Political Fiction On The Homeless Is Not Solving Anything
I spent the other night at a fascinating Manhattan Institute dinner hearing Chris Rufo talk about the homeless problem in LA and other cities.

He debunked the notion that we just need to give people housing. 78 percent of the people on the streets are mentally ill and/or addicted, and simply housing them does not solve the problem that has them out on the streets.

The other 22 percent...they are the ones who fell on hard times or who had a domestic violence or some other circumstantial issue leading to their losing their housing. They are the ones who just need a roof and some bridge services to get on their feet, Rufo explained.

This isn't what we hear: It's "housing first!" -- as if that's all people need.

Rufo writes in the New York Post:

The reality is that Los Angeles has adopted a policy of containment: construct enough "supportive housing" to placate the appetites of the social-services bureaucracy, distribute enough needles to prevent an outbreak of plague, and herd enough men and women into places like Skid Row, where they will not disrupt the political fiction that everything is OK.

Roughly a decade ago, Skid Row's future looked more hopeful. In 2006, then-LA ­Police Chief Bill Bratton and LAPD Central Division Commander Andrew Smith implemented a strategy of Broken Windows policing for Skid Row called the Safer Cities Initiative, which led to a 42 percent reduction in major felonies, a 50 percent reduction in overdose deaths, and a 75 percent reduction in homicides.

"We've broken the back of the problem," Bratton said at the time, reporting that the overall homeless population had been reduced from 1,876 people to 700 people -- an astonishing success.

The progress proved short-lived. Arguing that Broken Windows policing "criminalizes homelessness," activists slowly dismantled the Safer Cities Initiative through civil-rights lawsuits and public-pressure campaigns. Today, Skid Row's homeless population is estimated to be at least 2,500 people, and crime has been rising for years.

At the LAPD's Central Police Station, a consensus is emerging that it's only a matter of time before the neighborhood explodes.

...Over the past 30 years, activists and political leaders have successfully shifted public policy regarding addiction and disorder away from a so-called punitive model that relies on prohibition, incarceration and abstinence, and moved toward a "harm-reduction" approach that takes widespread drug use as a given and attempts to reduce rates of infection and other negative effects.

'This is pretty much the epicenter in LA for maintaining your addictions.'
Mark Casanova, executive director of Homeless Healthcare Los Angeles, has been working with addicts on Skid Row since 1985. His Center for Harm Reduction distributes 2.4 million clean needles to more than 12,000 addicts each year. As I walk through the door to the waiting room, I see a gaunt young man waiting to collect needles, swabs, and fentanyl testing strips. A woman with floral tattoos covering her scabbed-over arms slides a tray of used needles into the metal sharps container. On the wall is a large map of the city, with hundreds of blue pushpins marking each spot where an overdose was reversed with a naloxone inhaler provided by the center.

"Since I've been here, so many decades, the percentages of the type of drug users has shifted," says Casanova. "Right now, about 70 percent of [the homeless drug users on Skid Row] are crystal-meth users or a combo of crystal meth and heroin, crystal meth and cocaine ... The remaining percentage is probably about 25 percent heroin and a fair number of cocaine users."

While having such a high percentage of meth users means fewer fatal overdoses per capita in Los Angeles than in cities with higher rates of heroin addiction, like San Francisco, it also means that service providers here must contend with the unique properties of methamphetamines, which flood the body with dopamine and noradrenaline and can induce psychosis and lead to violent behavior.

The Center for Harm Reduction unquestionably saves lives: its needle exchange reduces the rates of infectious-disease transmission, and its naloxone kits reverse hundreds of overdoses per year. Still, it's a brutal calculus, measuring overall "harm reduction" against a baseline of worst-case scenarios.

And outside this limited framework, no evidence exists that harm reduction reduces overall rates of addiction, crime and overdose deaths. In fact, despite a steady expansion of harm-reduction services, last year was the deadliest on record for Los Angeles County, with meth-related overdose deaths up more than 1,000 percent from 2008, claiming Skid Row as its epicenter.

In the Central Division, crime has increased 59 percent since 2010, with officers responding to 13,122 incidents last year, including 2,698 assaults, 2,453 thefts and 1,350 car break-ins, a trend doubtless intensified by the addiction crisis.

Harm reduction's major limitation is that its practitioners lack a viable method for moving addicts into treatment and beyond their addictions. Though the center provided clean needles and supplies to more than 12,000 addicts last year, less than 1 percent voluntarily enrolled themselves in its free outpatient drug-treatment program.

"There's a mysterious element to that moment [when people decide to enter recovery that] all of us that work in treatment would love to be able to understand," says Lori Kizzia, the center's addiction specialist.

...The truth is that homelessness is not primarily a housing problem but a human one. Mayors, developers, and service providers want to cut ribbons in front of new residential towers, but the real challenge is not just to build new apartment units but to rebuild the human beings who live inside them.

Unfortunately, this isn't the kind of work that can be "scaled" like a product. Still, the builders have prevailed. Every few weeks, Mayor Garcetti and a rotating group of public officials announce new projects, shovel dirt and cut ribbons. On Skid Row, a nonprofit developer is building two permanent supportive-housing projects -- the Flor 401 Lofts and Six Four Nine Lofts -- that will provide studio apartments to 153 homeless men and women, at a cost of $65 million. Though Skid Row is undoubtedly one of the most difficult places in America to achieve sobriety and reclaim a normal life, the city's political class continues to centralize the problem.

This is the iron grip of homelessness, addiction, and mental illness in Los Angeles: You can't arrest your way out, you can't harm-reduce your way out, and you can't build your way out. Beneath the optimistic rhetoric of the politicians lies a growing anxiety that the crisis has moved beyond its control.

"This is a ­FEMA-like, Red Cross-like disaster," says Andy Bales, a critic of the Housing First model who has spent the last year calling for the National Guard to intervene and help prevent the outbreak of an epidemic. "We have actually left homelessness to grow exponentially to the point that it has put all of us in danger."

I think it will take a celebrity getting murdered by a mentally ill homeless person before anything possibly changes.