Opinion
Why treating the Homesless as victims only makes the problem worse
This article is from Substack
Bestselling author Michael Shellenberger has just published a new book, “San Fransicko” about the homeless crisis in San Francisco. Shellenberger has lived in San Fransisco for 30 years. In “San Fransicko” Shellenberger argues one of the root causes of the homeless crisis sweeping cities all over America (and Canada) is the victimization of homeless people. In this article, Michael Shellenberger talks about the prevalent theory that homeless people are all victims as portrayed by TV Host John Oliver.
Why John Oliver Is Wrong About Homelessness
HBO TV Comedian Repeats Myth that the Homeless Are Just Poor People in Need of Subsidized Housing
The intelligent and hilarious HBO comedian John Oliver last night aired a 25-minute segment on homelessness. In it, he attributed homelessness to poverty, high rents, and NIMBY neighborhood activists who block new housing developments. Oliver showed interviews with homeless people who say they would like to work full-time but are unable to do so because they have to live in homeless shelters.
Unfortunately, Oliver’s segment repeated many myths that are easy to debunk. The vast majority of people we call “homeless” are suffering from serious mental illness, addiction, or both. We do a great job of helping mothers and others who don’t suffer from addiction or untreated mental illness to benefit from subsidized housing, but don’t mandate the psychiatric and addiction care that many “homeless” require. And the best-available, peer-reviewed science shows that “Housing First” agenda Oliver promotes fails on its own terms, worsens addiction, and is one of the main reasons homelessness has grown so much worse.
It’s true that we need more housing and voluntary addiction and psychiatric care, including what is called “permanent supportive housing” for people suffering from mental illness. In my new book, San Fransicko, I advocate for universal psychiatric care, drug treatment on demand, and building of more shelter space for the homeless. And Oliver is right that the U.S. lacks the social safety net that European and other developed nations have.
But Oliver badly misdescribes the problem. For example, he notes that some cities lack sufficient homeless shelter. But he doesn’t acknowledge that it has been “Housing First” homelessness advocates who caused the lack of shelter by demanding that funding be diverted to apartments often costing $750,000 each.
And Oliver promotes policies that have made addiction, mental illness, and homelessness worse. He claims homelessness causes addiction when it is far more often the other way around. And Oliver completely ignores the overwhelming body of scientific research showing that using housing as a reward for abstinence, rather than giving it away as a right, is essential to reducing homelessness by reducing addiction.
Oliver was wrong to encourage more of the same policies that caused homelessness to increase in the U.S. over the last decade, but also wrong for suggesting that anyone who disagreed with him were racist and NIMBY “dicks” who cause violence against homeless people. Oliver closes his segment by ridiculing a white woman who expresses concern about subsidized housing bringing the homeless into her neighborhood.
Why is that? Why does such an intelligent, thoughtful, and compassionate journalist repeat easily-debunked myths about homelessness?
Part of it is just ignorance. Oliver appears to have relied entirely on Housing First advocates and not read anything that questions their narrative. As I document in San Fransicko, homeless advocates are not just small service providers but major academics at top universities including Columbia University and University of California, San Francisco. Those “Housing First” advocates have received hundreds of millions in grants from Marc Benioff, John Arnold, George Soros, and other donors to promote the notion that Housing First works.
Another part of it is ideological. Housing First advocates believe that housing, not shelter, is a right, and that governments have a moral obligation to provide it. They have spent 20 years trying to prove that giving away housing to addicts and the mentally ill works, but the studies show that it fails to address addiction and thus even keep people in apartments at higher rates than other methods. The only thing proven to work is to make housing a reward for good behavior, mostly abstinence but also things like taking one’s psychiatric medicines, and going to work.
The dominant view among progressives of homelessness, drugs, and mental illness stems from victim ideology, which was born in the 1960s. Starting in the late 1960s, progressives attacked any effort to hold people who receive welfare or subsidized accountable as “blaming the victim.” Today, many progressives even view drug dealers as victims.
Victim ideology categorizes people as victims or oppressors, and argues that nothing should be demanded of people categorized as victims. This is terrible for the mentally ill, who often need to be coerced into taking their medicines, so they don’t end up breaking the law, hurting people or themselves, and winding up in prison. And this is terrible for addicts, who need to be arrested, when breaking laws related to their addiction, such as public drug use, shoplifting, and public defecation.
In the end, Oliver’s 25 minute segment on homelessness is a perfect encapsulation of victim ideology and why it is so wrong on both the facts and on ethics. On the facts, Oliver misdescribes a homeless woman who is likely suffering from mental illness and/or drug addiction as merely down on her luck. And Oliver mixes together apparently sober and sane homeless families, temporarily down on their luck, with people are on the street because of addiction and untreated mental illness. Doing so is wrong, analytically, but also wrong, morally, since most addicts and the mentally ill need something very different from just a subsidized apartment unit.
If we are to solve homelessness rather than make it worse, we need intelligent and thoughtful comedians and influencers like Oliver to do their homework, rather than to repeat myths. I researched and wrote San Fransicko, in part, to make it easier for people to get the facts, rather than repeat what we were told, and to see that there’s a better way to help the homeless, whether addicted to drugs, mentally ill, or not.
The good news is that the conversation around drugs and homelessness is changing rapidly because the situation on the ground has grown so much worse. Environmental Progress and the California Peace Coalition are at the very beginning of our efforts to educate journalists, policymakers, and the public. And San Fransicko was published just three weeks ago.
As time passes, many Americans will see the consequence of treating what is fundamentally a problem of untreated mental illness and addiction as a problem of poverty, high rents, and NIMBYs. And some of them, perhaps even comedians like John Oliver, will come to find humor, and humility, from the fact that so many of us got it so wrong.
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From LifeSiteNews
The family of an elderly man is speaking out about the terrible hospital conditions that led their father to request euthanasia before he died of natural causes.
The family of Cleo Gratton, an 84-year-old retired diamond driller who died earlier this month in Chelmsford, Ontario, of natural causes after being approved for assisted suicide, is speaking publicly about their appalling experience in the Canadian healthcare system.
According to the CBC, the elderly man “told his family he would rather die than go back to Health Sciences North in Sudbury,” and that a recent stay there found Gratton, who was suffering from heart disease and kidney failure, spending one night in the emergency room and then being transferred to a bed sitting in the hallway on the seventh floor.
“There were no lights, all the bulbs in that hallway had been completely removed,” his daughter, Lynn, told the CBC. “The only light we had was almost like a desk lamp that had been bolted to the wall. Patients are passing by, nurses are going by, no privacy, no compassion, no dignity.” The visit took place in mid-October, after which Gratton decided to apply for “medical aid in dying,” or assisted suicide.
Lynn said that nurses had to use headlamps to inspect her father’s feet, and that the experience was “just one thing after another and it really opened our eyes to what’s going on in our hospitals. My dad said, ‘Push, push, push for change. Make people aware of what’s gong on. Open the discussion, bring it to your MP, your MPP, keep going straight up.”
His family is now honoring his wishes to speak out about his experience. The doctors and nurses, Lynn emphasized, were “amazing,” but she noted that they seem overworked. “Why are they still taking in patients if we have an overcrowding issue and they have no place to put these people?” she said.
Cleo Gratton, who died of natural causes surrounded by his family before he could go through with assisted suicide, is just the most recent of many examples of Canadians opting for assisted suicide because they could not access the care that they actually desired.
In Quebec last year, Norman Meunier, a quadriplegic man, developed bedsores after four days left on an ER stretcher without a good mattress. That experience combined with lack of available homecare pushed him to request, and receive, assisted suicide.
An unnamed woman in her 80s, referred to in a MAID report as “Mrs. B,” received MAID earlier this year after requesting but being denied palliative or hospice care. Instead, with her spouse burning out as the result of her care, a rushed MAID assessment was completed, and she died by lethal injection.
In 2022, 44-year-old Winnipeg woman Sathya Dhara Khovac died by euthanasia after failing to receive the homecare resources she had desperately sought. In her posthumous obituary, she said she could have had more time if she’d had more help.
In 2019, 41-year-old Sean Tagert was euthanized after spending years attempting to find and fund the homecare and resources he needed to stay in the community where his son lived. He did not want to die but felt that he had no other choice.
And, among other stories, at least four Canadian veterans were offered assisted suicide in lieu of the unavailable mental health supports they were requesting.
Stories of Canadians seeking palliative care, mental health resources, homecare, and other medical support finding that the only option available to them is assisted suicide have become routine over the past several years. Euthanasia has become a pressure valve for an overworked and under-funded healthcare system serving an aging population increasingly need of complex care — and if assisted suicide for mental illness is legalize, things will get much, much worse.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? It’s one of the grand conundrums of history, and it is one that is impacting the rapidly expanding AI datacenter industry related to feeding its voracious electricity needs.
Which comes first, the datacenters or the electricity required to make them go? Without the power, nothing works. It must exist first, or the datacenter won’t go. Without the datacenter, the AI tech doesn’t go, either.
Logic would dictate that datacenter developers who plan to source their power needs with proprietary generation would build it first, before the datacenter is completed. But logic is never simple when billions in capital investment is at risk, along with the need to generate profits as quickly as possible.
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Building a power plant is a multi-year project, which itself involves heavy capital investment, and few developers have years to wait. The competition with China to win the race to become the global standard setters in the AI realm is happening now, not in 2027, when a new natural gas plant might be ready to go, or in 2035, the soonest you can reasonably hope to have a new nuclear plant in operation.
Some developers still virtue signal about wind and solar, but the industry’s 99.999% uptime requirement renders them impractical for this role. Besides, with the IRA subsidies on their way out, the economics no longer work.
So, if the datacenter is the chicken in this analogy and the electricity is the egg, real-world considerations dictate that, in most cases, the chicken must come first. That currently leaves many datacenter developers little choice but to force their big demand loads onto the local grid, often straining available capacity and causing utility rates to rise for all customers in the process.
This reality created a ready-made political issue that was exploited by Democrats in the recent Virginia and New Jersey elections, as they laid all the blame on their party’s favorite bogeyman, President Donald Trump. Never mind that this dynamic began long before Jan. 20, when Joe Biden’s autopen was still in charge: This isn’t about the pesky details, but about politics.
In New Jersey, Democrat winner Mikie Sherrill exploited the demonization tactic, telling voters she plans to declare a state of emergency on utility costs and freeze consumers’ utility rates upon being sworn into office. What happens after that wasn’t specified, but it made a good siren song to voters struggling to pay their utility bills each month while still making ends meet.
In her Virginia campaign, Democrat gubernatorial winner Abigail Spanberger attracted votes with a promise to force datacenter developers to “pay their own way and their fair share” of the rising costs of electricity in her state. How she would make that happen is anyone’s guess and really didn’t matter: It was the tactic that counted, and big tech makes for almost as good a bogeyman as Trump or oil companies.
For the Big Tech developers, this is one of the reputational prices they must pay for putting the chicken before the egg. On the positive side, though, this reality is creating big opportunity in other states like Texas. There, big oil companies Chevron and ExxonMobil are both in talks with hyperscalers to help meet their electricity needs.
Chevron has plans to build a massive power generation facility that would exploit its own Permian Basin natural gas production to provide as much as 2.5 gigawatts of power to regional datacenters. CEO Mike Wirth says his team expects to make a final investment decision early next year with a target to have the first plant up and running by the end of 2027.
ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods recently detailed his company’s plans to leverage its expertise in the realm of carbon capture and storage to help developers lower their emissions profiles when sourcing their needs via natural gas generation.
“We secured locations. We’ve got the existing infrastructure, certainly have the know-how in terms of the technology of capturing, transporting and storing [carbon dioxide],” Woods told investors.
It’s an opportunity-rich environment in which companies must strive to find ways to put the eggs before the chickens before ambitious politicians insert themselves into the process. As the recent elections showed, the time remaining to get that done is growing short.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
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