| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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This is one of the last places where people are actually having conversations, even people who disagree. | |
| Shows that you can have a television network that can try to be objective. | ||
| Thank C-SPAN for all you do. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why this program is so valuable, because it does bring people together where dissenting voices are heard, where hard questions are asked, and where people have to answer to them. | ||
| And past president... | ||
| Dominant. | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is outrageous. | |
| This is a kangaroo for. | ||
| This fall, C-SPAN presents a rare moment of unity. | ||
| Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| Join Political Playbook Chief Correspondent and White House Bureau Chief Dasha Burns as host of Ceasefire, bringing two leaders from opposite sides of the aisle into a dialogue to find common ground. | ||
| Ceasefire this fall on the network that doesn't take sides, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| At our table this morning is Michael Tanner. | ||
| He is the Social Mobility Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity here to talk about efforts to combat homelessness in the United States. | ||
| Mr. Tanner, thank you for being here. | ||
| I want to begin with President Trump's executive order on homelessness, where the White House wrote this, shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order. | ||
| Surrendering our citizens and cities and citizens to disorder and fear is neither compassionate to the homeless nor other citizens. | ||
| My administration will take a new approach focused on protecting public safety. | ||
| Mr. Tanner, what did you make of this executive order? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, like so many of the president's executive orders, this is sort of a vague wish list for policy rather than a specific directive on exactly how things are going to take place. | |
| So a lot depends on the implementation and the details to follow. | ||
| But it's sort of a designer to help make it easier or to at least encourage the states to pursue the involuntary commitment of individuals who are mentally ill or suffering from substance abuse and are basically not able to care for themselves. | ||
| Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, the top-ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee in the House, had this to say about the executive order. | ||
| Let me be very clear. | ||
| Forcibly removing people from the streets and institutionalizing them is not just cruel and inhumane, but also blatantly ineffective. | ||
| Trump's order also undermines evidence-based solutions to addressing this crisis, is what she had to write, like Housing First, and instead doubles down on the type of criminalization and policing that have consistently proven unsuccessful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we certainly don't want to criminalize homelessness and we don't want necessarily the police involved in enforcing these mechanisms. | |
| But we should recognize that even folks on the left side of the spectrum from California like Governor Newsom or Scott Wiener from the legislature have said basically there's nothing compassionate about letting people die on the street because they are suffering from mental illness or substance abuse. | ||
| Now we're not talking about all homeless people. | ||
| We certainly want to build in safeguards to the system. | ||
| But certainly there are some people out there who are simply not capable of caring for themselves. | ||
| Well according to the government estimates, at least 653,000 Americans are experiencing homelessness in January of 2023. | ||
| We'll take your questions and your comments on homelessness in the United States here this morning with Michael Tanner. | ||
| If you live in the eastern central part of the country, dial in at 202-748-8000. | ||
| Mountain Pacific, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And if you've experienced homelessness, we'd like to hear your story at 202-748-8002. | ||
| Remember, you can text instead of calling at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Michael Taynor, before we get to these calls, what leads to homelessness? | ||
| What are the factors? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we should be careful not to try to lump all people who are experiencing homelessness into one single category. | |
| There are actually a variety. | ||
| The majority of people are people who simply can't afford housing for whatever reason, or they're experiencing a life crisis and they've ended up falling to the street because they can't find affordable housing or shelter. | ||
| And the other group that's out there is probably 20 to 40 percent, and those are people who have serious mental illness problems or their substance abuse problems that prevent them from taking the actions that would help get them off the street. | ||
| And these folks require very different looks, very different types of sets of solution to deal with. | ||
| I just gave the numbers from the government on their estimates of how many Americans are homeless or suffering from homelessness in this country. | ||
| How does that compare to recent years and decades? | ||
| Is it getting worse? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It actually is. | |
| We are at some of the highest numbers that we've seen in a long time. | ||
| So basically, homelessness has gotten worse in America over the last several years. | ||
| Some of that has to do with COVID. | ||
| Some of it has to do with rising cost of housing, but there's basically a lot of people on the street than there used to be. | ||
| What about the current price of housing has led to this situation? | ||
| I mean, how big of a factor is that in the rise of homelessness? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a surprisingly big proportion of this. | |
| There's been studies out there that show that for every 1% increase in rents, you get about a 1% increase in the number of people on the street. | ||
| And especially in areas where most homelessness occurs, about half of all unhoused homeless are in California, for example, which is one of the most expensive housing markets out there. | ||
| When I did some work out there and met with many people who were experiencing homelessness, I met people who were certainly employed, teachers, government workers, even emergency room nurse who were basically living out of their cars because they couldn't find apartments. | ||
| When an apartment, you know, an average apartment in San Francisco costs some $3,000 or so for a one-bedroom apartment, it's very difficult if you encounter some sort of temporary interruption in your income or a problem of that nature. | ||
| So what are cities' governors, I mean, who is in charge of homelessness policy? | ||
| Is it the mayor or is it the governor of the state? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it depends on state laws. | |
| But basically the person who's going to have the skin in the game and be most dealing with it's going to be the mayor, essentially, the city councils in these areas. | ||
| Certainly there can be funds from the state government and certainly they can pass some requirements and some laws both to increase the housing supply and also to deal with people who have mental illness issues. | ||
| What are some Laws that are being passed in recent years as the numbers have risen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, for example, California has taken steps in recent years to try to lower the cost of housing to basically deal with a lot of the zoning issues, restrictionary, exclusionary zoning and other issues that prevents new houses from being built, new apartments from being built, give supply and demand problem that drives up the cost of houses and apartments in those communities. | |
| So they've made it easier to build houses, and that's a good step in the right direction. | ||
| They also created in California something called a Conservancy Court, which is basically not widely implemented yet, but the goal is to be able to make sure you're protecting the rights of homeless individuals and at the same time permit the imposition of some sort of treatment plan on those people who are unable to make decisions for appreciate the decisions for themselves. | ||
| We're talking about homelessness in the United States this morning. | ||
| Michael Tanner is our guest related to this conversation. | ||
| And what Mr. Tanner was just speaking about is this headline in the Washington Post. | ||
| Senators make rare bipartisan effort on housing package. | ||
| After the unlikely duo of Senator Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, Republican of South Carolina and Democrat of Massachusetts, teamed up to write the measure, it passed unanimously out of the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Lawmakers stress the urgency of the nation's housing crisis as they come together to move the package forward. | ||
| What do you know about this package? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's largely symbolic, again, because most of the laws that block the construction of new housing are at the local level. | |
| They have to do with individual, you know, local zoning ordinances, exclusionary zoning, things of that nature. | ||
| But there are certainly some steps that the federal government can do to encourage states to make changes. | ||
| And hopefully this package will do something to that effect. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, thank you very much for jumping in there as I get a drink of water. | ||
| And we'll go to Laverne, who's in South Carolina. | ||
| Experience with homelessness. | ||
| Laverne, welcome to the conversation. | ||
| Tell us your story. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Laverne in South Carolina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Hello. | ||
| Laverne, I'm going to move on to Janetta, who's in Granite Falls, Washington. | ||
| Janetta, good morning. | ||
| Welcome to the conversation on homelessness. | ||
| What's your question or comment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for taking my call. | |
| First of all, I was, for the past year, I was sort of facing homelessness myself. | ||
| And my situation has pretty much worked out, thank God. | ||
| But it was a terrifying experience. | ||
| And the only reason that I was facing homelessness was I've rented the same place for 30 years, and all of a sudden things changed. | ||
| But I don't make enough on Social Security to cover the rents now, which is a real problem in this state. | ||
| It's very expensive living here. | ||
| But my question for the gentleman there is: in hearing about this executive order, what is going to happen to these people if they're rounded up? | ||
| Because I did a little research myself, and there are no facilities available. | ||
| They're all full. | ||
| The jails couldn't absorb the overflow because they're full too. | ||
| And especially with all these cuts that are going on, budget cuts, where are these people going to go and what's going to happen to them? | ||
| And as somebody who is facing living on the street, I got to tell you, it's a terrifying, terrifying thought, especially for somebody like myself who's worked all my life. | ||
| And the only reason that I was facing it was because I didn't make enough money. | ||
| So I guess I'll leave it there unless you have any questions. | ||
| No, you raise a huge point. | ||
| And the executive order does direct the government to see if any of the federal resources can be made available, but there aren't a great many federal resources available for this either. | ||
| And we know that in states like California, the substance abuse waiting list for treatment is enormous. | ||
| We know there's not enough beds to handle all the homeless population on any given night. | ||
| So certainly localities and probably the states as well are going to have to inject more resources into the problem. | ||
| You have to have someplace to put people if you're going to just go in and pick them up. | ||
| We'll go to John next in Florida. | ||
| John, good morning. | ||
| Question or comment on homelessness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm not homeless, thank God, but I try to help the homeless. | ||
| I'm in Florida, in Hernando County, and the prices of real estate and rentals are very, very expensive. | ||
| The prices around where I live, I live in a manufactured home. | ||
| The prices have tripled in the last 12 years. | ||
| And people getting like $1,000 on Social Security just can't cut it. | ||
| They usually try to get a bedroom in somebody's house. | ||
| But I know some people that are living in the woods in tents. | ||
| And it's private property. | ||
| Then people come along and say, you've got to move out. | ||
| I know a woman living in a car with two dogs for the last year and a half. | ||
| And with this heat here, it's terrible. | ||
| I wish the county or the state would allow access to free land or public land and almost like wooded land and provide tent space, you know, and also provide port-a-potty so they have a place to, you know, have sanitation facilities. | ||
| Michael, let's get Michael Tanner's response. | ||
| Yeah, as I've said, we need to address both ends of that equation. | ||
| We need to bring down the cost of housing, and that is largely a question of deregulating the housing market that's very restrictive right now in terms of building. | ||
| And on the other side of that, we do need to find some sort of way to care for the people who are on the street today. | ||
| That needs to be done, of course, in cost-effective ways. | ||
| It's the famous million-dollar public toilet in San Francisco when they tried to deal with the Port-a-Potty issue there. | ||
| But we do need to find ways and places for these people to stay. | ||
| You have some recommendations that you've made recently. | ||
| Let's go through them. | ||
| Institutional care is one of your five strategies to address homelessness. | ||
| Enact stricter conservatorship laws to manage those who cannot. | ||
| What are these laws? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, essentially, conservatorship allows someone to take temporary control or charge of someone else's life. | |
| We can go back, we all remember the Britney Spears issue around conservatorship, but it's actually generally used much in a larger way. | ||
| Certainly, I've known people whose son or whose sister-in-law or whatever was mentally ill and was on the street. | ||
| Someone needs to be able to come in and compel them to take their medication or to seek treatment in some way. | ||
| Or in some cases, what may be necessary to actually institutionalize them because they are unable to care for themselves. | ||
| Now, we need to be very careful in how this is done. | ||
| There's huge abuse in the past, LGBTQ families, women who were recalcitrant wives once upon a time could be committed, things of that nature. | ||
| So we need to be very careful of how this is done to protect people's rights. | ||
| And the lifestyles, even if we don't approve of them, can't be the excuse for locking someone up. | ||
| That said, there are clearly people out there who are a danger to themselves and others, and they probably need to be taken off the street. | ||
| Your second strategy is invest in treatment. | ||
| How much money are you talking about and who is doing or what entity is doing the investing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, as I say, I think primarily it's a municipal function, but probably some state funds are going to need to help support municipalities which can't always afford these things. | |
| I mean, we can look back to, for example, the Grants Pass case that just this year where the Supreme Court ruled it was okay to break up homeless encampments. | ||
| Grants Pass had no shelters, had one private evangelical shelter, had no public shelters for them all. | ||
| So the question was, are you going to break up these camps? | ||
| Where are people going to go? | ||
| They were mostly interested in moving them to the next town over, so it's someone else's problem. | ||
| But eventually that circle runs out. | ||
| We've talked about your third strategy, build more housing in this country to address the housing shortage as well as the affordability. | ||
| Your fourth strategy, enable state and local experimentation. | ||
| What are you talking about here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| We should be very careful about imposing a one-size-fits-all strategy. | ||
| Communities are different. | ||
| They have different levels of homelessness. | ||
| Dealing with a place like California, which has 50% of all the unhoused homeless, is very different than what you're going to encounter in some small town in rural Alabama, for example. | ||
| You're going to have a different number of people, different solutions, different types of homelessness. | ||
| We should be flexible enough to allow those communities to adapt to whatever their particular problem is. | ||
| And your fifth strategy is broader social mobility policies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We should recognize that a lot of homelessness takes place in light of poverty overall, and we should be addressing ways to reduce poverty. | |
| That is certainly going to make it much easier for people who face a temporary crisis to get through without ending up on the street. | ||
| All right, for our viewers, you've seen Michael Tanner's five strategies to address homelessness. | ||
| We can take your thoughts on those strategies and other aspects of this debate here in Washington over how to address homelessness in this country. | ||
| Gregory, Albuquerque, New Mexico. | ||
| Good morning, Gregory. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you, ma'am? | ||
| I'm sure to appreciate C-SPAN. | ||
| I'm an older gentleman. | ||
| This is what happened to me. | ||
| I became homeless at 70 years old. | ||
| At the start of the coronavirus, I was kicked out of my place October the 5th that year, and I've since lived in motels, hotels, and stuff. | ||
| This is because these real estate companies are coming in, buying up properties, kicking out the people who are established, who have been there. | ||
| I've been in my apartment almost three years, kicking them out, moving in a new crowd, jacking up the rent. | ||
| It's affordable housing. | ||
| And there's a symbiotic relationship between the homelessness, the homeless people, and the police. | ||
| I personally experienced this. | ||
| Somebody stole my stuff. | ||
| I kind of roughed him up. | ||
| I did. | ||
| I wanted my property back. | ||
| And next thing I would, I've been arrested by the police. | ||
| They're trying to put drugs on me. | ||
| I'm sober. | ||
| I don't do anything. | ||
| I'm clean. | ||
| I volunteered in Vietnam, went to college, married over 40 years. | ||
| I just don't get it. | ||
| My wife is dead. | ||
| And I have to experience this in my old age. | ||
| It's pretty tough. | ||
| Mr. Tanner. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that really sounds terrible. | |
| And I certainly hope you find housing soon. | ||
| I wish you the best for that. | ||
| And I think you also mentioned a couple of particular problems that are out there. | ||
| Rents are too high, but it's largely a problem of supply and demand. | ||
| There's a lot more people looking for housing than we have housing right now, which drives up the cost. | ||
| If we could build more housing, we could bring down that cost of rent and make it easier. | ||
| COVID was another big issue that did increase homelessness to a significant amount during the pandemic. | ||
| We haven't bounced back from that yet. | ||
| And policing is very tough. | ||
| I mean, it is tough for police to deal with homeless encampments. | ||
| There's a lot of problems there, but it's on both sides, and you do get a lot of police abuse to the homeless population as well. | ||
| All right, Lexington, North Carolina. | ||
| Dennis is watching there. | ||
| Good morning, and welcome to the conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'd like to address the issue with the homeless. | ||
| I was homeless at one time. | ||
| I'm a disabled veteran that served this country for 21 years. | ||
| I was in Iran, Iraq war, came home, and a lot of things were different for I came home. | ||
| The problem is, it's a lot of veterans that come home from Fed de Polo and the whole world change. | ||
| And we deal with ACEs every day. | ||
| And then a lot of us are becoming homeless. | ||
| And they don't commit suicide because right now the problem is it's 22 veterans a day commit suicide. | ||
| And the ones that do not commit suicide are homeless. | ||
| The population of homeless are part of veterans that don't know how to deal with these. | ||
| Yeah, Dennis, let's take up the VA and this issue of veterans and homelessness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, there's actually some good news here. | |
| Veterans hopelessness was rising very rapidly, but both the federal and state governments have prioritized dealing with homeless veterans, and the result has been that they have actually declined in the last couple of years, the percentage of homeless that are veterans. | ||
| So some good news on that front. | ||
| A lot further to go, obviously. | ||
| What does the VA do? | ||
| I mean, how do they try to address this issue? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's less the VA than other areas, but they've basically prioritized funding for homeless vets, prioritized getting them into shelters and in areas where there's a great deal of homeless. | |
| They've done more outreach and things of that nature to try to make sure that the people know where the resources are and are available for them. | ||
| Is it largely a mental health issue when it comes to our veterans? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a little bit of both, but certainly it's sometimes difficult to sort of separate the pieces of the onion here. | |
| I mean, did mental health issues lead you to losing your job that then left you to become homeless? | ||
| Or was it other problems you came back and didn't have the skill set? | ||
| And so how you exactly parse these things is often very difficult. | ||
| But certainly mental health issues play a big role in this. | ||
| And the VA has not had the best record when it comes to dealing with mental health and veterans. | ||
| Bob in New York, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I was in Syracuse, Law, maybe back in the late or excuse me, early 70s. | ||
| And we had some fellows that came to class about closing down the mental hospitals in central New York. | ||
| And they referred to the individuals as what they were going to do was called dumping. | ||
| And they closed all the various mental hospitals around central New York. | ||
| And these people just went on the street. | ||
| Fast forward to 2010, I was involved in homeless services in Onondaga County. | ||
| And we had, if somebody was homeless, they could come to the county. | ||
| We house them, help them find a job, get services. | ||
| And what I saw was that 95% of these people were either mentally ill, drugs, alcohol, or a combination of all three. | ||
| And I think it would help if some of the worst cases were more ushered into some kind of service required to do that. | ||
| Otherwise, the problem just kind of goes on. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we should recognize deinstitutionalization has pretty much been recognized as a failure now. | ||
| But at the time, it was broadly popular. | ||
| It was bipartisan support for the idea. | ||
| And it was driven in part because there were really horrible abuses going on in many of the mental illness settings that there essentially was no treatment. | ||
| They were warehoused, often in rags and filth. | ||
| And there were some exposés, Life Magazine. | ||
| Raldo Rivera won an Emmy, I believe, for his expose of one in New York. | ||
| So there was certainly real reason to consider that the system at the time was not working. | ||
| They thought getting people out into community settings for treatment would be better. | ||
| It doesn't look like that that's worked quite the way that people intended. | ||
| All right, Will's in Atlanta. | ||
| Good morning to you, Will. | ||
| What's the situation like there in Atlanta on homelessness? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I believe this is the new Jerusalem. | |
| I think civilization pivots on urban culture, and Atlanta just didn't come up with Reverend King for no reason. | ||
| We are a community that loves, sees God in each other's faces and loves one another. | ||
| And that's what America was built on, e plus unum, where we're one people, one God, one law, one flag, one language. | ||
| And we've forgotten that. | ||
| In fact, there are interloping cults that actually deny God. | ||
| And that's the source of a lot of the mental illness that promotes homelessness because people are actually ritually sodomized as toddlers and they're literally demon-possessed. | ||
| Okay, we're going to move on to Kathleen in Mississippi. | ||
| Kathleen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| This is Mississippi. | ||
| It's been like this even before I was born. | ||
| My mother had me by midwife. | ||
| My father and mother had tensions. | ||
| We had one health department. | ||
| It's gone. | ||
| We had one hospital at Mount Bau. | ||
| It was gone, but it came back. | ||
| But you can't get the service you need. | ||
| I have a sister with breast cancer. | ||
| I have a sister with cervical cancer, but we can't get what we need. | ||
| We're paying for everything, but we're not getting nothing. | ||
| If you work your whole life, your whole life, and don't have a pension, that's getting $988 a month with one food box a month is sad that the person at the top of the white sold everybody on that bus except himself. | ||
| We that memories stay at 725 here, but if you'll believe me, come to Mississippi. | ||
| See for yourself. | ||
| Oh, the rich get richer and the poor get poor. | ||
| All right, Kathleen there with her thoughts. | ||
| I mean, it's not just housing that's expensive for folks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Certainly, the cost of living is expensive, and we know that inflation actually hits low-income people harder than it does people at the top of the income scale. | |
| The new tariffs that have been imposed are going to hit low-income people harder than they're going to hit people at the top. | ||
| So we're going to drive up costs even further. | ||
| But I think the larger point is that we need to address poverty in this country. | ||
| We need to find ways to create the opportunity for people to rise out of poverty and be able to achieve their ambitions. | ||
| Don, in Los Angeles, good morning to you, Don. | ||
| We've been talking about the state of California, the number of homelessness in your state. | ||
| What are your thoughts on it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm in the capital of homelessness, LA, Hollywood area. | |
| And it seems to be like a big business here. | ||
| We have these charitable places, allegedly charitable, 100% nonprofit people, organizations that try to say that they're involved in getting you housing. | ||
| And what they do is they have these huge, huge contracts with the government or grant money or whatever, multi-millions of dollars flowing in for free. | ||
| And then they harbor us into hotels and say that we're off the street, and then they kick us out later. | ||
| That's basically what it is. | ||
| It's making money off of people who have no money off the government. | ||
| All right, Mr. Taylor, do you have some thoughts on that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, California is a good example of how some of these things do work. | |
| They had a referendum in California, but it was called Triple H, that provided, that basically used money taxing from the marijuana industry and then was going to use that to build new housing. | ||
| They built very few new houses and at an enormous cost per unit there. | ||
| It has not been a story of success. | ||
| Janine, in Erie, Pennsylvania. | ||
| Morning, Janine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'd just like to say that I'm 74 years old and I live on a fixed income and I live in a trailer court and the lot rent has gone up $80 in the last two years. | ||
| Well, that's $80 that I don't have. | ||
| And I really feel for these veterans and these homeless people, as I could be one step away from it, I do have one option. | ||
| But it's getting so bad, the cost of everything is outrageous. | ||
| Michael Taylor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Yeah, and we know that seniors are the fastest growing category of homeless today. | ||
| So that's something we've got to watch because they do live on a fixed income. | ||
| As housing prices rise, it's going to be a problem. | ||
| And because there's often more mental challenges, mental illness challenges among the elderly population. | ||
| And how does that compare to previous administrations, previous decades, that this rise in seniors not having a place to live? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, the numbers that we have are not from the first six months of the Trump administration. | |
| So there's no idea what the impact is right now in that regard. | ||
| So it largely came under the Biden administration, and it was a significant rise. | ||
| How did the Biden administration approach homelessness versus what we've seen now with this executive order from President Trump? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Biden administration focused almost exclusively on what's called housing first, which is the idea that you simply take the homeless population, you put them into some sort of permanent supportive housing, subsidized by the government with no preconditions or no requirements to do that. | |
| That's sort of been the trendy thing. | ||
| It was big in California. | ||
| It's been big in New York, a lot of the states that have large homeless populations. | ||
| And it's pursued advantage by the Biden administration. | ||
| It's very expensive, and the studies that are coming out suggest that it does not do a particularly good job of keeping people off the street long term. | ||
| Why not? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Basically, because a lot of the underlying causes of their homelessness do not go untreated, whether it's substance abuse, whether it's mental illness, whether it's lack of education, whether it's lack of a job. | |
| They're not addressing the root causes. | ||
| They're simply warehousing people in very nice warehouses. | ||
| And the taxpayers are paying for that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, indeed. | |
| We'll go to Suzanne, Washington, D.C. Hi, Suzanne. | ||
| What's it like here? | ||
| How would you describe it here, the homelessness? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Well, I'm from Los Angeles, so here doesn't seem particularly awful to me. | ||
| But I just want the problem is so intractable. | ||
| But I want to just talk, no one's really talking about private equity owning so much housing stock. | ||
| And, you know, it takes 10 years to get an in-law permit. | ||
| But really, if we really wanted to solve this, I think more people would be talking about the unused office space and the sheer amount of square feet available all over the nation. | ||
| I mean, we should really address that. | ||
| It just seems like the obvious, you know, solution. | ||
| Yeah, that is one of the solutions for the problem there. | ||
| They can't use a lot of this space because of the way it's zoned right now, and they would have to go in and make changes to the zoning law. | ||
| I know that the federal government's been looking at the possibility of federal office space and allowing that to be turned into housing. | ||
| There are some states that have taken steps in this regard, allowing commercial space, whether they're malls or office buildings to be used, to be turned into housing units. | ||
| So I do think that there's a real opportunity there rather than let these things sit empty. | ||
| Anthony is in Brawley, California. | ||
| Anthony, where's Brawley, California? | ||
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unidentified
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Near San Diego in the Pearl Valley. | |
| Okay. | ||
| And do you have an issue there? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, my comment was to, can you hear me? | |
| Yeah, we can. | ||
|
unidentified
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My comment was that here in the Pearl Valley, there's a lot of homelessness and it's very bad. | |
| And the thing is that there's a lot of mental health and drug abuse that are lacking in those communities. | ||
| And there needs to be more resources. | ||
| There's a resource available, but there needs to be more output people to give them understanding that it's available to do those things to help people get out of that drug abuse and poverty and get them into housing. | ||
| Okay, Anthony there in California. | ||
| Michael Tanner, though, when you have resources available, as he's describing, what is the hurdle with people who have mental illness to get them to use those resources? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, that's sort of the chicken and egg here. | |
| The fact that they have mental illness, they're suffering from mental illness, makes it more difficult for them to then pursue the resources they want. | ||
| If you don't have the wherewithal to make decisions or to understand the consequences of your decisions, it's very difficult to get people into treatment. | ||
| That is why I'm suggesting that we, in some cases, need to pursue some sort of mandatory treatment, mandatory institutionalization for some of these folks. | ||
| Be very careful in how we implement it, but I think we're going to have to go down that route. | ||
| So you said to be careful because it's been abused in the past. | ||
| How do you suggest going about conservatorship? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, I think someone has to look after the interests of the individual that we're talking about placing in conservatorship. | |
| Again, I think the idea behind the conservatorship courts in California is a good one where a public advocate, sort of like a public defender, is appointed to look after the interests of the homeless person that's going to be required to seek treatment in some way so that we're not getting abuses of it and that we can ensure that his civil rights are protected. | ||
| But I think that we are going to have to accept the fact that some people are not capable of making these decisions. | ||
| And there's certainly no compassion about simply allowing these people to starve to death or freeze to death or whatever it is on the street. | ||
| Are there any states that have conservatorship laws that you would point to as sufficient and successful? | ||
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unidentified
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I think about 49, I believe, of the 50 states have a conservatorship law. | |
| And California's, as they say, the new conservatorship court is certainly something to look into. | ||
| It has not been widely adopted. | ||
| There's a lot of reasons that. | ||
| There's been a lot of pushback from municipalities. | ||
| There's been a lack of resources to be able to do it adequately. | ||
| But there has been some effort to move in that direction. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Christina, who experienced homelessness, calling from New York. | ||
| Go ahead, Christina. | ||
| Tell us your story. | ||
|
unidentified
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My name is Christina Spring. | |
| I'm a motorized wheelchair user. | ||
| My children and I are age disabled adults who are experiencing homelessness. | ||
| We're supposed to be protected under Violence Against Women Act. | ||
| And we were displaced when I refused traffic person traffic king and then discriminated against, including by the county, where there were people related to who are funding the problem in Erie County that were in the homeless department. | ||
| My concern is that my children are not getting proper housing. | ||
| We have been discriminated against. |