Homelessness in California

[Bullazin]

We left California five years ago. Lived there my whole life, and I can tell you that the change in those decades has been quite dramatic.
Supafreak hits the nail on the head, and I will only give a couple of our personal experiences.  Drug addicts walking our street, approaching us for money in our cars.  Our gang mailboxes were stolen repeatedly - the entire BOX (maybe 20 homes). Homeless people living behind our house in a dry river bed started fires, would use our pool to bathe in, our hose for water, and would rummage through our recyclables.

No intention of returning, good luck to those who stay

What nail did he hit?  Just curious which part you agree with.

[JimmyinSD]

its been a few years, but there was a homeless group living under an overpass near me, a local farmer stopped one day and offered to give a job ( including free meals ) to anybody that wanted to come to work for him, not one person took him up on his offer. ( IIRC he was offering about 2.5 times the minimum wage at the time.) small sample size, but for those homeless it certainly wasnt about lack of opportunity or money or whatever, it was a choice to be living under an interstate in rural SD.

[JR44]

We left California five years ago. Lived there my whole life, and I can tell you that the change in those decades has been quite dramatic.
Supafreak hits the nail on the head, and I will only give a couple of our personal experiences.  Drug addicts walking our street, approaching us for money in our cars.  Our gang mailboxes were stolen repeatedly - the entire BOX (maybe 20 homes). Homeless people living behind our house in a dry river bed started fires, would use our pool to bathe in, our hose for water, and would rummage through our recyclables.

No intention of returning, good luck to those who stay

I have lived in CA for over 30 years and love it, there is no state that has the diversity both geographically and demographically.  Like every state CA has its share of issues, with the climate that no other state has brings an extreme high population and combine that with the high cost of living and you have a perfect storm for a high homelessness issue.  In the area that I live, they have done an amazing job of working with the homelessness issue, they have a great rehabilitation program that provides temporary housing with the commitment to transition back to a working state. 

Many create the picture that all of CA is a slum, which is kind of like CA being stereotyped as every inch is Hollywood Blvd/Venice Beach, there are areas that certainly need to be rehabbed, but the vast majority of CA is an amazing place to live. Then again, we already have a population issue, so maybe that is a good picture for everyone to have, as opposed to the annual Rose Bowl parade under 75 degree skies in January which brings another flock of winter birds our way!  

How about we start a thread on every other state and the issues there 

[Vanguard83]

Specifically Supafreak's observation of the closing of mental health facilities, and how it perpetuated the homelessness problem.

It's just my personal observations from living there my whole life (Riverside, CA) but yes, there are these problems everywhere, and yes many places in California are great...nonetheless, I don't miss it. My father was robbed at knife-point (but he broke the F'kers nose, and he ran off) and my mom had a gun pointed at her at an intersection, before driving out of the situation.

Living there I was always under the assumption that one day something tragic was going to happen, and that's really no way to live.

[badgervike]

I posted the link to an NIH study. Did you look at it?  I looked again and it is quite dated, but go ahead and post data if you can find a scientist that agrees with your opinion. I went to the NIH because it’s an institution of experts.  

How you gonna fix the social family issues then?  One child policy? Sterilization? One church?  Freedom goes both ways. 

No I didn’t have to thank you, as you don’t need to thank me for my decades of social service and volunteering, then again I never have posted about it on a message board.

I read most of it.  It's tough to take a 36 year old study seriously to explain the recent uptick in homelessness in California.  The main point in the study was that homelessness is tied to the percentage of people living in poverty.  Here's the poverty rate trend in the US which has gone DOWN significantly...yet homelessness has increased dramatically.  Why?  Kind of takes away the poverty angle.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/2004...ince-1990/

I posted the information on volunteering at the homeless shelters because I do have 30 years experience working with homeless people so might have some personal information to share...not what I read on a blog somewhere citing a very old source.

I gotta run tonight but I'll give the societal issue question some thought and get back tomorrow.  I'm sure others have some good thoughts.

[hogjowlsjohnny]

its been a few years,  but there was a homeless group living under an overpass near me,  a local farmer stopped one day and offered to give a job ( including free meals ) to anybody that wanted to come to work for him,  not one person took him up on his offer. ( IIRC he was offering about 2.5 times the minimum wage at the time.)  small sample size,  but for those homeless it certainly wasnt about lack of opportunity or money or whatever,  it was a choice to be living under an interstate in rural SD.

Bingo! It's a choice. Obviously not in all cases but likely most. Non conformists. The rest of us buckled to the pressure to conform to societal expectations. We are comfortable with that. They aren't, and that makes us uncomfortable.
It's not that they can't hold a job, they simply elect not to.
There are many with mental issues living on the streets since Reagan closed down the mental institutes as a financial strategy all those years ago. But there are many more who elect to live this way. And government, religion, breakdown of family structure, and society enables their lifestyle to a certain extent. It is merciful to help those in need but does it perpetuate and possibly exacerbate the problem?

I am all for charity for those who need help. For example, no child should go to bed hungry when we have so many wealthy people in our country. Our government is challenged to determine who really deserves help and who doesn't.
Perhaps they don't care. They don't see homeless people where they live; though they must certainly drive by a lot of them.
The government can't solve the issue. So how does this story end?

The primary problem is over population of the world. It is the basis of many of the worlds woes!
Sorry for the rant.

[JimmyinSD]

For those suggesting that we need to re-open mental institutions and force those deemed in need into those places... who do we trust to make those decisions...who do we trust to run them? If the state of our health care system is any indicator of how it will be operated....id rather see the homeless shitting all over california. For profit private isnt working due to greed, and our govt could fuck up a crow bar in a sand box so no way i would want them getting into more ways to fuck away our tax dollars. I agree that something needs to be done, but how, and by who? I really go back to a previous position, we need to identify what is causing the health crisis and work on correcting it for future generations.

[Bullazin]

For those suggesting that we need to re-open mental institutions and force those deemed in need into those places... who do we trust to make those decisions...who do we trust to run them?  If the state of our health care system is any indicator of how it will be operated....id rather see the homeless shitting all over california.  For profit private isnt working due to greed, and our govt could fuck up a crow bar in a sand box so no way i would want them getting into more ways to fuck away our tax dollars.  I agree that something needs to be done,  but how, and by who?  I really go back to a previous position,  we need to identify what is causing the health crisis and work on correcting it for future generations.

I like a lot of this post. 

I think what a lot of people maybe don’t fully understand is that government’s responsibility is to execute law and protect rights.

 Our  government is structured not to operate efficiently due to their responsibility to be transparent and serve all interests, most importantly being accountable for the dollars they spend and create regulation to carry out Congress intent.

It’s basically all overhead to assure protection.

---

Here’s a couple more recent studies from NIH. There’s a ton of non profit orgs that I could post info from that point directly to income issues being the primary driver but I still think it’s best to defer to expert studies.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7525583/

Here is one non profit take.

https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/takeaw...nt-report/

My reading shows me that approximately 20% of homelessness is willful.

[supafreak84]

For those suggesting that we need to re-open mental institutions and force those deemed in need into those places... who do we trust to make those decisions...who do we trust to run them?  If the state of our health care system is any indicator of how it will be operated....id rather see the homeless shitting all over california.  For profit private isnt working due to greed, and our govt could fuck up a crow bar in a sand box so no way i would want them getting into more ways to fuck away our tax dollars.  I agree that something needs to be done,  but how, and by who?  I really go back to a previous position,  we need to identify what is causing the health crisis and work on correcting it for future generations.

It's a good question, and I'd have to say a major part in addressing the health crisis is to stop the fentynol and other drugs flooding through our southern border. Not sure if everybody has seen a camp of fentynol addicts but it's literally like something out of the Walking Dead.

I'd think the mental institutions would have to be state ran (which is scary in states like California) with some independent oversight at the federal level. Sorry, but you have the right to live free, however you do not have the right to infringe upon the common rights of others, or become a danger to others by way of your mental illness/substance abuse and the fact that you refuse or are incapable of taking the appropriate medications prescribed to you. That's a major problem in California. You can 5150 someone, but they hold them just long enough for the drugs to wear off then they kick them out the door with a prescription and a follow up doctors appointment when most of these people aren't even capable of tying their own shoes much less being put in charge of theor own health and wellbeing. It's a totally broken system that hasn't worked spurned on by a lax criminal justice system. These politicians don't have to deal with the problems created by their own policies, it's the every day folks like you and I that have to. Scumbags like Gavin Newsome don't care because it doesn't effect his daily life.

[StickierBuns]

It's a good question, and I'd have to say a major part in addressing the health crisis is to stop the fentynol and other drugs flooding through our southern border. Not sure if everybody has seen a camp of fentynol addicts but it's literally like something out of the Walking Dead.

I'd think the mental institutions would have to be state ran (which is scary in states like California) with some independent oversight at the federal level. Sorry, but you have the right to live free, however you do not have the right to infringe upon the common rights of others, or become a danger to others by way of your mental illness/substance abuse and the fact that you refuse or are incapable of taking the appropriate medications prescribed to you. That's a major problem in California. You can 5150 someone, but they hold them just long enough for the drugs to wear off then they kick them out the door with a prescription and a follow up doctors appointment when most of these people aren't even capable of tying their own shoes much less being put in charge of theor own health and wellbeing. It's a totally broken system that hasn't worked spurned on by a lax criminal justice system. These politicians don't have to deal with the problems created by their own policies, it's the every day folks like you and I that have to. Scumbags like Gavin Newsome don't care because it doesn't effect his daily life.

Most of the fentanyl is manufactured in China (and more recently India) that gets to the U.S. For sure, much then gets here via Mexico from the South...but some even from Canada, as that's where the Indian manufactured product comes in from. But the scary part is it soon will be manufactured in other areas because of below:

From the DEA: "Fentanyl production and precursor chemical sourcing may also expand beyond the currently identified countries as fentanyl lacks the geographic source boundaries of heroin and cocaine as these must be produced from plant-based materials." That's why 90% of the cocaine in the U.S. is from Columbia.