“We want stories that don’t exist in systems”: Mike tells Sarah what happened when Utah set out to solve one of America's most intractable problems. Digressions include the Paleo diet, the planet Mars and the inadequacy of the term “up the river.” Jimmy Carter makes an extended cameo appearance.
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“We want stories that don’t exist in systems”: Mike tells Sarah what happened when Utah set out to solve one of America's most intractable problems. Digressions include the Paleo diet, the planet Mars and the inadequacy of the term “up the river.” Jimmy Carter makes an extended cameo appearance.
Continue reading →
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Sarah: Every episode I'm like, when is Jimmy Carter going to show up and give everyone a sweet but firm talking to and sort out all of this mess. And finally like 36 episodes in he has.
Welcome to Your Wrong About the show where Mike tells me about what he saw when he went out into the big world and made sense of it.
Mike: That's a generalizable tagline.
Sarah: All right. Let's see.
Mike: Welcome to Your Wrong About the show where Mike has to check all of his writing ideas with Sarah before he writes them to make sure that they're smart and good.
Sarah: There you go.
Mike: That's basically what we're doing today.
Sarah: I don’t know, that makes sense as an order of doing things. I don't think that the model of journalism we have, where everyone goes to their individual little cubicle and does everything all by themselves is like the best idea. Especially since secure journalism and capitalism don't actually seem to be friends.
Mike: Oh, tagline. We found our tagline.
Sarah: There it is.
Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm a writer and resident at the Black Mountain Institute in beautiful Las Vegas.
Mike: And today we are talking about homelessness, which is a little bit different than the shows we usually do because it's not a historical event. It's more of a policy area or social challenge that is, I think, very misconstrued and very misunderstood. I'm also working on a long article about this, and this is a great way to procrastinate.
Sarah: Because your other main procrastination activity of reading congressional testimony is like, you are bored of that right now, right?
Mike: Yes. So I think probably the place to start is that I just came back from a week long reporting trip to Salt Lake City. And the impetus for the story that I'm writing, is that in 2015 Salt Lake City announced that it had solved homelessness. And this was something that was in the New Yorker. It was on the Daily Show. It was a huge deal. And it started a movement among other cities, and other countries even, to try to adopt Utah's motto. So, I went there to figure out how they did it, and it turns out that, this will surprise you, significantly more complex than solving homelessness.
Sarah: Something is more complex than the headline said.
Mike: I know, so strange. And it kind of puts solving in scare quotes. So, this is going to be an hour long putting scare quotes around one six letter word.
Sarah: Cool. We're painting really big scare quotes then.
Mike: Yes. What is your understanding of the issue of homelessness? You're someone who cares about other people. I feel like I'm not going to be doing much debunking for you.
Sarah: Okay. So my relationship to homelessness currently is that right now I am living in Las Vegas, and I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and also lived in Hawaii in Honolulu, Hawaii for a few years when I was growing up. And those are all places that have very significant and pretty visible homeless populations.
My relationship to it is something that I've always grown up seeing, and always felt like this is something that I'm very used to and having it be something that always felt like an unsolvable big problem. Overwhelming to the degree that kind of that creates that empathic burnout effect in people, like, if you are driving around your city and like you take a moment to allow your heart to really go out to the person that you see who's standing on the corner, you would become, or I become too overwhelmed to function. The moment that I feel guiltiest for in my day is often when I look away from a person who is like standing on the corner and at an intersection asking for change. And like when I ignore that person and don't look at them, like, that's the worst.
Mike: One of the things that I didn't know until I started working on this story. It is sort of obvious that homelessness is a political issue, but the most important thing to know about homelessness, I think is that the people that you see are the tip of an iceberg. You know, the people that you see, the really heartbreaking people that you see, begging for money or talking to themselves.
Those are actually only about 10% of the homeless population. The vast majority of the homeless population is invisible to us because they are either in emergency housing or transitional housing or they're in a domestic violence shelter. And one of the things that is really fascinating about this is the ways that different cities manage their homeless population. So, one thing, a lot of people don't know is that New York City has 11 times more homeless people than San Francisco.
Sarah: Really?
Mike: Yes, New York city has a huge homelessness problem, but in New York City, only 5% of their homeless people are sleeping outside because the city has an entire row of services that get them into dorm rooms or into transitional housing, or they will literally rent them rooms at like the Holiday Inn Express for a night if they need emergency shelter. There's a huge ecosystem, getting them into shelters, whereas in San Francisco, only 30% of the people in San Francisco are housed and also a huge reason for the difference between the East coast and the West coast is that if you sleep outside on the East coast, you die.
If you sleep outside on the West coast, you live. And San Francisco has nice weather and LA has nice weather and so it's really crass to talk about it this way, but it just doesn't take on urgency.
Sarah: No, it's true.
Mike: Yeah. 180 people died sleeping on the streets in Seattle last year, which is five times the number of people who were murdered in the city in the year.
Sarah: Really?
Mike: Yeah. They didn't necessarily freeze to death, although it does get cold in Seattle. But it's just, you know, they had an overdose and there was nobody to get them, or they had alcohol poisoning, and nobody really noticed. I mean there is a million reasons why people die when they're homeless that are not related to the weather. So it's not that West coast cities have zero homeless deaths on the street. It's just that their services were built up around this lack of urgency to get people into housing.
Sarah: Can you talk about like how we came to know homelessness as we do in America?
Mike: You're asking me the question, like, you know, that I want to answer like, Mike, give me the tedious, detailed history of this policy.
Sarah: Yes, always.
Mike: But I want to, I think the best way to illustrate this is with this woman that I met in Salt Lake City, who illustrates a lot of the principles that we're going to talk about in this episode. And secondly of all, you're going to love this story because it has a Your Wrong About twist at the end of it. So I don't want to use anybody's real name because I haven't checked their stories with any of them yet. So, I have the cast list for The Poseidon Adventure, my favorite movie, I'm just going to go down the list. So the first female name in the cast list of The Poseidon Adventure is Carol. So we're going to call this person Carol.
So I met Carol at an opioid clinic. She's actually now a volunteer at the opioid clinic and she had struggled with drug addiction, her entire life. She was in alcohol rehab when she was 17 years old, she called herself a high functioning addict where she wasn't stealing stuff. She was holding down jobs, she was in college. She was doing really well, but she was using heroin and meth and a couple of other things. And it all started to fall apart when her dad got evicted, her addiction gets worse at that point because she's super stressed out. She ends up living in her car. After about three weeks of living in her car, she finds out that she's pregnant.
I did not know this, but she told me that if you are addicted to heroin and you get pregnant. You can't go off the heroin because the withdrawal symptoms could kill your baby. It's really bad for your baby to go cold turkey. So they put you on methadone for the entire pregnancy. Like that's less bad for the baby than going cold turkey. This is where it gets really difficult. So she has the baby, she is a new mom. She's living with her aunt who she doesn't actually know all that well. And then it's really stressful in that the methadone costs about $85 a week to take methadone. You have to be at the clinic before 8:30 AM, seven days a week.
Sarah: Why?
Mike: Because they can't like give it to you because it's a controlled substance. And she was supposed to get like daycare vouchers, but for some administrative, whatever, whatever they didn't come through. So, she says after every shift at Denny's, she goes to the daycare and just gives them this wad of cash. All of her tips for the previous night, she said, it felt like paying someone to take my child from me. And so, she applies for housing, but she's on a wait list so that hasn't come through yet. And then she decides, she says, it's the worst decision she's ever made. She goes, well, you know, if I just went off the methadone, everything would be easier.
I'd have more money. I'd be able to manage this slightly better. So, she goes off the methadone within a couple of weeks, the stress gets to her. She starts using again and then she talks about how, what shocks her and what amazes her, looking back on it now is how fast it happened. She's like, you know what?
I was a new mom nursing my baby, steady job, three months later, I was sleeping in empty parking garages. The addiction comes back, she loses her job. Her aunt finds out, asks her to leave. She starts living in her car, but then she gets pulled over. They find heroin in the car, the car gets impounded, she goes to jail. She begs to be put into court ordered treatment, but they say she's not severe enough. She didn't have enough heroin on her to get into court ordered treatment.
Sarah: Where's her baby after she gets arrested?
Mike: She gives it to her mom.
Sarah: Okay.
Mike: And she tells me during this period where she ends up moving to the street. It's December and so she's sleeping in the parking garage, because that's like some semblance of a roof above your head. And during this period when she's homeless, her housing voucher has come through. So, it's like, hey, we have an apartment for you.
Sarah: It is like a line that Alanis Morrissette wrote for Ironic, and then deleted because it was too depressing.
Mike: This is the really depressing part, the housing vouchers come through and they're like, okay, you can move in on Monday, just send us your $400 deposit and it's yours. And she's like telling me the story and she's like, I was tapped out. When you're an addict, she's already pawned everything. She's already asked her whatever family members. She's already tapped out whatever friends couches she can crash on. This is the thing about being addicted and being homeless is that it's a poor status being homeless, right? That you sleep on a friend's couch for a couple of days until they can't do it anymore. And then they ask you to leave and then you're homeless for a while. And then a friend offers you a motel room and you're there for a night or two, and then that runs out and then you're on the street. It's the sort of in and out thing and she'd already been in and out. She had run out all of her social support and so she had to let it lapse. And so this is the twist part that I feel like you're really going to like. So, we're sitting at a cafe, she's telling me this, we're like two hours in at this point. I'm like, holy shit, so how did you end up getting out of homelessness? She goes, do you know who Jimmy Carter is? I was like, I'm familiar with his work.
Sarah: Because Jimmy Carter like appeared to her one night and he had a halo and wings and he was like, hello, Carol, my name is Jimmy Carter and then he like gave her a peanut butter factory to run. Is that what happened?
Mike: Well done. So, when she tells me, I'm like, please keep talking, this is amazing. So, what she tells me is, as you know, and I only vaguely knew about Jimmy Carter had a brother named Billy Carter.
Sarah: Oh yes.
Mike: Who was an alcoholic remember? And he was kind of this joke.
Sarah: He was the fun one.
Mike: He was the fun one. He borrowed money from the Libyans and didn't get that they were probably trying to influence his brother. He was just very naive and kind of, not necessarily thinking things through, or at least that's the cultural construction.
Sarah: Didn't he also have a beer named after him or like a beer brand?
Mike: Yes, yes, yes. He ran the peanut farm after Jimmy Carter had to give it away. And so, Carol tells me, Billy Carter's son was a friend of hers in rehab when she was 17.
Sarah: Of course.
Mike: His name is Earl Carter. He's the nephew of Jimmy Carter. This is amazing. So he sees on Facebook that she had a baby. He also sees on Facebook that after that she sort of disappears. He calls her parents. They tell him, like she's kind of disappeared, we don't really know where she is at this point. He gets on a plane that day to Salt Lake City. He, Facebook messages her totally lies, he is like, oh, I'm coming through Salt Lake City for business, just like wondering if you want to catch up whatever.
She eventually writes back. And she's like, yeah, let's, let's meet up. He shows up in Salt Lake City, she doesn't show up. He goes around the streets, looking for her, doesn't find her. He gets up the next morning, goes out for some breakfast, comes back around 11:00 AM and she is sitting in the hotel lobby with all of her stuff around her and she's 80 pounds.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Mike: And he basically says to her, I will take you to Plains, Georgia, where I live in Billy Carter's ranch house. And you can stay there as long as you want. And she says, yeah, let’s do it. And so, because living on the street, this is one of the things that always happens when you live on the street, her ID had been stolen, so they can't fly. So they take a three day bus ride from Salt Lake City to Plains, Georgia, which she says is the worst three days of her life, because she's going through withdrawals on a Greyhound bus. Like a Greyhound bus is a bad enough place to be when you're in perfect health. So she stays with him for two months. Plains, Georgia is one of the places where they filmed the Walking Dead apparently. And so whenever people would see them out and about, they'd be like, oh my God, is she okay? And he'd be like, oh, she was an extra on the Walking Dead.
Sarah: Should be a show called, ‘Touched by a Carter’, and every episode is a story about something that a member of the Carter family quietly did to save the life of a random American.
Mike: So I called him up to confirm the story. And I was like, why did you do this? This is like some total saint hood shit. He's like the coolest guy, I'm like totally star struck about entire thing. Just that anyone would be this nice to another human being is amazing to me and I said, man, it's a really amazing thing that you did. And he's like, you know what? She did all the hard work; she is the one who deserves all of the kudos for this story. He also tells me that Billy Carter used to do this. This is like the Your Wrong About twist of this.
Sarah: Your Wrong About Billy Carter?
Mike: Yeah. Earl Carter says to me, he was like, you know what the central thing you need to know about Billy Carter is, he got sober in 1979 and he died sober in 1988. That was his life. He took this recovery stuff extremely seriously.
Sarah: Whatever substance or not totally healthy self-soothing behavior, I lean on a little bit too much. I would start leaning on way more if I were Billy Carter and I suddenly became the president’s brother.
Mike: Totally. And so it's kind of a theme of the show, but sometimes you just need a reminder that a person is a person.
Sarah: We all need to be reminded of that constantly. That's like every day in American life.
Mike: Right. So, I asked Carol of course, did you ever meet Jimmy Carter? And she says one time when she was in Plains, he was at a barbecue or some sort of family function, but she had warrants out for her arrest in Salt Lake City. And so she was afraid to go say hi to him because she was afraid the secret service would know about her warrants.
Sarah: Oh that's emotional.
Mike: I know. And so, anyway, so the way the story ends is Carol eventually because of court dates, because of her warrants, because of her son, she's like, I have to go back to Salt Lake City, I can't stay here forever. So, after two months he goes back to Salt Lake City, and then I'm like wanting, you know, like as a journalist, you want these stories have like nice, tied up loose ends.
Sarah: Yes. Because you want your closing image where she's like sitting with her toddler, playing patty cake, surrounded by morning glories, yes.
Mike: So, I am of course like, and then you never did drugs again. She's like, well, she is clean now. She works for the Utah Harm Reduction Coalition. She volunteers at this opioid clinic, she's back in college. She has made it, but all of this happened in 2015 and she's like, you know what? It took me like another year and a half of being in and out of treatment of relapsing and getting sober. It's a process, right? So, she says, it takes her another year and a half where she has custody of her son and she's living in an apartment that she is paying for with her own wages. But anyway, I just want to reclaim Billy Carter.
Sarah: He is going on the mural.
Mike: And I also think that this is a very instructive story in that any story of homelessness, you can tell through the lens of like the bad choices the person made, but then you can also tell it through the lens of the bad systems that she was a part of, right. One of the things that strikes her now is like, how much money did she really need, right. When she was in her methadone, working at Denny's, terrible, kind of barely making it through a period. She's like, you know, what if someone had given me a check for like $3,000 or $4,000. I could have moved out; I could have paid the deposit on a new place. I could have gotten one level up to a level of security where I wasn't so precarious.
Because the system did not have a way for her to do that. How much money did the state of Utah spend in jail fees and court fees and judges’ time and cops’ time and shelters and services? It's hard to calculate these things, but she definitely cost the state way more than $3,000 or $4,000 ultimately.
Sarah: And she also like fell in a hole so deep that she had to be rescued by a former president's nephew. Like when Earl Carter intervenes, she was at a point where the services that were available to her as a citizen probably wouldn't have been enough. But instead of having small amounts of resources when they needed them, they fell into this spiral that ultimately put them in a place where it was very, very difficult to get them back into healthy daily life. I feel like that happens constantly in America.
Mike: Totally. Another really important principle of her story is how important it is to just get housing.
Sarah: Like when you need it.
Mike: Yes. Recovery is hard. Recovery is not made easier by being homeless.
Sarah: I've heard that or maybe I haven't heard it anywhere, but it seems intuitively true, doesn’t it?
Mike: Yeah, one of the things I hear from a lot of these health clinic folks is just that homeless is one of those things that makes everything worse. If you have mental illness, it makes it worse because you're under stress all the time. You're not sleeping properly, you're not eating properly, you're afraid for your life. You're living day to day, and you're probably not taking your meds every day because it's a huge pain in the ass drug addiction. Also, you're around drugs. You're much more likely to be in the proximity of drugs, you're much less likely to have access to resources, you're much less likely to just be warm. And so, this relationship between mental illness, substance abuse and homelessness go both ways.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, and also think about how many people whose entire day is thrown out of whack. If they're like traveling for business and then they accidentally didn't bring their earplugs. Humans really rely on routines and stability, you know, aside from just like having a stable place to call home, like we, just rely on some baseline of, I have shelter, I have warmth, I have water. We have this narrative that like, you can earn the right to have those preferences.
Mike: Right. Well, this actually transition very well to the history of homelessness policy, which a lot of this, I did not know. First of all, mass homelessness is a pretty new phenomenon.
Sarah: Can I tell you the story I heard from my mom?
Mike: Ooh, yeah.
Sarah: So, what she told me, I remember as a kid. She grew up never seeing homeless people visible on the street. The narrative she told me is that in, I want to say the sixties, there was this massive exodus of people from mental institutions that led to mass homelessness. Is that true?
Mike: That's true. It is actually not a huge component of it. One of the really important principles is that within the homeless population, there's a lot of sub populations. One of the populations is people with severe mental illness. There's a lot of schizophrenia people, and a lot of people with severe anxiety, severe depression, catatonia, but what's interesting is that's only 15% of the homeless popular.
85% of the homeless population is what is called temporary homeless. The people that are in and out of homelessness, their whole lives are called chronically homeless. Those people that were deinstitutionalized, which is a really hard word to say. That was true that a lot of those people got essentially kicked out of the institutional system, but that didn't actually increase the numbers that much, that increased the visibility of that particular population. A huge thing that led to the rise of mass homelessness was the end of public housing and the end of housing assistance. So, one of the things that I was not aware of is that first of all, federal housing assistance in the 1980s got cut by 75%.
Sarah: Did our friend or Ronnie have anything to do with any of this?
Mike: It's like the opposite of a twist. It is like oh.
Sarah: I feel like if capitalism is like Emperor Palpatine than Reagan is Darth Vader.
Mike: And like every single story we tell, yeah. Another thing that I think we sort of sleep on housing assistance as a really important component of this, that in the 1970s, the government built 300,000 units of low-income housing every year.
This was like an infrastructure project. It was like building freeways. We also switched from building low-income housing to giving people a voucher to live in low-income housing. It was actually a huge shift, because what that does is instead of giving people a dedicated place to live and increasing the supply of homes, what you're doing is you're giving people a voucher that has them competing on the open market.
Sarah: The free market Michael, the free market.
Mike: Yes, it solves everything. You've just got more and more and more poor people competing for cheap apartments. And pretty soon those apartments aren't that cheap anymore. Another aspect of this that I feel like gets overlooked is all of the responsibility and all of the funding of homeless services was pushed on to cities.
So, I read this really interesting case study of homelessness policy in Philadelphia, during the 1980s, the city of Philadelphia raised taxes, 19 times. Huge part of that was that all of this federal welfare homelessness, everything getting cut that the city then has to rely on its own residences for funding much more. And that created this vicious cycle that we're still living with, where people see their taxes going up and they're seeing more homeless people on the streets at the same time, because they're both being driven by the same forces. And that feels like, what the hell am I paying for?
Sarah: Yeah. It's just like, if you're living in Philadelphia and your city taxes are being continually raised and you're like driving on Philadelphia streets and using its public transit, you're looking around, like you begin to highly suspect that you're paying into a city, government hooker fund, if anything.
Mike: And so, the sentiment, what the hell am I paying for? Becomes the basis for essentially all of the homelessness policy in the 1980s and the 1990s.
Sarah: Yeah, that sounds like the America I remember growing up in.
Mike: It's like citizens want punitive things. They want people off the street.
Sarah: And so is this also when, like the sense of like animosity toward homeless people appears because I feel as if there's just like a sense of violence toward homeless people, that American society sort of on a large scale feels.
Mike: Well, I think, not to give these reactionary forces too much empathy.
Sarah: We can empathize with it then without agreeing with them, that's the big trick. Like you can you be like, okay, I see that this is where you're coming from. It doesn't make sense, but like, I get that is what you are seeing as logic, even though it isn't actually logic. But you know, you can talk more effectively to someone if you know where they're coming from.
Mike: Right. A friend of mine is actually the city manager of a college town. He's like the Rob Lowe from Parks and Recreation basically. And his whole thing he was talking about how one of the biggest problems they have there is placing a homeless shelter that nobody wants it in their neighborhood. And me being the online Che Guevara that I am, I was like, fuck these people. They have no compassion, but, but, but. And he was saying like, look dude, living next to a homeless shelter is actually really challenging for people. It means because it doesn't open until 9:00 PM to let people in, people have to line up around 6:00 PM to get in. And so that means that you've got a lot of people who are on substances, who are having undiagnosed mental illness, who maybe haven't showered in a couple of days kind of milling about outside of the homeless shelter.
A lot of people don't want their kids walking home past a bunch of 44-year-old men who are maybe drinking. That's not nice for people and so this is the vicious thing that happens in city policy, where it's like, even if you're a compassionate person and even if you're not a terrible person, it is a difficult thing to live next to a homeless shelter.
Like it makes sense, but it's like the entire 1980s, all of these larger federal policies that have nothing to do with decisions that cities made, created the sense that homelessness is out of control, that the cities aren't doing enough. And what we really need to do is the simple, easy thing of cracking down.
Sarah: We love the phrase ‘cracking down in America’, right? What is that even? Do you have a sense of what it's supposed to literally mean? I always picture, like, I guess slapping someone's knuckles with a ruler, like a nun, we cracked it. So what are the crackdowns?
Mike: So, in the eighties and nineties, we get a wave of cities that make it illegal to panhandle, illegal to sit on the street. Some cities made it illegal to give food to homeless people. So there was a case in Florida where a guy got sent to jail for giving his lunch to a homeless person.
Sarah: I had a cop give me a talking to once when he saw me give money to a homeless woman and was like, you know, I know this lady it's illegal for her to be soliciting here. So what you just did is illegal and she's going to spend it on crack. Yeah, but it was this very interesting moment of like you two are committing a crime by giving someone money.
Mike: Yeah, and lots of places you literally are. There are also crimes like loitering and trespassing and public urination that essentially only use like the people that work in homeless services call them homelessness crimes.
Sarah: Yeah, I loiterer like a motherfucker and no one has ever harassed me about legally.
Mike: And if you talk to actual homeless people, like one guy that I talked to was attacked by a police dog for sitting on some steps and eating a sandwich.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Mike: He showed me the scars. There's nothing to do during the day when you're a homeless person because all the shelters closed during the day. So you're essentially just killing time. You just want to sit down and do nothing for a second and two seconds later, somebody is like, nice try. Again, I have some sympathy for the people that are cracking down, but like way more sympathy for the actual homeless people that are like, just let me live, dude. You're not asking anyone else who sits down, and you know, rolls a cigarette or whatever, you're not asking anyone else to leave. It's because of the way that I look.
Sarah: Yeah. It's very similar to how sex offender laws functioning in the United States, where we have these like civic phobias of sex offenders to the point where we're creating law that makes it extremely difficult for them to have any stability in their lives. Makes it more likely that they'll re-offend because we're exposing them to the kinds of dehumanizing experiences and stressors that lead us to fall away from our best behavior and indulge in our weaknesses.
Mike: Well, this is, the perfect demonstration of this is the ways the criminalization of homeless people actually seeped into the homeless services sector. So, in the 80s and 90s, the way that they administered, you know, shelters and all these other services was called the Continuum of Care. So the idea was like a stepping stone. Once you sort of graduate from the emergency shelter, then you can go to transitional housing. Once you're good enough to transition out of that housing, then you get to the permanent housing, it's all this kind of stair-stepping things.
And so they started to do was they started adding barriers to access any of these levels on the continuum. So, to get into a shelter, you had to not be drunk or high. You had to not have any drugs on you. You had to commit to sobriety, be there by a curfew or else they would close the doors.
Sarah: And if you are subject to like that many draconian rules. It's a weird feeling for a human being. You know, you're like, why am I being treated as if I'm a nuclear core?
Mike: Yes. It's also just really ineffective. One guy that I was talking to in Salt Lake City said, you know, the drunk and the high people, are the people most likely to be victimized on the streets. Homeless people are victims of violent crime constantly in ways that the police do not give a shit about. This is the thing is like, who is benefiting from this idea that to get homeless services, you have to jump through all these hoops. You have to perform chores or whatever. It's really ineffective because then the people who the most in need of services, aren't able to get them.
So, it just creates this spiral where basically once you've reached a point where you're addicted to drugs on the street, you can't access shelters, you can't access detox, you can't access employment services, you can't access anything. So, it's like, well, what am I supposed to do now? It's all under the logic that we apply to homeless people generally, which is if I make it hard enough for you, you will change.
Sarah: It is an entire nation based on hazing. We were just surrounded by bunch of frat boys, aren’t we?
Mike: What's really interesting is what breaks the continuum of care model and what leads to this idea that Utah then takes and runs with is the costs. Generally, we assume that most things in the world are a bell curve. If you think of height, like some people are really tall, some people are really short, but the vast majority of people are somewhere in the middle, like within one standard deviation of the average height. And so, we assume that the cost of homelessness, while some people cost a little bit more, some people cost a little bit less, but most homeless people cost somewhere in the middle, somewhere around the average cost of homelessness. Not true. It turns out that it's more of a hockey stick distribution, where about 90% of homeless people cost very little and then 10% of homeless people account for about 80% of the cost.
Sarah: Really?
Mike: Yes.
Sarah: What group is that or what groups?
Mike: These are essentially the chronically homeless. One of the guys that I interviewed in Salt Lake City named Gene, he had been a construction worker. He lost his job in the financial crisis. He cashed in his 401k. He had always been a drinker and had a drinking problem, but he was pretty functional cause he had to function during the week. Once he gets laid off, he just starts drinking all the time. And so, when he was homeless, he used a panhandle until he got enough money together for a half gallon of vodka.
And then he would just stop panhandling and go spend the rest of the day with his half gallon of vodka. So he told me he once didn't eat for six days. He would end up in the ER for alcohol poisoning two or three times a month. He was in the ICU for three weeks once and when you start to think about the cost an ER visit $4,000 or $5,000, $6,000 every single time. So, somebody like that, he's costing $12, $18, $20,000 on medical costs per month.
Sarah: So like $240,000 a year.
Mike: Yes. And then you've got the policing costs. One thing that I feel like nobody takes into account is that criminalizing homelessness, the current strategy is extremely expensive.
Sarah: Right? You don't think about how much it costs for the police to freak out, or brutalized someone, but like that's expensive.
Mike: Yeah. Utah actually did an analysis of this, that every misdemeanor arrest accounts for about $5,000 of spending.
Sarah: Wow. And people like gave Tammy Faye Bakker a hard time for spending a few thousand dollars on makeup. Makeup is something you can play with; you can't play with a misdemeanor arrest.
Mike: One thing that I didn't know until I got to Salt Lake City was the way that these costs compound. So, you're a homeless person, you get busted for public urination, you get a $40 fine. Well, you don't have $40 cause you're homeless. So then a warrant goes out for your arrest, but you don't have an address, you never find out about the warrant. Then the next time the cop gets you, they take you in and they say, you have a warrant, then you have to spend the night in jail. And then you have to go before a judge and the judge says, well, you have a warrant. Here is a bigger, fine at $1,200 fine. Well, you still don't have money.
So, then another warrant goes out for you and then another couple of months later, you get arrested again. And then the judge brings you in and they say, well, you have to do volunteering because you don't have any money. So, we're going to make you volunteer, do community service.
Sarah: This is a very optimistic scenario because I haven't been thrown in jail yet for not being able to pay any of these fines.
Mike: Essentially what happens after that is that you don't show up to your community service because maybe you don't have a watch or maybe you're addicted to drugs, or maybe you have mental illness and don't really understand what's happening to you. And so then another warrant goes out for you.
Sarah: This is a really depressing chose your on-adventure game, I don't think anyone's going to buy this. I'm sorry, I hate to say no to you, but.
Mike: So, it's not necessarily the, each arrest itself cost money. It's just this cascade and this cycle. It's actually really interesting. If you look at a bar graph of the costs of homelessness, it's only, I think it's 8% to 12% is homeless services. Shelters and people driving around, handing out socks and giving out free meals. The vast majority of the cost of homelessness, what we spend on homelessness is medical care and law enforcement. That's why homelessness is expensive, is this silly, choose your own adventure game with the cops and this just in and out of the ER.
Most of the people that you speak to that are homeless, not only are they kind of in and out of the ER all the time, but they also, a lot of them have chronic illnesses. A lot of them have diabetes. Gene actually has diabetes, that's why he quit drinking. So, he has to keep his insulin refrigerated during the summer and during the winter, his insulin freezes because it's so cold. He essentially now has to near the hospital so that he can get his insulin regularly. And I mean this is like everybody, right? They have Hep C, they have tuberculous, they have to get a shot every month for their anti-psychotics. A lot of them have cancer.
Sarah: Really? Do you feel as if we're just continually sacrificing people in the volcano of capitalism? And the reason we have to commit all these sacrifices is to maintain the illusion that capitalism is a workable and humane structure for organizing society. Because to allow people to suffer this way and to come up with a narrative where things will be worse if they don't suffer. What is that?
Mike: I think what's behind it to me is the way that we make the cost of the status quo invisible. I was looking this up the other day, putting someone in prison for a year, cost $30,000.
Sarah: I did not make $30,000 last year.
Mike: And I think it is California was the most expensive state, it was $68,000. You think about, you know, all the people in San Francisco, which has a huge homelessness problem talking about like, oh, lock them up and like, get them off the streets. It's like, well, you're going to spend more.
Sarah: And even if they're being neglected and abused, it's still expensive to neglect and abuse them in prison.
Mike: In the 1990s, late 1990s, all of these studies start coming out. North Carolina find there's a one homeless guy named Michael who costs $268,000 a year.
Sarah: Was that you?
Mike: Yes, essentially. There are pilots of cities that essentially say, let's just put people in fucking housing.
Sarah: People do well, if you give them responsibilities and let them have agency in their own lives and you don't treat them like children or dangers to society.
Mike: The way that Utah finally gets into this story is that in 2001, Utah did a project called Pathways to Housing. The idea was like, you know what, let's get the worst. The term they use is hardcore homeless, which I think is not like, I think it's like the dark humor of actual service providers. They deliberately looked for people that they thought were never going to make it at a homelessness.
Sarah: America's next top homeless person.
Mike: Yes. People that were drug addicted, people that had really bad schizophrenia.
Sarah: I'd be like I didn't come here to make friends.
Mike: And what's amazing is they take 17 people and there's like, you know what, we're just going to test what happens when we just put these people into housing. And what they told me is of those 17 people that they put into housing in 2001, 15 of them are still there. One person perished, another person who moved into a nursing home because she got old. But the other 15, the caseworkers that I talked to about this they're like, we thought they would die on the streets. These are people who are every negative stereotype that you have about homelessness. These are those people, right. Shouting on the street, not showering, not eating for days.
Sarah: You know, I go days without showering or eating. And that's just because I'm a writer with anxiety issues.
Mike: But so, one of the things, you know, there's one in Philadelphia, there's one in San Francisco and this really becomes the big idea that animates housing policy for the next 15 years. It turns out you can save a ton of money if you just.
Sarah: Are nice.
Mike: Yes. And so this also converges with the George W. Bush administration and this whole idea of compassionate conservatism,
Sarah: Okay, I feel like we've moved so far beyond that, but I feel like I once knew what that was, but it's buried underneath layers of composting bullshit. So, like, what was it?
Mike: It was kind of a Bush campaign promise, you know, the idea of compassionate conservatism perfectly fits with this model because it turns out that when we help the poor, we save money. So it's a win/win right? That's what they're really looking for is these kinds of win-wins right. We don't really have to invest a lot of money, but we can free up resources and we can be more effective. We can have effective government by being nice
Sarah: Because children, there was a time in the United States where if you figured out that being humane saved money, he convinced capitalism to actually do it.
Mike: So the idea gets called housing first. That before you can do anything else, drug addiction, mental illness, anything put them in a home and then you work on everything else. That becomes the flip of the continuum of care model, and this totally catches fire, the Bush administration encourages cities to put out 10-year plans to solve homelessness.
This becomes the rhetoric that you have to reach for is, look, we have a solution to homelessness now. We know, so you need to solve homelessness. So 371 cities across the country in the first years of the 2000s put up plans to solve homelessness. And a lot of them say by 2020, by 2035, by 2015, we're going to solve of homelessness.
Sarah: I dream of living in a world where you can really like get people on their feet by promising that they can help mitigate something.
Mike: And so, one of the states that does, this is Utah, and it's actually a pretty amazing story that Utah like fucking went for it, dude.
Sarah: Utah goes for things.
Mike: I mean they got faith leaders. They got private businesses, they got local and regional governments. They got everybody together around this idea of housing first because they had this great pilot that had worked really well. People sleep on the Mormons, but like the Mormons give an unbelievable shitload of money to homeless services.
Sarah: The Mormons are like one of the most fascinating groups of people in human history in terms of being capable of so much incredible violence and so much significant altruism.
Mike: It's amazing.
Sarah: They're fascinating.
Mike: I spent a lot of time at sort of soup kitchen type places, and they're like, we have too many volunteers. We don't want you anymore.
Sarah: Hashtag Mormon problems.
Mike: Everyone wants to come and feed the homeless, like go home. We don't need as many people. And so this is a huge advantage that Utah has and so Utah builds 800 units of permanent supportive housing. They build entire buildings, they buy an old Holiday Inn, and they convert it to housing units for the most quote unquote unhelp able homeless people. And so, in 2015, the state of Utah says that it has solved chronic homeless.
Sarah: Yeah. So what does it mean by that
Mike: Basically, the word chronic there is very important because like I said, only about 10 to 20% of the homeless population is quote unquote chronically homeless, like the worst cases. So, in April of 2015, Utah says we have reduced chronic homelessness by 91%. We solved it.
Sarah: It is like, okay, you didn't, but you tried very hard and in America we don't know the difference between actually doing something and fixing it forever maybe.
Mike: Yes, and so what is really interesting about this story is that this blows up, Hasan Minhaj from the Daily Show comes to Salt Lake City, and he runs around downtown interviewing random people. He's like, where's all the homeless people? Where is all the homeless people? And Jon Stewart does this whole big segment about like, wow, it took us this long, like decades to realize that the way that you solve homelessness is by giving people homes. It's like sock lessness give people socks. There's a New Yorker article, there is Wall Street Journal. People in Salt Lake City told me they were having visits from like British people and from Belgians and from all over the country. It is seen as this huge success story.
Sarah: But there is a spot in the dick.
Mike: Yeah. And this is also why I visited Salt Lake City, because since then it's gotten complicated. So we're going to do like a three stage debunking here.
Sarah: I love how you always say what like forum, the debunking is going to be before you do it. You're like a, a waiter in a very fancy restaurant. You're like, I have a flowerless chocolate risotto tonight, which will be served on, I'm like making up a horrible, fancy image in my head. But yes, it's beautiful. Go on, take me on the ride.
Mike: First level of debunking is that you Utah did not solve homelessness.
Sarah: Really.
Mike: They didn't even really solve chronic homelessness.
Sarah: No one's ever going to solve anything. I don't know why we're so obsessed with this idea of like solving and curing and fixing it's like, oh, life is entropy and decay, and we just have to do the Groundhog Day Dharma.
Mike: There is this guy from the American Enterprise Institute like this right wing think tank. He infuriatingly is correct in pointing out that the state did not actually solve chronic homelessness. What happened is they redefined the definition of chronic homelessness twice.
Sarah: Oh Utah.
Mike: Basically, if you look at the reduction in chronically homeless, it's not like a steady downward slope. It's essentially two jumps downward and what he finds is the first jump downward is when the state of Utah redefined chronically homelessness. So that if you're living in transitional housing, emergency shelter, or like three, six months vouchers, whatever, you don't count as chronically homeless anymore. So overnight they just remove 248 people from chronic homelessness with just like a stroke of a pen. Like, wow, we solved homelessness by 240 people, but those, human beings are still there. They haven't moved, they've just been defined as normal homeless.
Sarah: So it is a little bit like Enron where you're just kind of telling yourself a story on paper.
Mike: Yes. Then the next big jump downward is they do the thing three nights a year called the Point in Time Count where in January, a huge team of volunteers go out and physically like a census, find all of the homeless people and count them. And this is how cities know homelessness is getting worse. Homelessness is getting better, whatever they go to the shelters, they go to tent cities, they find panhandler, everybody. Typically, what they do is they find whatever a thousand homeless people that they count. But a thousand homeless people on one night in January, isn't the entire homeless population, right? Because some people are sleeping with friends and some people are in motels and some people you didn't find. They take that 1000 and they expand it and they say, well, it's probably 4,000 people, right or it's probably 2000 people or whatever formula they use.
Sarah: Right. And they have some kind of general knowledge base so they can be like, if we're counting X, many people and there's play X, many other people that we like weren't able to count.
Mike: But during this entire process, Utah stops doing that. They started just counting people and they said that's all our homeless people. So again, overnight you have a couple hundred chronically homeless people that disappear because they were a statistical artifact.
Sarah: What if the theme of our show is that statistics are doubly tricky for the fact that you can massage them every which way and make them seem to indicate really any possible outcome. The same way that we've talked about people putting on toward faith and science presented to them at trial like Pete, we have way too much faith in statistics because we have this idea of like, well, they're numbers. You can't make numbers lie and it's like, that's almost all you can do with them.
Mike: It's worth noting that at the end of its little experiment with housing first, Utah had twice as many homeless people as when it began.
Sarah: What?
Mike: Yes. So it started with about 4,000 homeless people. It ended with about 8,000 homeless people. Homelessness has gone insane. Carol, when she was on the street, when Jimmy Carter's nephew saved her, that was the winter that Utah was announcing it had solved homelessness.
Sarah: And so if you're a Carol, you're like interesting.
Mike: Another thing that comes out is the cost savings didn't really happen. So finally, a report comes out on this pathways project that Utah did, and they tracked the homeless people for the year before they got into the housing. And then the year after they got into housing, and they cost exactly the same. All of this stuff about they cost so much money and we're going to save the medical and police and whatever. None of that really came true. So after this right wing think tank dude puts out this blog post about how all of the numbers were fake. Everyone kind of like abandoned this model. They're like, well, we tried the housing first thing, but come on guys, it's all bullshit. It's a total mirage. We tried the idea; it was an interesting idea in the early 2000s.
Sarah: Trying to help the homeless is a nice idea, but like, let's all move on. We all know that you can't help people. Right.
Mike: And so now we get to level two debunking. This is the debunking of the debunking. So, what nobody sort of notices is that yes, the overall numbers of homeless in Utah have doubled, but the percentage of chronically homeless plummeted precipitously. So, when they started this experiment, 22% of their homeless population was chronically homeless was really difficult and now it's down to 6%. And if you actually look at the numbers, what happened between 2005 and 2015, isn't that they failed to solve homelessness. It's at the fucking economy crashed. Basically, what happened is the type of people who becomes homeless completely changed.
So, if you look at their actual numbers, they break it up. And it's like domestic violence went up and people getting evicted from their homes went up and family homelessness went up, every form of homelessness, other than chronically homeless people went up during this time. It's like they got swamped by a rising tide.
And of course, when you talk to everybody in Salt Lake City, they are like punk, we never said we were solving homelessness. We said we were solving chronic homelessness. This was a narrow thing that we were doing. It was the Daily Show, it was the New Yorker. It was everyone else were the ones that are like, oh, Utah didn't really solve homelessness. It's like, we fucking know, we did not say this.
Sarah: This is the big problem between the media and reporting on any kind of systemic issue is that we want stories that don't exist in systems, right. It's like Hollywood is trying to make a movie set on Mars and they're like, well, why don't we have like a, you know, lizard people living there. And it's like, well, lizard people don't live on Mars. And they're like, well, it has to be lizard people. The thing that you need to get you to the place where I'm trying to take you is like the thing that you will never find there. This idea of like, Utah's going to solve homelessness. And that's a ridiculous thing to attempt to do, or to promise her to claim. But like the only way you can get a big media story out of trying to, we don't want to hear about helping the homeless or want to hear about saving the homeless.
Mike: Another debunking thing to debunk is the reason why the cost savings of that pilot didn't materialize is that just because fewer people are going to the ER, the ER doesn't lay off doctors and nurses.
Sarah: It is probably good to not arbitrarily lay off essential staff.
Mike: Yeah. One of the problems with this cost logic that we apply to chronic homelessness is that you don't necessarily save money in a sort of one-to-one way.
Sarah: Right.
Mike: If there's fewer chronically homeless people showing up at the ER, which there were, because they measured the number of ER visits, that doesn't mean that the hospitals fire everybody. It just means that they reallocated those resources to something else. Just like police, police are arresting the same 10 homeless people way less, but they're not like, well, let's lay off Bob and Steve, cause they're not arresting Gene for drinking too much anymore.
That's not how it works. This is why you shouldn't justify policies like this on cost saving because the cost savings don't always show up. Another big thing, I went to two of the permanent supportive housing units to interview people that had been living there for years. One of the guys that I interviewed named Ernest after he moved into permanent supportive housing, he was diagnosed with cancer.
Sarah: Because he'd gone to a doctor for the first time in forever.
Mike: Yeah. It's like, there's a lot of chronic pain associated with being homeless. You know, your knees hurt your back hurts. And then he gets into housing and all of his other sort of homelessness related medical stuff goes away, but he's like, ah, it still hurts to breathe. So, he then goes into the doctor, they find a lump.
He ended up having surgery where they removed three quarters of his lung. And it shows up in the other pilots to. Things like, you know, visiting the doctor, medical costs, all that stuff. The savings don't happen for like two or three years after people get into housing because there's so much stuff they need to deal with.
You know, they're stabilizing their meds oftentimes, and that causes like crazy side effects. It's really hard to get people taking meds regularly, getting into preventative care. There are tons of lingering shit. One guy that I spoke to at another permanent supportive housing unit needs a knee replacement.
So that's like something that you get once you move into permanent supportive housing, like he can barely walk. And this is something that we need to think about, I think is that the minute you get into permanent supportive housing, you know what happens? You get on Medicaid. That's a really important component of this, that it actually starts to shift the cost of homelessness from cities to the federal government.
And that's a huge achievement. All of the medical costs for Ernest, his lung surgery, everything was paid for by the federal government. It's actually really good for Salt Lake City and Utah to get him on Medicaid. That's the best thing they can do because then they don't have to pay for any of his medical stuff anymore.
Sarah: That's like a conservative brain teaser.
Mike: Yeah. Another thing that happened during those 10 years is the opioid epidemic. So you talk about getting hit really hard by this. Somebody was telling me at the opioid clinic that because Mormon kids don't learn how to drink and like smoke weed. They don't know how to do drugs.
Sarah: You got to learn to do that.
Mike: And Carol actually said this to me too, that she grew up vaguely Mormon, but she got dared, so she was like, dare absence only drug education was like not great for me. And I was like, I have a podcast for you. And then the biggest thing that, you know, I'm obsessed with this because I'm obsessed with it generally, but just housing got way more expensive.
One of the central truths about homelessness is that every single city where housing prices are rising, gets a homeless crisis as night follows day. So I interviewed somebody who her hours got cut at Popeye's and she didn't even get evicted. She just like raised her hand and was like, I'm moving out, I can't afford it. I'm going to go move into the shelter. And so now she's there some social program where she cleans up trash in downtown three hours a day, and she's trying to get a fast-food job back, but you know, a one-bedroom apartment in Salt Lake City now is like a thousand bucks. And the minimum wage in Salt Lake City is the federal minimum wage. I think it's $7.25. It's really the transformation of the economy, it's not that the system failed.
Sarah: Well or like it's not that the system of trying to mitigate homelessness failed, but that the infrastructure of America itself has been in a precipitous collapse for the past, let's say 10 years. America itself is falling apart and more and more people are living daily with the kind of precarity that we wouldn't have thought of previously as homelessness, everyone is closer to it. Everyone's more aware of the fact that like, if one happens to not be homeless, like great that's luck, that's not because you did something right.
Mike: Right. One of the guys I ended up speaking to, he said, his way of making money now is he goes dumpster diving. And he says the best places to dumpster dive are at rich people's houses. And it really poor apartment complexes because so many people are getting evicted now that when you get evicted, your stuff is just out on the street and you kind of end up throwing away a bunch of stuff that you hadn't thought about because you just have to like leave.
Sarah: Right. And like perfectly good appliances and stuff. Yeah, sure.
Mike: Yeah. He literally said appliances. He's like, you find microwaves like nice microwaves in the trash because people can't carry them.
Sarah: And you are just suddenly downsizing.
Mike: Yeah. And so there's two more things I want to say about this. These are sort of the debunking of the debunking of the debunking that. So I spent a day driving around with this guy named Sean, that's his real name. That's not from The Poseidon Adventure whose job is to hand out stuff to people. We went to this little, this tent city that was under a bridge.
We ended up talking to this guy named Red, who got a cold. I asked Sean afterwards, I was like, oh, well, how do you know Red? And he's like, oh yeah, I know him from Horseshoe. And I was like, what is Horseshoe? And Sean said that there used to be this homeless encampment called Horseshoe, where people made these sorts of lean twos, like one level above tents, they would take tarps and string them between trees.
It was this forested area. It was near like a housing development, but you couldn't really see into it. The trees were dense enough that homeless people could be really discreet in there. So like 15 or 20 homeless people were living there. And Red told us that, you know, they used to do Christmas and Thanksgiving together and like, they'd watch each other's stuff.
They would make a fire every night to stay warm. It was like this community and Sean said, if I was homeless, I would want to live at Horseshoes, it's like a little town. And then a year ago the cops came, broke up the whole thing and cut down all the trees. And so now it's like a field and there isn't anything there it's like, they didn't even necessarily do it to like build homes. It's like they just took this all away because it was there.
Sarah: Well, yeah. And it's just, it's difficult to contemplate the logic of that. It does seem like part of that response is encouraged by, no, you're not allowed to create a temporary and essentially functional society where you can look out for each other and like take care of yourselves in a way that society refuses to, like, you can't do that. You can't go off and peaceably abide by your own rules. You have to abide by ours and ours of the ones that dehumanize you.
Mike: What is fascinating about it to me is that, you know, this is something that happens in Seattle, the return of criminalizing homelessness is a huge part of the story that every, just like every city with the housing crisis has a homelessness crisis. Every city with a homelessness crisis has a get tough on crime approach. I heard off the record, grapevine kinds of conversations with people that are like the cops don't like this either it's tedious for cops. The cops and homeless people all know each other.
They're like staring at each other from different sides of the divide. They can be friendly with them. Some cops are awful and it just like this weird pack that they've made where it's like, sorry, man, we got to ask you to move. And then, you know, tick tock in two weeks, we're going to find you and ask you to move.
Sarah: What's it like to be a police officer in America today? I do feel like some of the crazy defensiveness that you see on the part of the police is based on the fact that like they're doing really dumb, unpleasant things that like, even they don't like doing. There is not a lot of glory, like the jobs that you get given as a cop, a lot of them involve doing something that like, if you stay in that job and keep doing it, you're going to surrender parts of your soul.
Mike: Yeah. And again, I don't want to like give cops too much credit, but apparently there was this local sheriff in one of the cities around Salt Lake City who like tried to hold a press conference and was like, we're not going to do this anymore. We're not going to sweep homeless shelters anymore because it's really boring, and it doesn't help anyone. And apparently there was like a revolt among the citizens. Citizens were like, nah, we have to do it as, and he's like okay.
Sarah: And again, it's the same as Enron. There gets moving homeless people around in different parts of the city. And like nothing's changing, none of them are becoming housed.
Mike: And it's like, you realize homeless people do not cease to exist when you do not see them anymore.
Sarah: I think people think that.
Mike: Even in the best-case scenario, like, wow, you succeeded, congratulations, they left town. That's what you really want, right they left town. Well, now they're in some other person's town, congratulations.
Sarah: It is the same feeling; I think that we have about sending people to prison. There's this idea of like going up the river, you know, you're going away, you disappear. And just, it really is out of sight out of mind. I think we're very obsessed with maintaining our own innocence as American citizens. And there's a lot of stuff that we just don't want to know about. And if we can successfully not witness it if all sweeps of homeless encampments are doing is making it harder for the house to see homeless people like that probably is the point.
Mike: Yes. I don't see any other conclusion from that. One of the things that I cannot get over is Salt Lake City like so many other places is returning to the criminalization of the 1980s and the 1990s. They're redesigning their entire homeless shelter system because right now there's one. There's one giant homeless shelter with a thousand beds. And they're like, its concentrated poverty, there's lots of drug dealing going on there.
And like, that is true. I went there at six in the morning and like somebody tried to beat me up, it's really bad there. And so, the state of Utah is spending $60 million on this new, they're building three new homeless shelters. They're closing down this giant homeless shelter in the middle of the city.
They're spending $67 million on a police operation called Operation Rio Grande where they arrest everybody looking for drug traffickers. Since this began last summer, there have been 5,000 arrests of homeless people. And as part of Operation Rio Grande, this police crackdown, they also added 240 new treatment beds.
Sarah: Wow.
Mike: So, there's 8,000 homeless people, 240 more beds and 5,000 arrests. I found this article where the cops were doing this mission accomplished thing of like, we arrested 5,000 people and we found 387 of those people were drug traffickers, not drug users who were like, kind of sympathetic and need treatment, but like predators preying on the vulnerable. And then in like the fifth paragraph of the article, it's like the police also announced they had seized as much as 50 pounds of drugs.
Sarah: So, like, how does that break down mathematically?
Mike: I did the math; it breaks down to 1/10 of a pound per trafficker. In all 387 arrests, they only collected five pounds of heroin, most of it was meth. So, it's like five pounds of heroin per, 387 arrests, is this success to you?
Sarah: Don't you feel that you can do better? I believe in you.
Mike: Yeah. This transitions very well into the final stage of the debunking, which is kind of what has happened to Salt Lake City and Utah now. I met a woman, this is not her real name, but she asked me to call her Katherine because that was her mother's name. And Katherine was severely domestically abused. Her husband abused her so bad that she got brain damage and she moved out from him in Ogden, Utah and she went to Provo because she used to be a concert pianist and a piano teacher.
And so she knew that the university there had a practice room that had a really nice piano in it, so during the day she would go up there and practice piano. Provo, Utah apparently is awful to homeless people and the cops harassed her constantly and kept arresting her and just like making her life miserable.
And she eventually was like, why are you doing this? Why are you so mean to me? They're like, we want you to go to Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City has the services like that's where homeless people go, this is a nice town. And so Katherine is eligible for permanent supportive housing, but they don't build permanent supportive housing in Salt Lake City anymore.
One of the things that happened is they gave up on this idea of housing first that they built 800 units of permanent supportive housing. And then since 2010, they've only built 65. I went to these permanent supportive housing buildings, and I talked to the case managers and the case managers said do you know why the system works? It's not just the housing it's us, case managers are dealing with these people every day of, did you take your meds? Did you get on food stamps? Did you renew your Medicaid? Did you do your laundry this week? Did you shower today?
Sarah: I need a caseworker.
Mike: A lot of the caseworkers that I talked to at the permanent supportive housing units said like when they started at Utah had this big idea in 2005, they would have 10, 15 people who they were managing and now they have 30 or 40.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Mike: One of the guys I talked to at this, this giant shelter, it's a 1000 people. It's this huge political punching bag. Everybody hates it, tells me he's like, you know what? This building was built for 800 people, one-night last summer, we had 1400. We do not turn people away. We have turned our offices into homeless shelters. There's a cafeteria where, when we have overflow, we just put like thin like yoga mats on the ground for people to sleep. He's like we have been given zero increase in funding in like 10 years. The only increases in funding we've had are to add metal detectors. What do you expect? Right.
These people are working so hard. I don't know. It just feels like one of these things where it's like, there's this huge break between what you hear from politicians and what you hear from people who actually do the work of as far as what needs to happen. When you talk to people who do the work, they're like, give us more money. Just give it.
Sarah: Politicians know about fundraising and dick sword fights, and I don't really think they have many other areas of expertise. I don't know why we're listening to them about all these social issues.
Mike: A big thing for me is the way that like, we fall for these big ideas and then we don't execute them.
Sarah: Well, it is like we have New Year’s resolutions, you know, like how people are like, I'm going to, you know, be paleo from now on. And it's like, you can't just be paleo from now on. You have to like, do something that's reasonable. Some people are paleo from now on it's like we to get so enamored of these triumphant total fixes that we then I think get more easily dismayed and discouraged. And then stop putting energy into it when it's like, oh, like you're never going to conclusively fix anything. I think as Americans, we guess we're in a bad place man, because we have both this deep jonesing for situations where we can be the hero and we can come in and triumphantly solve a problem either individually or as a nation or whatever.
And we also are actively creating situations where the problems that destroy people's lives are systemic and cascading and where the heroism ethos is going to make it harder to do what we actually have to do to alleviate the problems and therefore the symptoms. The thing that we most crave, the story that we most want to be the protagonist of is like the most useless in the situations that we're trying to make it be helpful in.
Mike: One of the things that I think about so much in this and many other issues is that, so of those 371 cities that made 10-year plans to end homelessness, they were all failures. None of those cities ended homelessness, but then when you actually read the reports, I read one from Philadelphia, I read one from Maryland, always in the footnotes. They're like, oh yeah, we actually reduced homelessness by like 71% but because we set out to solve it, we failed.
Sarah: And it is like doctors don't believe they're ever going to vaccinate 100% of babies, they just say 100% so they can get 93%. We can still have measles outbreaks in Portland.
Mike: And so now there's this narrative that you know, we tried housing first. We tried giving homeless people housing. It didn't work, we got 371 cities that tried it and they all failed.
Sarah: The homeless people failed. They were unworthy. We gave them what they asked for and they screwed the pooch and now we can't give them anything ever again.
Mike: The last thing I want to say is that, just overall, like as a person going and spending a week, dealing with homeless people and homeless service providers, the thing that just struck me again and again, is how like warm and wonderful and generous and innovative the service providers are. The caseworkers are like actual fucking saints dude. They don't make that much money; they are dealing with the most challenging population in our entire society.
Sarah: Except for rich people. I will tell you my Pollyanna take on this if you would like to hear it. Okay. I think that similar to what you said when we talked about Enron and how, like, if we look at all this as a system and see like, okay, we have a financial system where corruption is incentivized, where you are in a position where the way to keep your job is by turning a blind eye on, you know, endemic corruption in your field.
If we change the incentives, then we can change people's behaviors and we can make them less likely to commit fraud on a massive scale, for example. And by the same token, I feel like if we work on our core narratives, we can orient ourselves toward different forms of change and toward forms of change that we have a hope of actually enacting and we're different ways of seeing ourselves and the communities that we're trying to help. Because this idea of like, I'm going to come in and I'm going to save homelessness, right. Utah's going to save homelessness or I, as a volunteer, I'm going to come in and I'm going to fix something or I'm going to whatever, do some kind of saving the day type role.
You're always going to be disappointed. And then if you get disappointed, you're going to probably get disaffected. One of the best ways to talk about solving that is to just think about the other narratives that we can bring into our lives. And one of them is like, I am part of a community, and I can see that as my neighborhood or my town or my city or my country.
But it is my job to show up for people every day. And to do that in a way that's like part of my identity and part of my being, and like, it's not my job to fix anything. Because if you see yourself as a person who is going to come in and fix stuff, then that's a story about you. You're telling yourself a story about how great you are and how able you are to solve problems. And it's never about the person that you're purporting to help. And if you show up every day and are like, what do you need? And how can I answer that to the best of my abilities then like, you're always going to be able to do something and you're not going to feel like a failure.
Mike: I think the way to think about it is managing it, right? When a city runs a bus system, they're not like, well, yesterday we took everybody to where they needed to go, so we're done. It's like, no, you wake up the next morning and you take them where they need to go next. We should think of homelessness as something like education or providing running water.
It's just something that cities need to do, and the federal government needs to fund every single day. It's not something that we're going to get rid of. It is an outcropping of the financial structure that we have chosen. We can either be mean to them or be nice to them, but it seems like it's kind of cheaper and better to be nice to them. And also, I don't care if it's cheaper to be nice to them.
Sarah: It's actually worth it to be nice.
Mike: I think when you make the argument that it's cheaper than it boxes you in where you can only do things that are cheaper.
Sarah: Yeah, it's true. It's like, it's so frustrating too when these initiatives fail on the attitude that you hear is like, well, you know, it didn't actually save money and it's like, right because that's the only God we're capable of worshiping. And it's like, there is another side to the force and yes, it costs a little extra to have humanity, but it's so worth.
Mike: I volunteered at a homeless shelter last year, just for a couple of months. And it like completely changed the way that I think about this issue. And if you do not believe me, go volunteer at a homeless shelter. It is super eye opening and super wonderful. Be like the Mormons go make food.
Sarah: Be a little bit like the Mormons.
Mike: That's more generalizable. You're right, you're right. Be like the Mormons in some ways then none.