1317: Homelessness | Skeptical Sunday

1317: Homelessness | Skeptical Sunday

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Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher Nick Pell. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

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Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start, or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, if you live in a major metro area, you've probably noticed that homelessness is out of control. Tent cities are springing up across America. Panhandlers seem to be everywhere, even in formerly nice areas of town. You are not imagining things.

In fact, homelessness reached record highs in 2024 when over 750,000 people were counted among the homeless. A lot of reasons are cited for the increase in homelessness among them, and end to COVID era relief programs, and an increasing number of homeless migrants showing up in America. It's often said that the average American is themselves only a paycheck or two away from being [00:02:00] homeless.

But is this true? Is homelessness, chronic homelessness, as a long-term way of life rather than a brief and transient condition? Is that more of a choice than it is a misfortune beyond someone's control? Here today, to help me separate the street myths from the sidewalk realities is writer and researcher Nick Pell.

Nick, have you ever been homeless?

Nick Pell: I had to crash on someone's house for a couple of weeks while I was in between places, but no. I once had a formerly homeless roommate and he used to dumpster dive us killer baked goods.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I actually, when I went to New York once, uh, this is years and years and years ago after I'd lived there, I went back to New York and this guy who was writing for me, he also was like, oh, I'm going to New York too.

I'd never met him, right? He was working for me over the internet. This is well before video chat days, so I was just sending him assignments on some paper, word website. I was like, oh, okay, cool. We can hang out. And then he's like, great. And I found out he was basically going to New York with no place to stay.

And he was cool. And we'd known him for a while online, so I was like, why don't you crash here for a couple nights? And he would just go and [00:03:00] come back with food. And I was like, man, this guy really knows how to pay his share for this couch. He's going to get food every day. And I was like joking with him. Because he was a really big, intimidating guy. I was joking. I was like, what are you going in and stealing this? And he was just like, ah, no. And then after a while I was like, man, you really overbought today. You don't have to bring back this much just for you and I. And he is like, well, I'm not paying for it.

And I was like, oh crap, you are stealing it. And he's like, no, I'm getting it from the dumpster. They're throwing this away and it's perfectly fine. And I was like, oh no, no. But it was good Chinese food, I'm not going to lie.

Nick Pell: Yeah, it's not that gross, man. There's tons of perfectly good food sitting in dumpsters, just waiting for some enterprising individual to come along and fish it out.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I want to be really clear here. This was not like someone's leftovers in a styrofoam container that they didn't eat after they ordered it and picked at it. This was like the Chinese buffet after the dinner. They just had a bunch of extra kung pow chicken and then they put it in the garbage. He would go in and be like, can you put this in a thing for me?

And they were like, fine, [00:04:00] here's all of it for five bucks or something like that. So I don't think he was like, he wasn't like taking it out of the actual dumpster. But I will say, I bet your homeboy with the baked goods was actually doing that.

Nick Pell: Yes. No, no, no. He would, he would literally just go in the dumpster and fish him out.

Jordan Harbinger: I'll stick to the ones from the bakery on the corner. But there is slash was an appeal to free, especially in my twenties. I don't know why.

Nick Pell: Free always tastes better for whatever it's worth. He was the first formerly homeless person I ever knew. Was the least sympathetic person on planet Earth to the plight of the homeless.

Jordan Harbinger: Really? That's interesting to me because you think that being somewhat fresh off the street, he'd want to go to bat for them?

Nick Pell: Well, he would always talk about how like, you know, living in a house was a like temporary thing for him, and he was going to go live on the streets or out of the woods again one day, and he hated living in a house.

Jordan Harbinger: This guy, his whole thing was like, I'm going to go play the ukulele in Times Square and make money doing that and busking. And he was kind of like, I'm a drunk and a writer and I just busk all day. [00:05:00] I don't know. I think this is back when in your twenties you thought it might be kind of cool to do a thing and then you're just like, wait, I have to join the real world at some point.

Nick Pell: I don't want to give the whole game away in the intro, but a lot of what my formerly homeless roommate used to say to me is going to be channeled into this episode. Another friend of mine runs a soup kitchen. He feeds at least 500 people every day. He's administered Narcan to people and saved their lives like he does that almost every week.

He is likewise, not terribly sympathetic to the plight of homeless. He overlaps a lot with my formerly homeless former roommate in terms of his perspective.

Jordan Harbinger: For my part, I really just want to get to the bottom of chronic homelessness. Northern California is kind of, well, California in general, notorious for homelessness around the country, and believe it or not, where I live, even in like suburban San Jose, is not immune to the problem of the chronically homeless either.

There are people that sleep in between the [00:06:00] commercial area that we had a 7-Eleven that finally moved out and there were so many people living behind that thing and now those people are all gone. But this is I live in like a nice area. It was really shocking to see people in a dirty sleeping bag on the sidewalk in this area.

Crazy.

Nick Pell: Yeah. The first thing I learned for this episode that shocked me was that like, we're not imagining that there are way more homeless people than ever before. That's actually a thing.

Jordan Harbinger: We're going to try to explain why this is over the course of the episode, but first you're just adamant that the idea that everyone is one paycheck away from being homeless, that's a myth, right?

Nick Pell: It's certainly a myth about everyone. Broad statements like that generally don't carry a lot of truth, but that one is particularly false.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So I read for this episode that the median savings for Americans under 64 is between $5,700 and $8,700, which is mind blowing. So I guess, aren't these people kind of a couple paychecks away from homelessness?

Nick Pell: Damn, those guys are rich. Um.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Nick Pell: First, I think the number of paychecks is [00:07:00] important. Unemployment statistics are tricky, but the second largest group of people who collect unemployment benefits are the ones who use it for less than five weeks. That's about a third. So about a third of people collecting unemployment are using it for less than five weeks.

The largest group is off after 15 weeks.

Jordan Harbinger: Do you think people can really get by in what they get from unemployment checks though? I've never had one of these, but I can't imagine they're generous.

Nick Pell: Oh, you're missing out, man. Funemployment. It depends on a lot of factors in Massachusetts, uh, which has the highest unemployment benefits in the nation.

And also where I, the only place I've ever collected unemployment, you can get over a thousand bucks a month for unemployment. And it's such a thing that in working class towns, guys just like don't work for the winter. I mean, I obviously don't mean all of them, right? But there's everybody who's of blue collar New England extraction listening to this is like, oh yeah, my cousin Jerry doesn't work all winter. Because he just collects [00:08:00] unemployment. Yeah, guys just get laid off and they eat pills and drink all winter.

Jordan Harbinger: Geez, that sounds miserable. I know somebody who was like this, I can't out this person, but we basically found out that he didn't get laid off a bunch of times and have really bad luck because some colleague or whatever boss called and was like, Hey, we're wondering if we can get so and so back to work.

And it's like, well, yeah, you laid him off. I'm sure you'd love to come back to work. And he was just like "Laid him off? He takes every summer off. What are you talking about? We look for volunteers when there's a slow season and he's always the first guy with his hand up," and this person who's related to me was like, are you kidding me?

Because you know, she's been supporting him while he got laid off and was just hanging out boating and stuff and like fishing.

Nick Pell: Yeah. This is not just one of my like inflammatory exaggerations that's designed to get you tons of hate mail.

Jordan Harbinger: Good.

Nick Pell: We don't have statistics on how many people in little shithole mill towns in New England are taking the winter off to go eat pills.

Is it significant? I [00:09:00] don't know. I very much doubt that the little town that I grew up in is much of an outlier in this respect. I also have a relative who does this, so.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: Yeah, it's a thing guys.

Jordan Harbinger: We're all cut from the same cloth. So that's Massachusetts. Where are benefits the lowest?

Nick Pell: Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama are all tied for dead last with 275 a month.

Jordan Harbinger: That you can't live on.

Okay, so how are those people supposed to last without a job?

Nick Pell: They're not. They're supposed to go get another one. But hey, let's say you bust your butt looking for work and you just can't find a job and you get evicted. Call a friend or call your family.

Jordan Harbinger: What if you don't have friends or family to call?

Not everyone has a rich, famous bestie to fall back on. I don't even have one of those.

Nick Pell: Well, luckily for me I do. So this is where we start getting into the meat of it though. Like who doesn't have friends or family to call on when they need help? Because this is where we're going to start diving into the difference between temporary homelessness, spending the worst month of your life sleeping in your car, [00:10:00] and chronic homelessness. In fact, there are three different kinds of homelessness, but people tend to collapse them all into the guy holding the cup outside of the 7-Eleven.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I see this tendency to conflate the guy living in his car for a month or living on a friend's couch for a month with the guy who's lived on the streets for a decade and will die there.

Or the guys living behind the 7-Eleven, right, who are basically naked except for the sleeping bag that they carry around with them. So what are the three different kinds of homelessness? What are the categories?

Nick Pell: First, there's what's called situational or transitional homelessness. These are the apocryphal, just like you and me, homeless we talked about earlier.

These are people who lost their homes because of an unforeseen event. In fact, this category includes people who, for example, lost their house in the Pacific Palisades Fire.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that was awful. All those houses are just gone. I think they've rebuilt like one of them. Literally. It's crazy.

Nick Pell: Yeah.

Those houses are not coming back, man. Which is a bummer. And those people who lived in them, they're not going to be [00:11:00] living there. Because.

Jordan Harbinger: No.

Nick Pell: They didn't pay $7 million for them. They don't have $7 million to spend on the rebuilt version, so.

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Nick Pell: Anyway, these people, a lot of times, these situational, transitional homeless, a lot of times they don't even show up in statistics because they make a couple phone calls and they get it sorted out, or they're just not on the street for very long, or they're in their car, they're showering in the Starbucks sink while they look for work.

They have skills, they have connections, they have reasons to get their shit together. Next, we've got the episodically homeless. These are the people who this happens to on the regular. They're in and out of normal housing. They're always losing jobs or getting thrown out of their house. There's often mental illness and drug abuse going on here.

Unless you have a drug problem or a serious mental health issue, you are not one paycheck away from being this guy. And these people make up the lion's share of the homeless in and out of normal housing in uh uh, the street. Finally, there's the chronically homeless. That's about [00:12:00] 10 to 20% of the homeless.

They're a smaller percentage, but they're who you're most likely to see on the street, and they're defined as people who have been homeless for a year or more repeatedly within three years and have a disabling condition.

Jordan Harbinger: Where does sort of couch surfers and such fall into this? Like my friend Andrew who stayed with me in New York, he was just kind of like, "Yeah, I slept at the bus station for a couple days, but then I went back to my friend's house. Now I'm here with you. And then I got this guy that I know that knows a girl that likes me and she's getting a place. I'm going to stay with her for a month." Like there's sort of transient people like this, you know.

Nick Pell: I spent one night in the Port Authority bus terminal in New York. I was 16 and holy shit.

Jordan Harbinger: When he said he's crashed at the bus station or Penn Station or whatever, bus station.

I was like, that can't be restful sleep with your stuff.

Nick Pell: That was the one thing I got told. They were like, do not fall asleep. You're going to wake up with no shoes.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. Yeah. Yikes.

Nick Pell: So couch surfers and such. This is where we start getting into the weasel words. This is the first of what's going to [00:13:00] be many of them.

These people are known as the hidden homeless.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Nick Pell: And this is just a term that means they stay with family and friends.

Jordan Harbinger: So in other words, not homeless.

Nick Pell: Right. And I know there's a bunch of people who are going to freak out over this, but it's just, it's wildly dishonest to refer to these people as being homeless.

Yeah. They're not, it sucks to be living on someone else's charity and you know what sucks way worse than that?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Sleeping in in a tent on the street or something like that. Yeah.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Sleeping on a in, in the street or a shelter or your car or any of the actual situations that actually homeless people deal with.

There's another term doubling up that's often used alongside hidden homeless. This means you live with other people because you can't afford your own place. I'm old enough to remember when this was called having a roommate.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: So this is just a hundred percent not homeless or even anything like it.

But in researching this, I just found article after article that, you [00:14:00] know, breathlessly talks about the hidden homeless epidemic and doubling up in the same sentence. It is an absolute bait and switch. These people are not homeless. People in cars often get counted as hidden homeless. There's no universal means of counting.

I mean, people in cars are homeless, sleeping on your best friend's couch for a month or two while you figure out your next move. You're not homeless.

Jordan Harbinger: If that's homeless, then I have been homeless because I've definitely crashed with like my girlfriend or lived at her cottage. Or a parent's friend's, parents little guest houses where they're like, "Hey, you can crash here because you don't have anything to do and your job pays dog crap. Because you're a college student who's 20 and you don't just want to live with your parents." If that's the case, then I'm homeless, you know? Or I've been homeless. Sorry. So why do you think it's an attempt to mislead and I guess more to the point, what is there to be gained from misleading people about the hidden homeless besides getting some clicks for your news website?[00:15:00]

Nick Pell: Money. It's really that simple. What is the financial incentive to actually solve a problem versus exaggerating it? Anytime someone has a vested interest in a problem existing, you should be extremely skeptical of how bad that problem is based on their say so. Which leads us to another bait and switch, the concept of sheltered versus unsheltered homeless.

Jordan Harbinger: You're not going to tell me that you think people living in homeless shelters should not be considered homeless, are you?

Nick Pell: No, but I do think it's worth pointing out nearly twice as many homeless people are sheltered as are unsheltered. I would also argue that if you're chronically homeless, and live in a shelter with no plans to obtain permanent housing at any point, don't you just live in a homeless shelter?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I guess that's where it sort of gets like technical, the lines blur because this is going to sound callous, and I'm trying not to say it that way, but if you live in a homeless shelter because you don't feel like you want to get your own [00:16:00] place, it's just easier to not have the responsibility slash the expense of doing that.

And you're okay with whatever drawbacks there are of living in a homeless shelter or limitations thereof. Yeah. You just live in a homeless shelter and it's not the same thing as somebody who doesn't have a place to live at all. Does drawing that line make sense?

Nick Pell: Yes. No, it absolutely does. I mean, there's a, um, a very old friend of mine who has been homeless for years now, you know, he lives at the homeless shelter.

He's lived in the same homeless shelter for I think like two years now. He has no plans to get a place. He spends most of his time either harassing people who've tried to help him at some point, or complaining online about how he should just be given an apartment, which like he's a drug addict and possibly schizophrenic.

I don't know that I think that would be the wisest use of taxpayer dollars. Um, but you know, he lives at the homeless shelter. Is it tragic? Yes, but it's not the same thing as somebody who's trying to get their life [00:17:00] together and get out of the shelter. It's somebody who's given up, and that is tragic, but in a very, very different way.

What's more, some of what's considered sheltered homeless, I think brings us back to what I was talking about earlier. Is someone who lives in a hotel homeless.

Jordan Harbinger: I know people are going to be like, lives in a hotel and you're thinking of, I don't know, Matthew McConaughey living in Chateau Marmont or something like that.

But uh, obviously not homeless, but they're in San Francisco anyway, which is probably a good example of what we're talking about. There are these huge residential hotels that are old buildings, you know, pre-war, that have the fire escapes like you would see from an old building like that. And they're in the Tenderloin or somewhere near there.

And I'm like, who stays at the such and such hotel? And you can look on Yelp and look at the reviews and they're all like one star. And it's like, people were so rude, we were just looking for a room. And I was like, no one would ever stay here. They basically cater almost exclusively slash exclusively to a nonprofit that buys or rents the whole thing or owns the whole thing.

And they give [00:18:00] rooms to people who are on disability. So all the people who live in this hotel long term for years at a time are homeless. Air quotes, homeless because they live in that hotel. So, yeah. They're kind of not homeless for purposes of what everybody assumes, sort of, everyone imagines, I should say, when they're thinking of homeless person.

Like they don't have a common place of, of their, the claiming meaning of the

Nick Pell: word homeless.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. Right. They have a home. It's just a temporary thing that's provided by the state. It doesn't mean that they're homeless. There's, there has we have to draw a difference between these things or the word just loses all meaning?

Nick Pell: Yeah. Well, they're counted as sheltered homeless.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Nick Pell: For the purposes of collecting information. So they're in the same category as people at a homeless shelter.

Jordan Harbinger: That doesn't make sense to me.

Nick Pell: Well get ready for things to not make sense.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Nick Pell: Uh, throughout this entire episode. But yeah. For the purposes of data collection, they are homeless.

They're sheltered homeless. There's hotels near where I live. I live, like I could walk to Route 66 from here in about three minutes. There are hotels that are like there for transients or [00:19:00] people unable to secure more permanent housing. They cost about a hundred bucks a month, less than the house I rent.

I just don't know how we can call someone who lives in a hotel homeless. To me, it's just like you live in a hotel.

Jordan Harbinger: Right? Yeah. What, what if they want to live in more permanent housing? Does that matter at all?

Nick Pell: I mean, I want to live in a five bedroom with a two car garage. Am I homeless? And I don't mean to be a jerk about it because it's like, I understand this is a transient, hopefully a transient, temporary situation for them.

They don't want to be in a hotel permanently. I don't want them in a hotel permanently. I want them to get a better life. But it's like, you're not homeless and you'd be, it's to some degree, like I would be thankful that I'm not, you know, and working really hard to not be. I'm not trying to take the position of like, oh, they're just living it up at, you know, the Ritz on the taxpayer dime.

Like, that's not my position. My position is just that they're not homeless.

Jordan Harbinger: If five bedrooms in your house is the line, then I'm homeless too. I don't know. Uh, you're [00:20:00] right. These cannot be the same category. It just doesn't make sense of, again, the word loses all meaning if we're just going to call people who don't live in their own owned property, homeless.

Nick Pell: Why are they counted as homeless?

I mean, they're, they're sleeping indoors on a bed with running water and heat every night. This is not homeless by anybody's definition, the plain meaning of the word homeless. I'm not saying it's great, I'm sure it's not, but what it's not is homeless. One thing that I think sheds a bit of light on the hidden homeless in a Department of Housing and Urban Development Report, they more strictly define who is homeless and who just live with friends and family.

You're homeless if your housing situation is secure for less than two weeks. In other words, if you can stay on a friend's couch for two weeks, but then you have to move on, you're homeless. That sounds mostly fair.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Why? Only? Mostly fair? Because that definitely sounds to me like that person is actually homeless.

Right? You, they just don't have a place. [00:21:00] They can't stay there as long as they want slash need to, and they've got to move fast. That's homeless.

Nick Pell: So mostly fair because if they're spending two weeks out of every month with friend A and two weeks out of every month with friend B, is that homeless? Maybe, but you're not sleeping over a street grate for warmth.

Jordan Harbinger: Is that how bad it has to be for you to consider a person homeless? You've got to be outside in a subway tunnel or something.

Nick Pell: I think a lot of people in shelters are sleeping somewhere warm and dry every night. But yes, they're homeless. The point I'm trying to make is that homelessness, as far as the government and NGOs define it, is not as cut and dried as people think it is.

It's not just people living in a tent near a junkyard or whatever.

Jordan Harbinger: I think that's a fair point and that you've made it. I'm sort of curious about who lives in the shelters, you know, what kind of homelessness are they dealing with there?

Nick Pell: The type of data for that is really difficult to pin down. It can vary wildly from one area to another.

There's a broad study from 2022 about shelters in [00:22:00] Boston providing some data that might be representative. That study covered over 44,000 shelter stays and found that the average stay was 77 days. The median stay was 30, 78% of the people in the study had more than one stay. There also some pretty significant tails in terms of length, meaning some people were staying there way longer.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So the study to me sounds like it's pointing to people suffering from either, what we we'd said earlier is chronic homelessness or episodic homelessness.

Nick Pell: Which paints a very different picture of homelessness. From literally anyone is a paycheck away from this.

Jordan Harbinger: This has me wondering that if that's not the case, what is driving homelessness in America?

Nick Pell: There are risk factors, but we have to remember that a risk factor does not mean destiny. So the two biggest risk factors are untreated mental illness and drug addiction. Okay. Big surprise.

Jordan Harbinger: No surprise. Yeah.

Nick Pell: No, none at all. A third very large factor is felony [00:23:00] criminal activity. In fact, released from prison and sex offender registration can count for as much as a third to 40% of total homelessness.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

Nick Pell: With sex offender registration topping out at 50% in some states. This is according to Devon Kurtz from the Cicero Institute. He helped us a lot with this episode. There's also the problem of a lack of a support network, but this is probably very tied to the other factors that we mentioned. Drug abuse, untreated mental illness.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Nick Pell: And felony conviction.

Jordan Harbinger: What do you mean? How are they tied?

Nick Pell: So again, anecdotal, but this friend of mine that I talked about earlier, he's either going to be episodic or chronically homeless. I think he's probably chronically homeless at this point. He has some kind of severe untreated mental illness. I'm not a doctor, I'm not going to attempt to.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

Nick Pell: Diagnose him.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, we've seen, we've all seen homeless people who are like talking to themselves in Yeah. The middle of a parking lot. Like [00:24:00] you and I talked about pre-show, I was getting a haircut and I was like, Hey, you know, there's a guy in the parking lot like stripping naked and yelling to himself. I mean we've, we've seen these kinds of people, and I'm not making light of this, just to be perfectly clear, these are the people who have untreated mental illness and or substance abuse issues.

We've seen the fent lean people. Yeah. You know, in tourist areas.

Nick Pell: My friend also has drug abuse issues.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: So there are people, including a mutual friend of ours who's one of my best friends in the whole world, who routinely offer him help on the condition that he start taking medication and stop doing drugs.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay?

Nick Pell: He won't do it. In fact, he gets extremely hostile when you give him those conditions. This is a guy who has a support network, but having a support network does not mean that they are willing to uncritically allow a person to engage in self-destructive behavior. This guy, this friend of mine is homeless.

He could be sleeping in a warm bed tonight [00:25:00] if he gave up drugs and got treatment, but he won't do it. Another anecdotal aside, my friend who runs the soup kitchen, he says this is true of just about every homeless person he encounters. They will not take help from friends and family. Or they will not take help from publicly funded resources because there's strings attached.

Jordan Harbinger: So the strings are, Hey, if you come and stay here, you can't do drugs, and you have to take your doctor prescribed medication, or something along those lines.

Nick Pell: Yeah. And I, you know, there's maybe a, a whole debate to have about whether or not that is their choice and if they have the capacity to make decisions, which I think is.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Huh.

Nick Pell: Kind of beyond the scope of this episode. But you know, assume that this is a free choice, like choices come with consequences.

Jordan Harbinger: It's true, but also if we start saying they don't have the capacity to make these kinds of decisions, then it's like, okay, so what do we do? Incarcerate them in a facility where they have to do things that are good for them because the choice can't be, well, they [00:26:00] don't have the capacity to make a choice, so we have to let them run around outside, screaming at all hours, not taking care of themselves.

This is a double-sided, uh, coin here. If they can't make a choice, then we have to decide what to do with people who can't make a choice to take care of themselves. And the, if they do have a choice, then yes, those choices come with consequences. Namely, you can't just have public housing and also do fentanyl, uh, or drugs all day and, you know, break the law.

Nick Pell: Yeah, I mean, to the degree that they're able to make. Choices, which again, like I don't actually have an opinion on about this. I've thought about it like it's outside the scope of the episode.

Jordan Harbinger: It's almost like a philosophical medical question that we're just not qualified

Nick Pell: for. Yeah, exactly. It's so outside the scope of this episode, but to the extent that they, they are making a choice, they've decided that the consequences of homelessness are preferable to getting treatment.

Jordan Harbinger: Crashing on your buddy's couch at age 24 is not homelessness.

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Jordan Harbinger: Thanks for listening.

Don't forget about our newsletter. Wee Bit Wiser comes out every Wednesday, two minute read. Great companion to the show. Something very practical. You can apply right away. jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Now, back to Skeptical Sunday. This is probably as good a time as any to talk about what kind of programs exist either for the homeless or people in danger of becoming homeless, like besides homeless shelters.

I have no clue what programs might exist because I've either never been in danger of being homeless or by previous definitions I have been homeless and just didn't know about the programs that were involved. But there has to be something there, whether publicly funded or private, other than just like, Hey, there's a homeless shelter where you can stand outside [00:30:00] starting at 6:00 PM and see if there's a bed.

Nick Pell: Man, I was so surprised at how much there was out there.

Jordan Harbinger: Really?

Nick Pell: Because I didn't expect there. I thought it was.

Jordan Harbinger: This is America. Well thought. We just let those people, you know, die outside with nothing like, oh, you want food? Sorry.

Nick Pell: Yeah, that was kind of what I thought too. Yeah, but no, there's a ton of programs and they are robustly funded.

The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development has the Continuum of Care program, which does not directly fund housing, but does fund local nonprofit and government agencies. These agencies then provide both transitional and permanent housing and other support services. This individual program disperses over $3.6 billion, and it is specifically designed to keep people out of shelters.

HUD also has housing vouchers for people at risk. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, hands out grants to states [00:31:00] for people with mental health or substance abuse issues who are either homeless or at risk. These programs seem to be very broad. They reach out to homeless people on the street and offer emergency shelter and day services, transitional housing, rapid rehousing, and prevention.

There's also specialized services. I mentioned mental health and substance abuse, but there's also support for veterans, youth and families.

Jordan Harbinger: What about nonprofits and private sector funded programs? There's tons of those too. I know because that's who owns all those hotels in the Tenderloin and because developers are always like, can we move these people?

And the nonprofits are like, no, we own this. Go fly a kite.

Nick Pell: Yeah, I mean it's kind of the same deal. There's a ton of 'em. They're very well funded. Some of the bigger ones are the Dough Fund Family Promise and the Salvation Army, as well as other faith-based programs. They might also receive funding from the federal programs we discussed earlier.

Jordan Harbinger: So I guess the obvious question is how well used are these services? [00:32:00] Because I certainly saw lines outside the homeless shelters in San Francisco when I lived in the city. How many people are they keeping from being homeless?

Nick Pell: HUD specifically helped 424,000 households avoid or exit homelessness in 2024.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Okay.

Nick Pell: Yeah. So over half of the 700,000 plus figure we talked about earlier of like the alleged total number of homeless.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Nick Pell: That covers both prevention and actual homelessness, so getting people off the streets and keeping people in their houses. We should also note that the number is households, so in many cases it might be an entire family.

Jordan Harbinger: You talked earlier about people not using services because there are strings attached. Are there any statistics on that so we can drill down into something that's not just anecdotal?

Nick Pell: Yes, and I was once again super shocked. In San Francisco in 2023, 60% of street homeless declined shelter because they didn't like the rules.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. So what are the rules? You mentioned some of these places are faith-based, so they make you go to church? Or is [00:33:00] it just like, Hey, no. Doing drugs.

Nick Pell: Main rules are sobriety, curfews, mandatory counseling. No pets, no partners. Now to be clear, if I'm homeless and they tell me that they have housing for me, but not for my wife.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: I'm staying on the street.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure. Yeah.

Nick Pell: But it's worth noting most people on the street are single men over 40.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: You're a literal beggar. Can you really be a chooser?

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Nick Pell: Situation.

Jordan Harbinger: Isn't it better for people to just have regular housing though?

Nick Pell: This is what housing first is all about.

Jordan Harbinger: Which is what? What is housing first?

Nick Pell: Housing first is the philosophical notion that the most important thing is to get the homeless into a house no matter what.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Nick Pell: I agree. The homeless need housing.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

Nick Pell: If you're hearing me say anything else, you're not hearing me. But I don't think that having housing magically solves their problems, and I don't see how only providing them with housing is sustainable.

Jordan Harbinger: I see.

Nick Pell: I don't see any way that getting someone an active drug addiction [00:34:00] with untreated mental illness is going to improve their lives in any sustainable way. Just giving them a house is not going to fix their problems.

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Nick Pell: They're going to end up back out on the street.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. What does the data say about the concept of housing first?

That's, I love to go to the numbers here.

Nick Pell: It's nuanced Proponents will point to the success of the housing first model by saying that it allegedly decreased homelessness by 88%.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

Nick Pell: And increased housing stability by 41. This is according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. An American nonprofit organization, which I absolutely do not consider to be a wholly reliable source.

And as much as I would say they have a, a dog in this fight,

Jordan Harbinger: what dog is in the fight here? Why don't we consider them that a totally reliable source

Nick Pell: because they're a housing first organization. What are they going to do? Return a bunch of data that says this sucks. Don't do it.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. Okay. So they're not neutral.

Nick Pell: As you know.

And is because I know you've taken college statistics. It's not that statistics could say [00:35:00] anything, but it certainly could be massaged.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. You can say, Hey look, we decreased homelessness by 88%. Yes. As long as you consider people who just needed a, a place to stay that was free, that cured their homelessness, we, or as long as you ignore the fact that they're able to do drugs in their house.

Like, I don't know. There's just ways to sort of stretch the definition of homeless so that you can say that you cured the problem by expanding it definitionally at first. Yeah. Okay. I see what you're

Nick Pell: saying. Yeah, and there's nothing in the data. Nothing I read suggests that people who have increased housing stability, whatever that might mean, are getting sober, gainfully employed and off of assistance later.

They're just experiencing increased housing stability, more objective evidence, finds the thing that everyone hates. Hearing that it works in helping some people get their lives together and it doesn't help other people. You know, you would expect that for many solution to a problem. Some people are helped by it, some people are not.

[00:36:00] Some people need other solutions. There are also studies suggesting that housing first is a complete and total failure. There's ample evidence that it increases drug abuse and exacerbates mental illness.

Jordan Harbinger: How does it do that?

Nick Pell: Well, because now you have a, a warm place to smoke crack. I mean, there was an urban institute, Denver Social Impact Bond housing first study that showed that housing first clients had one and a half times the mortality rate

Jordan Harbinger: oof.

Nick Pell: Of programs

Jordan Harbinger: y yikes,

Nick Pell: with substance abuse and other psychological conditions.

Jordan Harbinger: So basically what we're saying is, Hey, it's better than dying in the cold on the street because you're dying in an apartment building that's been provided for you at 1.5 x the rate, uh, I don't know about that. Uh,

Nick Pell: yeah, I mean there's also, there was a study in Ottawa that found housing first resulted in a greater death rate.

Street homelessness.

Jordan Harbinger: That's just terrible. Presumably because of an increased number of overdoses. I don't know what else having housing would do that would cause you to die.

Nick Pell: Yeah. You [00:37:00] were talking about things that don't make sense. Housing first, organizations don't count drug overdoses. Death as a negative outcome.

They don't count that as a negative outcome.

Jordan Harbinger: Death by drug overdose is not a negative outcome. Why? Because it has nothing to do with being homeless or something. Like how do they get a ride? Yes. That's it. Oh, oh my God. I was joking.

Nick Pell: The only positive outcome is whether or not you have a house.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh man.

Nick Pell: That's the only metric that's used You could od in the house. Well, he had a house. You know, to me the, the metric is how many people are dying.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: I mentioned the Urban Institute. Denver Study Housing First. Organizations also have lower uptake on services for mental health and substance abuse. A core claim of housing First is that the voluntary services have higher utilization.

This is false. They do not.

Jordan Harbinger: So basically saying you have to come in order to get this is more effective than saying, please come and do this.

Nick Pell: [00:38:00] Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: If you want to.

Nick Pell: Yes. They're drug addicts.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, yes, that makes complete sense.

Nick Pell: I'm not trying to dehumanize them. It's just like this is why we have interventions.

Yes, you are going to stop doing drugs.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I mean, it's why we have to incarcerate a lot of these people because they can't stop on their own. They have to be put in a place where they can't get drugs really easily all the time, at all hours of the day and night. Although I bet you can still do that in prison, but whatever.

That's another Skeptical Sunday episode, I suppose.

Nick Pell: I also think it's worth talking about the greater financial cost of these programs because I think, you know, you ask people, Hey, do you want to see homeless people in homes? I think every normal person says yes.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, of course.

Nick Pell: The thing is though, the housing fairy does not come down out of the sky and wave her wand and make housing for people.

There are costs involved, the costs are not trivial and they're footed by the taxpayer.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: In San Francisco, each unit costs up to $750,000.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

Nick Pell: That's a mansion in my town, by the way.

Jordan Harbinger: That is [00:39:00] actually insane. I remember my friend, super rich kid growing up, lived in a really nice hilltop literal mansion, and I remember my parents being like, I heard that house cost $700,000.

Now granted, this is the nineties and things are different now, but how are you building an apartment for $750,000? What is going on there? I mean, yes. Hashtag San Francisco, but holy crap guys. What the heck?

Nick Pell: Well listen to the upcoming, uh, housing crisis episode, and that'll maybe answer some of that, but.

In Los Angeles, taxpayers were, you know, sold on a, a bond proposal costing $140,000

Jordan Harbinger: per unit.

Nick Pell: Per unit. Still seems a little pricey to me, but

Jordan Harbinger: sure,

Nick Pell: maybe not for Los Angeles, but it ended up costing at least triple that per unit, often up to $700,000.

Jordan Harbinger: Geez.

Nick Pell: There is also significant evidence that landlords are making money off of this, along with third party for profit real estate.

Management agencies.

Jordan Harbinger: It is wildly inappropriate [00:40:00] and totally makes sense, right, that you're going to, I mean, I get why you have to pay a landlord to deal with something like this, but also maybe the state should run these, not that I know you're, you know, not a government guy, but like a nonprofit or something should run this.

Not a landlord who's making it as an investment. And why is a third party for-profit real estate management company managing a state run service like this for people who are a vulnerable population? What could go wrong

Nick Pell: at profit?

Jordan Harbinger: Yes, exactly. Unbelievable. One thing I never understood is why these people, this is going to sound so terrible and I just, I apologize in advance because there's no sort of non callous way to say this, but one thing I never quite wrapped my head around is why these folks have to slash get to live in some of the most expensive markets in the world.

We're talking about San Francisco, we're talking about la These are expensive cities. Why are we stuffing entire city blocks in the heart of downtown San Francisco with homeless people living in residential hotels on public assistance? They could literally live anywhere. That's the idea. They don't have anything to commute to, they don't have [00:41:00] responsibilities most of the time.

Nothing. Why are they living in the middle of Union Square in a residential hotel? It just, and I know that developers have tried to buy these places and they're like, look, we'll give you a ton of money. You can rebuild this somewhere else. Right now we can build a high rise here and everybody makes money, and this nonprofits are like, no, these people have a right to live here.

And I'm like, why? What? No. Why? No, they don't. I mean, maybe they do, but like also, no, that's ridiculous. I don't know. Again, I know I sound like a terrible person.

Nick Pell: You're a terrible person, Jordan.

Jordan Harbinger: Nobody's surprised by this. That's the thing though, is I just, I don't, it's not even economic. It doesn't even make economic sense.

Like I know it's a whole different, like if you lived in Times Square when it was terrible in the eighties and it was all crack heads and you had a housing project there and you still live there because that thing is still there. Okay, I get it. But it just seems like you could shuffle these people around and the advocates always say things like, you're demolishing the community.

And I'm thinking there's not much of a community here. It's loaded with gangs, it's loaded with people who are sort of like unmedicated [00:42:00] and need to be and drug addicts. This is not like a bunch of kids running around playing pickup basketball together. These are like actually people who need treatment in a proper facility.

They're just being paid to live in a residential hotel instead. It, none of it makes sense to me. None of it makes sense to me. But let's say like, I don't care. I just want people in houses. I don't care where, what, when and why. Just get these people housed. Come on.

Nick Pell: Yeah. That's cool. That's a beautiful, beautiful impulse you have.

Yes. Um, there's any number of charities that you can donate to. I do not want to pay $750,000 for someone else's house when mine would cause a fraction of that. The last thing I want to note about housing first is it's not unreasonable to assume that the successes they do see are coming from the people who accept treatment.

In which case, what's the difference? If that's the part that's working, why not restrict the limited supply of housing to people who it might actually help in the long term? This is not like a [00:43:00] deserving and undeserving poor thing. This is just like, why are we not allocating resources for people who actually want the help?

Jordan Harbinger: So this is where I hopefully qualify as a not terrible person. I do not want a situation. In which a single mom who can't afford a place to live for her kids and her can't get housing because I'm or has to live in the middle of absolutely BFE, because it's like Jordan and all the big wigs pushed everybody out of the city.

So now she's got a 45 minute commute by bus to get her kid to school, another three hours to get to work and back. Like I don't want a situation where that happens. What I'm talking about is certainly there's a way to separate the people who are like, Hey, I've fallen on hard times and I work two jobs and I have two kids, and this is really tough.

Versus the person who's like, I want to sit around and do drugs all day. Oh, cool. You're going to gimme a free place to live downtown. Guess I'll take that too. There's got to be a way to separate these few people, these two types of people into buckets where some of them are actually going to make their lives better and the other ones are just waiting to kill [00:44:00] themselves.

Sorry, that's that. Maybe there goes, my Jordan's not a bad person qualification, but come on. Like if you're doing a bunch of dangerous drugs all day until you die, you're not in the same bucket as the single mom who's trying to raise her kids. You're just not.

Nick Pell: What's really crazy is that some of the housing first places might actually have the same types of strings as other forms of aid.

Jordan Harbinger: How is that possible? If they're housing first, how do they have the same rules as other types of programs? Is that the opposite of what that we were just talking about?

Nick Pell: Because people figure out the rules of the game. They game them for the grants for the money that are reserved. I

Jordan Harbinger: see.

Nick Pell: For the housing first aid.

Jordan Harbinger: So how bad is homelessness now in America as opposed to in the past? I don't, I don't mean the recent past. I mean, I went back to LA and I didn't even recognize areas in my old neighborhood because you couldn't see off the bridge. Because there was a tent city on both sides. They're like, you couldn't, I was like, what street is this?

This can't be I, you know, whatever It was Vine and it was like there was just a 10 city on the other side of the road. Yeah. I couldn't identify where I was.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Hollywood's a mess.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: [00:45:00] I think that if we look at de-institutionalization, that's a good starting point. People like to blame Reagan for that, but it's actually a lot more complicated.

Deinstitutionalization, people leaving asylums that starts in the mid fifties and actually doesn't really end until the early 1990s. But let's use Reagan. Why not? Uh, 81 ish. The problem though is that it's almost impossible to quantify because the definition of homeless has changed, which if you're like, how's that possible?

Well, you've, if you've made it this far in the episode, I would think it would be clear, yeah, how the definition of homelessness can be used as football. I think it's probably safe to assume that not all of the people who got turned on out on the street when the asylums were emptied are currently housed and leading a productive life to say nothing of people who might be in asylums today, if that were still a thing.

Jordan Harbinger: That's speculative, but I'm following the logic and [00:46:00] in the absence of good data, I kind of think that's fair.

What kind of programs were in place for those people who were led out of asylums during deinstitutionalization? Did they just get thrown out into the street?

Nick Pell: There wasn't a lot. I mean, I know, like I lived in a town in college that used to have an asylum in it, and there was just like, there was tons of street people, but they like.

Slept in a house at night, like they were in some kind of care and they just got turned out for the day and let back in at night.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Yikes.

Nick Pell: Some people will argue that it was the way it was carried out rather than deinstitutionalization as such. There's one study on this. It's in the show notes in general, I think there's a type of person that it doesn't matter what programs they're offered, like you can't legislate people out of making stupid choices, some people anyway, and a non-trivial number of people.

That said, one of the biggest problems we have in evaluating the subject, there's just not a solid

Disclaimer: count at all of how many homeless people there [00:47:00] were in 1981.

Jordan Harbinger: Why is it so difficult to count though? I mean, I think that homeless is homeless. Is homeless. I mean, I know that that's not the case because of the shifting definitions now, but back then, how was that not just people who live on the street

Nick Pell: when words were not defined for political ends.

Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: Uh, yeah, it never existed. Prior to 1987, there's no uniform definition at all. So what you have are these kind of ad hoc counts. They're mostly from advocacy groups. They're mostly at the local level. They include unsheltered, sheltered, marginally housed. The McKinney Vento Homeless Assistance Act is the first time we get an actual uniform definition of what counts as homeless.

That's great. Still no way of counting. At that point. In the 1990s, they start counting via the program we talked about earlier continuum of care, but this is just counting surveys from providers. It's not hitting the streets and counting people like it's a census. Most modern counting starts in 2007.

That's called the [00:48:00] point in Time method. That means who is homeless tonight. We also start getting breakdowns about who's sheltered and who's not. So basically our only real semi reliable counts start in 2007.

Jordan Harbinger: That's crazy to me. Now, before I get canceled for this episode, let's hear from what's left of our sponsors.

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Jordan Harbinger: If you want an audience for how angry you are at me about this episode, Reddit is the place to do that. There's a Jordan Harbinger sub Reddit. You can discuss any episode, post resources, or other takes for or from the show.

It's a great place to have a conversation with other show fans as well as my team with Gabriel and Bob in there. That's all on Reddit at the Jordan Harbinger subreddit. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. Other than costs, why are there not more [00:51:00] homeless shelters and other low income housing for people who need them?

Nick Pell: Not in my backyard.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So nimbyism, I guess that makes sense. I also wouldn't want one to spring up next to my house either.

Nick Pell: Yeah. They built transitional housing on Route 66, like right by my house and the first thing I did was like, call my county supervisor who I know from the gym and, and be like, Hey, I don't know how this got built across the street from an elementary school, but like, can we make sure the cops are keeping an eye on this place?

I don't care if they build a homeless shelter or transitional housing, but I sure care if it's in my residential family neighborhood and next to an elementary school.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: The problem is everybody's got a real good reason why it shouldn't be in in my neighborhood.

Jordan Harbinger: What are the concerns? I mean, I can see property value, I guess, but you rent so

Nick Pell: well.

Real quick, before we get into that, I just want people to know I'm putting some research about NIMBY attitudes with respect to building housing and shelter in the show notes. But first of all, there's mountains of [00:52:00] evidence that property values will be impacted and that it is significant. These stats are all specific to Manhattan that I'm about to share, but they are worth sharing.

If your home is within 500 feet of an adult homeless shelter, you just took a 7.1% haircut on the value of your home. Big deal.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: For family shelters, it's 6.4%. If there are two or more shelters within a thousand feet, that is a 17.4% drop on top. The original cut from the single shelter.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Okay. So you're losing significant value.

Nick Pell: That's a lot of value.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: It impacts everybody. If you're wealthy, it's a big chunk of money. If you're not wealthy, it's a significant chunk of your net worth.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

Nick Pell: You know, it's the biggest investment most people have. They don't want to see it tank by 20%. The main dispute for these numbers, you know, where people kind of push back on them is, well, they're getting built in bad [00:53:00] neighborhoods anyway, so who cares?

It is gross. It's a gross attitude. Yeah. I hate this attitude that like the pores have to absorb the consequences of the altruism of their supposed betters. I hate it.

Jordan Harbinger: What about quality of life issues? I mean, look, I hate to say this because I don't really know, but if you have a homeless shelter near you, are you actually experiencing something bad other than losing value in your home?

Or is it just like, ew, I live near homeless people. Like I don't like that attitude either, really.

Nick Pell: I agree. And I also would maybe push back a little in saying, losing value in your home is a real issue.

Jordan Harbinger: No, that is a real issue. But I mean, are you day to day like, oh my gosh, look, this place used to be so nice and now there's crime everywhere.

Like, you know, that's, if a gang moves into your neighborhood, you're experiencing a real decrease in quality of life. But if a homeless shelter pops up, does that same thing happen? Or is it just like, wha my house value is lower

Nick Pell: Again, your house value being lower is a big deal,

Jordan Harbinger: but it's not a quality of life issue on a day-to-day basis.

Nick Pell: Sure. Yes. [00:54:00] Is the short version.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Nick Pell: Uh, we have one study that shows a 56% increase in property crime around newly constructed emergency winter shelters in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is an excellent place to look at where more liberal approaches are being used and how they're working.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: This was mostly burglaries, vehicle thefts and vandalism.

Jordan Harbinger: That sucks.

Nick Pell: This was all within 100 meters of the shelter. That's about 300 feet for people from countries with flags on the moon.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Okay. All right.

Nick Pell: The effect didn't dissipate entirely until 400 meters or about 1200 feet.

Jordan Harbinger: I mean, that's think four city blocks to 12 city blocks. That's basically, even if you live nowhere near this thing, you live two close to this thing.

That sucks.

Nick Pell: Yeah, it does. A Los Angeles study found a significant increase in arrests for drug dealing and drug use. I think drugs should be legal, but I do not think people have a right to smoke crack [00:55:00] in a public park where I want to take my kids. Yeah. If people who are in active drug addiction are not allowed to use drugs in transitional housing or shelters, there's a good chance they're just going to go outside and do it.

When getting clean isn't a requirement of having housing. They don't have drug. You can't do drugs on the property, but we're not drug testing you. Okay. Well, I'm going to go do Fenton, the park. There's a study outside of Portland, Oregon showing a moderate decline in some crimes, but we did see a 53% increase in drug and weapon crimes, which are conflated together.

So we don't know how much of that is drugs, how much of that's weapons. I think one of the things to keep in mind is that Portland is one of these cities that simply decided that, you know, crime is legal here and surprise of surprises. Your crime problem disappears when you stop enforcing the law

Jordan Harbinger: without getting too far afield.

What do you mean by that? Because obviously Portland did not legalize crime. [00:56:00] Actually,

Nick Pell: no. They kind of did though. Uh, Portland dramatically reduced its police force by 25%, which, you know, no cops around to, to catch people doing crimes. No crimes get reported, but somewhat more important, the Multnomah County District Attorney.

Which is the county in which, uh, Portland is the county seat of, announced that it would decline to prosecute a number of crimes such as disorderly conduct and trespass unless there was violence or serious damage. Oh my God. So yes, it is now effectively legal in the city of Portland to get drunk and hassle people or hang out in someone's backyard.

That seems like a pretty big asterisk to put over all the stats coming out of Portland. In fact, there's a whole discussion to be had around the issue of law enforcement. Let's talk about the homeless camps.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Wow. I feel like this is what I'm talking about when I say that homelessness or visible homelessness has exploded over the [00:57:00] last five or 10 years.

But again, anecdotal, I go up to San the city of San Francisco and I'm like, dang, what's going on here? I go to la Dang, what's going on here? Could you find any data on that? because these are these homeless encampments. Some of them are just huge.

Nick Pell: There's no specific data I could find on camps, but we do know the total number of homeless, and we know that 36% of them are what are called unsheltered.

That doesn't mean they're all in camps. Some of them just sleep rough. Others are in cars, uh, still others squat, empty buildings. But it does give us a bit of insight as to how many people might be in camps. The other issue driving increased homeless camps is that it's now, or was basically illegal to disperse homeless camps in some places.

We have Martin versus City of Boise. Which found that enforcing anti camping or public sleeping ordinances against unhoused individuals, that's their euphemism, not mine. Violates the eighth amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment if those individuals have no [00:58:00] access to adequate shelter.

Now this only applied in California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, and Nevada, but there's a lot of homeless people there, and that is what was driving the normalization of homeless camps, particularly in Western states.

Jordan Harbinger: So what are cities doing now? Just letting the homeless camps sit. Because I can totally believe that based on what I see again in California.

But I I have a hard time believing this flies where you live in Arizona, for example.

Nick Pell: Yeah, specifically where I live, which is like an 80% Trump County. Like there's not homeless camps here. They, I, you do see homeless, but there's no camps that I'm aware of. I mean, there might be in like weird off to the side parts of town.

It's funny though, you mentioned California because San Francisco responded by having areas where camps were allowed. That cost $5,000 per tent per month for a total budget of $12 million.

Jordan Harbinger: Bro, I had a nice apartment in San Francisco. I was not paying $5,000 a month to live there.

Nick Pell: Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: [00:59:00] 5,000 bucks per tent.

Per month.

Nick Pell: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: San Francisco. What do you get your shit together? What are you talking about?

Nick Pell: What are you doing?

Jordan Harbinger: What are you doing?

Nick Pell: In Arizona, they still perform sweeps, but they go in 72 hours before and they offer people some kind of shelter.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm stuck on this 5K per tent per month. That is a luxury apartment in any major city on planet Earth.

That could easily house the amount of people living in any size tent period.

Nick Pell: You can get a solid broom closet in a basement in Manhattan for 5,000 a month. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: You can still actually for five grand get a literal luxury apartment that includes a toilet and running water and probably has a fricking squash court downstairs for 5K.

Like this is what I'm talking, where is that money going? So is this just like oh 5K per 10? But Jordan, you need to look into this because that includes like drug counseling and full on social services because if that's the case, that's still way too much money, but also makes some sense. But if it's just like, Nope, we have a park that has water access in a bathroom, it's just that it's a [01:00:00] million dollars a month to run that is just peak California somehow.

That's insane to me.

Nick Pell: I don't know what it includes. Um, probably more than just running water in tents, but probably not $5,000 worth of stuff. There's other responses like using health codes and sanitation or environmental or fire codes to clear the camps because the ruling only said that you can't target people on the basis of homelessness, but you can enforce general safety and sanitation laws.

Some states that aren't impacted by the decision have responded by drafting tougher laws. Uh, Texas did a statewide ban on camping under penalty of losing state funding. Tennessee made camping on state property a class E felony, but it also built more shelters in advance of enforcement. Florida's Public Spaces Protection Act allows the clearing of camps if they're within 50 miles of available shelter.

Even in San Diego, in [01:01:00] California, which is one of the states impacted by Martin, they passed the unsafe camping ordinance, which bans camping within two blocks of schools, parks, and transit stops. Police will pair citations with immediate shelter referrals. Refusal to accept the referral will result in arrest.

Federal judges allowed it citing the documented availability of shelter Las Vegas bans sleeping on public sidewalks downtown when shelters have space. The city maintains real-time shelter, bed tracking to prove compliance. And that was built explicitly around Martin.

Jordan Harbinger: So none of these states are arresting people or even issuing citations without also offering them shelter.

That seems reasonable. It's nice to say that once during an episode.

Nick Pell: Correct. But all of this is kind of moot because the Supreme Court overturned Martin and it's ruling on City of Grant's pass v Johnson, where they found that clearing camps targets conduct and not status and thus is not cruel and unusual punishment.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Nick Pell: And I think this is like worth [01:02:00] highlighting that the Martin decision like created, it's like there's this new category of person and they're called a homeless person.

Jordan Harbinger: Right? Like it's an immutable quality.

Nick Pell: Yeah, it's immutable quality. They're homeless and there's nothing anybody can do about it. So we can't tell them to pack up the park across the street from the kids' elementary school because that would be cruel.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I can see why people would argue something like that, but it also really screws up everything and is also like just a weird construct. So that you can allow crazy conduct to just fly because you don't have a better solution.

Nick Pell: It's also kind of a gross way to look at people who are homeless. Yes.

Like you're, you're just, you're a homeless person. Like what? What's there to be? It's like the wind blowing,

Jordan Harbinger: right.

Nick Pell: What is there to be done about it?

Jordan Harbinger: You have to put that little cast mark on your head that shows that you are an untouchable and you were never going to change. Yeah. You can't get no upward mobility for you.

That doesn't make sense to me,

Nick Pell: but I still, even though Martin was overturned, I think it's worth talking about the response because it does show, like municipalities are willing to take measures to find shelter [01:03:00] for people. They're not just demanding that the homeless kick on down the road, but the camps remain, which says a lot because people are being offered shelter and still choosing not to take it.

I mean, they ha they directly have someone coming to their camp. And it's telling them, Hey, you can move or you can go to a shelter. And people are saying, yeah, I think I'll move on down the road.

Jordan Harbinger: I think there's something to be said about how people don't always make the best decisions when they're in active drug addiction slash mental illness.

Nick Pell: Yeah. I don't disagree, but again, like why am I on the hook for the primary and secondary costs of these things and all the externalities that go along with them. Like

Jordan Harbinger: I agree,

Nick Pell: they're grownups with agency. The degree to which they have it is a philosophical question that's outside the scope of this episode, but this is what they're choosing and like, fine, but when you make it my problem, it's now my problem.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That is our, my problem slash our problem to solve with policy and legislation and law enforcement

Nick Pell: people will try and justify [01:04:00] the like lack of utilization of the shelters by saying that they're unsafe. And I know that there's like out there probably a lot of people are saying, well, the shelters aren't safe.

Well, safety's relative. Shelters are probably less safe than your neighborhood. They're probably even less safe than my neighborhood in poor Arizona. But yeah, they are definitely more safe than sleeping on the street. They have one third, the mortality rate of street sleeping that's 300% safer because people don't freeze to death.

Women's shelters and family shelters are reasonably safe, and when you enforce zero tolerance on crime. People will flock to them. This happened in Utah.

Jordan Harbinger: I feel like the big thing missing from all this are the more structural factors, stagnant wages, increased cost of housing, general rising cost of living.

I'm not saying that's the main cause, I'm just saying we haven't addressed that yet. Right. People just not [01:05:00] being able to afford stuff at all at this point,

Nick Pell: and I think it's worth bringing that up, but it's, again, it's kind of outside the scope. It's not really an issue for the chronic homeless or the, you know, the episodic on homeless.

It's more of an issue for the transitional homeless.

Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense. Right. Because those are the people with careers who were like, how am I not getting paid more? I can't afford rent in the area where I work. Versus people who are like, I've lived on the street for three years and haven't had a job.

Nick Pell: Yes. Yeah. And for people who are, you know, for lack of a better word, normal, and basically have their life together, there are resources for the schizophrenic crackhead who prefers sleeping under a bridge to getting clean. Yeah. There's not a lot of resources for that guy. I am aware that it is harder for people to get by than it maybe was in the past.

But what I'm saying is that for those people, there are tons of programs to help people. And even for the chronic homeless, there are tons of programs, but there's also tons of people who don't utilize them because [01:06:00] they think it cramps their style. And it's hard for me to have a lot of sympathy for those people, especially if they're harassing people on the street or doing drugs in a park or aggressively panhandling.

And you know what? I don't think we're helping anybody by making it easier for them to continue to make bad choices. I don't consider that a form of helping people.

Jordan Harbinger: No, I agree with you. I think the structural part is important. It's probably a whole show in itself. Obviously, if wages are stagnant while the cost of living is going up, it's going to be harder to keep your head above water.

But at the same time, there are lots of programs out there for people who need them. It's a complicated topic, not a lot of easy answers, and pretending it's all one thing or all the other just does not get us anywhere. Homelessness is not caused by a single villain or solved by a single type of intervention.

It's a patchwork of economic forces, personal choices, public policy, addiction, mental health, and sometimes just plain bad luck. That means the solutions have to be just as [01:07:00] multi-layered. More shelter capacity, helps more mental healthcare, helps smarter enforcement, helps more housing helps, but none of them on their own are going to be a magic bullet for this.

So as we wrap up, remember the point is not to oversimplify a very messy problem. Thanks again to Nick Pell for helping us sort the survival stories from the sanctified slogans. And thanks to you all for listening, topic suggestions and inevitable angry emails about this episode. Straight to me, jordan@jordanharbinger.com.

Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Tadas Sidlauskas, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Our advice and opinions are our own, and I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Also, of course, we try to get these as right as we can. Not everything is gospel, even if it is fact checked. So consult a qualified professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and wellbeing.

[01:08:00] Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge we doled out today because I want angry emails from them too. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time.

Nick Pell: You're about to hear a preview that may completely reframe how you think about nuclear power. What if the energy source

Jordan Harbinger: we've been taught to fear is actually one of the safest and cleanest tools we have?

JHS Trailer: We're very familiar with electricity. You get home, you turn on the lights, you charge your phone, charge your computer.

Do all the things that we do without thinking twice about electricity, right? But electricity is a secondary source of energy. The primary source of energy that we use are coal, oil, methane, gas, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. Nuclear is actually the largest source of clean energy in the United States.

It's the second largest source of clean energy in the world. And what I mean by that is that whenever we [01:09:00] make electricity with nuclear, we're not releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere or even particulate matter. So there are no emissions that happen whenever you're creating electricity with nuclear.

So it's just to say, you know, everything that's related to nuclear accidents in Chernobyl is completely overblown. Because people tend to think generally like everybody died and it became this wasteland that nobody can go in. And so it's interesting, right, that we have all this weird fears about nuclear when the facts and the reality just point to it being actually extremely safe.

The biggest energy disaster in history was actually a hydropower dam collapse, so entire villages were swept away. It's estimated that 200,000 people died. He would need like at least 200 Chernobyls happening every single year for nuclear to be as dangerous as fossil fuels. What about the 4 million premature deaths from burning fossil fuels?

Why are people so afraid of nuclear?

Jordan Harbinger: Hear the science behind the stigma with Isabelle Boemeke on episode 1277 of The [01:10:00] Jordan Harbinger Show.