the addiction problem is really a connection problem -- he said 'those folks were kicked out of friends' and families' homes'. I'm not advocating friends and families take the addicts back into their homes. I'm suggesting there were huge underlying issues in the family long before the child became an adult addict, that probably started by their teen years.

By the way, most people in my mostly female-only "encampment" were NOT drug or substance addicted, nor psychotic. Almost all came from abusive families, especially emotionally abusive. I have a logic problem calling people disordered because of the abuses they suffered as children.

[bikersoncall]

So, , , lets create a State Agency, gosh, where have
I heard this as a solution to societal issues..
One issue that I agree with, raised by the second
speaker was that of audits, it is extremely disturbing
that the agencies in question or the overseers
of those agencies would
block or shelve the notion that spending by
these agencies should remain secret, above accountability.

[matthewmontague]

One more insight, truly, how effective are drug and alcohol treatments? 10 percent? Am I wrong? Is there a sobriety tracker? Isn't relapse the norm?

[susanepp]

I have a dear loved one who was in a horrendous auto accident in a rural county up north. He was transported by amballance to L.A. for the medical care he needed. He was in the hospital over a year. Each week he would ask the hospital social worker and I also would ask her over the phone what would happen to him when he got released from the hospital as he is quite disabled now. Every week we'd be told he'd be placed in disabled housing. Then the week he was to be released the social worker called to say she had a place for him..then she said a cot in a shelter on Skid Row. He is too disabled to defend himself and there's a lot of violence on Skid Row. He took off to be homeless in a more rural, isolated area.

[ronaldmcdonald]

Interesting how Schellenberger clearly identifies the mental health and drug issues.
Whereas my local activists characterize the homeless as young families and down on their luck people who lost their jobs or are under-employed.
I am with Schellenberger.

I disagree on Section 8. Let's say you as a landlord rent to a Section 8 person. And they violate your rules. They will bring you up on false charges and/or turn the system against
you as a landlord. Why would a landlord take the risk?

[OMGAnotherday]

Audit to see where the money is going would be too revealing!

[bikersoncall]

My guess regarding the massive number of homeless in Ca,
vs other states, has NOTHING to do with affordable housing.
Ca became an overnight, 'easy-mark' by homeless people
across the nation via social media, Mainstream Media and
word of mouth.
Why on earth would a drug addict for example,
remain in AZ or TX, where it's hot and there are not the
handouts and open drug-areas that they might enjoy in a
perfect climate. How big is the homeless problem in Siberia,
Alaska..

[rigell]

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair

[matthewmontague]

Also lived in motels. Much like group homes with the dregs of society and aggressive policing. Somewhere between do what ever you want but CPS or police can show up any time

[laprepper]

It is definitely not normal to be homeless and it’s also very abnormal for society to consider it normal. It’s a sickness that affects us all and usually when you get sick you try to get better but for some reason society is okay with letting people live in this abnormal way indefinitely.

[m.singleton]

Joe rogan is a traditional liberal and that's what he claims to be

[scribebat]

Dang! Wasn't until 1:16:10 on the time stamp in a pondering of homeless issues that the cost of housing in CA even came up. Remember hearing about problems in SF at one time, the police weren't making enough to be able to afford living there. 😕
Youse guys be a hoot, talkin' about this stuff, only one of you actually seemed to have any direct familiarity with any homeless population, appeared to be limited to addicts. Ya, there's those.
But then, in LA, you'll see people living in their cars, had jobs and either maybe ran into some health issue or they had their rent raised on them faster than their wages were going up and couldn't find a new place they could afford.
Then there's the psychological stress involved if you lose your home, and where to turn to for help is far from obvious for most newly homeless and finding they've not only been booted out of their home but have taken a sizable fall in the eyes of much of society. It's a whole new world to adjust to. You should maybe try it, here, give me your keys, your wallet, your phone (much of that would go with your home), oh, here, you can keep the car keys. See ya in 72 hrs. You'd get a good understanding of what they're up against. Tell me, what would you do? i wouldn't really want to put anyone through that, maybe try it as a thought experiment.
And all i hears was talk about compelling people... a little scary that. Ya, that might be needed for a few.
i worked with a group helping homeless when i was in Palo Alto back in the 90s, the homeless population ran quite a spectrum. You had a lot of disabled veterans among then there because there were a couple of VA facilities near by at the time.
You just aren't going to be able to abstract ponder your way through the problems causing homelessness but need to get down and dirty, get to know the homeless, what happened with them to get them there, what their needs are, only then are you going to eve remotely be able to come up with some cohesive idea of how to begin to address the issue. It's pretty complex.
i cringed early on, taking a out building facilities, "there's places in CA where land is less expensive". Ya, nobody lives there, there's no work and there'd be no way out. The homeless i'd met would flat out reject the idea of moving to some shelter in the country, wouldn't find the isolation tolerable. Then there's the issue of community perceptions of homeless if you want to try to put housing for them in any healthy community. In Palo Alto, one group working with homeless had identified a property they wanted to buy to provide temporary housing for up to maybe 6 people, not exactly Cabrini Greens sort of a concept, but neighbors around the property heard of the plan, 4 of these good citizens of Palo Alto pooled resources and seriously outbid on the available property.
Ya, it's a pretty complex picture but if you actually do your homework about causes (gee, maybe look at what might be done to help people in not losing their home in the first place could be a good place to start), you'd have at least half a chance of coming up with something meaningful, something coherent. You find something like that and it would likely sell itself. But without a reality based plan, just throwing money at it is throwing money away.

Sorry i didn't watch the whole thing, stuck with it 1.25 hrs. At least i gotta commend you all for even thinking about it. Just hope it wasn't because you found some junkie crashed in your back yard one day and realized it was something needed addressing for all the wrong reasons.

[susanepp]

I would bet that adjusted for population Honolulu has many more homeless on the streets then L.A..